Karl Rove, like the Spanish Inquisition has three things going for him: Criticize, Terrorize and Demonize. Just think how the Democrats in Congress act when the ize of Rove are upon them: like whiny little children.

Well, you know, it's time for a little payback. Since Preznit KnowsOnly Nine-Eleven appointed him to be Lord God of the Disaster, it's time for Democrats to get onto Frank Lautenbergs' bandwagon. Why is the Roveulator out in North Dakota doing fundraising? And why, since he's a paid, full-time employee of the US Government, is he doing it on the Taxpayers Dime? He's got a job to do now that has nothing to do with fund-raising...in fact it's closer to Barn-Raising.

It's time to start turning the eyes of the Nation onto the ize of Rove, and rip away the facade of competance that has been imbued by the Poodle Media and their apologists everywhere.

Take back our country...indict Karl Rove for fraud, waste and abuse.

Commander of NORAD: Welcome Mr. President, we're honored to have you here at NORAD. Over there on those large screens on the wall, you can see the situation in real-time from geo-synchronous weather and intelligence satellites tracking the progress of Rita in the Gulf. The one on the left is the false-color infrared satellite which allows is to measure factors from the storm like windspeeds and cloud tops, as well as to see telemetry from surface-based weather stations. To the right is a live feed from NOAA, the NWS Hurricane Center in Miami, and to the right of that are real-time feeds from all the major news networks. In front of you is a headset that will allow you instantaneous real-time communication with Fleet assets currently deployed behind Rita in the Gulf as well as contact with the Hurrican Hunter personnel currently monitoring the storm on-station in the eye. Again, we're honored to have you here and look forward to helping you lead the response to Rita as it makes landfall in Texas. Do you have any questions for me, sir?

Preznit Facial Abrasion: Neat-O. Now, can I ride my bike in the halls? I wanna see if the bell echos when I ring it.

So a week later, and what is Times Select?

Just a way to become even less culturally relevant than before, if that was possible. Well played, y'all. NYT: Why Bother?

Probably not work safe. But pretty damn great. Thanks to AmericaBlog for the link.

It seems that everytime I manange to write about Ratzi the Nazi I get in trouble. Got unceremoniously booted off one blogroll for it. My bad, I guess. But you gotta look beyond the vista of the good, faithful, loving Catholics to see what their beloved Church is becoming. Let's face it, Catholicism is not exactly without its' own minor indiscretions over the centuries. But to be fair, it seems to have been able to chart a course towards improving (sometimes) the lives of many of its' adherents by the good works and faith of its leaders from the lowliest Priest trying to live his vows, to Bishops and Cardinals who have stood up to repressive regimes, sometimes at the cost of their own freedom and even lives.

So what's to be made of a man who was a Nazi? Who wears the hat of the leader of one of the major religions of this planet who seeks to use the training of his youth to marginalize men who share his alleged love of his god, but are gay? Here's where he came from:

Because some Nazis believed homosexuality was a sickness that could be cured, they designed policies to "cure" homosexuals of their "disease" through humiliation and hard work. Guards ridiculed and beat homosexual prisoners upon arrival, often separating them from other inmates. Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, wrote in his memoirs that homosexuals were segregated in order to prevent homosexuality from spreading to other inmates and guards.

Mat 5:10
Blessed [are] they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven

Mat 5:11
Blessed are ye, when [men] shall revile you, and persecute [you], and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.

Gee, maybe they can call it "Auto-da-Fe 21". Real Catholic Torture for the 21st Century. No Comfy Chairs Provided.

This is from the "Hearts and Minds" department:

BASRA city authorities last night declared they would no longer co-operate with British forces in southern Iraq, as the row caused by Monday's confrontation between UK troops and Iraqi police escalated.
...
Speaking in London, John Reid, the Defence Secretary, insisted the dispute over the capture and forcible release of two SAS soldiers on Monday "will not affect the relationship between Iraq and Britain".

But a few hours later in Basra, the provincial city council held an emergency meeting and voted unanimously "to stop dealing with the British forces working in Basra and not to cooperate with them because of their irresponsible aggression on a government facility".

Will the the people that Preznit Completely Corrupt calls his base be asked to sacrifice their tax-cuts to pay for Mess O'Potamia? No.

Will the people that Preznit Sippin' Whiskey regales with tales of strolling with First Responders to have photo-ops with be considered as candidates for sacrifice in "Operation Offset"? No.

Then who will be asked to (once again) shoulder the burden of paying to continue the feeding frenzy at the tax-cut trough?

