In perhaps the most stunningly stupid move since the Trojans said—hey, cool horse, let’s bring it inside the gates!, Michael Chertoff has decided that the DOHS (pronounced Doh!–like Homer Simpson) doesn’t really need to defend New York.

By a margin of 2:1 over his nearest competitor, George W. Bush is seen as the worst US president since World War Two. 34% of respondents in a Quinnipac University poll ranked Bush at the bottom of a heap that also includes Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, the elder Bush and Bill Clinton.

You might think the significance of the massacre in Haditha is self evident, but in the event it eludes you, The Nation helpfully explains. Even though Iraq is, they say, a place where civilians are being killed in scores by a variety of people, including us, “there remains a distinctly sickening horror in close-up systematic killing of civilians that’s at odds with the declared US mission in Iraq and is repugnant to our national ideals.”

Tony Snow does his best to control the damage after Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki, speaking to reporters on Thursday, denounced coalition troops’ treatment of Iraqi civilians.

The image could have been from one of Sam Shepard’s essays/remembrances from Cruising Paradise: A man in cowboy hat, shoeless in red socks pulled over his jeans boarding a bus after throwing his cell phone against a wall in the depot somewhere in the desert Southwest. It’s one of the first scenes from German [...]

Foreign leaders make a fuss. The president makes a face. The secretary of state makes a complicated color-coded calendar. A new policy is born. If White House aides speaking anonymously to the New York Times are to be believed, that’s how the US came to decide talks with Iran, or at least the potential for talks with Iran, might not be such a bad idea.

It’s early days yet, but New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer appears set to clock whoever opposes him in this year’s gubernatorial election.

This is a repost for technical purposes of earlier commentary on the new Iran initiative.

It’s a peculiarity of modern political discourse that Democrats who hold strong positions on two non-ideological issues are labeled as leftists.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has been the face of the war since before there was a war, second only to Saddam in the months before the invasion. Those waxing triumphant over al-Zarqawi’s apparent death should remember the parade of pivotal enemies whose deaths or captures have come and gone with little effect.

Having saturated the local market, Slate editor Jacob Weisberg is exporting his brand of analytic idiocy to the pages of the Financial Times. In an otherwise unremarkable treatment of the Bush administration’s resort to gay bashing as a campaign rallying cry, Weisberg manages to equate the Democratic party’s attempts to raise the minimum wage with the Republican party’s annual efforts at constitutionally outlawing the casual incineration of the US flag.

Admiral Harry Harris told reporters today that suicides by three inmates at the Guantanamo Bay prison were acts of war, not desperation. The inmates hung themselves in the maximum security area of the prison. One had just ended a hunger strike.

Remember when “compromise” meant finding some acceptable intermediate position between opposing viewpoints?

The suicides of three inmates in the US gulag at Guantanamo Bay have US officials screaming “foul.” One says the suicides were”a good PR move.” Another says they were a form of asymmetrical warfare, and still another invoked 911 as a comparably unpredictable and diabolically clever act.

Slate magazine has two offerings related to the centrist blogfest in Las Vegas over the weekend, one from Bruce Reed and one from John Dickerson. Reed, the current president of that millstone around the Democratic party’s neck known as the Democratic Leadership Council, writes from the perspective of someone who dearly wants bloggers such as those attending the Yearly Kos confab to sit down and shut up; Dickerson, Slate’s chief political correspondent, focuses more on bloggers as a media phenomenom.

Someone claiming to be “the man named Wissam al-Zahawie” responded this week on Slate.com’s message board to noted British romancer Christopher Hitchens’ April 10, 2006, Slate article in which Hitchens charged Zahawie, once Saddam’s envoy to the Vatican, with being a raving anti-Semite whose love of Wagner places him in dangerously close approximation to Hitler.

Adherents to the Democratic Leadership Council’s concrete overshoes philosophy refer to themselves as “New Democrats.” Joe Lieberman’s refusal to rule out leaving the Democratic party if he loses his primary fight to challenger Ned Lamont, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee head Chuck Schumer’s refusal to rule out supporting Lieberman if he does leave and DLC president Bruce Reed’s brief paeans to Republicans Dan Coats, John McCain and Michael Gerson suggest that there’s a “New New Democrat” waiting in the wings.

