Although not as widely remarked as the elimination of habeas rights and the consecration of torture, the recently passed Senate torture legislation includes provisions that would immunize the Bush administration and other US personnel from prosecution under the War Crimes Act of 1996, not just looking forward but retroactively as well, going back to 1996.
Why [...]

Most Democrats know that the GOP is not actually the party of family values, unless you’re talking the Sopranos or the Borgias. Still, the sight of the House leadership fracturing into tiny pieces over the Mark Foley scandal and the ensuing coverup is an astonishing one. Democrats haven’t been able to dent Republican dominance despite six years of White House and Congressional negligence, corruption, incompetence and lies; instead, Denny Hastert and the crew have obligingly begun to rain shock and awe down upon themselves by magnifying a scandal that if handled appropriately when the leadership first learned of it, would have played little if any role in the upcoming elections.

Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-Gommorah) says he won’t resign in the face of criticism over the Mrk Foley scandal. Although he stopped short of announcing that he has full confidence in himself, Hastert told Rush Limbaugh in the same interview in which he blamed political opponents for making a big deal of his aggressive failure to protect House pages from Foley’s advances that he plans on remaining in office at least long enough to welcome Nancy Pelosi as his successor.

Suggestions by Republicans and some journalists that Democrats are behind the sudden emergence of the Foley scandal have exploded.
On Tuesday, soon-to-be-former House speaker Dennis Hastert told Rush Limbaugh that the Foley revelations and fallout were politically motivated. The same day, Steve Thomma of McClatchy Newspapers’ Washington bureau penned a classic “pox on both your [...]

You’ll know Baghdad is safe for human habitation when a Bush administration official can announce a visit to Iraq’s capitol in advance. That won’t happen before the clock runs out on the administration in January of 2009: the city isn’t safe for anyone, even inside the alternate reality known as the Green Zone, and it’s [...]

Two leading journalists contributed to and kept secret a report the Bush administration used to argue for the invasion of Iraq. Newsweek senior editor Fareed Zakaria, an ardent proponent of the invasion who has now given it up as a lost cause, and Robert Kaplan, a highly touted foreign affairs journalist and another advocate [...]

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 [...]

” ‘Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?’ I asked [Republican Congressman Terry Everett] a few weeks ago.
“Mr. Everett responded with a low chuckle. He thought for a moment: ‘One’s in one location, another’s in another location. No, to be honest with you, I don’t know. I thought it was [...]

This item has been seriously updated: see asterisked comments below.
George Bush today signed into law a bill that tramples and spits on the Constitution and whatever claim to lofty morals the US once had. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 sends the 900-year-old right of habeas corpus on a permanent vacation, leaves it to the [...]

Thanks to a blogging librarian in San Antonio, we now know a bit more of what George Bush thinks constitutes torture. BiblioSquirrel has unearthed a 1967 New York Times story in which Bush downplays his fraternity’s practice of branding new recruits with the Delta Kappa Epsilon emblem.
A former president of Delta [said] that the branding [...]

Pennsylvania’s Rick Santorum has arrived at the strangest and most geographically dislocated analogy ever for the War on Terra®: it isn’t World War II or the Cold War, but the War of the Rings. There’s no way to do justice to his remarks, so we’ll let them speak for themselves.
“As the hobbits are going up [...]

Needlenose blogger Swopa is so good at predicting various Iraq-related stupidities, cupidities and disasters that I sometimes think US policymakers are reading the blog and mistaking it as prophetic command. “Swopa says we’re going to alienate al Sadr and magnify his influence again. To hear is to obey!” This entry, “How many soldiers’ lives has [...]

I was in a mood this month to take a bitter but comical view of theology and humanity. Here are two books that scratched the itch.
James Morrow, Towing Jehovah (B+)
I was going to open this review with “what this author lacks in writing ability he makes up for in big brass ones,” but as [...]

UPDATE: We’ve chosen and submitted six questions from among those suggested here and via email. We hope to have the opportunity to do this again, so please continue to leave suggestions should you have any. I’ve asked Dave Almacy, the White House spokesman who agreed to answer your questions, when we can expect to receive [...]

Questions about Iraq? The imperiled Constitution? Health care? The economy? Those cute dogs? The upcoming elections?

A note to our readers: BTC News is inviting you to submit questions to be asked of a White House spokesman who has agreed to answer on the record the ones we select. If you’d like to join in the exercise, read the invitation and leave your questions in the comments section.
Harsh words about US [...]

A note to our readers: BTC News is inviting you to submit questions to be asked of a White House spokesman who has agreed to answer on the record the ones we select. If you’d like to participate, read the invitation and leave your questions in the comments section.
State department official Alberto Fernandez now says [...]

A note to our readers: BTC News is inviting you to submit questions to be asked of a White House spokesman who has agreed to answer on the record the ones we select. If you’d like to participate, read the invitation and leave your questions in the comments section.
Now that the majority of Americans view [...]

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 [...]

More than half of Friday’s White House press briefing was consumed by Dick Cheney’s Tuesday endorsement of waterboarding. The various exchanges between reporters and press secretary Tony Snow could be boiled down to this: Reporter: “Do you think we’re stupid?” Snow: “Not really, but what am I supposed to do?”
Here’s what Cheney said in response [...]

Oh, the perils of blogging. Joe Lieberman’s communications director, Dan Gerstein, has some fundamental differences with his boss. In March of this year, Gerstein wrote on his now-dormant blog that “I disagree with Lieberman about the conduct of the war in Iraq” and that “I view Bush as one of the worst leaders in American [...]

Corruption, torture, thievery, sexual improprieties, coverups, lies … if the GOP were a city, anyone taking a last look at it as they fled would turn into a pillar of salt. Maybe that’s why religionists such as Focus On The Family’s James Dobson refuse to turn their backs on the party despite the decidedly un-Christian [...]

Slate’s Jacob Weisberg is getting a tingly feeling in his political pants over a potential Barack Obama-John McCain matchup in 2008. Since Weisberg’s political appetites are a reliable reflection of Washington’s pundit class, we can all look forward to a steady diet of Maverick reruns until the 2008 primaries begin or one of the senators [...]

Meet Mark Halperin, world’s most pathetic journalist. Halperin, who runs ABC’s conventional wisdom assembly line, The Note, co-wrote a book with the Washington Post’s John Harris ironically entitled The Way to Win. Regardless what the book says, Halperin’s winning strategy appears to involve publicly debasing yourself beyond any hope of redemption. Glenn Greenwald, whose [...]