Pennsylvania Congressman John Murtha has announced his intention to run for the position of House Majority Leader, should the unthinkable happen, and the Democrats take back the House. I guess from where I sit, this looks like a great move; he’d leapfrog over current House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, a guy who makes Joe Lieberman look like the Daily Kos in terms of his giving deference (and succor) to the Bush Administration. Plus, Murtha actually stands for something with respect to the Iraq War, to wit, ending it, and won’t do the usual Democratic two-step: when they talk about something...

Well, well… Republican efforts (supported by some Democrats) for outright repeal of the nation’s fairest and most efficient tax, that on estates that doesn’t really kick in until estates reach around $2,000,000, failed to overcome a “cloture” (or “filibuster”) vote in the senate. In part, this issue is a result of a failure of Democratic discipline (see “Baucus, Max”) in two ways. The first is holding its members in line against any asinine deficit-expanding repeals, until we have some semblance of overall budget sanity, there’s no call for making things yet worse. Second, the proponents of repeal have had the...

What a week this has been for the GOP AMERICA! Today’s spectacular news is that terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has been killed in an airstrike north of Baghdad. This was “confirmed” by the Iraqi government, but actual confirmation appears on the Islamist web-site of his “organization”, “Al-Qaeda in Iraq”. In short, it might actually be true. There is no doubt that this will be the greatest day in the long march toward winning the key battle in Iraq in the global war against swarthy-people’s extremism since the fall of Saddam, or the toppling of his statue, or the deaths...

Oooohhh!!! All hail the latest urinating contest between the United States’ outspoken ambassador to the United Nations (and advocate of its destruction) John Bolton and the United Nations Secretariat, notably Mark Malloch Brown of Britain, the U.N. Undersecretary General. Malloch Brown gave a speech suggesting that the United States “plays” the U.N. by convincing the moron masses in the heartland that the U.N. is utterly irrelevant and to be despised while engaging with it from Bosnia to East Timor to Kosovo to Pakistan to Palestine to Iraq, etc. Worst of all, he suggested that people who listened to Rush Limbaugh...

Talk about “rhymes with witch”! Hillary Clinton is forced to take to the floor to condemn the latest rhetorical outrage by Ann Coulter, whose latest literary atrocity refers to four particularly outspoken 9-11 widows as “the witches of East Brunswick”, and insisting that the ladies “were enjoying their husbands’ deaths”. Condemning 9-11 widows for having the audacity to speak out against the government whose incompetence killed their husbands and rendered their children fatherless. This is the “kindler and gentler” nation that Poppy Bush envisioned. This is the “compassionate conservatism” of George Dubya Bush at its best. Only a fool would...

Bruce the veep forwards us this LA Times piece, discussing plans that are afoot in the Department of Defense to change the Army Field Manual to delete that part about avoiding degrading and humiliating prisoners (a/k/a compliance with the Geneva Conventinos on some things), in the interest of “flexibility” to “interrogate” terrorist suspects. The State Department, which has to deal with other countries, is duly outraged. The JAG Corps of military attorneys are apoplectic. But the Vice-President’s office wants these changes, and damn the torpedoes. Look for tortured-while-a-prisoner-of-war Senator John McCain, who introduced an anti-torture bill that became an “inadvertent”...

And so, with OBL (who?) still out there now four years and nine months after 9-11, with the war in Iraq generating over two thousand dead American service personnel, tens of thousands wounded, untold thousands of dead Iraqis, and hundreds of billions in costs of the war, with the federal deficit at record levels and only poised to get worse (as Congress debates eliminating the “Paris Hilton” tax, a/k/a the fairest, most efficient tax on the books, i.e., the estate tax), with National Guard troops being rushed to our Southern border, with terrorists apparently operating just north of our Northern...

Happy birthday to TD Mother-in-law, who is now 75 years young.

The facts are far from in, and in the end, as horrible as the events that took place in the Iranian town of Halitha (where it is alleged that American Marines massacred at least two dozen Iraqi civilians last November), we really don’t yet have a full picture of what has happened, and let’s just say in the fog of war, there are lots of grey areas… Still and all, new Iraqi PM Maliki has no choice but to demand a full investigation of the American forces even as they are propping his fragile government up, which he did… Needless...