This effort appears to be one very significant move (of likely many to come) towards shoveling dirt over Karl Rove's tactics and legacy. The list here includes quite a few influential people and by all accounts they've had enough of the craven, some-would-say-criminal shenanigans old Shit Blossom had been able to get away with for far too long.

With any luck, when we finally get GW out the door, hopefully exiting with him will be every cancerous form of "governance" he and Karl ever introduced into the process. And yes, fortunately some see the need to start the purge and cleansing now.

Bhutto said Osama bin Laden is dead, that he was murdered. Is that why she was killed (or at least one big reason)?

Last week, the Washington Post ran a story about how the GOP was splintering in large part due to its incessant search for the next Ronald Reagan. Yes, this inane quest for reliving the past and finding the next Gipper has further thrown the party into electoral chaos. I say "further" because let's be honest, GW's nightmarish legacy has not done this party any favors. However, it's all just deserts since these clowns have supported this goon for the last several years, and they continue to support him.

As a result, we could ultimately end up seeing the Republican nomination process linger until their convention in early September. If so, and assuming the Democrats don't succumb to the same fate, it would allow the Dems to unify early and focus on the general election. Meanwhile, the Republicans would still have to attack each other through the summer months, wasting valuable campaign dollars on fighting each other and not the Dems.

Oh wouldn't that be poetic justice.

With Brooks already on board, the idiot duo is complete. Time magazine's "loss" is apparently the NY Times' gain.

Abbott meet Costello, Laurel meet Hardy, Dumb say "hello" to Dumber....

(Get ready for Krugman to blow a gasket).

The next time some right-winger snarls about how environmental measures will cost us in economic progress and undue added expenses, remind them of this:

In July, the World Bank (along with SEPA) released a report saying that pollution costs China US$100 billion a year, or 5.8 percent of its gross domestic product (that's about half of China's own first rough estimates). When it was released in China, however, Chinese officials had succeeded in stripping the report of a more sobering number: 750,000 -- the number of premature deaths in China per year due to air and water pollution.

And note the World Bank used data from China's own EPA. Here we see where pollution has a monetary cost in the many billions, but also a cost in human lives. The right-winger may exclaim, "yeah, but that's China, not the U.S.," which would mean what exactly? The larger point is pollution has tremendous costs, no matter in what country it occurs.

Recall way back when the auto industry warned that the cost of installing seat belts in every car would be hugely expensive and jeopardize the rate of cars sold. Didn't happen. If anything, reports show that the non-use of seat belts costs this country more than $25 billion per year "in medical care, lost productivity and other injury related costs." Same running principle as with the environment, but only myopic, narrow thinking refuses to see the whole picture. For shame.

The NY Giants put up a valiant effort, but nonetheless the New England Patriots prevailed, becoming the first undefeated NFL team since the 1972 Miami Dolphins. Congrats to the Pats, they were certainly the best team this year, if not in NFL history.

This past Sunday, Frank Rich wrote the following in his NY Times column:

We can only imagine what is going on inside John McCain’s head when he contemplates Mike Huckabee. It can’t be pretty. No presidential candidate in either party has more experience in matters of war than the Arizona senator, and yet in a wartime election he is being outpaced by a guy who has zero experience and is proud of it.

“I may not be the expert that some people are on foreign policy,” Mr. Huckabee joked to Don Imus, “but I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night.” So much for the gravitas points earned during a five-and-a-half year stay at the Hanoi Hilton.

So let me understand this, Huckabee had the temerity to make this light-hearted comment, directed at a former war vet who happened to be tortured for years in a Vietnamese hotel. This statement could very well be more below-the-belt than the Swift Boat lies aimed at John Kerry.

For whatever reason, Huckabee felt the need to poke fun at McCain's harrowing "stay" at a hotel -- what does this tell you about Huckabee's judgment, about his temperment? Even if he didn't mean to mix metaphors with Holiday Inn vs. Hanoi Hilton, what kind of a moron would even go there? We already have a class-A dunce in the White House, do we really need another joking, smirking idiot for the next four years? With Bhutto's tragic death, it should be fairly obvious that the world is becoming increasingly more dangerous and complex and the last thing that is needed is a United States leader who is clueless and worse yet insensisitive and willing to toss out the ill-advised one-liner, hoping it buys him some time. Again, we've had eight years of this kind of "leadership" -- enough!

