Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

At some point, the ability to learn is a factor of character, not IQ.

It’s easier to kill a dangerous animal than a man who just happens to have different thoughts/values than one’s own.

This blog will pay for itself.

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

Fundamental belief of white supremacy: white people are presumed innocent, minorities are presumed guilty.

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

This fight is for everything.

I conferred with the team and they all agree – still not tired of winning!

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

Wake up. Grow up. Get in the fight.

… gradually, and then suddenly.

Innocent people don’t delay justice.

I was confident that someone would point it out and thought why not me.

Second rate reporter says what?

The current Supreme Court is a rogue court. Very dangerous.

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

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Archives for September 2006

One Down, Another Hundred or So To Go

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More rats and scoundrels:

Representative Bob Ney, Republican of Ohio, has agreed to plead guilty to federal criminal charges related to his dealings with the corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff, lawyers and others with knowledge of the investigation said Thursday.

A guilty plea would make Mr. Ney, a six-term congressman, the first member of Congress to admit to criminal charges in the Abramoff investigation, which has focused on the actions of several current and former Republican lawmakers who had been close to the former lobbyist.

People with detailed knowledge of the investigation said Mr. Ney had entered an in-patient rehabilitation center in recent days for treatment of alcoholism, making it uncertain whether he would appear at a court hearing to announce the plea. Lawyers and others would speak only anonymously because of concern that they would anger prosecutors.

They said the agreement with the Justice Department — and the exact criminal charges, which are expected to include conspiracy and false statement — would be disclosed in Washington as soon as Friday and would probably require Mr. Ney to serve at least some time in prison.

We’ll see if he has the decency to step down from office, and how the rest of the House acts will be very telling.

In another note, if, by November, every voter does not know the names Abramoff, Cunningham, DeLay, and Ney, then the Democrats are just idiots.

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It Wasn’t Even A Game

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The first quarter was exciting, then it got boring as hell:

Steve Slaton’s speed and Maryland’s sloppiness turned No. 5 West Virginia’s first anticipated test of the season into a laugher.

Slaton rushed for 195 yards and the Mountaineers forced two turnovers in a 28-0 first-quarter blitz on the way to a 45-24 victory over the Terrapins on Thursday night.

Slaton, a sophomore, scored twice in the opening quarter of his first career action against Maryland, the school that offered him a scholarship, then withdrew it.

Pat White threw for a TD and ran for another while Darius Reynaud scored twice, including a 96-yard kickoff return, for the Mountaineers (3-0), who extended their winning streak to 10 games, second in the nation to TCU’s 12 in a row.

Pretty dominating performance by the Eers.

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The Sudden Demise of Fiscal Conservatism

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Joe Scarborough was mentioned earlier in the Nancy Grace thread, and it reminded me of this piece from the Washington Monthly:

Maybe that’s because right-wing, knuckle-dragging Republicans like myself took over Congress in 1994 promising to balance the budget and limit Washington’s power. We were a nasty breed and had no problem blaming Bill and Hillary Clinton for everything from the exploding federal deficit to male pattern baldness. I suspected then, as I do now, that Hillary Clinton herself had something to do with “Love, American Style” and “Joanie Loves Chachi.” And why not blame her? Back then, Newt Gingrich felt comfortable blaming the drowning of two little children on Democratic values. Hell. It was 1994. It just seemed like the thing to do.

The terminally rumpled Dick Armey (R-Whiskey Gulch) even went so far as to suggest that the Clintons might be Marxists, drawing an angry personal rebuke from Bubba himself. But 12 years later, it is Armey’s fellow Republicans who should be sobered by the short and ugly history of Republican Supremacy.

Under Bill Clinton’s presidency, discretionary spending grew at a modest rate of 3.4 percent. Not too bad for a Marxist, even considering that his worst instincts were tempered by a Republican Congress. (Well, his worst fiscal instincts.)

***

During the 1990s, conservative Republicans and the Clinton White House somehow managed to balance the budget while winning two wars, reforming welfare, and conducting an awesome impeachment trial focused on oral sex and a stained Gap dress.

The fact that both parties hated each another was healthy for our republic’s bottom line. A Democratic president who hates a Republican appropriations chairman is less likely to sign off on funding for the Midland Maggot Festival being held in the chairman’s home district. Soon, budget negotiations become nasty, brutish, and short and devolve into the legislative equivalent of Detroit, where only the strong survive.

But in Bush’s Washington, the capital is a much clubbier place where everyone in the White House knows someone on the Hill who worked with the Old Man, summered in Maine, or pledged DKE at Yale. The result? Chummy relationships, no vetoes, and record-breaking debts.

Kinda bizarre to think the nastiness of the 90’s would be desirable, but then you read stuff like this:

On Wednesday, leaders of the House prepared to take up a rule requiring individual lawmakers to sign their names to some of the pet projects they tuck into major tax and spending bills. As an internal House rule, the requirement would be in effect only until the end of the session, just a few weeks away.

While reform advocates denounced the proposal as nearly toothless, its bite was still too sharp for many in Congress. By Wednesday night the resolution appeared to be bogged down in a three-way squabble among Republicans, Democrats and the powerful members of the House Appropriations Committee.

“It has been a very pathetic showing,” said Mary Boyle, a spokeswoman for the reform group Common Cause. Even with one congressman in jail, a well-known lobbyist on the way and several other members and staff members still under investigation, she said: “The response to this has been nothing. It has been silence.”

