So true, so true--a little more humor

Well...ain't this the truth?

Hey! A little bit of humor...

Rob, I can still laugh at my angst (and the President's perceived lack of intellect). I know you don't think I am capable of finding humor in anything (and I don't blame you, I suppose). But...HA HA!

I hate to do it again...another Bush joke/quote (you decide which)

"I felt it was my obligation to intervene on her behalf, because just as a member of the religious right, I can fully identify with the brain dead."

-President George W. Bush, on his involvement in the Terri Schiavo case.


Were truer words ever spoken?

George W. Bush meets with the Queen of England (it's a joke, but you can never be too sure).

George W. Bush meets with the Queen of England.

He asks her, "Your Majesty, how do you run such an efficient government? Are there any tips you can give to me?"

"Well," says the Queen, "the most important thing is to surround yourself with intelligent people."

Bush frowns. "But how do I know the people around me are really intelligent?"

The Queen takes a sip of tea. "Oh, that's easy. You just ask them to answer an intelligence riddle."

The Queen pushes a button on her intercom. "Please send Tony Blair in here, would you?"

Tony Blair walks ! into the room. "Yes, my Queen?"

The Queen smiles. "Answer me this, please, Tony. Your mother and father have a child. It is not your brother and it is not your sister. Who is it?"

Without pausing for a moment, Tony Blair answers, "That would be me."

"Yes! Very good," says the Queen.

Back at the White House, Bush asks to speak with vice president Dick Cheney.

"Dick, answer this for me. Your mother and your father have a child. It's not your brother and it's not your sister. Who is it?"

"I'm not sure," says the vice president. "Let me get back to you on that one."

Dick Cheney goes to his advisors and asks every one, but none can give him an answer. Finally, he ends up in the men's room and recognizes Colin Powell's shoes in the next stall.

Dick shouts, "Colin! Can you answer this for me? Your mother and father have a child and it's not your brother or your sister. Who is it?"

Colin Powell yells back, "That's easy. It's me!"

Dick Cheney smiles. "Thanks!"

Cheney goes back to the Oval Office and to speak with Bush. "Say, I did some research and I have the answer to that riddle. It's Colin Powell."

Bush gets up, stomps over to Dick Cheney, and angrily yells into his face, "No, you idiot! It's Tony Blair!"


With this administration, one can never be TOO sure of whether this is a joke or surreal event.

Iraqi Civil War

Patrick Cockburn on Iraqi split

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n07/cock01_.html

It is strange to hear George Bush and John Reid deny that a civil war is going on, given that so many bodies - all strangled, shot or hanged solely because of their religious allegiance - are being discovered every day. Car bombs exploded in the markets in the great Shia slum of Sadr City in early March. Several days later a group of children playing football in a field noticed a powerful stench. Police opened up a pit which contained the bodies of 27 men, probably all Sunni, stripped to their underpants; they had all been tortured and then shot in the head. Two and a half years ago, when the first suicide bomb targeting the Shias killed 85 people outside the shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf, there was no Shia retaliation. They were held back by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and the hope of gaining power through legal elections. Since the Samarra bomb this restraint has definitively ended: the Shia militias and death squads slaughter Sunnis in tit-for-tat killings every time a Shia is killed....

The moment when Iraq could be held together as a truly unified state has probably passed. But a weak Iraq suits many inside and outside the country and it will
still remain a name on the map. American power is steadily ebbing and the British forces are largely confined to their camps around Basra. A 'national unity government' may be established but it will not be national, will certainly be disunited and may govern very little. 'The government could end up being a few buildings in the Green Zone,' one minister said. The army and police are already split along sectarian and ethnic lines. The Iranians have been the main winners in the struggle for the country. The US has turned out to be militarily and politically weaker than anybody expected. The real question now is whether Iraq will break up with or without an all-out civil war.

