Boy, it's been a day. What with the  horrific bombing in Baghdad, Kerry's speech being buried in favor of Cheney's snarling lies, and the leaked bin Laden video showing once again it's all Clinton's fault, I've been thinkin' it's about time to add Valium to my diet.

But then I found this.

 

I'm pissed...I'm outraged...and not the least bit surprised.

From The Hill:

Salon has been paying attention to the Nader discussions going on here at Kos, and has quoted some of our friends.

I hope I don't get in trouble, as it takes a day pass to read the article, but I'm going to post the first two grafs anyway.

Enjoy...

Huge explosion on main thoroughfare, in front of coalition headquarters, in Baghdad.  Reporter said at least a dozen cars and a small bus destroyed. Causalties...

Al Franken has signed on with Central Air Media and will host a show weekdays from 12-3.  Guess who else is on at that time? Rush Limbaugh.

Here's a little bit more...

According to what I've been hearing this morning on the news, there is a mini controversy brewing over what happended at the fundraiser Dean had last night.

Talk radio show out of  Concord, New Hampshire with Arnie Arnesen and three other guests.  She just took a call from an older woman who said she is a Republican and hates Bush.  She said she isn't happy that Dean signed the civil unions bill but thinks "those" people deserve the same rights as everyone else. Go figure. She said she'll be voting for either Dean or Clark.

Anyway, watch and listen if you're a mind to.

A few weeks ago there was some discussion about Tom DeLay using a children's charity for fund raising purposes.  Today's WaPo has another article. Looks like Delay is sending out a 13 page brochure(invitation) to a few of his friends.  

I'm not a kool-aid drinker, yet.  However, after 20 minutes of watching him with tweety, I've got the packet out, a pitcher of water, and a cup of sugar ready.

HeHe

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch said Tuesday he had put one of his staffers on administrative leave for improperly obtaining data from the secure computer networks of two Democratic senators.

Hatch, R-Utah, said preliminary interviews suggested that a former Republican member of the committee staff may have also been involved in penetrating the Democratic computers.
(...)  

What an amazing read.  Here's a taste:

Regarding the protesters...

It is not only Bush the Chicken-hawk warmonger and promoter-in-chief of the great illusion about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction who they will be denouncing. It is also Bush the ignorant, self-righteous Christian warrior, Bush the smirking executioner and Bush the believer in one law for America and another for everyone else. And, of course, Bush the "Toxic Texan", an image made flesh by the "ghost ships" bearing down on Hartlepool, whose US-produced contaminants will find a last resting place on Britain's unpolluted isle

Senator Durbin in on C-Span 2 right now hammering the Republicans.  If you aren't watching, do it.
"Scratch the DNA of all these judges and you'll find a Federalist Society chromosome"!, so says Durban.  He's got graphics...thank God the Dems are fighting this crap!  Watch!

OK, now he's off.  Well, it was fun while it lasted.  Does anyone know how the next 30 hours is suppose to work?  I thought it was only the Republicans speaking.  How much time do the Democrats get?  Durbin's comments were succinct enough, and his graphics pointed enough, that the Dems should get a few good sound bites out of it.

Sure hope we get more time, tho.

...and that was from McCain.  Half-way thru my first cup of coffee and there's still more...

The strategy will involve the dismissal of Democrats as the party of "protests, pessimism and political hate speech," Ed Gillespie, Republican National

It looks like GW will not be greeted with candy and flowers during his upcoming trip to London.

White House security demands covering President George Bush's controversial state visit to Britain have provoked a serious row with Scotland Yard.

American officials want a virtual three-day shutdown of central London in a bid to foil disruption of the visit by anti-war protesters. They are demanding that police ban all marches and seal off the city centre.

Seems our Republican friends have their knickers in a knot once again.  A memo, written without authorization by a Dem staffer, has surfaced:

The memo laid out plans for highlighting contradictions between the intelligence and statements by administration officials. It suggested approaches for beginning a separate Democratic investigation or renewing calls for an independent probe.

Among its recommendations were "pull the majority along as far as we can on issues that may lead to major new disclosures" and that Democrats "can pull the trigger on an independent investigation" after exhausting the opportunity to usefully collaborate with Republicans.

Sounds reasonable to me.  However, some on the other side seem a little upset:

"I never saw the kind of blatant partisan politics emerge that has apparently emerged as revealed in this memorandum," said Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz.

