New EPA study finds Bush is wrong about cause of gas price increase

I guess Bush won't be able to repeal those environmental protection laws like his rich donors wanted you to. Do Republicans have any agenda other than giving the country away to their corporate donors? Oh, that's right: gay marriage.

More from AP:

"Boutique" gasoline blends to help states meet clean air rules are not a factor in higher prices as President Bush has suggested, says a draft of a study ordered by the White House.

Although often cited as a reason for volatile gasoline prices, so-called "boutique fuels" have not caused unusual distribution problems or contributed to price increases, the report concludes.

The review was conducted by a task force headed by the Environmental Protection Agency and involving representatives from the 50 states as well as the Energy and Agriculture departments.

Facing growing public outrage over soaring gasoline prices, Bush ordered the study on April 25 in a speech in which he attributed high gas prices in part to the growth of special fuels.

"We ... need to confront the larger problem of too many localized fuel blends, which are called boutique fuels," the president told a renewable fuels conference, adding that this has produced "an uncoordinated, overly complex set of fuel rules" that "tends to cause the price to go up."

But the task force found otherwise, according to its report to be released possibly as early as Friday.

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Yes, how convenient

I just don't believe a thing this administration says any longer.

Seven people were arrested Thursday in connection with the early stages of a plot to attack Chicago's Sears Tower and other buildings in the U.S., including the FBI office here, a federal law enforcement official said.

And they just happened to arrest them today. Uh huh. What's the matter? A good Orange Alert just doesn't get out the vote like it used to? Read More......

Are US intelligence agencies trying to influence the US election?

You remember yesterday when Rick Santorum and another House member were trying to con the country into believing we found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and we didn't. Well, now we know that the report Santorum and the House member based their lie on came from the George Bush's top spy, National Intelligence Director John Negroponte.

Why Bush's top intelligence guy chose this week, right in the middle of a congressional Iraq debate intended to help the Republicans in this fall's elections, to release this "news" that we supposedly found WMD in Iraq, is anyone's guess. But it sure smacks of an attempt by the US intelligence community to influence the US domestic elections in favor of the Republcans, and that is an incredible breach of trust and law.

At what point does George Bush stop treating America like some kind of personal banana republic? Read More......

Iraq war supporters speak out

One of them posted this in our comments today:

Lets face it, muslims are dirty, vile disgusting satan worshipers. The only thing they know is force. We must take all embedded reporters out of the front lines. finding those who killed the 2 American soldiers is simple. Drag 100 women and babies into the streets., kill one baby with a head shot, and say all will die if you do not tell us who killed these men., If nobody speaks up, torture the women and kill all babies , We must ask ourselves are these muslims really human, or just a disease upon the earth that should be eraddicated.

Yes, great impact this war is having on our country. Thank you George Bush, and the Republican Congress, for continuing to insist that the war in Iraq is going a-okay and we should remain there until the next decade. Read More......

Ann Coulter loses it during radio interview

Wow, she's always been a bit nutty, but I always thought it was mostly theater. But this radio interview by WERS's David Goodman and WERS 88.9 FM Boston, to be aired this weekend, is simply unsettling. We first got a whiff of something weird going on with Ann during her recent Today Show interview, and now this. She just doesn't sound quite all there. Read More......

Rumsfeld decides to cut and run from Iraq

Gotta love them. The week that Bush and the Republicans in Congress yell and scream about how we simply cannot withdraw a single US service member from Iraq, ever, the Pentagon now is considering withdrawing some men from Iraq - though it's clearly only a few and being done for political purposes.

Still, how hypocritical, and transparent, can you get. Read More......

Atrios is a Big Fag

I read it on the Internets. Read More......

Gen. Clark speaks, you listen

Take action to protect your phone records privacy. Read More......

Open thread

Any more bright ideas from John Kerry as to how to make the Dems look like idiots? Read More......

Isn't inciting the murder of a sitting US member of Congress illegal?

Why isn't the FBI, Secret Service and Homeland Security investigating this? Yet they have more than enough time to investigate small children who draw stick figures of George Bush in school. Read More......

Senate Iraq Votes

11: 43 a.m.: -- The Kerry Amendment calling for redeployment of U.S. troops by July 1, 2007 was defeated by a vote of 13 - 86.

They're voting on the Levin/Reed amendment next.

UPDATE:

12:01 p.m. The Levin Amendment, a "Sense of the Senate" that the U.S. should begin redeploying troops by the end of 2006, was defeated by a vote of 39 - 60. From what I could tell from watching C-SPAN, all the Republicans -- except Chafee -- stuck with their President's failed Iraq policy. The Democrats who joined the GOP in voting NO were Bill Nelson (FL), Ben Nelson (NE), Mark Pryor (AR), Mary Landrieu (LA), Mark Dayton (MN) and, of course, Joe Lieberman. (I'll get the official vote tally when it's on-line.) Read More......