Most probably war is coming, but it will not be fought in all parts of Iraq. It will essentially be a battle for Baghdad between Sunni and Shia Arabs. 'The army will disintegrate in the first moments of the fighting,' a Kurdish leader told me. 'The soldiers obey whatever orders they receive from their own communities.' The parts of the country with a homogeneous population, whether Shia, Sunni or Kurdish, may well stay quiet. But in greater Baghdad, sectarian cleansing is already taking place. The place bears an ever closer resemblance to Beirut thirty years ago. The Shia Arabs have the advantage because they are the majority in the capital, but the Sunni should be able to cling on to their strongholds in the west and south of the city. The new balance of power in Iraq may be decided not by negotiations, but by militiamen fighting street by street.

John Dean to Senate: Censure Is Necessary

John Dean to Senate: Censure Is Necessary

Posted by John Nichols to Portside, 03/31/2006 @ 2:27pm

"[The] president needs to be reminded that separation of
powers does not mean an isolation of powers," former
White House counsel John Dean told the Senate Judiciary
Committee Friday. "He needs to be told he cannot simply
ignore a law with no consequences."

Arguing in favor of U.S. Senator Russ Feingold's motion
to censure President Bush for illegally authorizing the
warrantless wiretapping of the phone conversations of
Americans, the man who broke with former President
Richard Nixon to challenge the abuses of the Watergate
era told the committee that Bush's wrongs were in many
senses worse than those of Nixon.

"I recall a morning -- and it was just about this time
in the morning and it was exactly this time of the year
-- March 21, 1973 -- that I tried to warn a president of
the consequences of staying his course. I failed to
convince President Nixon that morning, and the rest, as
they say, is history," Dean, who famously told Nixon
that there was "a cancer growing" on his presidency,
explained in testimony submitted to the committee. "I
certainly do not claim to be prescient. Then or now. But
actions have consequences, and to ignore them is merely
denial. Today, it is very obvious that history is
repeating itself. It is for that reason I have crossed
the country to visit with you, and that I hope that the
collective wisdom of this committee will prevail, and
you will not place the president above the law by
inaction. As I was gathering my thoughts yesterday to
respond to the hasty invitation, it occurred to me that
had the Senate or House, or both, censured or somehow
warned Richard Nixon, the tragedy of Watergate might
have been prevented. Hopefully the Senate will not sit
by while even more serious abuses unfold before it."

Republicans on the committee attempted to dismiss
Feingold's motion as a partisan gesture, rather than a
necessary reassertion of the system of checks and
balances that has so decayed since Congress ceded its
oversight role in the aftermath of the September 11,
2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon. Utah Senator Orrin Hatch was particularly
aggressive in echoing Republican National Committee
talking points, denouncing Feingold's motion as nothing
more than an attempt to "score political points."

But Dean rejected that claim, as did Bruce Fein, a
lawyer who served in Ronald Reagan's Justice Department
and who joined Dean in testifying in favor of the
censure motion.

"To me, this is not really and should not be a partisan
question," said Dean, who served as chief counsel for
the Republican minority on the House Judiciary Committee
before joining the Nixon White House. "I think it's a
question of institutional pride of this body, of the
Congress of the United States."

Feingold went even further, suggesting that Congress has
a duty to hold president's to account for authorizing a
secretive domestic spying program that operates without
legal authorization, in clear violation the 1978 Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act.

"If we in the Congress don't stand up for ourselves and
the American people, we become complicit in the
lawbreaking," Feingold said. "The resolution of censure
is the appropriate response."

Predictably, Hatch and several of the more aggressive
defenders of the Bush administration on the committee
fell back on the "talking points" argument that it would
be inappropriate to censure Bush while the country is at
war in Iraq. "Wartime is not a time to weaken the
commander-in-chief," growled the Utah Republican.

But Feingold rejected the suggestion that Congress
should surrender its oversight responsibilities in
wartime.

"Under this theory, we no longer have a constitutional
system consisting of three co-equal branches of
government, we have a monarchy," explained the senator,
who added that, "We can fight terrorism without breaking
the law. The rule of law is central to who we are as a
people, and the President must return to the law. He
must acknowledge and be held accountable for his illegal
actions and for misleading the American people, both
before and after the program was revealed."

If an impeachment falls in the forest and no one covers it...

National Impeachment Movement Ignored by Corporate Media
by Peter Phillips Published on Monday, March 27, 2006 by CommonDreams.org http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0327-29.htm