[Updates below, under the “fold.”]
Regarding the terrorist plot against Fort Dix, which was foiled by standard law-enforcement procedures — Steve M. correctly predicted much chest-pounding and feces-throwing on the Right, although Michelle so far has not resorted to multiple exclamation points (!!!). Steve also says, Continue reading
[Update: Now it’s the White House saying that Kathleen Sebelius’s statements are just the whining of another woman Democratic governor. More below.]
Much of the nation is one storm away from catastrophe, and the National Guard is not ready to respond. Nancy A. Youssef of McClatchy Newspapers writes that
With much of their equipment in Iraq and Afghanistan, state National Guards face profound shortages in responding to natural disasters, particularly as they get ready for the hurricane season, which begins June 1.
The Guard has been shipping gear to hurricane-prone states in an effort to ease concerns, but a large disaster affecting several states would tax the Guard’s ability to respond, according to National Guard officials and government reports. Some deficiencies aren’t correctable. The Texas National Guard’s helicopters, for example, are in Iraq and can’t be replaced easily.
This sudden concern for disaster readiness was triggered when Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius said that the Kansas guard could not respond to the recent tornado devastation because so many of its troops and equipment were in Iraq.
Guard and other government agencies have been warning of the problem for months.
“Most of the units in the Army and Air National Guard are under-equipped for the jobs and the missions that they have to perform” domestically, Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard bureau, told Congress last month. “Can we do the job? Yes, we can. But the lack of equipment (means it takes) longer to do that job, and lost time translates into lost lives, and those lost lives are American lives.” [emphasis added]
Righties — supporters of the Iraq War — can come unglued over an exploding backpack and homemade cherry bombs, but they can’t grasp the importance of disaster response.
A Government Accountability Office report in January found that of 300 types of equipment needed in natural disasters, the Guard had fewer in all categories than it did in 2001, before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Some of the equipment is unavailable for domestic disasters, the GAO found, including radios and dump trucks. Only 2 percent of the diesel generators needed are available, the study found.
The GAO report estimated that Guard units in the United States have only 50 percent of the equipment they’d need in the event of a disaster. A study by the National Guard Association of the United States pegs the percentage at 40 percent, according to John Goheen, the group’s spokesman.
And to achieve the 40 percent, the Guard had to count some of the guardsmen’s privately owned vehicles.
Before the Sept. 11 attacks, Guard units had access to 75 percent of their equipment needs, according to the GAO. But Guard units deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan have been leaving their equipment behind when they return to the United States so that other units can use it.
Much of the equipment that remains in the United States is rundown. Blum estimated that it would cost $40 billion to bring the National Guard to 80 percent readiness.
Note that the Iraq War supplement bill Bush just vetoed was for $124.2 billion. The “pork” that so vexed the President included money “for training, operations, repair of equipment, purchases of equipment, and other expenses related to improving the readiness” of the non-deployed National Guard.
There’s a program to move Guard and active-duty Army equipment from other states to hurricane-prone areas, thereby taking equipment away from tornado-prone, earthquake-prone, and terrorist-prone areas. But even relatively weak hurricanes could be devastating to the Hurricane Katrina survivors still living in flimsy FEMA trailers.
In today’s New York Times, Clark Kent Ervin explains what America needs to do to prepare itself for another major terrorist attack, which likely would involve more than exploding backpacks and homemade cherry bombs. Ervin is a former Inspector General of the Homeland Security Department who was purged by the White House for actually doing his job rather than focus on providing butt cover for Bush Administration incompetence. In today’s op ed, Mr. Ervin writes,
Perhaps another strike on the country is unlikely, but I very much doubt it. From everything we know, Al Qaeda is as determined as ever to attack us at home, and it remains as capable as ever of doing so. While many of its operatives have been killed or captured since 9/11, the supply of young people who are willing and even eager to attack Americans seems limitless.
Our disastrous misadventure in Iraq has only increased that desire. Al Qaeda has reconstituted itself in Pakistan and is trying to reclaim Afghanistan. It is only marginally harder for terrorists to enter the United States now than it was before 9/11, and once they’re inside our borders the potential targets are infinite. Many of those targets are more secure today, but not to the degree they should be
Ervin follows up with a to-do list: better airport and mass transit security, better inspection of cargo at seaports, better border patrol, better intelligence, better preparedness. We’ve been talking about some of these items since 9/11 — hell, I bet if I looked I’d find them in the Hart-Rudman recommendations — and they still aren’t done. One of the last items is
Ensure that, in the event of an attack, there is a clear chain of command among the federal, state and local governments; interoperable communications among first responders; supplies of food, water and medicine; and clear, workable evacuation plans.
