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Books I want to read:

MAYFLOWER
A Story of Courage, Community, and War.
By Nathaniel Philbrick. Viking, $29.95.
This absorbing history of the Plymouth Colony is a model of revisionism. Philbrick impressively recreates the pilgrims' dismal 1620 voyage, bringing to life passengers and crew, and then relates the events of the settlement and its first contacts with the native inhabitants of Massachusetts.

THE OMNIVORE'S DILEMMA
A Natural History of Four Meals.
By Michael Pollan. The Penguin Press, $26.95.
"When you can eat just about anything nature has to offer, deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety," Pollan writes in this supple and probing book. He gracefully navigates within these anxieties as he traces the origins of four meals - from a fast-food dinner to a "hunter-gatherer" feast -

THE PLACES IN BETWEEN
By Rory Stewart. Harvest/Harcourt, Paper, $14.
"You are the first tourist in Afghanistan," Stewart, a young Scotsman, was warned by an Afghan official before commencing the journey recounted in this splendid book. "It is mid-winter - there are three meters of snow on the high passes, there are wolves, and this is a war. You will die, I can guarantee." Stewart, thankfully, did not die, and his report on his adventures - walking across Afghanistan in January of 2002,

Retarded Child Emperor is Full of S@#$

Go to YouTube, watch this

Warren Buffet pays less taxes then you do!

Article from NYTimes by Ben Stein

Bush failed histroy class at Yale

In the Shadow of Ho Chi Minh by Robert Scheer

Triumph of Unrealism

By George F. Will
(Don't forget, Will is considered a very conservative writer---to see entire article click title)
emphasis added
The "new Middle East," the "birth pangs" of which we supposedly are witnessing, reflects the region's oldest tradition, the tribalism that preceded nations. The faux and disintegrating nation of Iraq, from which the middle class, the hope of stability, is fleeing, has experienced in these five weeks many more violent deaths than have occurred in Lebanon and Israel. U.S. Gen. George Casey says 60 percent of Iraqis recently killed are victims of Shiite death squads. Some are associated with the Shiite-controlled Interior Ministry, which resembles a terrorist organization.

The London plot against civil aviation confirmed a theme of an illuminating new book, Lawrence Wright's "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11." The theme is that better law enforcement, which probably could have prevented Sept. 11, is central to combating terrorism. F-16s are not useful tools against terrorism that issues from places such as Hamburg (where Mohamed Tower of the World Trade Center) and High Wycombe, England.

Cooperation between Pakistani and British law enforcement (the British draw upon useful experience combating IRA terrorism) has validated John Kerry's belief (as paraphrased by the New York Times Magazine of Oct. 10, 2004) that "many of the interdiction tactics that cripple drug lords, including governments working jointly to share intelligence, patrol borders and force banks to identify suspicious customers, can also be some of the most useful tools in the war on terror."

. . . Kerry said that although the war on terror will be "occasionally military," it is "primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation that requires cooperation around the world."

Immediately after the London plot was disrupted, a "senior administration official," insisting on anonymity for his or her splenetic words, denied the obvious, that Kerry had a point. The official told The Weekly Standard: "The idea that the jihadists would all be peaceful, warm, lovable, God-fearing people if it weren't for U.S. policies strikes me as not a valid idea. [Democrats] do not have the understanding or the commitment to take on these forces. It's like John Kerry. The law enforcement approach doesn't work."

This farrago of caricature and non sequitur makes the administration seem eager to repel all but the delusional. But perhaps such rhetoric reflects the intellectual contortions required to sustain the illusion that the war in Iraq is central to the war on terrorism, and that the war, unlike "the law enforcement approach," does "work." The official is correct that it is wrong "to think that somehow we are responsible -- that the actions of the jihadists are justified by U.S. policies." But few outside the fog of paranoia that is the blogosphere think like that. It is more dismaying that someone at the center of government considers it clever to talk like that. It is the language of foreign policy -- and domestic politics -- unrealism. Foreign policy "realists" considered Middle East stability the goal. The realists' critics, who regard realism as reprehensibly unambitious, considered stability the problem. That problem has been solved.

