Well, folks, it looks like we have another one of those typical Bush heckofjobs still in office. A holdover from the Bush Administration had skiing plans the day after the attempted underwear bomber attack. The official, Michael Leiter, did not find it necessary to cancel or shorten his vacation.
Director of the National Counterterrorism Center Michael Leiter didn't cut short a ski trip until several days after alleged Nigerian attempted bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to destroy a commercial jetliner en route to Detroit Christmas day, veteran New York Daily News intelligence correspondent James Meek reports Thursday.
Citing two intelligence officials grousing about Leiter's continued vacation, Meek says the top counterterror boss declined to cut short his snow-struck holiday.
With heckofjobs like this, why not put a terrorist in charge of our national security?
What other horrors are we go learn about when President Obama releases the Christmas Day Bomber Report, I wonder?
Update: some folks over at Daily Kos have problems with Raw Story.com and the New York Daily News as entirely credible sources. I am therefore including a link to ABC News that also covered the story.
Liz Cheney, whose father served as one of the architects of two wars, one of which is unnecessary and which has broken us in terms of blood and treasure, and her father, who had also received five deferments during the Vietnam War, attacked President Obama for greeting our fallen soldiers at the Dover Air Force Base.
Only a Republican could turn a respectful and well-meaning Presidential act into an inappropriate or self-serving one.
How low can they go? Apparently the pit is bottomless, as readers will see later in the post.
Veterans over at Daily Kos have much to say about Liz Cheney and her father.
Remember all of the color coded alerts issued from Tom Ridge, former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security? The red alerts and the orange alerts that would send chills down the spines of the American people? The ones that would make some hearts stop with fear? The alerts that would send CNN and all news channels into feeding frenzies that would in turn bring fear and anxiety into homes across America? Remember the huge and bold front-page headlines in our daily newspapers? How many children went to bed at night afraid? If parents were fearful, their children were terrified. For those who live in New York City and Washington, D.C. the fear was even more palpable because the residents know all about a terrorist attack.
And now we learn some of the alerts, if not most of them, were fake.
According to an article published in Politico posted on Daily Kos Tom Ridge admits he was pushed by the Bush Administration to announce terror alerts when it was politically advantageous to do so.
Tom Ridge confirms a long-held suspicion among Bush critics, writing in his new autobiography that he "was pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush's re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over."
to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Hearings for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor tomorrow?
Based on the questions posed to Ms. Sotomayor by Republicans, when coupled with the hateful right wing ad below, I believe my question is completely legitimate.
Senator John Cornyn is indeed in total lock step with Senator Sessions' right wing racist fringe of the GOP. Cornyn continues to beat Ms. Sotomayor's comment about "Latina woman" like a dead horse.
Talk Show Host Mancow admitted water boarding is torture after six seconds.
At least the dude was willing to step up and put his ideology to the test.
Where are Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, David Addington, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Alberto Gonzales, G.W. Bush and other lovers of torture?
As I've written before, Republicans don't want us talking about torture and so they are creating a fiction about Nancy Pelosi and her lying about torture.
Hats off to diarist Muzikal203 over at Daily Kos for sharing the incredible video clip of Jesse Ventura's appearance on The View.
According to the some of the renowned Viet Nam War draft evaders and right wing war hawks
Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, George W. Bush, Karl Rove, Pat Buchanan, Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, Bill Kristol, Bill Blunt, Tom Delay, Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, Phil Gramm, John Cornyn, Trent Lott, Mitch McConnell, Paul Wolfowitz, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage
Nancy Pelosi personally ordered the CIA to find a link between Iraq and Al-Qaida. The GOP sissy boys also insist that when no links between the two evil doers could be found, Nancy the D Girl unilaterally ordered heinous torture to bring about the results the sissy boy cowards needed to gin up their war on Iraq.
Hats off to Ed Shultz of MSNBC for calling the Sissy Boys out for their psycho babble.
As we know Senator Arlen Specter changed his Party affiliation yesterday from Republican to Democrat. In his remarks the Senator had said the Republican Party had been recently "purified" by the right. Needless to say Specter's switch delivered a devastating blow to an already wounded GOP.
No wonder Dick Cheney has been appearing so frequently on FOX News. It's an attempt for him to defend his deplorable record and to distract the media and the public from the truth. Cheney has been attacking President Obama right and left in order to change the subject about torture.
A newly declassified narrative of the Bush administration's advice to the CIA on harsh interrogations shows that the small group of Justice Department lawyers who wrote memos authorizing controversial interrogation techniques were operating not on their own but with direction from top administration officials, including then-Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.
What else can one expect from the Party of Intolerance, No, Never, Hate, Ginned Up Warfare, Obstruction, Torture, Tax Cuts for the Rich, and Whores for the Fat Cats?
Thanks to the Republican jackasses in Austin and Washington, the video clip below gives us a glimpse into how the people of Texas are perceived.
First, from the Texas wing of The Party of Torture and Tax Cuts.
Senator John Cornyn, prominent member of the Party of Torture and willing player in the Bush Administration's
Journey to Depravity must think Democrats are quaking in their boots because, according to The Huffington Post he attempted to bully and blackmail them on the torture issue.
Cornyn apparently prefers to sweep the recent revelations of torture under the rug. That or pin the blame on Democrats who served on the Foreign Intelligence Committee at the time, and/or stick it to low level military and CIA officers at the bottom of the torture chain of command.
