The UN doesn’t have to accept John Bolton’s credentials. This may come as a rude surprise to George W. Bush, who this morning appointed Bolton U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, despite his rejection several weeks ago by the Senate. The unintended consequence of Bolton’s appointment, which is creating a lightning rod at the UN for resentment, anger and fear of Bush Administration foreign policy, is a possible move by the General Assembly to limit U.S. actions in the Middle East and Persian Gulf.

We applaud the president for this breathtaking display of pandering to a relatively small segment of the electorate. It isn’t often you find an elected official willing to consign entire generations of American school children to ignorance for the sake of a few votes.

The US failure to provide basic security for Iraqis in the years since the invasion has created a fuel shortage in the country that sits atop the world’s second-largest supply of oil.
Continuing attacks the oil industry infrastructure have made it nearly impossible to repair equipment that was already antiquated prior to the invasion and [...]

In a case that outraged women’s rights groups and prompted a change in state law, an appeals court has sided with a judge who voided a woman’s divorce because she was pregnant.

The appeals court ruled Spokane County Superior Court Judge Paul Bastine was correct in vacating the divorce order because Carlos Hughes and the state had not been properly notified of Shawnna Hughes’ pregnancy.

Former Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin, who was first charged in May of this year with “disclosing classified information related to potential attacks upon U.S. forces in Iraq to individuals not entitled to receive the information,” is now facing additional charges.
Along with Franklin, two former officials of a powerful Jewish lobbying organization, the American Israel Public [...]

After three years of lies from the Bush administration and at least two leaks that did serious damage to our own national security and likely that of other countries as well, Congress has decided to investigate Rafael Palmiero.

After three years of lies from the Bush administration and at least two leaks that did serious damage to our own national security and likely that of other countries as well, Congress has decided to investigate Rafael Palmiero.

Neither Afhganistan nor Iraq, nor dead Americans nor live terrorists, figured into the president’s weekly radio address Saturday. As Escahton’s Duncan Black noted, the president’s Saturday radio address focused exclusively on the economy. Coming as it did at the end of a week during which 30 US troops were killed in Iraq, crafting that speech and delivering it took an effort of will sufficient to resuscitate a thousand Tinkerbells a thousand times. And these are much the same people who couldn’t get the image of a waggling presidential penis out of their heads for years.

Time doesn’t say when the interviews with Rice and others for the profile were conducted, but it’s likely most of them were done before the week ending today saw the deaths of more than 30 US troops and another 200 or so Iraqi civilians and police. (A reminder: Iraq has less than a tenth the population of the US. During much of this year, the country has been experiencing the equivalent of a 911-scale loss of life every two weeks or so. Men, women, children, babies, and most of them have nothing to do with the war other than getting blown up in it by us or insurgents or terrorists or their own armed forces.)

In fairness to Congressman DeLay, the provision doesn’t explicitly name his hometown consortium, or even specify a particular longitude or latitude; just certain requirements met by the Sugarland group. And the unspecified consortium meeting certain requirements that all but guarantee it’ll be the one in Sugarland won’t get the entire $1.5 billion.

The inspectors still haven’t made it back, but they have been able to provide some of Hitch’s “exquisite detail” just from watching entire UN-sealed Iraqi facilities vanish, bit by bit, from the commercial satellite images the inspectors buy in lieu of ones supplied by the Bush administration, who would rather not think about it.

Just kidding: No one in the upper ranks of the US Army has been punished for creating the conditions under which abuse of prisoners in Afhganistan and Iraq flourished, but 4-star General Kevin Byrnes has been relieved of command for engaging in what Army sources described to the Washington Post as an adulterous affair that the general’s attorney says was with a civilian unconnected to the Department of Defense.

Meanwhile, US Joint Chiefs chairman Richard Meyers says “nobody knows” when Iraq’s military and police forces will be ready to assume responsibility for security in the country. Although he said there were eight to ten ares in Iraq where local forces were taking the lead security role, he named only two. His remarks are in conflict with those of other military officers and administration officials.

The electoral college is a bit of a hobby of mine. I’ve written about it before at my own blog, The Third Estate ( you can read it here – it’s the second half of the post) Therefore when people like Ruy Teixiera or Chris Bowers start talking about it, I feel obliged to jump [...]

USA Today reported Monday that the Ohio Marine reserve regiment which suffered 19 combat deaths earlier this month had repeatedly requested as many as 1,000 additional troops to help defend the area of western Iraq for which it is responsible.

