Tom Friedman, who gets paid far too much money for what he writes, and takes up far too much valuable editorial space in the NY Times has done it again. 9/11 and 4/11 is his complaint that Bush has wasted too much time while doing nothing that might actually  work with regards to the energy situation. Friedman is 'outraged'

I am reliably told by a Bush administration official that there is an old saying in Texas that goes like this: “If all you ever do is all you’ve ever done, then all you’ll ever get is all you ever got.”

Could anyone possibly come up with a better description of President Bush’s energy policy? America is in the midst of its worst energy crisis in years and what is the big decision our Decider has decided? Drum roll, please: Our Decider decided to lift the executive orders banning drilling for oil and natural gas off the country’s shoreline — even though he knew this was a meaningless gesture because a Congressional moratorium on drilling passed in 1981 remains in force.

Well DUH!

A congressional investigation has produced new details on the degree to which senior Bush administration officials favored using the Clean Air Act to limit greenhouse gas emissions — until pressure from Vice President Dick Cheney's office, ExxonMobil and others in the oil industry led the Bush administration to change course.

A report by the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, issued today, supports the disclosure by a former Environmental Protection Agency official last week that someone in Cheney's office had a hand in the shift in policy.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/...

... of Cheney, or Bush, isn't going to happen.
There simply isn't enough time left on the play clock.

That doesn't mean that Kucinich and company are tilting at windmills, however. The impeachment movement is fulfilling a very important role, one vital to the welfare of our democracy. It is using the Republican's most potent weapon against them.
Fear.
Not the same way they use it against us. We are making them fear for the only thing they really care about... their own asses.
Nope, impeachment isn't going to happen. But that's OK.

KBR, the former subsidiary of Halliburton, has been accused of shoddy electrical work, in connection to the deaths of 13 Americans, numerous injuries, 283 electrical fires which destroyed or damaged military facilities in Iraq, plus reports of soldiers receiving electric shocks almost on a daily basis.

This absurd level of incompetence might be considered by some as mere happenstance. However, if we were to add to this KBR’s sordid history as a military contractor, many should be outraged that KBR has not been held properly accountable!

Eight days ago, I saw the video of the second meeting Veterans for Peace held with Congressman John Conyers and ran completely out of patience.

The wrongdoing of this administration is clear. We have been presented with lie after lie and excuse after excuse by this complicit Congress for a lack of movement on the impeachment issue. The Bush administration has been cited with NINE subpoenas by Congress that they have completely ignored.

Yesterday the excuse was that "they aren't getting enough calls". Are we not supposed to know due to the media blackout on the subject that Veterans for Peace presented 23,000 signature petition for impeachment on June 11th? Are we supposed to be unable to see the 1011478 signatures here or the 249184 signatures here?

Here is another perfect example where Obama needs to feel the Progressive HEAT. How the kind of  INTERACTIVE campaign I have been writing about using the Internet as the platform can have a major impact on the kind of candidate Obama will be during the General Election and as President if elected.

Just suppose our supposedly Democratic congress all of a sudden got balls and impeached both Bush and Cheney.

Next in the line of presidential succession is Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, right?

Um, maybe not. And maybe the maybe not is why congress is reluctant to impeach.

And, what about National Security Presidential Directive 51?

A July 15 article in Slate asks the question:

Does the Bush administration have a secret succession order that bypasses Congress?

http://www.slate.com/...

Barack Obama scored major national security marks with his July 14 New York Times editorial "My Plan for Iraq" and his speech in Washington D.C. on July 15.  He deftly addressed Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's insistence that the U.S. make deadline-centric plans to end its occupation of Iraq and outlined the core of the coherent foreign policy and national security strategy he'll pursue as president.

I'm not saying Obama parked one out on Waveland Avenue.  It's more like he safely bunted his way to first.  He has a long way to go, and I'm concerned whether it's humanly possible to graft sanity onto the foreign policy of a country in which, after nearly eight years of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and the neocons, John McCain is a credible candidate for the presidency.

So, while this review ran back in February (when the film won an Oscar for best documentary), it's still essential viewing for a rigorous and non-partisan examination of U.S. policies and procedures during the so-called War on Terror.

It's currently available on DVD. See it. (review on the flip)

I have a ridiculously long post on torture and some of the revelations we've seen this week, in the Jane Mayer book, the Omar Khadr tape, etc.  Those who have been paying attention know what has been done in our name.  Much of the torture and abuse was subjected on people who had no intelligence value and were never credibly charged with any crime.  The methods were based on decades-old survival techniques produced by the Navy to resist torture, and a manual from the Chinese that used torture to elicit false confessions.  They used psychologists to develop a program of "learned helplessness", reverse-engineered from the SERE techniques.  In the end, not one terror suspect has been convicted of anything since 9/11.  The "intelligence" gained from the likes of Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was of the wild goose chase variety.  Evidence of torture inflamed the Islamic world and became a recruitment poster for Al Qaeda.  And on and on.

