"Send Ships, Land Troops, Kill Germans."

. . . the pamphlet looked like it had been laid out by a college student trying desperately to meet his professor's requirement for "20 pages, double-spaced" — unnecessarily huge graphs on almost every page, fonts jacked up to readable-for-the-legally-blind size, absurdly placed clip-art images (to wit: photo of cute child with broken arm, gratefully gazing at the caption "Provide Universal Access to Affordable Health Care"). While reporters flipped through the idiotic text, searching in vain for content, Minority Whip Eric Cantor, who had already made brief introductory remarks, stealthily slipped out of the room, leaving Boehner to the wolves.

Matt Taibbi tells us that it's back to "The Class Clowns" for the Rethuglicans (who are devoid of any type of response to the worldwide devastation they have wreaked other than demanding more of the same to occur immediately, please, or else).

Once the masters of evil politics, Republicans have been reduced to half-assed buffoonery, providing comic relief for desperate times Following the Republican Party of late has been a movingly depressing experience, sort of like watching Old Yeller die — if Old Yeller were a worm-infested feral bitch who spent the past eight years biting children at bus stops and shitting in neighborhood swimming pools. As a useful force in American politics, the Republicans have been dead for a while now. But in the seven months since Sarah Palin's nomination, they have taken on an intriguing new role: providing much-needed comic relief during dark times, serving as the unofficial rodeo clowns of the Financial Crisis Era. If there were any doubts about the once-mighty party's hilarious new role in American society, they vanished in recent weeks, as the Republican leadership's attempt to stop the passage of Barack Obama's budget turned into one of the most half-assed public-relations campaigns in congressional history. Watching this amazingly amateurish performance by a party that not long ago was led by highly skilled and ruthless political assassins like Tom DeLay and Karl Rove was just the latest bummer in the spiraling American-decline story. Not only don't we make good cars or airplanes anymore — now our Republicans have apparently lost their touch for evil politics. The comedy began in late March when, after weeks of sniping about the high spending in the president's budget, the Republicans — steered by House Minority Leader John Boehner, one of the few influential Republicans in Congress to survive the Bush era — called a press conference to release an 18-page "alternative budget." The document quickly entered Washington lore as one of the most preposterous things a politician has ever handed, with a straight face, to a reporter on the Hill. Intending to counter accusations by Democrats that Republicans had become a "Party of No," blindly opposing every Obama initiative without a real plan, Boehner sternly waved the thinnish "Republican Road to Recovery" pamphlet at reporters gathered at his presser. "The president said, 'We haven't seen a budget yet out of Republicans,'" Boehner croaked. "Well, it's not true, because here it is, Mr. President." Except that "it" contained almost nothing inside. The actual text, which included no specifics or numbers at all, was full of wildly general phrases like "Republicans would fully fund our ongoing commitments overseas while devoting the entirety of any savings from reduced fighting to deficit reduction." As one observer put it, it was like an invasion plan that read, "Send ships, land troops, kill Germans." Not only that, the pamphlet looked like it had been laid out by a college student trying desperately to meet his professor's requirement for "20 pages, double-spaced" — unnecessarily huge graphs on almost every page, fonts jacked up to readable-for-the-legally-blind size, absurdly placed clip-art images (to wit: photo of cute child with broken arm, gratefully gazing at the caption "Provide Universal Access to Affordable Health Care"). While reporters flipped through the idiotic text, searching in vain for content, Minority Whip Eric Cantor, who had already made brief introductory remarks, stealthily slipped out of the room, leaving Boehner to the wolves. The onslaught started quickly. "There's no detail in here," grumbled one reporter. "This is the blueprint for where we're going," Boehner barked. "Are you asking about some other document?" Reporters stared at each other. "What about some numbers?" another asked. Republicans, Boehner dithered, would provide details on the budget "next week." Opposition politicians rushed on the air to rip the Republican nonbudget budget to shreds. The Democratic National Committee released an online ad that opened with a graphic: "This DNC ad is brought to you by the number zero. That's how many numbers are in the GOP's 'budget.'" Even White House press secretary Robert Gibbs got in on the act, lauding the document's depth. "It took me several minutes to read it," he quipped.

Driftglass is equally as hot today and he's giving no quarter.

Cheney Regime Dead Enders are monsters and destroyers of worlds.

And finally we get the in-depth reporting we've been awaiting from our old friend Robert Parry who illuminates exactly how effectively the torture program of the Bush League-Cheneyites

helped divert U.S. focus away from their al-Qaeda colleagues by providing tantalizing misinformation about Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and dropping tidbits about Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who operated inside Iraq. The May 30, 2005, memo by Steven Bradbury, then acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, also appears to have exaggerated the value of intelligence extracted from detainee Abu Zubaydah through harsh interrogations – references that Bush administration defenders have cited as justification for abusive tactics, including the near-drowning of waterboarding.

Suzan ____________________

The New Nattering Nabobs of Negativism Are Out Gunning Again (and Again)

The brilliant drifting glass has inserted the final (I hope) spike into the heart of the rightwing dracula that always returns with more lies to justify the unjustifiable. (I am a dreamer.)

