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Wednesday, May 18, 2005
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Goodnight, moon
Of course, the filibuster
fight isn't about the 7 judges, or even about the Supreme Court.
It's about the Republicans, with 51 votes that don't even represent a
majority of the country, having the power to do whatever they want,
whenever they want, however they want to do it.
And breaking the rules to change the rules isn't a very promising start
for a party that wants absolute power, now is it?
- Lambert [corrente]
9:58:22 PM 
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Beating seven shades of shit out of...
..."a lickspittle Republican
committee" - and - just for the hell of it - one tosspot popinjay:
Galloway and the mother of all invective
Wednesday May 18, 2005
They were "neo-cons" and "Zionists" and a "pro-war lynch mob", he
raged, who belonged to a "lickspittle Republican committee" that was
engaged in creating "the mother of all smokescreens". Before the
hearing began, the Respect MP for..
- the farmer [corrente]
9:57:27 PM
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Frist (And When I Say Frist I Mean Dobson) Will Not Accept Any Compromise.
I have seen a lot of handwringing here and elsewhere on the various
proposals for compromise on the nuclear option. Many have been severely
critical, and maybe they are right in some instances, of the different
compromise proposals being floated about. I think these folks miss
the point. Frist, and when I say Frist I mean Dobson, will not accept
ANY compromise. Frist's position is that the filibuster be nuked and
that all of Bush's judicial nominees get voted on for confirmation.
That is Frist's (Dobson's) "compromise position." It amazes me that folks are missing that. And I stress it again here now.
Frist (and by Frist I mean Dobson) will not accept ANY compromise. So
critiques of the different compromise proposals are interesting, but
ultimately irrelevant.
[Daily Kos]
9:55:35 PM
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Not Good Macro News.
The Financial Times reports:
FT.com / US - US wholesale prices rise 0.6 per cent: Producer
prices rose by more than expected last month, with the headline rate
rising 0.6 per cent and the core rate excluding food and energy - up
0.3 per cent, the Labor Department reported. Over the past 12 months,
the overall PPI rose by 4.8 per cent, just below the March level, while
the core rate increased by 2.6 per cent.... Separately, a report
released by the Federal Reserve on Tuesday pointed to a surprising drop
in industrial activity last month. Industrial production fell by 0.2
per cent in April, compared with the consensus forecast of a 0.2 per
cent increase. Capacity utilisation fell slightly to 79.2 per cent....
The Federal Reserve has signalled concern about inflation pressures,
and has said it expects to continue raising its target interest.
Earlier this month, the Fed tightened by another quarter point,
bringing the federal funds rate to 3 per cent. Don Kohn, a Federal
Reserve governor, said following a speech yesterday that higher core
inflation represented in part the effort by businesses to pass on
higher energy costs to their customers. "My best guess is that
inflation...
[Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal]
12:08:12 PM
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More Bad News from Iraq. And Eric Umansky is shrill about it:
Eric Umansky: Good to know we have enough troops to control the place:
From the AP: QAIM, IRAQ -- Iraqi fighters toting machine guns and
grenade launchers swaggered Friday through the rubble-strewn streets of
this town on the Syrian border, setting up checkpoints and preparing to
do battle despite a major U.S. offensive aimed at rooting out followers
of Iraq's most-wanted terrorist. The six-day U.S. offensive in the area
-- one of the largest since insurgents were driven from Fallujah six
months ago -- was launched in Qaim and is aimed at supporters of Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi. Capt. Jeffrey Pool, a military spokesman, said
Marines have not conducted operations inside Qaim since the opening
days of the campaign, called Operation Matador, which began overnight
Saturday and led to the killing of six suspected insurgents and capture
of 54 in the town. In other words, Qaim was one of the focuses of the
campaign and yet while the offensive is still under way, guerillas are
tooling around and actually feel secure enough to set up checkpoints!
You might recall what one 'military official' told the LAT a few days
ago: 'We require more manpower...
[Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal]
12:07:15 PM
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Hearts and Minds, Hearts and Minds.
Rising Hegemon:
...the implementation of 'Operation Matador'. In interviews,
influential tribal leaders and many residents of the remote border
towns said the 1,000 U.S. troops who swept into their territories in
the weeklong campaign that ended over the weekend didn't distinguish
between the Iraqis who supported the United States and the fighters
battling it. 'The Americans were bombing whole villages and saying they
were only after the foreigners,' said Fasal al Goud, a former governor
of Anbar province who said he asked U.S. forces for help on behalf of
the tribes. 'An AK-47 can't distinguish between a terrorist and a
tribesman, so how could a missile or tank?' Once again, the troops are
only following the dictates of their commanders -- none of them know
f***-all about Iraq, or what the hell is going on. The Bush
Administration had no idea what it was doing in Iraq, nor has it really
learned shit about how to deal with it since....
[Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal]
12:06:09 PM
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Frist goes wildly off-message.
If you haven't already seen the Think Progress post about Bill Frist's
off-message arguments on the Senate floor this morning, it's worth
checking out.