Interview With Sidney Blumenthal

(click title to see entire interview)

LiberalOasis: What makes the Bush presidency "radical" as opposed to merely "conservative" or "right-wing"?

Sidney Blumenthal: It's certainly not conservative in any classical definition of the sense of conserving something.

And, it's radicalism, in some ways is of the Right, but it is a unique radicalism...

...we're in the grip of this radical presidency, and I don't think that the country is fully aware of how radical Bush is, what the true and sweeping agenda is, and how this is changing our country fundamentally, including an attempt to change the nature of our government and Constitution.

It is unique because it's a kind of perverse mutation of conservatism and right-wing thought, but it's unto itself.

And it is unique in that Bush is more radical than any other president we have ever had in American history.

LO: You say that many Americans don't know what the agenda is. How would you summarize that agenda?

SB: I think that agenda is to completely transform our system of government, so that we have an unaccountable, unfettered concentration of power in the Executive.

It's an agenda that also seeks to transform the place of the United States in the world.

Bush has discarded 60 years of broad bipartisan consensus in foreign policy and internationalism.

And in place, asserted an agenda of, using the attacks on 9/11 as the proximate cause, ... first-strike pre-emptive attacks, unilateralism, de facto dismissal of internationalism.

He has shattered our traditional coalitions, including the Western Alliance.

And you can go through the whole foreign policy, but particularly, point to the immense dangers that he has created to our national security interests, coming from the utter fiascos he has engendered in the Middle East.

He also [is] the only President ever to show hostility to science.

Cheney's argument is empty for those who are actually dying

from WaPo

We are now very close to that point of general agreement in the Iraq war. Do you believe that if Bush, Cheney and company could turn back the clock, they would do this again? And now, thanks to Rep. John Murtha, it is permissible to say, or at least to ask, "Why not just get out now? Or at least soon, on a fixed schedule?" There are arguments against this -- some good, some bad -- but the worst is the one delivered by Cheney and others with their most withering scorn. It is the argument that it is wrong to tell American soldiers risking their lives in a foreign desert that they are fighting for a mistake.

One strength of this argument is that it doesn't require defending the war itself. The logic applies equally whether the war is justified or not. Another strength is that the argument is true, in a way: It is a terrible thing to tell someone he or she is risking death in a mistaken cause. But it is more terrible actually to die in that mistaken cause....

The last man or woman to die in any war almost surely dies in vain: The outcome has been determined, if not certified. And he or she might die happier thinking that death came in a noble cause that will not be abandoned. But if it is not a noble cause, he or she might prefer not to die at all. Stifling criticism that might shorten the war is no favor to American soldiers. They can live without that kind of "respect."

Earth to America - Will Ferrell

watch this video here

What Bush Isn't Addressing on Iraq

It would be nice if, even once, the Bush administration addressed the strongest version of the case against its Iraq-and-terrorism policy, rather than relying on bromides ("fight them there, so we don't have to fight them here") and knocking down straw men ("some say Iraqis don't deserve freedom...").

It probably won't happen.
On available evidence, the President himself has not grasped the essential criticism of moving against Iraq when he did: read on

"I think this has the potential to be the biggest scandal in Congress in over a century,"

The Justice Department has signaled for the first time in recent weeks that prominent members of Congress could be swept up in the corruption investigation of Jack Abramoff, the former Republican superlobbyist who diverted some of his tens of millions of dollars in fees to provide lavish travel, meals and campaign contributions to the lawmakers whose help he needed most. . .

