Can I get some fries with that?

We've seen lots of "news" stories about the $87 billion dollars Bush is requesting for Iraq. We know that 66% of the public says nope, they aren't at all happy with the big, unexpected bill. Yet it's widely assumed that Congress will ultimately approve the request anyway. Can't screw over the boys in battle - Congress really has no choice but to approve it.

Meanwhile, the press reports on what we could've gotten for our money instead. (Not that we would have spent it on any of that stuff - after all the republicans are in charge of everything).

Then we have Bush, who seems concerned that he's "having trouble getting the message out," I guess because only 36% of us broke out into a rousing chorus of "I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free" upon hearing the cost. Others, in the same article, expend oxygen we'll never get back explaining why the speech didn't bump up his poll numbers (as if in some strange universe, it should have).

Lost in the flurry of the obvious and inane is the fact that one of the main reasons the appropriations request is so large is that the Bushies are undoubtly hoping the money will last for 14 months -- until the presidential election is over. Let's do the math.... [4 billion/mth x 14] + $20 billion for all the reconstruction we can do in a year = $76 billion, plus an $11 billion dollar fudge factor (or the graf built in to transfer money from the U.S. treasury to Halliburton) = $87 billion dollars.

Indeed, the memory hole of the American public is a huge bottomless pit and something dropped down into it a year before the election is likely to be long forgotten by the voters before they head to the polls in '04. Now if they could just do something about all the dead soldiers and the huge budget deficits.

Why We Fight

Big lie on Iraq comes full circle: ''War on terror'' is a metaphor. It is not an actual war, like the World War or the Vietnamese or Korean wars. It is rather a struggle against fanatical Islamic terrorists, exacerbated if not caused by the conflict in Palestine. When one turns a metaphor into a national policy, one not only misunderstands what is going on, one begins to slide toward the big lie. One invades Iraq because one needed a war."

That's the real reason. But not one, of course, that the Bushies were willing to make a case for.

So-called liberal media strikes again!

Natasha over Pacific Views brings us a description of John Edwards by a CNN reporter:

"The millionaire trial lawyer promised to [fight for the working class.]"

And then give us a few examples of what we might hear IF the Bush / Cheney team got the same treatment from the press:

The two former energy company executives promise to respect the environment. The ticket, with three drunk driving arrests between them, promises to encourage a culture of personal responsibility. The veteran of several failed companies promises to bring the best traditions of the business world into the Oval Office. The man who called a reporter an ***hole on mic promises to end the climate of bipartisan rancor in our nation's capital. The former governor who mocked a woman on her way to be executed promises to serve as a compassionate conservative. This wealthy son of a wealthy family claims direct knowledge of the concerns of those who have a hard time feeding their children."

How right you are, Natasha!

Oh just impeach him already...

Barely a day goes by lately that Bush or one of his cronies doesn't come out with a big, steaming, stinking to high heaven lie. Today, Bush was finally able to bring himself to admit that Iraq was not actually linked to 9/11, after implying otherwise for the better part of a year, yet he couldn't seem to help himself from recycling another oft repeated fabrication - the supposed link between Iraq and Al Qaida.

From the transcript today: Q Mr. President, Dr. Rice and Secretary Rumsfeld both said yesterday that they have seen no evidence that Iraq had anything to do with September 11th. Yet, on Meet the Press, Sunday, the Vice President said Iraq was a geographic base for the terrorists and he also said, I don't know, or we don't know, when asked if there was any involvement. Your critics say that this is some effort -- deliberate effort to blur the line and confuse people. How would you answer that? THE PRESIDENT: We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11th. What the Vice President said was, is that he has been involved with al Qaida. And al Zarqawi, al Qaida operative, was in Baghdad. He's the guy that ordered the killing of a U.S. diplomat. He's a man who is still running loose, involved with the poisons network, involved with Ansar al-Islam. There's no question that Saddam Hussein had al Qaida ties.

Sorry, Mr. President, but there is most definitely a "question" about that assertion. In fact, no one seems to really believe it but you. Not your CIA, not your allies (including Great Britain), no one.

Exhibit A:

Guardian | CIA had doubts on Iraq link to al-Qaida:"The debunking of the Bush administration's pre-war certainties on Iraq gathered pace yesterday when it emerged that the CIA knew for months that a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida was highly unlikely. As President George Bush was forced for the second time in days to defend the decision to go to war, a new set of leaks from CIA officials suggested a tendency in the White House to suppress or ignore intelligence findings which did not shore up the case for war. The interrogation reports of two senior al-Qaida members, both in US custody, showed that the CIA had reason to doubt the allegations of a connection between Saddam's regime and the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon."