***

The final thrust of the House reform agenda was a measure to address earmarks — a favorite idea of Mr. Boehner. He initially called for substantive restrictions on their insertion in spending bills but eventually settled for a measure to at least illuminate the murky practice by requiring the public identification of the member who sought each earmark.

But the Republican leaders’ draft resolution defined earmarks only as funds for organizations outside the federal government, like cities, universities, museums or nonprofit groups. It would not apply to earmarks directing money to the Defense Department or other federal agencies to execute projects, which account for the vast majority of the federal money spent on earmarks.

THROW. THEM. ALL. OUT.

And then pour bleach down the damned streets of Washington and pray that the smell and the stain go away.

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Know Your Jihadists

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We have seen and will see again unintelligent people shoehorn every single muslim lined up against America into the rhetorically convenient empty phrase islamofascists. The phrase plays great in Peoria, which after all is the point, but it displays a lack of knowledge about who is fighting us and why, a misunderstanding that could and is getting American kids killed. Some might argue that the administration cannot possibly be as chunderheaded as its rhetoric implies. Maybe I am wrong, in fact I hope so. So show me. Who is doing the deep thinking in our government? Where is their work product? As near as I can tell this lethally stupid oversimplification reaches all the way to the top.

Anyhow, I don’t link to Billmon enough at all. He deserves better, so go read this essay.

What’s alarming (or encouraging, from bin Ladin’s point of view) is that the original covert war against a transnational terrorist group appears to have morphed into a connected set of traditional Third World insurgencies, in which Islamist guerrilla fighters have managed to find or create relatively secure bases — the Taliban in Afghanistan’s Orzugan and northern Helmand provinces, the core of the old Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas and, just perhaps, Al Qaeda in Iraq in Anbar Province.

Col. Pat Lang, a former Middle East desk officer for the DIA, calls these “redoubt areas” — perhaps harking back to the so-called Iron Triangle, an expanse of rubber plantations northwest of Saigon that was one of the Viet Cong’s favorite stomping grounds. (Che Guevara’s old concept of revolutionary foci might also apply.)

Such redoubts are essentially no go zones where the “legitimate” government has no presence and occupation troops rarely go (and then only in massive strength). This means they can be used as rear areas by the insurgents — places to assemble units, rest and refit, build supply dumps, headquarters, hospitals, etc. Locals can be enlisted or dragooned into serving as porters, laborers, spies, etc. Redoubts are what southern Lebanon is to Hizbullah, and like southern Lebanon they may be honeycombed with tunnel complexes, command bunkers and underground ammo dumps and armories — all the things a guerrilla army needs to survive a war with a vastly superior First World military.

How big a problem is this? Well, if you buy the Cheney administration’s premise that the United States cannot allow the creation of sanctuaries that could be used to plan, organize, train and prepare for terrorist attacks on America or its allies, then it’s a very big problem. Totally unacceptable. But the threat could be even more serious than even the Cheneyites understand.

That is just a teaser to get you to read the whole thing. So go. I don’t agree with his last paragraph (not shown here), which in my opinion conflates a failure with an impossibility, but the piece should help to dispel the picture-book rhetoric that seems to have taken over our understanding of how and why Americans are dying in the middle east.

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RIP Ann Richards

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Ann Richards passed after a long bout with cancer:

Former Gov. Ann Richards, the witty and flamboyant Democrat who went from homemaker to national political celebrity, died Wednesday night after a battle with cancer, a family spokeswoman said. She was 73.

She died at home surrounded by her family, the spokeswoman said. Richards was found to have esophageal cancer in March and underwent chemotherapy treatments.

The silver-haired, silver-tongued Richards said she entered politics to help others _ especially women and minorities who were often ignored by Texas’ male-dominated establishment.

“I did not want my tombstone to read, ‘She kept a really clean house.’ I think I’d like them to remember me by saying, ‘She opened government to everyone,'” Richards said shortly before leaving office in January 1995.

She was governor for one term, losing her re-election bid to Republican George W. Bush.

I am sure I had strong opinions about Ann Richards at one point in time, but I really don’t have much to say now because those feelings seem to have faded as she was no longer on the national stage. My condolences to her family.

And yes, I am posting this at 4 am because I have insomnia.

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From The “You Can’t Make This Shit Up” Department

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This is too much:

US President George Bush is to host White House talks on British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen.

Cohen, 35, creator of Ali G, has infuriated the Kazakhstan government with his portrayal of Borat, a bumbling Kazakh TV presenter.

And now a movie of Borat’s adventures in the US has caused a diplomatic incident.

The opening scene, which shows Borat lustily kissing his sister goodbye and setting off for America in a car pulled by a horse, had audiences in stitches when it was first shown last week.

But the film, which has just premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, has prompted a swift reaction from the Kazakhstan government, which is launching a PR blitz in the States.

Kazakhstan president Nursultan Nazarbayev is to fly to the US to meet President Bush in the coming weeks and on the agenda will be his country’s image.

President Nazarbayev has confirmed his government will buy “educational” TV spots and print advertisements about the “real Kazakhstan” in a bid to save the country’s reputation before the film is released in the US in November.

In other news, Toronto protestors last year threatened to boycott Blockbuster if they carried the tenth anniversary edition of Canadian Bacon. Or maybe I just made that up.

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