Hayden really is the giggly, bloodless bureaucrat/butcher from Central Casting; alternately boasting that he himself banned that awful, awful technique of waterboarding...and then turning right around and allowed as how waterboarding wasn’t really torture, and may or may not even “shock conscience”, because that all "depended on the circumstances". Of course, being that this was Fox News, the question that never got asked was this:

What has turning America into a torture nation done to our soul, our democracy and the foundational moral authority upon which our global leadership depends?

Because, being Fox News, any questions of “morality” that don’t serve to advance the Republican agenda simply never come up. But what really made me wish a mighty wish for temporary smiting powers, was one minute later, when Hayden was asked about Hugo Chavez and answered thusly and without a hint of irony: "I’d watch for behavior, not rhetoric. The behavior of Chavez over the last few years has been downright reprehensible." Really? Why? What makes Chavez’s behavior “downright reprehensible”? Did he perhaps…torture people? Or did he merely “technique” them? And doesn’t this kooky theory that countries actually pay attention to the behavior of other countries and should respond to each other according to behavior and not just rhetoric completely negate everything you just said about how the United State should expect the rest of the world to react to the fact that the Bush Administration tortured people -- in one case, waterboarding a prisoner 183 times in one month -- and then lied about it?

The rest of the brilliance can be found here. [** DONATIONS NEEDED ** I usually don't mention the economic circumstances surrounding the provision and maintenance of this blog, but I need to ask any interested readers who aren't unemployed or poor themselves to consider making a donation to me in a time of dire need. I won't go into the personal details of what makes me ask this favor at this time, but please know that if it hadn't been for a very few readers making donations in the past two years since I've been writing about our trying economic times, I would not be here trying to shed some light on our current catastrophic predicament and provide a much-needed forum for discussion of it. Thank you so much to the readers who have made donations to me in the past. Most months I am very lucky to receive more than one, but that's not so bad in that it has given me the hope that some day there may be more people who want to read this type of economic analysis and perhaps even add to the store of it in a place that welcomes all opinions. Yes, I am still unemployed although continuing to think positive thoughts as I apply for any job that comes into view. Thank you for being out there, for all your emails and comments and understanding notes (and CD's and love letters, etc., no, seriously). I think my readers are my friends of consciousness and wouldn't know how to live my life today without them. Thank you.] And now back to the regularly scheduled programming . . . . John Dean redirects our focus to the latest campaign from the rightwing as they strive to further pervert the justice system (by refusing to bring any of Obama's nominees out of committee for a vote). You'd think the Dems hadn't approved any Bush nominees wouldn't you?

There is a high-stakes game for the future of the federal judiciary currently underway, albeit, at this time, still quietly being played out behind-the-scenes. Over a month ago, the New York Times revealed the then-imminent selection by the Obama Administration of "a small stream of nominees to the federal appeals courts" throughout the nation. The story even floated a few names of potential nominees. But little has happened since then. Thus far, there has been no stream of nominees; indeed, barely a trickle. No one keeps score better than the Alliance for Justice, which reports three Obama nominees so far: Gerald Lynch for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Andre Davis for the Fourth Circuit, and David Hamilton for the Seventh Circuit. The reason Obama's judicial nominees have not been streaming forth is that conservatives in the Senate are doing their best to dam that stream, literally and figuratively. To use the phrase coined by former Nixon speechwriter Bill Safire, the Obama Administration is being blocked by what can accurately be described as the new "nattering nabobs of negativism." According to the coiner of the phrase, Safire, nattering is complaining; a nabob – taken from Urdu – is a self-important potentate; and negativism, of course, is habitual skepticism, the tendency to be pessimistic, seeing the world in the worst light possible. This outlook is very much the one possessed by the remarkably pompous contemporary conservative Republican leaders, particularly those in the Senate. Well-known nabobs like John Boehner and Eric Cantor have led House Republicans to vote in-bloc against the stimulus legislation, and the half-dozen Republican nabobs serving as governors announced they would reject all or some of the federal stimulus money – until the citizens of their states turned on them. Not as well-known are the nattering negative nabobs of the Senate, who have laid down a gauntlet to block President Obama's judicial appointees, before they even arrive in the Senate Judiciary Committee. These are Senators who are having trouble adjusting to the fact that there is no longer a Republican in the White House, and in no area is this truth more difficult for them to accept than with the prospective loss of conservative control, as well, of the federal judiciary. These are men like Senators John Cornyn of Texas and Jon Kyl of Arizona – to mention but two of two dozen. These men were part of the effort by all forty-one Republican members of the Senate to warn the new president that if he wanted to avoid a huge fight over the future of the federal judiciary, then he should start by re-nominating a number of Bush nominees who had not been confirmed before the Bush presidency ended. This unprecedented request was chutzpah on stilts. Their letter to President Obama spelled out another demand: "[I]f we are not consulted on, and approve of, a nominee from our state, the Republican Conference will be unable to support moving forward on that nominee" – a thinly-veiled threat of a filibuster on any Obama nominee who fails to meet the GOP standard. In short, if a GOP senator rejects a judicial nominee for a court with jurisdiction in his state, the entire Republican Conference has agreed to join that senator to hold up the nomination. (It takes sixty votes to prevent a filibuster, so if the Republican Conference remains together, it can block any Obama nominee from confirmation.) Clearly, Republicans plan to fight any effort to change the conservative ideological make-up of the federal judiciary.

Read the rest here and don't stop organizing to fight this continuing ideologically driven campaign to revoke the last election. Suzan ______________