Okay, we're there now. The new page is here: The Indisputable Truth. Thus far the comments have evaporated over there and the site isn't quite finished, but in the next day or so I'll hopefully get everything back together and I'll be writing consistently again. Tags: blogging, web site, server, update

No updates quite yet, folks. Sorry, this is taking up a lot of time.

After Blogger's 18-ish hour crap out that resulted in a few lost articles (which I had thought would be saved), as well as the current display errors, I've made the decision to move away from the Blogspot service. In the next day or so, I'm going to be migrating to my own domain and server, most likely www.indisputabletruth.net, possibly www.indisputable-truth.com although I don't like the hyphen. More updates as they come. Just be prepared for a change of bookmarks and a cosmetic change. I'll hopefully keep it minimal, but as I'm abandoning Blogspot, I'm going to be using a completely different software service. Keep your hats on, folks, things may get a little bumpy. Tags: website, domains, internet, blogging

Well this is awfully comforting. NBC recently did a little investigative journalism and found out that American airline screenings to not detect explosives. The test went through 21 different airports to see if homemade bomb materials could make it onto the plane. Apparently they could, and could do it pretty easily. In all 21 airports tested, no machine, no swab, no screener anywhere stopped the bomb materials from getting through. Even when investigators deliberately triggered extra screening of bags, no one discovered the materials. Isn't that fantastic? In all these years since 9/11, that's the progress we've made. Namely: none at all. We've moved ahead almost five years and we haven't even managed to protect the country from the one thing that would seem almost mandatory. Now, according to the Transportation Security Administration, "detecting explosive materials and IEDs at the checkpoint is TSA's top priority." There are two obvious ways of looking at that response, given the current situation. Either they're completely full of shit, or that may be the most frightening statement about the aviation business I've ever heard. 21 for 21 you can get homemade explosives onto a plane and that's the TOP priority. Hate to see what's considered unimportant. It's times like these that I absolutely do not understand how anyone can claim that the Bush Administration is even remotely good with national security. Our country gets hit by three hijacked airplanes and you can still get explosives onto airplanes? That's simply absurd. It reminds me of a few months ago when the 9/11 commission said we still weren't prepared for an attack. "A lot of the things we need to do really to prevent another 9/11 just simply aren't being done by the president or by the Congress." And now we have solid proof of it. Well done, Bush Clan. $247 billion spent on the Iraq War, thousands upon thousands of NSA wiretaps without court orders, and five years of invoking 9/11 in order to rally support and you haven't even gotten our airlines free of explosives, which shouldn't even require a 9/11 to get done. Tags: nbc, terrorism, 9/11, security, travel, bush, airlines

Okay, I think that makes me two for two on calling bullshit. First I pegged that the IEDs weren't coming from Iran, and now this crops up. I'm a little late with reporting it, I admit, but it's still worth noting. The story of 14 year old Martin Lee Anderson dying at a juvenile boot camp in Florida was hot stuff for a short period of time, and the claim of a medical examiner that the kid died from completely natural causes (sickle cell anemia, specifically) struck me as a little odd at the time, as I wrote here: Because, clearly, things like internal bleeding and hemorrhaging always crop up unexpected. The fact that the kid was tied up and being beaten was entirely unrelated. It's not like that could cause any kind of bleeding. And the bruises on his body? Oh those were from the attempts to resuscitate him. Really. Well, wouldn't you know it, it looks like that's not the case, and Anderson really was beaten to death. The new autopsy was conducted Monday by Hillsborough County Medical Examiner Vernard Adams. Baden said it was clear the teen did not die from sickle cell trait, or from any other natural causes. Yes, it turns out the kid probably didn't have the disease at all, that was just a pure excuse. The fact that it lasted even this long without being uncovered is pretty surprising to me, since I used pure logic to determine that it couldn't have worked like that. This was a 14 year old kid who didn't know he had sickle cell? And it was bad enough that it could kill him after a minor scuffle? Come on now, the kid was in a juvenile boot camp, odds are he's been in at least one fight during his life. If the condition was that bad, it would have reared its head by now. So, unsurprisingly, we find out that nothing sickle-cell related killed this kid and he really was beaten to death. This confuses me a bit, though: No guards have been arrested or fired but the camp has been closed. The fact that none of the guards have been arrested annoys me, to use the term as mildly as possible, but I'm still not sure what it matters that they weren't fired if the camp was closed. I suppose that's telling us that no specific action was taken against just them, but on the same token, the camp closed. No matter what they lost their jobs, action was taken against the whole damn camp. What really does get to me is that in cases like this, no action is ever taken against the guards or anyone responsible for this in a legal sense. If I worked at a convenience store and beat a kid to death because I thought he might have been stealing a candy bar, I'd be in prison. Nine guards beat a 140 pound kid to death and all that happens is the camp closes. Amazing. Tags: boot camp, injustice, cover-up, juvenile, Florida, military, death, youth, human rights

I think this is a good idea at night. Have at it. Also, I'm going to be fiddling with putting Technorati tags on the site now. I may or may not do the whole backlog (that could take hours), but I'll be doing it to the more recent ones. Go ahead and click on the tags if one of the topics interests you, see what others are saying. Tags: politics, liberal, progressive

File another one under the "who says it's all about terrorists?" heading. While all of the discourse during the NSA scandal has generally been about whether or not what the president did was patently illegal (which is where it should be, I believe), another fairly important thing to at least look at is who is getting spied on. Here we have The Thomas Merton Center, an anti-war activist group named after a Vietnam protestor, whom the ACLU has discovered was being spied on by the FBI in 2002. And it's a good thing, too. We can't be having these dangerous anti-war radicals running around with their "free speech" spreading their hate. The memo says that among other things, they advocate "pacifism". I'll tell you, I feel a lot safer knowing that these crazies are being looked at closely. And that's not all! The same memo notes that one of the leaflet distributors "appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent" but that no other participants appeared to be from the Middle East. Look out! They've got a Middle Eastern looking guy! Is this where we've gotten to in this country? The FBI is going to start eyeing anti-war groups? I know, I know, this one's special because there was a guy handing out leaflets who may or may not have been Middle Eastern, so this is totally different. That seems to be the excuse the FBI is hiding behind, that they were looking for a "person of interest", but unfortunately the documents don't say anything that effect. The ACLU reports on the incident in detail. The documents come to the ACLU as a result of a national campaign to expose domestic spying by the FBI and other government agencies. The ACLU has filed Freedom of Information Act requests in 20 states on behalf of more than 150 organizations and individuals. In response to these requests, the government has released documents that reveal monitoring and infiltration by the FBI and local law enforcement, targeting political, environmental, anti-war and faith-based groups. This is going beyond simple checking up on someone who may be a criminal. It's hard to argue with that, no one has immunity from the law simply because they're a group advocating whatever. If there's someone who may be a terrorist in the group, I'm pretty sure the rest of the group would like him outta there. That's not what this is. This is the FBI watching an anti-war group simply for being anti-war. I'd like to know what's so conservative about anything the Bush Administration is doing these days. This is shaping become the biggest Big Brother style government in the US's history. The Patriot Act lets the government find out what books you read and search your house without your permission (or even awareness of it), the NSA is allowed to spy on you any time Bush feels like it, and now the FBI will watch you protest. "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. Or else." Tags: spying, anti-war, FBI, ACLU, terrorism, activism

Hope you're proud of yourself Carla J. Martin. After her idiotic misconduct in Moussaoui's trial caused a judge to throw out a large portion of testimony, the prosecutor of the case has said there's no point to the trial now. The barred testimony "is one of the two essential and interconnected components of our case," the prosecutors wrote in a motion submitted to [Judge] Brinkema. Excluding the witnesses, the prosecutors wrote, make it "impossible for us to present our theory of the case to the jury." Now, one of the easiest responses would be "so what? It's a terrorist, who cares if there was a little misconduct." In fact that's what a few of the prosecutors are saying, that the misconduct of just one attorney shouldn't screw up the whole case. Unfortunately, I don't think that's the best idea in this case. Aside from the fact that Moussaoui, if the death penalty is thrown out, get off with "only" life in prison with no parole, to overlook such a ridiculous instance of misconduct in the courts simply for the severity of the case is opening up a pretty dangerous door. As much as I'd love to hit Moussaoui to the fullest extent of the law, the key note there is the "fullest extent of the law". One of the things we pride ourselves here in the United States, at least I do, is that for better or worse everyone is offered the exact same rights under the letter of the law. It's one of those nifty little things that makes sure no one can be oppressed by the government in the court (you can tell how well that's worked). However, it offers a fair amount of protection, and unless we accept that now and again it's going to result in something like this, we could easily lose what we do get. The real problem isn't the judge's ruling, it's the prosecutor's idiocy. I've said it already that this wasn't a hard case to prosecute, he admitted to conspiracy for terrorist attacks. This is another one of those cases where someone broke the law, and we can't play Bush here and start deciding which laws aren't important just because it may get us a result we want. Can you imagine a scenario when improper court procedure was considered unimportant just because of who the defendant was? I know a lot of people out there want the country to shift to a totalitarian "we can do whatever we want as long as its under the guise of stopping terrorism" state, but not me. Freedom isn't free, and that doesn't mean we have to give up freedoms. It means we have to give freedoms to people we probably wouldn't like to if we want them ourselves. The lesson to glean from this isn't "terrorists get off scot free if someone messes up a little", it's "FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DO NOT SCREW AROUND WHEN PROSECUTING A TERRORIST". Tags: Moussaoui, 9/11, terrorism, al Qaeda