A group of House Republicans have proposed a plan to offset the costs of relief and rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina that includes trimming military quality-of-life programs, including health care.

Possible sources of funding cuts to free up money for Katrina relief include reduced health benefits, consolidation of the three military exchange systems and the closure of the military’s stateside school system.

It's against the law for many of them to say anything about this in anyway but to vote "with their feet" when (and if) they can. But how unconscionable is it for the republicans to put these folks in Harm's Way and then blithely assert that they need to sacrifice further for other Americans, when the richest 1%, who will get over 300 Billion in tax-relief over the next five years are being asked to sacrifice nothing?

One of the juiciest Canards of the Right is that we should not defend our opposition to American Soldiers being tossed into the meat grinder in Mess O'Potamia because they are all "volunteers". Well, no one joined the Army and "volunteered" to leave their family destitute, no one "voluneteered" to be treated as a Second-Class Citizen as the 1600 Crew does for the Guard and Reservists in terms of benefits, even though they serve on the frontlines in Iraq and Afghanistan with their regular Army counterparts.

No one but the fiscally insane, rubber-stamping one-party Congress would have ceded all their responsibilities to the 1600 Crew under the guise of this "War" of choice and then had the balls to ask for more sacrifice in the one place it shouldn't ever be made, in the paycheck of our servicemen and women who are not "volunteering" to be part of the Great Social Experiment in Supply-Side Economics and Government Accounting Trickery.

Jeff Huber's all over this too...

From the Self-Absorbed Boob Department:

What did we in the media talk about before we spent all our time talking about hurricanes? Before all the chatter was about Category 4 and Category 5 and levees and evacuations? Before we flooded the zone, to use Howell Raines's phrase, of Katrina and Rita and every storm in between?

Gee, did I forget anything?

Well, it was only paper. After all, if he were not the most "powerful" guy in the Senate, but instead Preznit American Idiot's Bitch, then we'd be having a different discussion now, wouldn't we?

The Baltimore Sun, Spiro Agnew's hometown paper, opined that the First Lady's adventures in the cow trade "certainly don't smell right, especially considering that Jim Blair represented a giant, influential agribusiness firm in Arkansas that later received what seemed to be favors from Gov. Clinton."

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) has maintained for years that his stock holdings in the nation's largest for-profit hospital chain posed no conflict of interest for a policymaker deeply involved in health care matters. He even received two rulings in the 1990s from the Senate ethics committee that blessed the holding of the stock in blind trusts.

So when Frist decided in June to dump all the stock, and later cited as the reason his desire to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, eyebrows went up among ethics experts and congressional watchdogs. Why did he do it at that time?

Precisely a month later, after the stock was sold, its price tumbled 9 percent when executives in the company -- HCA Inc., which was founded by Frist's father and on whose board Frist's brother serves -- disclosed that hospital admissions of insured patients were lower than expected, depressing profits in the second quarter.

Oh yeah, a stock sale that the benficiary knew nothing about, gee anyone want to give Bill Frist Martha Stewarts phone number? I'm sure she'd be happy to give him some advice on how to talk to the investigators when they come a-visitin'.

Well, here's your all-purpose Clenis cover.

A new line of condoms is grabbing headlines in China even as its sparks a debate about trademark law and promotion campaigns. The products' brand names: "Clinton" and "Lewinsky."

The condoms are sold in boxes of 12, with the brand named after former President Bill Clinton priced at $3.70 and that of former White House intern Monica Lewinsky at $2.25.

Guangzhou Haojian Bioscience Co. said it registered both trademarks and is pricing the brands differently to reflect the higher quality of the Clinton line.

Do we get a 70 million dollar congressional report on the failures of these Clintons?

Jeebus.

So there's another Big-Ass Storm heading for the US. And baby, it's gonna be a doozy...

Remember when gas spiked to $3-plus a gallon after Hurricane Katrina? By this time next week, that could seem like the good old days.
...
We could be looking at gasoline lines and $4 gas, maybe even $5 gas, if this thing does the worst it could do," said energy analyst Peter Beutel of Cameron Hanover. "This storm is in the wrong place. And it's absolutely at the wrong time," said Beutel.

I hope that the warnings of the National Weather Service are heeded by the residents of the Texas Gulf Coast. I feel bad for the New Orleans evacuees who are having to bolt twice in less than a month because of the wrath of Mother Nature.

My thoughts are with the East Texans about to have their lives up-ended by nature. I hope that the Government treats you better than the folks north and east of you over the next 96 or so hours and beyond.

