This is not my plant, I don't have the light or the room to grow it, but what a GREAT plant. It takes years to get to the size where it can flower, but look at those flowers.
Anyway, there's not much more I can add, that picture speaks for itself. Some day I want the home and the lighting to grow something like that. Some day.
Note: Please check out my new regular segment at politicstv.com called Republican Sexcapades. Those who like what I do will enjoy it, for the rest of you it provides a nice, safe place to spit in my face.
Another week. More preposterousness to report.
Well those cunning linguists in the Grand Old Party have been more active than a Republican consultant immersed in a throng of underage lesbians lately. First flapping their jaws about Iraq, then gay marriage, then flag burning, now the New York Times and its treasonous, you know, reporting on stuff in a democracy. Representative Peter King, better known as a former bag man for the IRA, thinks The New York Times should be prosecuted for disclosing their bank-tapping program, so secret it already had a public Web site devoted to it.
So Representative King’s jowls have been all over television lately, shaking as flaccidly as Rush Limbaugh when his luggage gets held up at the airport.
This of course is all part of the plan by the Bush Administration. It is called Operation "We’ve destroyed the budget, Iraq, Ken Mehlman’s night life, Medicare, John McCain’s last shred of integrity, education, the chances of Jenna’s scoring blow in the near future, gas prices and America’s defenses — so let’s distract people with hate so they mightn’t notice how we govern like Nicolae Ceaucescu."
Condi, of course, views this plan of attack as a historical document.
As for the multifaceted right-wing assault on The Times, it’s a given that the media will dutifully report the Administration line about how they leak like Starr Jones after a staple bursts. Without the slightest trace of irony, of course, that an admitted leaker/traitor named Rove is still on the White House payroll, free to spread the reek of day old buckets of KFC and emit global warming from his armpits all within spitting distance of the Oval Office. Or at least close enough for Senator George Allen to hoc a loogy when the camera’s on and he’s chewing a wad of tobaccy to make himself seem all Southern-like.
Speaking of the Virginia cabana boy, this week we got perhaps the best example of how a Democrat SHOULD respond when attacked by one of these atavistic, intellectual croutons trying to take this treasury-wasting, mind-numbing, faux-populist “legislative agenda” out for a spin to attack those who actually intend to do the people’s business. Allen attacked Democratic opponent Jim Webb (former Reagan Secretary of the Navy turned Democrat), implying he was not patriotic because he doesn’t think our Constitution need be amended to outlaw the possibility that Dick Cheney might shoot a hunting buddy in his American flag-draped drawers and go to jail for despoiling our nation’s symbol of its grandeur.
“While Jim Webb and others of George Felix Allen Jr.’s generation were fighting for our freedoms and for our symbols of freedom in Vietnam, George Felix Allen Jr. was playing cowboy at a dude ranch in Nevada. People who live in glass dude ranches should not question the patriotism of real soldiers who fought and bled for this country on a real battlefield.”
God I hope Democrats can learn from this. In that one statement, Team Webb are exposing what an elitist tool Allen is, all the while mocking his ballot-searching backseat-driving on patriotism. It’s not too late Democrats, pay heed!
Otherwise you’ll just consent to being tarred and feathered by a chickenhawk, you know the kind of man’s man who likes to wear flight suits and ten-gallon hats because its makes the quivering stop momentarily as he ponders the complexities of the modern world or multi-syllabic words. Just remember, you have to be ready to stand up so that the Republicans will stand down.
Otherwise find a way to get the GOP caucus to read one of Peter King’s “novels.” The resulting ulcerative colitis should render even your average GOP candidate unable to manufacture bullshit for at least a few weeks.
This provocative piece (linked by the inimitable Laura Rozen) does a great job of both critiquing some of the Iraq-Vietnam comparisons and outlining what analogies can appropriately be drawn. Essentially, it proposes that Iraq is kind of like Vietnam in reverse:
In Vietnam, the United States entered a divided country with a simmering civil war and left behind a nasty tyranny. In Iraq, the US has unseated a nasty tyranny but may leave behind a simmering civil war that could lead to a divided country. In Vietnam, fearing a nuclear clash with the Soviet Union or a confrontation with China, the US slid in slowly: first sending technical advisers, then undertaking search and destroy missions, and ultimately engaging in a full-throttle war. In Iraq, the US began full throttle, switched to search and destroy, and is now seriously debating whether to begin sliding out.
