Be careful who you piss on

Goss's resignation should come as no surprise to blog readers, especially those that follow Billmon. He was prescient last week, on April 28, when he wrote this:

I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the news (from Harper's via TPM Muckraker) that Porter Goss, director of the CIA, may be implicated in a hooker service for corrupt (and horny) congressmen paid for by defense contractors and run out of -- you really gotta love this part -- the Watergate Hotel.....

...Goss has a lot of enemies, including just about the entire career staff at the CIA, which he has been industriously purging of suspected Democrats at the behest of his White House masters. (If Porter ever turns up dead, the suspect list is going to include half of the McLean, Va. phone book and most of the world's professional assassins.)...

LINK

So who knows what anonymous hands are helping run down all the threads winding through the Duke Cunningham toxic waste dump.

Josh Marshall gives us the backstory.

Billmon update: LINK

Woods for sale. Whose are they?

If you're planning to hike the Appalachian Trail, or visit any other areas in National Forests, you better get there in a hurry. The Bush regime needs money and to get it they are going to sell our woods. They're covering the sale by suggesting it's to help the poor.

Here's the first paragraphs of the story and a link to the rest.

National forest lands could go up for sale
Protests greet Bush administration proposal to offset states' losses from logging revenue

By Tom Pelton
Sun Reporter

ROANOKE, Va. // Along a rocky path of the Appalachian Trail, Sherman Bamford pointed to a mist-shrouded mountainside in the Thomas Jefferson National Forest, where 121 acres could soon be up for public auction.

The land is on a list of about 300,000 acres of national forest the Bush administration has proposed selling to help fund the operation of rural schools and offset cuts in federal aid.

Forest Service officials said yesterday that they do not expect to sell more than about 175,000 acres in order to reach their goal of raising $800 million. But auctioning any of the land would reverse more than a century of federal policy and law barring such sales of national forests....

LINK

(Thanks to America Blog.)

You can only sell them once. After the woods are gone maybe Bush will sell some monuments and whatever else he hasn't already given away to Halliburton.

Colbert 2

Here's a link to Michael Sherer's fun to read (but not for Bushistas) Salon article on the Colbert take down of the regime.

The truthiness hurts
Stephen Colbert's brilliant performance unplugged the Bush myth machine -- and left the clueless D.C. press corps gaping.

Here's a sample:

...Then he turned to the president of the United States, who sat tight-lipped just a few feet away. "I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound -- with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world." ...

...What Colbert did was expose the whole official, patriotic, right-wing, press-bashing discourse as a sham, as more "truthiness" than truth. ...

Thanks to Atrios

Billmon's review illustrates larger problem

Here's a lengthy quote from the center of Billmon's review comparing the movie American Nightmarez to Stephen Colbert's performance at the White House Correspondents dinner.

"...Like its upscale sibling, the annual Gridiron Club dinner, the White House Correspondents dinner is a ritual designed, at least implicitly, to showcase the underlying unity of our Beltway elites. It's supposed to demonstrate that no matter how ferocious their battles may appear on the surface, political opponents can still gather in the same room and break bread, with the corporate media acting as the properly neutral host. It's a relic of the good old days of centrism and bipartisan log rolling ("the end of ideology"), visible proof that in the American system, there may be enemies, but there are no mortal enemies. And so we last night we had Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame sitting at one table, Karl Rove at another, and no knives were drawn.

The light entertainment at these events is also supposed to reflect the same spirit of forced good cheer, to the point where even matters of deadly seriousness -- things that in other countries might cause governments to fall -- are treated like inside jokes, as with Shrub's looking-for-the-missing-WMDs-under-the-couch routine. Ha ha ha. We're all friends here!

The underlying message, never stated or even acknowledged, is that there are no disputes that can't be resolved within the cozy confines of our "democratic" (oligarchic) system. Friends don't send friends to jail -- or smash their presses or abolish their political parties or line them up against the wall and shoot them.

The problem is that the tissue of this particular lie has been eroding ever since the Clinton impeachment, if not before, and is now worn exceedingly thin. It's becoming harder and harder to conceal the ruthlessness of the struggle for power, or ignore the consequences of losing it...."

LINK

The first inclination of nearly all the insider/plutocrats is to stick together when the status quo is threatened. Even the insider outsiders, like elected Democrats, supposedly neutral big media members and even many celebrity left of center writers, know their cushy lives, padded with gigantic pensions, and fantastic health insurance, depend on ruling class unity and keeping the great starry eyed wad deluded and dutifully trooping off to solemnly vote in rigged elections. (Oh shucks, we lost again; we’ll just have to tighten our belts and try harder in 2008.)

