The Iraq war has so far cost nearly $500 billion (again, billion with a "B"). Meanwhile, the presidential commission appointed to look into ways to improve veterans care released a report recommending, among other things, improvements that would initially cost $500 million (again, million with an "M").

Despite this cost for needed changes being 1/10 of 1% of the cost of the war, "Tony Snow initially told reporters yesterday morning that Bush would not take immediate action. But late yesterday afternoon, after Dole and Shalala's comments and criticism from a veteran's group, Bush announced he would move quickly."

Sounds about right. What a worm -- oh, and remember, Bush loves the troops!

Rowan Scarborough reports that the right-wing think tank, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), was behind the "surge" plan, but much more alarming was "the AEI approach won out over plans from the Pentagon and U.S. Central Command. The two Army generals then in charge of Iraq had opposed a troop increase."

Yes, a conservative think tank "won out" over the government's Pentagon and U.S. Central Command. Need more proof partisan ideology and politics drives everything with this administration?

Paul Krugman reminds that right-wing sources continue to nail-it (not) regarding economic predictions:

Each new peak in oil prices was met with declarations that it was all speculation — like the 2005 prediction by Steve Forbes that oil was in a “huge bubble” and that its price would be down to $35 or $40 a barrel within a year. And on the other side, as recently as this January, National Review’s Buzzcharts column declared that we were having a “pop-free” housing slowdown.

Another piece of evidence illustrating Bush's historic, unprecedented dislike:

With more than a year to go before the 2008 elections, Democratic candidates have raised $100 million more in campaign contributions than Republicans, putting them on track to win the money race for the White House and Congress for the first time since the government began detailed accounting of campaign fund raising three decades ago. (bold added)

For as long as I can remember it was always the case that the GOP would raise more in $$ than the Dems and it was up to the Dems to outnumber Republicans at the polls. And again, if my memory serves, registered Dems outnumber Republicans, which is why the GOP is always so gung-ho on suppressing the Dem vote.

But now the Dems are out-doing the Republicans at their own game, raising oodles more in cash -- wow! Even more amazing, with this astounding change of affairs, congressional Republicans continue to support this guy who has wrought such ruin on their status quo. Quite perplexing.

Speaking of voter suppression, NOW has a devastating report that "examines documents and evidence that points to a Republican Party plan designed to keep Democrats from voting, allegedly by targeting people based on their race and ethnicity." To watch the video, go to the web site. The revelations would be jaw-dropping if it weren't for the fact we by now know full well what this version of the Republican Party is capable of.

On Wednesday, Dan Froomkin wrote:

There was a long period, starting around 2003, during which Bush avoided even mentioning Osama bin Laden's name, presumably embarrassed by his failure to capture the man "dead or alive" as promised -- and loath to enhance bin Laden's stature with a presidential mention.

Asked directly about bin Laden at a March 2003 press conference, Bush responded: "He's a person who's now been margimalized.... I truly am not that concerned about him."

But by the summer of 2005, Bush had changed course. Ever since a speech in June of that year-- in which he thunderously exclaimed "Hear the words of Osama bin Laden: 'This Third World War is raging' in Iraq" -- Bush has repeatedly invoked Bin Laden in an effort to terrify Americans into supporting his unpopular policies.

By not capturing bin Laden all along, could it be this administration had long-term plans to use Osama as a convenient scare-tactic symbol and puppet, mentioning his name in volume whenever needing to deliver a good scare to the electorate only to then go silent with his name when objective achieved...? After all, Psych 101 explains you can't maintain a sustained heightened sense of fear as its effect will eventually diminish as people adapt, so best to turn it up and down like a thermostat. But the point being Bush & Co. couldn't capture or kill bin Laden because he's been a key pawn in this insidious, political strategy in managing the collective American psyche.

Similarly they can't get rid of Gonzales because he's desperately needed in his role; to replace him is to open up the administration to in-depth, widespread investigations, very likely turning up very, very bad (illegal) discoveries. Gonzo must stay put to serve his invaluable purpose: to lie, fabricate, and stonewall.

