Hurricane Damage Will Be Worse, thanks to Bush

Yup. Bush has cut the budget for New Orleans' hurricane and flood protection efforts every year that he's been in office.

In 2001, the New Orleans district spent $147 million on construction projects. When fiscal year 2005 wraps up Sept. 30, the Corps expects to have spent $82 million, a 44.2 percent reduction from 2001 expenditures.

Shameful. But, hey, sorry all you liberal Orleaners. The rest of your state voted for him.

Oh, and where's the Louisianna National Guard? Bush will never be able to wash the blood off his hands.

Quotes from when Clinton committed troops to Bosnia:

"You can support the troops but not the president."
--Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)

"Well, I just think it's a bad idea. What's going to happen is they're going to be over there for 10, 15, maybe 20 years."
--Joe Scarborough (R-FL)

"Explain to the mothers and fathers of American servicemen that may come home in body bags why their son or daughter have to give up their life?"
--Sean Hannity, Fox News, 4/6/99

"[The] President . . . is once again releasing American military might on a foreign country with an ill-defined objective and no exit strategy. He has yet to tell the Congress how much this operation will cost. And he has not informed our nation's armed forces about how long they will be away from home. These strikes do not make for a sound foreign policy."
--Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA)

"American foreign policy is now one huge big mystery. Simply put, the administration is trying to lead the world with a feel-good foreign policy."
--Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)

"If we are going to commit American troops, we must be certain they have a clear mission, an achievable goal and an exit strategy."
--Karen Hughes, speaking on behalf of George W Bush

"I had doubts about the bombing campaign from the beginning . . I didn't think we had done enough in the diplomatic area."
--Senator Trent Lott (R-MS)

"I cannot support a failed foreign policy. History teaches us that it is often easier to make war than peace. This administration is just learning that lesson right now. The President began this mission with very vague objectives and lots of unanswered questions. A month later, these questions are still unanswered. There are no clarified rules of engagement. There is no timetable. There is no legitimate definition of victory. There is no contingency plan for mission creep. There is no clear funding program. There is no agenda to bolster our over-extended military. There is no explanation defining what vital national interests are at stake. There was no strategic plan for war when the President started this thing, and there still is no plan today"
--Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)

"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is."
--Governor George W. Bush (R-TX)

I've added new Bush quotes to my Bush quote page, including this progression of gems on leaking confidential information about a covert CIA operative:

"Any sources and methods of intelligence will remain guarded in secret. My administration will not talk about how we gather intelligence, if we gather intelligence, and what the intelligence says. That's for the protection of the American people." — 9/13/01

"We can't have leaks of classified information. It's not in our nation's interest." — 10/9/01

"Listen, I know of nobody -- I don't know of anybody in my administration who leaked classified information. If somebody did leak classified information, I'd like to know it, and we'll take the appropriate action. And this investigation is a good thing." — 10/7/03

"I don't know whether we are going to find out the senior administration official." — 10/8/03

"If someone committed a crime, they will no longer work in my administration." — 7/18/05

Lie:

And I must say from a common sense standpoint, driving back and forth to work to the CIA headquarters, I don't know if that really qualifies as being, you know, covert.

- Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS), on CNN Late Edition, 7/24/05

Truth:

There are thousands of undercover CIA employees who drive through the three gates at CIA Headquarters in McLean, Virginia everyday.

- Former CIA intelligence official Larry Johnson, at TPM Cafe, 7/24/05

Thanks to DavidNYC at the KOS for his post about debunking Republican lies.

Guest writer explores the psychiatric nature of Arab Assassins

This is from my union brother Jeff.

Back in the '20's and '30's, Pavlov tortured and maimed dogs to try and prove that they could be conditioned to salivate when he rang a bell. "Uncle Joe" Stalin asked Pavlov to write down everything he had learned with an eye to how it could be used on humans. Thus was born "Russian brain-washing".

The West, in the traditional tit-for-tat vein, the CIA developed Cointelpro, or counter intelligence program some time after WW II. It was a vast black program which further developed "brainwashing" techniques by the use of drugs and deep sleep drug induced comas. People were placed in comas for months at a time and regularly electro-shocked. Canadian and American psychiatrists collaborated in this latter day stepped up version of Pavlovian and dehumanizing and very heartless and cruel program.

