Bedtime open thread

So what's up for the week? Read the rest of this post...

Maybe Cheney really was just sending a signal

The news hasn't been very good for the Bush crew these past few weeks. We just learned that while Bush and Cheney are decrying leakers, Scooter fingered Cheney as the key leaker in the CIA leak scandal. You know you're having a bad week when even Brownie looks good compared to the rest of the Bush administration. Now, the "accidental" shooting in Texas. There are more tough times ahead for Team Bush/Cheney according to Newsweek. More Republicans are turning on Bush and Cheney over the domestic spying scandal:

This coming week is not going to be any better. The Senate intelligence committee is likely to vote to open an investigation into the NSA's wiretapping program, according to senior congressional aides who declined to be identified discussing sensitive matters. The chairman of the committee, Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, will probably follow the White House line and try to keep a lid on the hearings. But three Republicans—Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Olympia Snowe of Maine and Mike DeWine of Ohio—are expected to join with the Democrats on the committee to vote to demand more information about the secret eavesdropping program from the White House and intelligence agencies.

But the White House isn't taking this lightly. Cheney's playing tough guy with the Hill. He's rolled them before and he'll roll them again:

The White House is likely to be defiant. Cheney's chief aide and counsel, David Addington, has advised his bosses that even if the intelligence committee votes to subpoena secret documents from the executive branch, the demand will not be upheld by the courts. Cheney's attitude seems to be: bring it on.

And, if you bring it on, face the consequences. That's the message Cheney gave this weekend down in Texas. It was vintage Tony Soprano. Read the rest of this post...

Cheney shot the guy yesterday, why are we finding out now 24 hours later?

Cheney shot the man on Saturday, yet we're only now finding out that our Vice President shot someone. I'm wondering if Cheney nearly killed the man and the White House wanted to make sure his victim was out of the woods before letting the public know about the story.

Sure, the public has the right to know immediately when our vice president nearly kills somebody, but not in the Soviet America. Here you have to watch to see whether the lights are on in the OEOB past 11pm in order to decipher what's happening with our government.

Perhaps some day our media will wake up and see that they've become dupes to this administration. You know they'll ask a few questions, then let the story die, like they let every story die. Pitiful. Read the rest of this post...

The NRA photo of Cheney with the gun

IronCity fortunately grabbed a screen capture.

Joe made a valid point about the Cheney shooting mishap to me earlier. I mean, the guy can't even invade the right country, so how can we hold him responsible for not shooting straight. Read the rest of this post...

Open Thread

Busy news day for a Sunday. Read the rest of this post...

Cheney Shoots Man While Hunting

Think the guy asked him if he told Libby to leak classified information from the National Intelligence Estimate? From AP:

Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot and injured a man during a weekend quail hunting trip in Texas, his spokeswoman said Sunday.

Harry Whittington, 78, was "alert and doing fine" after Cheney sprayed him with shotgun pellets on Saturday while the two were hunting at the Armstrong Ranch in south Texas, said property owner Katharine Armstrong.
...
Whittington was in stable condition Sunday, said Yvonne Wheeler, spokeswoman for the Christus Spohn Health System.
...
"The vice president didn't see him," she continued. "The covey flushed and the vice president picked out a bird and was following it and shot. And by god, Harry was in the line of fire and got peppered pretty good."
...
She said emergency personnel traveling with Cheney tended to Whittington, holding his face and cleaning up the blood.

"Fortunately, the vice president has got a lot of medical people around him and so they were right there and probably more cautious than we would have been," she said. "The vice president has got an ambulance on call, so the ambulance came."

I don't think that God pulled the trigger, I think that the guy with the gun did. Click the link, the picture is priceless.

UPDATE 1: The photo on the jump page has changed. It's now a CPAC conference photo. The prior photo was a picture of Cheney receiving a rifle from the NRA. Read the rest of this post...

WH: Yep, that was Jack with Bush after all

The White House has been caught in another lie. According to AP, the White House originally denied that Abramoff was even at the meeting with Abramoff's client -- until they saw the picture. The Bush team is trying way too hard to cover up their relationship with Abramoff:

The photo, published by The New York Times and Time magazine, shows Bush shaking hands with an Abramoff client, chairman Raul Garza of the Kickapoo Indian tribe in Texas. Abramoff's bearded face appears in the background, small and slightly blurry.

