Senate to begin Iraq-withdrawal debate on Wednesday. GOP says won't filibuster.

That means every Republican, including Lieberman, gets to vote to keep the war going after next year. And while that proposition may or may not hurt them at the moment, come next year the American people are going to be demanding that we get the hell out of Iraq. And only one party can say they tried over a year ago to make it happen, while the other party voted no. I can't wait until November 2008. More from Reuters. Read More......

Only 46% now think we can win in Iraq

The numbers got worse since Bush started his "surge." That means people aren't buying it. From ThinkProgress. Read More......

More trouble coming for General Pace over his bigoted anti-gay remarks

I hear a slew of editorials are coming out tomorrow, slamming the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff for his bigoted, homophobic comments today about gay and lesbian soldiers. It didn't help that the not-very-Christian bigots of the religious right are now sending out action alerts urging their members to call the White House and say that General Pace is right, gay soldiers really are immoral. Seems the far-right wacko wing of the Republican party still didn't get the message - you're toxic and nobody likes you anymore. Call it the "Mary Cheney" effect. Now that Mary is preggers and due any day now, I don't see this White House doing a lot to publicly attack the vice president's lesbian daughter.

Stay tuned, I think tomorrow is going to be fun. Read More......

Open thread

Keep forgetting those. Read More......

Tired of attacking women, gays, blacks, Jews and Hispanics, Republicans on the Hill move on to Muslims

It must suck being a political party based on bigotry when there's almost nobody left to hate. Read More......

Republican "let business self regulate" in action today

Wall Street gets ripped, again. It seems that the subprime lenders were doing plenty of business with so-called top tier Wall Street organizations who are now starting to get nervous about loan defaults from both the actual buyers as well as the lenders. It was all such a fun party when it was going up and Wall Street was handing out multi-million dollar bonus' but it might not be quite as fun as foreclosures continue to rise.

What was the GOP thinking when they looked the other way and encouraged these shady lending programs? And big business wants Congress to ease up on regulations? Read More......

Dean says Gonzales and Rove must go

And the pressure builds. Read More......

New provincial governments needed in Iraq

Everyone paying any attention to Iraq knows that political solutions and compromises are more important than military force in the effort to stabilize the nation. While the insurgency began as a primarily anti-occupation movement, its motivations and goals increasingly reflect a feeling of Sunni disenfranchisement and marginalization.

One of the most significant issues fueling these feelings is the current makeup of the local governments. Iraq's provincial elections were held in January 2005, when most Sunnis boycotted. The national elections held in December of that year, in which Sunnis participated, essentially rectified the imbalance at the federal level, with parliament roughly reflecting population percentages.

Provincial elections were supposed to occur six months later. We're now at the 14 month mark with no local elections even scheduled. As a result, Shia politicians are running Sunni areas:

Sunni Arabs constitute at least 40% of Baghdad's population, but only one of the 51 members of the local provincial council is Sunni . . . Sunni Arabs are also underrepresented in Diyala province, northeast of the capital, where they are believed to make up 60% of the population but hold only about one-third of the provincial seats. In the disputed northern city of Kirkuk, capital of Al Tamim province, Sunni Arabs and Shiites constitute about 25% of the population but only 15% of the Kurdish-dominated provincial council.

If we want to see a surge that actually has some beneficial effect, how about a surge toward local elections that would solve the problem of provincial governments being a daily reminder of Sunni political impotence? The ignorance of political realities -- with a corresponding (and compounding) focus on military action -- means Iraq will continue to deteriorate. Read More......

Gonzales speaks

UPDATE: As Atrios notes, if Harriet Miers would just start blogging again, we could get to the bottom of this pronto.

He's not resigning, what a surprise. He accepts responsibility for the mistakes that "we're made." Oh my, now he's playing the race card. He's overcome a lot of obstacles in his life to become attorney general - sounds like the race card to me. Which is funny coming from an administration that attacks Latinos every change it gets.

I'd like to see him overcome a perjury charge.

LOL He saying that DOJ is a really big organization and he's not aware of everything that goes on. So much for him accepting responsibility. It was his freaking chief of staff, and the president of the United States, who were involved in this - and he didn't know about it?

Oooh, he's now saying that he's dismayed that he may not have given the congress accurate information. UNDER OATH, I might add. Now we know why he's doing the presser. Oh here were go again, we have 110,000 people here at DOJ, and he just can't know everything. So I guess he was just lying when he went before congress and under oath said he knew definitively that this entire affair wasn't political. Or did Gonzales only JUST discover that there are 110,000 people at DOJ and he doesn't know everything that goes on - you know, so he wasn't lying to the congress under oath because he thought he did know everything that goes on with all 110,000 people?

