Run To The Hills
Me, Missus Southjaw and the dawg are heading to the hills for a little R&R ... Play nice while we're gone. Back in a week.

Cheney, Bush Leak Approval To Be Revealed In Libby Trial
"Your Honor, our core defense, whether it is in the indictment or not is that what Mr. Libby was doing during this period of time ... It wasn't just him. He was involved in what was a multi-agency response. It was office of the vice president. It was the office of the president ... in every obstruction case, in every perjury case, the key issue is motive and the underlying offense. Even though the underlying offense is not charged, in every perjury case the real question is did the person have a reason to lie. So the underlying offense is always in play."

The Niger Intelligence Success Behind Bush's Iraq Advendture
"For more than two years it has been widely reported that the U.S. invaded Iraq because of intelligence failures. But in fact ... the Iraq war started because of an extraordinary intelligence success—specifically, an astoundingly effective campaign of disinformation ... the Niger claim, unlike other allegations, can't be dismissed as an innocent error or blamed on ambiguous data ... Even after information in the Niger documents was repeatedly rejected by the C.I.A. and the State Department, hawkish neocons managed to circumvent seasoned intelligence analysts and insert the Niger claims into Bush's State of the Union address ... By the time the U.S. invaded Iraq, in March 2003, this apparent black-propaganda operation had ... led us into war."

Bush 43, Bush 41, Watergate, Iraq ... Like Father Like Son
"Should any puzzlement exist regarding GWBush’s handling of the Iraq war, one can turn to history for elucidation. Bush 43 is handling Iraq exactly the way his father handled Watergate: deny and stonewall as long as possible; muddy the issues with bogus counter-accusations; exploit the situation for whatever is exploitable in it; position oneself for future advantage; then cut bait. Few people today remember that George H. W. Bush, way back before being CIA director and after being Nixon’s Ambassador to the U.N., was head of the Republican National Committee in the early '70s while Watergate was unspooling. His son apparently absorbed some lessons from the times."

Confronting the B.S. of "Cut and Run"

Nice to see someone from the GOP with the gumption to purposely stray from the comfort of the pack. Perhaps this little lemming won't hurl himself off of the cliff after all?

"This afternoon on the Senate floor, Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) blasted conservatives who have turned to “catchy political slogans” to avoid having a serious debate about Bush’s Iraq policy. Hagel argued that using such focus-group tested words like 'cut and run' demean the debate and 'debase the seriousness of war.'"

Democrats couldn't have said it better themselves.

A Sober Deconstruction of "Cut and Run"

"Last week the White House operative Karl Rove traveled to New Hampshire to pump up the faithful by telling them that if Democrats had their way, Iraq would have fallen to terrorists. "When it gets tough, and when it gets difficult, they fall back on that party's old pattern of cutting and running," Rove said. Never mind that there were no terrorists in a position to take over in Iraq before the U.S. invasion..."

One Step Forward On Holding Bush Accountable For Domestic Spying
"Today, the House Judiciary Committee passed H.Res. 819, calling on the President and the Justice Department to disclose its role in approving massive telephone call databases maintained by the NSA and others ... the House Judiciary Committee is exercising its oversight authority and demanding real answers of the Administration ... We do not know how trillions of phone call records were obtained, nor how they are being used. And there is no guarantee that this private information will ever be destroyed ... Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner will put the resolution on the House calendar, where, at his discretion, it will be subject to a full vote of the if the Administration refuses to comply."

Adultery - The New Republican Family Value
"Three of the top potential Republican candidates are admitted adulterers ... McCain was still married and living with his wife in 1979 while ... aggressively courting a 25-year-old woman who was as beautiful as she was rich ... McCain divorced his wife, who had raised their three children while he was imprisoned in Vietnam, then launched his political career with his new wife's family money ...
Giuliani informed his second wife, Donna Hanover, of his intention to seek a separation in a 2000 press conference. The announcement was precipitated by a tabloid frenzy after Giuliani marched with his then-mistress, Judith Nathan, in New York's St. Patrick's Day parade ...
Gingrich obtained his first divorce in 1981, after forcing his wife, who had helped put him through graduate school, to haggle over the terms while in the hospital, as she recovered from uterine cancer surgery. In 1999, he was disgraced again, having been caught in an affair with a 33-year-old congressional aide while spearheading the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton ..."

