Mugsy`s Rap Sheet: Conservative AHIP says Republican health care solution will do nothing to lower costs

Rick Ungar: Senator Evan Bayh - a wolf in sheep's clothing

The Mahablog: Help! They're Stealing My Home!

They gave us a republic: A GOP stall on all Health and Human Services nominees has left the department without a surgeon general during a period of a global flu pandemic, prompting the HHS secretary to call for Senate action.

Consortiumblog: How a torture protest killed a career

HOLY CRAP: Even Jesus' assassins need to eat...Crumb’s Genesis...Conversion anxiety...For goodness sake...Wake Up, America...GOP & Rapture Cult...Cosmic narcissism...Latter Day Liar...Once a molesting priest, now a Moonie...Grandma gambit...Take action...Badass sign

Yeah, we were right about the U.S. Attorney firings. (See above video, which is ten months old.) Even Karl Rove and Harriet Miers admit it now:

The dismissal of New Mexico U.S. Attorney David C. Iglesias in December 2006 followed extensive communication among lawyers and political aides in the White House who hashed over complaints about his work on public corruption cases against Democrats, according to newly released e-mails and transcripts of closed-door House testimony by former Bush counsel Harriet Miers and political chief Karl Rove.

A campaign to oust Iglesias intensified after state party officials and GOP members of the congressional delegation apparently concluded he was not pursuing the cases against Democrats in a way that would help then- Rep. Heather Wilson in a tight releection race, according to interviews and Bush White House e-mails released Tuesday by congressional investigators. The documents place the genesis of Iglesias's dismissal earlier than previously known.

The disclosures mark the end of a two-and-a-half year investigation by the House Judiciary Committee, which sued to gain access to Bush White House documents in a dispute that struck at the heart of a president's executive power. House members have reserved the right to hold a public hearing at which Rove, Miers, and other aides could appear this fall.

House Judiciary Chairman John M. Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) Tuesday characterized the role of Bush White House figures in the firing episode as improper and inappropriate.

Open Left: The corroded corruption at the heart of 'moving to the center.'

cab drollery: Folksier Than Thou

Bark Bark Woof Woof: The genesis of an email smear campaign.

Publius Endures: Religious Right = a 'Leave Us Alone" coalition?

Firedoglake: The Conservative "civility" scam.

The Opinion Mill's Sunday Bookchat reveals: How Iraq descended into chaos, how a plane crash laid for foundations for the national security state, how Oliver Stone poisoned the well of truth about John F. Kennedy and how the Confederacy set out to win the war by other means

Dusty at It's My Right To Be Left of Center has video of a Japanese journalist being killed in Burma. I had to look away. *link fixed

Buck Naked Politics spends a Sunday in the Park with George Bush.

Orcinus, Sisyphus Shrugged and Roger Ailes think that maybe Matthew Shepard has been bashed enough.

That old-time religion: Higgaion on a teacher fired for questioning Genesis and The Smirking Chimp on the Theology of the American Empire.

Circle Jerk in the Square reports on Bill O'Reilly's visit to a Chinatown restaurant.

Driftglass presents The Adventures of Sgt. Iraq.

This was the last Blog Round Up hosted by noted conservative blogger Jon Swift. Tomorrow Steve from The Opinion Mill is hosting. Send your tips to Steve at steve.theopinionmill [at] gmail [dot] com. I want to thank everyone here at Crooks & Liars for being such great hosts and all the readers and commenters, even the ones who mercilessly attacked me. In fact, I think I'll miss you most of all. Have a piece of schadenfreude pie on me. And thank you also to everyone who sent me tips and my apologies if I didn't get to yours. Whatever Atrios might think, your blogs don't suck.

(h/t MF)

BlueGrassRoots made the trip to the $27 million dollar institute of non-learning, the Answers in Genesis Creation museum, so you don't have to.

Early in the museum, the visitor is given advice on the proper mind frame to have for your visit: "Don't think, just listen and believe". [..] Human Reason is the enemy and God's Word is the hero. Descartes represents Human Reason, saying "I think, therefore I am". But God tells us there no need to waste your beautiful mind, for God says "I am that I am".

So logic, reason and science are Bad; blind faith is Good.

And you wonder why our jobs are being outsourced...

UPDATE: Maybe making casting decisions on faith doesn't work out so well.  It's a slippery slope; start researching the actors you use for your Creation videos and pretty soon, you're learning and stuff.  ((shudder)) Can't have that, can we,  Mr. Ham?

...Ironically enough, I am planning a trip to Kentucky later this year, but I don't think we'll put the Answers in Genesis Museum on the agenda...I prefer my children to get facts in their education.

Yahoo: (h/t JR)

Museum Founder Ken Ham anticipates 250,000 visitors the first year. And all to see exhibits as described in the NYTimes: (reg. req'd.)

The heart of the museum is a series of catastrophes. The main one is the fall, with Adam and Eve eating of the tree of knowledge; after that tableau the viewer descends from the brightness of Eden into genuinely creepy cement hallways of urban slums. Photographs show the pain of war, childbirth, death - the wages of primal sin. Then come the biblical accounts of the fallen world, leading up to Noah's ark and the flood, the source of all significant geological phenomena.

The other catastrophe, in the museum's view, is of more recent vintage: the abandonment of the Bible by church figures who began to treat the story of creation as if it were merely metaphorical, and by Enlightenment philosophers, who chipped away at biblical authority. The ministry believes this is a slippery slope.

Start accepting evolution or an ancient Earth, and the result is like the giant wrecking ball, labeled "Millions of Years," that is shown smashing the ground at the foundation of a church, the cracks reaching across the gallery to a model of a home in which videos demonstrate the imminence of moral dissolution. A teenager is shown sitting at a computer; he is, we are told, looking at pornography. Slide show here

Ballon-Juice just made my day: "The 2005 Creation Mega-Conference, slated from Jul. 17 to 22 in Lynchburg, Va. tackled several prominent issues facing the creation/evolution debate, such as the dinosaurs, the flood and Big Bang theory...read on.

Here's my favorite: Dinosaurs were also explained. According to John Whitcomb, co-author of the seminal creationist book, The Genesis Flood (1961), Noah’s ark carried 1,000 different kinds of dinosaurs as well as all of the other species, and the book has sold more than a quarter of a million copies in English…read on

As John says the report is so rich that any attempts at snark would simply fall short, so I will not even try.

ran a very good story this weekend about the genesis of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and its founder, retired Rear Admiral Roy Hoffmann. Here are the key paragraphs:

Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was registered with the IRS on April 23. Its early expenditures included money for a Dallas-area private investigator, Tom Rupprath. Hoffmann said Rupprath's job was to find vets and collect their stories so that a single account could be presented to the public.

"If everyone was saying something different it could be confusing. We wanted one version of the truth," Hoffmann said.

....In a defining moment, on July 9 and 10, dozens of veterans, the group's top advisers and a film-making crew descended on a Marriott hotel in Rosslyn, Va., to film raw material for later commercials.

"The admiral helped me to see in hindsight what was really going on with Kerry," Thurlow said.It's a work of high art — if political assassination can be called high art. The only question is how these guys can still bear to look at themselves in the mirror when they wake up every morning.