Man, I'm pretty sure I called this one earlier this month. Despite all of the yelling on the part of Rummy and Bush, there is no evidence that IEDs in Iraq came from Iran, according to Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the military's Joint Chiefs of Staff. President George W. Bush said on Monday components from Iran were being used in powerful roadside bombs used in Iraq, and Rumsfeld said last week that Iranian Revolutionary Guard personnel had been inside Iraq to stir up trouble. Asked whether the United States has proof that Iran's government was behind these developments, Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the military's Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Pentagon briefing, "I do not, sir." I had previously expressed some skepticism about the US's setting the stage for an Iran War, feeling that it was fairly convenient shifting of responsibility for violence. Much like the war in Afghanistan was moved to Iraq, the war in Iraq is being moved to Iran. Now it seems I may have been onto something with that. Of course, simply admitting that there was a hasty conclusion drawn is too uncharacteristic of this administration, so it's time to make a few excuses instead. "As to equipment, unless you physically see it coming in agovernment-sponsored vehicle or with government-sponsored troops, you can't know it," Rumsfeld said. "All you know is that you find equipment, weapons, explosives, whatever, in a country that came from the neighboring country." Well, it is a neighboring country, after all. It's next door and there are almost certainly people in there who don't like the United States. That doesn't mean jack. Now if stuff was coming from India, then that might be serious cause for alarm and an indication that the government might be involved. You can't suddenly make the leap that because some weapons came in from Mexico that are being used in gang violence that the Mexican government is responsible for fighting in the United States. In this case, it's not even full weapons, just components. What components? Well, we don't know, because we haven't even been told where the information came from. I have this image of wires and red buttons being pointed at as proof of something. Rummy then goes on to say that you can't even tell if people are involved from the government because Iranians make a pilgrimage to sites in Iraq (I wonder if that Golden Mosque was on the Shiite's list...). So now all we've got is some people who are from Iran who may not be involved in anything and a few weapons and that's adequate evidence to start up a war with Iran. Honestly, though, that's more than we ever had to go into Iraq. Tags: Iran, Iraq, Bush, Rumsfeld, IEDs, war, military, terrorism

The republicans call Vietnam War veterans Murtha and Kerry "cowards", the Bush Clan has smeared those two men as well as McCain (another Nam vet) on numerous instances. Meanwhile, the right flocks behind Bush as a brave man of war, behind a man who saw as much combat during Vietnam as I did. Discuss.

When even our closest ally is telling us that things are going terribly, I'd say that's a minor hint that things are really going terribly. Here we have warnings to Tony Blair that the US was mishandling the war. Now, really, I'm pretty sure none of us needed any reaffirmation of this fact, but it's especially interesting to hear that the country we pretty much point to as proof that there's any kind of meaningful support was rumbling of, basically, incompetence. Describing [retired general Jay] Garner's outfit, he wrote: "No leadership, no strategy, no coordination, no structure and inaccessible to ordinary Iraqis." The forthcoming arrival of Paul Bremer, the U.S. diplomat who replaced Garner, was "not a day too soon," he added. I'd say that's a pretty fair way of putting things. Though the real doozie's here: Phase IV [the post-war nation-building stage] "did not work well" because the focus of U.S. planners had been on the invasion, he wrote. "There was a blind faith that Phase IV would work. There was a failure to anticipate the extent of the backlash or mood of Iraqi society." Now I don't know about that part. I can't really think of anyone who would blindly have thought that we would be greeted as liberators in Iraq. That's a pretty optimistic way of looking at things. Who in the world would have... Oh, right. Forgot about that guy. What's really nice is that while everything coming in from other areas is talking about problems over there, be they potential or realized, American intelligence refuses to acknowledge them. We had Bush telling us Saddam had WMDs and helped al Qaeda with 9/11, Rummy telling us Saddam was an "imminent threat" to the US, our Veep assuring us that we'd be greeted with open arms as liberators, Administrator of the US Agency for International Development Andrew Natsios assuring us that $1.7 billion in taxpayer money for the war was a high estimate, and Gen Casey reminding us that the civil strife was over. Hard to believe how completely wrong everything we were told was. Oh, speaking of the violence in Iraq, it seems that around 87 more bodies were found in the past 24 hours. A few mass graves, some stuffed in buses, that's a body count of around 25% of what the media kept trying to push across as the total count. Interestingly, I mentioned a little while ago that body counts were being suppresed by Shiites, and it didn't seem to get picked up. As I wrote there: It seems now I have my answer: Shiite officials are suppressing execution-style death tolls, so the only "official" numbers are coming in the form of explosions and in-the-street violence. What do you know, almost a week later we find stockpiles of bodies killed in that exact manner. I'd keep an eye on this one, folks, I heavily doubt this is the end of discovering bodies out there. There are more, possibly many more. It's going to really bring to light what's happening with the forming government. I can only imagine how Bush could possibly respond upon finding that the government he's championed putting into the country may be executing people and hiding the bodies. Can his little mind possibly comprehend the elected government hating democracy? I doubt it, myself. Personally, I think we do need to "cut and run" now. Dangerous place, and they need to sort out their own affairs. Like I said, we aren't police, we've made them a non-threat to the United States, time to go.

Is it just me, or does it seem like there's always a new reason to spend another few billion in Iraq and stay there another year? Now we've go the United States spending billions and deploying experts to stop IEDs, or Improvised Explosive Devices, which is a pretty fancy term to mean a bomb that they piece together on the fly and put on the side of the road. The situation is just maddening. Not only because we've got American soldiers being blown up by street bombs planted by insurgents, but for the way it's being looked at by the government. I would think that anyone viewing this situation with an objective eye would see this as some ragtag insurgents planting bombs and that's about the end of the situation. The bombs may be fairly advanced due to using Saddam's old materials, but these aren't war experts. But listening to the military you'd think we're dealing with masterminds. Hoaxes are a peril. "The enemy's very smart," said Capt. Peter Weld, Sisk's commander. "They plant a harmless device that soldiers find and gather around, and then they hit them with a real device nearby." I fail to see how "very smart" the enemy is. It's planting a fake bomb. It's not exactly a carefully planned strategy, I'm pretty sure that's shown up in a number of movies. Our military is getting outsmarted by that? You know, I don't even know why they'd need to use a fake bomb. According to the Captain here, the soldiers all gather around the harmless device. The insurgents could just blow that up and not need to worry about having decoys. Is that what our military is trained to do? Find something that looks like a bomb and huddle around it? No wonder people are calling the attackers so smart. People wonder why I say the war isn't planned and constructed well at all, here you go. Then we've got this kind of comment: Lt. Col. Bill Adamson, operations chief for the anti-IED campaign, was realistic about the challenge in a Pentagon interview. "They adapt more quickly than we procure technology," he said of the insurgents. What kind of a state are we in? We're the United States of America, can someone tell me why a bunch of ragtag insurgents are able to stay a step ahead of us? It occurs to me, though. What's going on is we're trying to fight insurgents while protecting the people who live there as peaceful citizens. The military in Iraq is protecting the emerging democracy and those who live in it while detaining and removing the threat of terrorism and insurgency. If this were really a war, we'd blow up the areas like we did at the beginning before we accomplished our mission. Now we're trying to root out the individuals. So what would you call a force that patrols the streets to protect the citizens? An army? I sure wouldn't. I'd call that the police. And that's exactly what our army is doing in Iraq. We haven't done anything remotely for the protection of the United States in as long as we've been there. We forced in a democracy and now we're spending our time and money to make sure it sticks. When did our military become primarily concerned with the well-being of people of another country? But, really, the end result of this is that we've got Sunnis fighting Shiites, with a death toll that's steadily climbing despite officials assuring us the threat is over, and we've got insurgents blowing up Americans. Bush wants to say anyone who opposes us staying there a coward, that we shouldn't want to "cut and run". But really, why are we still there? What benefit are AMERICANs getting? Sure a warm fuzzy feeling from a democratic Iraq is nice, but the cost of this war is just incredible and that's going to hurt us far more than it helps. Some will say "having an ally in the Middle East is what we need". Sure, that'd be nice if we weren't doing it by pissing off other countries and destroying our own military. Our soldiers did not enlist to act as police for Iraqis. They are our protection, and using them for this purpose is simply sickening. Killing them for this purpose is detestable.

You know, there are times when you almost want to feel bad for the guy, until you remember how many people he's killed and all the civil liberties he took a crap on. Many were complaining about the CBS poll showing Bush's rating at 34%, saying that the polling group was more democrats and independents than republicans. Well, now we've got another one to work with, the USAToday/CNN/Gallup poll that's got him at 36%, the lowest they've seen yet. Now, I could obviously question what everyone's problem is about who gets polled, because these same polls had Bush at nearly 90 after 9/11, and in the 70s after the "Mission Accomplished" banner happened. Actually I'm going to do just that, and I'm going to attack the problem from three different heads. First off, as I mentioned, Bush's ratings were around 90 after 9/11. Unless these people complaining think that the poll targeted a different demographic back in '01, we all agree the same people said that 90% that are saying the 36%. So either the republicans are bitching and moaning about a very small percentage difference between what the recent polls are saying and what they really are, since it's the same people, then they're apparently of the belief that after 9/11 over 100% of the country liked him. I don't think I'm alone in saying that's pretty bloody unlikely. Secondly, trends are more important than straight numbers, and the trends make Bush look even worse. If his approval was low after all of the events that should typically spike approval (tragedies, the "victory" in a war), then it'd be pretty easy to accuse polling bias of keeping him down. But he went from the highest approval of any president to the third lowest. His approval dropped by almost two-thirds from that huge 9/11 bump to now. Since I'm still going off the assumption that these polls (if they're so biased) aren't going to have ever skewed numbers to make him look BETTER, he's still the president with the worst approval rating drop in history. Thirdly, how do people think these polls happen? Aside from not having seen any proof of party bias in the polls, do these people think 4,000 people are selected, and then after the poll is conducted 1,100 of them are used? A thousand or so people are selected at random, and then the party affiliations are revealed after it's over. So it's still a random sampling. I'd question if there are simply more democrats or independents. now thanks to him. Of course, then we find ourselves noting that the party affiliation isn't necessarily a great indicator of things, as we see in Susa's 50 state poll of whether people thought Bush broke the law with wiretaps. Now, yes, it's true that the red states are more inclined to saying he obeyed the law and the blue states more inclined that he broke it, but what are our (unweighted) averages? RED STATES Obeyed the law: 35% Broke the law: 36% BLUE STATES Obeyed the law: 28% Broke the law: 43.5% So we're talking a 7% difference between the republicans and democrats on the issue, roughly. I ignored the undecideds because they were fairly even between the two groups. Now, if it's true that bias is given to one group over the other, let's say a nice pro-blue bias (three dems for every one republican), let's see how that stacks up to normal: NO BIAS (50/50) Obeyed the law: 31.5% Broke the law: 40% BIAS TOWARD DEMOCRATS (75/25) Obeyed the law: 29.75% Broke the law: 41.5% Wow. What a change even an enormous bias for democrats gives to that poll. Republicans, you're going to have to stop crying about every little poll that comes out. Like it or not, the country is not behind Bush, and all of the moaning about liberal bias in the media isn't going to change that. At least not in any significant way. And then there's this, which totally slays me. Nearly half of those polled said they believe Democrats would do a better job of managing the war -- even though only a quarter of them said the opposition party has a clear plan for resolving the situation. That's right. Only half of the people who think dems would do a better job actually have any idea what they would do. There is a significant portion of the population who is basically saying "anyone can do a better job than Bush"