Have Chertoff and crew done a dadblamed thing along these lines since Katrina? Not that I’ve heard.
Update: The Associated Press reports (Thanks Joan16) —
The White House fought back Tuesday against criticism from Kansas’ governor that National Guard deployments to Iraq are slowing the response to last week’s devastating tornado.
White House press secretary Tony Snow said the fault was Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius’.
In a spat reminiscent of White House finger-pointing at Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco after the federal government’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina, Snow rapped Sebelius for not following procedure to find gaps and then asking the federal government to fill them.
“If you don’t request it, you’re not going to get it,” he said.
However,
But Sebelius said she asked the Pentagon in December to replenish lost resources. She also said she spoke about the issue at great length with Bush over a year ago, in January 2006, when they rode together from Topeka, Kansas, to a lecture in Manhattan.
“What the Defense Department said then and continues to say is that states will get about 90 percent of what they had,” Sebelius said. “Meanwhile, it doesn’t get any better. I’m at a loss.”
Sebelius isn’t backing down.
President Bush will travel to the area on Wednesday. Sebelius plans at that time to raise her contention that disaster preparedness and response are hampered because so many state National Guard units have been sent to the Middle East.
“I don’t think there is any question if you are missing trucks, Humvees and helicopters that the response is going to be slower,” she said Monday. “The real victims here will be the residents of Greensburg, because the recovery will be at a slower pace.”
Sebelius said about half the state’s National Guard trucks are in Iraq, equipment that would be helpful in removing debris, and that the state is also missing a number of well-trained personnel.
“The issue for the National Guard is the same wherever you go in the country. Stuff that we would have borrowed is gone,” she said.
Updates: From FEBRUARY 2006 — “Bush Policies Are Weakening National Guard, Governors Say.” Released FEBRUARY 2007 — “Sebelius: Guard equipment shortage leaves state vulnerable.”
Kenneth Walsh has an article in U.S. News called “A Sinking Presidency.” Short version: Bush thinks he’s a cross between Abraham Lincoln and Harry Truman. He has an absolute confidence in himself and the rightness of his convictions. He thinks future generations will praise him and realize he is right. He’s bleeping nuts, in other words.
Everyone who works in the White House agrees with President Bush’s opinion of himself. The atmosphere in the West Wing is calm and serene. That’s because people in the White House are all living in the bubble and reinforcing each other’s delusions. The West Wing staff thinks the President is doing a heck of a job, and that his critics are wrong.
Most of the rest of the planet … disagrees.
See also The Carpetbagger.
Amanda at Think Progress posts more about the problem of responding to disasters, discussed in the last post:
This morning on CNN, Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (D) said that the state is missing vital National Guard equipment because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Usually the state has approximately 70-80 percent of its equipment at any given time, but it currently has just 40-50 percent. She added that these shortages “will just make it [recovery] that much slower.†…
… According to a recent report by a congressional commission, nearly “90 percent of Army National Guard units in the United States are rated ‘not ready,†largely “as a result of shortfalls in billions of dollars’ worth of equipment.†A January Government Accountability Office analysis found that the Pentagon “does not adequately track National Guard equipment needs for domestic missions†and as a consequence, “state National Guards may be hampered in their ability to plan for responding to large-scale domestic events.â€
The same problem was an issue after Hurricane Katrina, you might remember, although plenty of troops and equipment from other states were on the Gulf Coast in a few days. Our military has become more depleted and stretched since, however.
Floods are spreading throughout large parts of the Great Plains — Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas and South Dakota in particular. Communities damaged by disaster not only need rescuing; they need money to rebuild. There’s some folks on the Gulf Coast who might have something to say about that. This weekend President Bush made noises about the “pioneer spirit” of Midwesterners. That sounds ominous to me. Instead of providing trailers, maybe this time FEMA will drop leaflets all over the Plains that explain how to build a sod house.
