Okay. For those of you who believe that Ron Paul is the answer to all of our problems and that the spirit of Guy Fawkes day is going to overwhelm us all and sweep Paul into the White House, now is the time to act.

Move all of your assets into gold. If we are moving to the gold standard anyway, get ahead of the curve. How can you lose?

[Gads, I'm channeling Shooter. WT is right, this is a freak show.]

Remarkably, Harry Reid has said that he will vote against Mukasey. If he truly feels that way, I think there is another plan Reid could undertake.

Because Schumer has at least gotten Mukasey to say that he would enforce a law passed to declare waterboarding torture, all Reid needs to do is to delay the vote on Mukasey while passing just such a bill.

Reid could inform Bush that a veto of the bill would keep Mukasey's confirmation vote tabled forever. Then, after getting the law enacted, one last hearing for Mukasey could be held to make sure he intends to follow the law as he has assured Schumer.

That would be real leadership from our Senate Majority Leader, so I am sure that it has no chance of happening.

I agree with your observation that for "the very purpose of the “surge” -- to give a chance for political reconciliation has been totally undermined – there has been no progress on that front at all."

It is this lack of political progress that highlights the absurdity of the entire spectacle of the surge and the occupation in general. If you look at the political front in Iraq and in the maladministration's other "fronts", all is chaos wrought by utter incompetence.

• In northern Iraq, we have the Kurds, who have been given a greater freedom to do as they choose (and praised for instituting their own "oil revenue sharing" plan), now conducting raids into Turkey. This, of course, is prompting the threat of return raids and the closure of the primary supply route for all of our adventures in Iraq.

• Zero progress on the legislative goals in the surge plan.

• Zero progress on troop and police force training.

• Nothing but sabre-rattling on the Iran front, where the next misstep is likely to place all of the hundreds of thousands of troops and contractors in Iraq in line for direct harm from Iranian retaliation.

• Oh, yeah. There's that little problem brewing in Pakistan. The "domino theory" I see there is truly frightening. If Musharraf's government falls and nuclear weapons disappear, that is just the "emergency" needed for further erosion of rights here in the US.

Yup, that decrease in violence means a lot. The rate at which radical Islamic terrorists are putting down their weapons and singing Kumbaya with us because we are spreading democracy in their homeland makes me feel all warm and tingly inside.

Are you sure that furry thing is a cat? I think it's a moldy shoe.

Glenn's link took me to Howie's column from today. If you have the courage to read the rest of the column Glenn quotes, you can find it here: http://tinyurl.com/yrkvmk.

Later in the column, Howie does highlight some "creative" editing the White House did on ABC News footage.

Pedinska: a little bleach will take care of those new life forms before we need to run for it.

Give Festus a break. His little head is still spinning. Two days of Ron Paul and he couldn't come up with a word. The cognitive dissonance was just too strong.

• Dismantle the Department of Education and IRS? --Loved it!

• Go to even more of "I've got mine, Jack"? --Couldn't be better!

• End the GWOT? --Whoa! Does not compute! We gotta kill more mooslims, don't we?

Give him some time. This has been very hard for him.

I think I may need to go lie down. Any room on that couch?

President Bush suffered the first veto override of his seven-year-old presidency Thursday as the Senate enacted a $23 billion water resources bill despite his protest that it was filled with unnecessary projects.

The vote was 79-14 to pass the bill. Enactment was a foregone conclusion, but it still marked a milestone for a president who spent his first six years with a much friendlier Congress controlled by his Republican Party. Now he confronts a more hostile, Democratic-controlled legislature, and Thursday's vote showed that even many Republicans will defy him on spending matters dear to their political careers.

/snip/

The House voted 361-54 to override the veto Tuesday.

http://tinyurl.com/3a7cfa

In a new AP story on waterboarding "reporter" Laurie Kellman spews this:

The interrogation procedure makes the subject think he's drowning, and has been banned by domestic law and international treaties. Those policies don't cover the CIA's use of the technique, however, and the Bush administration has sidestepped questions about whether it has allowed the agency's employees to use it against terror detainees.

Emphasis added.
http://tinyurl.com/2afgjr

Aside from the info@ap.org general email address, does anyone know a better process for registering a complaint with AP? How can such a blatant lie be allowed to stay out there? How in the world do the Geneva Convention and the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel Inhuman and Degrading Treatment not apply to the CIA?