If enough us wear tin foil hats will the amount of solar energy reflected back out of the atmosphere counteract the global warming caused by excessive fossil fuel use? Hmmmmmmm. Nah, I didn't think it would be that easy.

But of course it would be silly to think that ANYONE could seriously imagine any benefit from the melting of the Arctic ice cap . . . or would it?

Russia, Norway, Denmark, Canada and the United States are among countries in a race to secure rights to the Arctic that heated up last month when Russia sent two small submarines to plant its national flag under the North Pole. A U.S. study has suggested as much as 25 percent of the world's undiscovered oil and gas could be hidden in the area.

Go North Young Man! The Northwest Passage is open and ready for business . . . BIG BUSINESS!

Sorry to anyone here who was hoping for a fully fleshed out diary. The hectic schedule of the working poor precludes me from stringing together too many worthy and apropos thoughts into what anyone might consider a worthwhile diary. My hats off to those of you who can really kick ass at this type of thing. That being said . . .

As I just drove home from working a little unpaid white-collar OT, I flipped on NPR just past 4:30 p.m. here on the east coast and I heard the female host begin to talk about the turmoil in the House as of lastnight and again today.

Flame if you will, and I admit I am using a very very broad brush, but in the end I think it is the truth. We allow the Republican party to beat the shit out of us, right in front of the house, in full view of everyone. 29% of people approve of what Bush is doing BUT SO WHAT? In the end, we aren't stopping Bush . . . Democrats Are Enablers.

As it is with any enabler, the rationalization is bulletproof. We must keep our powder dry, if we stoop to their level we'll be no better than them, if we fight back we run the risk of losing our next election. Oh yeah, one more: We TRY to fight back but the media just doesn't cover it.

Yeah well, I am getting to the point where I don't want to vote for us anymore, because what "we" end up doing is letting Republicans and Corporations run this country into the ground. And what if the media doesn't help . . . is that enough reason to give up?

Impeachaphobia is an anxiety disorder which primarily consists of the fear most elected Democrats feel when faced with the task of bringing Bush and Cheney to justice.

Democrats with impeachaphobia may experience panic attacks in situations where they feel trapped, insecure, out of control, or too far from their personal comfort zone.

Yes, yes, I restate the obvious yet again, but maybe on some psychic level this might help some Daily Kos reading congressional staffer or actual office holder open their mind to the rising tide of dissatisfaction that is creeping up their ankles.

Maybe this won't be read by anyone who can do their small part, but I refuse to stay quiet or veer away from the obvious for FEAR of sounding redundant or seeming out-of-step.

Yes, yes, whatever. I learned about this stuff in grade school from finger wagging crotchety Miss Zimmer, that was about 100 years ago (factoring in the premature aging I experienced yesterday while watching the Bush press conference). But now I discover in my latter years, that the theory of "checks and balances" is a fallacy. It does not work.

In the White House, as you read these words, there operates a small corporation with a complete dolt playing the part of the unitary chief executive with one finger on the button and another finger up his nose. More importantly there is a powerful cadre of megalomaniacs who are using a glaring loophole in the enforcement of the Constitution to shift actual mountains of public money into the pockets of their friends and favored business associates.

That they also cripple and kill thousands of US soldiers, tens upon tens of thousands of innocent foreign civilians; that they put future generations of US citizens deeply into debt; that they turn the whole diplomatic world against our country; that they ignore the science of global warming  . . . this is just an inconsequential by-product of doing business to them.

I just woke up at 5:30 a.m. EST to hear John Bolton crisply warn a BBC Radio correspondent with off-handed certainty about the utter reality that Iran is inciting hostilities with the whole world and especially the USA that will result in an upcoming conflict. Speaking as a member of the American Enterprise Institute, Bolton was very matter-of-fact with his assessments that conflict with Iran is inevitable and coming soon.

Sorry that I cannot cite, link, or quote any of this, the BBC has not put anything up on their website(s) yet. I will try to update later but I assume the story will appear here. And I know that this is far from shocking to hear Bolton calling for war with Iran, but I still find it remarkable that a politically ousted warmonger, having left an extremely unpopular presidential administration, and having joined an unabashedly right-wing think tank STILL gets his voice heard around the world on a MSM outlet like the BBC. Take away those qualifiers and "we" are still left with a former high-ranking US official openly advocating war with Iran.

It is just stupid neo-con fantasy foreign policy with no regard for consequences.

Premise: George W. Bush has succeeded in doing things that warrant investigations with an eye toward impeachment proceedings.

Hurdle: Thanks in large part to . . .

1) the freaks who sought to impeach Bill Clinton, and the act of oral sex they settled upon to use as the "tool" to make it happen

2) the breathtaking absurdity of Bush's presidential activities (i.e. falsely premised war, signing statement mania, illegal wire-tapping, outing CIA operatives)

3) the tabloid-like state of the once sober and thoughtful mainstream news media

Impeachment has become a laughing-stock! Any mention of impeachment or impeachable offenses instantly gets filed under "fringe-worthy." The stuff of deranged maniacal twits.

It is an odd dynamic that the longer you get exposed to a poison or a strain of disease, the more immune you become. Sometimes I think about how these years in the presence of the ever-lengthening Reagan/Bush 1/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Bush 2 legacy has toughened me up to their particular vile pathogen. I think that if a time machine had somehow spirited me forward from 1973 to the present, I would come to grips with how low we have sunken as a country and somehow just self-destruct like that tape-recorder on Mission Impossible.