Osama's mentor, Ayman al-Zawarhi, an Egyptian rich kid and medical student was involved in the assassination of Abdul Nasser. He got caught and spent seven years in an Egyptian prison. Zawarhi was subjected to cointelpro techniques. He learned to despise America and finally got some measure of revenge on America on 9/11. Osama was a perfect dupe and Zawarhi, being a medical doctor made sure Osama received lots of opiates and heroin and amphetamines and electro shock and cointelpro behavior modification techniques.

Regular folk wonder how anyone could blow themselves up and murder civilians in the process. Well, in addition to being carefully selected beforehand, Suicide bombers are normally very heavily doped up on amphetamines and opiates.

The Arab culture is steeped in the lore of the "assassin". There were "Thugee" cults in India, but the Assassin is the Arab version. The word comes from "user of hashish". An unwitting and somewhat impressionable and imbecilic young man would be selected by agents working for Hashshashin, founder of Serif Arabi Cult of assassins.

This young goober would be slipped a mickey of hashish. He would pass out and be kidnapped and when he woke up, he would be in a harem tent and would be told he was in heaven. A couple of days would pass and this goof-ball would have enjoyed himself immensely. Then his mentor would say that he had been brought to heaven prematurely and that Allah needed just one more small task performed: "Kill so-and-so. And upon your success, you will at once be whisked back up to heaven".

The guy would be slipped another overdose of hashish and pass out and then be dumped back out on the street. The guy would be very highly motivated to kill Sultan so-and-so and with a fervent frenzy, could very well succeed!

Modern day al Qaeda techniques have this tradition. That is why their suicide bombers are so fervent and so dedicated. Intelligent or well schooled or educated or not; they are more or less suggestible to begin with. That is the primary criterion that the suicide bomber scouts look for
-- gullibility.

Add to this months of "brainwashing" and heavy doses of amphetamines and opiates and hallucinogens and voila! Suicide bombers made to order by the gross.

My point is that our psychiatric programs, the misguided and violently misanthropic programs that they are, were exported by the CIA and probably the NSA to various operatives in the field. And the Arab, already familiar with the history of the Assassins readily understood and embraced and combined cointelpro methods with what he knew of his history; the assassins. And thus he has really taken the West by the scrotum.

It is a tragic dilemma and there is no one-shot-cure. Using psychiatric techniques such as post-cointelpro dehumanizing and torture methods at places like Abu-Ghraib are kerosene thrown on the fire.

Jeff

The Real Conspiracy Theories
In Response to New 9-11 Conspiracy Theories

I only worry that by buying into this the Bushies can make us out to look like freakish UFO types.

At the very least, the Bushies IGNORED terrorism. The neo-cons said, in a PNAC report from the late 80's that they needed a "Pearl Harbor type event" in order to speed up American military intervention in the middle east, specifically, Iraq. Remember, these are the guys who wanted Bush Sr. to go all the way to Baghdad.

So, they just did nothing on terror. Richard Clarke was running around with his "hair on fire" trying to get someone in the White House to talk about terrorism and Al Qaeda (which Clinton and Gore had been very hawkish on), but they kept blowing him off.

So, hey, they got what they needed. Coincidence? Probably not? But an active effort from the upper echelons of the White House. I doubt it. After seeing the way they've handled everything else, I don't think they're good enough to pull something like that off.

What they are good at is getting the red-neck agenda front and center, so people won't look at the big picture. They get middle America voting on gay marriage, abortion, Terry Schiavo laws, and then scare the living shit out of them with their "we're strong on terror" lies - because they are actually the opposite. Terror helps them. Terror is the new cold war, vague and threatening, to justify new Viet Nams with new domino theories and new Gulfs of Tonkin.

But were more than just the 19 mostly Saudi hijackers involved? Most definitely. Could there have been other people in high levels of the military (ours or someone else's) actually helping the terrorists? Maybe. Did Bush have something to do with it? Hell, I doubt if he could tie his shoes without all the anti-depressants they're feeding him.

Al-Qaeda has changed; Bush strategy also needs to shift

For those who say Democrats offer no plan of their own, I suggest you follow the link above to a great article by General Wes Clark.

Protect your country from the American Taliban

While the 101st fighting keyboardists who love this war still refuse to sign up to fight it, a real threat to this nation's security has attacked us from the White House. Valerie Plame was an undercover CIA agent working on ACTUAL WMD PROLIFERATION. She has spent years setting up the cover operation that allowed her, and her operatives, to find out about old soviet nukes, where they were going, and who was trying to get them.