Chuck Schumer: Isn't it correct that on March 8,
2000, my colleague [Sen. Frist] voted to uphold the filibuster of Judge
Richard Paez?
Frist: The president, the um, in response, uh, the Paez [...]
[The Carpetbagger Report]
12:03:08 PM
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A question for Scott McClellan.
If, as Dubya's press secretary Scott McClellan says, the 'Downing
Street memo's assertion that the decision to invade Iraq had already
been made in the summer of 2002 is 'flat out wrong,' how does McClellan
explain this? Former Sen. Bob...
[Pacific Views]
8:21:37 AM
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Great Oratory.
The land of the Bard, or make that the land of Macbeth, produces
politicians of exquisite eloquence and astonishing truthfulness. We,
the distant offspring of that literate isle, have an unimaginative
demagogue who cannot put two sentences together (or even...
[Pacific Views]
8:20:36 AM
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The New Delay Delay?.
...when the headline first came across my headline ticker, it did sound
promising. "ETHICS PANEL READY TO INVESTIGATE DELAY", it said. Despite
my insistence that Tom Delay's Congressional career needs to be nursed
along as deep into the 2006 election cycle as possible so that every
Republican incumbent can be linked to him, the self-satisfying
fantasies did play themselves out in my head: Delay, in torn, muddy
prison stripes, struggling through a dark bayou swamp with the sound of
the bloodhounds and the shouts of the posse growing louder behind him
in the night; the poisonous water snakes swimming out of his path in
revulsion; alligators (or crocodiles maybe; I can't keep them straight)
turning up their noses because even ancient reptiles have certain
minimum standards; only the bugs, seeking their final revenge for all
those years, swarming down as if Alfred Hitchcock himself had commanded
them, sucking and biting and stabbing and stinging as Delay fights
desperately to avoid the sharp flashlight beams swinging back and forth
through the swamp-tree limbs. The reality that none of this added up to
the dry flatland part of Texas from whence Delay sprung - fully mutated
- onto the national scene snapped...
[RuminateThis]
7:56:38 AM
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Twisting Some Tails.
...THIS must have stirred things up in the Cuban exile community in
Florida. The mere thought of Elian Gonzalez speaking at a rally
celebrating his "liberation" from Florida five years ago, thanking
Americans for giving him the opportunity to be a 'free child' in
Castro's Cuba would probably be enough, one would think, to spin the
anti-Castro element in this country into such a whirling rage that they
would begin to rain futile demands down on Gee Dub to commence the
bombings immediately and not stop until the island sank (which, come to
think of it, would solve all those Guantanamo Bay detention problems at
the same time)...which, of course, is undoubtedly why Castro staged
this little dog-and-Elian show to begin with... ...our relationship
with Cuba has always been passably strange, but especially so over the
last half-century. We abandoned Batista in the face of his rising
unpopularity and increasingly dictatorial regime in response to the
guerilla war being waged by Castro's forces, hoping for the rise of a
free government in the wake of Batista's collapse. When Castro came to
power and declared a Marxist government, however, we refused to
recognize or accept it (which is understandable, given the...
[RuminateThis]
7:55:15 AM
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Coleman Learns the British Way.
...hopefully Norm Coleman wasn't expecting any sort of quiet, reserved,
deferential testimony by British lawmaker George Galloway in Coleman's
subcommittee hearing on abuses of the Iraqi 'oil for food' program. If
he hosted such expectations, a simple review of Galloway's past would
have disabused him of such notions. Failing that, proper work by an
alert staffer could have led his to this observation made by Galloway
to Reuters about his appearance: "I have no expectation of justice from
a group of Christian fundamentalist and Zionist activists under the
chairmanship of a neocon George Bush." ...in any case, there was no
quiet and there was no deference. "Georgous George" was explicit in his
denials, even throwing in his opposition to the 2003 invasion for good
measure. Coleman, undoubtedly more used to the usual parade of gray,
obsequious, federal servants in his short tenure as a Senator, met his
match in this guy. The forcible insistence of Galloway's innocence,
coupled with the unavoidable fact that evidence of wrong-doing comes
from former Iraqi government officials and businessmen, who are just as
likely to have a personal agenda as the Iraqi's who insisted that WMD's
were piled up in warehouses, garages, and people's front...
[RuminateThis]
7:53:24 AM
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JOURNAL: Counter Insurgency Experts Baffled.
James Bennet, writing for the NYTimes today on the Iraqi insurgency:
Yet it may prove to be one of history's humbling lessons that history
itself fails to illuminate the conflict under way in Iraq. No one
really knows what the...
[Global Guerrillas]
7:33:56 AM
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Bush's Buddies.
Guest: cntodd President Bush is a wonderful man who just loves a good
contradiction... Nominating someone who hates the U.N. to be U.N.
ambassador... Nominating someone who supports the use of torture to run
the justice department... Nominating a guy...
[Majikthise]
7:31:57 AM
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© Copyright
2005
Michael Mussington.
Last update:
6/1/2005; 1:34:16 AM.
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