the friday news dump

Posted by dada | Sep 28, 2007 | 20 |

AKA: cleaning the septic tank:

ITMF’sA

The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it’s good-bye to the Bill of Rights. h.l.mencken

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dada

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dada on September 28, 2007 at 2:44 pm

more chickenhawks,chickenshits, cowardly candidates and a craven congress…

same old shit, different day:

Congress Quietly Approves Billions More for Iraq War

The Senate agreed on Thursday to increase the federal debt limit by $850 billion — from $8.965 trillion to $9.815 trillion — and then proceeded to approve a stop-gap spending bill that gives the Bush White House at least $9 billion in new funding for its war in Iraq.

Additionally, the administration has been given emergency authority to tap further into a $70 billion “bridge fund” to provide new infusions of money for the occupation while the Congress works on appropriations bills for the Department of Defense and other agencies.

Translation: Under the guise of a stop-gap spending bill that is simply supposed to keep the government running until a long-delayed appropriations process is completed — probably in November — the Congress has just approved a massive increase in war funding.

The move was backed by every senator who cast a vote, save one.

Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, the maverick Democrat who has led the fight to end the war and bring U.S. troops home from Iraq, was on the losing end of the 94-1 vote. (The five senators who did not vote, all presidential candidates who are more involved in campaigning than governing, were Democrats Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden and Republicans John McCain and Sam Brownback.)

via the nation

lTMF’sA

Gore/Feingold, anyone?
- idredit on September 28, 2007 at 4:22 pm
  
  yeoman’s work Dada. We get the government we deserve.
  
  FDL also notes HRC’s vote on Iran.
  
  fool me once fool me twice. can’t blame Bush now can we
  
  “When challenged about her Iraq authorization vote, Senator Clinton has repeatedly tried to pin the blame on George Bush — that she had a right to expect him to be honest, to use good judgment, and to exercise good faith in completing the WMD inspections and acting on the facts. In short, Hillary’s defense has been “I trusted Bush to make the right decision, but against my advice, and to my surprise, he deceived all of us and made the wrong decision.” And she has added, “if I had known then . . .” and (paraphrasing) “I would not have made the same judgment as Bush.” Not very satisfying, but she’s stuck to it.
  
  But what about the next war? Senator Edwards framed the most obvious question: Now that we know Bush and Cheney cannot be trusted to tell the truth, or to give peaceful alternatives a chance, or to act with wisdom and due regard for consequences, why would anyone in their right minds approve a resolution that would give Bush and Cheney the idea Congress had enabled them to make any decision regarding possible war with Iran?
  
  Wednesday’s vote on the Lieberman – Kyl resolution, condemning Iran and allowing the designation of its Revolutionary Guards as a “terrorist” entity, was a litmus test for candidates seeking the Presidency. The vote separated the wise from the foolish, and Senator Clinton voted — again — for foolish.
  
  follow the money…nice buy, AIPAC.
  - dada on September 28, 2007 at 4:47 pm
    
    thanks
    
    lTMF’sA
  - KNUCKLEHEAD on September 29, 2007 at 12:54 am
    
    “…nice buy, AIPAC”
    ouch, & touche (accent grave)
- Real History Lisa on September 28, 2007 at 5:44 pm
  
  Feingold’s the only guy who could have gotten me excited about this year’s presidential campaign. I don’t feel inspired to work for any of the others this time around.
dada on September 28, 2007 at 2:46 pm

california dreamin’

ratpublican pipe dreams of revising the way california’s electoral votes are allocated have gone up in smoke:

GOP electoral initiative dealt major blows

A proposed California initiative campaign that could have helped Republicans hold on to the White House in 2008 was a shambles Thursday night, as two of its key consultants quit.

[…]

“Shambles’ is the wrong word,” said strategist Marty Wilson, who curtailed his fundraising efforts weeks ago. “The campaign never got off the ground.”

[…]

California Democratic Party Chairman Art Torres… “We want to make sure this is not the Freddy Krueger of initiatives that comes back to life,” Lehane said. “We’ll continue to monitor it. We thought it was a debacle from the beginning and seems it suffered from its own internal dysfunction.”

via LAT

chalk one up for the good guys.

lTMF’sA
- stormkite on September 29, 2007 at 10:50 am
  
  No biggie; they’ll fix it in the software.
dada on September 28, 2007 at 2:51 pm

speaking of war funding, how’s that war on

crime

drugs working out?

funny you should ask….seems as though marijuana arrests have increased by 188% in the past 15 years: A pot-smoker is arrested every 38 seconds in America. [NORML]

Police arrested a record 829,625 persons for marijuana violations in 2006, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s annual Uniform Crime Report, released today. This is the largest total number of annual arrests for pot ever recorded by the FBI. Marijuana arrests now comprise nearly 44 percent of all drug arrests in the United States.