Listen up, kids: Never, EVER, believe what any Republican politician tells you about morality, family values, faith, God, love, honor or duty. They talk pretty, but they fuck dirty.

Bush Ordered Torture Of Mentally Ill Man To Avoid Losing Face
"I said he was important," Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you? ... Do some of these harsh methods really work?" ... Interrogators ... strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board ... threatened him with certain death ... withheld medication ... bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety -- against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target." And so ... "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."

Immune From The Standard Of Bush Ethics?
"Rove testified five times before the grand jury with a resourceful lawyer in frequent touch with the prosecutor. Lesser mortals would not have had five opportunities to explain their conduct. There is no question Rove was a leaker. And the president has often spoken of his anger about leakers. But Rove is apparently immune from that standard of Bush's ethics ... Within hours of learning he could breathe a sigh of relief, Rove was in New Hampshire telling a GOP audience that Democrats were cut-and-runners on the war issue. This nasty charge comes from a man who has never seen combat and has never fired or heard a shot fired in anger. He has no shame."

Do-It-Yourself Impeachment
"Impeach for Peace, a Minnesota-based impeachment group, has researched a method for impeaching the president using a little known and rarely used part of the Rules of the House of Representatives ("Jefferson’s Manual"). This document actually empowers individual citizens to initiate the impeachment process themselves. "

One Down, A Whole Bushel To Go ...
"A former Bush administration official was convicted on Tuesday of lying about his links to Jack Abramoff, a disgraced lobbyist whose ties to powerful Republicans have embarrassed the party. A federal jury found David Safavian -- a former chief of staff at the General Services Administration -- guilty of four of five counts of lying and obstructing justice in the first trial to be held in connection with the Abramoff influence-peddling scandal."

"No Comment" From Fitzgerald Spokesperson On Rove Indictment
"For the record, we did reach Kimberly Nerheim, a spokesperson for Patrick Fitzgerald, and asked her these questions: Did a grand jury return an indictment of Karl Rove? Did Patrick Fitzgerald send a fax to Robert Luskin similar to that described in recent press reports? Is Patrick Fitzgerald's probe of the Plame matter still ongoing? Her response to each question was identical: 'I have no comment' ... We also continue to be very troubled that no one has seen the reported communication from Fitzgerald to Rove's attorney Robert Luskin, and more importantly, how so much public judgment could be based on a communication that Luskin will not put on the table. Before we can assess the glaring contradiction between what our sources say and what Luskin says Fitzgerald faxed to him, we need to be able to consider what was faxed - and in its entirety."

Suddenly I Don't Feel So Safe ...
"In a new book, Professor Justin Frank says the US president exhibits classic signs of being a paranoid schizophrenic. The study, based on Bush's public appearances and medical records, claims it leads the president to believe he is omnipotent and able to operate outside the law. And it says he could be driven by his medical condition to invent and then destroy enemies to demonstrate his power to the world."

Easy For Fat, Lying Leakers To Sit In Washington And Tell Soldiers To 'Stay The Course'
"He’s sitting in his air-conditioned office on his big, fat backside, saying stay the course. That’s not a plan. … We’ve got to change direction. You can’t sit there in the air-conditioned office and tell troops carrying 70 pounds on their backs, inside these armored vessels hit with IEDs every day, seeing their friends blown up, their buddies blown up — and he says stay the course? Easy to say that from Washington, DC." (Click thru for video)

Another Brush With Disaster
So now we see how close we came to another 9/11 scale attack in 2003:
"U.S. officials received intelligence that al-Qaida operatives had been 45 days away from releasing a deadly gas into the city's subways when the plan was called off by Osama bin Laden's deputy in 2003 ... Ayman al-Zawahri had canceled the plan in January 2003, despite the likelihood that the strike would have killed as many people as the Sept. 11 attacks."

Aint it just a shame Bush didn't capture the Al-Qaida leadership when he had the chance? But of course, his mind was already on other things:
"Despite the importance of finding al-Qaeda's leaders, by early 2002 the United States was already shifting its attention and resources away from Afghanistan. (That shift began early: according to Bob Woodward, in late November of 2001 President Bush had asked the Pentagon to revamp its Iraq war plan, an 800-page document known as Op Plan 1003.) For more than a year and a half the search for bin Laden was given relatively low priority ... Intelligence and military assets that might have been directed at bin Laden were directed largely at Iraq."