This is absolutely unbelievable. Thanks to the attorney's coaching the witnesses, a federal judge has recessed Moussaoui's trial for two days. More than that, there's a chance that now the death penalty will be taken off the table as a sentencing option. According to descriptions by the lawyers in court, it appeared that a female FAA attorney who had attended closed hearings in the case went over with four coming witnesses from her agency the opening statements at the trial, the government's strategy and even the transcript of the questioning of an FBI agent on the first day. All right, let's examine this one for a moment. I've expounded on my opinions about the Moussaoui trial in relation to 9/11, but I've also stressed that he should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Considering the guy obviously committed some treason, to a level that would have resulted in a whole slew of deaths no less, I don't believe the death penalty would be at all out of line. That brings me to this incident. The guy has admitted that he conspired to fly an airplane into the White House. If he's sentenced to death for that, then really that's the most we can do to him, so I think trying to pin anything extra is unnecessary and won't amount to much other than looking good. Hell, you can even say "see? We got one" no matter what. Why am I stressing this point? Because, as I said, the man admitted to a crime that may be worthy of execution. So what does Lil Miss Moron do? Screws up the whole damn trial with a ridiculously illegal move. The judge herself said that in "all the years I've been on the bench, I have never seen such an egregious violation of a rule on witnesses" and the prosecutor called it "horrendously wrong". This is like the OJ trial with Mark Fuhrman. You take what should be an airtight (or at least fairly easy) case and one idiot throws the whole thing out the window by doing something stupid. Of course, the obvious observation: throwing out the death penalty just isn't right thanks to the severity of the case. So, how about we just throw out that testimony? Clearly it's unreliable, but the prosecution has a slight problem with that: Prosecutor David Novak replied that removing the FAA witnesses would "exclude half the government's case." Novak suggested instead that the problem could be fixed by a vigorous cross-examination by the defense. Fantastic. Half of the government's case is currently resting on the testimony of people who were illegally informed of trial proceedings, which is about as helpful as taking testimony from someone who used a teleprompter. I said earlier that it'd be pretty easy to pin some serious crimes against the nation on Moussaoui, particularly concerning his admitted involvement in other attacks that never came to fruition. Admittedly that does ignore this little tidbit at the end concerning this specific trial: Up to now the burden of proof was this: To obtain the death penalty, prosecutors must first prove that Moussaoui's actions — specifically, his lies_ were directly responsible for at least one death on Sept. 11. I'm sorry to say, that's almost impossible. For that to be proven, the prosecution would have to prove that the government was completely on top of things before 9/11, and that if Moussaoui had been honest then it would have been prevented. For that accusation to stick, somehow it would have to be proven that he was the only reason that the attacks happened. If all of the doors to your house are open, you can't blame the guy guarding the front door after someone robs you, even if he was sleeping on the job. We're trying to get this guy for the wrong thing, and the prosecution managed to even totally screw that up.

I'll tell you, this is one of the coolest things I've read in a while. Though it's a fairly extreme leap, Feingold's resolution to censure Bush is, even if unsuccessful, the kind of thing we need to start pushing to show that aside from disagreeing with the president, people are going to do something about it. Disagreement with the president isn't anything new, and in the five and a half years since he took office it's not like Bush has never run into a time where he was facing a whole lot of opposition. Opposition from the United Nations, from Congress, now and again his own people (remember Colin Powell saying he didn't think pre-war intelligence was right?), it's all old hat for this guy. However, that doesn't amount to jack when it's a president who has no problem with simply hopping around anyone in his way and doing whatever he bloody well pleases. It ends up looking like a bunch of whiners not actually trying to get anything done. Thank the lawd for Feingold, then. He even makes sure to clarify this movement in relation to the current efforts to fix up the laws. "There can be debate about whether the law should be changed. There can be debate about how best to fight terrorism. We all believe that there should be wiretapping in appropriate cases -- but the idea that the president can just make up a law, in violation of his oath of office, has to be answered." This is what I've been screaming about for forever. It isn't a fight against wiretapping, it's a fight against ILLEGAL wiretapping. You can argue all you want about the inefficiency or the problems with the laws as written, but the president simply isn't allowed to go changing any laws he doesn't like just because he wants to. It's the same argument I wrote into the Pittsburgh Post Gazette about in response to a woman who just didn't catch on. There are other people who didn't catch onto this problem, namely our good friend Bill Frist. Still proving he thinks the only purpose of government is to give a thumbs-up to whatever the president says, he had this to say: "He is flat wrong, he is dead wrong," said the Tennessee Republican --also a potential presidential candidate in 2008 -- adding that "attacking our commander in chief ... doesn't make sense." Right. Being against the president: always a bad idea. He even added that the American people are "solidly behind" the president on this issue. I guess he forgot the poll that showed that 52% of Americans favor impeachment if it turns out he spied without a court order, amongst others with similar numbers. Even the most sunny reports have those who say Bush should be allowed to do it in the low 50's. Hardly "solidly behind". Will the censure succeed? That's fairly debateable, but it's definitely a step in the right direction. Let's take this in the other direction, for any right-minded folk who might be reading. Can you imagine what kind of havoc would happen if a hardcore liberal president was allowed to sidestep any laws he didn't like, and then the only consequences are that the laws are fixed to allow him to do what he already did? Mull that over, imagining what would happen, then tell me you approve of what's happening now for reasons other than just liking Bush.

Honestly, I sure hope so. So Frist won a poll concerning potential 2008 presidental candidates. He even trounced, which really shouldn't come as a surprise since McCain has been losing points for breaking ranks with Bush, while Frist has generally stuck alongside the pres aside from the ports deal, and that was only because it was trendy. Frist, who packed the home-state crowd with supporters wearing blue "Frist is my leader" buttons, won nearly 37 percent of the 1,427 votes cast by delegates to the Southern Republican Leadership Conference. You know, I think this is great. I honestly do. Frist is the weakest willed person I know of in Washington these days. The man cannot make a decision on his own, he just drifts along wherever Bush is headed unless the political climate is such that he should oppose the guy. If the republicans want to nominate a man that will not take a stand on anything unless there's someone there to tell him what to think, that's just dandy. Hell, they've already done it once before. By proxy, that leaves Frists's popularity in the tanker as well. But if I were to diverge from my "anything to sabotage the republican party" rhetoric then I'd say the republicans need to honestly choose anyone but this dingbat. Bush's popularity keeps going down, and anyone who sticks by him is going to look worse and worse as time goes on. Even other GOP'ers are making distance between themselves and Bush in order to help their presidential bids. The first-tier presidential aspirants (McCain, Romney, Allen) all showed up here, switching on their best smiles as they back slappedtheir way around the fabled Peabody Hotel. In the lobby, New Hampshire power broker Tom Rath talked about that delicate dance: "Unless things improve (for Bush), you won't see anyone running back to embrace the mother ship. Nobody is running as his natural political heir." Well... nobody except for Frist. And yet, he's the guy that gets chosen as the next republican candidate. That tells me two things: that the republicans in power realize that they need to get away from Bush because he's simply a black spot on the country's history, and that the republican population still flocks to whoever still is faithful to our Mighty Leader. I think that speaks a fair deal about the general intelligence of your average republican voter. Or at least roughly 37% of them. The democrats don't like Bush, neither do the republicans in Washington. I can only wonder what it is that keeps the general population still rooting for the guy.

Hi there. My name's Zach, and I suppose I'm not a very good liberal. I think the world has blacks, cripples, retards, and fat people. I think things are "illegal", not "unlawful". I think the KKK has every right to say they hate everyone, but I also have the right to call them idiots. I think Osama and al Qaeda should be thrown off of skyscrapers, because it seems fitting. I think Saddam was an asshole and a terrible person. I think some problems can't be solved by throwing money at them. I think illegal immigrants don't deserve the same rights afforded to citizens. I think the death penalty is necessary sometimes. I think you can put all the religious decorations on your personal property you want. I think abortion isn't something everyone should aspire to have. I think a family with a stable mother and father is the best situation for a child to be in. I think affirmative action is problematic. I think the welfare system is being abused. I think kids need a smack now and again. I think drugging kids to make them calm down is a terrible idea. I think media bias masking as journalism is a bad thing. I think Hardball is a pretty good show. I think that after 9/11 there is a valid reason to be wary of some Arabs. I think Christmas is a pretty nifty holiday. I think America is a great nation, and I want to have a family and die here an old man. Hi there. My name's Zach, and I suppose I'm not a very good liberal.

