Open thread

Chat away. Read More......

SoldierGate grows

They used one of their own military press spokespeople as a "combat soldier" for Bush to interview yesterday when he was "chatting" with the troops in Iraq. That's like interviewing your own press secretary to get a sense of how "real people" think.

Absolutely disgusting. Read More......

POST: Scandal Scandal Everywhere and not an honest man to be found

Excellent summary piece by the Washington Post. Read it all. Here's a glimpse:

A string of scandals involving some of the most powerful Republicans in Washington have converged to disrupt President Bush's agenda, distract aides and allies, and exacerbate political problems for an already weakened administration, according to party strategists and White House advisers.
...
"The Rove thing has gotten to be enormously distracting," said one outside adviser to the White House. "Knowing the way the White House works, being under subpoena like this, your mind is not on your work, it's on that."

"It looks like a perfect storm," said Joseph E. diGenova, a Republican and former independent counsel, who noted that so many investigations can weigh on an administration.

Weigh on an administration? Cry me a river. They've been a weight on our nation's reputation, they deserve all they get and a life sentence more.

Conviction on impeachment doesn't put the President in handcuffs does it? Read More......

Headlines that make me happy

"Facing revolt, White House touts Miers experience" Read More......

NPR audio proves Bush's visit with the troops was a pre-scripted fake

Conservative bloggers are in an uproar that the "liberal media" has put out "fake story" claiming "incorrectly" that Bush's chat with the troops yesterday morning was a pre-scripted fake event.

Well, an astute AMERICAblog reader sent me a link to a National Public Radio clip of the preparations for Bush's "unscripted chat" with the US soldiers in Iraq yesterday morning. If you listen to the NPR live feed, you not only hear the soldiers getting the questions in advance, you hear one soldier giving his scripted answer - and what's funny, he starts to give his answer even before getting the question! It doesn't get more scripted than that.

This first snippet from othe audio nips the debate in the bud over whether this was scripted. To wit, the Pentagon asst. secretary warns the troops what to do if they get a question that ISN'T "scripted." Thus, they had questions that WERE scripted, she just admitted it.

Deputy Asst. Defense Secretary Allison BARBER, prepping the troops: If he gives us a question that's not something that we've scripted, Captain Kennedy you're gonna have that mic and that's your chance to impress us all.

CAPT KENNEDY: Okay.

BARBER: Which won't be a problem for you. Alright here we go.

Now we get to hear one of the soldiers start giving his answer before the woman impersonating the president even gets to ask her question:

BARBER AS BUSH: It's an honor to be speaking with the members of the 42 infantry division....

BARBER: The president will continue to speak, and then he'll go into his questions.

BARBER AS BUSH: I'm interested in knowing...

CAPT. KENNEDY (INTERRUPTS BARBER): Good morning, Mr. President. [Laughter] Oh sorry. [More laughter] Okay.

Here you get to hear the president's pre-scripted question (as read by the DOD representative) and the soldier's pre-scripted answer:

BARBER AS BUSH: I'm interested in how your pre-elelection operations are going. Can you give me a quick update on what you've been doing for the last couple of weeks?

CAPT. KENNEDY (giving his prepared in advance answer): Good morning, Mr. President, my name is Captain Brett Kennedy from xxx Valley, Washington, here in Tikrit. To my right is Iraqi Sargeant Major Akeel from the 5th Iraqi Army Division. We are working in northern Iraq right now with an operation we call Operation Saratago. It's a surge of operations to prepare for the referendum. We are currently securing 12250 polling sites through northern Iraq.

From the White House Web site we get Bush's actual LIVE question that he asked the soldier - taking into account Bush's butchering of the English language it's the same:

BUSH: Let me ask you some questions, Captain, if you don't mind. One of the, you know, questions I have is about the pre-election operations, about what you've been doing, and what are the -- what's your strategy, and how do you think it's going for -- to make sure the people have a chance to vote.

