Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

There is one struggling party in US right now, and it’s not the Democrats.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Fight them, without becoming them!

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Republicans got rid of McCarthy. Democrats chose not to save him.

How can republicans represent us when they don’t trust women?

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

The revolution will be supervised.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Biden: Oh no. We’ve upset Big Pharma again.

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

It could be worse. Vance could have said “post-menopausal sows.” Waiting for that audiotape to surface.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Trump’s legal defense is going to be a dumpster fire inside a clown car on a derailing train.

The words do not have to be perfect.

How any woman could possibly vote for this smug smarmy piece of misogynistic crap is beyond understanding.

It’s pointless to bring up problems that can only be solved with a time machine.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

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Plame Update

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Kos points to this Murray Waass piece:

Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, testified to a federal grand jury that he had been “authorized” by Cheney and other White House “superiors” in the summer of 2003 to disclose classified information to journalists to defend the Bush administration’s use of prewar intelligence in making the case to go to war with Iraq, according to attorneys familiar with the matter, and to court records.

According to sources with firsthand knowledge, Cheney authorized Libby to release additional classified information, including details of the NIE, to defend the administration’s use of prewar intelligence in making the case for war.

Libby specifically claimed that in one instance he had been authorized to divulge portions of a then-still highly classified National Intelligence Estimate regarding Saddam Hussein’s purported efforts to develop nuclear weapons, according to correspondence recently filed in federal court by special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald

This could get interesting.

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Never Knew Him

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I’ve largely passed on the Abramoff story since Jack’s decision to turn state’s evidence because for now, anyway, nothing is really happening. We’re stuck in the period after the witness has begun to cooperate but before we know where exactly the prosecution is headed. This might be one of the most entertaining games of musical chairs in history, with the White House on the run and the press desperate for excuses to call this scandal ‘bipartisan,’ but that’s all it is.

The political impact, of course, is enormous. People care about this story. The question of corruption resonates enough that Republicans and Democrats have fallen over each other to get out competing proposals to clean up DC, although it turns out that Republicans were just kidding about theirs. Two politicians in particular are looking at the sharp end of the public’s wrath over corruption in DC: Rick Santorum, whose dimming reelection prospects have forced him into an increasingly comical position of denying any knowledge his own K Street Project, and of course Tom DeLay. Not to be unfair to Santorum, I feel obligated to point out, via Carpetbagger, that DeLay also isn’t above denying the obvious.

A letter to Republicans in DeLay’s district, yesterday:

“A final word on Jack Abramoff: the notion that he was a close friend who wielded influence over me is absolutely untrue,” DeLay wrote. “As Whip and Majority Leader, I met with many people who brought issues before Congress and sought support of both Republicans and Democrats.”

DeLay added: “The reality is, Jack Abramoff and I were not close personal friends. I met with him only occasionally, in fact less frequently than numerous others who brought issues before Congress — never did he receive preferential treatment.”

Tom DeLay in 1997:

“When one of my closest and dearest friends, Jack Abramoff, your most able representative in Washington, D.C., invited me to the islands, I wanted to see firsthand the free-market success and the progress and reform you have made,”

Nice try, Tom. You don’t cure gangrene by washing your hands.

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Quick. Someone Find Howard Dean

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And make sure he is sitting down when he reads this:

John Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is one of two Americans who have been nominated for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.

Last year, Democrats and a few Republicans refused to confirm Bolton to the U.N. post, forcing President Bush to resort to a recess appointment.

Bolton and Kenneth R. Timmerman were formally nominated by Sweden’s former deputy prime minister Per Ahlmark, for playing a major role in exposing Iran’s secret plans to develop nuclear weapons.

Heads are going to explode.

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Neanderthal Nincompoop Nailed At NASA

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We haven’t yet reached the point in the NASA story arc (more here, here, here and here) where the Deathmobile, representing science, triumphantly emerges from under the cake and crushes everything in its path. Doubtless that day will come, but in the meantime we can all have the pleasure of watching NASA flack and erstwhile B/C2004 campaign operative George Deutsch make the sad transition from a government player to a pejorative term conflating hubris, theocratic idiocy, ideology-driven patronage hiring and (late bonus) forged credentials. (login mrbig/mrbig):

George C. Deutsch, the young presidential appointee at NASA who told public affairs workers to limit reporters’ access to a top climate scientist and told a Web designer to add the word “theory” at every mention of the Big Bang, resigned yesterday, agency officials said.

