It's back !! The bankruptcy "reform" act was recently attached to legislation concerning debt relief for farmers, and is, unbelievably, even worse than the legislation killed in committee last year. Among the new provisions: a "reform" that would permit investment bankers to be employed in bankruptcies involving companies for which they worked. Neat trick, that; you sell securities on behalf of a company that tanks, then you get to decide whether holders of those securities get paid by the bankruptcy court. Ch-ching !!!

What Judith Miller did was ten times worse than anything Andrew Gilligan has been accused of. At least Gilligan's story was accurate; his problem was that his source didn't say what he said he did. Miller, either knowingly or recklessly, quoted sources of questionable veracity, and put out false and misleading information about Iraq's WMD capability to the public. To date, she has not offered to resign [link via Atrios].

"The big fight right now between John Kerry and George W. Bush is over their military service. And Bush is on the attack - he's accusing John Kerry of ducking time in the Texas Air National Guard once a month by hiding in the jungles of Vietnam.''
--Jay Leno

Bush's Nuts 'n Sluts Defense: It is absolutely shocking that this judge will be the co-chair of the President's Committee investigating pre-war intelligence. Someone who theorized that Anita Hill was a "lesbian acting out" fantasies over her former boss when she testified at the Clarence Thomas hearings will no doubt be a vigorous and neutral arbiter when it comes to Dick Cheney. Any power exerted by Laurence Silberman in this context will almost certainly be used to whitewash the Oval Office.

You have to admit this is a novel attack on John Kerry: claiming that he was a "war profiteer" because he risked his life in Vietnam even though he questioned the war at the time, and (even worse) attended an Ivy League school where many of his compatriots opposed the war. A traitor to his class, indeed.

Thank God that after 9-11, our nation was blessed with conscientious men of principle like Perle, Wolfowitz, DeLay, Lott, Bush, and Cheney, who had refused to similarly profit from the Vietnam War, instead courageously manning the trenchs, tunnels and swamps of college. Because of the sacrifice those fratboys made, their less-privileged brethren were given the opportunity to reap the fruits of battle, and if they were (in the infamous words of the Wall Street Journal op-ed page) "lucky duckies", to "profit" by having their names posthumously etched on a black wall in D.C.

In the end, though, it's an issue of character, and Karl Rove will surely have the last laugh. John Kerry selfishly put the interests of his country ahead of his own skepticism about the cause back in 1966, and now he wants to be President? If there's one thing we know in the blogosphere, it is that true courage and patriotism is to be found not on the battlefield, fighting for your country and risking your life to save your countrymen, but must instead be sought behind a computer terminal, playing junior orwell in the war against the islamofascists and their idiotarian, fifth-columnist allies.

So far, the most accurate polls in the primary season are coming from much-derided Zogby, according to Daily Kos.

Finally, the President comes clean on why we went to war with Saddam....

The Washington Post tackles the Bush-AWOL flap. This is a pretty significant article, not for what it reports (it's pretty much just an exegesis of past articles from other newspapers on the subject), but for the fact that it was even printed. As one blogger noted, the Post is pretty much our national version of Pravda, a newspaper that publishes the party line of the Ins (especially on its editorial page) pretty much verbatim. Writing that there is no documentary evidence that Bush completed his service shows that the President is starting to lose his Beltway support, and could be in for much tougher media coverage than he received back in 2000.

For what it's worth, I don't remember Mondale ever leading Reagan in the polls taken in 1984, or, for that matter, Dole leading Clinton in 1996. So for Kerry to lead at this stage isn't entirely meaningless [link via CalPundit].

Matt Welch reports on how you can be a daddy, and owe child support, without ever having met the mom. It's all because of a scam of convenience, in which the state has a vested interest (thanks, in no small part, to the 1995 Welfare Reform Act) in enforcing thoroughly bogus default judgments against men who have the same name as a deadbeat dad. Whoever said that the law had anything to do with justice?

Those of you who have Jeff Jarvis on your blogroll may be interested in this little gem, where he ridicules the clinical depression of another blogger. As someone who has battled that disease, my anger at such wanton cruelty towards another should be obvious. I mean, can you imagine the flack I would get if I were to express my disagreement with the political views of Andrew Sullivan by making an AIDS joke? Is this what the blogosphere is coming to?

As a follow-up to Friday's post about our "Type-A" President, George Bush is now calling for the establishment of a commission to look into the "intelligence failings" that led to the fiasco in Iraq. Frankly, this should have been done months ago, after the CIA concluded that there were no WMD's in Iraq, but better late than never. By implicitly conceding that he made a mistake, he is in better position to take the issue off the table when he goes before the voters, and certainly is a more honorable course of action than having your shills debate whether or not you ever said Saddam was an "imminent" threat.

He is still trying to have his cake and eat it too, by limiting the focus of the commission, as well as mandating that it not issue a report until after the November election. But "investigations" like the one conducted by Lord Hutton are a rarity here; there is an expectation in Great Britain that an official inquiry will be used to defend the government, as the Hutton Commission did, while in America, the expectation is usually that any comparable inquiry, such as the Tower Commission, will try to uncover official malfeasance. And as Matthew Yglesias writes, any investigation into intelligence breakdowns will necessarily have to deal with the pressure the Administration brought to bear on the CIA before the war to exaggerate WMD claims. Bush's earlier attempt to stack the inquiry looking into 9-11 by nominating Henry Kissinger to head it failed disastrously, and any similar move here will discredit the commission before it starts.

