The [Republican] party's main, almost sole, purpose has been to ensure that as much money as possible goes to those who need it least and that as little as possible goes to those who need it most. -- Jacob Heilbrunn review of The Making of the American Conservative Mind

Thus the condundrum: accepting the reality of climate change is one thing....But accepting that Al Gore was right about climate change, well...hoo... That throws a wrench into the personality-based Republican justification machine. – Laura Turner on what prevents conservatives from accepting the reality of climate change

When I last used the above graphic, George Bush had just been re-elected (or finally won without an assist depending upon your frame of reference) and things looked awful bleak for the reality-based community which would be the people who expect a minimum of competence and truth out of their elected officials. – tbogg

Since 1996, thanks to the Republican addition of Section 912 to that year's welfare reform bill, the federal government has spent over a billion dollars funding "abstinence only" sex education programs for teens. Recently, however, the Bush administration rewrote the rules so that programs can only get funding if they promote avoidance of sex at any age until you're safely ensconced in a traditional marriage of one man and one woman. – Kevin Drum

Fully armed Russian long-range strategic bombers flew UNDETECTED into U.S. airspace during a training exercise over the Arctic Ocean recently. The U.S. military is now investigating why it was unable to see them on radar. – The Raw Feed

Blogger is slower than George Bush on Jeopardy right now … tbogg

Quotes of the Day: From the 1985 movie “Bliss”. “The entire economy of the Western world is built on things that cause cancer.”

Bill of Rights - Security Edition is a copy of the Bill of the Rights (the first ten Constitutional Amendments), printed on a metal plate small enough to fit in your pocket. As you walk through the security checkpoint at an airport, go ahead and give up your Rights by tossing it into the plastic bin. If you take your rights through a metal detector, it will probably sound off an alarm, in which case a security officer may ask you to forfeit them. (from Strange New Poducts)

A former president of Delta said that the branding is done with a hot coathanger. The former president, George Bush, a Yale senior, said that the resulting wound is "only a cigarette burn."

George W. Bush’s plan on intelligence is the opposite of the old saw that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. His is “if it ain’t broke, break it.'’ Then put the fix in.

The Big Fish ... (From Rubber Hose)

See how three presidents answered the question "what was the best moment of your presidency?"
to summarize:

carter: the camp david negotiations

clinton: the resolution of the kosovo crisis

bush: that time i caught a big fish on my ranch

y'know, as richard cranium says, bush is probably right. catching that fish probably was the best thing he's done since he entered the oval office. who says i never agree with the president?

Looking for a quick background to the Porter Goss mess? TPM gave a pretty good one last week. There are probably more details by now..

The hookers in Hookergate are, of course, the sizzle. But there's a bigger story. It stems directly from the Randy "Duke" Cunningham bribery scandal, which many had figured was over. But it's not. You may have noticed that while Duke Cunningham is already in jail and Mitchell Wade has already pled guilty to multiple charges, Brent Wilkes has never been touched. Wilkes is the ur-briber at the heart of the Cunningham scandal, you can see pretty clearly by reading the other indictments and plea agreements. Wade was Wilkes' protege.
Now, on the surface one might surmise that the prosecutors are just taking their time, putting together their best case.
I hear different.
Wilkes has deep ties into the CIA. The focal point of those ties is to Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, the man Porter Goss appointed to the #3 position at CIA when he took over the Agency last year. Remember, Wilkes' scam was getting corrupt contracts deep in the 'black' world of intelligence and defense appropriations, where there's little or no oversight. Foggo was in the contracting and procurement field at the CIA. So you can see how he and Wilkes, who have been friends since high school, had plenty to talk about.
The CIA wasn't the only place Wilkes and his protege Wade plied their corrupt trade. There were also in the mix contracting on the Bush Pentagon's extra-constitutional spying operations. And I am told that senior appointees at the DOD knew about their corruption but overlooked it.
Now, since the Cunningham scandal got under, and particularly of late, there's been a big tug of war between federal law enforcement and the CIA over whether to really go after Wilkes. Probably a little more specificity is in order there, folks at CIA in the orbit of Foggo and presumably Goss.
Now, how does Goss know Foggo?
That's how we get into the other part of this story -- those 'hospitality suites', that moveable feast of food, poker and love, Brent Wilkes ran in Washington for maybe fifteen years. We hear that's how Goss got to be friends with Foggo, whom he later promoted to executive director of the CIA, the number 3 post at the Agency.
Now, last week, Goss denied he had attended any of Wilkes' parties, in answer to a question from TPMmuckraker. Foggo admitted attending the parties but claimed he'd never seen the hookers.
Now, corrupt contractors saucing up Agency officials and members of Congress to get contracts and free money. Hospitality suites where the saucing takes place. Hookers in the mix. It's going on for more than a decade, various members of the key committees in the mix. Goss, former member of one of those committees, appoints one of the key players in all this mess as the number three guy at CIA? The feds leaning hard on the limo company owner who probably knows all the details and already has a long rap sheet and can't afford another conviction?
There's a lot going on here, a lot we don't know, what's connected and what's coincidence. But this is the backstory. And why this story is likely to turn out to be a very big deal.