I also think about free-thinking progressives of the past who succumb to the physical weight of mortality. I wonder, likewise, if they could bear the weight of the horrid reality that surrounds the current administration, its thoughts, its strategies, its deeds. Would Martin and Bobby survive the shock of the reality that would greet them upon their reviving?

Escalating troop levels in Iraq is exactly what Cheney wants to do in order to more solidly establish a base for pro-Western commercial interests. Cheney and Bush are not mad, they are cooly calculating how much money and how many lives they can "use" to maintain Iraq as an Industrial Colony in the Middle East.

The hardest part is getting your foot in the door. Cheney had to wait almost half of his adult life for the right opportunity to arise. He thought he had it made with the first Bush but much to his dismay that president was far too wimpy and/or concerned with diplomacy.

But with the second Bush, Cheney found a perfect dupe to allow for colonization of the Middle East. And with the McGuffin of The War on Terror framed in such starkness by the 9/11 attacks, Cheney found the perfect opening into which he could get his foot in the door.

There is a time to debate, then there is a time to move on. In the case of the War in Iraq, even though it is technically and logistically far from over, in the hearts and minds of the American people it is time to set a new course.

The numbers show that people disagree with Bush on Iraq, and that most people now assume that intelligence was falsified to get us into that war, that horse is dead now we needn't beat it anymore. We should keep acknowledging the fact of it because voters need to bear it in mind as they vote and make Congress turn from red to blue, but successful businesses don't dwell on the past, they move on to the next step.

This administration and this Republican Congress have the fatal flaw, they have some screwed-up male pride gene that rarely allows them to second-guess any decisive decision that Cheney makes (social security privatizing was a rare exception). And this is what can happen when you surround yourself with bleachers full of partisans cheering your every burp and fart, and a willing and able mainstream media who never questions and only promotes.

Bush and Cheney and the whole crew thinks that their shit doesn't stink, but I think they might grow to regret this lack of self-examination. Here on the ground in middle America, I am hearing from a lot of everyday people from both sides of the political spectrum speaking out against torture as being unAmerican. Torture is just far more akin to Nazi Germany than it is to the USA.

Liquid explosive threat, cockpit door issue, water supply threat, suitcase nuclear device threat, container ship threat, border security menace, profiling of Muslims, anthrax mailing, castor bean manipulation . . . you know the drill, please add your favorite one to the list.

Next week there will be a new threat trumpeted on FOX. A gadget, a gizmo, a gimcrack, a geegaw. Anything to keep a gullible American public in a state of fear. The reason the neo-cons settled on the War on Terror is the same reason we have already lost the war, because this isn't a war we're supposed to win so much as it is a theme designed to dominate our lives. This is THE THEME to take the place of the late, great Communist Menace.

I think that it has been a failure to adapt. And I think that the US foreign policy of "exporting" democracy displays the same lack of adaptability as the US auto industry. A dooming cultural parallel.

Of course this is not an earth shattering theory but I do think it is a shame that the smugness, blindness, and imperiousness of "the deciders" ends up trickling misery down onto the rank and file. And perhaps the stumble of an icon like Ford will cause people to question the "wisdom" of the governmental status quo.

"We lurch from near disaster to near disaster," said James Monnier Simon Jr., the assistant director of central intelligence for administration from 1999 to 2003. John MacGaffin, a 31-year C.I.A. veteran and a senior White House counterterrorism consultant, warned recently that "the national counterterrorism effort more closely resembles kids' soccer than professional football."

This quote from today's NY Times piece got me to pondering how the America people, most of its industries, and even its INTELLIGENCE agency are stuck thinking inside the box.

What is happening to the CIA, its disarray and its lack of function within its own government, is exactly what has been happening to other bloated US businesses that cannot put aside their old way of thinking in order to save themselves EXCEPT the CIA is far more critical to the country than IBM or GM.

The only reason Bush and Rove and Cheney and Frist and Hastert are finally reacting to the gasoline price issue is purely because of timing. Extremely low approval ratings plus an extremely high cost of living (led by fuel costs) in the summer before an electionseason might mean an extreme loss of House and Senate seats for the party that caters to the whims of the Ruling Class.

The price at the pump is finally becoming that the elite cannot afford to ignore because it is threatening to take away the political party that has made their New Golden Age flourish for the past 6 years.

Excuse me for being such an innocent, but this NYT account of Mary O. McCarthy's dismissal is just so emblematic of our country's descent into madness, it makes me ill.

The crime against humanity is brushed aside, filed under business as usual, while the crime of the whistleblower is pursued with great vigor. I can only imagine what other criminal policies will now flourish with current and future employees with a conscience duly chastened by this turn of events.

There are many in the White House who must see and know the dark business afoot: invading Iraq without due cause; outing a CIA agent; knowingly signing wrongfully worded bill into law; etc. If only someone (like Andrew Card) would DO THE RIGHT THING our country would take a giant leap forward.

This woman or man would go down as the greatest whistleblower ever, an unparalleled American hero. Deep Throat would be a minor footnote to this person. But it must be someone in-the-know, and willing to place loyalty to the Constitution above loyalty to George Bush. To think that simply telling the truth could return this country to greatness.

Take a look at this flimsy crap. Greenfield duffs the "story" off on the media's and the public's over-reaction. Screw that.

Jeff Greenfield is a stone cold stooge. If anything good can come out of this 6 year old deepening national nightmare I can only hope that it is that media apologists like Greenfield and Brooks and the rest somehow lose their credibility FOREVER. Maybe ridiculous editorials like this will help accomplish this goal.