General George Casey has proposed a number of planned troop reductions of American forces in Iraq, including some reduction by [politically critical] September, and a reduction to about half of the number of combat brigades by the end of next year. It is unclear what effect this will have on total number of troops. Why doesn’t General Casey want to stay the course? Doesn’t he know that an announced reduction in the American military presence only benefits our enemies? Sheesh. Somebody check Casey’s voter registration card: he’s doubtless a traitorous Democrat. [In some sense, these troop reductions are coming much...

And so we learn of yet another secret Bush Administration program eavesdropping on activities many Americans might have thought beyond the government’s snooping ability absent a warrant, in this case, secret monitoring of bank wire transactions, which (naturally) the Vice-President was quick to condemn (the disclosure of, that is, not the program, which he obviously likes, having approved it and all). This is an interesting area, because, of course, unlike the apparent monitoring of tens of millions of telephone records, one would ordinarily think that people might just have a tad less of a privacy interest in this kind of...

Although it’s still June, it looks like the consortium of major news outlets and Republican operatives that control what we see and hear have gotten it together, and given us a look at what we’ll be seeing between now and Election Day. We’ll start with the announcement of the arrests of seven young men in Miami who are certainly guilty of being Moslem and of living in a warehouse in the (heavily minority) Liberty City area, and having “aspirations” but “no means” of blowing things up… let me repeat that minor point: they had absolutely no means whatsoever to carry...

A National Academy of Sciences study (commissioned by a Republican Congressman) demonstrates that the Earth is currently the hottest it has been in some time.… at least for the last 400 years, and probably for the last 2,000 years. The study concludes that greenhouse gases are largely responsible for this, as well as other factors. The Bush Administration, of course, opposes various pollution control measures, that it contends will cost American jobs. Well, look: the industrial era started long before George W. Bush became President, and indeed, long before George W. Bush was born. This is an ongoing problem, that...

The New York Times, itself oh so instrumental in uncritically adopting Administration propaganda (and IMHO committing war crimes in the process, at least to the extent that similar actions to its resulted in the occasional conviction and death sentence at Nuremberg) that helped get us into Iraq, now offers us this discussion of Congressional Republicans’ exploitation of some Democrats’ call for a timetable for American withdrawal– a timetable favored by an overwhelming majority of Iraqis, btw. Katrina. Let me make this easy. We can’t really leave Iraq; no, we shouldn’t be there in the first place, but we’re there, and...

Taking an unfortunate page from Henry VI, it seems that Shia militias are content to try their own hand at killing all the lawyers, in this case, Khamis al-Obeidi, the third lawyer for Saddam Hussein or co-defendants to be killed during the course of his trial. (Trials are hard enough to prepare for without having to worry about whether you and/or your family will be kidnapped, tortured and murdered. For better or worse, Saddam’s lawyers are just trying to do their damned jobs… like it or not, everyone is entitled to a defense, no matter how distasteful or even monstrous...

I’ve tried to minimize discussion of the upcoming primary challenge to Joe Lieberman in Connecticut because, quite frankly, I believe that multi-millionaire Ned Lamont should be funding his own damned run, and by not doing so, is diverting critical money and energy that could be used by Connecticut Congressional candidates Diane Farrell, Joe Courtney and Chris Murphy to unseat Republican incumbents… Plus, Joe’s pro-war stance shouldn’t be any more offensive to Democrats than, say, that of my own state’s senators Schumer or Clinton. But then Joe Lieberman opens his damned mouth, such as described in this WaPo Op-Ed, where Lieberman...

The latest “bad idea” comes from the very same Pentagon that gave us “Start long, ugly, protracted, bloody, expensive invasion of country posing no threat to us followed by occupation and intervention in said country’s sectarian civil war in Southwest Asia after dismantling all potentially stabilizing institutions in name of ideological purity based on advice from probable Iranian agent.” Their great new idea is “Bear-bait unstable nuclear-armed regime on doorstep of two most critical allies in East Asia using method almost guaranteed to result in failure and probable national humiliation.” Yes, that’s right: plans are afoot to try to shoot...

The New York Times treats us to this lengthy article documenting just how well numerous Bush Administration officials have done since leaving government for the private sector to work on homeland security matters. While, for example, the famous success of St. Rudy of Giuliani in cashing in on the growth-industry-that-is-paranoia with Giuliani Partners may be so great that it is sufficient to keep him out of serious consideration for national office, other moves include former Deputy Homeland Security Secretary (and Clinton Impeachment operative) Asa Hutchinson to the Venable law firm, Tom Ridge to Savi Technology’s board (which will be conveniently...

In response to the ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act request, the Pentagon released over 1,000 pages of documents detailing abuses of prisoners detained by American forces in Iraq, including at least two major military reports on abuse. The overall conclusion of the reports (and other documents produced) is that while numerous… questionable… actions were taken against prisoners (including “sleep deprivation and playing loud music and limiting detainees to bread and water for extended periods up to 17 days and stripping at least one detainee naked”), such actions were, in the end, deemed “wrong… but not illegal.” For her part, commenting...