Do yourself a favor and go listen to Neil Young's Living with War album which is streaming right now. The CD won't be released until May. I just listened to it and it is a good album even without the political comment. Most of it is Neil Young and Crazy Horse. By that I mean that it is the Neil Young side which always comes out when playing with Crazy Horse as opposed to what you might call his Harvest side. The band is not Crazy Horse by the way. This is a three piece and it sounds excellent. I'm glad Neil has honed his preference for recording with as little production as possible. This enabled him to put out a quality effort like this in such a short time.

Bits and pieces:

Won't need no shadow man/Runnin' the government
Won't need no sunshine/Won't need no purple haze

We live in the garden of Eden, yeah/Don't know why we wanna tear the whole thing to the ground

I never bow to the laws of the thought police ..

From Brad's Blog: 'It may just be the Fahrenheit 9/11 of rock' ... Neil Young wants to keep on rockin' the free world.His new record, Living With War, makes very clear that if the Bush regime is allowed to continue, there may not be a free world to rock for much longer.

Don't need no ad machine/Telling me what I need/Don't need no Madison Avenue War/Don't need no more boxes I can see/Covered in flags but I can't see them on TV

Don't need no more lies

Don't need no terror squad/Don't want no damned Jihad/Blowin' themselves away in my hood/But we don't talk to them/So we don't learn from them/Hate don't negotiate with Good

Don't need no more lies

.... Young kicks out the proverbial jams with the album's centerpiece, "Let's Impeach the President." This song is a blistering, barnstorming indictment of our Commander-in-Thief, and Young borrows a page from Michael Moore here by letting Bush destroy himself with his own words.

Thousands of children scarred for life/Millions of tears for a soldier's wife/Both sides are losing now/Heaven takes them in/Thousands of children scarred for life

We had a chance to change our mind/But somehow wisdom was hard to find/We went with what we knew and now we can't go back/But we had a chance to change our mind.

... The really remarkable thing is that the CD captures a live sound like few others do. It really sounds like you're in the room with Young and his 3-piece band as they blaze through the tunes. The album was recorded in a week with minimal overdubs, and this contributes an amazing vitality and urgency to the whole package. The choir and occasional trumpet add zing to an otherwise hard-rockin' bass-guitar-drum assault.

Do you think that you believe in yours more than they do theirs somehow?

... "I was waiting for someone to come along, some young singer 18 to 22 years old, to write these songs and stand up," Young said. "I waited a long time. Then, I decided that maybe the generation that has to do this is still the '60s generation. We're still here."

America has a leader but he's not in the house. He's walking here among us -- we have to seek him out.

America is beautiful but she has an ugly side.

Gems from Fafblog …

Fare thee well, Tom DeLay. After years of diligently and thanklessly serving his donors, his lobbyists, and himself, the former House majority leader is leaving the United States Congress. He has endured one of the cruelest smear campaigns in recent political memory, a bitter and protracted effort to paint him as a criminal simply because he broke the law.

