Open thread

Nothing to add. Read More......

UN blasts "outrageous and dishonest" House intel report on Iran

The UN is a little late to the "House intel report on Iran is ridiculous" party, but a hearty welcome anyway. The UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) publicly disputed much of the report, and did so vociferously.

U.N. inspectors investigating Iran's nuclear program angrily complained to the Bush administration and to a Republican congressman yesterday about a recent House committee report on Iran's capabilities, calling parts of the document "outrageous and dishonest" and offering evidence to refute its central claims.

And just for those keeping score at home, this is from AMERICABlog over three weeks ago:

The House intel committee is right to say that we don't have enough information on Iran, but analysts have to work with what they have, not politicized conjecture. There's a difference between connecting and explaining the dots and creating new ones to reach a preordained conclusion [...] The bottom line is, it's not that analysts are trying to downplay the threat of Iran . . . it's that the threat doesn't meet the "SCARY!" threshold that these Republicans are hoping for.

As a fun little add-on, the end of the article indicates that the author of the Iran report (Fredrick Fleitz, a onetime CIA officer and lackey of Ambassador Bolton) is currently working on a report on North Korea. I can hardly wait. Read More......

There's something rotten in Prince George's County

Donna Edwards is challenging the results of balloting that took place in the primary on Tuesday:

Congressional candidate Donna Edwards announced plans yesterday to file a lawsuit over apparent voting irregularities in Tuesday's primary election in Prince George's County, while defeated county executive challenger Rushern L. Baker III demanded an independent investigation of the process.

The separate announcements signaled that Tuesday's voting, a flawed process by many accounts, may not conclude the close primary contests for a seat in Congress and the county executive's office. The election itself was "horrendous," the Prince George's elections administrator said yesterday. And the victorious Democratic county executive candidate, incumbent Jack B. Johnson, said it warranted investigation.

"The integrity of the election is at stake," said Edwards, who ran against Rep. Albert R. Wynn in the 4th District Democratic primary and is waiting for the race to be decided when provisional ballots are counted next week in Montgomery and Prince George's counties.

No surprise, but the only major candidate in Prince George's county who isn't concerned about voting irregularities is "Landslide Al" Wynn. (And, yes, for you history buffs, that is a comparison to "Landslide Lyndon" and his 1948 primary victory)

It's 2006. This was a Democratic primary. Yet, Donna's right: the integrity of this election is at stake. If the integrity of an election is at stake, it is not an understatement that the integrity of democracy itself is at stake. The system in Prince George's County lost its integrity when voting machines were left unsecured.

Montgomery County also had its fair share of voting problems last Tuesday. There are still votes to be counted there.

This election is not over -- and there cannot be a winner named until the actual votes that were cast on Tuesday are counted. Read More......

Hey Disney/ABC, it seems the Pope agrees with Rosie O'Donnell

Should be interesting to see if the religious right is going to demand that the Pope apologize and be fired for saying that radical religious people are evil, be they Muslim or Christian.

He said the pope's speech ended with "clear and radical rejection of the religious motivation for violence, from whatever side it may come."

That's not very different from what Rosie O'Donnell said, that radical Christians and radical Muslims are equally bad.

I can't wait to see if Disney/ABC decides to side with the religious right and adopt the position that Muslims are worse people than Christians. In view of the recent Mohammad satire brouhaha, I'd love to see what happens if Disney/ABC decides to offend a billion Muslims. And they thought the "Path to 9/11" fallout was brutal. Ha! Read More......

The Jersey Hustler

Tom Kean, just another corrupt politician. Read More......

Open thread

Joe just sent me this, had to share. It's stupid, and funny. And totally not political.

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Outrage against Pope continues

Who could have predicted such outrage when the pope decided to read quotes from the medieval text? Well, just about anyone who is following world events. Is the Vatican ever going to move on from being hate-mongers or is that going to continue being the focus of the Vatican? It's 2006, almost 2007 so let's think about how we are going to bridge cultural divides instead of making them larger. Haven't we had enough?

Salih Kapusuz, deputy leader of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Islamic-rooted party, said Benedict's remarks were either "the result of pitiful ignorance" about Islam and its prophet or, worse, a deliberate distortion.

"He has a dark mentality that comes from the darkness of the Middle Ages," Kapusuz told Turkish state media. "It looks like an effort to revive the mentality of the Crusades."

The outrage has forced an apology of sorts from the Vatican:

``The Holy Father is very sorry that some passages of his speech may have sounded offensive to the sensibilities of Muslim believers,'' said Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone in a statement.

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Bush facing "Republican Revolt" and "GOP Infighting" against "GOP rebels"

The battle between Bush and GOP Senators (and Colin Powell) greatly escalated yesterday when Bush did the kind of press conference he usually does to bash Democrats against his fellow Republicans. The media has clued in to the fact that Bush and Rove's well laid plans to use the torture issue against Democrats has backfired because, believe it or not, some Republicans are finally standing up to him.

AP called it a "Republican revolt""

The president called a Rose Garden news conference to confront a Republican rebellion led by Sens. John Warner of Virginia, John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Susan Collins of Maine.