Prof. Johnson has a modest proposal on how to solve one state's budget shortfall.

True Patriots reject Bush: If the election were to be held today, John Kerry would defeat George Bush, 43-40%. That is, among people pulling for New England tomorrow, according to this poll. Fans of the NFC champion Carolina Panthers favor the President, 49-33% [link via NY Times "blog"].

Watching his press conference this morning, and the manner in which he cut off a questioner who was asking a follow-up to another reporter's question about the Kay testimony before Congress, it occurred to me why feelings about George Bush are so strong in this country. He is the first true "asshole" to be President since Richard Nixon.

I don't mean that necessarily in a negative sense. Many creative artists and talented athletes are assholes; the fact that Picasso was a jerk doesn't make "Guernica" any less powerful, no more than the fact that Gary Sheffield disses reporters makes him any less valuable to his team. In politics, though, that personality type usually has some difficulty succeeding. Having a sense of humility is typically viewed as an important quality to have in a leader, and if there's one thing we know about the President, he is pathologically incapable of ever admitting he was wrong about something.

The call for an independent commission to investigate the mistakes made leading to war against Iraq is one case in point. In Great Britain, Tony Blair was able to use the Hutton Commission to deflect the fact that his government presented incompetent and misleading intelligence to justify war by shifting the onus to the BBC's reporting of same. The question became not whether the intelligence was "sexed up", it was whether Blair knew that the intelligence was sexed up, as the Beeb reported; an incredible bit of political jujitsu, it led to the resignation of several high-ranking directors at the BBC, and allowed Blair to appoint successors more willing to be the mouthpiece of the government (although not without some political fallout: the Hutton Report is being treated with derision by much of Great Britain, as a clumsy whitewash of government actions).

Focusing on whether the client had the specific intent to deceive is precisely what clever defense attorneys use in white collar criminal cases, but it also entails an assumption, on the part of the defense, that the client made a mistake. If the client believes himself to be infallible, that defense won't fly. A President who won't read newspapers, who insults Congressmen from his own party who dare to vote their conscience, who freezes out reporters who attempt to ask difficult questions, and gives demeaning nicknames to those he perceives to be beneath him, is obviously someone who is not going to admit that he blew it, even on a minor point.

And that's problematic. People are willing to accept that our political leaders make mistakes (ie., Clinton during the Lewinsky Affair), and that intelligence from other countries may be spotty. Saddam Hussein was a tyrant, so his downfall, even with the questionable rationale which we chose to go to war, is to be celebrated. But by pretending that nothing went wrong, Bush insults a large portion of the American people, those who disagree with him on other issues, and are not inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt politically, but who are also patriotic citizens who are willing to support him, as President, when the chips are down. In the end, it will prove his downfall, because, when all is said and done, people tend to root against assholes.

Anyone want to lay odds that this document recently "retrieved" from the Iraqi Oil Ministry, is yet another forgery? [link via EllisBlog] Besides the inevitable reference to George Galloway, the bullshit detector of anyone with an IQ over single digits should have been triggered with the listing of a payout to something called the "October 8 Movement" in Brazil. Apparently, Saddam's minions couldn't come up with the name of an actual Brazilian, so they just sent the multi-million dollar bribe to a "movement".

Humanitarianism, the last refuge of suckers (or is it "Francophobia, the socialism of chickenhawks").

This can be filed under the category, "Limits of Technology", or perhaps, "Why Some Stereotypes Make Sense". This morning I had a trial in Lancaster, California, a city some fifty miles north of Los Angeles. Rather than just opening up the Thomas Guide and driving to the general location of the courthouse, I decided to use the LA Superior Court's website to give me directions. Bad move--the courthouse was erected in October of last year, and the website the court links to for that purpose, MapQuest, can't give an accurate location, since the access street was built at the same time as the courthouse. So it compensates, giving me directions to a street with the same name, but five miles to the north. I realized something was amiss when the directions I was following led me down to two unpaved roads in the middle of nowhere. When I finally called the court to get directions, the operator had it figured out: "you used MapQuest, didn't you?"

Although tonight's victory in New Hampshire doesn't exactly wrap up the nomination for John Kerry, it definitely makes life a lot easier for the next few weeks. Gephardt's withdrawal last week suddenly puts Missouri in play; a larger state than South Carolina, a Kerry victory there (and possibly in Arizona) will overshadow anything Edwards or Clark do next Tuesday. His fundraising has picked up dramatically since his win in Iowa, and his larger-than-expected win this evening will increase his momentum. No matter what Dean says about getting off the deck, New Hampshire was a state he desperately needed to win, and he failed. With the Southern regional primary not until mid-March, Clark and Edwards need to win something besides South Carolina next week, if only to show they have appeal above the Mason-Dixon Line, or their campaigns will be over in a matter of days. With any sort of luck, Kerry could have this all but clinched before California and New York vote on March 2, and not have to even worry about his appeal in the South until November.

With 7% of the vote counted, Kerry has an early 12-point lead...but the exit polls indicate a close race with Dean.

UPDATE: Now with 19% counted, it's up to 14-points...Dean is going to have get a lot closer to claim "Comeback Kid" status. Third place is a coin flip; hard to say that it matters (unless it's not Lieberman).