While we in the US talk of private e-mail servers the United Kingdom issues blistering report condemning the decision to invade Iraq.

Damn you look fine in the flight jacket. I just wish I knew how to quit you.

Courtesy of The Guardian: 

Sir John Chilcot has delivered a devastating critique of Tony Blair’s decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003, with his long-awaited report concluding that Britain chose to join the US invasion before “peaceful options for disarmament” had been exhausted. 

The head of the Iraq war inquiry said the UK’s decision to attack and occupy a sovereign state for the first time since the second world war was a decision of “utmost gravity”. He described Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, as “undoubtedly a brutal dictator” who had repressed his own people and attacked his neighbours. 

But Chilcot – whom Gordon Brown asked seven years ago to head an inquiry into the conflict – was withering about Blair’s choice to join the US invasion. Chilcot said: “We have concluded that the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort.”

 The conclusions of the report were as follows: 

• There was no imminent threat from Saddam Hussein. 
• The strategy of containment could have been adopted and continued for some time. 
• The judgments about the severity of the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction – WMDs – were presented with a certainty that was not justified. 
• Despite explicit warnings, the consequences of the invasion were underestimated. The planning and preparations for Iraq after Saddam were wholly inadequate. 
• The government failed to achieve its stated objectives.

The report did not weigh in on the legality of the invasion itself, though it makes it abundantly clear that the evidence did not support the decision.

The report also revealed the private correspondence between Blair and Bush, with one memo written even before Bush had sold the idea of an invasion to Congress saying:“I will be with you [Bush] whatever.”

What was it Dakota Meyer said again about the Obama Administration being corrupt and its supporters overlooking "obvious crimes?"

In this country Congress has NEVER launched a serious investigation into the legality of the Iraq War decision, and as long as the Republicans remain in charge it never will.

Instead they will likely launch yet another investigation going after Hillary Clinton. (Oh look they are already starting.)

However if anybody wants to really learn of the criminal and deceptive behaviors utilized by the Bush Administration to get us into this tragic and costly conflict perhaps the best source for that would be Rachel Maddow's brilliant documentary "Hubris."

Dogs strapped to the roof of their car, and now horses drugged out of their minds, what is it with the Romney's and animals anyhow?

"Seriously, have you ever just really looked at the sky? "Dude, I can't feel my hooves!"

Courtesy of Buzzfeed:

Ann Romney found herself briefly the subject of a lawsuit at whose core, according to court documents, was a heavily-medicated horse. 

Romney and her trainers sold the horse, Super Hit, in 2008 for $125,000. And Super Hit had what a prominent veterinarian described as a staggering quantity of drugs in its system at the time of its examination before being sold, according to a toxicology report that's part of the lawsuit over the horse's condition. 

The lawsuit, which was mentioned in a New York Times story last month, was filed in 2010 by a woman in San Diego who had bought Super Hit from Romney and her trainers, Jan and Amy Ebeling. The woman, Catherine Norris, sued Romney for fraud after the horse allegedly proved physically incapable of performing as a dressage horse. 

The case with Romney was settled last September and she is no longer involved in the lawsuit. 

According to a toxicology report provided to the horse's vet and testimony from a veterinarian, Dr. Steven Soule, included in the lawsuit, Super Hit had three sedative pain killers and one narcotic pain killer in her system when the horse was examined to check her condition pre-sale. The drugs were Butorphanol, Delomidine, Romifidine, and Xylatine.

Soule, who has been the United States Equestrian Team veterinarian since 1978, writes, “In my 38 years of practice, I have never come across a drug screen such as this where the horse has been administered so many different medications at the same time.” The horse had a defect in its foot, and Norris's lawyers alleged that the Ebelings had drugged the horse in order to hide its condition.

So the Romneys got this poor animal hopped up on painkillers and sedatives in an attempt to hide its injury from the potential buyers? Oh yes, that kind of thing is just SO presidential.

