Yesterday the NY Times had an interesting article on just how far to the right the Supreme Court has shifted. It's clear that there are two four-person contingents on the court, on the one side being the Thomas/Scalia/Alito/Roberts bloc and on the other the Souter/Ginsburg/Breyer/Stevens bloc. Justice Kennedy has become the new Sandra O'Connor, the wildcard who often decides the majority with his vote. Steven Calabresi, a former law clerk to Justice Scalia and a founder of the Federalist Society, is quoted as saying, “Kennedy is very much the median justice now, as Justice O’Connor was, and he is to her right...Clearly the court has moved in a direction that leaves most conservatives pleased.”

While indeed Kennedy is no centrist, at least he's shown some independence to not always vote with the Scalia crew. However, the damage has been done. We face many more 5-4 decisions in the future that heavily favor the far right.

It's been several weeks since media whore Ann Coulter has been in the headlines so of course she felt the need to open her mouth and make another ingenious, reasoned comment: "If I'm going to say anything about John Edwards in the future, I'll just wish he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot."

I wonder if the lunatic right will applaud this latest disgraceful salvo? Funny how Bush's poll numbers continue to head south, with many Republicans becoming "brave" and daring to criticize the administration, yet we nary hear a peep of condemnation directed at the pathetic Coulter. Yeah, those courageous souls on the right. What principles, what backbone.

It's easy to throw cream pies in Bush's face now -- him being lame duck and all, but he's been this bad for years and yet these same Republicans looked the other way or simply rubber-stamped anything he was doing then. Elizabeth Edwards has more courage in her pinky finger than most of these lap-dog politicians combined. Kudos to her for taking at least one minute out of her life to admonish the despicable Coulter -- but it should just be one minute, as Coulter's not worth much more than that.

After the Dems caved in late May regarding Iraq, I both wanted to condemn them but held back some, writing at the time:

In light of the intractable veto and the known hatchet artists for the GOP, the Dems could be playing the smart poker hand by letting the tide of the war play out. A formal timeline was dropped, but a comprehensive report is slated for September, Bush must give a status report by July 15th on Iraq's progress towards meeting benchmarks, and there are indications judgments will be made well before September rolls around -- in particular by more than a few Republicans.

Assuming no miraculous turnaround in Iraq, GW's popularity will remain in the toilet and the pressure to withdraw will only increase.

Is it, dare say, immoral for the Dems to back away from digging in and demanding a timeline? On principle, yes, but practically, not really. In this case, the practical could be the wiser, and more effective, choice.

It's been just about a month since then and Iraq has not improved, Bush's poll numbers continue to reach new lows, and more Republicans have thrown in the towel on the war, increasing pressure on lame duck GW:

Republican support for the Iraq war is slipping by the day. After four years of combat and more than 3,560 U.S. deaths, two Republican senators previously reluctant to challenge President Bush on the war announced they could no longer support the deployment of 157,000 troops and asked the president to begin bringing them home.
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Lugar and Voinovich are not the first GOP members to call for U.S. troops to leave Iraq. Sens. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Olympia Snowe of Maine and Gordon Smith of Oregon made similar remarks earlier this year. But their public break is significant because it raises the possibility that Senate Democrats could muster the 60 votes needed to pass legislation that would call for Bush to bring troops home.

Their remarks also are an early warning shot to a lame duck president that GOP support for the war is thinning. The administration is not expected until September to say whether a recent troop buildup in Iraq is working.

"Everyone should take note, especially the administration," said Snowe, R-Maine, noting Lugar's senior position within the GOP. "It certainly indicates the tide is turning."

It certainly looks like the Democratic leadership were not so dumb a month ago.... With time, Republicans will continue to help with achieving much of the heavy lifting, as they abandon this withering president to save themselves. After all, they are politicians.

In today's Washington Post: "The big question right now among Republicans is how to remove Vice President Cheney from office. Even before this week's blockbuster series in The Post, discontent in Republican ranks was rising. As the reputed architect of the war in Iraq, Cheney is viewed as toxic...."