The investigation by a federal grand jury, which began more than a year ago, has created alarm on Capitol Hill, especially with the announcement Friday of criminal charges against Michael Scanlon, Mr. Abramoff's former lobbying partner and a former top House aide to Representative Tom DeLay. . .
Scholars who specialize in the history and operations of Congress say that given the brazenness of Mr. Abramoff's lobbying efforts, as measured by the huge fees he charged clients and the extravagant gifts he showered on friends on Capitol Hill, almost all of them Republicans, the investigation could end up costing several lawmakers their careers, if not their freedom.
read on

Two cheers for immorality.

Good little esssay about morality from Deepak Chopra --link--

Nobody is immoral just because someone else says they are. Keeping this in mind is important. It comes in handy when self-righteous moralists take the stage and try to denigrate and punish those who disagree with them. In the eyes of the right wing, it is immoral to oppose the war, have an abortion, or not believe in Jesus and the literal word of the Bible. . . .

Murtha in Full

War Hawk Rep. Murtha (D-PA) Calls for Immediate Iraq Withdrawal

"The war in Iraq is not going as advertised. It is a flawed policy wrapped in illusion. The American public is way ahead of us. The United States and coalition troops have done all they can in Iraq, but it is time for a change in direction. Our military is suffering. The future of our country is at risk. We cannot continue on the present course. It is evident that continued military action is not in the best interests of the United States of America, the Iraqi people or the Persian Gulf Region...read on

Murtha, a Marine intelligence officer in Vietnam, angrily shot back at Cheney: "I like guys who've never been there that criticize us who've been there. I like that. I like guys who got five deferments and never been there and send people to war, and then don't like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done."

Watch video here at C&L

click here for larger image

Under Democratic Pressure, GOP Senators Pass Advisory Measure For Admin. To “Explain” Iraq Strategy…

also from HuffPo . . . . . . . . link

Big Oil Execs Deny Meeting With Cheney To Develop Energy Policy, Wash Post Has Doc That Shows They Did...

from Huff Po

link

Bush admin. recent assertions about war critics are deceptive

From the Washington Post

Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) strongly criticized yesterday the White House's new line of attack against critics of its Iraq policy, saying that "the Bush administration must understand that each American has a right to question our policies in Iraq and should not be demonized for disagreeing with them."...
"To question your government is not unpatriotic -- to not question your government is unpatriotic," Hagel said, arguing that 58,000 troops died in Vietnam because of silence by political leaders. "America owes its men and women in uniform a policy worthy of their sacrifices."...
Hagel supported the 2002 resolution to authorize military action in Iraq, but he has emerged as a strong skeptic of the Bush administration's handling of the war. In his speech, he called for a regional security conference to help invest Iraq's neighbors in the effort to stabilize the country....
At one point, while answering a question from the audience about Syria, Hagel suggested that the Middle East is worse off after the invasion because the administration failed to anticipate the consequences of removing Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. "You could probably argue it is worse in many ways in the Middle East because of consequences and ripple effects," he said.

Rumsfeld described an evolution of U.S. policy toward Iraq embraced by Democrats and Republicans. He read several quotes from 1998 from then-President Bill Clinton, Vice President Al Gore, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger. They predicted that Hussein, if unchecked, would again use weapons of mass destruction.
However, many of the comments cited by Rumsfeld were used to justify continued sanctions on Iraq, not to invade it. Moreover, the Clinton administration officials did not cite the problematic intelligence that formed the core of the Bush administration's case for an invasion, such as allegations that Iraq sought uranium in Africa and tried to obtain aluminum tubes as part of a resurgent nuclear program.

Rumsfeld also pointed to congressional actions in 1998 and 2002 calling for Hussein's removal. But the 1998 law, signed by Clinton, said "nothing in this act shall be construed to authorize or otherwise speak to use of United States Armed Forces" to implement it.

Letters, postcards, notes on the fridge: Pining for the blowjob dodge

read this, very good piece

on the McLaughlin Group, Pat Buchanan not only acknowledged that the Iraq War is destabilizing the entire region of the Middle East, but added that it was in fact the objective all along (video).

