Posts from — February 2006

In the Soviet system every enterprise of any size had a political officer, someone to ensure that Party loyalty was enforced in the enterprise and there was no “counter-revolutionary thinking” allowed to take root.

As we hear of all of the crony appointees that are spreading throughout the structure of the Federal government it has become apparent that loyalty to the Party and the Great Leader of the Party are the only requirements for promotion. People with no experience or credentials beyond working on the Bush campaign or making contributions to Bush are given positions for which they are obviously unsuited.

These people have not made a single appointment that wasn’t predicated on the assumption of Party loyalty, and as soon as their orthodoxy came into question they were purged.

The people who cannot be replaced are given political officers to watch over them and to divert any “bourgeois” opinions to editors who redact their reports to conform to the Party line.

All of the press offices have become propaganda bureaus to ensure that the proletariat only receives good news about the success of the Party’s programs.

Anyone who dares to deviate from the Party line is declared an enemy of the people and working with foreign elements to harm the future paradise that is guaranteed by strict adherence to the plan.

The Party is the only hope the people have to protect them from the foreign powers wishing to destroy their way of life.

No matter what it said on the office door, George Deutsch was a political officer.

You should read the Constitution of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics. It guarantees people many more rights and privileges than the Constitution of the United States. Too bad it was ignored.

They are trying to sneak the dismantling of Social Security into through the back door, eliminate the $255 death payment, cut off payments for teenagers who have left high school, etc. to cover some of the revenue lost when they do away with the Estate Tax.

All of this talk about tax cuts never seems to include Social Security taxes, even as they spend hundreds of billions of dollars of those taxes to hide the real size of their deficits. They don’t talk about the fact that a lot of their revenue increases are based on increases in Social Security taxes, not general taxes.

Why on earth would any rational human being think that is was a good idea to spend money and resources to create a children’s site for the National Security Agency?

This is beyond absurd.

Ted is looking for the $6,000 it will cost him to sue Ann Coulter for libel in New York. That’s the problem: Ann Coulter gets paid to tell lies and spread hate, but you have to pay to call her on it.

I don’t think Ted will have any trouble proving malice, that’s Coulter’s stock and trade, but you have to hire an attorney and start the paperwork.

I blame it on a Republican state government.

If we are at war as a result of 9/11 why didn’t Congress issue a declaration of war instead of an Authorization for Use of Military Force?

If they felt hemmed in by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act why didn’t they make adjustments in the USA PATRIOT Act. The PATRIOT Act had everything else under the sun it, so why wasn’t there any tweaking for perceived problems with the FISA system?

How can anyone believe that ignoring the Fourth Amendment does anything but advance the cause of the terrorists? How can you support the Constitution by ignoring it?

The President is selected by a majority of 535 electors. Each state has the right to designate its share of the total by any means it finds appropriate. While states may have laws that would punish “unfaithful electors”, whoever a majority of them select is the President of the United States. How can someone receiving fewer actual votes than most small town mayors unilaterally decide that the law of the land is not binding?

There are rumors that something happened in Detroit this past weekend and something is happening Torino starting today, but it doesn’t involve a real sport.

His viewpoint and expertise will be missing from the front page, so now you’re going to have to read the letters/comments.

Summary: During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, writes the intelligence community’s former senior analyst for the Middle East, the Bush administration disregarded the community’s expertise, politicized the intelligence process, and selected unrepresentative raw intelligence to make its public case.

So why didn’t Mr. Pillar say something sooner? How about: because no one was willing to listen.

The New York Times sat on the NSA story for a year. A host of media figures have been commenting on the Valerie Plame case while failing to mention that they were involved. Only after they helped the Shrubbery get re-elected did the media finally wake up to what a mess they had foisted on the country with their failure to report what they knew. The media are complicit in every failure that has plagued the American people, from Iraq to Katrina. They were enablers.

Finally, the media is taking small steps back to reporting the news, but not to the point that it bothers their corporate overseers.

Read Mr. Pillar’s article and understand that the intelligence community wasn’t broken or wrong until the Shrubbery’s thugs, Negroponte and Goss, started pushing out the pros and replacing them with cronies, just as they have done at every Federal agency.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest–
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men–
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.

Oh, right, there’s never been political speech at funerals.

Would someone buy Republicans a book and make them read it. Remember their talk about “Western Culture”, well the quote is from the canon for “Western Culture”.

™ ^{[Kevin Drum]}

Cat Blocking

When are you going to visit Daily Kitten?
What does this button do?
Did you see what I dropped in the water dish?
When’s dinner?

[Editor: Blogger isn’t the only problem some of us have with posting.]

Friday Ark

Posted early because of outage

The only person in Scooter’s chain of command with the authority to release classified information is the President, so I hope Scooter’s got it in writing.

According to the Constitution, while the President is alive and well, the Vice President’s sole function is to be the President of the Senate and vote in the case of a tie. The job is so discounted that, unlike the President, a Vice President can be indicted while in office.

I seem to remember the President specifically saying that the leak didn’t originate from the White House, and surely he wouldn’t have said that if he had authorized Libby to talk about Ms. Plame.

You know the possibility of a Vice President being indicted and a President conducting illegal domestic surveillance reminds me of something that happened earlier. I seem to remember there was long running unpopular war involved too. Don’t tell me, I’ll figure it out.

No word yet on his request for the Abramoff Chair on the Ethics Committee.

Sorry for the short notice. Blogger.com will be down tonight, Thursday, February 9th, from 7:30–8:30PM PST. Blog*Spot will be unaffected.

That’s 9:30-10:30PM CST and it’s only supposed to affect posting, not reading.

Update at 10:46PM CST: at some point they changed the time to 9:00-10:00PM PST, 11:00PM-Midnight CST.