Can we please get beyond the "it's just the Dems who want Gonzo out" lie?

Bush spokesman Tony Snow said yesterday that Mueller “didn’t contradict the attorney general,” and that the Democrats in Congress are simply out to get Gonzales: “they’re going to smear him up as good as they can” – somehow omitting the fact that virtually no congressional Republicans are lifting a finger to defend the attorney general. Republican Sen. Arlen Specter even went out of his way to trash Gonzales yesterday while traveling with Bush on Air Force One (“Our hearing two days ago was devastating. But so was the hearing before that, and so was the hearing before that”).
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It’s also a bit rich that another White House spokesman attempted yesterday to describe Alberto Gonzales as a victim of “an out of control Congress.” Any administration that launches a secret warrantless wiretapping program, in defiance of rules set down by a 1978 act of Congress, and then finds itself overruled by a conservative attorney general (Ashcroft) who essentially deems the program to be illegal, and then tries to pressure the attorney general while he’s under sedation in a hospital…well, I think that’s a fair description of “out of control.”

If indeed the Congress is "out of control" then hallelujah, it's about time. For 6+ years they were too controlled, allowing tons of malfeasance and wrongs to occur, letting it happen if not actively involved in the machinations without uttering a peep. It's about time for them to get Howard Beale crazy mad!

With all the focus directed at global warming (GW) / climate change (CC) over the last several years, what increasingly seems to get less emphasis in the process is the specific problem of pollution. While yes, global warming is related to pollution, they are different. I wrote a bit about this trend not too long ago, but the point being the two should not be lumped together.

The GW/CC debate typically involves dialogue that revolves around CO2 production (To what extent is man responsible? What can we do to slow or even reverse its build-up? To what extent, if any, will it impact our economy? etc.), but what ends up getting little mention is harmful pollution. Whereas global warming still has what some would consider items for disagreement, it's difficult to find critical backlash concerning the damage that say mercury, sulfur or nitrogen dioxide inflicts on us.

I for one call for renewed attention on pollution, to not displace or overshadow GW/CC discourse but rather to attain equal footing. The fact is many solutions to climate change are difficult and will require global cooperation and enforcement. Yet, we've observed that cures to pollution problems are much more dramatic, immediate, and available -- but they frequently necessitate media spotlight and public pressure to force action.

Over decades, pollution has been reduced in many areas thanks to eventual-legislated compliance, but it's worsened in other areas , under the radar due to this lack of public awareness. Again, with the demise of Bush, let's work to expand the environmental discussion to include topics of importance other than strictly global warming.

The total number of dead U.S. soldiers in Iraq is fast approaching 4,000. Also, the duration of the war is longer than World War II by over 200 days and counting.



Note: WWII time refers to US participation, 12/8/1941 - 8/15/1945.

Once again, imagine the right-wing scream machine if Bill Clinton resided over this complete and disgraceful mishandling of the hunt for Osama bin Laden. The Coulters, Limbaughs, and O'Reillys would've blown vocal chords by now.

The Bush administration's strategy for pursuing al-Qaida in Pakistan's tribal region could stoke support for the Islamic militants who are protecting the terrorist network's leaders....The White House is also threatening U.S. strikes in the region, where bin Laden and his closest followers are believed to have fled after the administration decided against sending U.S. forces to block their escape from Afghanistan in December 2001.
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Some U.S. military and diplomatic officials and many independent experts, however, warn that military intervention could fuel greater instability, anti-U.S. hatred and opposition to the Pakistani regime of Gen. Pervez Musharraf....Thomas Fingar, the chairman of the National Intelligence Council, which includes the top U.S. intelligence analysts, told a House of Representatives panel on July 11 that there is "some risk" that U.S. military intervention in the tribal areas could spread anti-Musharraf unrest to other parts of Pakistan.