Of all the evil, inept people to populate this administration through the years, the GOP has finally decided that Cheney is just too evil and inept, and gosh darn it he must go! After subjecting the country to this maniacal a-hole for 6+ years, Republicans decide now to shit-can him to save their political skins come an election year. Chain(ey) of fools.

For the past several months, many of we bloggers have been writing about the slow death of John McCain's campaign, but how long before Giuliani suffers the same fate? If there's any justice, he will.

Yesterday, Steven Benen wrote about the company Rudy keeps, with Time magazine asking, "How many alleged criminals can a law-and-order candidate be associated with before it starts to hurt?" Benen tallies up the infamous Bernard Kerik, Rudy's SC campaign chairman's recent indictment for cocaine distribution, but also Rudy employs an alleged child abuser(!) -- and he's supposedly America's Mayor?

Rolling Stone magazine appears to be on a roll with their political reports and Matt Taibbi's piece on Giuliani is a terrific read. Taibbi basically reiterates the case Rudy has been making for months on the campaign trail: if you want four more years of GW, vote Giuliani.

Just like Bush, Rudy appeals to the couch-bound bully in all of us, and part of the allure of his campaign is the promise to put the Pentagon and the power of the White House at that bully's disposal.
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To the extent that conservatism in the Bush years has morphed into a celebration of mindless patriotism and the paranoid witch-hunting of liberals and other dissenters, Rudy seems the most anxious of any Republican candidate to take up that mantle. Like Bush, Rudy has repeatedly shown that he has no problem lumping his enemies in with "the terrorists" if that's what it takes to get over.
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[T]here's no question that Giuliani has made the continuation of Swift-Boating politics a linchpin of his candidacy. His political hires speak deeply to that tendency. Chris Henick, formerly Karl Rove's most trusted deputy, is now a key aide at Giuliani Partners, the security firm set up by the mayor to cash in on his 9/11 image..."Rudy definitely got some of Bush's heavier hitters, including all the Swift Boater types," says Alex Cohen, a senior researcher at Public Citizen, who tracks the president's top donors.
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In his years as mayor -- and his subsequent career as a lobbyist -- Rudy jumped into bed with anyone who could afford a rubber. Saudi Arabia, Rupert Murdoch, tobacco interests, pharmaceutical companies, private prisons, Bechtel, ChevronTexaco -- Giuliani took money from them all. You could change Rudy's mind literally in the time it took to write a check. A former prosecutor, Giuliani used to call drug dealers "murderers." But as a lobbyist he agreed to represent Seisint, a security firm run by former cocaine smuggler Hank Asher. "I have a great admiration for what he's doing," Rudy gushed after taking $2 million of Asher's money.

That last paragraph depicting Rudy's greed and thirst for money was written long before the recent revelation concerning Rudy's choice for lucrative speaking fees over serving on the Iraq Study Panel. Self before country -- yeah, sounds like GW.

Another Bush/Rudy similarity: huge ego married with astonishing ignorance -- an immensely dangerous combination. Fred Kaplan of Slate recently wrote:

The fact is, Giuliani has no idea what he's talking about. On the campaign trail he says that the terrorist threat "is something I understand better than anyone else running for president." As the mayor of New York City on Sept. 11, 2001, he may have lived more intimately with the consequences of terrorism, but this has no bearing on his inexperience or his scant insight in the realm of foreign policy. He is, in fact, that most dangerous would-be world leader: a man who doesn't seem to know how much he doesn't know.

"Has no idea what he's talking about" could've easily been written about Bush in his 2000 run, but also at anytime since then. Both Rudy and GW are clueless, yet through bullying and sheer determined insistence they pull off the image that they at least appear to know what they're talking about. Many have since wised up to Bush being a know-nothing buffoon, and it will just take some time for the same to occur for Rudy.

As I've been complaining about since February, we have the wrong NYC mayor running for president. A month ago, Bruce Reed wrote:

Giuliani's never-ending stumbles over such an obvious hurdle as abortion suggest that he has approached his campaign with insufficient seriousness. By contrast, Bloomberg's calculated bids for attention on climate change, education, and guns give every indication that his unannounced campaign for the presidency is running on all cylinders.

As a shadow candidate, Bloomberg is running the campaign Giuliani should have run, as a pragmatist who helped a big city take on big problems. Earlier this month, Bloomberg launched a Web site that outlines his stands on the big issues in greater detail than Giuliani can provide after five months in the race.

Who knows, in a few months the picture could greatly change, with Rudy having finally imploded and Bloomberg making a surprise go of it. Stay tuned.

Yesterday, Dan Froomkin noticed something I wrote about on Thursday, that "Cheney's office was complying in 2001 and 2002 but decided to stop doing so in 2003. Smells like he didn't like doing it in those first two years, had David Addington et al working overtime to come up with some interpretation voiding this need to be accountable, and lo and behold in 2003 they apparently came up with some deranged view that they hoisted and have been hoisting ever since -- until we finally got a congress that would fight back."

Froomkin argues:

On March 25, 2003, just days after ordering U.S. troops into Iraq, Bush signed an executive order amending Executive Order 12958, which President Clinton had signed in 1995, and which laid out a host of rules about the classification and declassification of secret information.

Bush did not change the requirement that federal agencies report at least once a year on their implementation of those policies. Nor did he change the definition of who was covered by the reporting requirements. That continued to include any "entity within the executive branch that comes into the possession of classified information."

But Bush did make one major change: Giving the vice president all the same classification powers as the president. Clinton's order had assigned those powers only to the president, agency heads and their specifically designated subordinates. Bush's order added one more party: The vice president. Or, in the precise and possibly telling words of the order: "[I]n the performance of executive duties, the Vice President."

We've known for quite some time that this VP is by far the most powerful in history, and with this bit of news it quickly becomes evident how this was made possible: Bush has made him equal to himself, changing the equation to "VP = President". Just more pissing on our Constitution by the gang that oh-so favors strict constructionism. An absolute joke.

The mafia is often used as an appropriate analogy for this administration and it's perfectly conceivable that Bush decided in 2003 to officially designate Cheney as his henchman, the go-to guy for all needed dirty work, his Luca Brasi.

This mob must go!

The Big Bail Out

Senior personnel are beginning to leave all areas of government and the expectation is for this pace to quicken very soon:

At least 20 senior aides have left important posts in the White House, Pentagon or State Department over the past six months, as chaos has deepened in Iraq. “There’s a real sense of fatigue and very little sense of purpose,” said a senior official, who asked not to be named. “My guess is you’re going to see a lot more departures.”

It's one thing to be a lame duck, it's quite another to be a slowly rotting carcass attracting flies. Where does this leave we the people in terms of governance we deserve? Granted, that same question could be asked about the last six years, but will there be one person left of any remote sense of quality to help guide an administration that effectively has become the Exxon Valdez? Can we possibly petition to have the presidential election this November, for the sake of the country? Bush, for one, would surely not protest the idea.

Yet, in some demented way, Bush may have done some good by insuring through his wreck-of-a-reign that we never, ever elect someone like him again. He has been so bad on so many fronts that one can only hope this lesson has sunk in, deep.

Is Dick Cheney the King of America?

As the Democratic-led Congress digs deeper into this administration's wrong doings, we continue to find Cheney showing up as a force that had huge impact and yet desired zero accountability, believing he was beyond it both legally and conceptually.

Chairman of the Oversight Committee, Henry Waxman, has written a letter to Cheney stating, "Your office may have the worst record in the executive branch for safeguarding classified information...Given this record, serious questions can be raised about both the legality and the advisability of exempting your office from the rules that apply to all other executive branch officials."

Cheney argues that the VP office is not part of the executive branch of government and therefore does not have to comply with numerous laws and orders. Last time I looked, his office was listed under "Executive Branch" of government. Also, isn't it quite interesting that Cheney's office was complying in 2001 and 2002 but decided to stop doing so in 2003. Smells like he didn't like doing it in those first two years, had David Addington et al working overtime to come up with some interpretation voiding this need to be accountable, and lo and behold in 2003 they apparently came up with some deranged view that they hoisted and have been hoisting ever since -- until we finally got a congress that would fight back.

In addition, King Cheney looked to abolish the agency that was giving him such headaches.

As if the above wasn't bad enough, we also learn from Rolling Stone magazine:

It is no secret that industry-connected appointees within the White House have worked actively to distort the findings of federal climate scientists, playing down the threat of climate change. But a new investigation by Rolling Stone reveals that those distortions were sanctioned at the highest levels of our government, in a policy formulated by the vice president, implemented by the White House Council on Environmental Quality and enforced by none other than Karl Rove. An examination of thousands of pages of internal documents that the White House has been forced to relinquish under the Freedom of Information Act - as well as interviews with more than a dozen current and former administration scientists and climate-policy officials - confirms that the White House has implemented an industry-formulated disinformation campaign designed to actively mislead the American public on global warming and to forestall limits on climate polluters.
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"It's a charade," says Jeremy Symons, who represented the EPA on Cheney's energy task force, the industry-studded group that met in secret to craft the administration's energy policy. "They have a single-minded determination to do nothing - while making it look like they are doing something."

A must-read article. Bush/Cheney/Rove basically organized and carried out a mafia-like hit on facts and science.

But deniers of climate change, who buy into all the orchestrated disinformation, will simply deny this investigation. After all, it's by the leftist, pinko Rolling Stone! Always easier to deny, deny, deny rather than get angry and demand accountability and retribution.

But one thing is certain: Cheney is one scary, scary entity (in his case, saying "person" just doesn't seem to fit).

On his radio show today, Hugh Hewitt interviewed the director of The Nixon Presidential Library, John Taylor. Hewitt mentioned to Taylor that Andrew Sullivan recently quipped that Hillary Clinton is "Nixon in a pant suit." Somewhat interestingly, Taylor responded that the one thing they certainly have in common is they're polarizing, but he added if people think this attribute could hurt Clinton to just consider that Nixon won two elections, the second one by a huge margin.

I accept his point, but remain doubtful whether the comparison is truly valid. Yes, a public figure is not doomed for being liked and disliked at extremes. However, it's difficult to see where it helps come election time, especially since the reality for Hillary will come down to X number of folks will never vote for her and X number will because they'll never vote for the GOP alternative. Also, if for the sake of argument we continue to assume she gets the Dem nod for next November, it's still too early to tell if she'll face off against as weak a candidate as McGovern turned out to be vs. Nixon.

My fear is a bigger hurdle for her will be closet sexism. Telling a pollster over the phone that you like Hillary and will vote for her is one thing, but unfortunately many could do quite the opposite when they get behind the curtain and have to pull the lever. During that moment of truth, deep-seeded feelings have a way of bubbling up -- no matter how ugly or wrong those feeling may be. The same could be said for Gore when he chose Lieberman, with closet antisemitism likely costing the ticket valuable votes, and closet racism could potentially cost Obama votes.

Yes, a horrible topic to consider and think about, but in this country -- where many still hold on to such backward, heinous beliefs -- it's a sad reality.

The Dem-controlled Congress continues to bring accountability back to DC. Their latest finding? Karl Rove and several of his colleagues used RNC email accounts for official business.

In short, they broke the law, period. Forget the fact they then deleted many if not most of those emails. The fact remains what they did was illegal -- THEY BROKE THE LAW.

Where is the condemnation from the sanctimonious "rule of law" crowd that so desperately wanted to hoist Bill Clinton from office? Hell, where is the outrage from the so-called liberal press? (crickets)

Of course, all of the above occurred with AG Gonzo well aware and yet he did nothing to stop it.

Sometimes you just run out of words....

Regarding progress with the surge, the recent U.S. News & World Report offers, "early indications are far from encouraging." In addition, "the Pentagon reports that overall violence levels nationwide remain as high as ever. Indeed, even as U.S. troops boost their presence in some Baghdad neighborhoods, many insurgents appear to have simply moved to outlying provinces that now have a much thinner security presence."

It's like the arcade game whack-a-mole. They just reappear somewhere else, only to then move back from whence they came. An exercise in futility with the end result being U.S. soldier fatalities. Madness.

Sometimes you just have to ask "why?"

The administration and the military have been hard at work trying to postpone this September as the month of reckoning for the Iraq surge. Hopefully, the Democrats will maintain spines and hold them to this deadline.

But in addition to Dems, count on many Republicans to also stand pat on September. Sen. GOP leader Mitch McConnell has recently stated, "I think everybody anticipates that there's going to be a new strategy in the fall...The time to properly evaluate that, it strikes me, is in September."

Look, it comes down to two realities: the political fate of more than a few Republicans heading into 2008 versus attempts to preserve the legacy of a failed, lame duck president. Which do you think will win out? My money is on the vote-thirsty former.

The following quote pretty much sums up Iraq: "The same policymakers who assumed that Iraq would be a cakewalk now assume that the hard-to-predict consequences of leaving will be vastly worse than the demonstrated costs of hanging on."

But are we to grant them a mulligan for getting Iraq completely wrong, assuming no one is perfect and they deserve another chance? Don't think so, for one because this war was not all about a single, huge decision but instead has been comprised of many decisions. So these guys are not 0-1 but rather more like 0-58. They've been wrong, repeatedly. It's called incompetence.

After 9/11, did GW's craziness blackmail Tony Blair?

The religious right is working to make America more secular:

In a paper in the American Sociological Review, Michael Hout and Claude S. Fischer announced the startling fact that the percentage of Americans who said they had “no religious preference” had doubled in less than 10 years, rising from 7 percent to 14 percent of the population. This unexpected spike wasn’t the result of growing atheism, Hout and Fischer argued; rather, more Americans were distancing themselves from organized religion as “a symbolic statement” against the religious right.

Many Americans are choosing to exchange freedom from eternal damnation for a blatant expression against conservative organized religion. I wonder to what extent the reasoning is something along the lines of if God endorses and condones the likes of Dobson, Falwell, or Robertson, I'd rather be an atheist. Oh, the irony.

Also, there's proof that Democrats should give up their attempts to court the votes of the deeply religious (meaning don't wear religion on one's sleeve while campaigning):

Liberals have spent much of the past six years straining to cut into the GOP’s advantage among religious voters. But when the Democrats finally shattered the Republican majority in the 2006 midterms, it was their consolidation of the secular vote that helped put them over the top. Despite all their efforts to close the God gap, the Democrats managed barely any gains among frequent churchgoers last November—but their share of the vote among Americans who never attend church at all leaped to 67 percent, from 55 percent in 2002.

Democrats should stick to the issues and ease up on the religion talk. The growth is apparently away from religion anyway thanks to the intolerant, hateful Dobson/Falwell/Robertson sect.

It's not surprising that Judge Walton would receive several threatening letters "wishing bad things on me and my family.” What is surprising is that no one in this administration, namely Bush, would take just a minute to publicly denounce those who sent such letters. But then again I'm not surprised.

Yeah, it sucks only when Bush criticizes his own (wasn't a problem when directed at Dems). And according to Trent Lott, it sucks only when the conservative talk radio dumbo machine is "pounding" their own (but apparently it's OK when they spread lies and distortions about everything else).

Dan Froomkin (facetiously?) wonders why Bush isn't being more forthcoming about exactly why the nine federal prosecutors were fired.

Instead, the White House's carefully parsed and entirely unforthcoming statements on this matter are reminiscent of the response four years ago to allegations that White House aides had leaked CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity to reporters.

Back then, Bush could well have demanded an answer from his staffers and then shared it with the American people. He chose not to. Whether he chose not to because he knew that two of his top aides were involved in the leaking is still, to this day, not entirely clear. By stonewalling, Bush was able to postpone that revelation until after getting reelected.

The obvious reason must be that because of the severity of the wrong committed, Bush would rather opt for the slower-moving course of action tied to subpoenas and court rulings than the much more expedient alternative of him willfully coming clean. Such stonewalling proved beneficial in the 2004 election with the Plame scandal, and as with Iraq, Bush is just desperately trying to run out the accountability clock. January 2009 cannot come fast enough for this failed lame duck.

It's up to the Democrats to push hard and remain in hot pursuit of the truth for this "mystery" to come to an appropriate end.

Libby must go directly to jail. The pardon clock starts now.