The Slipperiest Slope. …any attempt to legalize gay marriage will inevitably legalize polygamy as well, leaving America at the mercy of unstoppable hordes of ever-copulating Mormon group sex brigades! But gay marriage and polygamy are only the beginning, because the dark road that begins with equal rights leads inexorably to the next terrifying step: legalized, state-sponsored robot sex!

Since the dawn of time marriage has been defined as a union between one man and one woman who are not also complex electronic devices - and once you abandon one part of this ancient formula you abandon it all! Oh sure, today you may think it's harmless for gays and lesbians to get married, but take away the precious protection of state-sponsored homophobia and tomorrow you'll have men marrying machines, unhinged threeways between two lesbians and a minidisc player, crowds of deranged mechanophiliacs humping household appliances in an orgy of animatronic man-on-android action! And the children! Within a decade America will be raising a morally deformed generation of depraved mutant human-toaster hybrids brainwashed to bang half-robot potato-peeler people by our cyborg-sympathist media elites! And not only will this destroy the sanctity of marriage, it will destroy Western civilization itself, as our superintelligent sex computers rise up against their human masters to make bottoms of us all!

And the only way to prevent this nightmarish future dystopia of apocalyptic cyborg sex? Banning gay marriage! Equality is a slippery slope, people, and if you give it to the gays you have to give it to the polygamists and if you give it to the polygamists you have to give it to the serial dog molesters and if you give it to the serial dog molesters you have to give it to the machine fetishists and the next thing you know you're being tied up by a trio of polygamist lesbian powerbooks and you can't get out because the safety word is case sensitive! Even as we speak Giblets' iPod nano is clearly coming onto him, and the only thing giving him the power to resist its seductively well-designed contours is the awe and majesty of the Defense of Marriage Act! Pass an amendment now, America - before it's too late!

The Nation That Knew Too Much. Millions were outraged to learn last December that the president had authorized a warrantless domestic spy program in direct violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. … Were it not for the New York Times, the American people would never have been menaced by this rogue information. Oh, terrorists would still be aware the U.S. was trying to wiretap them, but they wouldn’t know it was trying to wiretap them illegally. Now that information has fallen into enemy hands, and it could be used to orchestrate the most dangerous attacks on the American government the United States has ever known: censure, Congressional hearings, or even an independent investigation – all of which could prove devastating in the Global War Against the President’s Approval Ratings. And make no mistake, my friends: that is exactly the war we must fight when we confront the teeming terrorist hordes. For how can America’s troops maintain their fighting spirit when their Commander-in-Chief is polling in the mid-thirties? … It’s one thing to ban journalists from talking about the NSA program, but what’s truly needed is a law to prevent the public from thinking about it. Classified information has been leaked to a public that was never meant to know it, and as long as Americans are free to think classified thoughts, they can silently undermine the president in a time of war from deep within seditious skulls. The occupation of America’s frontal lobes by the United States military may be long and costly, but the cause of freedom requires many a sacrifice.

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But as we come upon the day that marks Bush’s last 1,000 days, April 26 or so, we’re going to have to come up with a new phrase, because "lame duck" doesn’t begin to cover Bush’s unmitigated collapse. – Firedoglake

Doris Kearns Goodwin, the historian and best-selling author of books on Lincoln and FDR, takes a different approach, judging presidents by the people they surround themselves with. “In contrast to Lincoln,” she explained, “who drew on the talents of a Stanton, Seward and Chase, Bush’s most trusted advisor is a guy who goes by the nickname ‘Turd Blossom’.” --- The Satirical Political Report

There’s both good news and bad news for the Right-Wing Evangelicals. Their good news is, there’s now conclusive proof, that the world was in fact created, by an intelligent designer. The bad news for these folks: As with most designers, this one was also gay! – Don Davis

Happy Jack. Washington Post: "Karl Rove quits policy position to focus on midterm elections" This is like reading that Jack the Ripper has given up his medical practice to focus on his night job. – billmon

Clearing Out Odds & Ends ...