I wanted to reiterate some of it here, because it's indicative of the fundamental rot at the heart of the American system these days, and why we'll forever be diminished until we cut the rot away.

Warrantless Surveillance.

Torture.

Iraq.

And on and on.

It's been a long 7 years.

So much damage done to the ideals that make up the nation.  

We got some significant insight this week into how it all spiraled out of control and into the abyss we find ourselves in now.  

All this mess, all the disaster that has torn the soul out of the country, came about because the big bully, little Dicky Cheney, got scared.

This Bud's for Big Oil, War Profiteers & Europeans, Middle-Class Americans Lose Again

The takeover of American icon Anheuser-Busch by Belgan Brewer InBev, a company that barely anyone had heard of 5 years ago, is another example of how middle-class Americans are paying dearly for the failed war in Iraq.  Simply put, the result of the war is sky high oil prices, a major inflationary pressure, and the worst economy in a generation.  In the process the dollar has dropped like a stone.  Imagine what the real estate crash has done to home values in a world economic context -- given dropping property values and the dropping dollar, many homes have declined in the neighborhood of 50%, ouch!  Call me a whiner but it's the truth.

A thorny issue will confront at least one of the five Jurisdictional Conferences of the United Methodist Church that will be meeting this week. These quadrennial regional meetings—held this year in Dallas (TX), Grand Rapids (MI), Harrisburg (PA), Lake Junaluska (NC), and Portland (OR)—have as their main business electing and assigning new bishops.  

When the South Central Jurisdiction convenes in Dallas tomorrow, in addition to electing bishops, they will have to decide what to do about the actions their bishops took to approve the lease of land to SMU for the Bush library, museum and institute. The General Conference in May referred a petition opposing the action to the jurisdiction for action. This means the assembled folk in Dallas will have to do something on record, something I suspect that they wanted to do even less after the story of bribes to pay for the library broke in Sunday’s London Times.

Karl Rove flees the U.S. to avoid a subpoena.

http://rawstory.com/...

Does he have a new house is Paraguay, like George W. Bush?

http://www.scoop.co.nz/...

Cheney has a new house in Dubai. The silver lining: Iran invasion unlikely for the sake of Halliburton.

http://smirkingchimp.com/...

Nancy Pelosi has told Dennis Kucinich to shut up with articles impeachment. It might be too late after Bush leaves office to hold the administration guilty of high crimes.

This will be a bit of a rant.

I was in DC recently.   I was near the Whitehouse when very bored looking police blocked all traffic.   Suddenly a motorcade appears of mostly black SUV's with Secret Service staring battle like out of some of them.  They must have been going 60+mph on a little side street near the Whitehouse.  Soon  after, I heard on the radio it was VP Cheney.

What immediately popped into my mind was Baghdad.   These guys were behaving like they were in eminent threat just like they were driving around Baghdad, not Washington D.C.  It was just like scenes out of Syriana

From the pages of today's (Sunday's)Philadelphia Inquirer

The Secret CDC Testimony Email.

In todays fast paced life we see new examples and names beening applied to individuals and organizations daily. Old definitions are not applicable to todays terminology, and many folks fall behind in the fast paced evolution of our English language. Older examples are how wghat was once "cool" evolved into "rad" or "radical". A 9 that used to be a number to be counted, has since in music been changed to mean a handgun. Promises and commitments made while pursuing elected office were mostly remembered at least for the first couple of years.

Medicine is in some ways been fairly constent in it's terminology as many of the medical terms are based in Latin, an ancient and dead language no longer spoken, even in Catholic Mass. However there appears to be a growing redefining of psychological and in some cases medical terms by our leaders, advisors and pundits. Below, after the fold I present a brief list that I will expand and terms change with updated definitions.

I’ll tell you who’s ba-bombing right now: John McCain. Sure, we still have to do a lot of work to prevent him from mounting a comeback, but barring big surprises, the odds are against him.

If Iran stays unbombed to Obama’s inauguration day, it will probably see only diplomatic pressure for the next four years. So any Strangelove in the administration must act fast if he wants to make sure that Iran receives its fair share of timely shock and awe. In this diary, I want to explore whether this is likely to happen in the waning months of the Bush presidency.