Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

Donald Trump, welcome to your everything, everywhere, all at once.

Republicans: “Abortion is murder but you can take a bus to get one.” Easy peasy.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

The fundamental promise of conservatism all over the world is a return to an idealized past that never existed.

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

The lights are all blinking red.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

Shut up, hissy kitty!

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

Cole is on a roll !

‘Museums aren’t America’s attic for its racist shit.’

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

“Cheese and Kraken paired together for the appetizer trial.”

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

… gradually, and then suddenly.

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

Fani Willis claps back at Trump chihuahua, Jim Jordan.

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Republican Stupidity

Another Bush Hater

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John Batiste– liar, Bush ‘hater,’ or both:

My name is John Batiste. I left the military on principle on November 1, 2005, after more than 31 years of service. I walked away from promotion and a promising future serving our country. I hung up my uniform because I came to the gut-wrenching realization that I could do more good for my soldiers and their families out of uniform. I am a West Point graduate, the son and son-in-law of veteran career soldiers, a two-time combat veteran with extensive service in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq, and a life-long Republican. Bottom line, our nation is in peril, our Department of Defense’s leadership is extraordinarily bad, and our Congress is only today, more than five years into this war, beginning to exercise its oversight responsibilities. This is all about accountability and setting our nation on the path to victory. There is no substitute for victory and I believe we must complete what we started in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Donald Rumsfeld is not a competent wartime leader. He knows everything, except “how to win.” He surrounds himself with like-minded and compliant subordinates who do not grasp the importance of the principles of war, the complexities of Iraq, or the human dimension of warfare. Secretary Rumsfeld ignored 12 years of U.S. Central Command deliberate planning and strategy, dismissed honest dissent, and browbeat subordinates to build “his plan,” which did not address the hard work to crush the insurgency, secure a post-Saddam Iraq, build the peace, and set Iraq up for self-reliance. He refused to acknowledge and even ignored the potential for the insurgency, which was an absolute certainty. Bottom line, his plan allowed the insurgency to take root and metastasize to where it is today. Our great military lost a critical window of opportunity to secure Iraq because of inadequate troop levels and capability required to impose security, crush a budding insurgency, and set the conditions for the rule of law in Iraq. We were undermanned from the beginning, lost an early opportunity to secure the country, and have yet to regain the initiative. To compensate for the shortage of troops, commanders are routinely forced to manage shortages and shift coalition and Iraqi security forces from one contentious area to another in places like Baghdad, An Najaf, Tal Afar, Samarra, Ramadi, Fallujah, and many others. This shifting of forces is generally successful in the short term, but the minute a mission is complete and troops are redeployed back to the region where they came from, insurgents reoccupy the vacuum and the cycle repeats itself. Troops returning to familiar territory find themselves fighting to reoccupy ground which was once secure. We are all witnessing this in Baghdad and the Al Anbar Province today. I am reminded of the myth of Sisyphus. This is no way to fight a counter-insurgency. Secretary Rumsfeld’s plan did not set our military up for success.

Or is the problem he and the media are “ignoring most tales of valor and achievement by our troops.”

I sure hope someone at Blogs for Bush or Michelle Malkin’s website googles Open Secrets to find out who he contributed to in 2004, because unless he donated to a Democrat and we can prove he is a commie terrorist sympathizer, some of this shit might stick.

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So Now I Am A Liar…

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Dean Esmay bloviating in his comments section:

A) The administration and military establishment do not “routinely lie,” and
B) Apparently, actual lies and agitprop by terrorist organizations are not worthy of anywhere near as much skepticism in John’s world as the “lies” of an administration he simply disagrees with sometimes.

Whatever.

Whatever, indeed. We won’t go into the ‘lies’ in too much detail, just brush up on a few of them. I guess we could start with the lie about the cost of the Prescription Drug Plan. We could move on to virtually any one of Cheney’s utterances about Iraq over the past few years (if you want to claim he is not ‘lying,’ and just wrong, you then need to articulate why we are continuing to advance policies based on the ‘wrong’ assumptions and ideas advanced by Cheney. Pick your poison.) We were lied to about secret prison camps. We were lied to about ‘just a few bad apples’ at Abu Gharaib, when there is more than ample evidence that the abuses were caused by administration policies. We were fed heapings of lies about stem cell research and the threat of gay marriage.