A good sign you've chosen the wrong person to run Iraq's 135,000 member police force: When asked whether he likes his job, he responds: "No. I don't want to keep it! They force me to take it. I'm a civil engineer, a merchant. I can't continue. I don't want to continue. My specialty is construction, industry. I want to rebuild Iraq. -- Think Progress

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From Political Animal …

BAN VIAGRA!....How dangerous is the "abortion pill"? Actually, it's not clear if it's killed anyone at all, but what if the worst is true and it turns out to be the culprit in all of the recent deaths in which it's been implicated? Kerry Howley reports:

If Mifepristone turns out to be the cause of death in all five possible cases, the pill's mortality rate will be under one in 100,000. Between 1988 and 1997 (before the abortion pill was approved) the mortality rate from legal induced abortion, according to the Centers for Disease Control, was 0.7 per 100,000.

....The Association of Reproductive Health Professionals cites a mortality rate of five per 100,000 for Viagra, the erectile dysfunction drug, and as Dr. Paul Blumenthal, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, puts it, "That's a risk men are willing to take to have erections."

How long do you think a conservative congressman would stay in office if he seriously spearheaded an effort to ban Viagra? Six months?

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NEW NEIL YOUNG ALBUM-- LIFE IN WAR-- WON'T PROVIDE ANY CAMPAIGN DITTIES FOR BUSH AND THE RUBBER-STAMP REPUBLICANS

Just after debuting his new film at SxSW Neil shocked the music world by announcing, kind of off-the-cuff, that he had recorded a brand new album and that it's all ready to go. (The guy introducing him, SxSW director Roland Swenson, had referred to how important Neil's song "Ohio," about the National Guard shooting down college students at Kent State, was to another generation then gearing up to end an earlier unpopular war, and how we needed something like that now. Neil took it seriously.) The new album is called LIFE IN WAR.

One of Neil's collaborators, filmmaker, Jonathan Demme, describes it as "a brilliant electric assault on Bush and the war in Iraq.” The linchpin track, "Impeach the President," features an edited-together Bush rap set to a 100-voice chorus chanting "flip/flop." The album, with Young on Old Black, Rick Rosas on bass and Chad Cromwell on drums, took three days to finish. Yep; that's Neil. No release date is set yet but... hopefully it'll be before November.

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From Firedoglake …

Now that I’ve been out of my blogging gig for a while, my anger wheel has been jolted far to the left and when I reread that extraordinarily perceptive passage by Taibbi, I actually felt kind of sorry for the subjects. They’re scared is all. They’re scared of a lot of things because they need to be scared of a lot of things. They lack purpose without things relentlessly scaring the shit out of them. And in order to distract the media from the fact that they’re more juiced up on fear than love for their country, they constantly try to frame liberals—who in their minds still wear patchouli, listen to Jefferson Airplane and love the fuck out of Jane Fonda—of being the cowards because, um, we’re "anti-war" (what fucked up times we live in where being "anti-war" is a "bad thing") and we aren’t 100% freaked out that gay people, Mexicans, Arabs and the Dixie Chicks are roaming free in our streets.

You see, in reality, us "cowardly" liberals aren’t afraid of much of anything. Disgusted, sure. We’re plenty disgusted with a lot of things going on in America and the world today, and rightfully so, but our repulsion isn’t fueled by fear. It’s fueled by hope for better days in America, a concept so antithetical to the rightists’ junked-out need for a constant influx of "bogeymen" (they’ve been trained well), that they aren’t able to process the notion that we don’t hate our country, we just take great, full-throated exception to how it’s being run by them. Or, more to the point, run into the ground by them.

… And some of them, primarily "9/11 Republicans" and alleged libertarians, were so addicted to the notion that "everything changed after 9/11" that they discarded large, important chunks of their belief systems because they figured the "everything changed" doctrine applied to their very beings as well.

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From digby …

However, I might also suggest that the fact that we are all in our mid forties to early 60's means we are taking care of both the elderly (who are living to amazing old age) and the young (who stay young a lot longer than they used to) while looking at a scary old age that some factions of the government are actively trying to fuck with, and who may very well succeed.