Pat Buchanan says it out loud . . .

Thus, in March, 2003, Bush, in perhaps the greatest strategic blunder in U.S. history, invaded an Arab nation that had not attacked us, did not want war with us, and did not threaten us—to strip it of weapons we now know it did not have.
(...)
Democratic imperialism is still imperialism. To Arab and Islamic peoples, whether the Crusaders come in the name of God or in the name of democracy, they are still Crusaders.
read on

Interesting back and forth on the issues

here
Mark Shields and David Brooks

I think this debunks the whole gay marriage thing quite well

video link here

Calling the Republicans on their hypocrisy--priceless

How's that Hooker Dick Morris? (from Crooks and Liars)

Thom Hartmann had Dick Morris (I am the toe man) on his show today and there was a very interesting exchange. Morris was prattling on about how wonderful Condi Rice is when Thom questioned her job performance. Immediately, Dick began assaulting Sandy Berger so Hartmann reminded Dick of his hooker obsession. Morris hung up on him.

Audio-MP3

Albino Dolphin has the full interview.

Sandy Berger told me personally Dick that he told Condi Rice when she came into office-that his words to her were look out for Osama Bin Laden. He's coming to get you. You need to be paying attention. This has to be your number one priority and she said, "OK thank you very much for that information," and did then nothing.

Morris: Did he, did he take the documents out of his socks when he told you that?

Hartmann: Come on Dick, do you want me to talk about hookers with you? Come on Dick.

Morris: Okay, well thanks very much for the interview. Bye-bye. (hangs up)

If more talk show hosts did this sort of thing there wouldn't be many extreme right wing apologists left on the airwaves.

Congress is slashing food stamps, student loans and heating assistance

from DailyKos
Finally, while Congress is slashing food stamps, student loans and heating assistance to save money (the Bridge to Nowhere remains intact, thank god), Molly Ivins looks elsewhere and comes up with 60 pain-free billion dollars:

Just for starters, is there anyone---anyone---who thinks we need more than 1,000 nuclear warheads in order to have a credible nuclear deterrent at this time? By cutting back to 1,000, we can save $13 billion right there.

Another $26 billion would be saved by scaling back or stopping the research, development and construction of weapons that are useless to deal with modern threats. Many of the weapons involved, like the F/A-22 fighter jet and the Virginia Class submarine, were designed to fight the defunct Soviet Union. All of this is according to Lawrence Korb, whose credentials are endless---senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, senior adviser to the Center for Defense Information, former vice president of Raytheon, etc. The $26 billion does not include the old Star Wars program, now called missile defense, which could be cut back to basic research for a savings of $7 billion.

I'm trying to give you some sense of scale here. According to Korb's research, we could take $60 billion out of the defense budget, 15 percent of the total, without remotely affecting military readiness.

Amazing---she didn't even break a sweat.

Another excellent debunking of ID as science

from Slate

The Price of Loyalty

This article has great info and the guy is a good writer as well, please read:

The consequences of a bias for loyalty over debate have been devastating. Issues don't get aired; downside risks remain unassessed.
(...)
Instead of reaching out and encouraging disagreement, Bush let neocons like Libby and Paul Wolfowitz hijack his foreign policy. Amazingly, the pros and cons of invading Iraq were never even debated in the National Security Council. If you had doubts, like Colin Powell, you were marginalized. (Powell's former chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, said last week that a "cabal" of isolated policymakers ran a government of dangerous "ineptitude.")
(...)
By showing how evidence of Saddam's WMDs had been cooked, Wilson undermined the very reason Augie Schroeder and the rest of the U.S. military went to war. He was more than "fair game," as Karl Rove called him. He was a mortal threat.

