Author: briggs

  • Reconstruction: Iraq vs Louisiana

    The Bush administration has doled out a lot of cash for the “reconstruction” of Iraq and we now have a report from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. The long story short is that $25 billion was appropriated by Congress to rebuild Iraq, including for 136 projects to improve water and sanitation and 425…

  • Bush & Johnson: In the Mirror of War

    Many have made comparisons between the Iraq war and the Vietnam war but I have been thinking lately about the characters and careers of the two men who waged those American–made wars: GWB and LBJ. Both were Texans, one a senator, the other governor, before entering the White House. They came from opposite sides of…

  • Karl Rove to Mitt Romney: “Al Qaeda calling. Just kidding!”

    Mitt Romney is running for president but he doesn’t want my vote. Here’s what he said to New York Times reporter Adam Nagourney recently from Iowa where he is campaignin…er visiting. “The eavesdropping is a big matter on the coasts for people who are inclined to dislike the president,” Mr. Romney said.” The Coasts, people.…

  • New York Times Hides Cheney Spy

    Hid him in plain sight, I might add, on the back page of the Saturday national edition. And here’s the bland headline to David Johnston’s inscrutable article on Paul Wolfowitz’s former minion in the Department of Defense’s “Office of Special Plans” who has just been sentenced to 12 years and seven months in prison (and…

  • Lawless presidents

    Since when do we have a system of Government where the President can simply “waive” away laws? That’s from Glenn Greenwald in a well-considered and comprehensive commentary, “An Ideology of Lawlessness” at digby’s blogspot. Take a read and educate yerself. I have to comment myself, however, on lawless precedents of American presidents since this ain’t…

  • Abramoff & DeLay: “free-market ” friends

    Just cleaning out my files….here’s an excerpt from Thomas B. Edsall’s piece in the Washington Post from 2004: In 1995, Abramoff took on another major client, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, an American protectorate in the Pacific. Again, he capitalized on his ability to exploit conservative ideology. The Marianas sought to retain exemptions…

  • Habeas Corpus Suspended in the District of Columbia

    A single paragraph in Harper’s Weekly on November 9, 1861 said this: On 23d the President instructed the Marshal for the District of Columbia not to serve writs on the Provost Marshal, but return them to the Court with the explanation that the President has, for the present, suspended the privilege of the writ of…

  • John Yoo’s Opinions: Discuss

    I have to ask how someone as obscure (until recently) as John Yoo, former law clerk to Justice Thomas, currently a law professor at UC Berkeley’s Boalt law school, is in the position of writing innovative legal rationales for the U.S. Justice department advocating denial of legal rights to U.S. prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,…

  • Jack and the Greenstalk

    It’s funny how shit keeps a bubblin’ up. The Bush administration is like a plumbing disaster these days. And all those leaky pipes are connected to each other. Which brings me to indicted former lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Back before his name was coffee break conversation, in the beginning of Senator McCain’s not-yet-newsworthy Indian Affairs Committee…

  • 16 lies

    Mary McCarthy once famously declared that every word Lillian Hellman wrote was a lie, including “and” and “the.” I don’t bring this up to get into the feud between two acclaimed writers. Rather, it came to mind when I was thinking about President Bush’s now famous “16 words” in the January 2003 State of the…

  • Woodward’s pucecake

    Or, a tale of a sneakily different color….the testimony of Bob Woodward, purveyor of deep cover journalism, in which he reveals his conversation with “Cheney’s Cheney” I. Lewis Libby on June 23, 2003 about an 18-page list of questions he wanted Cheney’s Cheney’s Cheney to answer, including one about “yellowcake.” I too, would like to…

  • Bush Team on a Busman’s Holiday*

    2002 was a busy year for the Bush Team…. January 9: Douglas Feith (OOSP) calls Lt. Gen. Jay Garner on the phone…. Feith: Garner, I got a job for you. Garner: Hello? Who is this? Feith: Directive from da Man himself Garner: The president?! Feith: Rumsfeld, you idiot. Da Man. We need you to put…

  • Yellowcake Shake and Bake

    As the NY Times finally gets its ass in gear and finds some reporters who aren’t owned by their sources to get on the Yellowcake Papers story…we continue with our little tale of aging spies, Italians in love, and the Bush administration’s Alternative Reality Operations (AROs). The Story, Part II: Recipe for a W-r (classified)…

  • Yellowcake Goes to America

    To continue the story of how an aging Italian spy called Rocco, for purposes all his own and not related to Dick Cheney’s need to find the goods on Saddam Hussein in order to justify a war on Iraq, concocted a phony “dossier,” also known as The Niger Papers (or Yellowcake as I like to…

  • Rocco and the Rome connection

    The U.S. Senate Select Intelligence Committee inquiry may be going nowhere but thankfully we have the Italian Parliament to help us in our journey to enlightenment in the Yellowcake! story. And I have Nur-al-Cubicle to thank for providing a lucid summary of La Repubblica‘s reportage on the government investigation of “The Niger Documents”. The Story,…

  • Yellowcake!: a journey back from ignorance

    Hey, the Democrats are finally getting mad about something! (Harry Reid shut down Senate business today saying, “… this administration manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to sell the war in Iraq and attempted to destroy those who dared to challenge its actions…”) I feel for them. I’m just working up a head of steam…

  • Weighing Justices

    Justice may be blind and that’s for the good but what about those scales? When it comes to weighing one side against another I’m worried about size and heft overpowering brevity and thrift. Another way of imagining this concern is to place a bible on one side of the scale and the U.S. Constitution on…

  • Harriet Miers, fashion froward?

    My first glimpse of the latest nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court on the afternoon news revealed not just your usual power-suited Washington insider. First, the suit was a serene royal blue, not screaming patriotic red. Beneath the suit jacket, nominee Miers sported a demure “high-collared” silk blouse, also in royal blue. Could this be…

  • David Brooks can go to Hell or New Orleans

    His choice–for saying “We have to think about whether we want to rebuild New Orleans” on the (Lehrer) News Hour this afternoon. Whaddya mean “we” Mr. Smarty Pundit?! Like, if a hurricane had destroyed Washington D.C. there would be a vote to decide whether or not it was wise to rebuild the nation’s capitol in…

  • Got (moooo) Smog?

    A curious editorial in the Sunday New York Times points out that California’s agricultural heartland may be at the heart of an air pollution crisis that could require regulation of cow emissions as well as car emissions. It seems that the mammoth dairy farms of the San Joaquin Valley–where about twenty percent of the nation’s…

  • Public Television vs The Klan

    Full disclosure: I have a liberal viewpoint. That means primarily that I believe in taxes, free speech, and that Abraham Lincoln was right. And sometimes I wish The North had let The South secede. Then we wouldn’t have today a national leadership lording their prejudices over us from the legacy of a constitutional compromise. That’s…