Despite claiming “a zero-tolerance policy toward election fraud and intimidation,” the Republican National Committee has so far paid out more than $700,000 dollars in legal fees to defend former RNC official Jim Tobin against charges he conspired to jam Democratic party phone lines during the 2002 elections.

A major debate has broken out over at TPM cafe over realignment. It started with Michael Lind’s piece, which argued that 2004 represented a watershed election in which the Democrats definitively become the minority party. He follows up by suggesting that cities are economic parasites and are doomed to decline, and that the Democratic party [...]

Former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega writes on Tom Engelhardt’s TomDispatch site that contrary to the near-unamimous consensus among pundits and legal commentators, obtaining a conviction under the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act — the statute presumed to be the starting point for prosectuor Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation of the Rove-Plame case — is nowhere near impossible.

The US invasion of Iraq has now been fully vindicated by the discovery of a warehouse full of chemicals apparently destined to become chemical weapons for use against US troops in Iraq. Further, the warehouse was unearthed and secured by Iraqi forces, which means all of ours can come home now.
Mission accomplished, albeit with [...]

And there’s no real evidence that this slow-motion epiphany has penetrated the upper reaches of the administration. Commanders in Iraq have been gently hinting, by publicly announcing impending troop withdrawals, that the Army cannot sustain operations in Iraq at the level they are now and have been for 30 months. Less senior officers, the colonels in the field, are telling the press that they have repeatedly requested and been denied more troops. Those kinds of statements are not unprecedented but are extremely unusual: you don’t find career officers sounding off in public unless they’re desperate.

Today, a reader pointed out another bit of good news. In our comments section, responding to the possibility that we may be able to add the manufacture of chemical weapons to the list of bad things Iraqis weren’t doing when we arrived but are now, blogger John Burt wrote, “I’m just grateful that Bush never claimed that invading Iraq would prevent an attack by ten thousand Saturnian flying saucers, or we’d be wrapped in slimy purple tentacles right now.”

There are days when the primary difference between the New York Times and the Weekly World News seems to reside in the fact that reporters for the Times believe the crap they’re writing.

More on the developing story about the US Army surveillance unit, codenamed Able Danger, that detected the 9/11 attackers inside the US, and the decision by Philip Zelikow, the 9/11 Commission staff director, to withhold this information from the Commissioners.

Post sources declined to specify what might have inclined the paper’s management to believe that an event conceived by the Pentagon’s political appointees in the midst of an increasingly unpopular war might conceivably develop political overtones, or that donating time and advertising space to such an event might call into question the paper’s objectivity.

The Bush administration have acknowledged that the energy bill just signed into law by the president will do nothing in the short term — the short term being a decade or so — to ease fuel prices and decrease US dependence on imported oil, and the New York Times reports today that the administration are abandoning a proposal to subject large sport utility vehicles such as the Hummer to fuel economy regulations.

Harris, who most recently made the news with her complaint that newspapers have retouched her photos to poke fun at her Tammy Faye-esque makeup, is not popular among the Florida or national GOP leadership despite her 2000 heroics.

What Douglas and Chin are talking about is image, and there’s ample evidence suggesting Bush doesn’t particularly care what other people think about him, least of all “Middle East and domestic political analysts.” For him, his legacy will be whatever he thinks it is and not the effects his actions and decisions have had on anyone else.

We are easily shocked by crimes which appear at once in their full magnitude, but the gradual growth of our own wickedness, endeared by interest, and palliated by all the artifices of self-deceit, gives us time to form distinctions in our own favor.
—Samuel Johnson
The clearest indication that there is a sea change—a political sort [...]

When the New York Times broke — or rather, rebroke, as it turned out — the story about Pennsylvania Republican Curt Weldon and his insistence that a secret Pentagon data mining operation called Able Danger had, during the summer of 2000, identified and tried without success to inform the FBI of a US al [...]

Although there’s nothing to this point connecting Weldon with the off-the-books diplomatic and intelligence operations in which Franklin, Rhode, Ghorbanifar and Ledeen were involved, there are some common threads, chief among which are a contempt for the CIA and other government agencies, the fixation on Iran and the connection with Iran-Contra, which of course is another example of individuals attempting (and in the Iran-Contra instance, succeeding; for the ultimate example, read Charlie Wilson’s War) to conduct their own foreign policies.