Paul Krugman has some refreshing and sober words of advice to liberals: IT'S TIME TO TAKE OFF THE GLOVES!

A few days ago, Dick Polman wrote the following:

One durable Republican staple is the alleged commitment to "small government." I've heard this repeatedly during the GOP presidential debates. The candidates declare that the feds should butt out, that "one size fits all" policies enacted by Washington would burden the states. On everything from guns to abortion, the GOP politicians say that states should be allowed to come up with solutions that reflect the will of their own people. This is supposed to be a cornerstone of the conservative ethos.

But it's really just pap for the stump. In reality, and for a fresh insight into contemporary Republican hypocrisy, let us behold (yet again) the Bush administration in action.

A couple days ago, the Bush team - acting through the Environmental Protection Agency, in violation of the law that created the EPA, and in defiance of federal court rulings - decreed that the state of California, and 16 other states, would not be permitted to act on their own to reduce global warming emissions from automobiles. The EPA explained that it favors a "national solution" (i.e. one size fits all), over what it calls "a confusing patchwork of state rules."

The catch, of course, is that the EPA - once considered a protector of the environment, before the Bush team go ahold of it - has no interest in a "national solution" to cut the carbon-dioxide emissions that contribute to global warming. The Bush EPA fought the idea for years, claiming that the 1970 Clean Air Act failed to specify carbon dioxide as a pollutant. They haven't budged in that belief, even though, back on April 2 of this year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the '70 law gave the Bush EPA plenty of authority to regulate those emissions.

There's another key feature of that '70 law (which created the EPA, and which was signed by Republican President Richard Nixon): It allows states to set their own clean air standards in the absence of federal action, as long as the feds give their permission in the form of waivers. Over the past four decades, California has sought 50 waivers from the feds, and it has received 50 waivers. Until now. The EPA administrator’s Wednesday ruling overrode the advice of his own legal staff.

In general, the GOP is for states' rights -- but not when it comes to air pollutants. When it comes to spewing such toxins into our atmosphere, apparently what various states wish to do is considered a no-no. Unlike gay rights or abortion laws, when it comes to the air we breathe, this administration has decided to defy the efforts of individual states to bypass the inaction of the federal ("large") government. No, in this case Republicans side with big government because it sides with industry, plain and simple.

Nothing here is shocking. The GOP only wants small government when it fits their political agenda, meaning when it doesn't work against corporate America and their big donors. But never believe that BS line about starving the beast; the GOP did a pretty good job of fattening said beast over the last few years.

Some very truthful words spoken by the man who would've been President:

So today we dumped another seventy million tons of global-warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet, as if it were an open sewer. And tomorrow we will dump a slightly larger amount.

After all, it's not as if the pollutants dissipate into outer space. No, they're with us for life (or death), having nowhere else to go but in us.

But imagine this stooge in the White House saying these words.... Yeah, on a cold day in hell....

Hold on to your hat but apparently the situation in Afghanistan has worsened over time to the point where it's in jeopardy of becoming a lost cause.

Let's not forget that Afghanistan was supposed to be the war, not one of two. Afghanistan harbored terrorists and was the country most responsible for 9/11 -- not so for Iraq on both counts. Yet we deployed the bulk of our military resources to invading the non-9/11-responsible country and now we can't properly secure the country that was the source of terrorism against us in the first place.

However we also must remember that first and foremost all of the military moves in the last several years have been about one thing: oil. Iraq has lots of it, Afghanistan has little if any at all. Nuf said.

Former CIA agent John Kiriakou revealed that the illegal act of waterboarding was used on terrorist suspects and as a result the CIA has launched an investigation against him.

No one should be surprised by what amounts to an act of retribution. Valerie Plame knows full well how this works. It's what they do.

Bill O'Reilly predictably took his "War on Christmas" hysterics to Massachusetts, or what the wingnuts love to regard as the home of Ted Kennedy, oodles of liberals, and high taxes. All for the sake of stirring up the intolerant juices with the religious right -- his core viewing audience.