Interesting take on PNAC. It's significant that both Bush Pere and Clinton virtually ignored the entreaties of PNAC for a dozen or so years. The events of 9/11 allowed PNAC to foist its ambitious agenda onto a President who was spoiling for an excuse to beat up Saddam. With many PNAC insiders sitting in the catbirds seat, well, it's history. Now it looks like a little tension in the household over there at NeoCon Central...

It was four years ago this week that a little-known group called the "Project for the New American Century" (PNAC) published an open letter to President George W Bush advising him on how precisely he should carry out his brand-new "war on terrorism".

In addition to ousting Afghanistan's Taliban, the letter's mostly neo-conservative signatories called for implementing regime change "by all necessary means" in Iraq, "even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the (September 11) attack". It also urged "appropriate measures of retaliation" against Iran and Syria if those countries refused to comply with US demands to cut off support to Hezbollah, which they considered part of the terror network.
...
So, four years later, how is the PNAC is doing? The short answer is not so well. Because it represents a coalition of different, although like-minded varieties of hawks, its own influence - or at least the perception of that influence - is highly dependent on the coalition's unity.
...
But the breakdown in the coalition's unity and coherence resulted at least as much from external factors, as well, beginning with the tenacity of the Iraq insurgency. In bogging down US land forces, it has put paid to the coalition's original dreams of the armed forces being prepared to intervene in any crisis - anytime, anywhere.
...
While realists within the administration argue in favor of engaging Syrian President Bashar Assad, if only because the alternative could be so much worse, the hawks, particularly the neo-conservatives who often refer to Damascus as "low-lying fruit", appear determined to prevent any weakening of their policy of isolation and economic pressure on the assumption that the regime will soon collapse.

I wonder if they are trotting this news into the Oval Office now, or are going to wait until some time next week to send the info to Preznit Vacations'r'Me.

As many as 1 million people were ordered to clear out along the Gulf Coast, and hospital and nursing home patients were evacuated Wednesday as Hurricane Rita turned into a Category-5, 165-mph monster that could slam Texas by the weekend and inflict more misery on New Orleans. Forecasters said Rita could be the most intense hurricane on record ever to hit Texas, and easily one of the most powerful ever to plow into the U.S. mainland.

Let's see...this sure sounds like a good idea:

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether gasoline prices were illegally increased after Hurricane Katrina and if oil companies have constrained refinery capacity to keep fuel prices high, an agency official told Congress on Wednesday.

"We are continuing our intense scrutiny of conduct in the petroleum industry in the aftermath of Katrina," John Seesel, FTC associate general counsel for energy, told the Senate Commerce Committee at a hearing on gasoline prices.

Pat Leahy has now said he's gonna allow French Fries on the Bench. I am disappointed beyond belief at this. I have always liked and admired Pat Leahy as being a pricipled, progressive, smart guy. Truly a leader in the Senate. But Pat Leahy just got his ass rolled by the 1600 Crew. Big Time.

he senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee announced Wednesday he will vote to confirm John Roberts for chief justice of the United States after leading senators met with President Bush to discuss candidates for a second high court vacancy.
...
Leahy, D-Vt., said he still has some concerns about Roberts.

"But in my judgment, in my experience, but especially in my conscience I find it is better to vote yes than no," he said.

"Judge Roberts is a man of integrity. I can only take him at his word that he does not have an ideological agenda."

In fact, there's probably a picture of you up on Karls bulletin board with the caption:

PUNK'D

All your previous good deeds: For Naught. Thanks for the Legacy. Thanks for Nothing.

I guess ICE can be more than one kind of trouble for the 1600 Crew these days...with an unqualified crony appointment to the Immigration and Customs goatfuck going on, check out this latest FEMA Fuck-all:

Hundreds of thousands of pounds of ice meant for the Gulf Coast arrived yesterday not in storm-ravaged New Orleans or Mississippi but in Gloucester, where almost two dozen tractor-trailers spent the day parked on Rogers Street with their engines running.
...
Johnson said he picked up an oversized load of ice in Sandwich last Tuesday. From there, he drove to Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Ala., where he spent eight days waiting to unload. All the while, his truck's engine continued to run in order to keep the ice from melting.

And after those eight days - he made around $900 per day, with some truckers earning in excess of $2 per mile - Johnson said he got the news his load was needed in Gloucester.

"I guess they sent us up here because of the big ice crisis you're having in Gloucester," said Dan Hanson, who picked up his 44,000 pounds of ice in St. Paul, Minn., before traveling to Maxwell and spending "eight days and seven minutes" waiting.
...
Truck driver Paul Kite said he never would have agreed to pick up the ice had he known it was a job for FEMA, because government orders on shipments often change, he said.