Exhibit B:

Report Cast Doubt on Iraq-Al Qaida Connection : "The president said some al Qaida leaders had fled Afghanistan to Iraq and referred to one 'very senior al Qaida leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year.' It was a reference to Abu Mussab Zarqawi, a Jordanian. U.S. Intelligence already had concluded that Zarqawi was not an al Qaida member but the leader of an unaffiliated terrorist group who occasionally associated with al Qaida adherents, the sources said. As for Bush's claim that Iraq had trained al Qaida members in bomb-making and use of poisons and deadly gases, sources with knowledge of the classified intelligence estimate said the reports conclusion was that this had not been satisfactorily confirmed. 'We've learned,' Bush said in his speech, 'that Iraq has trained al Qaida members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases.' But the president did not mention that when national security adviser Condoleezza Rice had referred the previous month to such training, she had said the source was al Qaida captives."

Exhibit C:

Allies Find No Links Between Iraq, Al Qaida: "Of all the intelligence services in the world, British agencies probably work the closest with U.S. spies. The sharing of sensitive information appeared evident in a British government dossier in September that laid out charges about Hussein's program to develop weapons of mass destruction. The report closely resembled Washington's accounts of Iraq's arsenal. The British have been much quieter when it comes to any alliance between Iraq and Al Qaida, however. Asked about the matter Wednesday, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw sounded diplomatic. 'It could well be the case that there were links, active links, between Al Qaida and the Iraqi regime before Sept. 11,' Straw said. 'What I'm asked is if I've seen any evidence of that. And the answer is: I haven't."

Zarqawi is arguably connected to Al Qaida through Ansar al-Islam, but unfortunately for Bush, no evidence has ever surfaced to show a connection between Ansar al-Islam and Saddam. In fact all evidence seems to point to the contrary. They were reported to be mortal enemies of one another. Perhaps that is why Ansar al-Islam made its home in the north, in Kurdish controlled territory:

U.S. scours for Saddam-al-Qaida link:"Proving a link between Saddam and Islamists in a region not controlled by the Iraqi leader will be difficult for the Bush administration. Iraq's Kurdish minority has controlled the north for a decade, though Saddam's intelligence agents regularly pass back and forth, according to Kurdish officials. "

So what we have is Bush making a claim that has been thoroughly debunked, for which he never had any evidence in the first place. Which begs a very important question:

Is this really the standard of information the Bushies feel is acceptable to carry out their doctrine of preemptive war?

Here's an even scarier thought. If a despotic dictator like Saddam Hussein is telling the truth here, and Bush is lying, what in Jeebus' name does that say about Bush?

BBC report:"Saddam Hussein himself denied on Tuesday having any weapons of mass destruction. He told Mr Benn in the interview broadcast by Channel 4 News: 'These weapons do not come in small pills that you can hide in your pocket. 'These are weapons of mass destruction and it is easy to work out if Iraq has them or not.' Denying any connection with aQaidada, he said: 'If we had a relationship with aQaidada and we believed in that relationship, we wouldn't be ashamed to admit it."

Update: MSNBC has already decided to provide Bush with yet another pass on a huge lie. To read this article reporting Bush's statement today you would never know the Al Qaida link had ever been (and in fact still is) in dispute.

DNC gets its blog on...

Check out the new DNC blog, DNC: Kicking Ass. You know, not too long ago I sent them a check and on the memo line I put "kick some ass, please!" Clearly, they have stolen the name of the blog from my plea. I'm 47% sure of it. Anyway, check it out - great stuff so far from what I can tell.

Stealing Democracy

Stuck in traffic in Seattle again, so what do I do? Turn on Rush Limbaugh, have a laugh, get the gist, and then speed scan down the dial to listen to two or three other right wing whackos, 3 minutes at a time. I just know they will be busting blood vessels over the 9th circuit court's decision to postpone the California recall election until state approved machines are in place in all counties. Maybe I'll get lucky and catch one of them having an aneurysm right on the air.

Rush is talking about the vast left wing conspiracy to destroy democracy in America, as if making sure that every vote counts is against everything this country stands for. The others are using the Ann Coulter method of argument -- citing absurd statistics in one breath, and then reputable institutions in another (MIT, Cal Tech), without ever informing their audience that the later is not actually the reference for the former.

Naturally, the strawman arguments abound among all of them. What democrats are actually saying, they tell us, is that the poor and the minorities are too stupid to fill out their ballots correctly. (No, what we're actually saying is that elections have become too close to using voting machines that have a 2% margin of error. That would seem fairly obvious given the increasing number of electoral contests decided by one percent or less). But never mind the facts. Their callers buzz the lines with hearty agreement. All in all it's a master rendition of the "hey, look over there..." style of political gamesmanship. Because here is what's really happening...