Such outrage!  My, oh my. Should we Dems just roll over and play dead?  Maybe not:

"It is disturbing that individuals are seeking to score political points and that a draft paper describing the rights of the minority to push for a full and fair review of these issues is being so grossly mischaracterized to try to deflect attention from the real issue," Rockefeller said.

No shit.  If exposing lies that lead us to war isn't political fair game, I'd like to know what is!  The American people have been steamrolled by this administration and for once, the Democrats better not cave.

The rest of the article is here:

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=512&ncid=703&e=4&u=/ap/20031105/ap_o n_go_co/congress_iraq_inquiry

This is my diary so I'm going to submit the following article in it's entirety. I've been bitching about this for months.  Too bad I had to read about it in a newspaper from another country.  From today's Sydney Morning Herald:

Cheney's hawks 'hijacking policy'
By Ritt Goldstein
October 30, 2003

A former Pentagon officer turned whistleblower says a group of hawks in the Bush Administration, including the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, is running a shadow foreign policy, contravening Washington's official line.

"What these people are doing now makes Iran-Contra [a Reagan administration national security scandal] look like amateur hour. . . it's worse than Iran-Contra, worse than what happened in Vietnam," said Karen Kwiatkowski, a former air force lieutenant-colonel.

"[President] George Bush isn't in control . . . the country's been hijacked," she said, describing how "key [governmental] areas of neoconservative concern were politically staffed".

Ms Kwiatkowski, who retired this year after 20 years service, was a Middle East specialist in the office of the Undersecretary of Defence for Policy, headed by Douglas Feith.

She described "a subversion of constitutional limits on executive power and a co-optation through deceit of a large segment of the Congress", adding that "in order to take that first step - Iraq - lies had to be told to Congress to bring them on board".

Ms Kwiatkowski said the pursuit of national security decisions often bypassed "civil service and active-duty military professionals", and was handled instead by political appointees who shared common ideological ties.

There was speculation earlier this year that such an ideologue group had emerged, and that it was behind the US attack on an Iraqi convoy in Syria in June.

The New York Times quoted Patrick Lang, a former senior Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) official, as saying that many in the Government believed the incursion was an effort by ideologues to disrupt co-operation between the US and Syria.

Ms Kwiatkowski said there was an extra-governmental network operating outside normal structures and practices, "a network of political appointees in key positions who felt they needed to take some action, to make things happen in a foreign affairs, national security way". She said Pentagon personnel and the DIA were pressured to favourably alter assessments and reports.

In a separate interview, Chalmers Johnson, an authority on US policy, said that the Administration's neo-conservatives had in effect seized power from Mr Bush.

Dr Johnson said the neo-conservatives had pursued an agenda outlined in the controversial 1992 Defence Planning Guidance. That document, drawn up at the direction of Mr Cheney when he was defence secretary, said the world's only superpower should not be cautious about asserting its power.

Sy Hersh is always an interesting read but this article is especially illuminating. The following explanation regarding the forged documents, if true, show the depth of anger at the CIA:

Who produced the fake Niger papers? There is nothing approaching a consensus on this question within the intelligence community. There has been published speculation about the intelligence services of several different countries. One theory, favored by some journalists in Rome, is that sismi produced the false documents and passed them to Panorama for publication.

Another explanation was provided by a former senior C.I.A. officer. He had begun talking to me about the Niger papers in March, when I first wrote about the forgery, and said, "Somebody deliberately let something false get in there." He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.

"The agency guys were so pissed at Cheney," the former officer said. "They said, `O.K, we're going to put the bite on these guys.'" My source said that he was first told of the fabrication late last year, at one of the many holiday gatherings in the Washington area of past and present C.I.A. officials. "Everyone was bragging about it--`Here's what we did. It was cool, cool, cool.'" These retirees, he said, had superb contacts among current officers in the agency and were informed in detail of the sismi intelligence.

"They thought that, with this crowd, it was the only way to go--to nail these guys who were not practicing good tradecraft and vetting intelligence," my source said. "They thought it'd be bought at lower levels--a big bluff." The thinking, he said, was that the documents would be endorsed by Iraq hawks at the top of the Bush Administration, who would be unable to resist flaunting them at a press conference or an interagency government meeting. They would then look foolish when intelligence officials pointed out that they were obvious fakes. But the tactic backfired, he said, when the papers won widespread acceptance within the Administration. "It got out of control."

This administration has complained about the media filtering out good news from Iraq.  Perhaps they should concentrate on the bad news filter they have in place. We'd all be much better off if they did.

Full article here:

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031027fa_fact