"Once you pick up a load from FEMA, you're stuck," he said. "We've done jobs for FEMA before, but never to this extent where you sit and sit and sit. I just drove 1,300 miles to dump ice in Gloucester. This has to be the stupidest thing I have ever done."
...
A frustrated Kite - only 200 miles from cities that he said were on television nightly pleading for help - offered to pay $1,500 for his load of ice so that he could drive it down to the Gulf Coast himself, he said. The offer was refused by FEMA, he said.

Three weeks later, Kite's truck is still carrying the same load of ice.

"Every man standing here will tell you," he said. "Yes, we're enjoying the money we're making. But, it's (expletive)."
...
Memhard said his Gloucester company tried to send ice to hurricane-ravaged regions after the storm but could not get permission from FEMA.

"We've been on the Internet and on the phone talking to as many people as we could," said Memhard. "We haven't succeeded in getting on the A-list yet."

Goddamn, that Preznit'n is HARD WORK!

Well, it helps when your uncle is the Chairman of theJoint Chiefs of Staff. I helps when you're married to the guy who works up there with Ming the Merciless Chertoff. Mostly, I'm sure it depends on if you know what to kiss, and when and how loyally you can kiss...then you get rewarded with a big job in the retinue of the 1600 Crew, no matter how unqualified you are.

The Bush administration is seeking to appoint a lawyer with little immigration or customs experience to head the troubled law enforcement agency that handles those issues, prompting sharp criticism from some employee groups, immigration advocates and homeland security experts.

Do we expect any less anymore? Qualified? That's so 20th Century.

Nine-Eleven.

With all the vigor of the terminally righteous the GOoPers regularly remind us that the gubmint of Beloved Leader is wholly and completely Holy and Righteous. Yeah, as if.

The Bush administration's top federal procurement official resigned Friday and was arrested yesterday, accused of lying and obstructing a criminal investigation into Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff's dealings with the federal government. It was the first criminal complaint filed against a government official in the ongoing corruption probe related to Abramoff's activities in Washington.

The complaint, filed by the FBI, alleges that David H. Safavian, 38, a White House procurement official involved until last week in Hurricane Katrina relief efforts, made repeated false statements to government officials and investigators about a golf trip with Abramoff to Scotland in 2002.

It also contends that he concealed his efforts to help Abramoff acquire control of two federally managed properties in the Washington area. Abramoff is the person identified as "Lobbyist A" in a 13-page affidavit unsealed in court, according to sources knowledgeable about the probe.

Our goal is to get the work done quickly. And taxpayers expect this work to be done honestly and wisely -- so we'll have a team of inspectors general reviewing all expenditures.

This is going to ratchet up the Abramoff-Delay game like never before. This guy was threatening OMB and GAO people with "Hill" pressure for not being nice to his buddy Jack, gee wonder who he might have been talking about? Apparently the word was that the US Attorney in Miami was not interested in hearing Abramoff sing in relation to anything he might have had on Delay, unless Delay was somehow connected to selling pr0n. [That's the man-date of the US Attorney there: Porn, not drugs, terrorism, bank robberies, white collar crime...nothing but Porn. Our tax dollars haaard at work for Abu Gonzales' agenda. How quaint.]

I have to wonder what the headline are going to say the day that Patrick Fitzgerald announces his indictments. It might be the equivlent of the Carny in the Capital! Coming soon to a blog near you!

I gotta wonder, how are these folks going to be counted when it comes time to vote? If they're still in Texas, will they be voting as Texans in the next election (2006)? What kind of shift will this represent for Democrats in newly-gerrymandered Texas?

''What we are seeing across the state is that each city is handling the situation differently," Williams said. ''The largest city is Houston, which probably has 100,000 to 200,000 new friends and new Texans. They are handling it and they are doing it day by day."

Worth keeping an eye or two on, I think.

Shorter Richard Cohen: Beloved Leader is a reg'lar guy who drinks beer and eats hot dogs and loves African Americans. Rich African Americans.

Cohen makes a compelling case that Preznit Trouser Trout really isn't a racist. He trots out a bushel of arguments why Preznit Demographically Dependant is not a racist. He blames LBJ for the hateful bigotry of republicans of Dixie. Cohen has every argument on the planet why Dearly Beloved Leader should not be called a rascist.

