Video- The Daily Show: Stewart takes on Bushie Marc Thiessen

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Well worth the watch especially when it went into overtime which you can see here.

VIDEO- Hardball: Rep. Jeb Hensarling wants to "re-engineer" Social Security

By GottaLaff

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

This is what they call a plan?

[C]ut benefits for everybody now under 55 and privatize the program like President Bush tried to do in 2005.

Great idea, because things went so swimmingly under BushCo.

By the way, calling cuts to Social Security benefits "re-engineering" just won't re-engineer, er, cut it, Ace.

Oh, and Jeb? It's a Democratic, not "Democrat" Congress. By the way, it's also the most successful Congress of any modern president, including Saint Reagan's.

Video Flashback: Bush spokeswoman accuses NBC News of political bias

But the Obama Administration is a big bully. Vid via Jed.

Judge to review Cheney interview with FBI

By GottaLaff

Judge, in legalese, to The Dick and the Obama legal team: Go Cheney yourselves:

A federal judge says he wants to look at notes from the FBI's interview with former Vice President Dick Cheney during the investigation into who leaked the identity of a CIA officer.

U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan said he wants to review the documents after Obama administration lawyers said they would continue the Bush administration's fight to keep the interview from becoming public.

The ObamAdministration is saying that future administrations would hesitate before cooperating with investigations, that their foes-- and comedians-- would abuse the info. Yeah, then they'd have to picket Letterman again, and that can be such a pain.

What did the judge have to say about that? Exactly what you might have hoped:

Sullivan the Justice Department must give him more precise reasons for keeping the information confidential.

How ironic: Now the Obama lawyers will have to come up with a Top Ten List of their own.

Premature jubilation-- Spanish AG: No torture probe of US officials

By GottaLaff

Remember those indictments? Never mind. Premature jubilation:

Spain's attorney general has rejected opening an investigation into whether six Bush administration officials sanctioned torture against terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, saying Thursday a U.S. courtroom would be the proper forum.

Candido Conde-Pumpido's remarks severely dampen the chance of a case moving forward against the Americans, including former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Conde-Pumpido said such a trial would have turned Spain's National Court "into a plaything" to be used for political ends.

"If there is a reason to file a complaint against these people, it should be done before local courts with jurisdiction, in other words in the United States," he said in a breakfast meeting with journalists. [...]

Gonzalo Boye, one of the human rights lawyers who brought the case in Spain, said the decision by Conde-Pumpido was politically motivated and set a terrible course for Spanish justice.

"The attorney general speaks of the court being turned into a plaything. Well, I don't think the attorney general's office should be turned into a plaything for politicians," Boye told AP. "It is a terrible precedent if those intellectually responsible for crimes can no longer be held accountable."

In addition, it turns out that the U.S. talked to them... and then this happened. But wait:

The Spanish prosecutors advised the Americans that they would suspend their investigation if at any point the United States were to undertake an investigation of its own into these matters.

Could this mean a U.S. investigation is in the works? I'm looking for a silver lining here.

VIDEO: That DHS report about right wing extemists? It started with BushCo

By GottaLaff


Herridge’s report comes in at the end of the video.

Paddy posted earlier about the outrage--the outrage!-- of the Rushpublics over the Department of Homeland Security report that was leaked about the rising radicalization of “rightwing extremists”. How dare the Obama administration! Sputter! Froth! Spitty protest!

But wait! What did a little Think Progress birdie just tell me? Why... this!

[T]his morning, Fox News’s Catherine Herridge revealed that the report, along with an earlier report on radicalized left-wing groups, was actually “requested by the Bush administration” but not completed until recently:

HERRIDGE: Well this is an element of the story which has largely gone unreported. One looks at right-wing groups, as you mentioned. And a second is on left-wing groups. Significantly, both were requested by the Bush administration but not finished until President Bush left office.

Herridge’s reporting undermines her network’s own “reporting” over the past 24 hours. Since news of the DHS assessment broke yesterday, Fox anchors and guests have been seizing upon the report as evidence that the administration is trying to intimidate tea party goers or “stifle speech”.

