Wow. I admit I'm very surprised to read that none other than Michelle Malkin is defending Obama over the Associated Press wiretapping "scandal."

The frenzy over AP is a stark reminder of basic party differences on the War on Terror. The Democrats put security first. The Republicans put trial lawyers, terrorists’ rights, and election campaigns first. The Democrats are acting to prevent another 9/11. The Republicans are stuck in a 9/10 world.

Woah!

And it turns out that it was Republicans who asked the IRS to look at the tax-exempt status of Tea Party groups.

Seven Republican members of Congress filed complaints with the IRS in 2010, claiming Tea Party groups engaged in partisan electioneering, leading to an IRS probe, according to agency documents released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) launched an examination of the Tea Party on Oct. 8, 2010, claiming a speech by a Tea Party leader made during the organization's annual convention that criticized President Barack Obama's education and foreign policies crossed the line from issue advocacy to partisan electioneering. [...]

The documents include letters sent from members of Congress on behalf of their constituents, including Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Susan Collins (R-ME), Rep. Jo Ann Davis (R-VA), the late Senator Strom Thurmond (R-SC), and former Reps. Larry Combest (R-TX), Joe Scarborough (R-FL) and Robert Ehrlich (R-MD).

Fascinating! Who knew Republicans were so principled?

And listen to former Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, on a possible investigation into the Benghazi attacks.

"I don't think that anyone should start pointing fingers in a personal way or suggest that people are trying to cover their political backsides. I just think that's ridiculous. I think we need to go forward. We need to be positive. There are failures. We need to get to the root of it and try to make our country more secure."

Oh, sorry.

My bad.

Malkin was actually defending FISA wiretapping under Bush, and it was the NAACP Republicans asked the IRS to investigate during the Bush administration -- and Senator Hutchison was speaking out against the formation of the 9/11 Commission.

You can see how I got confused.

What's that they say about blind squirrels again? Here's Nooners, talking about what ails the GOP this morning on "This Week."

NOONAN: You know, I tend to think that the go GOP's central problems have to do with things we don't talk all that much about. One is what happened in 2008 and the continuing repercussions of the crash. The repercussions where the party stands, what its positions are on how to create growth, that is becoming in part within the party, a rising disagreement -- not disagreement, but a rising difference of emphasis between those who are saying the way we have to go is growth right now and those who are saying we've got to handle this debt and deficit thing. They're sort of different approaches.

Another is that I think the Republican Party has to make clear what its foreign policy is. It has had two wars for the past 12 years, people are still settling in and thinking -- I mean, the voters have said, we don't like that. We're not for that. The Republican Party has to make clear what it stands for and it's going to have to have a little bit of debate to get there.

So I think those two big things, and the policies that spring from them, will make all of the difference and so will an eventual compelling presidential candidate, somebody who is involved right now is going to work his way through. At the end of the day, it is the candidates who resolve a lot of unresolved things by taking a stand and speaking for forcefully for it.

Exactly right.

"Those two big things" -- the Iraq War and the Great Recession are indeed the two major reasons the Democratic Party swept into power 2006 and 2008, and they both loomed large in 2012. The problem for Republicans is they seem to be in complete denial about this. They're still insisting George W. Bush was a great president, that we "won" in Iraq, and that Barney Frank and irresponsible minorities caused the crash.

Do you ever hear Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio or Paul Ryan say the Iraq War or the radical financial deregulation of Wall Street were mistakes? No, you haven't. And as long as the official domestic policy of the Republican Party is tax cuts and deregulation and the party's official foreign policy is neoconservative, you won't.

Even if the Republicans decide to adopt less hateful policies towards immigration and gay marriage, they're still, at the end of the day, going to have to come to terms with the Bush administration. And that's something to date they've refused to do.

(h/t David of VideoCafe)

Who knew that seeming double-centenerian Pete Domenici was such a player? None of us, it turns out, until the former longtime Senator of New Mexico recently admitted to an extra-marital affair with a colleague's [Senator Paul Laxalt of Nevada] daughter, which produced a now-thirty-something son.

Domenici is certainly not the first politician to suffer from Strom Thurmond Disease. You may remember the late Senator Thurmond, he of the presidential campaign in 1948 based on the segregation of the races - something he couldn't personally accomplish with the hired help in his own household (let's call it an Early Schwarzenegger). Just two weeks ago, at the age of 87, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, his bi-racial child who could not acknowledge her father publicly until his death in 2003, passed away herself. Just another sad story of conservative hypocrisy, and in Thurmond's case, one of many dalliances with women not his wife for the "family values"-spouting, Lost-Cause romantic.