A better constitutional amendment

From Hank Steuver over at The Stranger:

Amendment: Congress shall recognize no votes or opinions about the sanctity and preservation of marriage from its members who have been divorced and/or remarried while their first spouses are still alive. (To say nothing of those who are married while not-so-secretly fucking someone on their staff.)

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New round of polls for Senate and Governor races

Wall Street Journal online has an interactive map with Zogby polls for the key Senate and Governor races this fall. It's a little addicting.

In the Senate races, there's good news for Democrats. The GOP candidate has the lead in only 5 of the 17 races that were polled. The Governor races are very tight. Nine are within the margin of error. Dems lead in 12, the GOP in 5 and two were basically even. Read More......

While you were politicking

The White House has completely failed in Iraq. They can't run a war, but they can run political campaigns. So, the Bush administration is blatantly treating the Iraq war as just another political operation. It's all about politics for them:

But people who attended a series of high-level meetings this month between White House and Congressional officials say President Bush's aides argued that it could be a politically fatal mistake for Republicans to walk away from the war in an election year.

CNN's Dana Bash just said the GOP is "downright giddy" about the current debate. They're all loving it.

Meanwhile, in Iraq

The U.S. military announced Thursday that four Marines were killed during operations in insurgent-ridden Anbar province, three of them in a roadside bombing.

The White House is worried about politically fatal mistakes, not about actual fatalities in Iraq. So just exactly how many more Americans have to die so the Republicans can win the elections? Read More......

Thursday Morning Open Thread

Start threading the news... Read More......

Why did the Pentagon fail to tell the truth again?

Like the foot dragging after the Pat Tillman death, the story of the two American soldiers who were killed by Iraqi troops in June 2004 was known since September 2005 but only now are their families learning the truth. The truth continues to be a struggle in certain circles these days. I think that the families and America also knows more about the motive and post murder actions against the Iraqi troops. What the hell happened?

The June 2004 deaths of Army Spc. Patrick R. McCaffrey Sr., 34, of Tracy, and 2nd Lt. Andre D. Tyson, 33, of Riverside, were originally attributed to an ambush during a patrol near Balad, Iraq.

The Army said this week a military investigation found the two had been shot by Iraqi civil defense officers. No possible motive has been divulged. Military officials visited Tyson's family on Tuesday and McCaffrey's on Wednesday to deliver the report, which was completed on Sept. 30, 2005, according to Sen. Barbara Boxer D-Calif. She called the nine-month delay troubling.

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Bush anti-terror case looking light on facts

After sitting in legal limbo for over 3 years for conspiring to activate a "dirty bomb", Padilla is now making his way into the court system and surprise, surprise, the actual facts seem to be a bit slim. The federal judge has had the audacity to ask for more then the word of federal prosecutors and his royal heinous George II who would prefer a kangaroo court system where every day is a success and stupid details like facts are forgotten.

If these people are in fact guilty of conspiring against the US, sure, throw the book at them and send them to prison but this tired act of factless cases, legal limbo and disrespect for the American Constitution and American values is really old.

U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke said Tuesday she agreed with claims made by defense attorneys that the indictment against Padilla and the others is "very light on facts" that would link the defendants to specific acts of terrorism or victims.

"We are so shooting in the dark," said Jeanne Baker, one of the attorneys representing defendant Adham Amin Hassoun. "The government has to tell us, what are these acts they conspired to commit?"

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Time to turn the White House's arguments against it

Here's the argument the White House wants Republicans in Congress to use against Democrats in order to win re-election.

...White House officials say will be a central line of attack against Democrats from now through the midterm elections: that the withdrawal being advocated by Democrats would mean thousands of troops would have died for nothing, would give extremists a launching pad from which to build an Islamo-fascist empire and would hand the United States its must humiliating defeat since Vietnam.

Unfortunately, we've already got all three. George Bush's lies and incompetence have already killed 2,500 American soldiers. It's hard to spin their deaths as a good thing when they were killed by a president's folly. Second, Bush's incompetence has turned Iraq into an Islamo-fascist state that we now can't do anything about. And finally, George Bush's incompetence has handed us our most humiliating defeat since Vietnam.

It's over. Bush lost Iraq. And no amount of partisan bluster by the White House or congressional Republicans will change the sad fact that our president is a dangerous idiot. Read More......

Republican House Speaker Hastert and two other Republican Congressmen accused of using pork to enrich themselves financially

Oh for simpler times when Denny was a great late-night dive.

From the Wash Post:

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) made a $2 million profit last year on the sale of land 5 1/2 miles from a highway project that he helped to finance with targeted federal funds.

A Republican House member from California, meanwhile, received nearly double what he paid for a four-acre parcel near an Air Force base after securing $8 million for a planned freeway interchange 16 miles away. And another California GOP congressman obtained funding in last year's highway bill for street improvements near a planned residential and commercial development that he co-owns.

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Open thread

Bedtime Read More......