Based on Memeorandum, at the moment rightie bloggers are still more hysterical about the exploding backpack in Las Vegas than they are about our nation’s continuing inability to respond to disasters as well as we should. The few righties who have commented on the problem in Kansas have brushed it off as the whining of another woman Democratic governor.
Last Friday, 95 percent of the town of Greensburg, Kansas, was destroyed by tornadoes.
Thanks to the Bush Administration, Greensburg will remain destroyed for a while.
GREENSBURG, Kan. (AP) — The rebuilding effort in tornado-ravaged Greensburg, Kansas, likely will be hampered because some much-needed equipment is in Iraq, said that state’s governor.
Governor Kathleen Sebelius said much of the National Guard equipment usually positioned around the state to respond to emergencies is gone. She said not having immediate access to things like tents, trucks and semitrailers will really handicap the rebuilding effort. …
… The Kansas National Guard has about 40 percent of the equipment it is allotted because much of it has been sent to Iraq.
In other words, the war in Iraq is eroding our capability to respond to domestic emergencies, including terrorist attacks. Although I feel for the residents of Greensburg — I’ve seen what tornadoes can do — I hope everyone in Kansas who supported Bush and his war takes note that if terrorists take out downtown Wichita, they can expect little help from the government.
Meanwhile, the righties have been terrorized by an exploding backpack in Los Vegas:
A backpack exploded in a parking garage attached to a Las Vegas hotel early Monday, killing a man who had picked it up and injuring another person, authorities said.
The man had removed the backpack from atop his car when it exploded shortly after 4 a.m. on the second floor of a parking behind the Luxor hotel-casino, said Officer Bill Cassell, a police spokesman.
The second person was taken to an area hospital.
Aerial video showed no apparent damage to the parking structure, where entrances were blocked while police, firefighters and federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents investigated. No further information was immediately available.
Sister Toljah is chattering about suicide attacks. “This incident may or may not have anything to do with al Qaeda terrorism,” says Michelle Malkin. At least she’s giving herself an out if the backpack owner isn’t Muslim.
But the Luxor Hotel has an Egyptian theme. Egypt is a Muslim country. See the connection?
BTW, I did a keyword search of Michelle’s site to see how much blog space she gave to the Alabama Free Militia. None, it turns out.
I say David Broder is the pure distillation of everything that is bleeped up in Washington. Take today’s column, for example.
Writing about the Iraq War, Broder says “A clear national mandate is being blocked.”
The public verdict on the war is plain. Large majorities have come to believe that it was a mistake to go in, and equally large majorities want to begin the process of getting out. That is what the polls say; it is what the mail to Capitol Hill says; and it is what voters signaled when they put the Democrats back into control of Congress in November.
This is exactly right. Clearly it is the will of the people to haul our national butt out of Iraq. Clearly that will is being blocked. But who is blocking it? Our blockheaded President, who vetoed timetables for withdrawal and who has made it plain he won’t even consider withdrawal as long as he’s in the White House? Republicans in Congress, who prevented an override of the veto?
No, of course not. Broder complains that the Democrats are responsible for blocking the will of the people and keeping the troops in Iraq. My only question is whether Broder is a perfect idiot or more of a slapdash, hit-or-miss sort of idiot. I’m leaning toward the former.
Broder also blames the Constitution.
It makes the president commander in chief of the armed forces, the only elected official whose orders every general and every private must obey.
Congress shares war-making power under the Constitution but can exercise it only through its control of the money the president needs to finance any military operation.
Geoffrey Perret has an op ed in today’s New York Times that argues the Constitution has been pretty much abandoned regarding war power. Perret is a highly regarded biographer and military historian; I’ve been one of his fans ever since I read his book on Ulysses S. Grant (highly recommended). He has a new book out called Commander in Chief: How Truman, Johnson, and Bush Turned a Presidential Power into a Threat to America’s Future that looks very promising. In today’s op ed, Perret makes a nice argument that the role of “commander in chief” as George Bush interprets it bears no resemblance whatsoever to the powers the Constitution actually gives him.
Since Lincoln’s day the war powers of the presidency have been pumped up like a balloon. It is current American policy that the president has the power to order the kidnapping, torture, indefinite secret imprisonment and even the death of almost anyone, anywhere. Can this really be what the Founding Fathers intended?