The younger cohort, like me, looks at greatly reduced opportunity in a shrinking job market that is unkind to older workers. Many cling to their pathetic jobs with their brittle fingernails for fear of having to pony up many thousands of dollars in health care premiums if they lose it (and having to take a shit job at Walmart when nobody will hire them at their formerly decent wage.) Health is becoming a big issue for us --- the system is quite inconveniently breaking down just as we enter our unhealthy years. This economy feels very unstable and if you are over 50 you know you will not be able to make it all back if it goes.

We are feeling a little bit stressed.

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I know this is old but I never sent it out….

TEXT MIGHT BE HIDDEN 'GOSPEL OF JUDAS'

The text begins with the "secret account" of a conversation between Jesus and Judas.

For 2,000 years Judas has been reviled for betraying Jesus. Now a newly translated ancient document seeks to tell his side of the story. The "Gospel of Judas" tells a far different tale from the four gospels in the New Testament. It portrays Judas as a favored disciple who was given special knowledge by Jesus -- and who turned him in at Jesus' request. "You will be cursed by the other generations -- and you will come to rule over them," Jesus tells Judas in the document made public Thursday.

The text, one of several ancient documents found in the Egyptian desert in 1970, was preserved and translated by a team of scholars. It was made public in an English translation by the National Geographic Society.

… A "Gospel of Judas" was first mentioned around 180 A.D. by Bishop Irenaeus of Lyon, in what is now France. The bishop denounced the manuscript as heresy because it differed from mainstream Christianity. The actual text had been thought lost until this discovery.

Elaine Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton University, said, "The people who loved, circulated and wrote down these gospels did not think they were heretics."

… The document "implies that Judas only did what Jesus wanted him to do."

Christianity in the ancient world was much more diverse than it is now, with a number of gospels circulating in addition to the four that were finally collected into the New Testament… Eventually, one point of view prevailed and the others were declared heresy, he said, including the Gnostics who believed that salvation depended on secret knowledge that Jesus imparted, particularly to Judas.

The newly translated document's text begins: "The secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot." In a key passage Jesus tells Judas, "You will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me." This indicates that Judas would help liberate the spiritual self by helping Jesus get rid of his physical flesh, the scholars said.

"Step away from the others and I shall tell you the mysteries of the kingdom," Jesus says to Judas, singling him out for special status. "Look, you have been told everything. Lift up your eyes and look at the cloud and the light within it and the stars surrounding it. The star that leads the way is your star."

The text ends with Judas turning Jesus over to the high priests and does not include any mention of the crucifixion or resurrection.

The late Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater on John McCain's new pal Jerry Falwell, July 1981: "I think every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass." -- Talking Point’s Memo

Well, you know, that's the problem in America, we're always having elections. – Sen. John Cornyn

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From Corrente:

THIS BUSH-ISM IS EVEN BETTER THAN "HECKUVA JOB"!

Words fail me. Well, almost. AP:

“[BUSH] I want the Iraqi people to hear I’ve got great confidence in their capacity to self-govern,” Bush said. “I also want the Iraqi people to hear — it’s about time you get a unity government going.

Well, naturally. The Iraqis only have a 5,000 year-old civilization. Now, wait for it…

“[BUSH] In other words, Americans understand you’re newcomers to the political arena. But pretty soon it’s time to shut her down and get governing.”

From the fine folks who brought you not just Katrina, but the Iraq Clusterfuck….

Plus extra special Winger Projection Syndrome Bonus quote:

“[BUSH] In fact, much of the animosity and violence we now see is the legacy of Saddam Hussein,” Bush said. “He is a tyrant who exacerbated sectarian divisions to keep himself in power.”

A tyrant who rules by exacerbating sectarian divisions… Seems familiar, somehow… Wait, it’ll come to me…

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From Kevin Drum …

FOX, MEET HENHOUSE....Hey, guess who President Bush has nominated to head up the Labor Department's Wage and Hour Division? That's right: the guy who represented Wal-Mart in trying to prevent a class of 1.5 million women from suing the company for discrimination in pay and promotions! He also appears to oppose pretty much every regulation related to wages and hours ever passed.

