How many lies did Tony Snow utter while responding to Helen Thomas?

1. There has only been one rationale for the war.

2. Saddam Hussein had refused to permit weapons inspectors to do their work.

3. We had cited other concerns in terms of democracy and human rights. [After the WMD excuse collapsed, "Saddam was oppressing his people" was used to justify the invasion; but it wasn't the rationale before.]

4. Also the case laid out and voted by the United States Senate [The Senate did not vote to go to war.] (He said twice that the Senate voted for war, but I'll count it as one lie.)

5. The president made his case back then.

6. [Bush] laid out his reasons. [He certainly didn't lay out his real reasons.]

Note that Tony says there was only one rationale, but then proceeds to contradict himself by stating at least six.

Is anybody besides me bothered by the idea of putting a military officer in charge of the CIA? He's not even retired; he's active duty.

As a member of the military, Hayden is under the direct command of the Commander in Chief. Refusing to obey Bush's orders would have more severe consequences for him than being told to resign as head of the CIA. Making Hayden the CIA Director would give Bush greater control over the agency. That's not good.

A man who lied us into war, and continued repeating the lies about WMDs and a Saddam-Osama connection long after the rest of the Busheviks, would have no scruples about lying under oath. All we can hope for is that Fitz has enough information from other sources to catch him at it.

"How can you possibly suggest the Republican Party will do whatever it takes to get and keep power, including destroying our democratic process? La la la la la la LA la, I can't HEAR you!"

It's true that Joe Scarborough doesn't have a "dead intern" problem, but only because Lori Klausutis wasn't an intern; she was a fulltime staff member in Scarborough's Florida office when she was found dead with a head injury that could not possibly have been incurred the way the medical examiner said it was incurred. (That medical examiner had lost his license in Missouri for falsifying reports, by the way.)

Scarborough gave false information to the media about Ms. Klausutis' general state of health, apparently to lay the groundwork for the medical examiner's improbable conclusion that Ms. Klausutis fainted and hit her head on the desk (and somehow end up several feet from said desk, facing the wrong way for her head to have hit it at the point where her skull was damaged).

For more details, see "A Death in the Congressman's Office", at http://www.americanpolitics.com/20010808Klausutis.html (researched and written by two members of Salon's Table Talk forum). Scarborough should have a "dead staff member" problem, and the only reason he doesn't is that the media was too busy hounding Democrat Gary Condit about Chandra Levy's disappearance to notice the much closer connection between a Republican and a young woman's death.

Whether or not Katherine Harris did warn potential contributors away from Joe Scarborough, the allegation gave Scarborough's cronies another opportunity to dismiss the reasonable suspicions as nonsense, and the media another opportunity to neglect their duty to investigate the mystery.

The AP fundraising story reported how much money the Democratic and Republican Congressional committees raised -- but it did not say how much money the DNC and RNC raised. It only said how much money each had in the bank, and then portrayed the RNC's greater amount as "besting" the DNC.

All along, the official storyline has been that Howard Dean is a big fat failure as a fundraiser -- even though he's raised more money than the DNC has previously raised in comparable election cycles. I suspect this is why the AP story used a different standard to compare the RNC and DNC than to compare the Congressional committees, so they don't have to abandon that storyline and actually admit that Gov. Dean is succeeding in his job as head of the DNC.

I'm a Michigan voter, and have been an elections worker. My city has been using optical scanners for voting, and in my experience as a voter and worker they served us well: easy to use, low failure rate, accurate operation. So I naively believed that [Republican] Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land's order that all counties will use optical scanners wouldn't affect us. Silly me. The order was actually that all counties will buy new optical scanners even if they already had them and have had no problems with them. The brand-new machines are, to say the least, not an improvement over the machines that had served us well for at least the last 12 years. I haven't witness any jams, but I've experienced that feeding the ballot into the new machine is more difficult than with the old machines.

A 15% failure rate for anything is simply unacceptable. For voting machines, it's criminal.

Call me cynical, but I'd like to know exactly what dealings Ms. Land has had with the voting-machine manufacturer.

One of my favorite memories of Ann Richards is her appearance on Politically Incorrect about 6 or 7 years ago. One of the other guests was one of the interchangeable rightwing blondes, who was going on about what a crime it is that the government wastes money keeping women on welfare because they're too lazy to go out and get a job. Ann's reply nailed the rightwing hypocrisy to the wall: "They blame the low income women for ruining the country because they are staying home with their children and not going out to work. They blame the middle income women for ruining the country because they go out to work and do not stay home to take care of their children."