Mr. Deutsch’s resignation came on the same day that officials at Texas A&M University confirmed that he did not graduate from there, as his résumé on file at the agency asserted.

As a fittting testimony to this weird new world of distributed journalism, the story was broken by blogger and recent A&M grad Nick Anthis. Kudos to the NYT for giving credit where credit is due.

Recall that Deutsch went a bit further than merely labeling the Big Bang a ‘theory.’

The Big Bang is “not proven fact; it is opinion,” Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, “It is not NASA’s place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator.”

Bye, George, you won’t be missed.

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Boehner’s Apartment

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This is an odd story that sounds more sensational than it probably is:

Rep. John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), who was elected House majority leader last week, is renting his Capitol Hill apartment from a veteran lobbyist whose clients have direct stakes in legislation Boehner has co-written and that he has overseen as chairman of the Education and the Workforce Committee.

The relationship between Boehner, John D. Milne and Milne’s wife, Debra R. Anderson, underscores how intertwined senior lawmakers have become with the lobbyists paid to influence legislation. Boehner’s primary residence is in West Chester, Ohio, but for $1,600 a month, he rents a two-bedroom basement apartment near the House office buildings on Capitol Hill owned by Milne, Boehner spokesman Don Seymour said yesterday. Boehner’s monthly rent appears to be similar to other rentals of two-bedroom English basement apartments close to the House side of the Capitol in Southeast, based on a review of apartment listings.

***

Milne could not be reached by phone or e-mail. His wife, Anderson, who is on the advisory board of mCapitol, said she and her husband have been friends with Boehner and his wife for years. After buying the house in 2004, she said, she mentioned at a social gathering that they had a place to rent, and Boehner said he was interested.

Anderson described Boehner as an “excellent tenant” who pays his rent on time.

If he is paying fair market value, I don’t see what the big deal is.

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The Diet Wars

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As I am currently trying to shed a few pounds, any story that has the word diet in it catches my eyes:

The largest study ever to ask whether a low-fat diet reduces the risk of getting cancer or heart disease has found that the diet has no effect.

Journal of the American Medical Association The $415 million federal study involved nearly 49,000 women ages 50 to 79 who were followed for eight years. In the end, those assigned to a low-fat diet had the same rates of breast cancer, colon cancer, heart attacks and strokes as those who ate whatever they pleased, researchers are reporting today.

“These studies are revolutionary,” said Dr. Jules Hirsch, physician in chief emeritus at Rockefeller University in New York City, who has spent a lifetime studying the effects of diets on weight and health. “They should put a stop to this era of thinking that we have all the information we need to change the whole national diet and make everybody healthy.”

Until this study is really analyzed, I am going to take it with, if you will, a grain of salt. The article points out that there are already a number of flaws with the study, and I continue to believe that lower fat diets are (and when I say lower fat, I think natural fats like olive oil are perfectly healthy), in general, healthier.

*** Update ***

Two quick things- Apparently I have no conception of what a ‘low-fat’ diet is, because I think removing all fat from a diet is stupid. We will stick to calling what I am referring to as a lower fat diet, which would include the healthy fats and oils.

Second, Ezra Klein has some thoughts on this study.

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Shock Therapy Update

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Via Aravosis, Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff of Die Zeit comments on the cartoon controversy in tomorrow’s Post:

Last week the publication I work for, the German newsweekly Die Zeit, printed one of the controversial caricatures of the prophet Muhammad….

In this jihad over humor, tolerance is disdained by people who demand it of others. The authoritarian governments that claim to speak on behalf of Europe’s supposedly oppressed Muslim minorities practice systematic repression against their own religious minorities. They have radicalized what was at first a difficult question. Now they are asking not for respect but for submission. They want non-Muslims in Europe to live by Muslim rules.

This is exactly what I was talking about on Sunday. I wasn’t claiming that Europeans have any problem with authoritarianism in general, which they don’t. Authoritarian governments come and go. Rather, and this applies much more to some European countries than to others, the question of mixing religious authority with civil authority is simply anathema. To many it’s as offensive as the cartoons of Mohammad are to the rioters.

Here that simply isn’t the case. You don’t have to argue that the religious right controls America to observe that as a country we have less of a problem with a fundamentalist religious viewpoint, and with the interdigitation of civil and religious authority.

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