Also from the White House Web site we get the text of the soldier's LIVE answer, it's basically verbatim the same prepared answer he gave during practice:

CAPTAIN KENNEDY: Good morning, Mr. President, from Tikrit. I'm Captain Brent Kennedy. To my right is Sergeant Major Akeel from the 5th Iraqi Army Division. We're working together here with the Iraqis in Task Force Liberty for the upcoming referendum. We're surging an operation, called Operation Saratoga, that includes the securing of over 1,250 polling sites. We're working right alongside with the Iraqis as they lead the way in securing these sites.

The entire event was scripted in advance. It was all a big fake. Read More......

Reuters: "Target letters" next week?

Is the noose tightening?:

While Fitzgerald could bring charges against officials for the crime of knowingly revealing the identity of an undercover CIA operative, several lawyers in the case said he was more likely to bring a broad conspiracy charge or easier-to-prove crimes such as making false statements and perjury.

Fitzgerald could send out letters to senior administration officials advising them they are targets of his probe, and bring indictments as early as next week, the lawyers said.

Read More......

Cute Wal-Mart parody from Jib-Jab

Except I cannot under the last 4 or 5 words, which is kind of annoying, since I think it's the big punch line finish. Sigh. Anyway, watch it here, it's cute. Read More......

Rove testifies...again

Fourth chance to get his story right:

It was Rove's fourth appearance before the grand jury. He testified for 4 hours and 15 minutes but said nothing to reporters when he left the courthouse. According to a source familiar with the investigation, Rove was warned by the special prosecutor's office that it could not assure he would not be indicted.

And, Scottie wouldn't say that Bush has full confidence in his brain trust:

Asked if President Bush still has "full confidence in Karl Rove," McClellan declined to answer directly, citing the "ongoing investigation." He added, "Karl continues to do his duties as deputy chief of staff and senior adviser to the president. . . . The president has made it very clear: We're not going to comment on an ongoing investigation."

Well, that's not quite accurate. Someone at the White House talked to the NY Times about the investigation today:

"Everyone is going about the work at hand while bracing for the worst case," said a senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to get around the official White House position that it will not comment on the investigation.

If the press corps would ask Scottie to answer "on the condition of anonymity" they might get something out of him. Course, it was that whole super secret double background that got this case rolling in the first place.

Okay, keep your fingers crossed for a perp walk next week. Read More......

We Don't Have an EPA Anymore - it's just a propaganda machine

From the Washington Post:

The Environmental Protection Agency issued draft regulations yesterday that would ease long-standing pollution controls on older, dirtier power plants by judging these plants by the hourly rate of emissions rather than the total annual output.
...
"We're focused on practical, achievable results that don't get delayed by years of litigation," Johnson said in a telephone news conference. "Let me be clear: This is not about getting rid of New Source Review. This is about making it work better."

Kind of like Clear Skies? And Healthy Forests? And No Child Left Behind? With Republicans, the truth is almost always the opposite of what they say. What comes out of their mouths is just sheer unadulterated propaganda. Read the article.

Stephen Johnson, just another Communist Party Apparatchik at work. Read More......

Friday Puppy Blogging

UPDATE: Who's your panda?

In my advancing age, I can't recall if I did or didn't post pics of my sister's new puppy. But since she's so darn adorable (the puppy, well my sister is adorable too, but different), I'm posting these anyway. I may, or may not, do orchid blogging later today. Who knows.

Anyway, her name is Carmella (not sure how the spelling is going there), and she's a 3-month old Yorkipoo - half Yorkshire Terrier, half Poodle. She's the sweetest damn dog you've ever seen. Not a yippee dog at all, thank God, has high energy, but also calms down nicely. Her big thing is for you to sit Indian style on the floor (or however we call that nowadays), then she runs around the room, leaps into your lap, lays there for a few second, then leaps out and around the room again, leaps into your lap, and on and on and on. Absolutely friggin' adorable. I don't generally like itty-bitty dogs, but this one simply makes you want to utter googy woogy baby noises all day long.

Enjoy.





