from the ever-amazing Think Progress:

Iraq Forced To Import Oil To Tackle Shortages

Paul Wolfowitz, 3/27/03:

There's a lot of money to pay for this that doesn't have to be U.S. taxpayer money, and it starts with the assets of the Iraqi people…and on a rough recollection, the oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years. … We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.

AP, 8/17/06:

Iraq has doubled the money allocated for importing oil products in August and September to tackle the country's worst fuel shortage since Saddam Hussein's 2003 ouster, a senior Iraqi official said Thursday. Even though Iraq has the world's third-largest proven oil reserves, it is forced to depend on imports because of an acute shortage of refined products such as gasoline, kerosene and cooking gas. Sabotage of pipelines by insurgents, corruption and aging refineries have been blamed.

Back in May, 2004, Decter frankly explained the real reason we attacked Iraq:

"We're not in the Middle East to bring sweetness and light to the world. We're there to get something we and our friends in Europe depend on. Namely, oil."

...Abrams' appointment by the White House on December 2, 2002 was considered highly controversial due to his involvement in the Iran-Contra Affair, over which he subsequently pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts of unlawfully withholding information from Congress.

I usually refrain from using any direct Nazi allusions when referring to Preznit Utterly Incompetant. So, I guess this is a first for me. Apparently, at a Camp David press conference, Beloved Leader got a bit testy when pressed with questions about yesterdays ruling out of the Federal District Court over the NSA debacle.

You don't get everything you want. A dictatorship would be a lot easier... So long as I'm the dictator.

* Responding to the difficulties of governing Texas, "The Taming of Texas," Governing Magazine (July 1998); also cited in Is our Children Learning?: The Case Against George W. Bush (2000) by Paul Begala.)

Secondly, there are such things as roving wiretaps. Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires — a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution.

* "Information Sharing, Patriot Act Vital to Homeland Security" speech at Kleinshans Music Hall, Buffalo, New York, 20 April 2004; whitehouse.gov (accessed 2006-05-18)

"I would say that those who herald this decision simply do not understand the nature of the world in which we live," Mr. Bush said in a question-answer session at Camp David, Md. "I strongly disagree with that decision, strongly disagree. That's why I instructed the Justice Department to appeal immediately. And I believe our appeals will be upheld."

My guess? It was probably this part of the judges ruling:

There are no hereditary Kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution. So all "inherent powers" must derive from that Constitution.

I notice that when the republicans can't win on fact, logic and law they resort to slandering the Judge. Why am I not surprised?

Now it's just a race to see how fast Scalia, Roberts and Alito take out great nation from being a Nation of Laws to Banana Republic where Widdle Georgie gets to wear a pretty medal-bedecked uniform and a big peaked cap with aviator shades.

Oh, and a Little Moustache.

... and I have a nice bridge for sale, and if you don't like that, perhaps some swamp land in Florida.

The White House denied on Wednesday that the U.S. hunt for Osama bin Laden has been downgraded after the CIA disbanded a unit set up in the 1990s to oversee the search for the al Qaeda leader.
...
Bush had vowed to get bin Laden "dead or alive" after the Sept. 11 attacks but as the hunt dragged on, he described bin Laden as only one part of a global terrorist organization.

Someone asked me to define the Bush Administration in less than six words. After thinking about it, I came up with this: A Smorgasboard of Malfeasance. If the foo shits....

Today from Zogby:

Zogby: Bush Job Approval - 34%

A man suspected in the slaying of 6-year-old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey was arrested Wednesday in Thailand in a surprise breakthrough in one of the nation's most lurid murder cases - a decade-old crime some feared would never be solved.

Iraq, Foreign Policy and Domestic Affairs? Not so much.

Afghanistan is sort of like the weather...except no one seems to talk about it and no one seems to do much about it at all; it just happens to be there all the time. When was the last time you read anywhere, including out here in either right or left blogtopia about the goings-on in Afghanistan? Not too often.

Insurgents hit a Canadian base in southern Afghanistan with mortars, wounding six soldiers, a military spokesman said Wednesday.
...
Afghanistan is suffering its deadliest bout of violence since the hard-line Taliban regime was ousted in late 2001.

Bin Laden and his bestest friend and protector, Mullah Omar have to be sitting back laughing their asses off over exploding hair gel and the utter paranoia they've induced in the West. The re-ascendence of the Taliban has been one of the least noted phenomenon in the media, and potentially one of the more low-key long-term annoyances for the West.