“These numbers belie the myth that police do not target and arrest minor marijuana offenders,” said NORML Executive Director Allen St. Pierre, who noted that at current rates, a marijuana smoker is arrested every 38 seconds in America. “This effort is a tremendous waste of criminal justice resources that diverts law enforcement personnel away from focusing on serious and violent crime, including the war on terrorism.“

[…]

The total number of marijuana arrests in the U.S. for 2006 far exceeded the total number of arrests in the U.S. for all violent crimes combined, including murder, manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault.

h/t jeralyn at Talk Left

smoke ’em if you got ’em….

lTMF’sA
- CabinGirl on September 28, 2007 at 4:32 pm
  
  Is that a real billboard? I love it.
  - dada on September 28, 2007 at 6:02 pm
    
    PS is suspected.
    
    these, on the other hand, are real:
    
    even hell has it’s standards
    
    too good for some evil bastards
    
    these guys advertising pushes the envelope: godwin’s pizza
    
    there’d be congressional resolutions condemning them here…amerika, land of the free
    
    lTMF’sA
    - stormkite on September 29, 2007 at 11:00 am
      
      When you link to flickr, remember that large portions of your audience (I’ll resist the urge to say “the thinking portion of your audience” ;-> ) can’t see anything.
      - dada on September 29, 2007 at 1:16 pm
        
        honestly? first time l’ve heard that. specifics?
        
        l’ve never had problems, tho l do have an acct.
        
        my apologies if it’s a problem for anyone.
        
        lTMF’sA
- chocolate ink on September 28, 2007 at 4:52 pm
  
  This is such a gd waste of taxpayer money and resources..it makes me just want to start screaming. I can’t remember the drug czar’s name but from my reading of him he’s another bush appointee who is a religious nut(surprise surprise eh)and still believes in reefer madness..no kidding.
  
  This asshole has been spending time in Ca. helping to shut down our medical marijuana places and harassing people who run them.
  
  Marijuana growers here in Ca. have banded together to say if pot was legalized they’d be perfectly happy to pay taxes which would bring in a billion in revenue for the state…there’s even a petition to sign but I imagine that is too logical and sane for most people to agree with. Too many still believe pot smoking leads to ‘hard’ drugs and then all kinds of terrible mayhem you know.
- KNUCKLEHEAD on September 29, 2007 at 1:09 am
  
  IIRC, 85% of those arrests were for possesion. So yet again, the little people pay to get the drug war Lords a nice spot at the cash trough. More prisons= cash, more Blackwater = cash. Ya wonder why there`s no photos or public viewing of the flag draped drug shipments from the opium fields. They`ll need to step up the body count to make up for the bulkier shipments of pot that the Afghanis are now growing. How much was the appropriation for corporate private contractors policing of worldwide drug users. (15 billion, as per ‘Naomi Wolfe?’)?= long green cash
dada on September 28, 2007 at 2:54 pm

speaking of the GWoT, how’s that working out…in, oh, lets say…Afghanistan? well aside that they had a record opium crop last year, producing approximately 93% of the world’s supply, they’re expanding their inventory:

Afghan farmers find alternative to opium: marijuana

BALKH, Afghanistan (Reuters) – As Afghanistan struggles to cut its raging opium production, aid workers try to find alternative crops, but for some former poppy farmers the choice was easy — they planted marijuana instead.

[…]

The farmers are still cautious. “They are not my fields,” said Shamseddin, surrounded by head-high cannabis plants in full flower. “I don’t know who they belong to,” he said, dropping a sickle to the ground and nudging it away with his foot.

[…]

Marijuana, while not as profitable as opium, still makes more money than other legal crops.

via Reuters

who said the cia wasn’t market savvy…

lTMF’sA
- KNUCKLEHEAD on September 29, 2007 at 1:10 am
  
  ‘CIA MARKET SAVVY” See above. hah
dada on September 28, 2007 at 3:13 pm

toothless is DC

whata bunch a moroons…

It only took, oh, seven years and up to $6 billion in potentially-criminal contracting fraud, but Congress is finally set to create an independent, bipartisan commission to investigate contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Last night, the Senate unanimously approved an amendment to the defense authorization bill…The commission will also look at how the federal government contracts for “security and intelligence functions” in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The commission will deliver a report after the 2008 election — on January 15, 2009 *– containing “specific recommendations” for improvements to the contracting process. It will seek to determine which functions contracted out are “inherently governmental” — a key concern for critics of outsourced security and intelligence priorities. While the primary product from the commission will be its report, it has the authority to refer potential criminal charges resulting from its inquiry to the Attorney General for prosecution.

However, *the commission no longer has subpoena power

, which was provided in an earlier version of the amendment, and which had drawn concern from Sen. John Warner (R-VA). In the final version, if the commission has difficulty acquiring information from any federal agency, it’s to report that difficulty to Congress, and rely on Congressional subpoena power to resolve any deadlock.

[…]

via tpm

yeah…that’ll work…tickets for the brooklyn bridge lottery are available in the loggia, adjacent to chambers.

lTMF’sA
idredit on September 28, 2007 at 4:32 pm

in the can’t make it up department

heard on local radio

Police in the north east, Vermont, New Hampshire border communities are on the chase of several TD North bank robberies.

The robbers’ get-away transport was

A bike.
idredit on September 28, 2007 at 4:38 pm

(H/T: Andrew Sullivan)

The Rush Limbaugh Show

Coming Monday (October 1st): A Ninety-Minute
Conversation with Justice Clarence Thomas
- chocolate ink on September 28, 2007 at 5:00 pm
  
  OOH, I’m waiting for that with bated breathe to find out what 20 some years of stored up wisdom is about to be unleashed on us. Didn’t Thomas marry Limbaugh to one of his wives?

the friday news dump

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dada

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