Roger Ailes wrote last Monday about shlock jock Howard Kurtz’s penetrating interview with Amanda Congdon of Rocketboom fame. Congdon, we learn, is young, hot and fond of brevity. Kurtz, we learn, is none of these things, although he confesses to being one of them some years ago.

A memo from the US embassy in Iraq to the US state department offers a bleak assessment of life for Iraqi employees of the embassy. As dark as it is, though, the memo may be more significant for what it doesn’t say.

A memo from the US embassy in Iraq to the US state department offers a bleak assessment of life for Iraqi employees of the embassy. As dark as it is, though, the memo may be more significant for what it doesn’t say.
Washington Post columnist Al Kamen got a copy of the memo (Acrobat file) and [...]

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

Kidnapping countermeasures taken by Iraqi employees were among the chilling details in the US Iraq embassy memo to Condoleeza Rice. “Planning for their own possible abduction,” the memo says, employees “use code names for friends and colleagues and contacts entered into Iraq cell phones.” Today’s news that more than 100 Iraqi government employees were kidnapped while leaving their jobs at an industrial facility near Baghdad highlights the nightmare.

Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum has been making the rounds claiming that the US has in fact discovered banned weapons in Iraq. The claims are based on the continuing sporadic discovery of pre-Gulf War I munitions containing variously disintegrated chemical weapons, and the Pentagon has said that the claims are crap: the munitions in question, mostly artillery rounds, are unusable and have been for years.

Each of the 500 unusable “WMD” artillery rounds Senator Rick Santorum is screeching about carries an extraordinary price tag. At current rates, the cost per unit is $6 billion in direct costs, 5 dead US soldiers, 40 wounded US soldiers, and hundreds of dead Iraqis. Add in the lifetime of medical care many US soldiers will require, along with death benefits and other incidentals such as the lost income and societal contributions of the dead, and the price tag rises considerably. Add in the costs to Iraqis, and it rises still more.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced today the arrest of some Americans plotting to blow up the Sears Tower and other targets. He says that “these homegrown terrorists may prove to be as dangerous as groups like Al-Qaeda.” He didn’t add “so bend over, America,” but then again, he doesn’t really have to.

The St. Petersburg Times inadvertently bought in to a bit of satirical truthiness today when it published a wire report on a Karl Rove press conference with Satan. Although the story has since been removed from the Times web site, a screen shot of it has been posted by the National Journal’s Hotline blog and the text was grabbed by the now Cox-less Wonkette. Here’s a sample:

At a joint press conference today in Washington, White House adviser Karl Rove said that he would be plotting the Republican Party’s fall election strategy with his longtime comrade-in-arms, Satan.

General George Casey has adopted the Democratic position on withdrawing troops from Iraq, and the LA Times says that’s bad for Dems. Greg Sargent at the American Prospect is bewildered by that construct: “What is it going to take,” he asks, “to get the media to stop spinning everything — even a situation where Republicans are being forced to follow where the Dems led — as good for the GOP?”

A Utah Republican congressional candidate says the Prince of Darkness is interfering with his campaign. John Jacob, who is in a dead heat with 5-term Republican Congressman Chris Cannon going into Tuesday’s primary, told the Salt Lake Tribune on Friday that Satan was messing with his business enterprises to prevent him from adequately funding his campaign.

In a ruling on the constitutionality of a Texas redistricting plan, the Supreme Court said any state can redraw legislative districts any time. Until the Texas state legislature, led by governor Rick Perry and urged on by the late Tom DeLay, redrew Congressional districts in 2003, states had limited their gerrymandering efforts to once a decade following the US census.

A neighbor of mine was recently arrested after trying to break into a military installation to share the secret of unlimited low-cost electricity. His big mistake was not that he attempted to gain entry to a restricted military facility, but that he neglected to get himself elected to Congress before pulling the stunt.