Madness of King George – Page 8

Well, There’s A Surprise.

Published on June 19, 2007

Maybe it’s time for Congress to round up all the wingnut sysadmins and apply a little Bushco-style LARTing?

After all, phyiscal mistreatment up to but not including major organ failure’s Ok for everyone else, why not their own operatives?

WASHINGTON (AP) – E-mail records are missing for 51 of the 88 White House officials who had electronic message accounts with the Republican National Committee, the House Oversight Committee said Monday. [….] The 51 include Ken Mehlman, a former White House political director who reportedly used his RNC account frequently, the report said.

‘Missing.’

Uh-huh, and I’m… well it seems I’m already Marie of Rumania several times over so if those emails and/or related logfiles – if they are actually, physically missing, then I’m… the Pope of Greenwich Village. CB Fry. Enver Hoxha. The Duchess of Duke Street. Virginia Plain.

Take your pick, all of those as are likely as those emails not being safely stashed away somewhere for use when most politically expedient. Try again, Oval Office.

Why Tomatoes Are Better Than Politics

Published on June 6, 2007

I had to walk away from the radio and tv altogether yesterday; Bush’s ideliberately inept stirring up of a hornet’s nest with Russia made me want to gio and put my fist through a window. I had to go and pot up some seedlings instead. There’s nothing gives you more perspective than potting up seedlings, unless it’s cats.

To see him tromping around in his monogrammed cowboy boots all over china-brittle alliances that are only barely glued together, it just…argh. the stupidity of it. But why? Why do something so apparently dumb?

Patrick Buchanan in The San Jose Mercury gets it:

When the Red Army went home from Eastern Europe, the United States, in violation of an understanding with Moscow, began to move NATO east. We have since brought into our military alliance six former members of the Warsaw Pact and three former provinces of the Soviet Union: Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.

Anti-Russia hawks are now pushing to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. If they succeed, we could be dragged into future confrontations with a nuclear-armed Russia about who has sovereignty over the Crimea and whether South Ossetia should be part of Georgia.

Are these vital U.S. interests worth risking a war? Why are we moving a U.S.-led military alliance into the front yard and onto the side porch of a country with thousands of nuclear weapons? Would we accept any commensurate Chinese or Russian move in the Caribbean?

After Moscow gave us a green light to use the former Soviet republics of Central Asia to base U.S. forces for the Afghan war, the United States has sought permanent bases there. Russia and China have now united to throw us out of their back yard.

America colluded with Azerbaijan and Georgia to build a Baku-Tiblisi-Ceyhan pipeline to transmit Caspian Sea oil across the Caucasus to the Black Sea and Turkey, cutting Russia out of the action.

In 1999, the United States bombed Serbia 78 days to punish it for fighting to hold its cradle province of Kosovo, which Muslim Albanians were tearing away. Orthodox Russia had long seen itself as protectress of the Balkan Slavs. That Clinton ignored Russia in launching this unprovoked war on Serbia was seen in Moscow as proof that Russian concerns had become irrelevant in Washington.

After helping dump over the government in Belgrade, our Neocomintern – the National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House and other fronts – interfered in Ukraine and Georgia, helping oust pro-Moscow regimes and install pro-American ones. Since then, NED has been run out of Belarus and its subsidiaries are about to get the boot from Moscow.

Can we blame the Russians for being angry? How would we react to left-wing NGOs in Washington, flush with Moscow oil money, aiding elements hostile to the Bush administration?

Oh yeah and fuck the EU too. Cheese-eating surrender monkeys. They deserve it.

Bush and the current generation of US politicians are very fond of using WWII and ‘the greatest generation’ to buttress their chickenhawkery and although they know in theory that a big war happened in Europe, because they”ve seen the movies and played the games, they don’t know that a war happened in Europe – and it wasn’t so long ago either, and it was as vicious at what’s happening in the Middle East if not more so. We can’t forget it, we’re still getting reminders every day.

A mass grave holding the remains of thousands of Jews executed by the Nazis during the second world war has been discovered in southern Ukraine by workers digging pipelines.

The workers stumbled upon the remains by chance last month in the village of Gvozdavka-1, near the Black Sea port of Odessa, Jewish leaders said yesterday.

[..]

According to Roman Shvartsman, spokesman for the regional Jewish community, the Nazis established a ghetto near the village. In November 1941 the ghetto was transformed into a concentration camp and at least 4,000 Jews were killed at or near the site between the end of 1941 and the beginning of 1942.

