I’m kind of disappointed by the mealy-mouthed comments coming from Democratic leaders prior to what was inevitable, to wit, the President vetoed the Iraq war funding bill that contained time-tables for troop withdrawals. E-mails I keep getting from John Edwards suggest that the Democrats continue to send the President the same bill, until he signs it. My view is that the Democrats should now move on to their legislative priorities, minimum wage increases, expanding health insurance to the working poor and all children, restoring low income housing subsidies cut by the President’s mean-spiritedness, combatting global warming, and… you know. An...

That would be the Bush Administration’s protecting us from foreign threats of aid, offered after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, according to this account from WaPo. The offered aid appears in the range of just under a billion dollars; total Katrina clean-up and recovery is at $125 billion and counting, and quite frankly, much remains to be done. It’s not as if the foreign aid could have completely alleviated suffering of Americans– but it sure as hell could have helped alleviate some of it, especially if the Bush Administration permitted its timely delivery. But, of course, there are people in this...

Coming the same day a leading international aid official abruptly resigned over allegations concerning his generous use of an escort service (and while Paul Wolfowitz continues to hang on at World Bank despite findings of an ethics breach amidst allegations of favoritism for the benefit of his Tunisian-Saudi girlfriend… and Alberto Gonzales hangs on despite being a freakishly scary incompetent crony yes-man) we see that the Christianist soldier-bots have infiltrated yet something else close to home, the once-proud Attorney General’s Honors Program where many attorneys (including, btw, m’self) start their careers with the United States Department of Justice, which, according...

In its own version of “asymmetrical warfare”, the Justice Department has asked a federal appeals court to limit lawyers’ access to Guantanamo detainees as part of its ongoing efforts to restore GTMO’s status as “America’s Legal Black Hole”. Even as “the terrorists” down there are so dangerous that the only one even charged was sentenced to a draconian nine months in an Australian jail, and half of “the worst of the worst” have just been released without charge or trial… those left must be treated more severely, in order to justify having held them for no reason in the first...

Despite the ongoing threat of a veto from the President, the House passed its war-funding measure by a 218-208 margin, and that war-funding measure includes time-tables for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. As noted in the linked WaPo piece, it is remarkably rare for Congress to engage in this level of management of an ongoing war. Of course, it was remarkably just as rare for the Congress to have utterly abandoned its oversight responsibilities of the Executive branch for the last six years, including the handing to the President of a blank check authority to carry out the...

Various Congressional committees unleashed a hail of subpoenas and other “invitations” on current and former members of the Bush Administration, including a subpoena to Secretary of State Incompetetentalleezza Rice concerning pre-Iraq war intelligence indicating Saddam Hussein’s purported attempts to acquire “yellowcake uranium” (the subject of my interview with Knut Royce), another committee sought the testimony of Karl Rove’s deputy Sara Taylor, and yet another granted immunity to our old friend, Alberto Gonzales’s assistant, Monica Goodling. Rice’s testimony comes at a very interesting time; it could be designed to take on a President trying to go schoolyard on war funding; perhaps...

Our comrades at Pravda give us this chronology of the career of Boris Yeltsin, and the Grey Lady gives us this far longer narrative, in light of Yeltsin’s death, at 76. Hard to sum up Mr. Yeltsin (other than to note an uncanny resemblance to pro wresting’s Bobby “the Brain” Heenan). Had Yeltsin and Gorbachev been different men, the transition from Soviet Union to successor states could have been far more chaotic and troubling than it was, particularly given all of those nuclear weapons. Perhaps (like its last mayor believed to be the case with New York City), Russia is...

It seems that the White House official who quipped that the Bush Administration made up its own reality wasn’t kidding, as the White House reaction to a performance by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales that was so God-awful that Republican Senators are calling for his resignation is, of course, an expression of renewed confidence in Gonzales by the White House. Was anyone expecting anything any different? And does anyone doubt for longer than a micro-second that if Gonzales is, indeed, forced out, he won’t be replaced with yet another crony potentially even more loathsome and incompetent than Gonzales himself? And even...

Call me gob-smacked to find that Sun-Kyung Cho, the sister of the Virginia Tech mass-murderer, is employed by the Bush Administration in an Iraq reconstruction function. At the moment, she appears to work for a contractor called McNeil Technologies, but the Princeton grad seems to have worked for the State Department in the successor to the Coalition Provisional Authority, either directly or indirectly in at least three stints. Given the Coalition Provisional Authority’s sordid history of hiring only inexperienced but connected Republican operatives for its crucial budgetary functions, we can more than reasonably conclude that in order to get her...

Those of us who were kind of troubled by the inability to mount a successful fillibuster of Scam Alito’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court get to shake our heads and say “surprise, surprise”… the High Court voted to dispense with a number of earlier precedents and outright find a so-called partial birth abortion ban constitutional (5-4… of course.) I’ll defer to Scott Lemieux’s observations on this; I think the short answer is “it’s about the patriarchy, stupid.” You little ladies don’t really know what to do with your bodies so we’ll tell you for your own good. Note that...