Who knew Bush was such a commie pinko socialist fascist traitor? Hands? Hmm, whassat? Oh, okay, let me rephrase: Who knew Bush was such a fascist traitor? Look at that! Everyone's hands went up at the same time!

[T]he Obama administration was apparently following the lead of the Bush Homeland Security Department in assessing the very real threat of violent right-wing extremism. Indeed, Bush appointees such as FBI Director Robert Mueller have acknowledged the threat of right-wing extremism multiple times.

As Emily Litella would say:

Joshua is angry

By GottaLaff

I love the Joshua Blog. Joshua is a cool guy who is responsive to my Tweets on The Twitter Machine. I went over to his place, and I found a very angry Joshua. He has graciously invited me to copy and paste his entire post:

Now I'm really starting to get pissed off. What the hell is he thinking?! He refused to go after Bush officials for torture, he embraces Bush's executive power grab and protects the domestic spying program and it's telecom conspirators, blackmailed by the Senate GOPers with filibusters his appointees & threatened by the CIA with God only know what, he decides not to release the torture memos as planned and now this bullshit?!

From the NY Times:

Obama to Appeal Detainee Ruling

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration said Friday that it would appeal a district court ruling that granted some military prisoners in Afghanistan the right to file lawsuits seeking their release. The decision signaled that the administration was not backing down in its effort to maintain the power to imprison terrorism suspects for extended periods without judicial oversight.

In a court filing, the Justice Department also asked District Judge John D. Bates not to proceed with the habeas-corpus cases of three detainees at Bagram Air Base outside Kabul, Afghanistan. Judge Bates ruled last week that the three — each of whom says he was seized outside of Afghanistan — could challenge their detention in court.

Tina Foster, the executive director of the International Justice Network, which is representing the detainees, condemned the decision in a statement.

“Though he has made many promises regarding the need for our country to rejoin the world community of nations, by filing this appeal, President Obama has taken on the defense of one of the Bush administration’s unlawful policies founded on nothing more than the idea that might makes right,” she said.

read more

NOT OK.

Joshua has a point. I really don't want to get this upset with President Obama, he's really terrific in so many ways... but regarding these topics, I'm starting to simmer. I'm still in wait-and-see mode before I get to the same boiling point as Joshua, but right now, I don't like what I'm seeing while I wait.

Let's hope there's more to this than meets the eye, and that we will feel some sense of relief, not dread or vindication for our outrage.

VIDEO: Former Reagan/Bush consultant equates teachers unions with Hitler Youth leaders

By GottaLaff

BuzzFlash found this one for me. Whoa::

The notion of government organized and funded community service volunteerism has no shortage of enemies on the right side of the political spectrum. [...] But no Republican politician can or would match the rhetoric Judith Reisman employs to denounce AmeriCorps programs.

Reisman, a former consultant for the Reagan and both Bush administrations says that government community service programs are not dissimilar than those employed in fascist or communist regimes to brainwash the young.

Old-timers naturally recall Communist, Fascist and Nazi youth brigades as severing children from their parent's religious traditions and beliefs.

In her WorldNetDaily column she has special animus for gay tolerance groups like the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network, and for the American Library Association and National Education Association. [...]

Reisman, a former producer for Captain Kangaroo, is founder of the Institute for Media Education fighting what she considers fraudulent sex scientists, sex education and the power and effect of images and the monopoly media to alter human behavior. She says the special emphasis of her work has been and continues to be the negative influence of these change agents upon children and society. Her primary target is the groundbreaking sex research of Dr. Alfred Kinsey which she believes promulgated “a growing and proselytizing international academic pedophile movement”.

She served as a consultant for the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education for the Reagan and both Bush administrations. She also claims that she was awarded a grant by the Justice Department to serve as the “principal investigator of an $800,000 grant to investigate Kinsey's role in child sexual abuse and the link to children appearing in mainstream pornography, Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler.”

Go here for more.

