America’s intelligence czar showed yesterday why he’s now the top dog in the US intelligence establishment. Testifying before the Senate Armed Forces committee, Negroponte allowed as how a civil war in Iraq “would seriously jeopardize the democratic political process on which they are presently embarked.”

The nuclear pact president Bush inked with India this week violates two international treaties and several US laws. Bush consulted neither the treaty agencies or Congress before signing the deal. It is, in short, illegal.

While perusing our comments this afternoon, I ran across a site written by deceased elitist political philosopher Leo Strauss. It is, as one might expect given the author’s spiritual fathers, philosphically elevating and a bit on the acerbic side.

As he weighed in yesterday on the now-infamous video of Silent George Bush attending a pre-Katrina video conference, John Dickerson unleashed a burst of inadvertent clarity that perfectly encapsulates what’s wrong with Bush, the administration and the reporters who cover both.

I’m among the legion of critics who complain that institutional press retractions of or corrections to widely read stories are often all but invisible. With any luck, that won’t be true in this decidedly non-institutional circumstance.

The one thing that makes me sure no Republican official or polemicist will agitate for the return of slavery is that the institution requires some responsibility on the part of slave owners. Indentured servitude is probably on the table somewhere; perhaps we can reintroduce the welfare state with the money going directly to employers.

US Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad told the Los Angeles Times in a story published today that the invasion of Iraq opened a “Pandora’s Box” requiring a continuing strong US troop presence.

National Journal reporter Shane Harris reports that the White House have appointed a former bottom rung White House staffer to an important position in the Department of Homeland Security.

Digby at Hullabaloo has raised the question of why, if abortion is murder, anti-abortion crusaders aren’t calling for women who undergo the procedure or the doctors who perform it to be treated as murderers. He links to a video in which the question is posed to a group of anti-choice demonstrators, who respond with, “Uh …”

Anyone who saw the video in which disgraced former Federal Emergency Management Administration chief Michael Brown looked like a dynamo as he briefed the White House and other agencies on the impending disaster that was Katrina knows that as much as he sucked in the job, his performance was head and shoulders above those of his bosses, including Silent George Bush.

Late last year, Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell and Post polling director Richard Morin were involved in a flap over the Post’s refusal to conduct a poll measuring public support for the impeachment of president Bush.

Beginning in 2004 and continuing for nearly a year, prominent Greek politicians were wiretapped by a program secreted in Vodafone’s Athens call centers. Testifying before a parliamentary committee, Vodafone chief George Koronias told members of parliament that the eavesdropping “required an organisation that combined advanced technology and ample financial means … such know-how does not exist in Greece.”

AP White House correspondent Ron Fournier has the first hit on the latest AP/Ipsos poll measuring George Bush’s job performance. Only 37% of respondents approve of Bush’s efforts, which matches the lows from October and November of last year. 67% say the country is on the wrong track, a new high. Ipsos hasn’t released the breakdown by party affiliation, but Fournier says “more people, particularly Republicans, disapprove of President Bush’s performance, question his character and no longer consider him a strong leader against terrorism.”

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.

President Bush on Friday gave the National Newspaper Association a preview of several speeches on Iraq planned for this month. Among the points he stressed were that although “this is a period of tension in Iraq,” Americans are safer because Saddam Hussein is no longer in power.

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.”

To paraphrase P.T. Barnum, it’s a rare politician who loses an election by underestimating the American public’s attention span.

US secretary of state Condi Rice added a little sizzle to her South American tour by accepting a guitar inlaid with a coca leaf from Bolivia’s president Evo Morales.

(Via Raw Story) The father of a man on trial for lying about whether he attended a terrorist training camp in Pakistan says the camp was manned by a thousand sword wielding masked ninjas who pole-vaulted rivers in a massive underground training facility.

Digby at Hullabaloo has been writing for several years about the conflict between anti-abortion rhetoric declaiming abortion as murder and anti-abortion statutes which don’t invoke criminal penalties against women who seek or obtain abortions.

It’s not often that you run across a polymath libertarian leftist cleric whose sensibilities suggest the bastard child of an unholy union between Hunter Thompson, St. Thomas Aquinas and Truman Capote. When you do, the question that pops immediately to mind is, “Does this guy have a blog?”

Rumors that president Bush is being encouraged to take a GOP establishment on board to whip his staff into shape are rife. CNN’s Dana Bash reported today that “a move is afoot among some friends and confidantes of President Bush to persuade him to bring in at least one seasoned Republican veteran to help his struggling staff.”

Today I finally got another chance to get Scott McClellan riled up. Ever since the last time I did it, back in January, he’s been lucky enough or tricky enough to avoid having to call on me, but today, the briefing room wasn’t quite as crowded as it has been, and I got my chance to ask a question that has been puzzling me ever since the Director of National Intelligence ,John Negroponte, testified to the Senate on February 2 that, “Tehran has been responsible for at least some of the increasing lethality of anti-coalition attacks by providing Shia militia with the capability to build improvised explosive devices with explosively formed projectiles similar to those developed by Iran and Lebanese Hizballah.”

Slate columnist Bruce Reed has an article today noting some of the more bizarre side effects of Ambien and wondering if they don’t explain the Bush administration.

They must be exhausted—they’re starting to tell the truth.

First, on Face the Nation on Sunday, President Cheney finally revealed himself: “Most of my predecessors spent a good part of their time as president—as vice president—getting ready to run for president.”

The Washington Post is second only to the dread New York Times as an object of right-wing press bashing. So when the Post hired a young Republican blogger in a putative effort to add a conservative voice to its roster of right-leaning editorialists, reporters who suffer periodic fits of Republican talking point logorrhea and an ossified readers representative who hates readers, one could be forgiven for thinking the newspaper was simply reacting to the needling of its critics and at the same time providing moderate critics with an endlessly entertaining piñata.

Two recent deals highlight the Bush administration’s schizophrennic approach to national security. One involves an Israeli firm has scrapped plans to buy Sourcefire, a US computer security company, in the face of skepticism from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS). The other involves a contract with a Hong Kong-based company to operate sensitive radiation detection equipment at a Bahamian port.

In a bill signing statement similar to the one in which he asserted the right to ignore the McCain anti-torture amendment, George Bush has notified Congress that he isn’t bound by provisions for Congressional oversight of FBI powers granted under the recently revised Patriot Act.

I wrote yesterday about a bill signing statement in which president Bush once again asserted his authority, under the rubric of national security, to ignore laws passed by Congress and signed by him. Gleen Greenwald offers a much more substantial response to the practice today, and Atrios, in pointing to the Greenwald piece, says “I have no idea how to wake the slumbering press.”

Via Chris Floyd at Empire Burlesque, we learn that hot document repository The Smoking Gun has obtained a copy of the requirements Dick Cheney’s advance team provides to hotels hosting the veep when he’s off hunting supporters and money.