“The workmen were laying gas pipes near the centre of the village. They discovered hair, children’s toys, skulls and pieces of clothing,” Mr Shvartsman told the Guardian last night.

54 years later the voices of those destroyed by war come back to haunt us.

A teenage Jewish girl living under the Nazis in Poland during 1943 feared she was “turning into an animal waiting to die”, according to her diary, which documents the final months before her death in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Rutka Laskier, 14, the same age as the Dutch girl Anne Frank, wrote the 60-page diary over a four-month period in Bedzin, Poland. The diary, published by Israel’s Holocaust museum, documents the steady collapse of the ghetto under the weight of the Nazi occupation and deportations, as well as the first loves, friendships and jealousies of an adolescent girl growing up during the war.

You can imagine the goodwill and sheer effort required to have reached a kind of modus vivendi after a history like that, Unsatisfactory as this arrangement is, it’s nevertheless relatively peaceful and prosperous on the whole, a few genocides and regional wars notwithstanding. Peace in Europe has been fragile but holding, even with Putin’s increasingly restrictive and totalitarian grip on power in Russia.

But Bush is flailing badly at home: there’s a power struggle with Cheney in the White House, he’s poison in the polls, his own party’s against him, Iraq’s a bloodbath and the US military’s at low ebb as a result, a whole swathe of experienced officers gone or planning to go, either retired or pushed out…. I could go on. suffice it to say he’s very, very weak.

But he’s also a sociopathic, bullying dry drunk – and when he feels weak he wants to hurt something or start a fight. He also desperately needs to divert attention from his continuing military failures and his illlegalities at home: what better way to thumb your nose at everybody, to start a fight for fun, to hurt people and to get attention, than to wind up Vladimir Putin?

I really want to put what he’s doing down to pure stupidity and psychopathy, but I’m also sure there’s a game plan here. Attempt to encircle and destabilise Russia, poke iit with a stick, go to the G8 spoling for a fight, win concessions. All about the oil, always and forever about the oil.

But Bush also wants a showdown with someone, anyone, to rescue his wounded pride; and he just doesn’t give a shit who gets hurt in the process. His advisers are just using his childish need to provoke to further their country’s economic interests.

Though the San Jose Mercury gets it, I wonder if Americans in general grasp the seriousness of the political situation their President is deliberately provoking. From a brief scan of news and the blogs, no, not really. To the mainstream US media it’s mostly harmless rhetoric, Bush being Bush for tv and a chance to roll out all the old Cold war cliches. Ooh, a new cold war, when the secret agents wore trenchcoats and made glamorous dashes across Checkpoint Charlie….

Shorter US mainstream media: “What, me worry?” Oh well, it’s not them the missiles are aiimed at, is it?

It’s not like there’s a surfeit of statesmen and women with the capability or stature to defuse the situation either. To the question “Can saner heads prevail? ” I can only answer “Who?” Really, who is there? Tony Blair perhaps?

He says he can, but then he would, wouldn’t he. He wants a Legacy. But Tony Blair is a completely busted flush, a nothing, yesterday’s man just waiting for the indictment to come – unless, miracles of miracles, he’s had a resignation conversion and for once tells it like it is. As if.

So it’s down to German Chancellor Angela Merkel to talk down these two roosters from their posturing. If anyone has the weight of history on her shoulders in matters of war and peace, it’s her. Is she up to it? Given her antidemocratic record, I’m not hopeful. Now, I have some clematis to tie in.

It’s The Secret Annexes, Dummies

Published on May 30, 2007

TPM Muckraker has garnered opinions from various lawyers and civil liberties types (and a fat lot of good they’ve done us so far) who say that the Presidential directive I blogged about. the one that givies supreme power to Bush follwing any catastrophic incident at home or abroad (as defined by guess who, Bush.) is nothing to worry about. Nothing to see here, move along, you’re all a bunch of paranoids, calm down.

And I’m Marie of Rumania.

What’s important are the secret annexes to the order, the ones that are classified, the ones no-one’s allowed to see. These secret annexes:

23) Annex A and the classified Continuity Annexes, attached hereto, are hereby incorporated into and made a part of this directive.

But of course they’re not hereto attached.

Who knows what they actually say, but in the light of Bushco’s ongoing power grab I have a pretty good guess. Halliburton didn’t get that open-ended domestic detention centre contract for nuthin’.

Typical bloody soft centrists though, to assign benign motives to a president whose every action in office has been the very opposite of benign.

Did it not even occur to these experts to ask themselves, if they are still of the opinion that the order changes nothing: why now? Why issue it at all?