I have two problems with all this. The first is not just that it's unfair -- Bush, in this case, was an equal opportunity bungler -- but that it rests on a stereotype: Republicans tend to wear lime green pants in the summer and dislike black people all year round.
...
But Bush is not cut from that cloth. He is a contemporary Republican, a person of another generation who, you may have noticed, has a black woman as secretary of state and had a black man before her. Under him, the GOP began an outreach to black Americans, and unless the Democrats wake up it will ultimately succeed.

Feel like crap. Migraine. Back later tonight or tomorrow. Sorry.

Preznit Criminally Liable is a moron. That made me feel a little better.

OK, it's one anecdotal example, but hey if this is true then it's Right On Schedule, and As Expected

I'm listening to WWL-AM in New Orleans. They have thus far received several calls from local contractors who say that FEMA is not allowing them to help with the recovery effort, that only out-of-state contractors are on the ground. One guy reports that the only way he can get hired as a subcontractor is to give a kickback to the contractor hired by FEMA.

In other words, as predicted, the recovery effort appears to be being conducted to benefit Bush campaign contributors, rather than the people of the area. But then, why should we be surprised? Everything about the Bush Administration has been calculated to enrich Bush cronies at the expense of the American people...

In an interesting, if sometimes not quite legal (a few have been overturned) trend in sentencing among judges has been the use of "novel" sentencing of offenders for various crimes.

Shawn Gementera must have known that he would face some kind of punishment after a police officer nabbed him and a friend in the act of stealing letters from mailboxes along San Francisco's Fulton Street four years ago. While jail or probation might have crossed Gementera's mind, U.S. District Judge Vaughn R. Walker had a more creative idea. Walker sentenced Gementera to stand outside a post office while wearing a sign that read: "I stole mail. This is my punishment." Where the judge saw a novel way of conveying society displeasure with mail theft, Gementera's lawyers saw a violation of the Constitution's ban on "cruel and unusual punishment." The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit decided, however, that while the humiliating sentence might be unusual, it wasn't cruel.
...
· In Kentucky, Judge Michael Caperton recently allowed drug and alcohol offenders to skip drug counseling if they agreed to go to 10 church services. A pastor, like a divinely ordained probation officer, signs off on the completion of this obligation.

· In Texas in 2003, Judge Buddie Hahn gave an abusive father a choice between spending 30 nights in jail or 30 nights sleeping in the doghouse where prosecutors alleged the man had forced his 11-year-old stepson to sleep.

· In Georgia last year, Judge Sidney Nation suspended almost all of Brenton Jay Raffensperger's seven-year sentence for cocaine possession and driving under the influence in exchange for his promise to buy a casket and keep it in his home to remind him of the costs of drug addiction.

· In Ohio, a municipal judge, Michael Cicconetti, cut a 120-day jail sentence down to 45 days for two teens who, on Christmas Eve 2002, had defaced a statue of Jesus they stole from a church's nativity scene. In exchange, the pair had to deliver a new statue to the church and march through town with a donkey and a sign reading "Sorry for the Jackass Offense."

· In North Carolina in 2002, Judge James Honeycutt ordered four young offenders who broke into a school and did $60,000 in damage to wear signs around their necks in public that read "I AM A JUVENILE CRIMINAL." One, a 14-year-old girl, appealed and Honeycutt was reversed.

EJ Dionne Gets It. Why don't our Blue State Democratic Senators not wholly owned by the DLC and their own craven cowardice?

If senators simply vote "yes" on Roberts, they will be conceding to the executive branch huge power to control what information the public gets and doesn't get about nominees to life positions. The administration has stubbornly refused to release a share of Roberts's writings as deputy solicitor general. This is a dare to the Senate, and the administration is assuming it will wimp out. A "yes" on Roberts would be a craven abdication of power to the executive branch.

Fuck that the republicans say, we'll own them too, we double-dog dare you to do anything about it. We're stealing those too, so that even if we lose Congress and Presidency one day we'll own the courts for decades and fuck with you from our political graves. Nyahhh Nyahh.

When they say it's not Vietnam, they're right. And they're wrong.

Using enemy body counts as a benchmark, the U.S. military claimed gains against Abu Musab Zarqawi's foreign-led fighters last week even as they mounted their deadliest attacks on Iraq's capital.

1. The -ize of Rove
   
2. Um...oh, forget it
   
3. Signs of the Times
   
4. Asshole
   
5. Fruit. Tree. Ratzi.
   
6. Ah, last throws?
   
7. Sacrifice, 1600 Crew style
   
8. Mistah Kurtz
   
9. Stock Sale
   
10. Heh