Even if Vietnam and Iraq diverge in their respective details, however, some parallels and applicable lessons remain. George Kennan, a foreign policy titan who remains largely unknown to non-polisci majors, weighed in on Vietnam during Senate hearings convened by Senator Fulbright in 1966. By that time, Kennan, Fulbright, and others could see the worrisome future of our Vietnam policy, and the worries then largely reflect the majority (and growing) public sentiment on Iraq.
"[T]here is more respect to be won in the opinion of this world by a resolute and courageous liquidation of unsound positions than by the most stubborn pursuit of extravagant and unpromising objectives," [Kennan] said. Kennan, were he alive today, would have little patience for the Bush administration's frequent call to stay in Iraq because a commitment was made and so many soldiers have already died. Just because the US had shot itself in one foot, he told the Senate committee, didn't mean it should fire away at the other.
Foreign policy requires constant adjustment and reevaluation, especially during wartime. The Bush administration -- and much of the Department of Defense -- has been stuck in 2003 for three years. It's time (and has been for a while) to reassess and improve our policies and tactics. It's time to change the course.
This is how the Bush White House treats Congress, as a nuisance to be bullied. And this is how it treats the Supreme Court and the Constitution - as terrorist-lovers.
White House counselor Dan Bartlett says the administration's task now is to determine how to design military tribunals that will pass constitutional muster. Bartlett says Bush could portray any lawmaker who objects to legislation as supporting the release of dangerous terrorists.
"restore the constitution to what it was before unelected jurists changed it five to four." He went on to say, "Five lawyers decided 48 states were wrong."
Those five unelected lawyers, who Hatch holds with so much contempt you can hear the venom dripping on his every word, those lawyers are commonly referred to as United States Supreme Court Justices. They are the highest jurists in all the land, and they are the governmental equal of Senator Hatch. He and they hold the same rank and power in our system of government.
So where does a United States Senator get off talking about justices of the Supreme Court as though they're two-bit thugs? This is the same kind of language Hatch's Republican colleagues have used repeatedly to paint the court as dangerous and even worthy of death, according to one Republican Senator and at least one religious right activist. It's what made Republican Justice Sandra Day O'Connor complain that such intemperate language could incite violence against Supreme Court justices.
Is this the way members of Congress should be talking about an entire branch of our government? About our entire system of checks and balances? Is this the best way to honor the framers of the Constitution, the founders of our country, on this upcoming 4th of July? Trashing the very system of government our men and women in Iraq are giving their lives for? And inciting violence against judges as a way of achieving political goals?
Orrin Hatch owes the Supreme Court, our soldiers, and all Americans an apology.
Good try, WSJ. So, it's bad when the NYT publishes a story about Bush skirting the law on domestic spying, but it's okay when the WSJ publishes the exact same story within hours of the Times. And that's because "no one asked" the WSJ not spill America's top secret anti-terror plans to the entire world. Had someone asked, we presume, they'd have been happy to pull the story. But gosh, no one asked. Sorry.
Some argue that the [Wall Street] Journal should have still declined to run the antiterror story. However, at no point did Treasury officials tell us not to publish the information. And while Journal editors knew the [New York] Times was about to publish the story, Treasury officials did not tell our editors they had urged the Times not to publish. What Journal editors did know is that they had senior government officials providing news they didn't mind seeing in print. If this was a "leak," it was entirely authorized....
So, the Wall Street Journal's argument seems to be that they'd sell America to Osama for a quick buck, so long as no one asked them not to.
Can't have it both ways, Wall Street Journal. Are you journalists or simply shills for the Bush administration?
Richard Clarke and his fellow terror error expert Roger Cressey have an op-ed in the NY Times today that examines the recent blow-up about monitoring money. That revelation has the entire GOP at war with the NY Times.