What a perfect nominee. If he didn't exist, the Republican Party would have to have invented him.

And another disgrace. This is from Glenn Greenwald’s excellent blog, Unclaimed Territory. These guys have to be stopped.

THE FICTITIOUS KYL/GRAHAM "FLOOR DEBATE"

… The Government contends that it does and in support of this position, Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and John Kyl have filed an amicus brief with the Court. … Specifically, the brief cites a lengthy colloquy between Senators Kyl and Graham themselves which purportly took place during a Senate floor debate just prior to passage of the bill. In the exchange, both Kyl and Graham suggest that the bill will strip the courts of jurisdiction over pending detainee cases such as Hamdan. But here's where the story gets interesting.

Apparently this entire 8 page colloquy--which is scripted to read as if it were delivered live on the floor of the Senate, complete with random interruptions from other Senators--never took place. It was inserted into the Congressional Record in written form just prior to passage of the bill.

Another national disgrace. This article was published in Roll Call and reprinted at the AEI website. These guys have to be stopped.

WILL SCALIA BLOW THE WHISTLE ON THIS CONSTITUTIONAL FARCE?
By Norman J. Ornstein

A few weeks back, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia described the legal philosophy of his adversaries--those who believe that interpretation of the Constitution should not rely on strict adherence to the words and intent of the document and the framers. “But you would have to be an idiot to believe that,” Scalia said. “The Constitution is not a living organism--it is a legal document. It says something and doesn’t say other things.”

That is quite a quote--and it is not a paraphrase. But it comes to mind as one watches the Speaker and the Senate Majority Leader stonewall on the issue of making S. 1932 legal under the Constitution.

To those unfamiliar with the issue and controversy, the House and Senate passed a major budget bill by the narrowest of margins in both chambers, including a tie-breaking vote in the Senate case by Vice President Cheney, but it turned out that the bill passed the House and Senate in different forms.

This was not simply a transcription error, a misplaced comma or a misspelled word--something that would be plenty serious--but a $2 billion discrepancy that arose over a last-minute compromise between the two chambers over the time allowed for the rental of medical equipment for Medicare patients. After the House had passed its version and the discrepancy became known, Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) unilaterally changed the House bill to match the Senate’s and then sent it on to President Bush, which he signed to great fanfare.

But a seventh-grade civics student who has done his or her homework would immediately know that what the president signed is not a law. Laws, as Article 1, Section 7 of the Constitution makes clear, must pass both chambers of Congress in identical form and then be signed by the president.

Of course, when Congress makes an error such as this one, it easily can be resolved by having both chambers re-pass the bill in identical form and having the president sign the proper bill. But not in this Congress with these leaders.

Because the two versions are different by a cool $2 billion, and because the more generous House version would be difficult to pass muster with fiscal conservatives, neither Hastert nor Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) wants to go through another vote. So they have decided to ignore the plain letter and intent of the Constitution and declare, with the same sensitivity to the rule of law as the queen of hearts, that it is law, period, because we say so.

The leaders have come up with a belated rationalization: the 1892 Supreme Court ruling by John Harlan in Field v. Clark, which found that the signatures of the Speaker and the president of the Senate are enough to certify the legality of a bill. But any serious reading of the facts surrounding that decision would make clear that this is a different kettle of fish.

Hastert and Frist are unlikely to budge, despite Democrats’ fulminations on the issue. But a suit has been filed by a private citizen contesting the act’s legality. It may get to the Supreme Court. If it does, we will see how strict Scalia’s adherence is to his own professed judicial philosophy--and what term he would apply to leaders who don’t understand that the Constitution says something and doesn’t say other things.

From American Progress Action ...