And the answer is no, it can’t. But Broder makes the common — and wrong — assumption that the Constitution gives Congress only “the power of the purse,” and says,
Most Democrats are unwilling to exercise their right to cut off funds for the war in Iraq, lest they be accused of abandoning the troops in the middle of the fight.
Lacking the will to do that, they are forced to an uncomfortable alternative. They are proposing to continue financing a war that most of them oppose, while placing conditions on the conduct of the war that the president says will reduce the chances of his strategy succeeding.
That claim, whatever its merits, places the Democrats on the defensive. It is not a comfortable position, but it is where they find themselves — for now.
Broder has a remarkable capacity for believing what he’s told:
In this moment, the commander in chief has a clear plan — to apply more military force in and around Baghdad in hopes of suppressing the sectarian violence and creating space for the Iraqi politicians to assemble a functioning government.
It is a high-risk policy with no guarantee of success. But it is a clear strategy.
In today’s St. Petersburg Times, Philip Gailey explains the true nature of this “clear strategy.”
Contrary to what his critics say, President Bush does have a timetable for ending the war. He plans to hand the disaster over to his successor at high noon on Jan. 20, 2009.
If Iraq is going to have an ugly ending, as it almost surely will, Bush is determined to see that it doesn’t happen on his watch, and there’s not much the Congress can do to foil him short of cutting off funds for the war, a step Democrats apparently are not ready to take.
Bush will keep asking for more time and money. As long as American forces are in Iraq, as long the fighting goes on, the war cannot be labeled a failure, at least in Bush’s mind. To admit defeat, to acknowledge that they blundered and destroyed a nation in the process, and maybe set the stage for even greater mayhem in the Middle East, is not the way of the swaggering pseudo-cowboy from Texas or his delusional and treacherous vice president.
As Ross Perot used to say, it’s just this simple: President Bush is the impediment to ending the war. There he stands, like a stone wall.
But both Broder and Gailey think that Congress could stop Bush if only the Dems would get the courage to cut off funding to the war. I disagree. Bush is a psychopath who is holding the troops hostage. If you’ve ever had to deal with one, you’ll understand when I say you cannot back a psychopath into a corner. Just when you think you’ve got the varmint boxed in, he’ll do some utterly unimaginable thing to get free. I think if funds were cut off Bush is likely to siphon money from other parts of government to keep the war going. And every Republican politician would be off the hook; instead of being forced to take a firm stand for or against the war, they could continue to scapegoat the Dems as “surrender-crats” who don’t support the troops.
If Bush is as crazy as I think he is, the only way a troops withdrawal will begin before 2009 is if Bush is removed from office. And, like it or not, it’s going to take some Republican support to accomplish that, because it requires two thirds of the Senate.
For that reason, I see no alternative to the step-by-step, bill-by-bill, vote-by-vote work of forcing Republicans to take a stand for or against the war. Sooner or later, Bush must be forced to either withdraw troops or defy a veto-proof majority of Congress. And even the Artichoke says “It is hard to imagine the Republicans going into the presidential election of 2008 with 150,000 American troops still taking heavy casualties in Iraq.” I think that if forced to make a clear choice between loyalty to Bush and their own political ambitions, Republicans will throw Bush under the next bus.
Conventional wisdom says that the Great Republican Defection will begin in August or September. CW can be wrong, and I have no doubt that Bush and his fellow psychopath Karl Rove already have a plan for keeping Republicans in line. On the other hand, Peter Spiegel and Julian E. Barnes write for the Los Angeles Times that Defense Secretary Gates may not be following Bush’s playbook.
President Bush has mobilized his administration, including his top general in Iraq, in a major push to win more time and money for his war strategy. But one crucial voice has been missing from the chorus: Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates’.
In fact, Gates’ recent comments seem to run counter to the message from the White House. During a recent trip to the Middle East, Gates told the Iraqi government that time was running out and praised Democratic efforts in the U.S. Congress to set a timetable for withdrawal, saying it would help prod the Iraqis. He reiterated that point during a meeting with reporters last week.
Whatever. I’m skeptical that anyone who works for Bush is going to be allowed more than a couple of inches off the reservation. We’ll see.
We’re all playing against the clock. Bush is trying to run it out, and he might succeed. On the other hand, time will soon be up for Republicans in Congress who face re-election in 2008. Will the realities of politics finally force Congress to take down a rogue president?
