Both Michael’s There’s a Mr. Kettle on line 4, Mr. President and Dave Johnson’s The Fall Lie-Attack Started Today deal with the bizarre claims made by the Shrubbery in his liar-side chat™ this morning.

Congress has barely finished cleaning up the mess left by the 109^th Congress and started to seriously discuss this year’s funding and already they are guilty of “tax and spend.” This from a guy who has been maxing out the national credit cards every month and stealing from retirees to fund his personal vendetta against Saddam.

Somehow it became the Democrats’ fault that he couldn’t convince the RepubliKlan to vote for his immigration bill. It is past time for the Shrubbery to look behind him and discover that no one is following where he’s leading. The party leaders are looking at his numbers and telling candidates to keep their distance.

It would appear that the Shrubbery’s legacy will be as the individual who destroyed the dream of a permanent GOP majority. He will be cast as Lucifer in their creation myth.  You have to wonder if this wasn’t a plot by Nixon loyalists to improve Tricky Dick’s standings.

Fortunately the Atlantic Basin continues to be quiet because the National Hurricane Center definitely isn’t.

The new head of the center, Bill Proenza, is attempting to remake things in his own image, and, as Dr. Jeff Masters reports, he is meeting with a lot of resistance from both above and below.

This is Supervision/Management 101, a new boss making too many changes, too quickly when taking over an established organization. Everything should have been left until after the season was over in December. People need time to adjust, especially when they have been working together as a team for more than a decade.

It isn’t just that Proenza is reordering priorities, he is doing it based on what some feel is weak scientific justification.

Hopefully everyone will calm down enough to provide the necessary forecasts that those in those of us in the coastal areas depend on for personal planning.

Steve Benen notes the White House complaints about the number of investigations that Congress is engaged in at the moment.

First off, this isn’t a Hastert/Frist Congress of two-day work weeks and only one item at a time. Congress can “walk and chew gum.” It takes concentration, but they can do it. They were slowed down by having to clean up the mess of unpassed funding bills left by the last Congress, but they are coming up to speed.

As for investigations, Zachary Roth wrote an article, Investi-Gate, in the June, 2006 issue of Washington Monthly about the Congressional investigations during the Clinton administration which provides context to the issue, and I found a statement by Rep. Henry Waxman on one of those Republican investigations, White House Christmas Caper.

I’ll make a personal commitment to create a series of really sarcastic posts if Congress starts investigating Barney for damaging the White House lawn. That has to be the “moral equivalent” of investigating Christmas card lists.

Sara Robinson covers Salon’s Biden piece in Biden Bites Bloggers Back, and includes this quote:

But I think — and this is naive maybe — I have confidence that the American people will put this in perspective. Like when one of the bloggers said, “We’re going to take back the Democratic Party.”

Ah, Eli Pariser of Moveon said that, not a blogger, and the “We” is the same one found in “We the people of the United States.” You do remember the Constitution, don’t you, Joe? The credit card corporations you shill for didn’t make you forget it, did they? He was talking about getting the party to listen to the people, and stop listening to the consultants who couldn’t figure out how to win elections.

Joe shouldn’t take other peoples quotes out of context and then complain about his quotes being taken out of context. Not everything written on the ‘Net is written by bloggers, and Moveon does most of its work via e-mail.

Mr. Biden’s problem isn’t bloggers or Moveon, his problem is a long record of votes on issues that affect people’s lives.

July 7^th, 2005, London

BBC In Depth and the Wikipedia articles on the bombing.

Update: Jams O’Donnell has more on the observances and a nice bit of the London mayor’s speech after the tragedy.