Not only have they f*cked up the entire planning and executing of a lied-into war, but they also managed to f*ck up the pursuit of the main figure behind 9/11, allowing him to slip out of Afghanistan and into the warm embrace of Pakistan, thus dodging the best chance they had of getting him. Now Osama is protected by militants who have deep ties with many of the Pakistani forces, so any U.S. moves against bin Laden could significantly weaken and jeopardize Musharraf's hold of the country. If unrest were to hit Pakistan, it will be come the next Iraq in terms of a new breeding ground and haven for al-Qaeda recruiting efforts.

All because of bone-headed incompetence from the start, thanks to the gang of neocon morons in charge at the time.

Surprise! More misleading statements from Bush.

"I think what the president is saying is in some sense fundamentally misleading," said Robert Grenier, former head of the counter-terrorism center at the CIA as well as the agency's mission manager for the war in Iraq. "If he means to suggest the invasion of Iraq has not created more jihadists bent on killing Americans, and that if Iraq hadn't been there as a magnet they would have been attracted somewhere else, that's completely disingenuous."

The war "has convinced many Muslims that the United States is the enemy of Islam and is attacking Muslims, and they have become jihadists as a result of their experience in Iraq," Grenier said.

As with Gonzales and his job at Justice, apparently Bush will say anything to try and salvage the course of this occupation. Anything.

As if he didn't already have a growing mountain of evidence proving his nose is growing longer every time he opens his mouth, Gonzales now must contend with the top dog at the FBI.

The director of the F.B.I. offered testimony Thursday that sharply conflicted with Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales’s sworn statements about a 2004 confrontation in which top Justice Department officials threatened to resign over a secret intelligence operation.

The director, Robert S. Mueller III, told the House Judiciary Committee that the confrontation was about the National Security Agency’s counterterrorist eavesdropping program, describing it as “an N.S.A. program that has been much discussed.” His testimony was a serious blow to Mr. Gonzales, who insisted at a Senate hearing on Tuesday that there were no disagreements inside the Bush administration about the program at the time of those discussions or at any other time.

The director’s remarks were especially significant because Mr. Mueller is the Justice Department’s chief law enforcement official.

In addition to this revelation, Senate Democrats called for an independent special counsel to investigate whether Gonzales lied under oath.

It's great to see the Dems find and flex their spines. This is starting to get good.

Josh Marshall is just about fed up, moving ever closer to urging for presidential impeachment.

Without going into all the specifics, I think we are now moving into a situation where the White House, on various fronts, is openly ignoring the constitution, acting as though not just the law but the constitution itself, which is the fundamental law from which all the statutes gain their force and legitimacy, doesn't apply to them.

If that is allowed to continue, the defiance will congeal into precedent. And the whole structure of our system of government will be permanently changed.

Whether because of prudence and pragmatism or mere intellectual inertia, I still have the same opinion on the big question: impeachment. But I think we're moving on to dangerous ground right now, more so than some of us realize. And I'm less sure now under these circumstances that operating by rules of 'normal politics' is justifiable or acquits us of our duty to our country.

Although Josh appears to stop just short of recommending impeachment, another ex-Reagan official, former Deputy Attorney General Bruce Fein, has come out against Bush, with Fein flat-out stating on Olbermann's Countdown show tonight that Bush should be impeached. In due time we'll have GW's father recommending his son must resign....

Whereas up till this week we're fairly certain Gonzales has been fudging the truth, parsing words, "not recalling" what he actually remembered, etc., but with his latest appearance before Congress, it's now perfectly clear that he's descended to a new low and is just making things up willy-nilly. It's as if he doesn't even care to spend the energy to at least try to come off as credible. Watch the video, you'll see that he smiles while telling his tales, as one would do when telling a joke and can't wait to get to the punch line.