Attacking and cutting off a schoolmate's hair because he looked like a homosexual, strapping a dog to the top of the car before driving the frightened animal down the highway until it shit itself, taking over companies and driving them into bankruptcy for a profit, and now drugging a horse in an attempt to rip off its potential new ownders?

Maybe it's just me, but I don't think I like Mitt Romney very much.

 And clearly I'm not alone.

Bill Cosby calls out the Obama critics.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Courtesy of Politicususa:

When David Gregory asked Mr. Cosby about President Obama he said, “I see Obama as Sisyphus in the first four years, and nobody would speak about the size of the rock, or the elevation of the hill. All you hear people talk about is what he didn’t do. To come from what he has asked to take over and do in the time, to behave as an American, to put up with those, who were, in my estimation, acting very un-American to get rid of those people, it took longer than patience should allow, but he tried to bring us together, even to argue with radio hosts and people who have nothing to do with anything. It’s important that this man has had to fight a similar battle of a black person in America. Hundreds of thousands and millions of people still behind him, but people who are very quietly acting like they have no idea what he inherited. It’s as if he had the surplus, when he moved into office, and this is — this is sad. And it’s sad about them. Because they know that they have misbehaved. They know they’ve taken America and slowed down the progress, and there are statements that are very clear in saying as much. I don’t want this man to succeed. Well, why, said the brown fly?”

Well said by a man who was one of my favorite people as I was growing up.

And it is something that must be repeated over and over.

This President was NOT elected to perform miracles while walking on water and healing race relations in this country single-handedly. He was elected to repair the damage done to this country by George W. Bush, a man who seemed hell bent on pulling a "Thelma and Louise" drive this country right off a cliff to be dashed to pieces on the rocks below.

And this actually seems to be part of a growing trend with Republicans as laid out by the Conceptual Guerilla over at the Daily Kos:  

That's right, Rod. Every Democrat is a communist . . . going all the way back to 1933 when FDR set up New Deal Communism. That would be the same New Deal communism you grew up under. The New Deal Communism that made us the richest, most powerful nation in history. The New Deal Communism that took us to the moon just 36 years after FDR was sworn in. Let me show you the track record of those New Deal Communists.

• Democrat Communist Truman left 2.5 percent unemployment to Eisenhower. 
• Republican Patriot Eisenhower left recession and 6.5 percent unemployment to Kennedy. 
• Communist Johnson left 3.5 percent unemployment to Nixon. 
• Republican Patriot Ford left recession and 7.5 unemployment to Jimmy Carter. 
• Communist Carter wasn't able to improve much on the recession he inherited . . . . . . and neither were Republican Patriots Reagan and Bush, who left recession and 7.2 unemployment to Bill Clinton. 
• Communist Bill Clinton left 4.2 percent unemployment to Dubya . . . 
• Republican Patriot Dubya left recession and 7.6 percent unemployment to Communist Barack Obama. 

No Republican Patriot ever left office with unemployment under 5 % . . . including Reagan. No New Deal Communist ever left office with higher unemployment than they inherited . . . including Jimmy Carter who left the same unemployment he inherited from Ford.

And yet the expectations for President Obama to somehow wrestle these unemployment numbers down to pre-Dubya percentages in the shortest amount of time possible, and while circumventing constant obstruction from the Republicans, seems to be an almost universal expectation by our media. Just as he is expected to bring gas prices down by sheer force of will, even though we are well aware that the Saudi's virtual blood brother George W. Bush had little control over them during his two terms in office as well.

The people who are the MOST aggressively attacking President Obama are doing so for purely ideological reasons, but the those on the Left who are echoing their talking points and gleefully  joining the dogpile are perhaps the ones who should be the most ashamed of their actions.

As promised here is the update on the long awaited book about Sarah Palin's faked pregnancy, and the culpability of the American press for not revealing the deception.

Just smile Todd. Trust me, NOBODY will ever figure out what we did.

Thank you for patiently waiting through the weekend for this update.  With no further ado, I will let Fred fill you in on the book's progress and just when we can expect to see it in our local bookstores.

