Bush reigniting nuclear arms race?
Thu Apr 06, 2006 at 06:09:36 AM PDT
Yesterday,
Night Owl raised some troubling questions around the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA)"simulation" of low-yield nuclear underground strikes in its Divine Strake testing program.
A report in today's LA Times raises broader questions over the intentions behind plans, called the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program, revealed by the Bush regime on modernizing the U.S. nuclear weapons infrastructure.
The plan, outlined to Congress yesterday by the head of National Nuclear Security Administration Thomas D'Agostino, would restart the production of new nuclear weapons. The last new nuclear weapon was produced in 1989.
Israelis consider drawing Arab towns out of Israel?
Wed Apr 05, 2006 at 11:17:42 AM PDT
The
CS Monitor reports today that Israelis are beginning to "ponder" a land swap that would transfer the status of Arab towns just inside Israeli's border, making them PA controlled areas.
The idea is currently being promoted right-wing nationalist Israeli politician Avigdor Lieberman. That in itself may make the notion suspect, but the particular problem is that his proposal essentially converts Arabs who currently have full rights as Israeli citizens into subjects of the Palestinian Authority living under Israeli military occupation. Who the hell would want that?
It is essentially an ethnic resettlement policy, without having to physically move anyone.
More below...
Bush's EPA hacks to polluters: Rape us more, please
Tue Apr 04, 2006 at 12:37:15 PM PDT
NPR's
Elizabeth Shogren broadcast a report on Morning Edition revealing that Bush's EPA is preparing to unleash yet another crime against nature:
A leaked document to the NRDC from the Environmental Protection Agency suggests that the agency is considering a significant change in air-pollution rules. It would give chemical factories, refineries and manufacturing plants new leeway to increase emissions of pollutants that cause cancer and birth defects.
Yes, there's more...
Bush's Intel Oversight Board: A sleeping watchdog
Mon Apr 03, 2006 at 06:01:53 AM PDT
Quiz question for intelligence wonkish kossacks:
How many cases of possible illegal or improper U.S. intelligence activities were referred by President Bush's Intelligence Oversight Board to the Attorney General during Bush's tenure so far?
What is the Intelligence Oversight Board, you ask? That and a few more pertinent facts to crib your quiz, below the fold...
Call for independent reform candidate for IL gov -- nominate here!
Wed Mar 22, 2006 at 05:36:47 AM PDT
Incumbent Illinois governor Rod "Elvis" Blagojevich yielded 30% of Democratic voters to a virtually invisible primary opponent.
Will those Dem dissenters jump parties to support Judy Topinka, a GOP veteran of Illinois' bipartisan sleaze machine? Perhaps not, but independent and swing voters probably will, figuring Rod has missed his chance to fulfill his 2002 promises to change Illinois politics and government.
Is there a public figure in Illinois with enough stature to mount an independent reform campaign? And I don't mean some Jesse Ventura-esque idiot like Mike Ditka.
Impeachment THE election issue
Mon Mar 20, 2006 at 10:42:36 AM PDT
If you, like me, are in one of the Congressional districts facing a contested Democratic primary, and having some trouble deciding between various well qualified candidates, there is one particular issue I think should take precedence.
Now I am not normally one for a litmus issue, but this is time for an exception: Ask this of your Dem primary candidates: If the Dems retake control of Congress this November, will you support bringing Conyer's resolution to open a committee of inquiry for impeachment of President George W. Bush?
More below...
Common sense from Obama
Tue Nov 15, 2005 at 05:19:24 AM PDT
Senator
Barak Obama lays out in the Chicago Tribune today a common sense plan to carve $100 billion dollars for Gulf Coast reconstruction using a combination of spending cuts and deferring or canceling Bush's tax cuts for millionaires:
Every family knows that it's one thing to use a credit card; it's another thing to keep spending money you don't have. You have to "Pay as You Go," which is a rule most Americans live by. Washington once did too, until the White House and Senate Republicans abandoned it to push through the president's tax breaks.
The latest example of this irresponsibility is Congress' plan to pass $70 billion in additional tax breaks despite record-breaking deficits. Clearly, old habits are hard to break.
It's time for a return to responsibility in the budget process.
More below the fold...
Drug companies buying endorsements for Prop 78
Fri Nov 04, 2005 at 06:45:01 AM PDT
Recent California TV and radio ads campaigning "Yes on 78/No on 79", claim, "The list of groups saying Yes to 78 grows bigger every day."
What those ads aren't stating is that many on that list are getting big bucks to "say Yes to 78".
From the LA Times:
Well-heeled campaigns have always bought space on mailed brochures. Some have paid people who offered testimonials.