It's been widely reported today that he clearly lied about the supposed real reason for his trip to the hospital to visit Ashcroft, with documents as well as other congressional members proving he lied. It very well appears as if the highest-ranking legal officer in the land committed perjury, and perhaps has done so on several occasions, and yet our president stands by him, allowing our legal system to sink lower and lower into a morass that will take years to repair. And many Republicans are letting this happen.

"Maybe the people who think there's a conspiracy out there are right"

Congressman Peter DeFazio (D-OR), member of the U.S. House on the Homeland Security Committee, is permitted to see classified documents, yet this administration oddly denied DeFazio access. He has no idea on what grounds this was decided stating, "I just can't believe they're going to deny a member of Congress the right of reviewing how they plan to conduct the government of the United States after a significant terrorist attack....Maybe the people who think there's a conspiracy out there are right."

In fact, Norm Ornstein, a legal scholar at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, said he "cannot think of one good reason" to deny access to DeFazio and continued, "I find it inexplicable and probably reflective of the usual, knee-jerk overextension of executive power that we see from this White House." This from a conservative.

DeFazio's story deserves much more attention from media outlets. It's just one more instance of this administration spitting in the faces of our founding fathers.

It's been several days but I didn't want to let David Brooks' last column fade into infamy without my commenting.

Many already have, labeling it one of his worst (which is saying something). Steven Benen wrote, "This isn’t an argument. It’s barely even an opinion piece. It’s more a love letter than anything else." No, it's simply embarrassing, another shameful entry from a non-thinker who frankly in no way should be afforded real estate on the most influential opinion pages in the country.

As it is, Brooks stole his topic (Bush's "confidence" or odd super-optimistic mood) from a Peggy Noonan column appearing in the WSJ just days before, but Brooks paints it differently than the typically-fawning Noonan. Whereas Noonan was at least somewhat critical of Bush (rare moment), Brooks in his infinite wisdom just sees this wide-eyed mood of GW's as one backed by steadfast confidence and faith.

Here are some samples:

He’s convinced leaders have the power to change societies. Even in a place as chaotic as Iraq, good leadership makes all the difference....When Bush is asked about military strategy, he talks about the leadership qualities of his top generals. Before, it was Generals Abizaid and Casey. Now, it’s Generals Petraeus and Odierno....Many will doubt this, but Bush is a smart and compelling presence in person....

Had enough? But to truly appreciate the depths of Brooks' idiocy, you must try to read through the whole thing yourself. BTW, I just love the way Brooks presents Bush praising his military generals, with "generals" being plural because no matter the "leadership qualities" if they disagreed with Bush they were gone.

It's not very often you have one columnist at a paper writing a column in response to another columnist, but I must say that Paul Krugman comes pretty close in this regard, responding to the dimwitted Brooks column described above. (Even Krugman couldn't not respond).

Some of what Krugman wrote:

What I don’t understand is why we’re supposed to consider Mr. Bush’s continuing confidence a good thing.

Remember, Mr. Bush was confident six years ago when he promised to bring in Osama, dead or alive. He was confident four years ago, when he told the insurgents to bring it on. He was confident two years ago, when he told Brownie that he was doing a heckuva job.

Now Iraq is a bloody quagmire, Afghanistan is deteriorating and the Bush administration’s own National Intelligence Estimate admits, in effect, that thanks to Mr. Bush’s poor leadership America is losing the struggle with Al Qaeda. Yet Mr. Bush remains confident.

Sorry, but that’s not reassuring; it’s terrifying. It doesn’t demonstrate Mr. Bush’s strength of character; it shows that he has lost touch with reality.

Actually, it’s not clear that he ever was in touch with reality. I wrote about the Bush administration’s “infallibility complex,” its inability to admit mistakes or face up to real problems it didn’t want to deal with, in June 2002. Around the same time Ron Suskind, the investigative journalist, had a conversation with a senior Bush adviser who mocked the “reality-based community,” asserting that “when we act, we create our own reality.”

People who worried that the administration was living in a fantasy world used to be dismissed as victims of “Bush derangement syndrome,” liberals driven mad by Mr. Bush’s success. Now, however, it’s a syndrome that has spread even to former loyal Bushies.

