Citizens of Guam (Guamians?) vote in their primary today with 4 delegates at stake. The latest I'm hearing is that Obama is up with about 53% of the vote with some of the larger areas still to report.
President Bush, buoyed by a batch of economic news that wasn't as bad as expected, predicted Friday that consumers are on their way to better days. "I know it's tough times, and I know you're having to pay more at the fuel pump than you want," Bush said. "But this economy is going to come on. I'm confident it will."
Yeah, that's the ticket! I snagged this from Raw Story.
We have some pretty strong thunderstorms ripping through the area this morning. I had planned on cutting grass today, but that will be out of the question since my yard is primarily clay and will now need several days to dry out. I will spend some amount of time doing some updating over at the right. I have already put up my Obama endorsement and next will be a check of the links to be sure all are active. My energy level has been low lately and I have not maintained the site as I should have.
Everyone have a great weekend!
Sanchez has a new book out and some excerpts have been published in Time as well as several web sites. Here's a snippet:
His sharp tongued conclusion: "Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars were unnecessarily spent, and worse yet, too many of our most precious military resource, our American soldiers, were unnecessarily wounded, maimed, and killed as a result. In my mind, this action by the Bush administration amounts to gross incompetence and dereliction of duty."
Go read the entire article, or, better yet, buy the book which would be worth the price just to see the extent Donald Rumsfeld goes to to cover his ass.
So what was Rumsfeld doing? Nineteen months earlier, in September 2004, when it was clearly established in the Fay-Jones report that CJTF-7 was never adequately manned, he called me in from Europe and claimed ignorance, "I didn't know about it," he said. "How could this happen? Why didn't you tell somebody about it?"Now, he had done exactly the same thing, only this time he had prepared a written memorandum documenting his denials. So it was clearly a pattern on the Secretary's part, and now I recognized it. Bring in the top-level leaders. Profess total ignorance. Ask why he had not been informed. Try to establish that others were screwing things up. Have witnesses in the room to verify his denials. Put it in writing. In essence, Rumsfeld was covering his rear. He was setting up his chain of denials should his actions ever be questioned. And worse yet, in my mind, he was attempting to level all the blame on his generals.
emphasis added is mine! I look forward to the war criminal tribunals for all of these bastards!
Talking to the dumbest old fart to continue to suck the life out of CNN:
Moore: "Personally, and I have nothing to back this up, I don't think bin Laden is hiding in some cave in Pakistan or Afghanistan. This guy's a multi-millionaire..."Dumb Old Fart: "Where is he?"
Moore: "I don't know where he is, but..."
Dumb Old Fart: "If he's not hiding in a cave, where is he?"
Moore: "You ever known a multi-millionaire to hide in a cave? Would you live in a cave for six years, Larry?"
Dumb Old Fart exhibiting a flash of brilliance: "No. I'd go to Vegas."
The jokes write themselves!
Curious that this is happening so late in the lame duck administration.
"Dear Friends and Colleagues at GSA,Early this evening I was asked to submit my resignation, and I have just done so. It has been a great privilege to serve with all of you and to serve our nation and a great President.
The past twenty-two months have been filled with accomplishments: together, we have regained our clean audit opinion, restored fiscal discipline, re-tooled our ability to respond to emergencies, rekindled entrepreneurial energies, reduced bureaucratic barriers to small companies to get a GSA Schedule, ignited a building boom at our nation’s ports of entries, boldly led the nation in an aggressive telework initiative, and improved employee morale so that we were selected as one of the best places to work in the Federal government.
These accomplishments are made even more enjoyable by the fact that there were lots of people who told us they could never be done.
Best of luck to all of you, it has been a true honor."
There must be some backstory here!
And he has certainly excited Lou Dobbs, Larry King, and Anderson Cooper! I was hoping that somewhere nearby was a good supply of blood pressure medicine!
In the past few days Jeremiah Wright has appeared with Bill Moyers, spoken at a NAACP gathering, and, yesterday, addressed his comments to the National Press Club. I thought that the Rev. Wright's comments were interesting, forceful, and went a long way toward explaining not only his approach to his ministry, but also the African-American approach to religion. I still was only offered sound bites of his comments, but Rev. Wright left me wishing that I could have visited his church before his retirement.
So, does this really hurt Obama? From my personal perspective the answer is no, but clearly this does not help with Indiana and North Carolina coming up. I have confidence that Obama will be able to weather this latest although clearly the talking heads of TeeVee land have now set the agenda, at least for the short-term.
As an aside, it's about 50 years too late for putting Larry King out to pasture! He's just too painful to try to listen to.
As I recall, Textism was the very first blog I ever visited lo those many, so it seems, years ago. Dean took something of a hiatus, but I ran across a link to Textism on Oliver Willis' site and revisited. What is missing is The Daily Oliver. Dean owns a Weimaraner named Oliver and posted a new photo daily. I always looked forward to the photos of Oliver romping in the French countryside!
As reported by Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek :
Amid the din of the dueling democrats, people seem to have forgotten about that other guy in the presidential race—you know, John McCain. McCain is said to be benefiting from this politically because his rivals are tearing each other apart. In fact, few people are paying much attention to what the Republican nominee is saying, or subjecting it to any serious scrutiny.On March 26, McCain gave a speech on foreign policy in Los Angeles that was billed as his most comprehensive statement on the subject. It contained within it the most radical idea put forward by a major candidate for the presidency in 25 years. Yet almost no one noticed.
In his speech McCain proposed that the United States expel Russia from the G8, the group of advanced industrial countries. Moscow was included in this body in the 1990s to recognize and reward it for peacefully ending the cold war on Western terms, dismantling the Soviet empire and withdrawing from large chunks of the old Russian Empire as well. McCain also proposed that the United States should expand the G8 by taking in India and Brazil—but pointedly excluded China from the councils of power.
We have spent months debating Barack Obama's suggestion that he might, under some circumstances, meet with Iranians and Venezuelans. It is a sign of what is wrong with the foreign-policy debate that this idea is treated as a revolution in U.S. policy while McCain's proposal has barely registered. What McCain has announced is momentous—that the United States should adopt a policy of active exclusion and hostility toward two major global powers. It would reverse a decades-old bipartisan American policy of integrating these two countries into the global order, a policy that began under Richard Nixon (with Beijing) and continued under Ronald Reagan (with Moscow). It is a policy that would alienate many countries in Europe and Asia who would see it as an attempt by Washington to begin a new cold war.
[added emphasis is mine]
I wonder just what other delusional proposals McSame has up his sleeve. I sincerely wish that the Obama and Clinton campaign organizations would focus more on McCain's plans for failure rather than attacking each other's proposals!
h/t to Laura Rozen for providing this link.
I watched the Lesley Stahl piece with Scalia this evening and was more than mildly taken aback by the humor of the supreme court justice given the damage he has abetted in inflicting to the United States of America! I'm going to have to find a transcript because my initial impression was that his views are inconsistent in their presentation.
I also didn't know that Scalia is eligible for a retirement plan which would pay him 100% of his current salary, which is not inconsiderable. I would have been fishing on my boat, if I now owned one, the day after I was eligible!