I'm going to open this one up with a challenge. Wade through the article without bursting into laughter or getting a nosebleed. So our president is facing more problems. His approvals ratings are in the toilet, Iraq is getting worse and worse, the Katrina videos are proving him to be more incompetent than we previously thought possible. What's a pres to do? Well, Bush is giving speeches to rally support of the war. Specifically, he's trying to convince skeptics that there is a victory strategy and it's going great. Wait a second. We have a plan for victory? Did we forget this? We're within two months of the third anniversary of this event, and now the president is going to make speeches to tell us that he's got a way to win the war? Seems like we jumped the gun with that little banner, there. You know, even if it's true that there is a strategy for "victory", it hardly matters now. Bush has done the equivalent of telling his nephew to knock a beehive down with a shovel and then four hours later saying "Okay Billy, I think I have a way to get you out of there!" The president hopes to give "better depth, understanding and context for how the strategy in Iraq is unfolding," a senior White House official said of the planned speeches. Nothing about the Iraq strategy is unfolding. Even giving the president the benefit of the doubt that he ever had a strategy beyond "git in there and git Saddam", we would call this "unravelling", not unfolding. To say any portion of the Iraq War has had any semblance of strategy would be to lie to oneself grievously. The president is in a pathetically desparate state now. Early on it seemed that what he did was in order to get his policies pushed, and he was exploiting situations to best suit him. Now it's more that all he can do is try to get the heat off of him as quickly as he can. The republicans in Congress are jumping ship in time for the 2006 elections, as if a presidential endorsement is a political kiss of death now. Which it may very well be when the man himself has a sub-40% approval rating that is only moving downward. So off he goes, determined to make things better. But don't worry, he's still doing my favorite trick which I'm going to dub "abracadubya". Basically it goes like this, you take a fairly cut and dry event, perhaps one concerning internal conflict and... "There are some who are trying to, obviously, sow the seeds of sectarian strife," Bush said, during remarks to a group of community newspaper publishers yesterday. "They fear the advancement of a democracy. They blow up shrines in order to cause this Iraqi democracy that is emerging to go backwards, to not emerge." ...Abracadubya! Now it's about terrorists who hate democracy and freedom again. The Sunnis aren't attacking Shiites because they have a centuries-long tradition of hating each other and now the advent of a Shiite-led government rubs them the wrong way, they simply hate the idea of democracy and progress. I think the problem is that Bush sees foreign violence as the complement to the violence he starts. He blows up cities in order to make democracy happen without a real end in mind, his plans made with vague philosophical ideas that look fairly nice on paper. Thus, he can't parse that anyone who does things that impede on his wishes could have any goals BUT simply to disrupt things. It just doesn't seem to register. To him, violence is there simply to start more violence. At least when people we don't like are doing it. That's really the strangest part. At this point I don't believe he is being politically manipulative with the war. He's been far too rock solid on how he sees it to be doing this for pure personal gain. He truly sees these attacks as people trying to destroy freedom, and he truly sees insurgents as haters of democracy and not people fighting against other people. You almost wonder if he were the principal of a school if he'd expel children for fighting, because they're sowing the seeds of discord and trying to disrupt the educational process. Fortunately, the country isn't following along any more. It's just three more years of him getting limper and more pathetic. Best we can hope is that his days of really screwing up are at a standstill, because he's too ineffective to do anything at all.

Yep, that's right. It seems that in light of the UAE ports deal being shut down, Bush is worried by the "broader message" it sends. "In order to win the war on terror, we've got to strengthen our relationships and friendships with moderate Arab countries in the Middle East," Bush told a meeting of the National Newspaper Association in Washington. I think if you took out "moderate" and replaced it with "America-invested" then chances are the statement would be a lot more accurate. Mr Bush, once again, this issue has far less to do with the UAE than I think you're willing to acknowledge. So far, no less than five relatively large events (some enormous like the war or 9/11, some not so large like the Cheney shooting) have all happened, each of which could have been considered understandable in their own rights. Attacks, hunting accidents, hurricanes, these things happen. I think it's pretty foolish for anyone to expect a president to protect us from any and all disasters. What is way more important is how you deal with it. All through the article Bush keeps talking about how grand the UAE is and how helpful they've been. That's awesome. Glad to know they're good people. I'd like to strengthen our relationship with them myself. Maybe if you hadn't been such a jacknut and threatened to veto any attempts to even delay the deal (not stop it, just delay) after hearing about it on the news, maybe people wouldn't have lost it. Or maybe, just maybe, when you're walking around saying Palestine's democratically elected government needs to bend to the United States' will, that we need to impose sanctions on Iran if they have a picture of uranium on their wall, and that anyone with a remotely Middle-Eastern sounding name is a terrorist and belongs on the watch list, you're going to run into a problem. Namely that in addition to the democrats who expect you do stupid stuff, you're also going to have to deal with your lapdogs who have crammed their heads full of "Arabs are bad". Speaking of those sentiments, we've also got this bit in a London paper by an Arabian writer: "The excuses that the U.S. Congress used to oppose this deal were not only pathetic but very racist at the same time because if a non-Arab company would have won the bid, we would not have heard all that noise from the U.S. Congress or any other American institution," the editorial said. That's absolutely right. I don't even pretend to doubt it. Well, it's not entirely true. If we were to find out that China or Cuba or Nigeria suddenly bought up our ports, there'd be a hell of an outrage as well. Don't forget Russia circa the 1980s. It's not the color of the skin, it's the history the nation has in dealing with us. I might trust Hamas to deal with Palestine, I wouldn't want 'em in charge of anything on our soil. If anything is damaged thanks to all of this, it's your fault, Sir Bush. Your fault for dealing with it so piss-poorly, like you have time and time again.

Somewhat, anyway. The United States is handing the prison over to Iraq, but not until we get all of our prisoners the heck outta there. And, in an interesting turn of events, it looks like that might start happening fairly soon. Though, honestly, I'm not exactly sure what this means in terms of how the United States will be dealing with prisoners. We've still got Bagram and who knows how many other hidden prisons full of people pissing in plastic buckets, so I fear mostly that this is a surface deal, made because Abu Ghraib has become the face of scandal in Iraq. All of the prisoners are getting moved elsewhere, and the fact that all of the heat was on Abu Ghraib nearly exclusively, I can't help but wonder if this is the last time many of them will see daylight. "There are facilities being built so that the U.S. can pull out of Abu Ghraib. Then it will be up to the Iraqi government to decide what they want to do. I do not know that the Iraqi government had decided. It's an Iraqi decision, I just don't know that they've made that decision." New facilities, though. There's a double edged sword to this concept. On one hand, that means they're new, so the media is going to be seeing where they are, seeing the progress as they're built, and thus will know they're there. On the other hand, it also means there's a great chance that there will be a lot more facilities that we aren't going to know bout, at least for a while. Thumbs up to the Iraq government, though, for working on how things will go after the occupation is over. Capital punishment was suspended during the formal U.S. occupation, which ended in June 2004, and the Iraqis reinstated the penalty two months later for those found guilty of murder, endangering national security and distributing drugs, saying it was necessary to help put down the persistent insurgency. A small handful of executions of violent insurgents, plus three others have happened so far. As it turns out, the president is against capital punishment and so far has deferred the authorization to his pair of vice presidents. They even freed a few of Saddam's former agents, saying they weren't guilty of any crimes against humanity. Looks like Iraq might pull itself out of the muck after all. Here's hoping, folks.

Count another loss for the Bush clan today. After a few weeks of serious debate and a completely unprecedented GOP split from the White House, Dubai Ports World will sell its American operation to a US "entity". A 62-2 vote in the House Appropriations Committee no less. A leading congressional critic of the ports deal, Rep. Peter King, applauded the decision but said he and others would wait to see the details. "It would have to be an American company with no links to DP World, and that would be a tremendous victory and very gratifying," said the New York Republican, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. See folks, when you have Chuck Schumer on Savage and they're both agreeing, you know this is bad for our Mighty Leader. When Bill Frist says he'll overturn the president's veto, you know it's really bad. So, faced with this kind of a problem, how is the president going to make Scotty respond? "It does provide a way forward and resolve the matter so we can continue working on other important priorities," said White Housespokesman Scott McClellan. ...gotcha. I wrote a little while ago on why the UAE deal was important, and I think the end result drives an important message to the White House. The people are not going to accept our leaders sleeping at the wheel for any more issues. Finding out that a deal is going through without Congress being aware of it or even a review held is simply unacceptable. I can't help but wonder if Bush found out that the deal died on TV.

Sometimes I really do love the Washington Post, and this is one of those times. You see, I'd been wondering why I had written about a body count of over a thousand while the vast majority of reports coming out of US media was putting the number at under 500 still. It seems now I have my answer: Shiite officials are suppressing execution-style death tolls, so the only "official" numbers are coming in the form of explosions and in-the-street violence. The official, who spoke on the condition that he not be named because he feared for his safety, said a representative of the Shiite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, ordered that government hospitals and morgues catalogue deaths caused by bombings or clashes with insurgents, but not by execution-style shootings. Given the numbers from the morgues, this would make sense. And, frankly, it's rather alarming to know that even the government may be withholding information related to this serious issue. It doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the new government to know that they're going to be hiding things. More than that, you have to remember that it's the Shiites that would be ordering these executions. The widely differing tolls reflect acute political sensitivity at a time when Iraq's three-year-old conflict is undergoing a fundamentalshift: Execution-style killings of the kind frequently blamed on police or Shiite militias allied with the government appear to be killing more Iraqis than bombings of government and civilian targets by Sunni Arab insurgents. Uh-oh. I would think the first thought when seeing something like this would be: are we sure Iraq is better now?

I have a bad feeling I'm going to open up a can of words with this one. Let's throw out a scenario, purely hypothetical but not exactly unrealistic. You've been going out with your girlfriend, and you've been going out with her a while (assuming you're a guy). Let's say a year or two. You've been faithful to each other, and the both of you have been tested for every STD on the planet and you're both disease free. Your girl is on the pill and the pair of you decide to go at it condom-free, since you both feel safe. You've agreed no kids yet, you're not ready for them at all and have stressed this. Everything's cool for a while, then your girl seems to be sick. Turns out she wasn't being honest about using the pill (she wanted a kid and was lying or she forgot and was horny that night, take your pick). Now she's pregnant and refuses an abortion. You don't want a kid and have said that since the beginning, and your girl refuses to put the kid up for adoption. You leave, because after all of that discussion on no kids, she's pregnant and won't terminate for religious/ethical reasons. Unfortunately, you now have to pay child support to the tune of a few hundred a month. Fair? I don't think so, and now men want a say in unplanned pregnancies. Meet Mel Feit, director of the National Center for Men. "There's such a spectrum of choice that women have -- it's her body, her pregnancy and she has the ultimate right to make decisions," said Mel Feit, director of the men's center. "I'm trying to find a way for a man also to have some say over decisions that affect his life profoundly." Some are calling this lawsuit the Roe v Wade for men. Unfortunately not everyone agrees with this. Take Jennifer Brown of Legal Momentum, a women's rights group. "Roe is based on an extreme intrusion by the government -- literally to force a woman to continue a pregnancy she doesn't want," Brown said."There's nothing equivalent for men. They have the same ability as women to use contraception, to get sterilized." Not quite, Jenny (mind if I call you Jenny?). You see, in the case of Roe v Wade, we have the government forcing a woman to be a mother when she doesn't want to be. In this case, we have the government forcing a man to be a father when he doesn't want to be. If a couple disagrees on an abortion, the woman can get the abortion even if the guy disagrees, and even if they break up at least the pregnancy is terminated. A man can't have an abortion behind his girlfriend's back, for hopefully obvious reasons. At the end of the day, the basic gist of things is that the baby is in the woman's tum-tum, so she gets to say whether or not it lives. This is where the "it's a woman's body, it's a woman's right to choose" thing starts to get hazy. It's going on in the woman's body, but that child isn't just hers. It's not just an extension of her body like an extra limb or a cyst. It's a composite little piece of life that two people made. I realize this makes me sound pro-life, but trust me I'm anything but. My point there was just to say that it takes two to make that thing. Feit doesn't advocate an unlimited fatherhood opt-out; he proposes a brief period in which a man, after learning of an unintended pregnancy, could decline parental responsibilities if the relationship was one in which neither partner had desired a child. I like this idea, though I think it does forget the possibility of a woman doing something in order to make a pregnancy happen (poke holes in the condoms, lie about being on the pill, lie about surgery, etc). There should be a statute of limitations, though, I agree. Can't have a guy that suddenly decides at the 9th month that he changed his mind and wants out. Honestly, I think abortion and this law should have roughly the same time frame. Sounds fair to me. If the guy didn't want out before the end of the abortion period was over, that means he's changing his mind and that's exactly what we don't want. This is a clause intended to be for when the pregnancy is entirely unplanned and he can't get his girlfriend/wife to terminate it. That is ALL this should be used for.