The complicity of the opposition, usually masked as civility, is much of what makes fascists, once in power, so difficult to dislodge.

Prostate cancer update

The two oncologists I consulted agree. The only real option is hormone therapy for three months followed by external radiation, 45 treatments, with hormone therapy continuing for up to two years.

I need an MRI because my two hip replacements obscured the CT scan view of the lymph glands near the prostate.

For me, here’s the key dialogue:

TR: This is probably a stupid question but is this going to kill me and in how long?

Sloan/Kettering, St. Clare’s oncologist: It’s a great question. Of course we don’t know but statistically you have about an 80% chance of living five years and a 60% of living ten….

There you have it. I am taking an oral med. Casodex 50mg once a day. Will get a hormonal injection, likely in the stomach, on Tuesday that should cover me for three months. If all goes well (meaning, among other things, the prostate gland shrinks) I will begin radiation.

There are numerous side effects from the hormonal treatments, though the oncologist said the intensity varies among individuals.

I told my daughter she may not be losing a father, but may be gaining a grandmother.

As for me, I have no symptoms, feel great, did fierce workouts three days last week, and intend to spend the weekend riding the Harley and raking leaves.

Goss goose cooked?

If you’re a procrastinator, like me, and looking for a way to wile away a few minutes and you really don’t want to deal with the implications of peak oil before the weekend but would rather daydream about Republicans sizzling on the spit, check out the last couple of posts from Billmon.

Cancer

The full body bone, CT scan and chest X-ray were all clean. Tomorrow I go to the second of two oncologists to discuss treatment. I will post all details tomorrow night or Saturday, but so far it appears I have late Stage 2 or early Stage 3 Prostate Cancer. Gleason scores were 8s and 9s. A year ago this May I had a PSA of 1.9. In March it was 4.7. The cancer seems to extend immediately beyond the "capsule" (whatever that is). But for very minor, barely noticeable occasional discomfort when peeing, I have no symptoms. I feel like I am in the best health of my life. (I'm 62)

As for the national cancer, there is almost too much going on for me to keep track of. Each of the great blogs, most of those listed to the right, are following one or another of the rapidly unraveling threads. Check them all out. Who knew we would have such easy access to so much brilliance. Enjoy it while you can because this freedom too won't last forever.

No deal

Senators want to buy rights to drill for oil in the Alaska National Artic Wildlife Refuge for a $100 bribe paid to each taxpayer. LINK

Personally, I'd sell them Congress, the Executive branch and most of the Supreme Court for a lot less. For a bonus, I'd throw in most newspapers and tv networks as well, so long as we keep the artic refuge. Not that I'll ever get there but as long as it is there, I can dream about it.

Rigged elections a matter of survival

Josh Marshall wrote:

...The White House and the entire DC GOP for that matter is just sitting on too many secrets and bad acts. The bogus investigations of the pre-war intel is just one example, if one of the most resonant and glaring. Keeping control of the House and the Senate is less a matter of conventional ideological and partisan politics as it is a simple matter of survival.

They have too much to cover up. They could not survive sunlight.

LINK

With the stakes that high, key 2006 elections will certainly be rigged.

Seafood garnish

…What millions of city and suburban folks thought just disappeared down their toilets actually wound up in nets. Swede Lovgren showed up at public meetings, toting samples in what fishermen and scientists began calling “black mayonnaise jars.”

“Swede had it analyzed and it was mostly human hair and Kotex fibers. If you weren’t steaming home with the net backward to clean it out, you were powerwashing it back at the dock,” Lovgren says. …

(From Clearing the Channels a profile of Jim Lovgren, Brick, NJ, by Kirk Moore in the National Fisherman, May 2006, page 23.)

Lovgren is talking about the Mud Hole, a large section of a long groove in the bottom from the mouth of the Hudson River to the Hudson Canyon. For decades the Mud Hole has been a lucrative fishing ground. Unfortunately it also is close to dumping areas for New York City sewage, dredgings and other junk.

I fished the Mud Hole for years, first on scallop trawlers and then on draggers from Point Pleasant, NJ, from the same docks that the Lovgrens use. Much of what we caught in the Mud Hole was shipped to markets in northern New Jersey and New York City, ironically completing a recycling circle of sorts. What went down your neighbor's toilet comes back to you by way of the dinner table.