If Democrats insist on probing the Bush administration's program of detainee torture, they'd better be careful, a senior Senate Republican said Tuesday, because they might find blood on their own hands as well.
"To sit quietly and to let this happen and then to come back later and say people ought to be prosecuted criminally, not just here in the United States but perhaps internationally, to me is inconsistent, to say the least," said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas).
Jed Lewison of Daily Kos captured a video of our tea bagging Guv. Folks might want to read the comments below Jed's diary to see the level of scorn Rick Perry and other Texas Republicans have brought to Texas. It is not pretty.
Lately we have been hearing a lot of squawking and screeching emanating from the conservative right wing about a revolution.
This is rather perplexing given that we recently had an election in which the elected President won rather substantially without the need for voter caging, voter suppression, election fraud, recounts, recount shut downs, lawsuits and the Supreme Court. Nor was it necessary to bring in the likes of a Swift Boat attack machine and a corrupted Secretary of State (R-OH) to deliver a win in a razor thin, close election.
And despite all of the problems we face in these dire and stressful times the President's approval ratings remain in the 60's. Today it is at 67%. Today an ABC/Washington Post poll also reveals 65% trust President Obama to handle relations with Muslim nations.
So, what is the problem? Why is a revolution necessary now?
Thanks to shoddy work done on the cheap, no doubt. According to a separate report, Houston based KBR is also hiding its money in an off shore tax haven to avoid paying its fair share of U.S. taxes.
What a fine, stand up firm.
Diarist Meteor Blades over at Daily Kos wrote an expose about KBR's appalling faulty electrical work in Iraq.
"It was horrible -- some of the worst electrical work I've ever seen," said Jim Childs, a master electrician and the top civilian expert in an Army safety survey. Childs told CNN that "with the buildings the way they are, we're playing Russian roulette.
As we all know, this week is the last of the G.W. Bush Administration. Given a national Democratic landslide election and George W. Bush's recent approval rating, there is little doubt that there is more than a tad of dancing taking place in a plethora of streets throughout the U.S. and the world.
For much of their eight year term in office, President Bush and Vice President Cheney have remained tightly entrenched behind iron gates. They avoided the press and media as much as possible. They steered clear of the public and chose to helicopter in and out of their homes and offices whenever feasible. And yet for the past two weeks both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have been parading around on the Sunday morning talk and political news circuits. In their final days in office both men desperately tried their darnedest to re-write history. I imagine at this time, after Bush's farewell address, both men are securely ensconced back in their delusional bubbles in undisclosed locations.
With regard to Presidential exit interviews, former Press Secretary Scott McClellan is one of many who offered commentary on Bush's farewell address.
"It's hard to talk about moral clarity when you have tarnished our government's moral standing in the world," McClellan said. "If you look at the speech it was really a feel-good farewell speech. It was designed one final chance to burnish his legacy by highlighting his humanity, showing his humanity, his compassion, his inner decency and good intentions."
But "there are really two problems they don't seem to get," Bush's ex-press secretary remarked. "First of all, the public trust. The president long ago sadly lost the public trust. They are no longer listening to what he has to say or buying what he is selling. Unless he is willing to come out and talk candidly about his own mistakes, his own policy mistakes, and address those issues openly with the American people they are not tuning in."
(Junior John is a disgrace, let's do better for Texas with Rick Noriega. - promoted by boadicea)
This diary is an expanded and updated re-post of one I wrote previously on Texas Kaos. This updated version is also cross posted on The Burnt Orange Report.
As predicted, John Cornyn voted for the Wall St. bailout the other night. I never doubted for a moment that John Cornyn would ever in a day let down his buddies the fat cats. After all, the Republicans enabled Wall Street's financial melt down by voting for deregulation and lifting all "shackles," as they would call it, from their beloved soul mates on Wall Street.
Deregulate, Baby, Deregulate.
And boy did they ever do that big time.
Republicans dumbly believed Wall St. would police itself. Indeed, this is what a recently retired professor at the London School of Economics has to say about the U.S. financial melt down:
I felt it was high time for me to pay a call to our esteemed U.S. Senators to inquire about the recent financial melt down on Wall St. Since as a taxpayer I will be expected to step up and bail out a bunch of corrupted greed mongers I believe I deserve an explanation from those who got us into this unbelievable mess in the first place.
Dear Senator,
In the past two weeks I feel as if I have been hit by two devastating hurricanes. Many residents in the Houston and Galveston areas are still without power and most continue to struggle with Ike's aftermath. The nation's fourth largest city and its surrounding areas have taken a tremendous beating.
Just when we were beginning to think we could see the light at the end of Ike's tunnel we now find ourselves suddenly blindsided by another hurricane. This one did not sweep in from the Gulf. This unexpected monster came hurdling down from Wall St. and its aftermath could prove far more cataclysmic than Ike.
What is this business about a financial bailout using the taxpayer's money? It seems to me that a group of greedy and corrupted fat cats on Wall St., with the blessings of their supporters and cheerleaders in Congress, raped and pillaged the United States and now taxpayers are being asked to pay for the carnage. And we're supposed to turn over nearly $1 trillion and say "we trust you to clean up after yourselves."
Please.
See what Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine has to say about the Wall Street debacle.