It remains to be seen whether or not the Afghani Adventure turns out to be the utter debacle that is Mess O'Potamia or not, perhaps the international actual "coalition" there will keep it from descending into utter chaos, but it does bear closer scrutiny than it seems to get from both sides of the aisle.

The TSA, an agency that will begin to have to justify their existance sooner than later, I suspect is already out in front of the Great Exploding Hair Gel Alert. It might have happened, you see.

Transportation Security Administration officials said they had not decided when they would end the increased screening procedures enacted after British authorities last week said they had unraveled a plot to blow up commercial jets with liquid explosives. The TSA banned all liquids and gels, including bottled water and toothpaste, from aircraft passenger cabins.
...
Over the weekend, TSA officials revised some security measures and began requiring passengers to remove their shoes for examination at X-ray machines.

TSA officials said the rule requiring shoe removal was not motivated by any specific intelligence about a potential attack using shoe bombs. In late 2001, Richard Reid tried to use such a device to blow up an airliner on a transatlantic flight.
...
"TSA always seems to be at least two steps behind every threat we face," said Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.). "I have spent the last four years trying to get TSA to acknowledge the threat of shoulder-fired missiles, which are one of our biggest vulnerabilities, and they have responded with denials at first, then with begrudging acceptance, then one study after another."

The answers to ensuring airport security have to be somewhere between the minimum-wage screeners who didn't give a shit before 9/11 and the hyper-political, overly paranoid and pretty much incompetant TSA that is in place now. Before the most recent round of trying to make airline travel incredibly inconvenient for everyone, I was in LAX waiting to go through screening. The TSA folks (there must have been at least 20) were not screening anyone, because they were waiting to end their shift. Sitting on their asses at the "checkpoint" waiting for their reliefs to arrive. The line in the terminal got longer and longer, as people were getting impatient about getting to their gates and flights. Finally brave guy in a suit spoke to (I assume) supervisor who curtly told him to mind his own business, and get back in line, he'd get through when he got through. He finally did, and they did everything but body-cavity search the poor guy.

The TSA is the answer to nothing. They are just another, highly visible part of the failure that is the Department of Homeland Security. Perhaps a new congress might bring some fresh insights into the methodologies and means for the complex tasks of airline and other transportation security, because they're not beholden to the same set of corporate interests that benefit from DHS and the 1600 Crew, but I'm not holding my breath for a fix anytime soon.

You have to love this:

President Bush asserted yesterday that Hezbollah was defeated in its month-long conflict with Israel, casting the fighting that killed hundreds of Lebanese and Israeli civilians as part of a wider struggle "between freedom and terrorism."

More interesting in this article is this:

Bush warned Tehran to stop backing militias in Lebanon and in Iraq, where U.S. officials have long accused Iran of feeding the sectarian violence that is threatening to erupt into a full-scale civil war.

"In both these countries, Iran is backing armed groups in the hope of stopping democracy from taking hold," Bush said. "The message of this administration is clear. America will stay on the offensive against al-Qaeda. Iran must stop its support for terror, and the leaders of these armed groups must make a choice. If they want to participate in the political life of their countries, they must disarm."

"Forces of terror see the changes that are taking place in their midst. They understand that the advance of liberty, the freedom to worship, the freedom to dissent, and the protection of human rights would be a defeat for their hateful ideology," Bush said. "But they also know that young democracies are fragile and that this may be their last and best opportunity to stop freedom's advance and steer newly free nation to the path of radical extremism."

And that whole advancing of liberty thing in Iraq, going well is it? Ah, not so much.

John Hendren, reporting for NPR on a killing in an East Baghdad grocery: "The grocer and three others were shot to death and the store was firebombed because he 'suggestively arranged his vegetables.' ... [A]n Iraqi collegue explained, matter of factly, that Shiite clerics had recently distributed a flier directing grocers how to display their food. Standing up a celery stalk near a couple tomatoes in a way that might, to tbe profoundly repressed, suggest an aroused male, is now a capital offense."

Post bombing, of course.

1. Compare and Contrast - TGIF funday
   
2. Lying Hitler Jr.
   
3. Uh-huh
   
4. 34%? Look...Over there!
   
5. That other little war...
   
6. The Bastions of Competence
   
7. Veddy Interesting...