But meanwhile in the lovely red state of Georgia, where they voted for GW in 2004 by a sizable 58%-41% margin, we have this story. School football coach John S. Hayes, 42, "loaded several middle schoolers into the back of his pickup truck, and drove them around after dark and damaged Christmas displays. Christmas displays were smashed and slashed. The group even positioned several homeowners’ displays in X-rated configurations, including placing reindeer in sexual positions."

Yikes! Wouldn't you expect O'Reilly to be all over this heinous news item? I mean reindeer placed in sexual positions, this is just awful! I assume he's sending a TV crew down to Georgia ASAP to show his audience how such deviant acts against Christmas can occur even in a Bush state.... But then I'm not holding my breath. Yawn.

Dick Polman writes about Romney:

And when Russert asked yesterday whether he believed that life begins at conception, he revealed his true self. From the transcript:

“I do. I believe, I believe, from a, from a political perspective that life begins at conception. I, I don’t, I don’t pretend to know, if you will, from a theological standpoint when life begins.”

Wait...Did he just say that he believes life begins at conception “from a political perspective?” No wonder so many grassroots Republicans don’t trust this guy. They want somebody who hews to that belief for theological reasons – not somebody who goes on TV and admits to the entire nation that his stance on life is “political,” and therefore just an exigency of the campaign.

I sense that Romney is basically a moderate Republican (as his father was), and it’s embarrassing to watch his incessant attempts to retrofit his convictions, all the while claiming that he is doing no such thing. There’s a reason why his lead in Iowa has evaporated, despite his expenditure of $7 million; conservatives smell an opportunist.

(Worse yet, an opportunist who makes stuff up. At one point yesterday, he stated that, while running for governor in 2002, "I received the endorsement of the NRA." The factual reality is that he did not receive the endorsement of the NRA. The gun lobby didn't back anybody in that race.)

What? Suddenly conservatives have a problem with an opportunist -- one that lies no less? Why now? And why start with Romney?

They've been backing such flip-flopping, lying opportunists for as long as I can remember. Recall that GW was exactly such a speciman in 2000 and continues to be.

Is it possible conservatives have finally reached their tipping point with such charlatans? If so, then who do they have left to support?

After years of Republican-controlled government, what do we have to show for it? Among many other unfortunate repercussions, we have more than $9 trillion in debt:

In a new report released last week, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said that the federal budget is on an "unsustainable path." The reason: The government is spending more and more for healthcare programs and for interest payments on the federal debt, now topping $9 trillion.
<..>
The CBO estimates that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could cost $2.4 trillion over the next decade. Nearly $700 billion of that cost will be interest on the debt to finance the wars.

It's a cost that's largely invisible to the public now, but will be much more evident as interest rates increase.

Recall Bush is the biggest spending president in the last several decades. Makes one wonder what all that "small government is best" stuff was about. And perhaps the most worrisome item to the exploding debt: our healthcare system. Yet the Republicans want nothing to do with reforming it, instead remaining a slave to insurance and pharma lobbyists, maintaining the status-quo so the rich get richer on our tax dime. Oh, and let's not forget the wars without end, with the CBO estimating at a cost of $2.4 trillion -- when all is said done, likely to be well north of $3 trillion.

Our kids future be damned. Absolute madness.

Interesting. In the poll I mention below regarding Huckabee, the Republican presidential candidate who appears to give the Dems the most trouble is none other than John McCain.

Whereas months ago, McCain did plenty of damage to his campaign by cozying up to Bush and making nice-nice with the likes of Jerry Falwell, he's been able to hang around and remain viable -- thanks in large part to his woeful, quite pitiful competition. They've turned out to be a bunch of unelectable, scary prospects. And their willingness to say and/or do anything to win over their kooky base makes McCain's earlier panderings look tame in comparison.

In light of these flip-flopping suck-ups, McCain once again gets to project himself as the stalwart, straight-shooting maverick (although you and I know much of that is just bunk).

Apparently Huckabee believes we're all huckleberries (read: fools). It's fairly well-documented that most of America either was informed of the fact or had come to realize during the mid-1980s that AIDS could only be transmitted through sexual contact or in a manner entering the bloodstream (drug needles, etc.). In other words, the general public understood it could not be passed on by way of kissing or casual contact. (Note that the NIH mailed information concerning this matter to every household in the U.S., and this occurred in May 1988).