But the campaign led by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Assn. and funded by the nation's biggest drug manufacturers is pushing the practice to new levels.
"They are clearly going beyond the traditional TV, radio and slate mailers," said Robert M. Stern, president of the nonpartisan Center for Governmental Studies, which has joined with the California Healthcare Foundation to analyze the Proposition 78 and 79 efforts. "The question is, are endorsements up for sale or are the endorsements coming first? ... We won't know the answer."
More below...
Pundit Parade: Iraq, 'Can't Win, Can't Leave'
Thu Nov 03, 2005 at 05:43:02 AM PDT
Former Senator
Thomas Eagleton (D-Missouri, 1968-1987), writes in today's St. Louis Post-Dispatch that the hubris of the Bush regime has left us in a "damned-if-we-leave, damned-if-we-stay" situation:
What do we do? Do we repeat what happened when we finally withdrew from Vietnam? Do we pull out on our own? "We are not ready," President Nguyen Van Thieu begged us. President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger crossed their fingers and hoped for the best but knew the chances that the Thieu regime could survive were, to say the least, thin.
More from Senator Eagleton, and more pundits below, including:
- Dr. William Hazel Jr., warns against cutting Medicare
- Miami's Andres Oppenheimer on Bush's antagonist in Argentinia (it's not Hugo)
- Today's cartoon
Rescue plan for GOP: More EXECUTIONS!!
Wed Nov 02, 2005 at 05:24:17 AM PDT
When your President, not to mention your House and Senate majority leaders, top administration officials, key gubernatorial candidates, etc., are all on the political and legal ropes, what do you do?
Kill more evil-doers!
Hey, it worked in Texas! Frying and lethal injecting evil-doers is what Dubya does and loves best!
The House bill for reauthorizing the Patriot Act has amendments sponsored by Rep. John Carter (Republican from Texas, of course), that would expand the number of terrorism-related offenses eligible for the death penalty from 20 to 61, and would drastically change the rules to make it easier to get a death sentence.
If this measure passes, and you unknowingly donate money to what you believe is a charity, but it turns out to be a terrorist front, YOU will be eligible for execution.
I kid you not. More below...
Laying the Alito trap: The real reason to fight
Tue Nov 01, 2005 at 06:01:37 AM PDT
I have doubts that Sammy Alito is the foaming-at-the-mouth right-wing nutcase a lot of folks here are making him out to be. Perhaps the details yet to emerge in the coming weeks will answer that question.
Two wonky attornies and legal bloggers, Tom Goldstein from SCOTUSblog.com, and Howard Bashman of How Appealing, both claim that a thorough look at Alito will reveal a candidate less doctrinaire than a Brown, Luttig or Owens would have been.
Bush, in fact, may be counting on Alito being just conservative enough to appease the right-wing without meeting the "extraordinary circumstance" that would lose the seven key centrist Democrats.
But the right and left are itching for this fight, and I hope they get it anyway, despite my doubts.
My reasons why, below...
Pundit Parade: Emperor Bush is naked, and it's U-G-L-Y!
Fri Oct 28, 2005 at 05:59:35 AM PDT
No more hiding from failure
Des Moines Register columnist
Rekha Basu writes that regardless of what comes out of Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury, Bush can no longer escape the weight of his accumulated failures:
But whatever happens criminally, Americans should be asking this question: Why was the Bush White House so hell bent on going to war with Iraq that it relied on discredited evidence to build the case? And what was President Bush's role in that?
Either he was unimaginably disengaged or he had other reasons.
More from Basu, and more pundits below, including:
- E.J. Dionne perfectly wraps up the Miers mess
- Frida Ghitis takes threatening words from Iran's president seriously
- Today's cartoon
Pundit Parade: Bush's cabal, fearing dissent, and a jealous Cub fan
Thu Oct 27, 2005 at 06:05:49 AM PDT
Okay, being an enormously jealous Cubs fan, I gotta make one call-out to the White Sox and their fans:
You guys done our town proud--way, way proud. Way to go.
On with the punditry...
Powell aide: Bush's 'cabal' failed America
Lawrence B. Wilkerson, who was former Secretary-of-State Colin Powell's chief-of-staff from 2002-2005, follows up his much noted public criticisms of the Bush NeoCon cabal with a formal commentary written originally for the LA Times.
The gist of Wilkerson's complaint is that Bush abandoned the formal National Security decision making process on the mistaken hunch that tough, strong leadership had to ride over the usual bureaucracy. Sometimes, there are good reasons for process and bureaucracy.
Excerpts from Wilkerson, and more punditry below, including:
- Paul K. McMasters on fearing dissent
- Steve Chapman on America's debt to Greenspan and Volcker
- Ryan O'Donnell on including all states in presidential politics
- Today's cartoon
Is Cheney a target in Plamegate?