The book is nearly finished, and large sections of the book were turned into our publisher's legal department in late June. We are still shooting for a release date within the next four - six weeks. 

However, there have been some hold-ups, and I'll share the status of that now. I noticed that after Gryphen kindly posted my request for title ideas back in May, many people asked if there were going to be any great new revelations in the book. Would we finally have the answer? At the time, the answer to that was - honestly - no. 

My original hope for the book was to, first, present, in one place, an iron clad summary of the material that have been collected by multiple researchers that Sarah Palin's pregnancy with Trig was not as presented to the public in March and April of 2008. One way that the mainstream media has been able to ignore the story is that the bits and pieces have been scattered on multiple blogs and websites, and presented piecemeal. Each piece, then, is argued about and ignored individually. The weight of the story, however, when presented as a coherent whole, becomes overwhelming. Crafting this "coherent whole" was and continues to be a very difficult job. For example, there are actually about fifty separate photos from the time frame of March 4th through April 18th that are relevant to the story, and tough decisions had to be made about what material to put in the book and what to leave out, since we simply cannot use it all. The main market for the book is going to be those who know almost nothing of the story. Too little evidence and the story falls flat. Too much and the main point - that the media ignored terribly glaring inconsistencies in multiple areas - gets lost. 

Secondly, the thrust of the book was to show how and why the mainstream media first during the campaign and second, since, have ignored the story

The "smoking gun" was the presentation of all the material together in such a way that the weight of the evidence made the idea that she had faked the pregnancy plausible beyond any reasonable doubt. As I am an attorney, the reasonable doubt angle is one that I explored a great deal in the chapters on the pregnancy evidence.This was, as I said, the original plan for the book.

Then, on June 10th, thousands of pages of Palin's emails were released. Within 24-48 hours, the Palin apologists were shouting, "There's nothing to see here!" and encouraging everyone to move on, even though no one could possibly have read even a fraction of the mail in that time. 

One extraordinarily interesting discrepancy was pointed out by Gryphen in his blog on June 13th, when he shared the enormous disconnect of Palin sending herself a draft copy of the letter she intended to release to friends and family after the baby was born. This letter was sent six weeks before Palin's announced due date and eleven days before the child's announced "birth." Numerous other media outlets had already commented on the letter, most taking the position that it actually "proved" Sarah Palin was Trig's mother, with none noticing the eye-popping discrepancy that she referred to her pregnancy in the past tense and as "easy" when she still supposedly had six weeks to go.

This discovery led me to believe that there was "plenty to see here." I put any new writing and editing on hold as I, with the help of two very dedicated research helpers, have pored over emails. Our persistence has paid off. The bread crumbs are tiny (more like crumbs of crumbs), but the trail is there. No, of course there is no email stating, "I woke up this morning and decided to fake a pregnancy." If there were, it would have been found weeks ago and the story would be over. 

But, as any good Catholic school-boy knows, there are sins of commission, and sins of omission. 

Those who spent months (paid for by the state of Alaska) redacting Sarah Palin's emails likely pulled out a lot of "commissions," but they missed the omissions, because they could not possibly know what to look for. We did. I can now tell you with confidence that there will be new material in the book. After almost three years, there is more to find...

I'm sorry that all of you who have been waiting for the book will have to wait a bit longer. Prior to the release of the emails, I believed that an August 15th release date for the book was realistic. Now, I am working terribly hard to make this all come together by September 1. 

Also, for all who are wondering about a title, we have made a decision, but are not yet releasing it.
Fred

This site compares the David Letterman/Sarah Palin faux pregnancies. Personally I think Letterman was much more convincing. But that's just me.

One of my commenter's believes this is about to hit the MSM.

Gosh wouldn't that be great?

By the way for those of you who are "parody-impaired" this was done in the interest of COMEDY, with just enough bite to make it "edgy".

Of course it COULD lead to something other than simply laughs. Only time will tell.