Yes, most liberals "got it" all along, they/we were right. It's often difficult being ahead of the herd.

But what Krugman is pointing out concerning Bush's disturbing confidence is similar to dumb being characterized as brave. Bush is not so much confident as he is delusional, removed from reality. Anyone can appear confident in a bubble. To some extent, we can't blame him as his entire life has been charmed, his many mistakes taken care of by his father, his worries few and far between thanks to his powerful namesake. And all of this is not a problem per say -- EXCEPT IF YOU ARE THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.

Krugman closes with:

You know, at this point I think we need to stop blaming Mr. Bush for the mess we’re in. He is what he always was, and everyone except a hard core of equally delusional loyalists knows it.

Yet Mr. Bush keeps doing damage because many people who understand how his folly is endangering the nation’s security still refuse, out of political caution and careerism, to do anything about it.

It's just like a king gone mad, when he's running naked through the palace, ordering the deaths of innocent peasants just for kicks, and yet his court minions do nothing to stop him. They stand idly by, allowing the insanity to continue, enabling the carnage and ruin. In many ways, they're worse than the king who long ago lost touch with the real world.

Yesterday, Adam Cohen penned a must-read "editorial observer" piece in the NY Times. He discusses this administration's goal of expanding its powers to the point where the country's founders would be rolling in their graves.

The war is hardly the only area where the Bush administration is trying to expand its powers beyond all legal justification. But the danger of an imperial presidency is particularly great when a president takes the nation to war, something the founders understood well. In the looming showdown, the founders and the Constitution are firmly on Congress’s side.

Given how intent the president is on expanding his authority, it is startling to recall how the Constitution’s framers viewed presidential power. They were revolutionaries who detested kings, and their great concern when they established the United States was that they not accidentally create a kingdom. To guard against it, they sharply limited presidential authority....The founders were particularly wary of giving the president power over war....When they drafted the Constitution, Madison and his colleagues wrote their skepticism into the text. In Britain, the king had the authority to declare war, and raise and support armies, among other war powers. The framers expressly rejected this model and gave these powers not to the president, but to Congress.
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The founders would have been astonished by President Bush’s assertion that Congress should simply write him blank checks for war. They gave Congress the power of the purse so it would have leverage to force the president to execute their laws properly. Madison described Congress’s control over spending as “the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.”

The framers expected Congress to keep the president on an especially short leash on military matters. The Constitution authorizes Congress to appropriate money for an army, but prohibits appropriations for longer than two years. Hamilton explained that the limitation prevented Congress from vesting “in the executive department permanent funds for the support of an army, if they were even incautious enough to be willing to repose in it so improper a confidence.”
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The Constitution cannot enforce itself. It is, as the constitutional scholar Edwin Corwin famously observed, an “invitation to struggle” among the branches, but the founders wisely bequeathed to Congress some powerful tools for engaging in the struggle. It is no surprise that the current debate over a deeply unpopular war is arising in the context of a Congressional spending bill. That is precisely what the founders intended.

Members of Congress should not be intimidated into thinking that they are overstepping their constitutional bounds. If the founders were looking on now, it is not Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi who would strike them as out of line, but George W. Bush, who would seem less like a president than a king.

Hopefully many in Congress read this piece and will heed its advice. The likes of Hamilton, Madison, and Jefferson are hoping we do what's right as they wrote for it to happen. In short, this administration has become those things we detested and wanted to rid ourselves of in 1700s England.

Many on the right complain about environmental regulations as being a primary reason for supply constraints in the oil refinery industry. To some extent it's true that many companies would rather not build at all than do so and comply with environmental code. But also by taking a pass on expansion, companies knowingly realize they're constraining supply and thus boosting price (and thus profits).

On Sunday, the NY Times had a front page article on this topic.

