Unaware Of Their Own Irony

I'll sneak in one more drive-by post.

In the first government analysis of the Stimulus Bill, the Southern states, after throwing partisan shit-fits against it, are receiving the majority of its benefits. This is ironic, but typical, and has been the case since FDR's New Deal. They're all bluster and bombast, full of hortatory pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps sermons in the front of the building, then they're constant crybabies in the alley out back. Maybe we should look at it as war reparations.

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Chuck Grassley's Debt and Deficit Dragon
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The Grassley Knoll

For a man who sweetens his corn flakes with lead shavings, Iowa's Senator Chuck Grassley has sure overachieved.

Long serving as a general benchmark for lowered public discourse, a recent Senate presentation outlining his position against health care reform is a modern classic, and a strong hint at his Party's future messaging style. There's no describing it, really, but the clip above is narrated by The Most Trusted Man in America (an incredulous Jon Stewart) and must be seen to be believed. You are going to laugh...and then you'll wonder, "Couldn't they at least have spelled 'Sur Taxalot' correctly?" I mean, Grassley's top donors are all health care companies, so you'd think they'd demand better.

(h/t to Lord Wife and Daunting Ideas)

Dog The Bounty Hunter's European Vacation

via The Sunday Times UK:

AMERICA has told Britain that it can “kidnap” British citizens if they are wanted for crimes in the United States.

A senior lawyer for the American government has told the Court of Appeal in London that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the US Supreme Court has sanctioned it.

The admission will alarm the British business community after the case of the so-called NatWest Three, bankers who were extradited to America on fraud charges. More than a dozen other British executives, including senior managers at British Airways and BAE Systems, are under investigation by the US authorities and could face criminal charges in America.

Until now it was commonly assumed that US law permitted kidnapping only in the “extraordinary rendition” of terrorist suspects.

The American government has for the first time made it clear in a British court that the law applies to anyone, British or otherwise, suspected of a crime by Washington.

Legal experts confirmed this weekend that America viewed extradition as just one way of getting foreign suspects back to face trial. Rendition, or kidnapping, dates back to 19th-century bounty hunting and Washington believes it is still legitimate.

Read More...

The Lame Report

Here's a nice snippet to make sense of the motive and means behind the US Attorney Firings Scandal:

Congress continued its inquiry into the role of the Bush
Administration in last year's firing of eight U.S
attorneys. D. Kyle Sampson, the chief of staff for
U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, resigned after
claiming, in an apparent attempt to save Gonzalez from the
charge of lying to Congress, that he did not tell his
superiors at the Justice Department that the White House
wanted to fire the prosecutors. The Justice Department
released a March 2005 email from Sampson to then-White
House counsel Harriet Miers, in which he ranked all 93
U.S. attorneys on their loyalty to the Administration and
made a "target list." In other emails, he cited a
little-known provision of the Patriot Act that authorizes
the Attorney General to replace U.S. attorneys without
Senate confirmation, and consulted with Miers about the
possibility of replacing between 15 and 20 percent of
U.S. attorneys, "the underperforming ones," and leaving
the "loyal Bushies."

(Excerpted from Harper's Weekly Review)

The White House is offering Congress interviews with Harriet Miers and Karl Rove, accompanied by two deputy White House counsels. No testimony, no transcripts, no transparency. Lame!

Bring Me The Head Of Alberto Gonzales

Digby predicted months ago that the attorney firings were going to be huge. In addition to being a lot smarter than I am, Digby apparently has nothing else to do but sit around his apartment and blog, so of course I took his words as nothing short of oracular, and lo, they are now coming to pass.

Congress is all about procedure, so to a regular schmo in the lumpeninvestoriat like myself, focusing on the attorney firings is like going up to a naked employee who is in the act of vigorously committing incest on his office desk on Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, tapping him on the shoulder, and saying, "Excuse me. We have to talk. Your attire is only permitted on Casual Friday." My approach would be to first drop a copy machine on his head, and begin to sort out an obvious debacle from there.

The US Congress seems remarkably incapable of talking about big issues, strongly preferring to attack them elliptically, probably so We The People don't set up a guillotine. As I understand it, here is the attorney hubbub in a nutshell: Bush can fire whatever attorneys he wants, but is supposed to inform Congress about it first. The fact that they got fired for threatening to investigate corrupt Republicans, or for failing to prosecute innocent Democrats is, congressionally speaking, a secondary issue. What bugs Congress most is that they were kept out of the loop. And for that, there will be hell to pay.

Or, more precisely, there will be Congress-persons to pay. The back-room is where I'm fairly comfortable, given that it's where I dwell in my line of work. The Dims loooove the attorney firings because it gives them leverage. They know they can get a lot promised in return for "not going there," i.e., not exposing just how dirty the inner workings of the White House have been under Rove, and take the resignation of Abu Gonzales as a public victory in the bargain. But if I were a Senator, I'd have to be pretty dumb not to realize by now that the Bush Administration never, ever negotiates in good faith. They're incapable of following through on a promise they don't like, and they never pay up in good money.

So in this case, I'd sit in that back room, shake hands with a big smile and say, "We have a deal. You give me my propers and the head of Alberto Gonzalez, and we'll stop digging into your ribs on this one." Then I'd let Gonzales resign. And then I'd go right ahead and subpoena Bush's inner circle, starting off with Rove and Miers. Then, amongst other things, I would make sure not to fly on any private planes for awhile.

(As for the graphic and title above, they refer to the Sam Peckinpah movie, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. If any of you were wondering what it would be like to live in a Sam Peckinpah movie, we've been doing it for a few years now.)

Scotland Yard: Princess Diana's Phone Bugged By US "Secret Service"

Article: The American secret service was bugging Princess Diana's telephone conversations without the approval of the British security services on the night she died, according to the most comprehensive report on her death, to be published this week.

Among extraordinary details due to emerge in the report by former Metropolitan police commissioner Lord Stevens is the revelation that the US security service was bugging her calls in the hours before she was killed in a car crash in Paris.

So...the British Royal family has concluded its investigation of its complete absence of any role in her death. (See the "Lord" in front of the report manager's last name? It's either a very ambitious first name, or a title granted by the Queen.) As is well and proper.

Only a couple of minor points remain unexplained: why Dodi Fayed's chauffeur was working for French intelligence, and why Diana's phone was bugged by an unspecified US intelligence agency. The writers don't care to speculate, and neither does Lord Stevens, having received assurances that nothing was awry. Gosh, I wonder why conspiracy theories linger over Diana's death?

Update: The National Security Agency is preparing a statement that it did not bug Diana's phone:

(CBS/AP) The National Security Agency is working on a statement that will deny eavesdropping on Princess Diana, a U.S. intelligence official tells CBS News national security correspondent David Martin.

Hogwash. The NSA has its largest world monitoring station in Northern England, and at the very least they would've monitored her cell phone conversations for gossip value alone.