And those are just a few, off the top of my head. And that does not count the thousands upon thousands of acts of daily spin that take place- bullshit, that when fed to unwitting or willfully ignorant audiences, portrays false impressions designed to ease the passage or acceptance of flawed policies. So maybe Dean Esmay is content being lied to by the people he elected to represent him. Maybe he is just an idiot and really doesn’t realize he is being lied to. Or maybe Dean, after fabricating and slandering for months in regards to the Schiavo affair, is simply incapable of discerning the truth from lies anymore:

I don’t think it’s reasonable to call anyone a liar when you simply disagree with them. I think that degrades discussions considerably. It’s also unnecessarily demeaning.

Furthermore, I stand firmly and staunchly with Austin Bay, Glenn Reynolds, and others. In fact, let me just go ahead and stoop to John’s level:

John Cole’s a liar. He calls people liars when he knows perfectly well they may just disagree with people. So if John Cole will lie like that, why should I not be skeptical of anything John Cole ever says?

***

Really, does that sort of thing to ANYTHING to promote dialogue? One day, Aziz, you’re going to have the wonderful experience of pulling the lever for a man you really like, and see him be elected President, and feel really good about it–and then spend four to eight years having his critics call him a liar and an incompetent non-stop and in almost anything they ever say or do. Then maybe you’ll think back and say, “wow, did I sound that nasty back when Bush was in charge?” And the answer will be: yes.

Otherwise: I prefer a media which is NOT automatically more skeptical of our government than everybody else on the planet when our government is in the middle of a war. I’d prefer a media that’s on our side, and that stopped with the vile, hateful, stupid idea that “our side” means “the administration’s side,” or that our side is best served by being more skeptical of our government than our enemies.

Furthermore, it’s very clear where the media drops the ball to me:

1) By not being skeptical enough of our overseas critics, especially the rent-a-rioters and other anti-American demonstrators.
2) By ignoring most tales of valor and achievement by our troops.

I think they’re four-square guilty of that. Completely.

In other words, like I said the other day- the problem with Dean Esmay, Glenn Reynolds, and others “isn’t the media coverage, it is that he is not getting to decide what the media is covering.”

And let’s remember, I voted for Bush, too. Twice. I think there are times when he is unfairly attacked for things that he is not responsible for, and I say as much. I also have waged my own guerilla warfare against people who unfairly attack the military for ‘lying’ when they have not- search the archives for ‘white phosphorus.’ So I am not some knee-jerk Bush-hater who simply labels disagreements as ‘lies.’ But, unlike Dean, I don’t feel obligated to defend Bush or his appointees in this administration when they are simply lying at will, even if it means I sound ‘nasty’ when I label someone who lies repeatedly a liar.

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Another Bad Apple

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This time it’s the the cornerstone program of No Child Left Behind, Reading First (via Benen, of course).

WASHINGTON – A scorching internal review of the Bush administration’s billion-dollar-a-year reading program says the Education Department ignored the law and ethical standards to steer money how it wanted.

The government audit is unsparing in its view that the Reading First program has been beset by conflicts of interest and willful mismanagement. It suggests the department broke the law by trying to dictate which curriculum schools must use.

It also depicts a program in which review panels were stacked with people who shared the director’s views, and in which only favored publishers of reading curricula could get money.

In one e-mail, the director told a staff member to come down hard on a company he didn’t support, according to the report released Friday by the department’s inspector general.

No pattern here. Nosir…

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Another Bad Apple

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For a government that has no credible Congressional oversight and the greatest mania for secrecy since Nixon, the Bush administration sure seems to attract investigations. Steve Benen observes:

Following up on yesterday’s item about Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson and his apparent penchant for letting politics dictate the grant process, it looks like Bush’s cabinet secretary has a real problem on his hands.

[…] Today’s news looks much worse [link].

* “During the investigation, Secretary JACKSON’s Chief of Staff, as well as the HUD Deputy Secretary testified that, in a senior staff meeting, JACKSON had advised senior staff, to the effect, that when considering discretionary contracts, they should be considering supporters of the President, language consistent with the remarks made by JACKSON in Dallas, Texas, on April 28, 2006.”

* “Investigation did disclose some problematic instances involving HUD contacts and cooperative agreement grants, in particular, the cooperative agreement award issued to Abt Associates…was blocked for a significant period of time due to Secretary JACKSON’s involvement and opposition to Abt. Secretary JACKSON’s Chief of Staff testified that one factor in JACKSON’s opposition to Abt was Abt’s political affiliation.”

* “Secretary JACKSON’s Chief of Staff also identified other instances of Secretary JACKSON intervening with contractors whom he did not like. Reviews of political contributions indicated these contractors had Democratic political affiliations.”

Given this, resignation shouldn’t even be open to debate. Jackson has to go.

Who would have guessed it. It isn’t like DC has a corruption problem or anything like that.