See also: The soft bigotry of Iraq and Bring them home.
There’s a must-read article by Charles Savage in today’s Boston Globe about Bradley Schlozman, a loyal Bushie. In March 2006 Schlozman became U.S. attorney to western Missouri, replacing a prior attorney considered too lax on voter fraud cases. Per the new Patriot Act provision, the Justice Department didn’t bother to seek Senate confirmation for Schlozman’s appointment. Less than a week before the 2006 midterm elections, Schlozman announced felony indictments of four workers for the liberal activist group ACORN on voter registration fraud charges.
Republicans, who had been pushing for restrictive new voting laws, applauded. But critics said Schlozman violated a department policy to wait until after an election to bring voter fraud indictments if the case could affect the outcome, either by becoming a campaign issue or by scaring legitimate voters into staying home.
Schlozman is emerging as a focal point of the investigation into the firing of eight US attorneys last year — and as a symbol of broader complaints that the Bush administration has misused its stewardship of law enforcement to give Republicans an electoral edge.
No stranger to election law controversy, Schlozman previously spent three years as a political appointee in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, where he supervised the voting rights section.
There, he came into conflict with veteran staff over his decisions to approve a Texas redistricting plan and a Georgia photo-ID voting law, both of which benefited Republicans. He also hired many new career lawyers with strong conservative credentials, in what critics say was an attempt to reduce enforcement of laws designed to eliminate obstacles to voting by minorities.
“Schlozman was reshaping the Civil Rights Division,” said Joe Rich , who was chief of the voting rights section until taking a buyout in 2005, in an interview. “Schlozman didn’t know anything about voting law. . . . All he knew is he wanted to be sure that the Republicans were going to win.”
If only they showed as much interest in government as they have in winning elections. Anyway, Missouri’s new Dem senator, Claire McCaskill, has requested that Schlozman testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Savage writes that the Bushies took an “interest” in voting laws after the close 2000 elections (seems to me they had already developed an “interest” before the 2000 elections). In May 2003 Schlozman was promoted to deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division, which is supposed to oversee redistricting and new election laws to be sure minority voters aren’t getting screwed. In Schlozman’s case, think “fox overseeing henhouse.” In the fall of 2005, he became acting head of the division.
Schlozman and his team soon came into conflict with veteran voting rights specialists. Career staff committees recommended rejecting a Texas redistricting map in 2003 and a Georgia photo ID voting law in 2005, saying they would dilute minority voting power. In both cases, the career veterans were overruled. But courts later said the map and the ID law were illegal.
Bob Kengle , a former deputy voting rights chief who left in 2005, said Schlozman also pushed the section to divert more resources into lawsuits forcing states to purge questionable voters from their rolls. One such lawsuit was against Missouri, where he later became US attorney. A court threw the Missouri lawsuit out this year.
Schlozman also moved to take control of hiring for the voting rights section, taking advantage of a new policy that gave political appointees more control. Under Schlozman, the profile of the career attorneys hired by the section underwent a dramatic transformation.
Half of the 14 career lawyers hired under Schlozman were members of the conservative Federalist Society or the Republican National Lawyers Association, up from none among the eight career hires in the previous two years, according to a review of resumes. The average US News & World Report ranking of the law school attended by new career lawyers plunged from 15 to 65.
Paul Kiel reported a couple of weeks ago that Schlozman allegedly would ask whether a potential applicant was a Republican before considering interviewing him.
Then in 2006 Scholzman became a U.S. attorney without benefit of Senate conformation and did his best to use his office to help Republicans win the midterm elections. But recently, the Bushies suddenly took a notion to replace Schlozman with someone else. Schlozman now works in the Justice Department office that supervises U.S. attorneys. Grand.
Last week Greg Gordon of McClatchy Newspapers provided some more background about alleged voter fraud in Missouri and made the all-important Karl Rove connection.
Few have endorsed the strategy of pursuing allegations of voter fraud with more enthusiasm than White House political guru Karl Rove. And nowhere has the plan been more apparent than in Missouri.
Before last fall’s election:
-Schlozman, while he was acting civil rights chief, authorized a suit accusing the state of failing to eliminate legions of ineligible people from lists of registered voters. A federal judge tossed out the suit this April 13, saying Democratic Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan couldn’t police local registration rolls and noting that the government had produced no evidence of fraud.