I'm incredibly surprised this one isn't getting that much attention in terms of international news. For those unaware of the issue, what we've got is a hell of a war going on in Darfur, Sudan. It's happening between "Arab" and "non-Arab" sections of the country (quotes because the differentiation isn't quite accurate), with the non-Arabs accusing the majority Arab government of neglect. The non-Arab citizens took up arms, and the government responded by ravaging most of their towns. Reports vary on the body count, but it ranges between 180,000 and 300,000 with around 2 million displaced from their homes. Needless to say, it's an ugly and disturbing situation. There are talks of UN intervention, which Sudan officials warn against. The opinion on that side seems to be that if the United Nations gets involved, violence will increase and the outside troops will be seen as invaders regardless of their race. An understandable position, though myself I'm wondering what the citizens think. It's pretty obvious that the people on the killing side are going to want to keep the UN out. "Even if they send pure Muslim or Arab troops we will consider them invaders and will fight them," Fatahi Khalil, the dean of the Sudanese Bar Association and secretary of the Popular Organization for the Defense of the Homeland and the Faith, told cheering crowds And really, why wouldn't the citizens want the UN to help? Foreign involvement always works. I mean, look at Iraq! Er, Israel. Um... Korea? All right, moving along then. The question is... where has the United States been during all of this? Saddam probably killed anywhere from thirty to forty thousand people in his borders, and so that's half the reason we invaded the country. Bush has already conceded that we'd have gone in regardless of the WMDs, and the number one anti-war argument seems to be "So you WANT Saddam to still be in power?" Naturally an anti-war arguer at this point will start hedging nervously and going "Well, NO, but..." and the argument's done with. Obviously, the proper response is "so why aren't we in Darfur?" We'll invade a country whose leader killed 40 thousand people, but a government killing two hundred thousand or so? That's not our problem, apparently. I really do hate turning things back to the Iraq war, but it's pretty difficult to avoid at times. They didn't have weapons and now we have a situation that's FAR more dire, but yet the war in Iraq is still defended. Amazing, no? So back to Darfur. What should the UN be doing? Take action or not? Hard to say.

I'll tell ya, the best thing about the presidency these days is that the administration either blames whoever blows the whistle on problems or calls them liars. Today's flavor is our good friend Don Rumsfeld blaming the media for exaggerating Iraq violence. Yes, exaggerating. "From what I've seen thus far, much of the reporting in the U.S. and abroad has exaggerated the situation, according to General Casey, "Rumsfeld said. "The number of attacks on mosques, as he pointed out, had been exaggerated. The number of Iraqi deaths had been exaggerated." Oh yeah, good old General Casey. Would that be the same General Casey who said the violence was over? Would that be him? I'm not entirely sure I'd trust the guy. Seems a little out of touch with things. Rumsfeld isn't too trustworthy either, though. Bearing in mind he's the man who called Saddam an "imminent threat" to the United States, and then later denied saying such on Meet the Press only to be shown video of him saying just that. So not only couldn't we trust him when he said it in the first place, he's lying about having said it later. And he's quoting someone who said the sectarian violence ended last Friday, when actually eleven people died today in Iraq, complete with some more mosque destruction just to make things interesting. Rumsfeld then goes on to say that all of these exaggerations are occurring on "one side" of the issue. Meaning, it's there to "give heart to the terrorists." Well, I certainly wouldn't want to do that. ...wait, what? Oh, that's how it works. Apparently telling people what's happening is giving aid to the enemy. It's certainly not doing anything crazy like showing people that things aren't going as well as the administration wants to tell us it is. It isn't honest journalism that tells the American citizens what's really happening in the world. No, it's another example of "playing politics" that the administration is so adamantly against. Which is really a shame, since they decided to have a career in politics. Honestly that's the most alarming trend coming out of the White House these days. Any news reports that come out that aren't in favor of Bush policies is immediately labelled as "giving aid to the enemy". Point out that illegal spying is going on? Aiding the enemy. Show that people are dying in sectarian violence in Iraq? Aiding the enemy. Continue to throw more and more troops into an unnecessary war in a dangerous area of the world while our actual enemies are elsewhere? Well that's just being tough on national security. Speaking of those enemies, Rummy was sure to explain that "al Qaeda "has media committees" and tutors people on how to "manipulate" news organizations." Eerily similar to the Gitmo claims that all of the torture reports were coming from lying al Qaeda operatives, no? Al Qaeda has become the Bush Clan's ace in the hole. Anything goes wrong there's a way to blame it on al Qaeda and say that things aren't that bad. Let's review White House spin on everything, shall we? Torture claims in Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib are all made up by al Qaeda, the severity of sectarian violence in Iraq is made up by al Qaeda (and it's being exaggerated by the media, to boot!), and the people causing said violence are al Qaeda. Oh, and all of the weapons in Iraq are coming from... Iran. Okay, not al Qaeda that time, but still. Someone care to remind me why we went into Iraq? More than that, explain to me me why, rearing on half a decade after 9/11, al Qaeda is still capable of causing all of this mayhem? I thought Osama was neutralized and we got all of the important operatives.

One of the best quotes I've ever heard. In a discussion over gay marriage amendments: "As I read Biblical principles, marriage was intended, ordained and started by God - that is my belief," [Sen. Nancy] Jacobs declared. "For me, this is an issue solely based on religious principals." ... "People place their hand on the Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution; they don't put their hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible," [American University constitutional law professor James Raskin] said. Awesome. That one's getting logged away in the ol' memory.

You know, I'm really not sure why this comes as any kind of surprise to me. Don't worry about all of those talks in Moscow folks, because as we speak the United States is getting ready for the next war that will make sure Bush can hold off elections "for our safety". First up, we find the United States rejecting any uranium enrichment by Iran, and saying the UN Security Council should take action unless Tehran makes an "about face" concerning its activities. The same United States who called the same United Nations inefficient when dealing with Iraq is now trying to get them to do something about Iran. And concerning the level of enrichment that appears to be going on? [State Department spokesman Tom Casey] told reporters: "You can't be just a little pregnant. You can't have the regime pursuing enrichment on any scale, because pursuing enrichment on any scale allows them to master the technology, complete the fuel cycle -- and then that technology can easily be applied to a clandestine program for making nuclear weapons." Okay, let's review the situation in Iran. They have 10-20 centrifuges for uranium enrichment. This is enough to make nuclear power. It would take a few thousand of these things many years to make weapons-grade uranium. But somehow they're going to daisy-chain these machines together to make weapons right under our noses. Oh sure, many of the machines aren't working right at this point, but the potential is there! No one's denying that Iran + nukes = trouble. That would be fairly foolish. What I'm saying is that we need to give Iran at least some leeway to see if their intentions are genuine. It takes years for thousands of centrifuges to make the uranium for a warhead, do the math on twenty of them. Now imagine that not all of them are working reliably. These guys are not going to be able to suddenly drop a nuke on our heads next week. If the number of centrifuges keeps going up or they refuse to let inspectors see what they're doing, then I see the need for recourse. What about Scotty McC? White House spokesman Scott McClellan complained that Iran continued to make provocative statements and take provocative actions, and said Tehran "can't be trusted" because it hid its programs for nearly two decades. Actions speak louder than words, and Iran is making actions and speaking words. But we can't trust them because of shady history? Wouldn't this very logic tell us that the UAE shouldn't be anywhere NEAR our ports? Oh, right, that would require the White House to show a shred of consistency. My bad. But don't worry, if they can't rally the necessary support just for that, an incredibly convenient story has appeared claiming that Iran is giving Iraqi insurgents weapons. "I think the evidence is strong that the Iranian government is making these IEDs, and the Iranian government is sending them across the border and they are killing U.S. troops once they get there," says Richard Clarke, former White House counterterrorism chief and an ABC News consultant. Of course! It's Iran. That's where all of the danger in Iraq is coming from. It's not Saudi Arabia, it's not Jordan, it's not even within Iraq itself. It's Iran. Not only that, but the weapons themselves are made with detonators that cannot be jammed and the explosions result in projectiles that our armor cannot stop! I guess that just leaves us with the option of air strikes, which is pretty handy because we're almost out of ground troops. I guess all we have to wait for now is Bush to use the powers Congress "gave him" to give himself an extension of his presidency so we don't change horses midstream. And then we'll hear about it on the news after it's all over and done with because everyone who even attempted to leak the information got put in jail. This truly is a Brave New World, this post-9/11 America.

By now the White House is rife with corruption. From Abramoff to the NSA, Plamegate to the newly found Katrina tapes. It seems like any information we're getting about what the White House is doing has something to do with underhanded activities. There's a tragic lack of actual progress being made up on the hill these days. Fortunately, Bush has worked out a way to fix that. The solution, you ask? Bush will stop information from being leaked, thus ridding us all of that pesky problem of knowing about all of the corruption travelling through the west wing. In 2000, President Bill Clinton vetoed legislation passed by the Republican Congress that would have criminalised unauthorised leaks of classified information, though even that bill would not have made the receipt of such information a crime. The Republican chairmen of both the Senate and House intelligence committees have said recently they might make another effort to pass such legislation. Isn't that simple? Quiet public outrage of scandals by stopping the public from knowing about those scandals. We won't get mad about domestic spying or bribery if we have no idea it's going on. Of course, that does beg the question: what's the difference between a scandal revealed about domestic spying and a scandal revealed about a CIA operative? Well, apparently the former is damaging to our national security and the latter is encouraged by our vice president, so it's okay. But then, Cheney said he did have the power to classify and declassify information whenever the hell he wanted, but it's not like that could lead to a situation where the White House briefly declassifies sensitive information for political purposes while keeping all else classified to keep the public in the dark, right? ...right?

Man. Being away from the news for a few days almost made me want to stay away. Especially with news like this coming down the wire. On Friday our good friend General Casey said Iraq violence was over. It's the same sentiment, really, that people have been saying since a few days after the violence started, and it always seems to be coupled with this beautifully bizarre analysis of motive: "This is a difficult time, and there are fairly determined and ruthless terrorists that are out to halt Iraq's movement forward to a democratically elected, constitutionally based government," Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., commander of Multinational Force Iraq, said in a news briefing from Iraq reported by the American Forces Press Service."What I see here on the ground is great persistence by the Iraqis to deny them that." Once again we find a situation where, in order to bring this all into the battle for democracy, and that any violence that happens there is for the express purpose of disturbing that democracy. I've said it before and I'll say it again: with or without Saddam, the Sunnis and the Shiites don't like each other. What kills me is that people like Gen Casey are going to try and turn what is a Civil War into an act of terrorism by a small force trying to screw things up for everyone else. But hey, at least the violence is over right? Well, as long as you don't count today's explosions in Iraq that killed 14 and wounded 52, amongst other deaths in Baghdad and others areas to the north. Aside from that, really, it's all good. Of course, it's really unfair to paint Iraq that negative a light. The leaders really are doing what they can and I commend them for that. The curfew attempts, and now there's a 60-day countdown to getting the new Parliament and a Prime Minister. It's all fantastic and I can do nothing but applaud Iraq for their efforts and hope that they'll all prove successful. What gets to me above it all is the American attitude toward what's happening. In the Iraq frame, we've got a brewing Civil War and the Iraqi officials trying to quell the violence. It's Iraqis dealing with Iraqis fighting Iraqis. It's a part of what happens when a government sets up another in a foreign country (hi, Pakistan), but it's entirely internal and though there are two factions of citizens, at the end of the day everyone is still a part of Iraq. In the Amerian frame, we've got terrorists trying to destroy democracy. It's Iraqi officials dealing with terrorists fighting Iraqis. It's not internal according to many of these people and must be dealt with as though it's a small-scale war of sorts. It's this skewed perspective that has messed things up as bad as they've become. The people fighting in this are not some outside faction. They're the same people we've been "liberating" and trying to separate the fighters as terrorists against democracy is only going to paint us as an interfering party and will create more animosity. Besides, if a Civil War does erupt, how could we possibly get involved? We can't take sides, and you can't be unaffilitated when in the middle of a war.

Sorry for the lack of updates this weekend. Been working on a bunch of stuff. If you want, throw some ideas into the comments or start up a debate of your own. Consider it an open thread.

Once again it's time for me to speak out on this Blog about something near and dear to my heart. And that of course is abortion (it should go without saying). Now I decided long ago that I wouldn't side with the crazies of the right which would have all the babies live, but only on the condition that these babies are baptized Christian. And at the same time I found the left to be so boring, offering a pro-choice solution. I mean where is the excitement with that? That is why I have taken it upon myself to defend the extreme position of pro-death. We should kill all the babies. Now I know what you're probably thinking, and that's; "Grant, you can't support abortions to the age of 5." That claim is erroneous! Of course I can. I mean we all know some people who should have been, or should be aborted. Take some of these people in South "the other North" Dakota. You may remember South Dakota. Know for it's scenic landscape, bison, and for its progressive laws, such as my personal favorite: "If there are more than 5 Native Americans on your property you may shoot them." well the friendly folks of S.D. have something new an exciting for you to chew on. And that of course is the repealing of Roe vs. Wade. You remember our old friends Roe, and Wade. Back in the 70s they fought this issue out in the supreme court. And now everyone is free to enjoy an abortion like they enjoy sunshine. But in some places of the country this did not sit well at all. Fundamentalist and the right wing have taken it upon themselves to resemble the Blues Brothers, that’s right they are on a "mission from God." they have taken it upon themselves to repeal the supreme court ruling in Roe vs. Wade, and try and make it illegal for anyone to have an abortion. Unless the baby is a health hazard to the mother, or if it is a case of rape or incest. What I don't understand is how these people can be so supportive of letting people live. And then be so supportive of upholding the death penalty. What the hell is that? Make up your minds people! Are they staying or leaving here? This is why we need to all be pro-abortion. Then no one can complain about anything anymore. There won't be any bitching from either side anymore. I personally suggest we do what Thomas Swift suggested and just harvest the babies for food. Help some starving kids in Africa, you know join the fight with Bono. I mean we could eliminate hunger forever, it truly is a "Modest Proposal." And now that we are competing in a global economy we need abortion more then ever. Look at our main economic competetor China. They can't get enough abortion over there, it's like crack there. Abortion has the same effect in China as David Hasselhoff has in Germany. We gotta pick up the ball here people. To fall behind a communist country in something that we obvious all care enough about to burn down buildings for would be un American. I figure the only measure we have to take is get rid of non-competitive soccer, so our children don't all turn out gay. Not that there is anything wrong with being gay, it's just that gay people can't have children, and can therefore also not supply us with enough abortions to blow China out of the water. It would put a damper on the abortion rates...and our American spirits. On another note worthy news event. Some monkeys native to Africa called Bonobos are being hunted out for food by the native people. This wouldn't be a big deal if these monkeys weren't known for their constant fornication with one another. They are known as the "love monkeys," much like Davey Jones. They are seen to represent peace and love, and are icons of the hippie, flower pour every waking hour movements. But now that starving tribes in Africa have decided to go in search of food these monkeys are being killed out in order to feed the hungry. Now a bunch of hippies from Washington, who obviously have more of a right to say what starving people can and can't eat are protesting these actions. And are fighting to save these "love monkeys." "Bonobos are an icon for peace and love, the world's hippie chimps," said Sally Coxe of the Washington-based Bonobo Conservation Initiative. "To let them die off would be a catastrophe." What do I think...besides the obvious, "you damn hippies should be shot into space. How dare you try and interfere with these tribes who get shit on by the rest of the world just because it would "bum ya out dude." you aren't there, starving, fighting day to day for food and clean water so shut the hell up." but instead I think this... ....if memory serves me correctly, sex with monkeys gave us AIDs...and I don't think monkeys should be having anymore unprotected sex. In closing I remind all of you to Keep the Faith, and stay sexy.

Yes, that's what we're getting this guy for. Though he was in prison at the time, Zacarias Moussaoui may be executed for not preventing 9/11. It seems as though we are unable to get a hold of any of the people who planned or helped to execute the attacks, so we're relegated to making a man who was possibly on the list of people do participate in it or another similar attack the fall guy for the entire operation. If convicted, he'll either be executed or face life in prison. Previously Moussaoui has said he was not part of the 9/11 plot but that he was tasked to take part in a second wave of attacks destined to hit the White House. At his plea hearing in April 2005 Moussaoui said, "I was being trained on the 747-400 to eventually use this plane … to strike the White House, but this conspiracy was different conspiracy than 9/11." The guy was a grunt. He was going to be one of the men blown up with the planes. Arresting him is good, interrogating him is good. Making him the public face of the 9/11 attacks that he has become is simply pointless. It's even a good thing to give him whatever sentence for the failed attack on the White House that didn't happen. All right, that's being pretty cynical of me, I'll admit. It's not like the government would be doing anything that ludicrous. The man is probably a legitimate target for the sentence he's up for, and it's not like they'd make a guy who was going to fly the damn plane the center of the entire 9/11 conspiracy, right? Justice Department prosecutors handling the case intend to identify in photographs the nearly 3,000 victims killed during the attacks and have said in court filings that they will call 45 victims to testify against Moussaoui. ...ah. So, during the trial, we're going to see the photographs of all of the victims who died, talk to the victims who lived, and get as many family members in as well. Either someone is planning on having some stupendously long trials for every single person who ever gets nabbed for this or the plan is to take care of Moussaoui and call it a day. If was a bettin' man, I don't think I'd be out of line in saying the latter. Okay, listen, I'm not downplaying the severity of 9/11. I'm not saying a man who had a part in the attacks should just go away with a slap on the wrist. I'm not even saying Moussaoui should be let off with a minor sentence. What I am saying is that it's almost blaringly clearly that Moussaoui is having the entire weight of the September 11th attacks placed on his shoulders and he's being burned at the stake for the sake of the public at large. Moussaoui was not an organizer, a planner, or even anyone that important in al Qaeda. How can I say that? He was going to be in the plane. He clearly wasn't so important he had to survive the only mission he was involved with. What's really funny (and not ha-ha funny) is how it almost seems that the feds want to maximally prosecute Moussaoui for how poorly they dealt with him. CIA Director George Tenet was briefed on Moussaoui's arrest on Aug. 23, 2001. "Tenet was … told that Moussaoui wanted to learn to fly a 747, paid for his training in cash, was interested to learn the doors do not open in flight, and wanted to fly a simulated flight from London to New York," according to the 9/11 report. The CIA immediately notified the FBI who... waited until September 4th, nary a week before the fateful day, before sending a message to the intelligence community. And even that was just a matter-of-fact type of notice, he's in custody and it's all good. The bulk of the information is classified, concerning this arrest, and if we know that they missed the mark that badly (he paid for the training in CASH?) in the available information, I can't imagine what's being withheld. So Moussaoui is being blamed for withholding information and that's why 9/11 happened. Because some low-level grunt may not have told enough. It has nothing to do with the "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in the U.S." memo that Bush got in August, it has nothing to do with the calls that were slow to be translated before 9/11, no. It's because of this guy. You know, Bush is possibly the least proactive president we've ever had. For all his chatter about having to pre-empt these attacks and events, he doesn't have much of a history of doing it. A pile of warnings about 9/11 go unacted on so we start wars and make a scapegoat out of a mostly ineffective party, warnings on a hurricane go ignored, ditto on warnings of civil war in Iraq. Possibly the most important and catastrophic events in his presidency, nothing done. And then this kind of things happens afterwards. Moussaoui should be punished for whatever he's guilty of. That's it. No more, no less.

Really, now, how can anyone in our government try a tactic like this and still claim that no torturing is going on? There's a guy who's been sitting in Gitmo for a little while now, his name is Mohammed Bawazir. He was one of a large number of prisoners there who were participating the hunger strike that caught a little press. Apparently in an attempt to save his life and protect his health, Bawazir was strapped down and force fed for hours at a time, he claims. Denied access to a toilet while restrained, he received nutritional formula plus four bottles of water at each feeding [with a tube through his nose and into his stomach], causing Bawazir to repeatedly urinate and defecate on his clothes, the filing said. It's about now that the lockstep Bush followers will say "that's not torture! People get fed through a tube in hospitals!" and other such completely asinine arguments. To them I would ask what their exact qualifications for torture are, since the horrors of Abu Ghraib didn't seem to qualify either. As far as I can tell, as long as the United States is doing it, it's not really torture. Back on topic, though, you would think these guys would be able to do something about it, since McCain managed to push that anti-torture thing through, right? Well, not quite. You see, now the US is saying that the Detainee Treatment Act doesn't apply to Gitmo detainees, at least somewhat. You see, the law does protect detainees from "systematic torture", but there is a bit of a caveat: Government lawyers have argued that another portion of that same law, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, removes general access to U.S. courts for all Guantanamo Bay captives. Therefore, they said, Mohammed Bawazir, a Yemeni national held since May 2002, cannot claim protection under the anti-torture provisions. Yes, that's right. The law protects prisoners from torture, but here it also doesn't allow them to go to the courts to get said protection. The obvious question of "how the hell do we expect the prisoners to be protected" doesn't appear to have a solid answer. I also can't help but question how that little provision managed to get in there without anyone seeing a problem. Naturally, everyone remotely implicated with this issue is already saying that the case is frivolous, false, and that Bawazir himself isn't trustworthy. They're saying that the United States was only doing what they did for the man's health, and really, who could blame them for that? Lt. Col. Jeremy Martin is telling us that any and all such procedures are done in the most humane manner possible. So why would Bawazir claim otherwise? "In short, he is a trained al Qaida terrorist, who has been taught to claim torture, abuse, and medical mistreatment if captured," [Maj. Gen. Jay W.] Hood wrote. He added that Bawazir allegedly went to Afghanistan to train for jihad and ultimately fought with the Taliban against U.S. troops. One little hook, though. He's never been charged with a crime. He's one of 490 terrorist suspects who were captured and put in Gitmo, he's been there since 2002 actually, and in that time he has yet to be charged with anything. Out of those 490 suspects, only 10 have been. The man has been held in prison for four years with no charge of a crime, and now he's completely unable to bring any charges of torture to the courts thanks to the very law offering him those protections. Bawazir may very well be guilty. Unfortunately, he's not really being given any ability to prove it either way. This is the problem with Guantanamo Bay, with Abu Ghraib and now with Bagram and who knows how many others. People are thrown in their on suspicion and treated as guilty parties with no way of proving their innocence. They have no rights, be they guilty or innocent. Humanity aside, this is no way to fight a war. Especially when fighting as morphous a subject as "terrorism". Torturing innocent parties and keeping them imprisoned for years on end without so much as a charge only creates more animosity towards the US, and thus more terrorists. Honestly, one of the most depressing things about the state of the nation is the supreme inability to do incredibly important things in a remotely logical way.

Sounds to me like we've started a bit of an avalanche. First we had an admitted terrorist saying he may want to take back his guilty plea due to the possible illegality of how his arrest happened, now there is a Saudi charity group with evidence they were spied on as well. The al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, a Saudi organization that once operated in Portland, Ore., filed a description of classified government records in a lawsuit Tuesday and immediately asked a judge for a private review. That's right, a charity group that situated itself in Oregon for a while may have been spied on under that oh-so-lovely NSA thing. If there was any question as to why Bush would be spying without warrants, I think we got an answer here. I don't think there's anyone up there in FISA courts who would issue a warrant to spy on a charity group. Of course, the article again states that the government is complaining that FISA didn't allow them to "move quickly enough". Once again, the government admits that it's breaking the law. But that's a sidetrack. The Iyman Faris deal was not the only such incident, a number of terrorist suspects out there are having their cases re-opened because they think the laws may have been broken in order to get their convictions. That's a wholly understandable and supported claim, unfortunately it's one that's pretty easy for the Administration to basically throw out the window. Illegal or not, the world at large is not going to come at it from a strict legality standpoint as long as the end result was terrorists in prison. In this "post-9/11 thinking" world the terrorist is more dangerous than the bomb. Two things separate this case from those, however. First of all, it's a case of an innocent party being spied upon. It's easy for someone like Faris to have his complaints tossed out since he ended up admitted to his plot. Here it's a charity group, about as dangerous as a box full of kittens (to use a line from The Longest Yard). There is no way for the Administration to defend circumventing the FISA courts in order to start wiretapping. The second is that this is more than just idle suspicion. Here, the group is citing the government's own records. The lawsuit contends that al-Buthe's conversations with people in the United States were illegally intercepted. In May 2004, the suit says, government officials provided al-Buthe -- apparently by accident -- copies of conversations he had with attorneys Wendell Belew and Asim Ghafoor. Whoops. Leave it to a little bungling with paperwork to blow this whole issue open. So that makes you wonder, at least it should. Here we've got a charity group with nothing criminal going on that very likely was being spied on by the government. Illegally. Why would the administration be doing that? It's a charity group, we have lots of charity groups around the United States, and a lot of them are foreign. Check out Children's Charity, they've got a few contact spots in the United States as well. Mr Bush, why would you treat an Arabian charity different than a British charity?

And here I was being all optimistic about the 45 day review. Yep, as the title says, the Dubai ports deal is set to close tomorrow or Monday, further proving that nothing we are told by the administration means a thing. No inspections, no review, lax standards in document disclosure, and now the very thing that was even making me optimistic about the deal has turned out to be nothing more than smoke up the country's ass. Dubai Ports World's $6.85 billion acquisition of Britain's P&O will close on Friday or Monday, despite an additional 45-day review by the U.S. government in response to security concerns, a U.S. Treasury Department official said on Thursday. There really isn't much to add to this one, but the message is crystal clear. Our president does not care about even obligatory security measures. Bush wants this deal to go through, and he wants it to go through NOW. But why? According to him and everyone representing him, nothing is changing. It's a non-issue. So why is it so incredibly important that it happen even without something as clearly warranted as a security review slowing it down? If history is any precedent with this administration (one thing you can't say about the Bush Clan is that they aren't consistent), then we're going to start to get more and more pieces of the puzzle in the upcoming weeks. And none of it's gonna be good.

If I was Bush, this would be a serious relief to hear that at least one thing went according to plan. With an 89-10 vote, the Senate has passed the mildy revised Patriot Act. If you'll remember, this is the same Patriot Act that's been at the center of a bunch of controversy since it first showed up, criticised as an act that offers less freedoms without any more real protection. Amongst these the famed "sneak and peek" provision that allows citizens to be searched without anyone notifying them until well after the fact. Also a nice little clause that lets the government see what books people have bought or borrowed from book stores and libraries. Fortunately, we're told that this "revised" Patriot Act makes sure to fix all of those pesky civil liberties problems that no one believes the president cares about. Check out these new provisions. Give recipients of court-approved subpoenas for information in terrorist investigations the right to challenge a requirement that they refrain from telling anyone. Eliminate a requirement that an individual provide the FBI with the name of a lawyer consulted about a National Security Letter, which is a demand for records issued by investigators. Clarify that most libraries are not subject to demands in those letters for information about suspected terrorists. There, don't we feel more protected now? We're allowed to challenge a requirement that we refrain from telling anyone. That doesn't mean there's any kind of a chance that the challenge will be accepted, but hey! At least we're allowed to challenge it now! And isn't much better now that most libraries aren't subject to those demands? What "most" means is up for debate, but hey, it's all good. I'm echoing Senator Russell Feingold. At best, these changes are cosmetic. None of the problems people have brought up with this thing have been answered here, and in fact are kind of insulting. Unfortunately, the bill passed with a near unanimous vote (I consider 90% something of a landslide), and part of me wonders if that's the Democrats trying to ride on their "look, we really are tough on national security!" high and the republicans, well, doing what they do best. The Patriot Act, a rushed piece of legislature that was passed almost immediately after it was proposed back in 2001, is the direct result of a country in the midst of a fear epidemic. Reeling off of 9/11, the Act was proposed on October 23rd and passed into law on October 26th. This was in a time when you could have proposed a law that required everyone to wear portable cameras and there would have been public support for it. Name it the "Patriot Act" and now it's a hell of a force to deal with. As a quick aside, what happened to descriptive names? "Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act" or something like that. Instead we get "Patriot Act" and such nondescriptive names that seem geared more toward making the laws difficult to oppose rather than tell the people what it actually is. Let's not forget that it was passed without anyone really reading it. Makes me wonder how many people actually closely read these new provisions. The UPI has made a nice list of the problems in the Patriot Act. From the "sneak and peek" to the library clause, and even this one: Moreover, the administration has been using the Patriot Act to prosecute cases that have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism. Local corruption, fraud and drug cases have all been the happy recipients of Patriot Act developed evidence. Remember that part where everyone kept saying that only terrorists and al Qaeda will be caught with these measures? Well, you can nicely throw that one out the window, now. The Patriot Act will be abused if let through, and those limp little revisions are not going to fix a damn thing. There are eight days until the Patriot Act's sixteen provisions expire, in that time it must make it through the House and then to the president. We already know that as soon as it hits our Mighty Leader's desk it's going to be passed. So that's eight days we need the House to fight it and stop it from continuing. I'm a strong supporter of security. What I'm not a supporter of whatsoever is Orwellian surveillance.