Bon appetite!

One more big mistake

Here's a column you must read. It's about our scuzzy little president on the ropes and looking to a last grandstand moment of an A Bomb on Iran.

Chips down, Bush prepares a Hail Mary bet by Mark Morford in today's San Francisco Chronicle.

Ommzm

Ommzm’s interesting diary with a post on reality manipulation is being singled out for attention at Kos. Here’s the link: Reality in Desuetude (or, Iran So Far Away)

In Ommzm’s post there is this quote from Robert Sheer, August 28, 2001, Salon that spells out nicely the mechanics of the Bush plutocracy.

There is method to the president's madness, as he spelled out in his press conference Friday, proclaiming that the prospect of government red ink is "incredibly positive news" because it will produce "a fiscal straitjacket for Congress." ...

... The plan is to bankrupt the national government so we can be reduced to life as it's lived in Texas, where the rich make out like bandits playing with public funds, as George W. did on that stadium deal, while the rest of the folks scramble. Texas politicians, including three presidents in the past 40 years, always make sure their companies are fed well at the Washington trough, even if it means going to war. Whatever the state of the federal budget, Bush is not going to be tight with the dollar when it comes to a bloated military, because big oil still needs that stick of U.S. military intervention to protect its investments abroad.

Why else do we need a military big enough to fight two wars at once except to protect U.S. investments that stretch from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf? Think of it as a Social Security program -- or more accurately, welfare -- for military contractors and energy companies, led by Halliburton, where Dick Cheney hustled his quick millions.

LINK

Nuclear realities

Juan Cole helps us understand Iran's nuclear program here: Iran can now make glowing Mickey Mouse watches.

Via firedoglake

(Speaking of nuclear, today was spent getting CT scan, whole body bone scan and chest x-ray. I will have results Monday afternoon.)

Crazies are in charge. Anything can happen.

Take a few minutes to read Billmon's latest "Mutually Assured Dementia". Best to do so in the morning when you have an entire day to regroup and get settled enough to sleep.

Cancer

Yesterday the results of the biopsy revealed an aggressive cancer. Last night I had a dream. Here it is:

I am a young deckhand wearing shorts. Tanned. No shoes. It is a busy harbor scene. No real landscape, only very calm, oily water and a dock. Numerous red tugs manuever close and far. Some are eccentric variations of the traditional silhouette and I marvel at them. The boat I am on is involved with bringing a barge to a dock with other tugs assisting. When we complete the job and get underway I am on the deck which is now spacious, high above the water, reminiscent of a cement barge deck. I stand near a cleat and take a line from a tug below us and secure it to the cleat. I am sure the deckhand below is eyeing my wife who has appeared on the deck with me and that his interest in her is why he tied up to us. But this concern passes quickly and the deckhand flips the line free of the cleat and his boat steams away from us. We get to a dock. I have my old sea bag. The same, army green one I carried year in and year out to the Felicia. I leave it on the dock and go into a tiny, very dark and dingy bar, similar to a place I frequented in Fulton Fish Market.. I do not recognize the bartender. He is a small, bald man, wearing a natty bow tie. Scattered around are fishermen who one time or another worked on Felicia. All are familiar but likely dead. I recognize the thin, lounging Curley Martin, One Eyed Magna, maybe (the original) Tiger Red. Dagfin, the long dead captain, is there. They seem to be waiting for something. I need to pee and open the door to the bathroom. It is filthy. The toilet seems to have overflowed and shit is on the floor. I do not want to go in there barefooted so I leave the bar to go to the boat and retrieve my bag. However the tide has come in. Where I left the bag is under water and the Felicia is nowhere to be seen. I think she is away somewhere for repairs, that the crew is waiting for her, and she will return shortly. I see my bag floating in the water. Strangers in a row boat fish it out and bring it to me. Water pours out but I seem to find my boots amid the clothing. I am relieved to have the bag, grateful to those that pulled it from the water. I think for a moment about how good people are. Another man I take to be a clammer shows me his shoes which have an elaborate contraption that looks a little like a thickly padded bandage attached to the sole. I take it to be something designed to help him walk better on the steel, shell and fish covered deck. No, he says, it is an arch support.

Cheney's pleasures

Here's a quote posted today by Juan Cole.

Eric Haney, a founding member of the Delta Force anti-terrorist unit, has denounced the Iraq War as an "utter debacle," and has blamed widespread US use of torture to the sadism of Dick Cheney, who he says seems to enjoy it. When people like Haney talk like this, it is probably over with.