This is not to say this kind of thing doesn't happen on the Democratic/liberal side. (I have two words for you. John and Edwards.) Yet, the difference is that like most Republicans, Domenici was all too concerned what was going on in our private lives if we were gay, a woman, or a President being impeached in the 1990s over an affair. He was a moral exemplar, you see, who was so pristine and pure you'd think he brought the Ten Commandments down from the mountain. He could deign to lecture us all, including then President Bill Clinton.

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Ten years ago today on December 6, 2002, the Bush Administration fired its top two economic advisers: Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey due to the continuing lagging economy (when Bush took office, unemployment was 4.2%. In Dec of 2002... more than a year after 9/11... the rate jumped from 5.7% to 6.0% in one month). In November of 2002, when O'Neill, a "deficit hawk", tried to warn Vice President Dick Cheney that growing budget deficits... expected to top $500 billion that fiscal year alone... posed a threat to the economy. Cheney cut him off, saying, "You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don't matter."

O'Neill was replaced with CSX (the freight train company) CEO John Snow, also a "deficit hawk", yet appointed the unenviable task of convincing the public (ie: Wall Street) that "deficits don't matter".

It is worth remembering on this tenth anniversary just how we got here. When the Bush Administration took office 22 months earlier, they were handed a balanced budget in which the government was actually collecting more in taxes than it needed to run the federal government. Less than two years later, O'Neill was warning of a HALF-TRILLION DOLLAR deficit for 2003. The surplus revenue under Clinton was used to start paying off our Debt which had exploded under Reagan and the first President Bush. Presidential candidate George W. Bush actually campaigned on the fact that because we were collecting more in taxes than it takes to run the government, that means we were being "overtaxed", telling cheering crowds, "It's not the government's money, it's YOUR money!", and therefore deserved a "tax cut"... the much heralded "Bush Tax Cut" that we are fighting over today, despite the fact that the original premise in support of them... a budget surplus... hasn't existed in over 12 years.

Think about this: How do we EVER pay off the Debt if the moment we take in enough in taxes to start paying it off, Republicans use it as an excuse for tax cuts?

Blast from the past: July 2006

Cheney implies he declassified Plame's identity.

My thoughts this Election Day. Comment if you remember too!

I REMEMBER wars of aggression based on lies.

I REMEMBER The Patriot Act.

I REMEMBER "Free Speech Zones".

I REMEMBER the color-coded "traffic light of fear" the Bush Administration ratcheted up every time they felt themselves sinking in the polls.

I REMEMBER fake news reports being produced by the government using actors pretending to be reporters, using fake names, distributed to as if it were real news.

I REMEMBER the outing of an undercover CIA agent by our own Vice President, and the enormous cover-up to follow.

I REMEMBER that prior to the last Administration, gasoline had NEVER sold for more than $1.75/gallon, and was up over $4 before they were through.

I REMEMBER the collapse of Wall Street, mass foreclosures, and the bailout of thousands of banks across the U.S. in the greatest economic crisis since The Great Depression.

...and there's no way in hell I'm going back.
 

Bush White House admits Iraq nuclear claims were bogus two months after invasion (July, 2003).

Prior to Iraq invasion, Economist is ridiculed for predicting $2Trillion dollar war and $75 oil.

I've always looked at my role in politics as that of "historian". In fact, the subtitle of my blog "Mugsy's Rap Sheet" is "Recording History for Those Who Seek to Rewrite it." Republicans have more than a bad habit of rewriting and white-washing history. Heck, the man Republicans have elevated to near sainthood... St. Ronnie... bears no resemblance to the man we knew as "Ronald Reagan" (I refer you to the book "Tear Down This Myth" for a detailed comparison.) And you'd THINK that since the invention of videotape, these numbnuts would stop thinking they can just make wild claims about The Bush Legacy without somebody calling them on it.

Back during the 2008 Presidential campaign, I couldn't help but notice how frequently & easily the Republican candidates (including Mitt Romney) would rewrite the history of how we ended up going to war with Iraq in order to paint Bush as less culpable. One of the most disturbing arguments was that we were FORCED to invade Iraq after "Saddam refused to allow the weapons inspectors back in", which I KNEW was a load of... eh, rubbish (this is a family site). So I dug through the BBC News archives and pieced together the following video. It's five years old now, but today on the eve of the third and final Presidential Debate, this time on foreign policy, with a Republican candidate whom has (as Rachel Maddow reminded us Friday) SEVENTEEN of his TWENTY-FOUR Foreign Policy Advisors comming from the Bush Administration, I thought that maybe now was the perfect time to look back for a moment to remember history as it actually happened, and think long & hard about possibly returning these people to the White House just four short years later:

Bush Kicked Out the Weapons Inspectors, Not Saddam
(source video is nearly a decade old now, so please excuse the quality.)