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Republicans love our troops to death

You're in the military, you vote Republican, then you've got some explaining to do. Yes, the Republicans want to protect your flag, and that's sweet, really. But wrap a flag around your jeep and see if it stops an RPG from ripping your arm off because the Republicans STILL haven't gotten you your body armor that WE'VE been complaining about for 2 years now.

From FromTheRoots.com

After spending the last presidential campaign bragging about their support for the troops, Senate Republicans have cast several votes over the last year that exacerbate the pressures soldiers serving in Iraq are facing during their tours and when they come home. Today it was reported that hundreds of soldiers returning from Iraq after being attacked or wounded, waking up in hospital beds, often seriously wounded, only to find a mound of bills – from the military.

Read More......

Post a cool link to a small blog

This is your chance to help get some smaller up-and-coming blogs the attention they deserve.

Got a small blog that you love? That you run? That posts cool stuff? Use the comment section to post a link to a small blog and tell us why you think it's a good blog. Either a link to the blog home page, or a link to a particularly good post.

Go! Read More......

Donate to CrooksAndLiars.com

UPDATE: A word about our advertisers. A number of you have asked if clicking on our ads, or the ads on any blog, "helps" us raise more money. Well, yes and no. It's actually our number of visitors that really helps us raise more ad money, so the most important thing you can do is come to the site regularly and tell your friends about us. BUT, having said that, yes, clicking on ads does help as well, since advertisers like to see their click-throughs, i.e., the number of people who actually visit their site via our site. Now, rather than just click for the heck of it, I wouldn't mind if folks clicked on the ads and read the sites that they take you to. Most of our ads are from folks you'd be interested in anyway, or in the case of Absinthe, liquor you'd be interested in anyway :-) So why not check it out. Thanks, JOHN

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This video blog provides an invaluable service to the blogosphere. I can literally email these guys about some show one of you mention in a comment, and within a few hours the clip in question is up on their site. Amazing. The thing is, bandwidth costs money, and videos take up a lot of bandwidth.

(For you non-techies, bandwidth is like water flowing through a hose, where the water represents the amount of information you're downloading from the Internet. In the case of Web videos, they're so damn large that you need a lot of bandwidth to provide them to visitors, meaning, a lot of water has to flow through that hose to provide the entire video to thousands of visitors every day. Now, Web sites pay monthly fees based on how much water flows. In our case, if we weren't on Blogger, we might have to pay as much as $1500/month for bandwidth. CrooksAndLiars.com uses even MORE bandwidth than us because videos are so large, and they have to host their own site, so they pay for their bandwidth. Now you get the picture.)

Anyway, this is C&L;'s fundraising week. Throw them some love if you can :-)

JOHN Read More......

Bush White House ignored CIA warnings on Iraq

I know this is old hat at this point, the idea that Bush charged into Iraq in spite of all the warnings to the contrary, but it's still interesting to see the evidence pile up.

A review by former intelligence officers has concluded that the Bush administration "apparently paid little or no attention" to prewar assessments by the Central Intelligence Agency that warned of major cultural and political obstacles to stability in postwar Iraq.

George Bush doesn't care about fact people. Read More......

WH: "jitters" "near panic" "fearful' "fractious" as Rove testifies again

Today is Karl Rove's fourth appearance before the grand jury. Apparently, the mood over at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, NW, is a little tense:

Mr. Rove, deputy White House chief of staff for policy and senior adviser, and I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, are the most prominent administration officials to find themselves squirming under the attention of the hard-nosed special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, and the attendant news media scrutiny.

But the inquiry has swept up a dozen or more other officials who have been questioned by investigators or have testified before the grand jury, and, should it lead to the indictment of anyone at a senior level, it has the potential to upend the professional lives of everyone at the White House for the remainder of Mr. Bush's second term.

The result, say administration officials and friends and allies on the outside who speak regularly with them, is a mood of intense uncertainty in the White House that veers in some cases into fear of the personal and political consequences and anger at having been caught in the snare of a special prosecutor. And given how badly things have been going for Mr. Bush and his team on other fronts - a poll released Thursday by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center put his approval rating at 38 percent, a new low - they hardly have deep reserves of internal enthusiasm or external good will to draw on.