LINK

Here's a LINK to the article/interview Cole references.

With friends like these....

Carl Levin, a Senator trusted and admired by liberal Democrats, sells us out on the domestic phone tap spying issue.

Glen Greenwald has the goods.

Below are a couple of paragraphs and a link. Greenwald first posts a transcript of a Levin interview. The quoted paragraph refers to the interview.

...The whole interview is like that. I just picked the worst of it. Carl Levin obviously believes that it is perfectly acceptable for the President to break the law just as long as it turns out that his illegal conduct is driven by good intentions. ...

...If it turns out that they were not abusing the eavesdropping power, then it is perfectly fine with Sen. Levin if the President broke the law. If the President broke the law, then the duty of the Senate is to "modify the law in order to make it legal" because, after all, the President broke the law for the "right reasons." As Daniel Webster warned: "Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions." ...

LINK

Great quote from Webster.

To the rats leaving the ship

The other day, on firedoglake (one of my favorite and maybe the best of blogs) blogger Pachacutec posted a lengthy and, for many, moving apology for having once supported the invasion of Iraq. (LINK) Most of the comments were sympathetic. I'm not. To Pachacutec I say go fuck yourself.

Pachacutec was simply a misguided war supporter and not necessarily a Bush supporter. But it takes an incredible dumbass to have not seen through Bush and everything Bush from the very start. Thanks to the shortsighted Pachacutec type supporters we are where we are.

Jane Smiley has a more lengthy response to former Bush supporters, “Notes for Converts”, posted on The Huffington Post. Below is an excerpt from Smiley’s note #4. In case you’re tempted to go over the top with forgiveness to former Bush supporters, go read the rest of Smiley.

4. President Bush is your creation. When the US Supreme Court humiliated itself in 2000 by handing the presidency to Bush even though two of the justices (Scalia and Thomas) had open conflicts of interest, you did not object. When the Bush administration adopted an "Anything but Clinton" policy that resulted in ignoring and dismissing all warnings of possible terrorist attacks on US soil, you went along with and made excuses for Bush. When the Bush administration allowed the corrupt Enron corporation to swindle California ratepayers and taxpayers in a last ditch effort to balance their books in 2001, you laughed at the Californians and ignored the links between Enron and the administration. When it was evident that the evidence for the war in Iraq was cooked and that State Department experts on the Middle East were not behind the war and so it was going to be run as an exercise in incompetence, you continued to attack those who were against the war in vicious terms and to defend policies that simply could not work.

LINK

U.S. is gone

In case you needed some expert legal opinion on the extent of the coup, here are a couple of paragraphs from "Administration tells Congress (again) - We won't abide by your "laws"" posted on Glen Greenwald’s blog Unclaimed Territory.

...There are numerous noteworthy items, but the most significant, by far, is that the DoJ made clear to Congress that even if Congress passes some sort of newly amended FISA of the type which Sen. DeWine introduced, and even if the President "agrees" to it and signs it into law, the President still has the power to violate that law if he wants to. Put another way, the Administration is telling the Congress -- again -- that they can go and pass all the laws they want which purport to liberalize or restrict the President's powers, and it does not matter, because the President has and intends to preserve the power to do whatever he wants regardless of what those laws provide. ...

....Put another way, the Administration has seized the power of Congress to make the laws, they have seized the power of the judiciary to interpret the laws, and they execute them as well. They have consolidated within themselves all of the powers of the government, particularly with regard to national security. This situation is, of course, exactly what Madison warned about in Federalist 47; it really is the very opposite of everything our Government is intended to be:....

LINK

(via Eschaton)

You might want to make Unclaimed Territory a regular stop.

Time for plan B?

When I stopped for a fancy coffee, on the way home from scheduling a biopsy, I asked the woman at the window “how’s business?”

“Slow,” she said. “I think it’s the price of gas cutting into spending money. They say we’ll be paying $4 a gallon by summer.”

She may be right or wrong for the short term, but long term, the reality is that these higher gas prices are just the beginning. Peak oil is coming, soon. With an idiot at the helm, with a crew of psycho fascists running things, we (all of us but the ultra rich and their retinues of personal MDs and ass wipers) are in serious trouble. I hope you’re not expecting Cheney to lend a hand when you’re out of oil, gas, heat, water, and food.

Here’s a book available on line that states the problems and proposes solutions. The site comes with a handy table of contents: Plan B 2.0:
Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble