No bounce to be found in the latestAmerican Research Group (ARG) poll. George W. Bush’s job approval ratings have not received a significant boost as more Americans say the national economy and their personal financial situations are getting better compared to August according to the latest survey from the American Research Group. Among all Americans, 38% approve of the way Bush is handling his job as president and 57% disapprove. When it comes to Bush’s handling of the economy, 33% approve and 61% disapprove. Among Americans registered to vote, 39% approve of the way Bush is handling his job as … Continue reading Dude, Where’s My Bounce?

Seems like that would be consistent with Republikkkan values now, right? Continue reading Torture Scooter Libby!

OK, the Republicans now have their torture bill ready to go. Secret detention without charges and torture are fine (so long as the torure is not really, really bad or so long as it is conducted secretly), testimony given as a result of torture is fine if a judge says it’s reliable (it never is) and relevant, the president may interpret the Geneva Conventions however he pleases (funny, I thought the judiciary branch interpreted the law while the executive is charged with enforcing it), habeus corpus is out, and the admissability of secret evidence is still to be determined. Turn … Continue reading Let’s Get Busy

Yesterday it wasAlphonso Jackson’s Department of Housing and Urban Development, today it’sMargaret Spellings’ Department of Education. A scorching internal review of the Bush administration’s reading program says the Education Department ignored the law and ethical standards to steer money how it wanted. The government audit is unsparing in its review of how Reading First, a billion-dollar program each year, that it says has been beset by conflicts of interest and willful mismanagement. It suggests the department broke the law by trying to dictate which curriculum schools must use. It also depicts a program in which review panels were stacked with … Continue reading Two Makes A Trend

Howitzer Explosionguypisses Chimpy off by reminding him that he has not caught Osama. BLITZER: Osama bin Laden’s still at large, Ayman al-Zawahiri is still at large. What went wrong? BUSH: Well, a lot went right. Khalid Sheik Mohammed is — if we can get a good bill out of the Senate and the House — is going to go on trial. Ramzi Binalshibh, Abu Zubaydah — the whole … BLITZER: But the guys — the major guys are still at large. BUSH: Well, no question Osama bin Laden’s at large, but the man who ordered the attack and about 75 … Continue reading Let Me Finish

More from Howitzer Explosionguy’s interview ofyour president. Brilliant! BUSH: These people want a unity government. The unity government is functioning. I’m impressed by President Maliki. I’ve talked to him. I’ve seen the decision-making process that he’s put in place. The Iraqi army is still recruiting and training. BLITZER: You weren’t upset when he went to Tehran and gave a big hug and a kiss to Ahmadinejad. BUSH: Excuse me for a minute. I was on a brilliant point, as you know. The Iraqi government and the Iraqi military is committed to keeping this country together. And so therefore, I reject … Continue reading Your President Speaks!

You can’t be a judge and a Senator, Huckleberry. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has been censured by an Army court on the same day he agreed to a deal with the White House outlining new provisions for military justice in cases involving suspected terrorists. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces yesterday held that Sen. Graham violated the Incompatibility Clause of the Constitution when, as a Reservist, he sat on the Air Force’s intermediate appellate court while also a member of the Senate. According to one military law expert, there is no penalty for Graham, but the court … Continue reading Sen. Graham Censured, To Lose Judicial Certification

Goddamn, Katherine Harris is mobbed up with both of the Republikkkan congressmen who have plead guilty to corruption charges recently, and shestill can’t stop lying. U.S. Senate candidate Katherine Harris received a campaign contribution from an Ohio congressman who has agreed to plead guilty to accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for political favors, marking the third time the Florida congresswoman has received money from a tainted source. Harris, who received illegal campaign contributions from a disgraced defense contractor and years ago accepted contributions in one of the Legislature’s biggest fundraising scandals, received $6,000 from U.S. Rep. Bob … Continue reading Your Friday Morning Republican Juggernaut Update

I’ve said before that I don’t like getting into left-meta discussions about who wore what to the rally, because I don’t care that much. I think one of the comments toTbogg’s post here is largely correct, that the two people with the “Say No To Veal” signs wouldn’t get noticed so much if there were 600,000 people with “Say No To War” signs, so if you want a protest to conform to your expectations, ain’t nobody stopping you from having one.

Would perfect message discipline be nice? Absolutely. But you know, the veal people get press because everybody but the veal people stays home. Plus, the veal people aren’t hurting anybody, unlike Dick Cheney.

All of which is my way of saying I was in Washington last Saturday to speak at Camp Democracy, and I loved the Bush Puppets, and so did the six zillion Japanese people who stopped by to take pictures of them. It was wet, it was muddy, there were protest songs and signs about lots of different things, and it was still profoundly moving to see this kind of dissent in the heart of the city’s patriotic tourist pageant. I sit here in Chicago, in the bluest city in one of the bluest states, and talk about how Bush sucks. Other people do it on his front lawn.

Continues, click “Read More” …

Continue reading “Keeping Up Appearances”

In the AP story. A. Continue reading Spot the Missing Element

From Holden: Scottie shared a brief gaggle today with Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere Tom Shannon regarding Chimpy’s trip to South America but he did find time to drop yeat another hint regarding the fate of one Karl Rove. Q Can you comment on The Washington Post report that there is some considerations that Rove should be leaving the White House? MR. McCLELLAN: A couple of things. One, there’s a lot of speculation going around at this time that relates to an ongoing investigation and an ongoing legal proceeding, and I’m not going to get into speculating … Continue reading Today on Holden’s Obsession with the Gaggle

Fatal Attraction edition. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque Continue reading Your Friday, uh – Thursday Afternoon Republican Juggernaut Update

Addthis to the growing pile of evidence that the Iraqi people were better off under Saddam than they are now. Torture in Iraq may be worse now than it was under Saddam Hussein, with militias, terrorist groups and government forces disregarding rules on the humane treatment of prisoners, the U.N. anti-torture chief said Thursday. Manfred Nowak, the U.N. special investigator on torture, made the remarks as he was presenting a report on detainee conditions at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay as well as to brief the U.N. Human Rights Council, the global body’s top rights watchdog, on torture worldwide. … Continue reading Better Off Under Saddam

Diplomacy, Bush style. The United States threatened to bomb Pakistan “back to the stone age” in 2001 unless it cooperated in the US-led war on terror, President Pervez Musharraf said in an interview. Musharraf, whose support for the US-led invasion of Afghanistan was instrumental in the fall of the hardline Taliban regime after the September 11, 2001 attacks, said the threat came from former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage. [snip] “The intelligence director told me that (Armitage) said, ‘Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the stone age’,” Musharraf said. “I think it was a … Continue reading Allies

Another story that should be getting more attention, testimony indicates that former EPA chief Christine Todd Whitman and the White Houseworked together to lie about the post-9/11 safety of ground zero. Christie Todd Whitman, while head of the federal EPA, “conspired” to falsely reassure the public that the air around Ground Zero was safe to breath, according to critics and bombshell new documents. In 2003, Whitman’s then-spokeswoman, Tina Kreisher, was asked by an Environmental Protection Agency internal investigator “whether there was a conscious effort to reassure the public [in the fall of 2001]. “Ms. Kreisher said there was such an … Continue reading Christine Whitman and the Bush Administration: Murderers

Chimpy’s torture fetish constitutes agrave violation of the Geneva Conventions and thus US law. United Nations human rights investigators said on Thursday that legislation proposed by U.S. President George W. Bush for tough interrogations of foreign terrorism suspects would breach the Geneva Conventions. In a joint statement to the U.N. Human Rights Council, meeting in Geneva, the five independent envoys also said that Washington’s recent admission of secret detention centres abroad pointed to “very serious human rights violations in relation to the hunt for alleged terrorists”. The investigators called again for the United States to close down the U.S. detention … Continue reading The Geneva Conventions Carry The Force Of US Law

What should you do when caught lying about torture? AskSteve Martin (late-70’s vintage). You.. can be a millionaire.. and never pay taxes! You can be a millionaire.. and never pay taxes! You say.. “Steve.. how can I be a millionaire.. and never pay taxes?” First.. get a million dollars. Now.. you say, “Steve.. what do I say to the tax man when he comes to my door and says, ‘You.. have never paid taxes’?” Two simple words. Two simple words in the English language:“I forgot!” According toRobert, the Gonzales Justice Departmenttook Martin’s advice. The Justice Department backed away Wednesday from … Continue reading The Steve Martin Defense

Dana Peroxide handled thegaggle today aboard Air Force One en route to Florida. She provided a little preview to Chimpy’s speech there.

So one of the things he’ll say in his speech is that the Democrat’s agenda — excuse me, the Democrat’s tax agenda comes down to this: If you bring home a paycheck, are married, have a child, or own a family farm or small business, the Democrats consistently vote to raise your taxes. He will talk about the consequences for ordinary Americans and small businesses if the Democrats get into the majority and let the tax relief expire.

Poor Dana, she wasn’t expecting a follow-up.

Q Can I ask one more question about taxes? The President has said, or his advisors have said that Social Security remains something he wants to deal with. When he talks about taxes today, does he believe that Social Security can be put on a sustainable path without raising taxes?

MS. PERINO: In the remarks that I saw, I didn’t see Social Security mentioned as a part of that. That doesn’t mean that the President doesn’t think that Social Security isn’t already having a massive impact on America’s fiscal health, and especially looking into the future, as we try to figure out how to sustain the program.

Q But if he’s saying, Republicans are not going to raise your taxes, is he saying, any fix that I propose for Social Security will contain no tax increases?

MS. PERINO: Again, I don’t believe that these remarks talk at all about the Social Security matter, and I think that the President has said that after the election he’s going to work with Congress to make sure that we try to solve this problem. I don’t have anything more for you on that. I mean, there’s not a new proposal on the table.

Obsession continues…

Continue reading “Today on Holden’s Obsession with the Gaggle”

This should be getting more play than it is. Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist have not been convicted of any crimes arrising from their relationship with Jack Abramoff (yet). But Neil Volz, Tony Rudy, and Michael Scanlon have and they were givenwide access to the White House along with Reed and Norquist. Republican activists Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed landed more than 100 meetings inside the Bush White House, according to documents released Wednesday that provide the first official accounting of the access and influence the two presidential allies have enjoyed. [snip] White House officials said Norquist, who runs the … Continue reading The White House as Free Range for Felons

We live in acleptocracy. Four government auditors who monitor leases for oil and gas on federal property say the Interior Department suppressed their efforts to recover millions of dollars from companies they said were cheating the government. The accusations, many of them in four lawsuits that were unsealed last week by federal judges in Oklahoma, represent a rare rebellion by government investigators against their own agency. The auditors contend that they were blocked by their bosses from pursuing more than $30 million in fraudulent underpayments of royalties for oil produced in publicly owned waters in the Gulf of Mexico. “The … Continue reading More Official Corruption

For the record, here’s what Chimpy said last Friday on the subject of entering Pakistan in order to capture Osama bin Laden. Q Thank you, Mr. President. Earlier this week, you told a group of journalists that you thought the idea of sending special forces to Pakistan to hunt down bin Laden was a strategy that would not work. THE PRESIDENT: Yes. Q Now, recently you’ve also — THE PRESIDENT: Because, first of all, Pakistan is a sovereign nation. Q Well, recently you’ve also described bin Laden as a sort of modern day Hitler or Mussolini. And I’m wondering why, … Continue reading The Osama/Pakistan Flip-Flop

Brace yourselves as the details ofChimpy’s torture fetish slowly dribble out. A federal judge ordered the Pentagon on Wednesday to identify some detainees who say they were abused by U.S. military personnel at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff rejected arguments by the Defense Department that it needed to black out the names and other identifying information of detainees to protect their privacy and he ordered the redactions removed within a week. The Associated Press filed a lawsuit last year seeking the detainees’ names and transcripts of U.S. military hearings. [snip] “By redacting … Continue reading This Will Be Like Water Torture for Bush

This is what apresident who is not a coward sounds like. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton joined a chorus of critics of Bush administration proposals for treating suspected terrorists, saying it would be unnecessary and wrong to give broad approval to torture. In an interview with National Public Radio aired on Thursday, Clinton said any decision to use harsh treatment in interrogating suspects should be subject to court review. “You don’t need blanket advance approval for blanket torture,” Clinton said. [snip] Clinton warned against circumventing international standards on prisoner treatment, citing U.S. abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, criticism … Continue reading The Clenis on Torture