There is so much political corruption on Capitol Hill that the FBI has had to triple the number of squads investigating lobbyists, lawmakers and influence peddlers, the Daily News has learned.

Maybe this is an isolated bad apple? It seems like other than David Safavian and now Alfonso Jackson the Bush administration has remained fairly clean. I mean, if you don’t include Claude Allen and the George Deutsch loonies at NASA, or the underage sex problem at DHS, or the entire Department of the Interior. You also have to discount the corrupt MZM defense contracting and the problem of DoD-sponsored profiteering in general. If we can ignore that and maybe sweep Keith Tomlinson under the rug then yeah, this administration is overall pretty clean. Alphonso Jackson must be some kind of outlier.

Sarcasm aside, it should be obvious to everybody by now that this administration simply does not take governing very seriously. Look at two simple things – one, I rattled off that list above off of the top of my head. However well-informed I might be the real list runs a lot longer than that. Two, this is the criminal behavior that we find out about despite the best efforts of Congress. Imagine the stones that would turn over if the party with subpoena power actually cared enough about the country to make sure that it is being managed well.

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Differently Abled

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Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA), 6/27/05:

Mr. Speaker, I rise because information has come to my attention over the past several months that is very disturbing. I have learned that, in fact, one of our Federal agencies had, in fact, identified the major New York cell of Mohamed Atta prior to 9/11; and I have learned, Mr. Speaker, that in September of 2000, that Federal agency actually was prepared to bring the FBI in and prepared to work with the FBI to take down the cell that Mohamed Atta was involved in in New York City, along with two of the other terrorists.

I have also learned, Mr. Speaker, that when that recommendation was discussed within that Federal agency, the lawyers in the administration at that time said, you cannot pursue contact with the FBI against that cell. Mohamed Atta is in the U.S. on a green card, and we are fearful of the fallout from the Waco incident. So we did not allow that Federal agency to proceed

The Pentagon Inspector General’s office, 9/22/06:

“We found no charts or other documentation created before 9/11 that contained a photograph or name of Mohamed Atta and was produced or possessed by the Able Danger team,” acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble said in the report.

[…] Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.) said in his 2005 book that, two weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, he presented White House officials with a chart that depicted people affiliated with al-Qaeda, including lead hijacker Atta. Weldon, who said the chart was developed as part of the Able Danger program, held news conferences, appeared on television programs and prompted a congressional hearing on his statements.

But the inspector general’s report determined that the program did not develop the chart and that it was instead a sample document passed to the military as an example of how to organize large amounts of data. Able Danger at the time was a small program working to develop a strategy for discovering information about suspected terrorists and terror cells in the United States. It was disbanded in January 2001.

Yes, Curt Weldon literally shouted himself hoarse about a sample document drawn up after 9/11 to illustrate how data management works. It is hard to imagine an interpretation of this incident that reflects well on Weldon. He could not possibly have dug as deeply as he did into the weeds of Able Danger without uncovering the basic facts about the information he repeatedly presented to the country. That is to say, to miss something that basic and relevant to his case Weldon would have to be a rampaging idiot. If pressed I might lean towards idiot, not least because of Weldon’s long pattern of utterly bizarre behavior.

Idiot or liar, Curt Weldon has a challenger who is credible on national security – retired Navy Vice Admiral Joe Sestak. Even Republicans should look forward to being rid of an embarrassment like Weldon.

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See No Evil

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Your government at work:

Four government auditors who monitor leases for oil and gas on federal property say the Interior Department suppressed their efforts to recover millions of dollars from companies they said were cheating the government.

The accusations, many of them in four lawsuits that were unsealed last week by federal judges in Oklahoma, represent a rare rebellion by government investigators against their own agency.

The auditors contend that they were blocked by their bosses from pursuing more than $30 million in fraudulent underpayments of royalties for oil produced in publicly owned waters in the Gulf of Mexico.

“The agency has lost its sense of mission, which is to protect American taxpayers,” said Bobby L. Maxwell, who was formerly in charge of Gulf of Mexico auditing. “These are assets that belong to the American public, and they are supposed to be used for things like education, public infrastructure and roadways.”

The lawsuits have surfaced as Democrats and Republicans alike are questioning the Bush administration’s willingness to challenge the oil and gas industry.

Just another example of political appointees subverting or ignoring the law.

The irritating thing about all this is, quite simply, the arrogance and the lawlessness of this gang of crooks. I probably would tend to agree with many anti-tax arguments, and might be sensitive to many arguments that the way royalties are collected should be looked at and adjusted. But the way to do that is to make an open proposal, use the appropriate venues, and change the way royalties are collected.

Not to act as lawless brigands, making things up as you go.

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