U.S. escalating covert operations against Iran - Reuters (6/29/08):
U.S. congressional leaders agreed late last year to President George W. Bush’s funding request for a major escalation of covert operations against Iran aimed at destabilizing its leadership, according to a report in The New Yorker magazine published online on Sunday.
The article by reporter Seymour Hersh, from […]
Maybe part of the fascination people have with politics — apart from the fact that it impinges on our life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — is that so much of it makes so little sense?
Yes, I know I said that just yesterday, but I can’t help it if it seems to be equally […]
If Muqtada al-Sadr is to be believed, Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki just lost a little more political face, making his so-called government even more of a joke than it already was:
Iraq’s top Shiite religious leaders have told anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr not to disband his Mehdi Army, an al-Sadr spokesman said Monday amid fresh […]
Or handling him. Whatever he’s got, it’s contagious.
First, we had McCain repeatedly making the confused statement that Shi’ite Iran was in cahoots with Sunni al Qaeda in Iraq. Last time around, his devoted handler Joe Lieberman was whispering into his ear, to set him straight. But now Lieberman himself has succumbed to […]
On Wednesday, I wrote (in the context of the Senate vote to declare waterboardling firmly illegal beyond possibility of equivocation):
Members of the Senate have one more opportunity today to show us what they’re really made of, to show us how firmly and deeply they are in Bush’s camp (and his back pocket) when it comes […]
You might guess that only a Republican could wax nostalgic about rape. But this is Tennessee Democratic Sen. Doug Henry, speaking on the record (on the floor of the state Senate):
Rape, ladies and gentlemen, is not today what rape was. Rape, when I was learning these things, was the violation of a chaste woman, […]
Yesterday, the Senate — by a vote of 67 to 31 — proudly went on record as supporting retroactive immunity for the telecoms which knowingly agreed to break the law governing wiretapping their customers just because the Bush regime said pretty please when they asked them to break the law.
As I wrote on […]
I think we are about to find out. And I very much fear that (once again) we are not going to like what we learn.
Bush is in the middle of pulling another of his patented if-you-don’t-do-exactly-as-I-dictate-I’ll-tar-you-as-soft- on-terrorism stunts. In the past, the Democratic leadership (if that isn’t an oxymoron by now) has always […]
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The Senate, in its profound deliberative wisdom, has seen fit to kill the Judiciary Committee’s version of the surveillance bill (by a 60-36 vote; obviously, many Democrats voted “Kill! Kill! Kill!). That is to say, the Senate has put to sleep the version of the bill that would have withheld retroactive immunity for […]
Last year when Joe Lieberman won his sour grapes general election rematch against Ned Lamont, there was a rush by his fellow Senators to toss his salad in the hopes that the newly (I)ndependent Lieberman would continue to caucus with the Democrats. And even the partisan fire-breathers, here and elsewhere, largely went along with […]
