This meddlesome judge

The nerve of some federal judges who won't bow and scrape to Preznit Duhbya! While I'm making ecclesiastical references, how many divisions does Florence-Marie Cooper have?

Novak the concern troll

Robert Novak is well-known as an insincere propagandist. Here, he pretends to critique Hillary's triangulation as premature. If she weren't running a centrist primary campaign, he'd be concerned about her ability to move to the center for the general election. Fear, uncertainty, and doubt - that's his job.

Why can Novakula still get paid for this tripe?

Too polite by half

Newtie Gingrich has written a book, and in it - get this - he's claiming to be an ardent environmentalist. What's next? A syndicated column giving marital advice?

Juliet Eilperin gives Newt's book a "balanced" review, rather than a fair one or an objective one. Maybe derisive laughter wouldn't translate well into print in the Washington Post. But I suspect journamalism at work. Bending over backward to conservatives is so expected by the handmaidens to power. Here, some bon mots, starting with the headline (not Eilperin's responsibility):

Green Republicans
Newt Gingrich gets tough on the U.S. role in the environment

There's this cherry-picked statistic:

[T]hey question the wisdom of imposing a mandatory, nationwide cap on carbon emissions on the grounds that Europe's carbon dioxide emissions rose faster than America's between 2000 and 2004.

Here's a graph that can put that captious crap into context. Surely even the WaPo has access to Google so that they could find a source not printed by the competition.

The most gaping "balance" comes at the end:

Gingrich and Maple contend that the private sector, not government, holds the answers to the globe's biggest problems.

This is the most patent bullshit, but Eilperin's comment is the vacuous:

The question is whether people in places such as Bangladesh can afford to wait and see if they're right.

If the private sector could have solved environmental problems, why haven't we seen any progress so far? The private sector is built to exploit externalities. It's like trying to solve peonage with Ebenezer Scrooge.

Eilperin does object to the specious equation of Duhbya's record with Bill Clinton's. Newt and his coauthor "compare the environmental records of Bush and ... Clinton in a way that strains credulity". This is a half-measure but welcome nonetheless. Newt the environmentalist is the fundamental strain on credulity.

Still, it would bode much better for our future if people with large platforms in our national conversation could recognize bullshit and call it what it is, even in less scatological terms.

Comics blogging, bulldoo-doo edition

Just now opened the Boston Globe dead tree edition from Sunday, and since this is in my core subject area, it has to go up, even late. Hey, would putting the word bullshit in a mission statement render it buzzword non-compliant? Omitting it would be insincere, so no mission statement for me...

Click image for complete strip.

Need to know basis

... and Americans don't need to know. That's the Bushist rationale. There's nothing they won't cover up.

I'm sure they'll appeal the decision to classify White House visitor logs as public records. The records won't be available before Jan. 2009, I would bet.

Yet when Bill Clinton was President, the Republicans argued that everything the Secret Service did should be public, the better to find stains related to Monica Lewinsky. Sure, the public really, really needed to know about the oral sex. But policy? No way.

Another craven capitulation

As I told the office of one of the good guys, John Kerry, "The Congress needs new leadership."

What Republicans care about

It's not debt or the deficit. It's low taxes for the wealthy.

Show me the money

Dan Froomkin labors away at the benighted Washington Post trying to shed a little light into all their smug Beltway denial. A vital challenge for anything that backs up the Bushist propaganda - even if it comes from a refreshing exponent of reality - is, "Prove it."

Update: Looking at the ABC videos of Kiriakou (hmm, the feminine form of a Greek name), I'm a bit skeptical of him. He's such a boy scout, and he's confirming so much without demurring from any question, that he seems more like an actor than a spy.

The Beltway strikes back!

The Washington Post despises John Edwards, and that's a good enough recommendation for me!

Sun-, oops, Monday comics blogging

Hey, if it's good enough for Ted Williams, it's good enough for the likes of you.

Acquiescence to torture

Is there anything the Washington Democrats won't allow the Bushists to do?

Nancy: You're not tough if you cave every time someone questions your toughness.

It is possible that the Bushists are claiming consent by silence when in fact there was none. That's a completely consistent pattern, too.

Thin cover-up

Someone might identify a torturer, and we can't have that! What would that do for the torturers' morale?

One percent doctrine

Under Darth Cheney's one percent doctrine, America should invade any country that has a 1% chance of conveying nuclear weapons to terrorists. So why aren't we in Pakistan? Good question.