To the administration's dismay, Colin Powell, Bush's former secretary of state, has joined with the lawmakers. Powell said Bush's plan to redefine the Geneva Conventions would cause the world "to doubt the moral basis" of the fight against terror and "put our own troops at risk."

The Washington Post called it "GOP Infighting":

President Bush warned defiant Republican senators yesterday that he will close down a CIA interrogation program that he credited with thwarting terrorist attacks if they pass a proposal regulating detention of enemy combatants, escalating a politically charged battle that has exposed divisions within his party.

An irritated Bush, raising his voice and gesturing sharply at a Rose Garden news conference, excoriated legislation passed by a Senate panel Thursday that is intended to conform U.S. detainee practices with the Geneva Conventions. Bush insisted on legislation more specifically defining what is banned so intelligence officers would not worry about being charged with war crimes.

The New York Times headlines blares "Bush Says G.O.P. Rebels Are Putting Nation at Risk" :

President Bush made an impassioned defense on Friday of his proposed rules for the interrogation and prosecution of terrorism suspects, warning that the nation’s ability to defend itself would be undermined if rebellious Republicans in the Senate did not come around to his position.

Probably the most striking revelation was Colin Powell's assertion that Bush's plan will put American soldiers at even greater risk. Bush has already sent soldiers unequipped to an ill-planned war. Now, a former top military official stated that Bush is devising policy that will unnecessarily endanger the troops.

Bush is playing politics with the safety and security of America's armed forces. Could it be that the media and some Republicans have finally realized that Bush really is that craven? There's still plenty of time for these GOPers to cave. But, they've made it clear: Bush cares more about politics than he does about solid policy. Read More......

Saturday Morning Open Thread

There's a lot swirling around -- what happened over night? Read More......

More Diebold problems in Maryland

Who even came up with this rollout plan for the new Diebold machines in Maryland? They bought new technology for $18.4M during the summer, give limited hands-off training and then they expect that by some miracle, a bleeding edge solution is going to work in time for the elections.

Anyone who has ever spent any time at all on new technology knows that buying the technology is just a part of the costs and plan. Rolling out something new, especially a system that has not been used anywhere before, is going to require plenty of training and hand holding. No, the team in Maryland fell for the "plug and play" pitch from someone and now the voters are stuck paying the price.

At one Baltimore precinct, poll worker Al Samples, a 38-year-old computer scientist, said he could not prevent the three small check-in stations made by Diebold Election Systems Inc. - called e-poll books - from suddenly turning off. The machines crashed about 40 times, he said.

The governor's office said yesterday that it might ask state election officials to abandon the new equipment during November's general election or at least have a backup paper list of registered voters on hand.

"It should have been disclosed that we were the guinea pigs," said Joseph M. Getty, Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.'s policy director.

Guinea pigs? Diebold ought to be giving this away if they are looking for a guinea pig. That is typically more common in the tech business when you are looking for a guinea pig.

It took Samples, who installs and maintains computer networks for Agilent Technologies, an hour and a half to figure out that the units in his precinct weren't talking to one another and to discover that a cord had not been plugged in all the way. Even after the correction, the computers continued to crash.

"The training was pathetic," said Samples, who has volunteered as an election judge since 1992 and who was responsible for checking in voters on the e-poll books. "I'm sitting there bored out of my mind, and they never let you work on the machines. A person just stands up front showing it to you."

And to think there were problems. Go figure.

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1200% inflation in Zimbabwe

Can you even imagine? The former breadbasket of southern Africa, a once thriving economy, has come to this. Poverty, starvation, political arrests, intimidation and torture, demolitions of opposition housing...it's all there for us to ignore. And the response from the "democratic" powers? Not much. I'm almost surprised that we have not heard the classic American line of "if they want to be free, they will rise up on their own like we did" missing the ever-so-slight point of the massive financial and military aid by Beaumarchais and the French. By no means am I suggesting yet another foreign adventure but just to say that it's not quite as clear or simple as many would suggest.

Forget about politics and focus on the human suffering in countries such as Zimbabwe. So how does the world help with a situation like this? Read More......

McCain says Bush proposals put "our military personnel and others directly at risk in this and future wars"

Thank God someone is standing up against this dangerously incompetent man:

"Weakening the Geneva protections is not only unnecessary, but would set an example to other countries, with less respect for basic human rights, that they could issue their own legislative 'reinterpretations,' " McCain said in a written statement. "This puts our military personnel and others directly at risk in this and future wars."

George Bush wants to put our troops at risk.

But it gets even more interesting. According to the article, Olympia Snowe has joined the rebel Republicans, and the Army's judge advocate general appears to have backed off of supporting Bush:

late yesterday, Maj. Gen. Scott C. Black, the Army's judge advocate general, sent a new letter to McCain and other senators, saying "further redefinition" of the conventions "is unnecessary and could be seen as a weakening of our treaty obligations, rather than a reinforcement of the standards of treatment."

It appears, ladies and gentlemen, that our entire federal government outside of the White House may have actually come back to live after 5 years of accepting whatever the hell Bush shoved down their throats. Read More......