Bush deputy White House counsel agrees to testify at commission

By GottaLaff

Just got a Tweet:

bush deputy WH counsel tim flanigan, asked by a law prof, just said he'd be willing to testify before a truth commission

Wiki

Obama administration tries to kill BushCo e-mail case

By GottaLaff

Am I missing something here? If this is accurate, then I'll need a talking down. A big one:

The Obama administration, siding with former President George W. Bush, is trying to kill a lawsuit that seeks to recover what could be millions of missing White House e-mails.

Two advocacy groups suing the Executive Office of the President say that large amounts of White House e-mail documenting Bush's eight years in office may still be missing, and that the government must undertake an extensive recovery effort. They expressed disappointment that Obama's Justice Department is continuing the Bush administration's bid to get the lawsuits dismissed.

Here is the back story.

Recently, the Bush White House said it had located 14 million e-mails that were misplaced and that the White House had restored hundreds of thousands of other e-mails from computer backup tapes.

The steps the White House took are inadequate, one of the two groups, the National Security Archive, told a federal judge in court papers filed Friday.

"We do not know how many more e-mails could be restored but have not been, because defendants have not looked," the National Security Archive said in the court papers.

"The new administration seems no more eager than the last" to deal with the issue, said Anne Weismann, chief counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the other group that sued the EOP.

Say it ain't so, Joe... and Barack.

"The United States is now back on the side of the enlightened on this issue of basic human rights.”

By GottaLaff

There is nothing more essential to co-existence than basic human rights. How nice that we now have an administration that agrees with that statement:

U.S. allies and human rights groups criticized the Bush administration’s position as it stood “in contradiction with America’s long tradition as a defender of human rights”:

– [France’s human rights minister Rama] Yade and the Dutch foreign minister, Maxime Verhagen, said at a news conference that they were “disappointed” that the United States failed to support the declaration.

– “The Bush administration is trying to come up with Christmas presents for the religious right so it will be remembered,” said Scott Long, a director at Human Rights Watch.

But as with a number of other important issues, the new Obama administration has come with a change in attitude and a new position. At preparations for the U.N.’s so-called “Durban Review Conference” on racism and xenophonia in Geneva, the U.S. offered support for a proposal to condemn “all forms of discrimination and all other human rights violations based on sexual orientation”:

The Czech Republic on behalf of the E.U., with the support of New Zealand, the United States, Colombia, Chili on behalf of the South American states, the Netherlands, Argentina and a few others, took the floor in support.

While the measure faced resistance and eventually failed, U.N. Dispatch’s Mark Leon Goldberg notes, “Still, it’s relieving to see that the United States is now back on the side of the enlightened on this issue of basic human rights.”

How pathetic and embarrassing that Bush put us on the other side for way too long.

VIDEO-- Hardball: Chris Matthews rips hypocrite "Precious Andrew" Card who says Obama disrespects Oval Office

By GottaLaff

Suh-nap! Chris Matthews accuses Andy Card of getting a little "dainty". (Note: I edited the title. I posted too quickly. Apologies)


The fun starts at about 1:27.

Paddy's original post here. Tweety could have asked his researchers to dig up more photos like the one Paddy found, to really push the hypocrisy charge. However, he did manage to rip into Dainty Andy pretty handily, and for that I am grateful.

Bonus! You get a second look at Barbara Boxer accusing Lindsey Graham of being "theatrical".

Obama v. Bush: Searching their White House web sites

By GottaLaff

Transparency:

An early indication of greater transparency from the federal government can be seen at the new White House web site.

According to Jason Kottke, the Bush administration set more than 2,400 rules to prevent search engines from indexing certain material on the site. The new Obama site eliminates nearly all of these rules.

Change. It's here.

Interior Dept. rule allowing guns in national parks may violate White House directive

By GottaLaff

This administration is so stupid that not once but twice, it violated its own directives:

Earlier this month, the Department of Interior overturned a Reagan-era regulation, allowing loaded firearms at most national park sites such as the National Mall. Yesterday, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence sued the administration, saying the rule “jeopardizes the safety of park visitors in violation of federal law.”

This news release notes the violation by Interior. Here's the gist of it:

The suit charges that the Interior Department violated several federal laws in its rush to implement the rule before President Bush leaves office, including failing to conduct any environmental review of the harm that the rule will cause, as is required by the National Environmental Policy Act. The Department also violated a White House directive that no rules should be issued after November 1, 2008, except in “extraordinary circumstances,” issuing the last-minute rule change on December 10, 2008.