But this petty White House, while trying to justify their geo-political obsession with Iraq, decided to blow her cover, and the cover of all the people working for her, over some vendetta against her Republican husband, Joseph Wilson, who honestly and openly doubted Bush claims (and forged papers from someone) that claimed Saddam was trying to buy yellowcake from Niger. Furthermore, Plame's outfit had established covert ties into the Saudi Royal Family (long time Bush family friends and financiers) and their state run oil company, ARAMCO. All of the decades of work on WMD and ARAMCO are now worthless, the lives of the many operatives have been put at risk, and the US has lost a great source of intelligence into the ACTUAL terrorists trying to threaten us.

At the same time, it seems, the Plame affair prosecutor, Fitzgerald, seems to have stumbled into another National Security breach, perhaps originating in Dick Cheney's office, regarding the fact that someone in the White House gave classified information to Chalabi, the lying Iraqi exile who the administration loved for his bullshit "facts" about Iraqi WMD. This, or these, White House officials told Chalabi that we had broken Iranian codes. Chalabi then told the Iranians, who changed them. This is a violation of the Espionage Act of 1917, and is punishable by death.

So, while right wing nuts and pseudo moderates rant and rave about taking away your privacy, in the form of their ant-choice, anti-gay-marriage, American Taliban fundamentalism, their beloved hero, GW Bush, is harboring felons in his White House, the very one he and Dick Cheney, in 2000, promised to restore honor and integrity to. These felons have sold out American security for some neo-con dream of Middle East democracy and Israeli dominance of the region. They have made us less safe by spending hundreds of billions of dollars on some insanely illogical "fly-paper strategy" in order to "fight terrorists there instead of here," instead of spending that money on protecting our borders, our ports, our chemical and nuclear plants, and our transportation systems. They have cut money from first responders all over the country, and they lie about that, and then they cut funding for the very veterans they praise as having answered the highest calling (which very few of them did).

And now, as the Turd-Blossom shit has hit the fan, the White House is "restoring honor and integrity to the White House" in a very strange way. In fact, it's very similar to parsing what the definition of is is. They are lying. When they're caught in a lie, the lie that they never lied.

Here's what White House press secretary Scott McClellan had to say about the Valerie Plame felonies two years ago:

"No one wants to get to the bottom of this matter more than the President of the United States. If someone leaked classified information, the President wants to know. If someone in this administration leaked classified information, they will no longer be a part of this administration, because that's not the way this White House operates."

Today, it was "Karl who?"

While Rove keeps on weaseling out of the facts, with beyond Clintonian statements like, "I didn't say her name," (no, Karl, you just said Joseph Wilson's wife), and "I didn't tell any reporter that she worked for the CIA," (no, Karl, you said the agency), the right-wingers in this country are going to continue to try to get swing state voters to believe that liberals are going to force you to be gay, force your children to become atheists, force you to give away your guns, force you to die if you don't want to, force you to have abortions, and force you to drive small cars with good gas mileage. These kind of bullshit lies are all they have left, because they've been exposed for what they really are: fascists.

They are the ones who want to restrict liberty in this country. They are the ones who passed the Patriot Act. They are the ones who lied to get us into a war to further the mad privatization schemes on a global scale. They are the ones who want to stop stem cell research because they think zygotes are people. They are the ones who want to stop talking to kids about birth control and safe sex. They are the ones who lie about the science behind global warming, health, pollution, grazing, wetlands, and many more important facts Americans need to protect our liberty from terrorists, whether they be Islamists, Timothy McVeighs, or corporate robber barons. They are the ones who put lobbyists in regulatory positions. They are the ones taking away your hunting and fishing lands for oil and gas wells.

Clear headed people who actually bother to read the news and form their own opinions, as opposed to letting Rupert Murdoch think for them, should look around and realize that even many conservatives are finding the Bush Misadministration too much to stomach. In 2006, the Democratic Party will be running someone in almost every single congressional district. In many of the conservative districts, they will be running pro-gun, pro-liberty candidates who are conservative and libertarian in many ways, but who will work to not only stop the bleeding of lives, limbs, and tax-payer money in Bush's global game, but who will vote to impeach this treasonous cabal, and hopefully bring honor and integrity back to the White House for real.

I urge you all to vote for the Democrat running for congress in your district. You don't have to join the military to protect your country. Protect your country by giving money to the party that will stop these fanatics. Protect your country by volunteering to help the Democrat in your district. Protect your country by putting a sticker on your car or a sign in your yard. Start now and don't stop until November 2006.