White House spokesman Allen Abney said the photo was taken in 2001, when the president dropped by a meeting of about two dozen state legislators to thank them for supporting tax relief.

Originally, the White House said it had no record of Abramoff's attendance at the meeting.

They lied about meeting with photographic evidence showing their relationship with Abramoff. What else are they lying about? Maybe this will inspire some enterprising report. Because, the traditional media which has been hoodwinked by the White House once again. Read the rest of this post...

Dem and GOP Senators say investigate Cheney for leaks

If leaking national security secrets is a crime, and Bush and Cheney seem to think it is, investigators need to find culprits. In the Plame case, the suspects include Dick Cheney:

Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald should investigate Vice President Dick Cheney and others in the CIA leak probe if they authorized an aide to give secret information to reporters, Democratic and Republican senators said Sunday.

Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., called the leak of intelligence information "inappropriate" if it is true that unnamed "superiors" instructed Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, to divulge the material on Iraq.

Sen. George Allen, R-Va., said a full investigation is necessary.

"I don't think anybody should be releasing classified information, period, whether in the Congress, executive branch or some underling in some bureaucracy," said Allen, who appeared with Reed on "Fox News Sunday."

Read the rest of this post...

NYT editorial eviscerates Bush

Armando at DKos pointed today's NYT editorial out to me, and he's right, it's bad (in a good for us, bad for Bush kind of way):

We can't think of a president who has gone to the American people more often than George W. Bush has to ask them to forget about things like democracy, judicial process and the balance of powers — and just trust him. We also can't think of a president who has deserved that trust less.

This has been a central flaw of Mr. Bush's presidency for a long time. But last week produced a flood of evidence that vividly drove home the point.

Read the rest of this post...

Gingrich message: GOP fails at government

Gingrich basically called the Bush administration a failure yesterday at CPAC. What other message can be drawn from this? After all, the GOP controls the White House, the Senate and the House. If government of the United States is a failure, it's a GOP failure:

Citing multiple government failures after Hurricane Katrina, the former House speaker said the government meltdown at all levels illustrated how badly government needs to be updated in all of its operations.

"The system failed, the city of New Orleans failed, the state of Louisiana failed and the government of the United States failed," Gingrich said. "When you see an American body on an American street sitting there for three days on television because the government can't collect the dead, something has failed.

Gingrich's trashing of the GOP was met by enthusiastic cheering and whooping from the conservative wingnuts at the CPAC conference. Read the rest of this post...

Congressional report trashes Bush response to Katrina

This is the first of several major reports examining Katrina. It won't be officially released until Wednesday but The Post was leaked the executive summary. Tough stuff for the Bush team -- which, of course, they deserve. The amazing thing is that this comes from the current Congress:

The 600-plus-page report lays primary fault with the passive reaction and misjudgments of top Bush aides, singling out Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security Operations Center and the White House Homeland Security Council, according to a 60-page summary of the document obtained by The Washington Post. Regarding Bush, the report found that "earlier presidential involvement could have speeded the response" because he alone could have cut through all bureaucratic resistance.

But, Bush was on vacation...just like he was on vacation when he learned that Bin Laden was determined to attack in the U.S. Read the rest of this post...

Sunday Morning Open Thread

We might as well get it started. The Sunday talk shows will surely give us some fodder. Read the rest of this post...

Is Bush using active duty military for political purposes?

Josh Marshall has the story, which would not be the first time we witnessed such activities by the White House. I recall something like this back during the GOP convention as well. The military sure are gluttons for punishment, supporting Bush at every opportunity despite being rushed into war unprepared, under-staffed and under-protected, not to mention the financial cuts for vets under Bush. Bizarre, isn't it?

Having just spent a week in the US, I noticed a lot fewer yellow ribbons on cars. The lemming attitude of a year ago seems to be shifting, fortunately. A year ago I listened to people droning on about how necessary the war was but those gung-ho, pro-war types seem to be less vocal now. I suppose people can only take so many failures and the hype just can't hold up over time when the realities are thrown in your face day after day. Read the rest of this post...