BushCo's One Big Important Accomplishment: It's the administration that violates its own directives better than any other!

George Tenet, Drunk in Bandar's Pool, Screaming about Jews

By GottaLaff

Ambinder asks, "what was former CIA director George Tenet doing, drunk, in Prince Bandar's pool, screaming about the Jews? Allegedly."

We can't let that little nugget just lie there, now can we? Let's see what the original post says:

I just picked up Patrick Tyler's forthcoming book, A World of Trouble, about America's tortured relations with the Middle East, and the prologue contains this whopper of a scene, one that is quite devastating, if true: An enraged George Tenet, drunk on scotch, flailing about Prince Bandar's Riyadh pool, screaming about the Bush Administration officials who were just then trying to pin the Iraq WMD fiasco on him:

A servant appeared with a bottle. Tenet knocked back some of the scotch. Then some more. They watched with concern. He drained half the bottle in a few minutes.

"They're setting me up. The bastards are setting me up," Tenet said, but "I am not going to take the hit."

And then this:

"According to one witness, he mocked the neoconservatives in the Bush administration and their alignment with the right wing of Israel's political establishment, referring to them with exaxperation as, "the Jews."

Tyler reports in a footnote that, when asked, Tenet initially denied staying at Prince Bandar's palace, then denied that he had said anything in the pool. "He disputed the remarks attributed to him and denied that his memory might have been affected by the amount of alcohol he was reported to have consumed on top of a sleeping pill," Tyler reports.

Gee, I can't imagine why his reputation is in tatters. Allegedly.

Frank Rich: Two Cheers for Rod Blagojevich

By GottaLaff

Barry Blitt

Frank Rich:

What went down in the Land of Lincoln is just the reductio ad absurdum of an American era where both entitlement and corruption have been the calling cards of power. Blagojevich’s alleged crimes pale next to the larger scandals of Washington and Wall Street. Yet those who promoted and condoned the twin national catastrophes of reckless war in Iraq and reckless gambling in our markets have largely escaped the accountability that now seems to await the Chicago punk nabbed by the United States attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald. [...]

Bush had arrived in Washington vowing to inaugurate a new, post-Clinton era of “personal responsibility” in which “people are accountable for their actions.” Eight years later he holds himself accountable for nothing. [...]

[W]hile some perpetrators of fraud at Enron would ultimately pay a price, any lessons from its demise, including a need for safeguards, were promptly forgotten by one and all in the power centers of both federal and corporate governance. [...]

Despite Bush’s post-Enron call for “a new ethic of personal responsibility in the business community,” the exact opposite has happened in the six years since. [...]

It’s a sad snapshot of our century’s establishment that Rubin has been an economic adviser to Barack Obama and Gramm to John McCain. And that both captains of finance remain unapologetic, unaccountable and still at their banks, which have each lost more than 70 percent of their shareholders’ value this year and have collectively announced more than 90,000 layoffs so far.

The Times calls its chilling investigative series on the financial failures “The Reckoning,” but the reckoning is largely for the rest of us — taxpayers, shareholders, the countless laid-off employees — not the corporate and political leaders who led us into the quagmire. It’s a replay of the Iraq equation: the troops, the Iraqi people and American taxpayers have borne the harshest costs while Bush and company retire to their McMansions. [...]

After a while they all start to sound like O. J. Simpson, who when at last held accountable for some of his behavior told a Las Vegas judge this month, “In no way did I mean to hurt anybody.” Or perhaps they are channeling Donald Rumsfeld, whose famous excuse for his failure to secure post-invasion Iraq, “Stuff happens,” could be the epitaph of our age.

Our next president, like his predecessor, is promising “a new era of responsibility and accountability.” We must hope he means it. Meanwhile, we have the governor he leaves behind in Illinois to serve as our national whipping boy, the one betrayer of the public trust who could actually end up paying for his behavior. The surveillance tapes of Blagojevich are so fabulous it seems a tragedy we don’t have similar audio records of the bigger fish who have wrecked the country. But in these hard times we’ll take what we can get.