Find out more at the DNC web site.

Thank you.
Scott Supak
http://supak.com

Representative John Conyers should be the House Minority leader. He regularly posts brilliant entries in his blog, at the Huffington Post, and the Daily Kos. Check out this gem from today.

On Oct. 10, 2003, White House press secretary Scott McClellan was asked whether Rove; Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby; or National Security Council official Elliott Abrams had told any reporter that Plame was a covert CIA agent. ‘I spoke with those individuals, as I pointed out, and those individuals assured me they were not involved in this,’ McClellan said. ‘And that's where it stands.’ Reporters pressed McClellan to clarify that statement but he held to the words in his first answer until one reporter asked, ‘They were not involved in what?’ To which he replied, ‘The leaking of classified information.’ In the 90’s, there was a media uproar when literally accurate, but misleading, statements were made about a private sexual affair. Today, when such statements are made out a life and death matter -- the decision to go to war -- for a Nixonian purpose -- to smear truth-telling critics -- there is barely a peep from the press corps. In the days since Rove’s role became public, the White House press corps has yet to pose a question to the White House press secretary about it. Not a word about the disgusting hypocrisy of an Administration that came to office promising to “change the tone” in Washington now attacking a critic through his spouse.

Why is he the only Democrat on this talking point today? If every Dem. in the country was on this point all day, then maybe the White House press corps would pose a question to Puffy McMoon Face, er, the Press secretary, about it it.

But this story goes way beyond hypocrisy. This is treason of the highest kind. One very intelligent poster at the dKOS has suggested that the Plame prosecutor Fitzgerald has stumbled into some very serious breaches of national security. Specifically, it seems Fitzgerald may have discovered who leaked information to Chalabi that we had broken Iran's codes, information Chalabi apparently passed to Iran.

If true, that would be a violation of the 1917 Espionage Act, punishable by death.

It's times like these that I lament being against the death penalty.

Fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here

On this horrific day of London terrorism, I would like to hear one Bush voter step forward with a defense of the "we're fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here" theory of global anti-terror.

Doesn't seem to have worked for the British. And a majority of their public has always been against the Iraq war.

How many improvements to homeland security could we have made with the $200 BILLION spent SO FAR in Iraq? How many cops and firemen could we have hired? How many improvements could we have made to first responder infrastructure? How many more containers could we have searched? How many more Arabic speakers could the FBI have hired? How many computer improvements could we have made so law enforcement agencies could better share information on terrorists?

And they have the balls to call me a traitor. They have the balls to say I'm unpatriotic. Patriotism is a lot more than tattered flags on your SUV, a yellow troops ribbon next to your gas cap, or a bunch of fireworks.

The US war with Iran has already begun

Scott Ritter, author of Frontier Justice, proves that the war with Iran is already underway. The neo-cons realize they may only have 3 years of W left, so they're getting busy.

Defense Tech: Pilot Training Time Slashed

OK, any of you lame brain, Bush loving, morally superior fuck heads want to explain this one to me? Because Iraq has so drained the military, the Air Force is cutting back on pilot training time.

"They're not cutting fat, they're cutting to the bone," [Retired Gen. Hal Hornburg, former Air Combat Command commander] Hornburg said, noting the Pentagon has taken large sums of money away from the Air Force to pay for the Army in Iraq.

And we attacked Iraq why? I mean, screw all the lies and distractions, like WMD and ties to Al Qaeda, which are impeachable enough. What's the reason Bush gives NOW for being in Iraq? Spreading Democracy? We are shelling out billions and leaving ourselves poorly protected at home because Bush thought we should spread Democracy to a region where Bush's best friends next door (Saudi Arabia) are a monarchy that doesn't even want women to drive? That's making us safer? Spending money on a war in Iraq instead on pilots who could shoot down hijacked planes is making us safer. Spending HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS on a war that the new World Bank President, Paul Wolfowitz, said could finance itself is making us more safe than putting hundreds of billions into ports, first responders, chemical factories, and borders would have? Spending hundreds of billions while recruiting drops off and big chunks of the reserve and guard (people who help protect and serve at home, like after attacks or natural disasters) are fighting in Iraq because the army is stretched too thin makes us safer HOW? If we are attacked, where is the National Guard to help keep order and protect us from harm? Over in Iraq with crappy equipment, driving dangerous routes that Halliburton employees make 10 times as much for! I'd like just one of you Bush voting schmucks to tell me how this all makes us safer.