Remember all the people that tried to tell us that George W. Bush was already planning the invasion of Iraq almost from the day he took office (with their eyes set on all that lovely oil)? President Bush's defenders (I call them "apologists", which riles them terribly because they don't think they have anything to apologize for) are quick to try and discredit those who dared say such things, but if you won't take those people's word for it, how about the word of George W. Bush?

Forget "9/11 changed everything", Bush was on the Iraq/WMD warpath from DAY ONE of his Presidential campaign.

And here we are once again, four short years later, flirting with the idea of electing another Republican president that appears to be hot for war in the Middle East, only this time, instead of Iraq, it's Syria and Iran. We've seen this movie before folks, and we already know how it ends.

Astounding. This New York Times oped piece by Kurt Eichenwald says the neocon influence in the Bush White House was so all-consuming, so rigid, that when President Bush received numerous intelligence briefings about an impending attack by bin Laden, they decided it was an attempt to distract them from Saddam Hussein. Frightening, just how criminally negligent they were - and they've never admitted they were wrong, not even after all this time and all these people dead:

On Aug. 6, 2001, President George W. Bush received a classified review of the threats posed by Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, Al Qaeda. That morning’s “presidential daily brief” — the top-secret document prepared by America’s intelligence agencies — featured the now-infamous heading: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” A few weeks later, on 9/11, Al Qaeda accomplished that goal.

On April 10, 2004, the Bush White House declassified that daily brief — and only that daily brief — in response to pressure from the 9/11 Commission, which was investigating the events leading to the attack. Administration officials dismissed the document’s significance, saying that, despite the jaw-dropping headline, it was only an assessment of Al Qaeda’s history, not a warning of the impending attack. While some critics considered that claim absurd, a close reading of the brief showed that the argument had some validity.

That is, unless it was read in conjunction with the daily briefs preceding Aug. 6, the ones the Bush administration would not release. While those documents are still not public, I have read excerpts from many of them, along with other recently declassified records, and come to an inescapable conclusion:

The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack began in the spring of 2001. By May 1, the Central Intelligence Agency told the White House of a report that “a group presently in the United States” was planning a terrorist operation. Weeks later, on June 22, the daily brief reported that Qaeda strikes could be “imminent,” although intelligence suggested the time frame was flexible.

But some in the administration considered the warning to be just bluster. An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both told me in interviews that the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat. Intelligence officials, these sources said, protested that the idea of Bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist, conspiring with Mr. Hussein, an Iraqi secularist, was ridiculous, but the neoconservatives’ suspicions were nevertheless carrying the day.

In response, the C.I.A. prepared an analysis that all but pleaded with the White House to accept that the danger from Bin Laden was real.

“The U.S. is not the target of a disinformation campaign by Usama Bin Laden,” the daily brief of June 29 read, using the government’s transliteration of Bin Laden’s first name. Going on for more than a page, the document recited much of the evidence, including an interview that month with a Middle Eastern journalist in which Bin Laden aides warned of a coming attack, as well as competitive pressures that the terrorist leader was feeling, given the number of Islamists being recruited for the separatist Russian region of Chechnya.

And the C.I.A. repeated the warnings in the briefs that followed. Operatives connected to Bin Laden, one reported on June 29, expected the planned near-term attacks to have “dramatic consequences,” including major casualties. On July 1, the brief stated that the operation had been delayed, but “will occur soon.” Some of the briefs again reminded Mr. Bush that the attack timing was flexible, and that, despite any perceived delay, the planned assault was on track.

Yet, the White House failed to take significant action. Officials at the Counterterrorism Center of the C.I.A. grew apoplectic. On July 9, at a meeting of the counterterrorism group, one official suggested that the staff put in for a transfer so that somebody else would be responsible when the attack took place, two people who were there told me in interviews. The suggestion was batted down, they said, because there would be no time to train anyone else.