It’s all in the secret annexes, dummies. And we won’t see those until the Deciderer decides to decide he’s the Dictator (cue the manufactured attack by Iran) or Cheney executes his domestic coup, whichever comes soonest.

[Added to later because I thought it was skimpy]

How Bushco Fixed the US Immigration Courts

Published on May 30, 2007

Political Corruption Barbie, Monica Goodling

It’s naive to think that political considerations have no informal influence in governmental hiring, particularly to sensitive posts like the administration of federal justice. But the lengths to which Bushco will go and the blatancy with wihich they blithely ignore due process to do it still beggar belief.

And is it just me or are these Bush Barbies all of a cookie-cutter type? Dana Perino and Mionica Goodling – clones of the ur-beneficiary of the looks=competence+decency myth, Ann Coulter? I think we should be told.

You know how it is, as does Bushco – people think better looking individuals are more competent and women are less corrupt, so to cover high crimes, appoint good-looking, photogenic women to commit them. Simple.

But the looks are just a sideshow – we should focus on what these willing tools do, not how they look. That’s playing their game.

From Legal Times, via TPM Muckraker:

Few people in El Paso know more about immigration law than Guadalupe Gonzalez, a lawyer who has prosecuted illegal immigration cases along the Texas border for nearly 25 years. In 2002, after seeing an advertisement, she applied — and was passed over — for an opening on the local bench of one of the nation’s 54 immigration courts. But when two more vacancies arose in 2004, nobody bothered to tell Gonzalez. In fact, the positions were never advertised.

Instead, the Justice Department’s leadership, which oversees the immigration courts, used a little-known power to appoint two lower-level attorneys — both of whom Gonzalez had supervised at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in El Paso — to the $115,000-a-year positions.

The authority used to bypass the competitive hiring process would be employed again and again during the last year of Attorney General John Ashcroft’s tenure and continue when Alberto Gonzales succeeded him in 2005. And according to the immigration court’s former administrator, it also allowed top political aides at Justice, including former Gonzales chief of staff D. Kyle Sampson and former White House liaison Monica Goodling, to fast-track candidates of their choosing — including a number of lawyers with no immigration law experience but strong ties to the Republican Party or President George W. Bush’s election campaigns.

[…]

Though allegations that Goodling had politicized the hiring of federal criminal prosecutors were known by the time she testified, her admission that she had taken political considerations into account in the hiring of immigration judges — who are considered civil-service employees — was not. Nor was it well-known that a discrimination suit filed by Guadalupe Gonzalez led to internal debate within the Justice Department over the appointment process and to a hiring freeze of immigration judges that began in December — a freeze that wasn’t lifted until last month. Justice’s immigration judge selection process is currently being probed by the department’s inspector general and its Office of Professional Responsibility for potential violations of federal civil service laws.

Gonzalez’s story illustrates the inconsistent methods used to fill immigration judge positions. As with the replacement of U.S. attorneys, political appointees at the Justice Department appear to have trod upon department norms — and may have even broken federal law — to reward their own people with plum assignments.

More…

Go read the whole thing: the Us attorney scandal and now the immigration courts are not siolated inciodents of polital corruption. Bush minions like Goodling and Paulose and their buddy in Rove’s office Kyle Sampson are like termites – you don’t know they’re there until it’s too late and the damage is done. You might spot one or two but you won’t know the extent of the infestation until the whole edifice collapses into a pile of dust.

Every Pre-Apocalyptic Hiatus Needs Daft Cat Pics

Published on May 25, 2007

Iraq’s drowning in blood, Lebanon is drifting into a US-supplied civil war, a new armada is readying itself in the Gulf off Iran and worst of all Cheney’s plotting and conspiring a coup to usurp Bush’s powers as C-in-C and bomb Iran. Portents are bad, to say the least.

Now Rove’s been seen scuttling around Washington’s corridors of power like a headless chicken, allegedly attempting to strongarm Republican senators into some plan or other. Something big is up; could it be that rival forces are rallying for the final Bush v Cheney power struggle? If so, hold on tight for a bumpy political ride.

You know, they said we leftist bloggers were nuts when we predicted that this would happen, a attempted modern fascist coup in the supposed bastion of liberal democracy, and we were called crazy and paranoid by the sensible media and the centrist liberals. Oops. Their bad.

Never mind though – whatever happens, while we still have lolcats, there’s still reason and sanity in the world. For certain values of reason and sanity, granted, but at least not the kind that’s inclined towards triggering armageddon, just because it can.