Daily Kos :: Smoking Bullet in the Smoking Gun?

Representative John Conyers is trying to get 100,000 signatures on a letter he is sending to President Bush, urging the administration to explain the Downing Street Memo. Today, new revelations have come from the London Times that the Bush and Blair administrations had greatly increased bombing of Iraq in 2002, in an attempt to goad Saddam into war. So Conyers, and the 88 congresspeople who signed his first letter, are the only elected Representatives in America who give a damn about lies that get us into quagmires for global business domination. Now Conyers is going to send a letter to Rumsfeld about these new revelations from, of course, the British Press. Apparently, the Bushies haven't figured out how to scare the British Press into submission yet.

Representative Conyers needs your help. Go to his site and sign the letter. But don't stop there. Write your local newspapers complaining about lack of coverage of the Downing Street Memo. Or check out this site: afterdowningstreet.org. Write letters to the networks, your newspapers, your local television stations, your Senators, your Representative, and anyone else you can think of who might actually care about our troops, instead of just putting a magnet next to their gas tank.

Stuff Keeps Happening

I'm sitting in the backrow of the Mark Taper Forum in downtown Los Angeles, watching my union brothers and sisters load in the new David Hare play about the Bush administration, Stuff Happens. While I wait for the electricians to cut work lights and focus, so I can focus projection, I've been blogging and reading. Check out my Backstage with Supak blog for more on this new, sure-to-be-controversial play. I stumbled upon this, thanks to mrboma's diary at the Daily KOS:

George W. Bush and his gang of neocon warmongers have destroyed America’s reputation. It is likely to stay destroyed, because at this point the only way to restore America’s reputation would be to impeach and convict President Bush for intentionally deceiving Congress and the American people in order to start a war of aggression against a country that posed no threat to the United States.

You know you're way too far right when the Reagan Republicans want to impeach you... If James Dobson can move his pinky and hurt your nuts, you may have too much in his palm, and that's where Bill Frist and his band of Dobsian Crusaders are stuck now, firmly in the hand of the new Jerry Falwells.

In my union newsgroup, my friend Jeff had this to say to this KOS post about recruitment problems:

Not surprising, really. We'll be recruiting 12-year-olds before you know it.

Per this NYT article, the only people who are voluntarily enlisting these days are one's who are at odds with society. Nice, eh? Nobody in their right mind; (and understandably) wants any part of Viet Nam: Act II. It is not a just war. That leaves the loonies. The "Kill 'em all" thugs; the psychos. Wow. This is bad.

I'm gonna miss a lot of things about this country. Too bad it's going down the shitter so fast.

To which I replied:

Well, what do you expect when blood thirsty idiots who lie and cheat take charge because idiot union voters buy their bomb-them-all bullshit?

Quick, one of you assholes down on your knees giving Bush a blowjob, tell me who attacked us on 9-11. Tell me where the Iraqi WMDs are? Tell me why Americans are dying in a country you think we should just turn to glass with nukes?

Yeah, I'm talking to the fascist pigs who refuse to defend the Bush administration any more, like the Jesus freaks who think God actually tells Bush to kill Muslims.

Yeah, I mean all you Bush voting union brothers who are too chicken shit to argue with me anymore, much less sign up for this glorious Holy war you love so much.

I just can't help it. I'm done with trying to get along with these people. No olive branches. We lose more voters by looking spineless than we do if we fire back at these people with better than what they give.

And the really sad part is that, in this country we just freed, our representatives in uniform are fast becoming the whackos. What a great impression these young nut cases must be making! I feel really sorry for the decent human beings in the military who will be screwed by these bad apples as they start to permeate the ranks.

Jim Lampley Gets Down with the Odds that Karl Rove Rigged the 2004 Election

Jim Lampley, yes the sports reporter, is mad as hell and he's not going to take it any more. In his post yesterday in the Huffington Blog, Lampley lambastes the fourth estate for it's collective silence in the Rovian/Machiavellian rigging of election 2004.

We know that professionally conceived samples simply do not yield results which vary six, eight, ten points from eventual data returns, thaty's why there are identifiable margins for error. We know that margins for error are valid, and that results have fallen within the error range for every Presidential election for the past fifty years prior to last fall. NEVER have exit polls varied by beyond-error margins in a single state, not since 1948 when this kind of polling began. In this past election it happened in ten states, all of them swing states, all of them in Bush's favor. Coincidence? Of course not.