The answer to the question is that Bush and company think the American people are incredibly gullible:
Terrorists have for many years employed nontraditional communications and money transfers including the ancient Middle Eastern hawala system, involving couriers and a loosely linked network of money brokers precisely because they assume that international calls, e-mail and banking are monitored not only by the United States but by Britain, France, Israel, Russia and even many third-world countries.
While this was not news to terrorists, it may, it appears, have been news to some Americans, including some in Congress. But should the press really be called unpatriotic by the administration, and even threatened with prosecution by politicians, for disclosing things the terrorists already assumed?
And, Clarke knows why the Bush team is playing this game. Too bad most of the reporting class (and that means you, CNN) haven't clued in:
There is, of course, another possible explanation for all the outraged bloviating. It is an election year. Karl Rove has already said that if it were up to the Democrats, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi would still be alive. The attacks on the press are part of a political effort by administration officials to use terrorism to divide America, and to scare their supporters to the polls again this year.
There goes Froomkin again, telling the truth and stating the obvious:
The approval-rating bumps Bush was counting on, first from his White House staff shake-up and then from the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, never really materialized, leaving the president in deeply unpopular territory.
Theoretically, Bush could get himself out of this mess by trying to solve some of the problems afflicting his presidency. But campaigning is easier.
Under the rule, intended to curb fraud by illegal immigrants, such proof as a passport or a birth certificate must be offered at the time a person applies for Medicaid benefits or during annual reenrollment in the state-federal program for the poor and disabled.
Critics fear that the provision will have the unintended consequence of harming several million U.S. citizens who, for a variety of reasons, will not be able to produce the necessary paperwork. They include mentally ill, mentally retarded and homeless people, as well as elderly men and women, especially African Americans born in an era when hospitals in the rural South barred black women from their maternity wards....The new provision is part of last year's Deficit Reduction Act, which President Bush signed into law in February. Despite a federal inspector general's report concluding that there was little fraud by noncitizens, supporters said the measure would ensure that Medicaid dollars go only to citizens or eligible immigrants.
Rep. Charles Whitlow Norwood Jr. (R-Ga.), one of the prime sponsors, decried "the outright theft of Medicaid benefits by illegal aliens."
Remember, this is the party of compassionate conservatives, morality and family values. Beating up on the poor and disabled, isn't that just what Jesus would do?
Interesting week, I'd say. Loved watching Bush getting the smackdown from the Supreme Court. In Bush world, that makes the Court an enemy of freedom...right up there with the NY Times.
The big news today: Bush is taking a road trip to Graceland with the prime minister of Japan. And, they're playing Elvis movies on Air Force One. Wow.
The Telegraph said it was the first time any of five successive Conservative leaders had been preferred to Blair since Blair took the helm of the Labour party in 1994 as opposition leader under Conservative Prime Minister John Major.
Lots of fed up voters around the world who just aren't happy with the direction of the mainstream political parties. It's always nice to see Blair get a reality check and the Tories obviously have some work cut out as well. Both parties lost traditionally safe seats in by-elections.
Tony Blair and David Cameron were both dealt by-election blows in heartland seats today.
Voters in Blaenau Gwent, south Wales, failed to re-elect Labour in one of its former strongholds, then the Tories almost lost Bromley and Chislehurst to the Liberal Democrats, previously safe Conservative territory.
In a further setback for the Prime Minister, Labour was relegated to fourth in Bromley and Chislehurst, behind the UK Independence Party.
Great analysis of th Supreme Court decision from the Wash Post:
For five years, President Bush waged war as he saw fit. If intelligence officers needed to eavesdrop on overseas telephone calls without warrants, he authorized it. If the military wanted to hold terrorism suspects without trial, he let them.
Now the Supreme Court has struck at the core of his presidency and dismissed the notion that the president alone can determine how to defend the country. In rejecting Bush's military tribunals for terrorism suspects, the high court ruled that even a wartime commander in chief must govern within constitutional confines significantly tighter than this president has believed appropriate.
For many in Washington, the decision echoed not simply as matter of law but as a rebuke of a governing philosophy of a leader who at repeated turns has operated on the principle that it is better to act than to ask permission. This ethos is why many supporters find Bush an inspiring leader, and why many critics in this country and abroad react so viscerally against him....
