Help Wanted

This country doesn’t need more socialism. It needs administrators and public servants willing to enforce the laws already promulgated throughout the glorious history of mankind’s most shining example of self-governance.

Enron may or may not have been a preventable debacle, but surely BushCo’s evisceration of the government’s investigative and enforcement functions (at least with respect to corporate America — there’s been no abatement in the trend to build more prisons and incarcerate more criminals under Republican hegemony), together with out-and-out appropriation of the same duplicitous, fantastical accounting and organizational chicanery that ultimately felled Enron (the Free Market is the best! ), surely the present administration has the most overtly pro-business and anti-popular policies of any since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

The House of Representatives is far less interested in the needs of the people, or in keeping cheap labor out of America, than it is in punishing those who actually provide, at the most visceral level, the opportunity for which the whole world yearns to come here.

Now That You Mention It

An Associated Press headline today says, "Clinton Speculates On Wife In White House."

Seems kinda icky, somehow, when it's put that way. Doesn't it?

Goat It Is

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald -- the man who has kept the blogosphere, if not quite the entire nation, on the edge of its seats for much of the past two-plus years in his ongoing work as the investigator into possible crimes attending the public outing of former undercover CIA agent Valery Plame -- will not, after all, be pursuing a criminal indictment against White House svengali Karl Rove.

According to a statement released this morning by Mr. Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, Mr. Fitzgerald "has formally advised us that he does not anticipate seeking charges" against Mr. Rove.

Among the many things this morning's announcement does and does not do, perhaps the one most likely to reverberate throughout the blogosphere will be the complete deflation of the credibility of truthout.org reporter Jason Leopold.Read more »

Born Free

How about the story of 16 year-old Katherine Lester -- straight A scholar and student council member -- who met a 27 year-old Jordanian guy on MySpace, tricked her parents into getting her a passport, and managed to buy a ticket and get herself on a plane to the Middle East to meet the dude?

Though her quest for romance was ultimately denied by heartless agents of the U.S. and Jordanian diplomatic and security forces, Ms. Lester emdodies the freedom George W Bush and the U.S. Military say they want to bestow upon the Middle East, yet it's a sense of freedom the Middle East will find hard to come by, and which Mr. Bush and his allies fear more than anything in this world.

A Tale of Two Men

American Shock and Awe came to a remote hideaway north of Baghdad Wednesday, when two 500lb bombs delivered by American F-16 fighter jets killed notorious terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and five others gathered with him at a safehouse in the isolated town of Hibhib.

The Jordanian ultra-Islamist was widely viewed as the brains behind the foreign insurgency in Iraq and his death was welcomed both by U.S. forces desperate for a tangible victory in the increasingly brutal war there, and by Iraqi Shiites, who have been the main targets of terrorist violence coordinated by Mr. al-Zarqawi.

U.S. President George W. Bush announced the news with understated wariness this morning, saying, "Zarqawi is dead...We can expect the terrorists and insurgents to carry on without him."

Indeed, on Thursday more than 40 people died in Baghdad bombings alone.Read more »

Modern History 101

Invest 45 minutes of your valuable time and understand everything you need to know about why we are in Iraq, and why we're going into Iran.

The laughter is just a happy bonus.

Robert Newman's History of Oil

Thanks, Butler!

Divided We Fall, Part 2

The U.S. Senate will begin debate next week on a constitutional amendment being pushed by President George W. Bush and the White House to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman. The proposed amendment also prohibits judges from ruling that either the Constitution or any state may give same-sex couples the right to marry or the same legal rights as married couples.

One would think people have more pressing concerns.

Nevertheless, the President used his weekly radio address today to flog the idea that the institution of marriage needs protection from "activist judges and some local officials [who] have made an aggressive attempt to redefine marriage in recent years." He'll be addressing the issue again on Monday in a nationally broadcast speech.Read more »

Testing For Prime Tme Readiness

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