Hey, if it takes a sports reporter to show these chicken shit journalists what odds makers understood from the exit polls, then I say "FORE!" Keep swingin' Jim.

BTW: that's twice in the first three days of it's existence that I heard about a Huffington Post post from another news source outside the internet. Nice goin' Arianna.

George Bush's Family Friends and the Dirty Bomb Blackmail

The Huffington Post got off to a bang--excuse the pun--today with an exclusive story about The House of Saud's dangerous self destruction mechanisms designed to force the west to protect their fascist regime and the world's largest supply of oil.

In "EMBARGOED BOOK CLAIMS SAUDI OIL INFRASTRUCTURE RIGGED FOR CATASTROPHIC SELF-DESTRUCTION," Arianna Huffington's new blog/newszine starts off with an exclusive story with mammoth proportions for Bandar Bush and George W. Saud. Since the actual goal of the jihadists is not the overthrow of the US, but the overthrow of the heretic monarchies and secular leaning governments of the middle east, Saudi Arabia, or, more specifically, the Saudi Royal Family, is very nervous.

How nervous? Nervous enough to rig their entire oil infrastructure with various conventional and radiological "dirty" bombs, which, in the event of a jihadist uprising (ironically from the very wassabist cults funded by the Royal Oils) or attack from a neighboring Islamist state, Bandar Bush and his majesty's family could push the button making the world's largest oil supply off limits for thousands of years.

Maybe they'll go for it soon! We'd sure find alternatives to fossil fuels then! Conservation would stop being a personal virtue and would start being the rule. Even Dick Cheney would have to stop using petroleum enimas.

Memo disputes Bush Iraq claims

Bush is a fucking liar. This is just more proof of that, albeit astounding proof from the upper echelons of the poodle Blair government. Why is Knight Ridder the only newswire picking this up? Rep. John Conyers and 88 other congresspeople are sending a letter to Bush about this memo.

Daily Kos :: 88 Representatives Want Answers on Leaked Memo

I first heard about it, of course, from Greg Palast: IMPEACHMENT TIME: "FACTS WERE FIXED.".

The Real Reason for the Rare Bush News Conference

Insurgent Attacks in Baghdad Kill 14 - Yahoo! News: "The Cabinet also signaled another surprising political comeback for Ahmad Chalabi, the one-time Pentagon favorite who later fell from grace over accusations he leaked intelligence to Iran and gave flawed evidence that Saddam Hussein was hoarding weapons of mass destruction. Chalabi, a Shiite, will serve as deputy prime minister and acting oil minister. His nephew, Ali Abdel-Amir Allawi (also the interim Defense Minister), was appointed finance minister."

There were a few stories noting this interesting appointment to Acting Oil Minister and Deputy Prime Minister. But for the most part, the strange occurrence of GW Bush "answering" press questions about a dead Social Security "plan" overshadowed the blatant neo-con payback to this convicted criminal, known liar, and the man most responsible for the crappy intelligence (via curveball) they just had to hear from somebody.

The sad thing is that I can't find anything, not even from the foreign press, about what kind of pressure the neo-cons put on the Iraqi "government" to make this appointment happen. Exactly how are we twisting arms over there? Is the military threatening to leave the Iraqi "troops" alone in some areas if they don't do as we say? Or is it our new, powerful "Embassy" that is exerting some other kind of pressure on the Iraqis? Did anyone ask the President about this last night? Of course not. Every "reporter" in that room realizes if they asked something like that, they wouldn't be invited back into the hand-picked bunch of ass lickers called the White House Press Corp.

What do the Jordanians, who convicted Chalabi of fraud, think of the appointment? What has become of "curveball" the crazy, drunken liar who Chalabi spoon fed to the insatiable neo-con appetite for anything that agreed with their blood-thirsty plans. Will he be appointed a cushy government job next?

This story gets stranger and stranger, and even people like Bill Mahr are starting to buy the neo-con crap about spreading Democracy. The appointment of Chalabi, his nephew, and who knows who else (the google translator doesn't work well enough for me to find that out) to the new Iraqi "Government" should dispel any inklings that this might actually work for the good of the Iraqi people. If they ever actually get back down to the number of annual assassinations that happened during the Hussein years, they'll look around and see their country being run by a bunch of US appointed thugs.

Same as it ever was.

So many Christians, so few lions.

While the right wing fanatics continue their building of an American Evangelical Theocracy, I'd like to point out that they are trying to build something that, when they're done, if they want to be consistent at all, they'll have to bomb.