Gaffe casts doubts on electronic voting: "The strange case of an election tally that appears to have popped up on the Internet hours before polls closed is casting new doubts about the trustworthiness of electronic voting machines. During San Luis Obispo County's March 2002 primary, absentee vote tallies were apparently sent to an Internet site operated by Diebold Election Systems Inc., the maker of the voting machines used in the election. At least that's what timestamps on digital records showed."

Just a mistake -- a gaffe, as it were.

Or not.

Democrats want election machine firm thrown out: Democratic leaders want a major Republican fund-raiser blocked from becoming the state's new voting machines supplier, saying his presence puts in doubt the fairness of all Ohio elections. Wally O'Dell, CEO of Diebold Inc., this week sent out letters to central Ohio Republicans asking them to raise $10,000 in donations in time for a Sept. 26 Ohio Republican Party event at his home. His company, which specializes in security and election machinery, is one of three under consideration to supply new, electronic voting machines to replace punch card machines still in use in 71 Ohio counties. [...] In his invitation O'Dell states his support for the Republican Party and notes he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President next year."

But hey, we're dems... we're tolerant, and it's a free country. Why shouldn't a political activist for the republican party be the one to supply the voting machines - even if they are machines we know can be easily tampered with? No reason not to give them the benefit of the doubt. Right? Sure wish Wally was a dem though, don't you? Yeah.

Anyway, it's not like republican politicians run the companies that are providing the machines. Now that would be bad. Right? Oops....

Hagel's ethics filings pose disclosure issue: "One underlying issue is whether Hagel properly disclosed his financial ties to Election Systems & Software (ES&S), a company that makes nearly half the voting machines used in the United States, including all those used in his native Nebraska. ES&S is a subsidiary of McCarthy Group Inc., which is jointly held by the holding firm and the Omaha World-Herald Co., which publishes the state's largest newspaper. The voting machine company makes sophisticated optical scan and touch-screen vote-counting devices that many states have begun buying in recent years. An official at Nebraska's Election Administration estimated that ES&S machines tallied 85 percent of the votes cast in Hagel's 2002 and 1996 election races. In 1996, ES&S operated as American Information Systems Inc. (AIS). The company became ES&S after merging with Business Records Corp. in 1997. In a disclosure form filed in 1996, covering the previous year, Hagel, then a Senate candidate, did not report that he was still chairman of AIS for the first 10 weeks of the year, as he was required to do."

This doesn't bother me at all either. I'm sure Sonny Perdue is as honest as a republican gets.

Forget about the debacle in Florida in 2000. Forget about the republican financed recall in California. Forget about the precedent setting redisticting being done in Texas. Let's play Colmes to the republican's Hannity, and agree that republicans are not assaulting democracy daily. There are still huge problems with this new voting technology being foisted upon us with little or no debate:

A compendium of errors in November 2002

These problems could all be easily solved by adding printers to touchscreen machines in order to provide a paper trail or using optical scan systems that read paper ballots. That, coupled with the reform of laws to mandate hand recounts when elections are decided by less than half of one percent of the total vote, is what people who are worried about the preservation of democracy should be talking about. Call your representatives... bitch, moan, complain and demand reform. Unless you're a republican -- then you're probably safe. Wally and Chuck have got you covered.

Reductio ad absurdum

Busy, Busy, Busy gets busy with this shorter version of Will Saletan's latest, greatest ridiculous article at Slate

But Digby gives the article the absolutely scathing treatment it deserves.

Pandagon weighs in as well.

My impression of Saletan has always been that he's a self loathing neoliberal, with a libertarian bent. An elitist yuppie without a cause, who hates all things political; particularly the people who objectively share his politics. He reminds me of progressives I run into in the course of political activism who spend entire meetings criticizing the specks in our eyes while the side with the logs in theirs (and not giving a damn about it) is busy kicking our ass.

Big Day for Bushie Lies

Last night I was reading the transcripts of Cheney on MTP earlier that day and I thought to myself, "my god, this is full of lies. I simply must save this transcript for tomorrow when I will have the time to pick it apart piece by piece on my mighty blog!" Imagine my surprise to wake up this morning and find that the Washington Post had already done it. But, wait, there's more:

David Corn reports on Cheney's most recent lies, and a bonus Bush whopper about education spending in a recent stump speech.

CalPundit focuses on the education whopper in Corn's article.

Brad DeLong has simply had enough. And so has Josh Marshall

Sigh... nothing left to post about. Oh well.

Update 9/17: Damn everyone seems to realize Cheney is lying, and lying, and lying, and lying...