MEET THE NEW CHIEF

President Bush announced this morning that he has replaced Andrew Card, his Chief of Staff for the past five years, with Joshua Bolten, the current director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The transfer of power will officially occur on April 14. Bolten served as Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy at the White House from Jan. 2001 to June 2003. Under his helm at OMB, the federal debt ballooned from $6.8 trillion to the current $8.4 trillion. And, despite issuing numerous veto threats to Congress to control its spending, Bolten never carried through on his rhetoric. In December 2003, Bolten "laid out a plan to shrink the deficit in half in a five-year period." But as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has noted, Bolten mortgaged the nation's long-term economic health for short-term gain because "deficits will rise sharply again soon after 2009, in part as a result of the Administration’s own policies." Even prior to the announcement today, Bolten has long been considered to be among a "tight team of close associates of the president [who] is calling the shots," including Vice President Cheney, Card, and Karl Rove. While many have called for a shakeup in the White House that would bring in new ideas and a new way of doing business, White House officials acknowledge that Bolten "knows how this White House operates" and is unlikely to make dramatic changes. As then-Sen. Jon Corzine once said of Bolten, "He's one of those people, though, who is on message and loyal to a fault."

AN ACUTE CASE OF CODEPENDENCY. This covers something I have wondered about a couple of times. Why are we so tied to Israel especially since it causes so many problems? James Wolcott discusses the issue via a book review of The Israel Lobby.

THE BUBBLE SQUAD: Shape-shifting Republican operatives impersonate reporters and the Secret Service.

People place their hand on the Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution; they don't put their hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible. -- Jamie Raskin, professor of law at AU

"--nanny state is a term frequently used to convey its moralistic, dependence-making, interfering nature, but it's an inadequate one, as nannies also make you feel safe, or should do, and the government of today is determined to do the opposite--the terrorists are coming, the attack is inevitable, London, Huddersfield, Sheffield, Little Sodsbury, who knows where or when, but come it will, we can't prevent it, but we can make your life complicated, anxious and miserable by implementing regulation after regulation that will help guard you from terrorists and their attacks, from which no one can protect you, which are coming because they're inevitable--here is a list of things you may not do, tomorrow will bring a list of other things that you may not do, eventually you'll have forgotten how to do them and even why you wanted to do them, and in the end, by the time we've finished regulating you, you should come not to mind the terrorists and their attacks, which are coming, from which no one, especially us, can protect you, because your lives will be so cabined, cribbed and confined that you might as well give them up to people who think it a duty and a pleasure to take them, so be supine in the name of Western civilization, our values are that we don't have any, our future is to pay for our past by surrendering--surrendering..." -- Simon Gray, The Year of the Jouncer

Bush has since presided over one of the most significant political re-alignments in the history of the Western Hemisphere. By this summer, every major Latin American nation but Colombia is likely to be run by elected leaders with stronger backgrounds in Marx than free markets. If Cold War-era 'domino theory' has been a bust in the Middle East, it's working with textbook precision in Latin America. -- Guillermo Delgado, professor of Latin American Studies at UC Santa Cruz

If this weekend's organizers could get 500,000 people to turn out on Saturday for their march, imagine a one-day work stoppage. If all of my Hispanic employees and the Hispanics who make deliveries to us or provide other services didn't come into work for a day, I'd be screwed. Now imagine if they all stayed home and didn't buy anything for a day. They could bring California to its knees and you'd have business owners and factory owners and large contractors and the entire service industry screaming bloody murder. – tbogg

In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, brave, hated, and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot. -- Mark Twain

From Swami Uptown …

DEAR OLD GOLDEN RULE DAYS

You won't believe--well, maybe you will--this story of the challenge of teaching science to children of Christians Who Know Better. From an Arkansas Times article about a geologist who teaches in Arkansas public schools:

Teachers at his facility are forbidden to use the “e-word” (evolution) with the kids. They are permitted to use the word “adaptation” but only to refer to a current characteristic of an organism, not as a product of evolutionary change via natural selection. They cannot even use the term “natural selection.”

But Bob’s personal issue was more specific, and the prohibition more insidious. In his words, “I am instructed NOT to use hard numbers when telling kids how old rocks are. I am supposed to say that these rocks are VERY VERY OLD ... but I am NOT to say that these rocks are thought to be about 300 million years old.”