Ah, those heady days I recall during my very short stay with our nation’s GAO, the non-partisan investigative arm of Congress, then standing for “General Accounting Office” (now “Government Accountability Office.”) The agency mission was, of course, to combat “waste, fraud and abuse”. The mission of the Bush Administration in general, and the former Coalition Provisional Authority operating under Viceroy L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer and a cast of people pulled from the Heritage Foundation job bulletin board in particular, seems to be to make sure that the GAO, and agencies like it, such as the Pentagon’s inspector general among others,...

WaPo reports that the White House had “eerily prescient” detailed knowledge about the likely effects of Hurricane Katrina two days before it made landfall in the New Orleans area… a rather extensive presentation, including graphic models of breached levees, arrived in the White House situation room. Of course, the President was over 1,000 miles from the White House situation room trying to avoid seeing Cindy Sheehan at his full-time hobby ranch in Crawford, Texas at the time… or he might have gotten a look at his own government’s hurricane and damage projections in time to, perhaps, have the federal government...

On this 33rd anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision, we’ll start with the President, unsurprisingly, talking up his “pro-life” street creds to an anti-abortion group rallying at the nation’s Capitol building (and rallying for the confirmation of Judge Samuel Alito to replace Sandra Day O’Connor as an associate justice on the Supreme Court.) Part of the “compassionate conservatism” message that the President campaigned on (twice) was a happy return to the days of back-alley abortions all across America, so, as a “truth in advertising” matter, it’s really hard to fault him on this one. Which, then,...

The military continued its perfect streak of not charging a single commissioned officer for abuse at Abu Ghraib with the conviction (for manslaughter and dereliction of duty in connection with the death of an Iraqi general from suffocation while in custody) of Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer, Jr. The incident, as you will recall, took place during the height of the Abu Ghraib abuses at some point in 2003 or 2004; the general in question, Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush, was wrapped in a blanket and jumped on by a number of interrogators, until he suffocated and died. Once again,...

We’ll start with the not-quite-dead Al Qaeda number two man Ayman Al-ZarqawiZawahiri, fresh from not getting killed in an American drone assault on a house in Pakistan that did kill 18 people including women and children… who released an audio tape of himself reciting poetry. Evidently, the tape was just an undated demo; it failed to make reference to recent A.Q. success stories, or the NFL playoffs… hence, there is no way to know when it was made, but I personally think OBL is fading physically, and can only be brought out for important situations; AAZ will likely be your...

Would be none other than our long-lost bogeyman, Osama Bin Laden himself, who released an audiotape aired on Al Jazeera that sounded an awful lot like it was written in anticipation of filling in blanks for the upcoming State of the Union address… indeed, it certainly looks like OBL has been reading the comments on Free Republic, Little Green Footballs, or the White House web site… I’m not going to dignify the bastard by quoting from him; I will say that he always appears at moments very convenient for the Bush Administration, last time, right before… the November 2004 election....

In a move that I’m sure you will find shocking… just shocking… for the second time this month, the (non-partisan) Congressional Research Service tells us that the Bush Administration’s domestic spying program (“Operation Big Brother”) violates yet another law, in this case a 1947 amendment to the National Security Act requiring notification of this sort of thing to all members of both the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, rather than simply to the Committee Chairs and Ranking Members, and the party leaders in each House (unless this was a “covert” operation, which, evidently, it was not.) This is on top...

This is the text of the speech former Vice-President and rightful President, the Sainted Al Gore delivered yesterday, in Washington, to a group dedicated to the preservation of what’s left of our constitution. Freed up from the idiocies of having to control every facial expression and bodily tick, lest it appear mocked on Saturday Night Live and late night talk shows and then lied about on CNN and in the so-called liberal New York Times and Washington Post… Gore can simply speak his mind. And he seems to be the only Democrat simply willing to get right to the point,...

I understand that today’s holiday is designed to honor the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a hero of the Civil Rights movement. However, I think its been just too long since we honored our own king… the one we elected twice now, thereby giving him “political capital” which he could spend. On that note, I give you this lengthy report (warning: PDF) on government secrecy in the Bush Administration prepared by the Government Accountability Office (GAO, one of my former employers). And here is a fascinating set of essays called “Patriot Debates” discussing various aspects of governmental surveillance associated...

From our comrades at Beijing’s People’s Daily we give you this succinct, to-the-point, completely lacking in irony discussion of the competing values of security against terrorism and protection of civil liberties that the American Congress is now confronted with. China, of course, need not tell us that it is, to put it politely, an “authoritarian” country that doesn’t trouble itself with these things, but China’s house organ gently reminds us that civil liberties were the founding principle of our republic… so perhaps this sort of debate will be more agonizing (or God damned well should be) than, well, than the...