Hey, check it out! Indisputable Truth on Slate.com. At Indisputable Truth, liberal Zach Gates is horrified by the death toll: "This is not a small roadbump ... Over a thousand people don't die in under a week of riots only to be followed by immediate peace. These attacks will continue. Let's just all pray the government will work hard to keep it from turning into an all out war." I'm making my mark, it seems.

I'd like to say at this point that I'm jaded about anything that may be found out about the Bush Administration, the lying and stupidity and all of that, but truthfully I'm not. Which is evidenced by my supreme shock to get this bit of news I've been sitting on since yesterday evening. See, not only did he hear about the possibility of Katrina's devastation, but Bush and Chertoff were explicitly warned about the levees before it hit. And what was the man's response to hearing all of the impending danger? ...he assured soon-to-be-battered state officials: "We are fully prepared." The man is on tape before the disaster saying "don't worry, we're prepared", and he's on tape afterwards saying "no one could have anticipated a breach". I'm just floored by this. See, I expect the president to be stupid. I expect him to lie. That doesn't surprise me. What continually baffles me is how he tries to lie in situations where he's going to be proven as such. It's like Rumsfeld saying he never called Saddam an imminent threat when Meet the Press had a video of him saying just that. If you know there are people who can testify that you said something or that you knew something, it's hard as hell to lie about it. Doubly so with video on record. Of course, once again someone in the Administration has to try to spin things around so they don't seem QUITE that bad. No Scotty McClellan this time, but don't worry, it's still a whopper. "I hope people don't draw conclusions from the president getting a single briefing," presidential spokesman Trent Duffy said, citing a variety of orders and disaster declarations Bush signed before the storm made landfall. "He received multiple briefings from multiple officials, and he was completely engaged at all times." I want you to read over this a few times to try and figure out what he's trying to say and how it's supposed to defend the president. According to Mr Duffy here, the fact that the president got LOTS of briefings and was engaged in ALL of them is why there's no problem with his claiming later that no one anticipated the breach. The fact that he was talking with lots of people is why it doesn't matter that, despite claiming to be "fully prepared", he was anything but. I don't know, folks. For once I truly have no idea what his defense is supposed to mean. What really jumped out at me from this one was Michael "Heckuva Job" Brown. I was on the front lines to call him inexperienced and a horrible choice for the job. Maybe he wasn't the right man to head FEMA, but after watching the video and reading a few of the things he said at these briefings, you can't help but feel like he was really a victim of the administration in this whole incident. "We're going to need everything that we can possibly muster, notonly in this state and in the region, but the nation, to respond to this event," Brown warned. He called the storm "a bad one, a big one" and implored federal agencies to cut through red tape to help people, bending rules if necessary. "Go ahead and do it," Brown said. "I'll figure out some way to justify it. … Just let them yell at me." ... "The Superdome is about 12 feet below sea level…. I don't know whether the roof is designed to stand, withstand a Category Five hurricane," he said. The man really sounds like he was aware of the situation. It makes you really wonder what happened, what went wrong and why it went wrong. From these tapes, Bush was aware of the situation, Brown knew what was going on and had an idea of what needed to be done. He even mentioned that people weren't being taken out of hospitals and prisons. So how is it that it took Bush a few days to react, and then claim that no one could have anticipated the breach? If there were any thoughts that people were being unfair to Bush in this deal, I hope you've changed your mind about it now. Bush will (at least claim to) pre-empt terrorist attacks and such events when there's no real credible evidence that it would happen. When he's given an explicit briefing, though, he does nothing. And then claims no one could have known.

It's been a pretty big issue lately, and it's been more divisive than most and in more bizarre ways than any other facing the president thus far. It's also fairly important to clarify exactly what the problem is and why it really is a big deal. What I'm about to say may not be what everyone is saying, but I believe it to be the true heart of the issue. The UAE port controversy is NOT that the United Arab Emirates is a bunch of terrorists. I just had to get that out of the way first off, because that seems to be what the opposing side looks like and what some of the more vocal supporters are saying. What really is the basis of the problem is exactly what the opposers are saying, though: that it makes Bush look incredibly weak on terrorism. To determine the problem, you have to look at all the facts as just what they are, and wait to assemble them until the end or else you'll make the wrong conclusion (trust me, it's important). Okay, about the UAE themselves. They have a very shady history record. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the State Department put the UAE on the "primary concern" list in the INCSR for terrorism-funding and money laundering even recently. The two 9/11 hijackers were indeed from there, let's not forget the transporation of nuclear weapon materials from Pakistan into the Middle East. The Coast Guard is also saying they don't have enough information to say whether or not they are dangerous. From this standpoint, the UAE simply does not look good. Moving on to Bush's side of things. The man was vehemently for the deal after hearing about it on the news, even threatening to veto any attempts to stop it. All this based on not even knowing it happened until it was already over and done with. His brother Neil may have gotten funding from the UAE to develop his educational software. The Dubai Ports World bought CSX's port assets, and John Snow used to run that company. David Sanborn was a senior executive of DPW who, a month prior to the ports deal, was made the new head of the Merchant Marines. In addition, the UAE gave four times as much Katrina money as the other countries combined. This makes the deal look as if the UAE bought support and that Bush was ignorant of it entirely. Now let's take a look at how the story happened. It was sat on for a while, then it came out that the deal happened without Congress being told about it. Then Bush did his famous "I'll veto anything that attempts to stop this deal" schtick. Then we found out there were 21 ports under consideration, not six. Then it turns out the DPW wasn't made to give the same documentation that other companies have in the past. In addition, the 45 day review, which is quite warranted in a situation like this, was not used until forced recently. The story came out very slowly, making it look like something was hidden. All right, there's our setup, now it's time to start piecing it together. The president supports a deal that puts what appears to be a dangerous company ahead of our ports. He himself had many connections to the country and the business in question, in addition to the other money the UAE has invested in the country. All the while it seems as if the Administration was trying to keep the details of the deal as quiet as possible. The final product is starting to gel. Our president is going to support a deal with a country that LOOKS incredibly dangerous without ordering any kind of investigation and without knowing the facts himself, and that those in the know were hiding details. If we were given the indication that he knew the deal intimately, or that the company was even inspected thoroughly, this wouldn't be quite the same issue. The thing is, Dubai Ports World may turn out to be a wholly benign company. The review may come back and tell us that we are in no danger from them. What is a problem is that Bush, who has made an entire presidency out of demonizing Arabs, would support a deal after hearing about it on the news, meaning he only knew what we knew. Which means he couldn't have possibly known that the DPW and the UAE were not dangerous at all, because we still don't know that. In addition, the deal has all those connections. The man clearly seems to be glossing over serious security issues simply because of personal connections, whether or not the danger is real is irrelevant because at this point we don't know. He was willing to support it without even checking. That's incredibly weak on national security. Even the most democratic anti-War "we should trust everyone everywhere" person would have at the very least been WARY of the deal and demanded an investigation. But not Bush. Our mighty leader, the man who tells us the country is safest under him. No, he couldn't even do that.

Well, I'd like to say I didn't see this one coming. Iyman Faris, a fella who pleaded guilty to plotting to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge back in 2003, is saying that he wants to rescind his plea if the NSA spied on him without a warrant. The real bastard of this issue is it looks like that's exactly what happened. If that wasn't bad enough, it looks like he's not going to be the only one trying this strategy. Faris, who was born in Kashmir but is a naturalized U.S. citizen, is the latest in a string of terror defendants across the nation demanding they be told whether their cases were influenced by the NSA program. I can't even imagine how many people are going to go free if this pans out the way it looks like it will. Now, there are two ways of looking at this issue. The first is the way the republicans and NSA supporters are going to spin it. They're all going to parade out and blame those who forced the program to be revealed, saying that if we'd all just let it be then these dangerous people would still be in jail. The president, Scotty McC, and Alberto are all going to point their fingers at the American people and the democrats, saying it's now our fault that these terrorists are going to be let free. This is the "by even talking about the program we're aiding the enemy" they've been alluding to all this time. This is an incredibly poor argument, since it's like blaming the police for letting your plants die after you got arrested for robbery. Sure the event immediately preceding the plants dying was you being arrested, but if you hadn't done something ILLEGAL in the first place, then you wouldn't have gotten arrested. Maybe a better analogy would be a kid in middle school getting mad at his teacher for giving him detention because "my mom's gonna kill me!" And that's the position the Democrats absolutely HAVE to latch onto for this to be even remotely effective. The President is already looking weak on security thanks to the UAE deal, the Katrina fiasco is flaring up again further injuring his ability to protect the nation, and now these terrorists may be released because he got them arrested via illegal means, it's HIS fault they're going to be free again. The only thing Bush has ever been able to turn to in his presidency as why we need him is now turning into his greatest weakness. And don't forget Osama's still out there. The president is a wounded dog right now. We just need to... wait. That's a terrible analogy. Well, the point is that we need to put the final nail in his administration's coffin, and make sure to show how wrong everyone who fought tooth and nail to defend him was in time for the 2006 midterms.

At least that's what the State Department is trying to push. Out of the three ratings for terrorism concerns, the State Department may rank Iraq as no concern again, as it has for the past few years. That's right, the same Iraq we were told all the boogeyman stories about has never been rated as even a concern since the post-9/11 decision to add terrorism concerns to the ratings. There have been insurgencies going all the while, people from neighboring nations inside the borders to blow up American soldiers, but to them there was no threat. Of course not, that would make the Iraq War look bad. While that reeks of political influence, this is the paragraph that struck me the most (my own emphasis added): But unwilling to add to Iraq's woes, some at State are pushing to give Baghdad another pass this year. Instead of appearing in the first tier, alongside such countries as the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, and Nigeria, Iraq appears likely to end up again with the lowest rating, joining such countries as Finland, Iceland, and New Zealand. That's right, the State Department rates the UAE as a terrorism concern of the highest order, right alongside a pair of countries that no one will say are safe. I don't even think I need to add anything to that, which is good because I'm tired and going to bed.