I've thought for awhile that their fears are based on the facts. That whole WH political crew knew what Rove and Libby were up to. They also knew if the truth came out, they were screwed. That explains the mood, the jitters and the fear. They've been busted:

The prospect of a White House without Mr. Rove, Mr. Bush's longtime strategist, has some allies of the president in a near panic, fearful that without him the administration would lose the one person capable of enforcing discipline across a party that has become increasingly fractious and that is almost at war with itself over the president's nomination of Harriet E. Miers to the Supreme Court.

Fear, panic, a White House without Rove, fractious, at war with itself....doesn't get much better. Read More......

Troops Photo Op: Bush is a complete phony

John brought this up yesterday, it's been on CNN this morning, and now AP has the details. Sometimes I think that I'm really over George Bush, and then he does something to make me so sick the anger is palpable. This is one of the latter moments. From AP:

It was billed as a conversation with U.S. troops, but the questions President Bush asked on a teleconference call Thursday were choreographed to match his goals for the war in Iraq and Saturday's vote on a new Iraqi constitution.

"This is an important time," Allison Barber, deputy assistant defense secretary, said, coaching the soldiers before Bush arrived. "The president is looking forward to having just a conversation with you."

Barber said the president was interested in three topics: the overall security situation in Iraq, security preparations for the weekend vote and efforts to train Iraqi troops.
...
A brief rehearsal ensued.

"OK, so let's just walk through this," Barber said. "Captain Kennedy, you answer the first question and you hand the mike to whom?"
...
Paul Rieckhoff, director of the New York-based Operation Truth, an advocacy group for U.S. veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, denounced the event as a "carefully scripted publicity stunt." Five of the 10 U.S. troops involved were officers, he said.

"If he wants the real opinions of the troops, he can't do it in a nationally televised teleconference," Rieckhoff said. "He needs to be talking to the boots on the ground and that's not a bunch of captains."

Mr. President, it disgusts me that after 2000 dead you've screwed it up so bad that you need to put words in the mouths of our troops. They put their lives on the line every day for what we now know were your outright lies - truth and honesty in government be damned. Democracy and free speech be damned. It's always been just propaganda with you. Only "leaders" like Kim Jong Il and Russian Communist Party Apparatchiks need propaganda to sell their "ideas". You are a truly pathetic man and if you weren't doing such damage to the country that I love, I might feel sorry for you for a moment. Failure, at any level is tough to take. But failure of this magnitude, well let's just say it would certainly explain the drinking.

Anyone who didn't see this coming and voted for him in 2004 should be ASHAMED of themselves. It's time for you to shut the hell up and get out of the way and leave making decisions for the nation to those who at least still believe in the ideals it was founded on. Free elections, free speech, accountable government. Not propaganda and a dim wit Soviet Premier. Read More......

Friday Morning Open Thread

So much happened this week, hard to decide what was my favorite. Probably the news of all the White House in-fighting -- especially Cheney being pissed at Bush. Read More......

New poll: Bush presidency a failure

So tell us something that we don't already know. He's a failure again, just like every job he's ever had.

Forty-one percent of respondents said Bush's presidency will be seen as unsuccessful in the long run, while 26 percent said the opposite.

Seven in 10 said they want the next president to offer policies and programs that are different from the Bush administration's.

Read More......

More violence in Darfur and Bolton does nothing

Funny how the bully talked and talked but now that he is sitting there in the UN, he's done nothing besides block a UN envoy from discussing the human rights abuses in Darfur. OK, so what is the plan here? A two year stare down or something that is so cunning, only you and your wingnut friends will get it? Bolton and his kind really don't care about Africans and could care less how many human rights abuses are happening or how many die because see, they're proving a point...somehow. Yes, they say they want sanctions but they're going to drag this one out forever while people are raped, beaten and killed. So what's the plan? Read More......