A sane one percent doctrine would prepare for 1% chances, war game them, create mitigation plans and scenarios, build infrastructure, keep some resources ready for rapid deployment, etc. The war gaming at least appears to be what the Pentagon is doing without any White House sponsorship (though it is possible the White House just couldn't acknowledge it), and I say good for the Pentagon.

One of the bonuses of being in Afghanistan is that we're right next door to the single most likely source of nuclear weapons for Islamic terrorists. I hope that we have a go team standing by at all times for possible interdiction or rescue. That would be a hell of a thing to try to put together on the fly. I'd rotate the duty, too. No team can stay sharp if it's sitting around the base yawning about alerts that always stand down.

Further, if we're not directing all the best of our satellite and electronic intel into Pakistan, we're idiots. Which is yet another reason to fear the results of having such incompetent morons in the White House.

Glasnostalgia

Remember those heady days when Russia was a fledgling democracy trying to build institutions of democratic succession? Well, the new tsar has put an end to that Western nonsense.

As for who lost Russia back to authoritarianism, there's plenty of blame to go around. Most of it belongs with Russians, of course, but a couple of U.S. Presidents failed to engage strongly, and there's then-Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs, whose plan to reform the post-Soviet economy was an abject failure.

Of course, I'll always remember Duhbya's insight-free assessment of Vladimir Putin's (non-existent) soul. Not that Bill Clinton did much better.

Wait for Dana Perino's tell-all

So.

Scotty McClellan now teases his White House memoir, implicating the whole Bushist conspiracy in the outing of Valerie Plame. Duh!

Odd how obvious lies become credible news instead of he-said-she-said-shrug news only when a Republican confesses.

And, of course, Dana Perino, instead of resigning on principle when asked to lie, follows Scotty's example and ignores the plain meaning of words. When she publishes her memoir of lying for a living, I'll bet they put a picture of her on the cover.

No one who has worked in the Bushist apparatus has any credibility at all. They should be believed only when what they say is obviously true from other sources.

Lock 'em up

The Washington Post does actual investigative reporting in this story. Maybe this will keep John Solomon out of political reporting in something he actually does well.

There was a complete lack of appropriate experimental control in the original forensics of bullet lead analysis. And this comes on the heels of many other instances in the recent past where forensics labs can measure something very precisely but have no idea what their measurement means.

In this case, the FBI assumed that bullets in the same box were likely to have the same measured composition and that that composition was systematically different from bullets in other boxes. It turns out that they were wrong on both counts and at least a few innocent suspects were convicted as a result. The tire expert in My Cousin Vinny was confident of his evidence, and it all fell apart. At least he was honest enough to admit it. The FBI, typical of bureaucracies, buried its error under vague memos.

When did testilying become so acceptable?

Never support a liberal or a Democrat who could actually win

Richard Cohen should be fired for his own navel-gazing irrelevance. Seriously, he's "liberal" for the neocon Washington Post, and he would never think to do anything but pox-on-both-their-houses columns that make lots of conventionally "wise" media narrative points and thrust the Rovian propaganda.

Seriously, Mike Bloomberg? Cohen has twenty candidates to choose from and he wants the other mayor of New York with all his foreign policy experience in a scenario as likely as a wookiee plucking his eyebrows?

Without looking at Eschaton yet this morning, I'd be willing to bet that Cohen is already Atrios's wanker of the day looking for a centrist pony who won't disturb the villagers but will be just the ass-kissing "centrist" they love more than anything.

No one should take the Post seriously until they fire this vapid waste of pixels. I guess that's my pony.

Drowning in a sea of ... petrodollars

This is a very interesting article. I don't have time to read it at the moment, since I have an oil-fired furnace and I need to better insulate my house, but the first page strikes me as the sort of clear analysis you hardly ever read in the Washington Post any more. I will get back to it.

IOKIYAR

Flying around with a former drug dealer is the best thing to happen to Fred Thompson lately. At least it keeps his moribund campaign in the news and gives him a chance to spin some homespun platitudes. This guy has obviously turned his life around - he's a Republican!

Fred could use a stimulant, though, and this guy sold marijuana. Funny he never did any time for it even after a probation violation.

Nowadays, there are literally hundreds of thousands of people serving mandatory minimum sentences in prison for similar crimes, thanks to Republicans and Democrats trying to out-tough each other. I notice no one asked Fred if he would pardon them. To spin it a Republican way: It would save the country a hell of a lot of money.

In 1945, Duhbya's policy a war crime

Read it and weep for what has been done in our name.