This has been the Bush pattern. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill presciently says a second tax cut is unaffordable if we want to fight in Iraq—he's fired. Bush's economic adviser Larry Lindsey presciently says the war will cost between $100 billion and $200 billion (an underestimate)—he's fired. Army Gen. Eric Shinseki presciently says that winning in Iraq will require several hundred thousand troops—he's sent into early retirement. By contrast, CIA Director George Tenet, who presided over two of the greatest intelligence lapses in American history (9/11 and WMD in Iraq) and apparently helped spread "oppo ammo" to discredit the husband of a woman who had devoted her life to his agency, receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom. read the whole article

Advice to Washington Democrats:

from Huffpost

Here’s some simple deductive logic: The President told us that he wanted to get to the bottom of the Valerie Plame affair. He told that Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby had been asked—by him or on his behalf—whether they had anything at all to do with it and that they had assured him they did not. It is now a matter of public record that both Rove and Libby were involved.

ERGO: ROVE LIED TO THE PRESIDENT.

I don’t care whether he broke the law or not. He cannot continue to work in my White House because he LIED TO MY PRESIDENT. Surely the President cannot continue to take advice from a man he cannot trust. Faced with this logic, the President has two only two possible responses: Fire Rove or admit that he, the President, was complicit in the lie.
This is serious. What if the President’s closest aides lied to him about WMD in Iraq? Oh my, what if he started a war because he believed them?
Oh Democrats, my Democrats. Don’t take the Republican bait. Please don’t debate the role of special counsel and the arcanery of law. Just explain and repeat, explain and repeat:

Nobody lies to my President and gets away with it.

Driftglass on the modern GOP

Driftglass as usual is long winded, but speaks to the real truth. Here are the salient points: (read the whole post here)

Sometimes we paint the place Red, and sometimes Blue, and sometimes what those colors mean changes completely, but the compact requires -- absolutely requires -- that we respect the house itself.

And it is in this signal betrayal that the Modern Republican Party is singularly infamous.

They are not remotely interested in changing the artwork or the crown molding; they're going after the walls, the floor and the brickwork. They're setting fire to the foundation stones themselves, and the indictment of Scooter Libby is only the latest link in the chain.

Consider just these few core samples taken from the anthracite soul of the Party of Darkness:

On Making War.

There is a proper way a modern Great Nation goes to war. When describing how a Great Nation undertook the gravest decision any country can make, the watchword damned well better have been "Deliberate". And Cautious. Reluctant. Even Sad. As a last, possible resort. The gravity a Great Nation must feel down to it's bones before going to war might best be summed up by Lincoln in his Second Inaugural:

"All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, urgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish.

And the war came."


For sober-minded adults, the days of undertaking mass slaughter for martial glory and piqued pride disappeared in the trenches of World War I, and were permanently entombed under the rubble of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But instead, this Chickenhawk Administration came to the table iron-hard, leg-humpin', Priapistic for war. For the profit it would bring as well as the suppressing fire it would provide for its political agenda. War as Distraction. War as Photo-Op.

And to accomplish this end, they ate away at the decision-making apparatus itself. When, like this Administration, you see war as just another means to a profitable end -- and you have no ethics-bound limits on what you are prepared to do to advance your partisan agenda -- you end up lying lavishly because you no longer recognize Truth or Falsehood as points on a moral compass.
(...)
So again we see the perversity of the GOP on a cellular level.

Because it affronts the sensibilities of its loyal swine, the Republican party is actually willing to wage war on Evolution; a science whose fundamentals have been settled beyond any serious debate across an entire, global community of literate, learned humans for over a century.

Except here.

Except with the panderers that run the Republican Party who, for sordid electoral wages, are more than happy to run three centuries of Enlightenment through the wood chipper.
(...)
And because it might impinge on the bottom lines of their corporate overlords, these same illiterate, innumerate whores are quite willing to rewrite the laws of physics and meteorology in Crayola, and pretend that Global Warming is just the kooky notion of a handful of addled intellectuals
(...)
Again, it is not a particular decision or theory against which the GOP has set themselves, but the entire idea of Man using Reason to make decisions against which they have set themselves.