Mon Oct 24, 2005 at 02:49:58 PM PDT
The
Raw Deal is reporting more details in the Plamegate story, some of which lead closer to Dick Cheney's door:
Those close to the investigation say that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has been told that David Wurmser, then a Middle East adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney on loan from the office of then-Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs John Bolton, met with Cheney and his chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby in June 2003 and told Libby that Plame set up the Wilson trip. He asserted that it was a boondoggle, the sources said.
Libby then shared the information with Karl Rove, President Bush's deputy chief of staff, the sources said. Wurmser also passed on the same information about Wilson to then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and then-National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, they added.
More below...
Pundit Parade: GOP scum buildup, Portrait of Dorian Bush, more...
Fri Oct 21, 2005 at 05:58:04 AM PDT
Bronwyn Lance Chester, from the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, offers a round-up on the collective scum buildup out of Washington recently:
Every time I see the news from Washington these days, I get that old familiar feeling again:
I want to take a shower.
It's an icky sensation I haven't experienced since the Clinton White House days, a scrub-off-the-muck mood akin to the one that helped sanitize Congress in 1994.
The taint hanging about the capital now has a distinctly different tang from the Clinton years, reeking less of frat boys covering up for their cheating pledge brother, and more of corruption, avarice and arrogance not on a personal scale but on a national one.
Every day seems to bring a brand-spanking-new scandal, another head-scratcher of a move or wildly desperate spin from powers that be.
More from Chester, and more pundits below including:
- Dr. Todd Huffman from Springfield, OR, puts out a APB on the Dems missing agenda
- Joseph Sabino Mistick from Pittsburgh says Bush has given cronyism a bad name
- Marianne Means on rightwing spoiled brats
- Today's cartoon
Pundit Parade: The Cosmic Context of Catastrophe, plus Rove tooned
Fri Oct 14, 2005 at 05:59:09 AM PDT
The SF Chronicle's
Mark Morford knows that you are withering under the full catastrophe of life:
I know how it is. You might say to yourself, just this month alone: "I cannot take any more, over 35,000 people dead from a massive quake in Pakistan and India and hundreds more buried alive in mudslides in Mexico and Guatemala as a result of Hurricane Stan, still more piles of dead in New Orleans and dozens (hundreds?) dying in unimaginably brutal ways every day in bombings and vicious warfare in Iraq, and that doesn't even include the everyday gunfire and the murders and the rapes and the busload of elderly people bursting into flames in Dallas, and the questions cannot help but emerge: Where to put all this bleak information? How to possibly sort through and find solace and hope? And by the way, what the hell is going on? Why so dark and violent and dour all of a sudden? What is happening to the world?"
Morford's answer, plus a word on Bush's legacy from Toledo and Today's Cartoon...
Pundit Parade: The key Iraq question; the case for Kerry 2008
Tue Oct 11, 2005 at 05:36:53 AM PDT
Robert Robb from the Arizona Republic grabs the Iraq Debacle in one hand and the Bush Doctrine on Terrorism in the other and smashes them together, shattering the fallacious Bush/NeoCon mantras justifying their expansionism:
The immediate issue, of course, is Iraq. Bush openly asserted that without the continued U.S. large military presence, Islamic militants would take over the country. He asked: "Would the United States and other free nations be more safe, or less safe, with Zarqawi and bin Laden in control of Iraq, its people, and its resources?"
The answer, of course, is less safe. But the antecedent question is why would the Shiites, the Kurds and even more moderate Sunnis, with substantially larger numbers and resources than the militants, allow that to happen?
And now here's that key question I promised:
A more pertinent question at this point is one Bush wants to avoid: Is the pervasive U.S. military presence in Iraq sufficient cause in itself to keep the insurgency alive?
More from Robb, plus the case for Kerry 2008 and today's cartoon, after the jump...
Pundit Parade: "Flight Plan" on the Culture Wars itinerary?
Fri Oct 07, 2005 at 06:07:50 AM PDT
Flight Plan a volley in the Culture Wars?
Quiz time: What do the following have in common:
- The proposed WTC Freedom Center
- The order by a federal judge to grant the ACLU's motion to release most of the remaining photos and video from Abu Ghraib
- Jodie Foster's latest blockbuster
Hoover Institute senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson says these seemingly unrelated items are evidence of liberal elitism inflicting "consequences" on others.
More from Hanson, and a look at Marcia Angell's commentary on the Oregon case before the USSC, after the jump...
PLOT ALERT: If you haven't seen Flight Plan yet and intend to, skip this section and Hanson's link; key plot points are revealed.