-The Missouri General Assembly – with the White House’s help – narrowly passed a law requiring voters to show photo identification cards, which Carnahan estimated would disenfranchise 200,000 voters. The state Supreme Court voided the law as unconstitutional before the election.
-Two weeks before the election, the St. Louis Board of Elections sent letters threatening to disqualify 5,000 newly registered minority voters if they failed to verify their identities promptly, a move – instigated by a Republican appointee – that may have violated federal law. After an outcry, the board rescinded the threat.
-Five days before the election, Schlozman, then interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City, announced indictments of four voter-registration workers for a Democratic-leaning group on charges of submitting phony applications, despite a Justice Department policy discouraging such action close to an election.
-In an interview with conservative talk-show host Hugh Hewitt a couple of days before the election, Rove said he’d just visited Missouri and had met with Republican strategists who “are well aware of” the threat of voter fraud. He said the party had “a large number of lawyers that are standing by, trained and ready to intervene” to keep the election clean.
Missouri Republicans have railed about alleged voter fraud ever since President Bush narrowly won the White House in the chaotic 2000 election and Missouri Republican Sen. John Ashcroft lost to a dead man, the late Democratic Gov. Mel Carnahan, whose name stayed on the ballot weeks after he died in a plane crash.
Joining the push to contain “voter fraud” were Sen. Christopher Bond, R-Mo., who charged that votes by dogs and dead people had defeated Ashcroft, Missouri Republican Gov. Matt Blunt, whose stinging allegations of fraud were later debunked, and St. Louis lawyer Mark “Thor” Hearne, national counsel to Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign, who set up a nonprofit group to publicize allegations of voter fraud.
The problem is, there is very little tangible evidence of voter fraud in Missouri. The charges filed against ACORN were about some low-level workers who were supposed to be helping people register to vote. Appatently they were being paid a few bucks for every completed voter registration form they could bring in, and some of the workers tried to pad their paychecks a bit by filling out forms with fictitious information.
In this February press release, Schlozman delcares trimphantly that one Dale D. Franklin of Kansas City had pleaded guilty to turning in “a voter registration application on which Franklin forged the signature of the applicant and on which the address and telephone number listed were false.” A voter registration application. As in one fake application. Wow.
Registering fake voters is a crime, but I don’t believe there is evidence that anyone tried to use the fake names to actually vote. Seems to be ACORN was the victim of the fraud, not the perpetrator.
If you want to see real voter fraud, check out what happened during the November 2000 elections:
It’s difficult to capture the emotional debate over the issue of voter fraud in Missouri without considering the Election Day tumult in St. Louis on Nov. 7, 2000. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of voters were turned away because their names weren’t on official lists, and many of them converged on the city’s election board seeking assistance.
Responding to the bedlam, Democrats won an emergency court order that kept some polls open beyond their scheduled 7 p.m. closings. That outraged Republicans, and Hearne, the Bush campaign lawyer, in turn won an emergency appeals-court ruling that shut the polls within an hour.
You will not be surprised to find out that the citizens whose names mysteriously disappeared off official lists were mostly African Americans from economically depressed precincts. Not exactly the standard Republican voter base. But the fascinating part of this, to me, is that Republicans used this shameful episode to whip up outrage against the “criminal enterprise” that cost Republican Senate candidate John Ashcroft the election. (You might remember that Ashcroft was defeated by the corpse of Gov. Mel Carnahan.) In the minds of Republicans, African American citizens who are likely to vote for Democrats amount to a “criminal enterprise.”
And I doubt very much that a few fake voter registration forms in Kansas City had much to do with what happened in St. Louis, which is on the other side of the state.
An editorial in today’s New York Times says that the U.S. attorney scandal “is only getting bigger and more disturbing.”
New reports of possible malfeasance keep coming fast and furious. They all seem to make it more likely than ever that the firings were part of an attempt to turn the Justice Department into a partisan political operation. There is, to start, the very strong appearance that United States attorneys were fired because they were investigating powerful Republicans or refused to bring baseless charges against Democrats. There is reason to believe that Carol Lam of San Diego, who put Randy Cunningham, the former Republican congressman, in jail, and Paul Charlton of Arizona, who was investigating Representative Rick Renzi, among others, were fired simply for their nonpartisan pursuit of justice.