Ooh, now he's outright blaming his now-ex chief of staff, and he's stumbling a bit, stuttering, etc. Someone is nervous. I never saw documents, we never had a discussion. But he's accepting responsibility, even though he's totally innocent.

Oh man, that was fascinating. The man isn't just trying to keep his job, he's trying to avoid going to jail.

CNN: "He comes out really strong, 'I take responsibility for all the mistakes, mistakes were made and I take responsibility for them, but I didn't know about them.' It sounds like he's taking responsibility, and then not so." Read More......

Gonzales press conf at 2pm, Eastern. CREW wants Special Prosecutor to investigate potential criminal violations in U.S. Attorney firings.

Paul at TPM Muckraker reports that our embattled perjurer is doing a press conference at 2pm. Resignation time? This comes as scrappy government watchdog CREW is calling for a special prosecutor. Read More......

Senator John Warner (R-VA) says General Pace wrong to call gays "immoral"

Wow. Good for Warner. Too bad he's the last of a dying breed of Republicans who aren't preoccupied with who they should next hate. From ABC News:

In an rare rebuke of the nation's top military officer, Secretary of Defense Sen. John Warner, R-Va., says he strongly disagrees with Gen. Peter Pace's views that homosexuality is "immoral."

"I respectfully, but strongly disagree with the chairman's view that homosexuality is immoral," Warner said in a statement released by his office.

Warner was reacting to Pace's unusual defense of the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy on gays in the military. Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Peter Pace said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune that he supports the policy because he believes homosexuality is "immoral" and that the military "should not condone immoral acts."

Too bad Pastor Pace, the head of our military, doesn't even know why the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy was adopted in the first place:

Military experts, however, say morality was never the basis of the policy, which says gays may serve in the military only if they keep their sexual orientations private and don't engage in homosexual activity.

"Morality was never the basis of the policy," said retired Gen. Jack Keane. "It was about unit cohesion."

Read More......

Urine Man's replacement, Maj. Gen. Gale S. Pollock, blames media for Walter Reed scandal. Says it's all one big fat lie.

More of the same from the new acting- Army Surgeon General, Gale Pollock, who is replacing Kevin "Urine Man" Kiley (why Urine Man? read this). Just last week, she blamed the media for the Walter Reed scandal - you see, it really isn't that bad at all. The Washington Post has Pollock's e-mail, written just FOUR DAYS ago, that blasts the Washington Post for covering the story of the poor treatment received by wounded soldiers. Now, she's in charge of caring for those same troops.

Here's a snippet from today's Washington Post:

Army officials quickly named a temporary replacement for Kiley -- his current deputy, Maj. Gen. Gale S. Pollock. She will serve until an advisory board recommends a new surgeon general.

Pollock, in an e-mail sent to colleagues and staff in the Army Medical Command on Friday, had also sought to minimize reports about conditions at Walter Reed and attacked the media's handling of the issue.

"I know everyone is extremely pained and angry about the media assaults on Walter Reed and our senior leaders," Pollock wrote in an e-mail obtained by The Washington Post. She added that she "articulated our displeasure at the misinformation about the quality of care" to a Post reporter after a congressional hearing last week but also acknowledged that she believes the stories could create momentum for changes that would better serve the Army.

She also wrote: "I know that your families and loved ones are affected by this event as well -- please reassure them that the media makes money on negative stories not by articulating the positive in life -- though that is something I will never understand."

Something we will never understand is how no one in the leadership of the Army, the Pentagon, or their commander in chief takes any responsibility for the care of our wounded and maimed soldiers. They still don't get it. Perhaps if the chairman of the Joint Chiefs spent less time worrying about how "immoral" gays are, and more time worrying about the war in Iraq and the well-being of his own troops, we wouldn't be in the grand mess we're in.

Urine (wo)Man II needs to be fired, not just from her new job as acting Army Surgeon General, but from the Army. There should be zero tolerance in the US military for anyone who would belittle the suffering of our injured and maimed troops.

UPDATE: Pelosi gives Pastor Pace a piece of her mind. Read More......

Kyle Sampson, key player in U.S. Attorney scandal and Chief of Staff to Gonzales, resigned

Senator Schumer, live on CNN, thinks Kyle Sampson, who quit yesterday as Chief of Staff to Attorney General Gonzales, "may well have obstructed justice."