The disruptions are helping to drive gasoline prices to highs not seen since last summer’s records....American refiners are running roughly 5 percent below their normal levels at this time of the year.
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After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita disrupted the nation’s energy lifeline two years ago, oil companies delayed maintenance on many of their plants to make up for lost supplies and take advantage of the high prices. But, analysts say, they are now paying a price for deferring repairs....As a whole, refining disruptions have been considerably higher than in previous years: they averaged 1.5 million barrels a day in the first quarter, compared with 700,000 to 900,000 barrels a day from 2001 to 2005.

So the rate of disruptions has doubled from the average rate in 2001-2005. And whereas in the story it is said that "refiners have been scrambling to meet a raft of environmental regulations," the key question is to what extent is routine maintenance being delayed versus that of needed improvements to meet new regulations? It sounds as if not just the latter is getting put off but both the former and the latter.

Yet the right doesn't mention this frequent choice of postponing routine maintenance repairs to in part keep supply tight, thus inflating price. It's called greed, and now everyone is paying for it.

Just think about this, looking back to Clinton's Monica scandal, we had Newt Gingrich leading the charge of the impeachment, then Robert Livingston. Gingrich has since admitted to committing adultery while hunting down the adulterous Bill Clinton, and Livingston was outed at the time for likewise having committed adultery. Who replaced Livingston? Well, none other than holier-than-though David Vitter, who recently admitted to being an adulterer.

Oh, but that evil, evil Bill Clinton!

On Friday, Dick Polman wrote:

The quote of the week goes to White House spinmeister Tony Snow.

In a USA Today guest column, he wrote this astounding sentence about Saddam Hussein: “We never argued that he played a role in 9/11; political opponents manufactured the claim to question the president's integrity.”

On the one hand, I wonder at this point whether it’s worth rebutting fact-defying and blame-shifting assertions from the Orwellian Ministry of Truth; on the other hand, it’s worth sticking up for empirical reality.

Polman continues on to thoroughly rebut Snow's absurd assertion.

But it's true, they tell so many lies it only becomes note-worthy to mention when they actually utter something factual. For instance, when Bush said regarding the hunt for bin Laden, "I just don't spend that much time on him." One of those rare truths that slipped from his lips, and of course now we're reading about the end result of this fact.

Polman concludes, "with reference to Snow’s aforementioned claim of innocence, suffice it to say that not only has the Bush team repeatedly uttered falsehoods, but now it is telling falsehoods about its falsehoods." As we often see in many crime movies or shows, lies built upon lies eventually reaches a point where it all starts to crumble. We've already witnessed some significant cracking but expect to see an avalanche occur over the next 18 months.

At times Bill Maher can go too far (as with his Cheney/dead comment, albeit even that was taken out of context), but much more often than not Maher is dead-on, nailing the crux of many issues that deserve to be highlighted and criticized.

For example, the following:

[W]as anyone as outraged as I was reading Robert Novak's little interview in the NY Times magazine on Sunday? Asked if in hindsight he would leave out the part of his 2003 column that identified Valerie Plame as a CIA operative, he said "I don't know. I thought journalistically it was justifiable. Nobody had told me -- and I still don't believe -- that it put anybody's life in danger. I don't think she was an important person in the CIA."

That really is quite an astounding quote, isn't it? How the hell would he know if it put anybody's life in danger? YOU'RE NOT IN THE CIA, BOB! They don't tell you any of their business! Considering the consequences of being wrong about such a hunch, is it really the patriotic thing to do? To sit in your office and just conjecture that this agent wasn't very important to the CIA? First, I think everyone who works at the CIA is important; and second, WHO THE HELL IS THIS MAN TO OUT PEOPLE IN THE DEADLY WORLD OF ESPIONAGE BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT HE "THINKS"?!

With patriots like that, I'm sure glad there are traitors like me and Michael Moore still living here in America.

Bill, I suppose that would categorize most Americans as traitors. Need anymore proof on how much damage this cabal of idiots has inflicted on the country, not to mention the world?