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Especially in light of the refusal to release the JFK assassination files, it's mind-boggling that they've finally released this information. Seven different times, Bush was informed of imminent strikes by Bin Laden, and he simply ignored them? I guess they were so determined to go to war, they wanted any excuse they could get:

Over 120 CIA documents concerning 9/11, Osama bin Laden and counterterrorism were published today for the first time, having been newly declassified and released to the National Security Archive. The documents were released after the NSA pored through the footnotes of the 9/11 Commission and sent Freedom of Information Act requests.

The material contains much new information about the hunt before and after 9/11 for bin Laden, the development of the drone campaign in AfPak, and al-Qaida’s relationship with America’s ally, Pakistan. Perhaps most damning are the documents showing that the CIA had bin Laden in its cross hairs a full year before 9/11 — but didn’t get the funding from the Bush administration White House to take him out or even continue monitoring him. The CIA materials directly contradict the many claims of Bush officials that it was aggressively pursuing al-Qaida prior to 9/11, and that nobody could have predicted the attacks. “I don’t think the Bush administration would want to see these released, because they paint a picture of the CIA knowing something would happen before 9/11, but they didn’t get the institutional support they needed,” says Barbara Elias-Sanborn, the NSA fellow who edited the materials.

[...] Many of the documents publicize for the first time what was first made clear in the 9/11 Commission: The White House received a truly remarkable amount of warnings that al-Qaida was trying to attack the United States. From June to September 2011, a full seven CIA Senior Intelligence Briefs detailed that attacks were imminent, an incredible amount of information from one intelligence agency. One from June called “Bin-Ladin and Associates Making Near-Term Threats” writes that “(redacted) expects Usama Bin Laden to launch multiple attacks over the coming days.” The famous August brief called “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike the US” is included. “Al-Qai’da members, including some US citizens, have resided in or travelled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure here,” it says. During the entire month of August, President Bush was on vacation at his ranch in Texas — which tied with one of Richard Nixon’s as the longest vacation ever taken by a president. CIA Director George Tenet has said he didn’t speak to Bush once that month, describing the president as being “on leave.” Bush did not hold a Principals’ meeting on terrorism until September 4, 2001, having downgraded the meetings to a deputies’ meeting, which then-counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke has repeatedly said slowed down anti-Bin Laden efforts “enormously, by months.”

Former vice president Dick Cheney, 71, who has struggled with cardiac problems for years, is recovering from heart-transplant surgery at a Virginia hospital, according to a statement from his office. Cheney had been on a waiting list for a transplant for nearly two years after being hospitalized in 2010 for conditions related to coronary artery disease. At that time he had a left ventricular assist device (LVAD) implanted to help his heart pump.

"Although the former vice president and his family do not know the identity of the donor, they will be forever grateful for this lifesaving gift," it said.

Cheney has a history of heart trouble, suffering at least five heart attacks since 1978. His first occurred when he was 37.

More at CNN.

I enjoy reading The Onion, even more so when those it lampoons don’t get the joke. But while satire is meant to be amusing, it quite often reflects a more serious state of affairs. A recent Onion post on a captive breeding program designed to save the critically endangered moderate Republican had me laughing, before it had me thinking.

Because, actually... they’re right - the Republican Party truly is dying. For all intents and purposes, it’s already dead, the only impression of life being the lurching about of animated zombies eating their own brains, leaving the traditional mainstream moderate Republican conservative embarrassed and frustrated. The traditional mainstream moderate conservatives aren’t even in reality Republicans any longer, as the party itself has deteriorated from the rot of tea party fanaticism, and Koch Brother corruption, and the constant barrage Fox propaganda posing as journalism, and hate-filled blustering talk shows spewing hydrophobic nonsense, and the jaw-droppingly atrocious bunch of incompetent idiots posing as GOP Presidential candidates. All that is left of a once a respectable political party is the name “Republican” for nostalgic conservatives to cling to.

Which is so not good for our country. If disaffected Republicans ever managed to purge themselves of the zombies and the tea partiers and the Limbaughs and Fox and regrouped as something else, much like New Labour rebranded itself in the UK (although New Labour turned out to be just Tory Lite rather than any sort of improved Labour party), Democrats might finally have genuine opponents again - which would be both a bit scary and a bit hopeful. A nation runs best when there's an honorable opposition to keep the ruling party honest, regardless of what party is in power. An honorable opposition represents a very large proportion of the nation’s citizenship, and gives that citizenship a strong voice. An honorable opposition works harder at designing and proposing alternative ideas in the hope that the good they can do will garner them enough votes next go-round at the polls. I’d like to see an honorable opposition again.

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