They make war on the idea of Enlightenment itself.

How much more of an enemy of Democracy could they possibly be?
(...)
And now...Scooter Libby.

What is the Scoot Man charged with?
Blow away the smoke and just listen to the sturdy poetry of the indictment itself to understand what is at stake here.

When all is said and done, what Libby tried to do was no less than attempt to destroy the instrumentality by which the truth itself could be found.
On a matter of National Security.
During a time of war.
He did it as cooly and deliberately as a suicide bomber going after a troop carrier, which is treason to the bone, and only a traitor would defend it or spin it as anything less.

The Rude Pundit frames it in his own special way

Patrick Fitzgerald: The Grown-Up in the Room:
But sometimes, into the fantastic realms of juvenile imagination, an adult must walk in and point out the reality of the situation. Looking around the destroyed room, the adult calls things by their names: No, Scooter, that's not a unicorn,... read on

Grand jury indicts Libby in CIA leak case

WASHINGTON — I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, resigned Friday after being indicted for lying in the investigation of the leak of a covert CIA operative's identity. full story

Stop those atheists!!

Are you bothered by those people that dare to doubt the reality and truth of the Bible? Then click here ...Does it irk you that those atheists want to take over the government and prevent you from celebrating Christmas and remove all the Ten Commandments displays from city parks? Then click here...

Also if you are a true believer, be sure to go here

Special Preview of New Anne Coulter Book

It won't be a good day for liberals when this hits the shelves. Included in it are pretty compelling arguments that Hillary Clinton is a lesbian (Coulter says she saw Clinton with her own eyes at a closeted dyke party, although why Coulter was there isn't clear), that Al Franken is a current drug user, and that Liberalism is the product of a genetic mutation resulting from incest and spicy European foods.

Scarborough on the Plame investigation and Iraq war

Harsh words from this normally rah rah Republican for the Bush admin. Go to Crooks and Liars for the video clip.

On Cheney:

Joe: In middle America, voters would call that a lie. He told Tim Russert something that was not the truth. Why is that important? It's important because you're talking about two thousand Americans killed in Iraq.

even more in the clip, watch it

Casualty reports on Page One

Write to your local newspaper and urge them to print casualty reports on the front page. Click here to use the easy tool to send a letter to the editor of your local newspaper to insist they properly Honor the Fallen.

"either "we" are out of our minds, or "they" are"

Scroll down the list of blog items here at HuffPo and you'll see one world.
But glance on over at the dinosaurs of the Corporate Mainstream Media and by and large you'll see a completely different world. It's been that way for some time in America. Two competing and polar opposite "realities".

I've often said over the last many months that either "we" are out of our minds, or "they" are. But most decidedly, one of us is completely fucking loony and wholly out of touch with reality.
Some of "us" received some validation that it wasn't "we" who were insane last June when Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel said what all of "us" have been thinking for quite a while. He said, out loud, "the White House is completely disconnected from reality".
(...)
The Mainstream Corporate Media has almost entirely bought into the Administration's version hook, line, and sinker for at least the last four years. The top headlines on almost every network and cable news all still look a whole lot like Tom DeLay smiling: Nothing to worry about here folks! But the answer to which of America's two "realities" is actually the reality, may soon be upon us. While every network, every cable news channel, and almost every carbon-based newspaper, continues to help "them" convince America that everything's fine, America might very well see the Vice-President of the United States resign from his office within a week.
(...)
David Gergen, Republican advisor to to four American Presidents was intellectually honest enough to ask The Question: "What did the President know and when did he know it?" On ABC's This Week of all places! Out loud!

Well that would change everything! Unless, of course, you are the Corporate Mainstream Media and the really really big "news" in your "reality" concerned a teen-aged blonde female who unfortunately decided upon Aruba for her Spring Vacation.

read the whole article by Brad