"There is a strain of legal reasoning in this administration that believes in a time of war the other two branches have a diminished role or no role," Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who has resisted the administration's philosophy, said in an interview. "It's sincere, it's heartfelt, but after today, it's wrong."
As an aside, the Post story below notes that Justice Stevens is 86 years old. If he doesn't survive through the end of Bush's term, it's all over (not to mention, we'd still need to win the White House in 2008). Even this landmark victory would have likely been lost. The Supreme Court is the last place we have any chance of holding the Bush administration accountable. I hope to God our liberal groups are planning on taking the next nomination seriously. Enough of the in-fighting, enough of the sitting back and holding your tongue when someone else is leading the battle and stinks at it. The next nomination is it. After that, we lose everything.
While the decision addressed only military commissions, legal analysts said its skeptical view of presidential power could be applied to other areas such as warrantless wiretapping, and that its invocation of the Geneva Conventions could pave the way for new legal claims by detainees held at the military facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba....
But the court's action was clearly a setback for the White House. At the high court, its approach to the war on terrorism has suffered the broadest in a series of defeats, and the administration has been sent back to the drawing board in dealing with hundreds of suspected members of the Taliban and al-Qaeda -- at a time when international pressure is mounting to shut down Guantanamo Bay....
Legal analysts said that the court's opinion could lead to a challenge to the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program, because wiretapping is already covered by a federal statute, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, just as military commissions were, in the court's view, covered by the UCMJ.
"The same reasoning would seem to apply to the NSA case, because the argument that the authorization to use military force enables them to ignore FISA goes down the drain," said Joseph P. Onek, senior counsel of the Constitution Project, a Washington-based civil liberties organization that opposed the commissions.
"It appears to be about as broad a holding as you could imagine," said one administration lawyer, who insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the ruling. "It's very broad, it's very significant, and it's a slam."....
In his majority opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens said that the United States was legally bound by Common Article 3, as the provision is known (it is common to all four Geneva Conventions). He said the article "affords some minimal protection" to detainees even when the forces they represent are not signatories to the conventions themselves.
"Let's take this resolution for what it is: it is a campaign document...There's never been any oversight of the program. The fact is that because there has never been any oversight of the program, there isn't one person in this body, who will vote on this resolution, who can attest to this statement. They're asking us to vote on something that we absolutely cannot attest to. Not any one of you can attest to this as a fact." (full speech)
Rep. Maloney (D-NY) "The Republican party has become masters of cut and run, cutting from the issues so that they can run for re-election in November. This resolution is a diversion. If it was really about condemning leaks of classified information, it would also mention Valerie Plame, Karl Rove, and Scooter Libby. As the Member of Congress representing the district that suffered the greatest loss of life on 9/11, I believe that combating terrorism is a serious bipartisan issue, not a one-sided, last-minute, take it or leave it, Republican-only, political campaign stunt."
Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) "They've called the disclosure of the swift anti-terrorist program a disgrace, they've accused a newspaper that first wrote it, the the New York Times, of forcing its "arrogant elitist left-wing agenda" on the rest of the country. If all of this is true, I have no choice but to conclude that our President, President Bush himself, is a disgraceful, arrogant left-wing elitist, because it was Mr. Bush who leaked the story."
Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) "Let's be honest. We are here today because there hasn't been enough red meat thrown at the Republican base before the Fourth of July recess. That's why we are here. So just in the nick of time we have H.Res. 895."
Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) "Others have said yes, it's true that the terrorists learned from Bush Administration statements that we were tracking their financial activities. But apparently they didn't know that that involved banks. Did they think we were going through their pockets? I mean, how can you acknowledge that people knew that they were being tracked financially but no, it didn't involve bank records."
Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL) "Maybe it's the devil who makes them do this. We have flag burning, proposal for constitutional amendments, we have gay marriage, proposals for constitutional amendment, yet, when it comes to the basic freedom and liberty of this country, the press, we are presented with a resolution that condemns them, that's all it does, it doesn't sanction, it condemns them, it's our opportunity to vent and say little things about The New York Times."
Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) "Well, there may be some motive that is political about the selective crying out about information. The swift story bears no resemblence to security breaches, disclosure of troop locations or anything that would compromise the security of individuals."
Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) "They tell us that they're protecting our civil liberties while they're tapping our phones and spying in our libraries and looking into our bank accounts. They tell us to trust us on everything. They tell us to trust us on -- trust them on everything because they're protecting their civil liberties. Well, I don't think I can trust this administration to protect my civil liberties and those of the people that I serve."
I'm watching Wolf Blitzer interview Andrea Koppel, reporting from the US House where they've just passed a resolution condemning the media for reporting classified stories about the Bush administration's law-breaking and near law-breaking domestic spying programs. Listen to the way Andrea Koppel describes the vote:
This doesn't have the force of law but Republicans hope it sends a strong message not just to the media but to those who leak within the Bush administration.
Or, this was part of a much larger and ongoing Republican effort to:
Chill any criticism of the Bush administration;
Delegitimize Bush critics (e.g., the media) by labeling them as liberal and un-American in the eyes of the American public;
Help George Bush's sagging poll numbers by shifting the focus and blame for his incompetent handling of the war on terror to the "liberal media" and by changing the story from high gas prices and the failed war in Iraq;
Deflect the real story that Bush is yet again spying on American citizens in possible violation of the law without obtaining a court order; and
Force yet another vote on a do-nothing issue in order to divide Democrats and ultimately use this as an election issue rather than focusing on the real problems facing Americans.
But come on, reporting this as "real" news without mentioning the entirely political motivation behind the entire effort? You really think this resolution came up because Republicans hope to send a message? A message to the voters, sure. This is yet another political ploy to invoke the war on terror to shore up the Republican poll numbers. And not even mentioning that is neither fair nor accurate.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE -- NEW YORK – June 28, 2006 -- Pfizer Inc. today announced conservative talk radio commentator Rush Limbaugh has been signed as the new spokesman for the company's erectile dysfunction drug, Viagra (sildenafil citrate). Limbaugh went public with his use of the medication following a security incident June 26 at the Palm Beach International Airport....
Pfizer is hoping the Limbaugh "dittohead" following will give a boost to sales. "His listeners will buy into anything he says, so we're hoping that transfers into them buying our product. With a doctor's prescription, of course."
Previous Viagra spokesmen have included Senator Bob Dole and NASCAR driver Mark Martin. The addition of the controversial radio personality to the Pfizer stable seems to indicate the drug manufacturer intends to target an increasingly conservative demographic.
However, Pfizer's representative denied reports that ultra-right-wing commentator and author Ann Coulter was also being wooed to push the erection-enhancing medication. "We feel that would be antithetical. As clinically effective as Viagra has proven to be, it has its limits."
I've read about half the decision, it's horrendously thick and complicated. Glenn is a lawyer too and always has a good thorough take on complicated legal issues, so I'm going to defer to him at this initial juncture. Check out his analysis of what today's decision means. One interesting point Glenn makes, he agrees with Judd at ThinkProgress, who is also a lawyer, that today's ruling has some serious implications for Bush's arguments in the domestic spying cases.
And, at the very least, the Court severely weakened, if not outright precluded, the administration's legal defenses with regard to its violations of FISA. Specifically, the Court:
(a) rejected the administration's argument [Sec. IV] that Congress, when it enacted the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force in Afghanistan and against Al Qaeda ("AUMF"), implicitly authorized military commissions in violation of the UCMJ. In other words, the Supreme Court held that because the AUMF was silent on the question as to whether the Administration was exempt from the pre-existing requirements of the UCMJ, there was no basis for concluding that the AUMF was intended to implicitly amend the UCMJ (by no longer requiring military commissions to comply with the law of war), since the AUMF was silent on that question.
This is a clearly fatal blow to one of the two primary arguments invoked by the administration to justify its violations of FISA. The administration has argued that this same AUMF "implicitly" authorized it to eavesdrop in violation of the mandates of FISA, even though the AUMF said absolutely nothing about FISA or eavesdropping. If -- as the Supreme Court today held -- the AUMF cannot be construed to have provided implicit authorization for the administration to create military commissions in violation of the UCMJ, then it is necessarily the case that it cannot be read to have provided implicit authorization for the administration to eavesdrop in violation of FISA.