Indeed.
See also: “The U.S. Attorney, the G.O.P. Congressman and the Timely Job Offer.”
By invading Iraq the Bushies carried out Osama bin Laden’s plans so perfectly you’d think al Qaeda had taken over the Department of Defense. Now al Qaeda’s number 2 guy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is repeating Republican talking points, according to Brian Ross at ABC News.
In a new video posted today on the Internet, al Qaeda’s number two man, Ayman al Zawahiri, mocks the bill passed by Congress setting a timetable for the pullout of U.S. troops in Iraq.
“This bill will deprive us of the opportunity to destroy the American forces which we have caught in a historic trap,” Zawahiri says in answer to a question posed to him an interviewer.
Continuing in the same tone, Zawahiri says, “We ask Allah that they only get out of it after losing 200,000 to 300,000 killed, in order that we give the spillers of blood in Washington and Europe an unforgettable lesson.”
Let’s see how the alliances line up — al Qaeda and the Bush Administration, and their various enablers, want to keep slugging it out in Iraq. Everyone else on the planet wants the U.S. out of Iraq. Tells you something.
Righties are thumping their chests and vowing to keep fighting, proving what a pack of stupid dupes they are. They’re playing the part of one of the oldest stock characters in fiction — the fool whose pride, vanity, or greed makes him easy prey for a trickster. Al Qaeda cannot defeat America, but it can trick America into defeating itself. The “historic trap” is not military; it’s psychological. All al Qaeda has to do is issue another video, mocking the U.S., and the entire American Right jumps up and dances to al Qaeda’s tune.
As Cernig at Newshoggers says, snarkily, “So Bush did exactly what the terrorists wanted him to? Say it ain’t so!”
Nicole Belle at Crooks and Liars:
Boy, al-Zawahiri couldn’t have served up Republican talking points better if he was on Grover Norquist’s fax distribution list, could he? And the timing…isn’t it amazing how al Qaeda videos seem to come out just when Republican backs are against the wall?
Amazing, yes. But not surprising.
Marcus Mabry writes at Newsweek.com:
It’s hard to say which is worse news for Republicans: that George W. Bush now has the worst approval rating of an American president in a generation, or that he seems to be dragging every ’08 Republican presidential candidate down with him. But According to the new NEWSWEEK Poll, the public’s approval of Bush has sunk to 28 percent, an all-time low for this president in our poll, and a point lower than Gallup recorded for his father at Bush Sr.’s nadir. The last president to be this unpopular was Jimmy Carter who also scored a 28 percent approval in 1979. This remarkably low rating seems to be casting a dark shadow over the GOP’s chances for victory in ’08. The NEWSWEEK Poll finds each of the leading Democratic contenders beating the Republican frontrunners in head-to-head matchups.
Mabry says that at last week’s Republican candidate debate, President Bush was mentioned only once, but Ronald Reagan’s name came up 19 times. And how pathetic is it that they can’t get past Ronald Reagan?
It’s been thirty years since one of the last Triple Crown winners, Seattle Slew, ran in the Kentucky Derby. Yep; Slew won the Triple Crown in 1977. Slew had the misfortune of being something of a follow up act to the Greatest Animal of All Time, Secretariat, who won the Triple Crown in 1973. But being a horse, I’m sure Slew didn’t care.
I’ve been trying since last night to post YouTube videos of Secretariat’s and Seattle Slew’s Derby runs, but they aren’t coming up. (Sometime next week six Seattle Slew videos will probably appear and clog up the site.) You’ll have to go to YouTube — Here’s the Secretariat run, and here’s Seattle Slew. You can see a Triple Crown race today, no matter what happens in Kentucky.
The favorite today is a horse named Street Sense. Hmm — Secretariat, Seattle Slew, Street Sense. SS, anyone? [Update: Street Sense wins.]
We were thoroughly spoiled by the time Affirmed won the Triple Crown in 1978. Will there ever be another?
Related: A half-brother to Secretariat saved from the slaughterhouse.
Update: Let’s try this —
Update: Here’s a trivia question — who is the oldest living Kentucky Derby winner? Bonus question: What does this horse have in common with only two other winners?