So much for that smooth transition: DOJ blocks Obama transition team from reviewing wiretap, torture documents

By GottaLaff

Via Think Progress:

According to the Blog of Legal Times, the Justice Department is blocking President-elect Obama’s agency review team’s request “to review classified legal opinions related to secret CIA and National Security Agency programs.” Included in these documents are the “legal rationale of the NSA’s warrantless spying program and the CIA’s detention and interrogation policies, among other intelligence initiatives.” According to a senior Justice Department official, they are “reluctant to provide the opinions to Obama’s team without permission from the two intelligence agencies whose activities they address.” (HT: Daily Kos and Talk Left)

So much for those promises of cooperation.

US President George Bush today publicly congratulated Barack Obama on his historic victory and vowed "complete co-operation" as the first black US president moves into the White House. [...]

"I told the President-elect he can count on complete co-operation from my Administration as he makes the transition to the White House," said the outgoing President, whose second four-year term ends on January 20.

True to form.

The ugly Bush stain: Hazardous waste edition

By GottaLaff

Hey kids! Time for your daily dose of sewage! Here's the latest from our Excrement in Chief:

The Environmental Protection Agency issued a new regulation yesterday exempting an estimated 118,500 tons of hazardous waste annually from strict federal incineration controls, and it separately exempted factory farms from a requirement to report hazardous air pollution to the federal government.

Gee, this isn't stressful at all. Deeeeep breath. ::cough! hack! wheeze!:: Never mind.

It allows companies that create hazardous chemical wastes in industrial processes to burn them as fuel in their own incinerators, instead of paying highly regulated incineration firms to destroy them.

Well now, that's forward-thinking. I hope Jenna and Not-Jenna's future kids appreciate the gifts from Grandpa George.

But Ben Dunham, associate legislative counsel for the nonprofit advocacy group Earthjustice, said that "everything about this rulemaking was flawed," including "the logic that says, 'If you can burn it, it's not a hazardous waste.' " He said it would allow firms with poor environmental records "to simply throw their hazardous waste in the company boiler" and burn it without strict monitoring, sometimes in populated areas.

Mmmm, there's nothing like the smell of smoldering toxic waste in the morning.

The ugly Bush stain: Endangered Species Act edition

By GottaLaff

I guess using Shout didn't work on this one yet. What passes for New Rules are nothing more than toxic tailpipe emissions billowing from multiple Bush orifices, including the hole in his tiny little head:

The Bush administration on Thursday eliminated 35-year-old regulations in the Endangered Species Act that required an independent scientific review of proposed federal projects to determine whether they imperil protected plants and animals.

Instead, federal agencies undertaking projects like road and power plant construction or oil and gas drilling will make their own assessment. Without the independent reviews, such projects could be accelerated.

As part of the changes announced by Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne in the final days of the Bush administration, the department finalized an interim rule that allows oil and gas drilling in polar bear habitat off Alaska's coast. The rule change is designed to prevent the Endangered Species Act from being used to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, essentially making climate change policy. [...]

H. Dale Hall, director of Fish and Wildlife, said he had concerns about how fast the estimated 235,000 public comments were processed. Staff assigned to the job spent eight hours a day tabulating the comments. Working under strict time restraints, agency employees had nine seconds to read each letter, according to one calculation.

Officials said that more than 200,000 of the comments opposed the rule change. [...]

President-elect Barack Obama said he would reverse the rule changes, as have some members of Congress. But that requires a lengthy rule-making process. In the House, members can invoke the rarely used Congressional Review Act to overturn the regulations.

I'm sure Also Palin is thrilled. She was never a big fan of polar bears.

Quote-O'-The-Day: Wuss edition

By GottaLaff

Via TPM:

An unnamed White House official, quoted in today's Times, describing Bush administration efforts to get home foreclosure relief:

"It's become clear that if you stick your head up, it'll get cut off. We're done in two months. The next administration can try to find a way out of that maze."

They need a nap after all that hard work and stayin' the course and waterboarding and destroying the economy and stuff. Let Obama take it from here.