LA Times: Cheney in Wonderland

Star Tribune Editorial:Truth / Too little of it on Iraq

Boston Globe: Cheney link of Iraq, 9/11 challenged

This is what happens to your blog on drugs

Do you ever read Glenn Reynolds over at Instapundit and think "so what?"; "hey, that's total bullshit"; or perhaps, "this guy's a prof - doesn't he have any classes to teach?"

Yeah, me too. Well here's the cure.... an instapunditathon

WMD? What WMD?

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo brings us this revelation:

"Enough already! For a week or more I and others have been getting word that the long-awaited Kay Report -- the systematic investigation into Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction programs -- might be delayed or never even issued at all. The administration has been telling us for months that it would be released in mid-September. And now, of course, it's mid-September. Then a couple days ago NBC's Andrea Mitchell reported that Kay's survey had come up short, but implied that a report would indeed be issued when Kay returns to Washington this week. But this morning the Sunday Times of London is reporting (subscription required) that "Britain and America have decided to delay indefinitely the publication of a full report on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction after inspectors found no evidence that any such weapons exist."

Just days ago I posted on the NBC story and Bush's personal weapons inspector, David Kay, "coming up short" when it comes to finding WMD in Iraq. I predicted, like many others, that a heavy duty industrial sized spin job was in the works. If Marshall and the Sunday Times of London are correct it would seem that the Bushies have determined that not even their best spinners can turn this story around. Instead, down the memory hole it will go.

Setting aside the incredible arrogance of an administration that blithely decides we don't need to know anything that might shed a bad light on them (and make no mistake, that is a pretty huge thing to set aside), just how bad does the news have to be if even the Bush spinners won't take it on? Did they all get together in a back room somewhere and decide, "aw, shit, we can't make this fly; better bury it instead?"

Now back to the arrogance. Clearly, WE the PEOPLE, have an inalienable right to know if a combination of lies and incompetence were used to justify this war. If the press and the Congress let them get away with bagging this report, then democracy, already in a persistent vegetative state, will need a brain scan to determine if the last vestiges of life support should be removed, and democracy left to die peacefully.

Update: This story has still not made it to the US press as far as I can tell (will it ever?) but here's a non-subscription news site that sums up the UK story.

The Bushies seem to be sticking to their story, for now. Today on Meet the Press:

"Speaking of the chief U.S. weapons hunter, Cheney said: “David Kay’s task is to look for the people that were involved in the program, to find documentary evidence to back it up, to find physical evidence when he can find that. It’s a hard task, but I’ve got great confidence that he can do this.”

Dizzying Dive to Red Ink Poses Stark Choices for Washington | NY Times

"Mr. Bush had campaigned on the promise of returning the surplus in the form of a big tax cut, and Democrats disagreed only on the size and distribution of the cut, preferring to direct more to middle-class taxpayers. (Democrats proposed a tax cut of $750 billion that year.) The budget had been balanced in the late 1990's using a combination of spending controls and higher taxes on the wealthy. But by 2001, the controls had expired and seemed unnecessary. Mr. Bush's election, giving Republicans control of both Congress and the White House, broke a stalemate that had long prevented the adoption of major tax legislation."

Choices? Did someone say choices? I wonder how many times a day Al Gore says to himself, "I told you."

Debate Transcripts: 2000 Debates, Gore: "Now, here is how that connects with all the rest of what we've been talking about. If you have -- if you squander the surplus on a huge tax cut that goes mostly to those at the top, then you can't make education the top priority. If the tax cut is your number one, two, three and four priority, you can't do education. You can't do both. You have to choose. I choose education and health care, the environment and retirement security, and I ask for your support. "

Misinformation - an epidemic

The Top Ten Conservative Idiots at Democratic Underground:

"A shocking poll revealed last week that almost 70 percent of Americans now believe that Saddam Hussein is linked to 9/11. Despite the lack of any evidence to make this case, the American people appear to have been led by the nose directly down George W. Bush's path, and its all thanks to the media. Why exactly do 69 percent of people think that Saddam and 9/11 are linked? Presumably because the Bush adminstration has been constantly mentioning them in the same sentence for the last two years, and the media has simply abrogated its responsibility to keep the people informed and done absolutely nothing to contradict this position. So for anyone out there who still believes that there is a liberal bias in the media, ask yourself why they have been willing participants in the farce which has allowed to Bush consistently mislead the American people and send us into an insane conflict from which there is now no obvious escape. Thanks guys."

Misinformation, a disease spread by the republican party and the media, has reached epidemic proportions. Unfortunately, duct tape and plastic sheeting offer no protection whatsoever. So far, the disease has not spread beyond U.S. borders, however, American citizens are urged to keep their heads up and be careful out there.... don't let it happen to you.