The NY Times reported the resignation earlier today:

D. Kyle Sampson has never worked full time as a federal prosecutor. But for much of the Bush administration he played a considerable role in vetting who served in the Justice Department. And last year he used his post as chief of staff to the attorney general to make a bid for a job as a United States attorney in Utah.

In many ways, until his resignation Monday, the rapid rise of Mr. Sampson, from a low-level aide on the Senate Judiciary Committee to one of the most senior advisers to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, is like that of many other young, ambitious lawyers who come to Washington with a passion for politics.

Read More......

O'Reilly: If you criticize FOX News, you're like the Nazis

In poker, we call that a "tell," Bill. More from ThinkProgress:

These people use techniques perfected by Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of information. They lie, distort, defame, all the time. So it’s not surprising that MoveOn objected to a debate sponsored by Fox News and the Nevada Democratic Party.

Read More......

Republicans still strongly support Bush's Iraq war, but are cranky and worried about party's future

According to a new NY Times/CBS News poll, Republicans are fretting:

In a survey that brought to life the party’s anxieties about keeping the White House, Republicans said they were concerned that their party had drifted from the principles of Ronald Reagan, its most popular figure of the past 50 years.

Forty percent of Republicans said they expected Democrats to take control of the White House next year, compared with 46 percent who said they believed a Republican would win. Just 12 percent of Democrats said they thought the opposing party would win the White House.

But the bottom line is that Republicans still support George Bush and his policies -- especially in Iraq:

For all that, the poll found that Republican voters remain largely loyal to Mr. Bush and his positions on the issues. Among Republicans, 75 percent approve of his job performance, and by overwhelming numbers they approve of his handling of foreign policy, the war in Iraq and the management of the economy.

They overwhelmingly support the war in Iraq. That says it all. Read More......

Tuesday Morning Open Thread

So, Bush was involved in firing the U.S. Attorneys. Huh. Looks like Gonzales lied about the firings under oath. Huh.

Just because someone in the Bush Administration says something, doesn't mean it's true. In fact, if someone in the Bush Administration says something, they're most likely lying. Yes, lying. Hard for the traditional media to grasp that Bush and his top aides lie right to their faces, but it happens time after time after time. Lying is pathological. Liars, like Bush and Rove, rely on the concept that most people don't suspect others are lying to them. They also know that when anyone accuses a liar of lying, that person looks like the bad guy, not the liar.

Okay, I know you're waiting...get it cranking. Read More......

Reports: Opposition leaders tortured and arrested in Zimbabwe

Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the political opposition group Movement for Democratic Change was arrested at a prayer meeting over the weekend. His future remains unclear as he is currently under arrest due to his opposition to government policy. The Mugabe dictatorship remains in control though with 17,000 percent inflation, a starving population and decreasing funds to prop up the police and military, it remains to be seen how much longer the situation will last. Efforts by the US and UK to influence discussions, dialog and change to address the growing problem remain limited, at best. Read More......

Trouble for Big Finance - subprime bank on verge of multi-billion dollar collapse

Who needs regulation anyway? Free and easy money for all and predatory banking practices never hurt anyone, right?

Subprime mortgages - home loans given to borrowers with weak credit - have been a lucrative business for investment banks, which buy the loans, repackage them and sell them to investors around the world, including pension funds and hedge funds.

But cracks in the subprime sector have been surfacing at an alarming speed. On Monday, No. 2 subprime lender New Century Financial warned that it faces $8.4 billion in loan repayment obligations - little more than a week after revealing doubts about its ability to survive.

New Century also disclosed that it had financing deals with some of the nation's biggest investment and commercial banks, including Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Bank of America and the mortgage division of Goldman Sachs.

Looks like a solid group that doesn't need to be regulated in any way at all. If you can overlook the overlap between the Big Finance names caught up in this problem as well as the recent SEC investigation into insider trading, everything will be fine and you can easily understand why regulation is not necessary, that industry can self-regulate. Just don't look too closely. Read More......

BREAKING: Bush got US Attorneys fired, after Gonzales denied any political involvement under oath

Oh. Man.

From the NYT:

The White House was deeply involved in the decision late last year to dismiss federal prosecutors, including some who had been criticized by Republican lawmakers, administration officials said Monday.

Last October, President Bush spoke with Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales to pass along concerns by Republicans that some prosecutors were not aggressively addressing voter fraud, the White House said Monday. Senator Pete V. Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, was among the politicians who complained directly to the president, according to an administration official.

And, as Josh Marshall notes, Harriet Miers was involved - White House chief counsel at the time - and Alberto Gonzales' chief of staff who just mysteriously resigned yesterday. And let's not forget that Gonzales denied any political involvement whatsoever, under oath. Read More......