Yet, in 1992, we have Mike Huckabee making statements about how he believed AIDS patients should be "isolated" from the rest of the population.

Of course, he's quickly backpedaling now, throwing out all kinds of excuses for his idiotic statement, but it's all a charade. Odds greatly favor that he was doing then what most Republicans do regularly: tossing red meat to his hate-mongering, intolerant base. You can just imagine how they'd love a point of view like that, to endorse the locking-up of those inflicted with AIDS. After all, recall what Rev. Falwell said: "AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals; it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals."

But then again, Huckabee could really just be another dumb-ass Republican. Yeah, that's what this country needs, another clueless, faith-based leader that makes things up as he goes along, winging the BS as he pleases and hopes the media never questions him on it. Lovely. Oh, and anyone who believes Duncan Hunter "is extraordinarily well qualified to be Secretary of Defense" has at least one bolt loose.

Fortunately, the Dem front-runners would crush Huckabee in the general election. Whew!

Did the order to torture come right from the top? Yes, according to former CIA agent John Kiriakou, who has been making the media rounds and discussing torture that has indeed occurred.

NBC's Matt Lauer asked him if the White House was involved in the order to perform torture and Kiriakou replied, "Absolutely. This isn’t something done willy nilly. It’s not something that an agency officer just wakes up in the morning and decides he’s going to carry out an enhanced technique on a prisoner. This was a policy made at the White House."

Just where and when do the lies stop, Mr. President? I suppose this guy is lying too?

More continues to come out about how the intelligence community and some other top-brass figures have apparently decided to reign in the madness of Bush/Cheney. Now we learn that several "intelligence career seniors" were fully willing to go to jail if the NIE report was not released.

Wow, threatening the White House with blackmail?! It's come down to this?!! And who would've thought that these folks would be saving us from further descending into a banana republic-type existence?

How did the intel community discover that Iran had halted its nuke program? A big reason has to do with a CIA-backed program called "Brain Drain," which was to entice well-placed Iranians to defect.

Kevin Drum comments further about the stepped-up efforts to obtain good info on Iran:

And why did we need a "major intelligence push" in the first place? According to Miller, it's because Bush dismantled the Iran Task Force set up during Bill Clinton's administration in order to focus all his attention on — surprise! — Iraq. "When Bush came in, they were totally disinterested in Iran," said a former CIA official who held a senior position at the time. "It went from being a main focus to everything being switched to Iraq."

How about that, Bill Clinton was on top of it way back then and of course Bush and his band of neocons had to disassemble it -- most probably because it was simply associated with Bill Clinton.

Well, we can file this genius move with the outing of Valerie Plame since she was hard at work spying on much to do with Iran's nuclear ambitions -- that is until Cheney and his buddies took care of that.

As I've written here before, perhaps the most worrisome repercussion stemming from the serial lies this administration peddles (only to be eventually caught and forced to eat crow) is their credibility is completely gone and as a result any threats or dangers actually facing us, requiring serious scrutiny, are likewise treated with scant belief, a case of baby tossed out with bath water.

In effect, real and growing geopolitical risks do not get the mature, sober consideration they merit due to the narrow agenda perpetrated by these partisan, maniacal neocon clowns. A country as dangerous as Iran is allowed to escape or get a reprieve from worthwhile international pressures, and heck even look good (or better), thanks to the idiotic, deceitful, Three-Stooges-like bungling of Bush/Cheney.

It's this continued trashing of our country's global standing and the willingness of other nations to believe in our statements that has exposed the United States to more danger, not less. These crackpot thugs have made us less safe by allowing their repeated screw-ups and reprehensible lies to sidetrack what are the true, real threats facing us, thus taking the focus off these threats as we instead focus on the hair-brained screw-ups and lies.

For us to be safer in this day and age, it's not so much a matter of weak vs. strong in leadership, but rather competence over dumb, clueless, cheap maneuverings that equate to sheer insanity. Enough!

Thankfully the intelligence community certainly understands this imperative, and with the release of this report despite being delayed and scuttled for over a year by the Dark One, they too have decided enough is enough. They fully understand that this loose-cannon rhetoric, riddled with nonsensical fabrications, makes us and the rest of the world less safe. It will be one of the lasting ironies of the past eight years.