Bush then issued a "signing statement" that declared his right to open people's mail under emergency conditions.

That claim is contrary to existing law and contradicted the bill he had just signed, say experts who have reviewed it.

Enough already!

New York Daily News - Home - W pushes envelope on U.S. spying

HUME: So, you don't want to answer the question, or what?

EASTON: No. There's a reality that a president has to factor in today when you ask the American public to go to war, you need to realize and understand what --

HUME: What the news media can do, right?

EASTON: -- the role of casualties. And the media is not -- it's no longer a question of the media in Iraq. The Pentagon --

HUME: That's it for the panel.

Ah, Faux News, gotta love 'em. When Mort Kondracke and Nina Easton both go the other way and Hume chops off his own panel discussion, and this is on Faux mind you, you have to wonder just how insane the people over there are. Their own talking heads are starting to deviate from the party line.

They can't fold up shop fast enough. The couple of good reporters they have will get jobs at the real news organizations, Brit Hume and Bill Kristol can get sent back to the holes in the ground they were dug up from.

Media Matters - Only on Fox: Panel discussed video of

we are leaving ourselves vulnerable to infiltration by those who want to mold the United States into the image of their religion,

What's next? Corruption of our precious bodily fluids?

Virgil Goode is still a moron

George Packer is simply essential. This is a long post because there is no way to boil this down.

"After 9/11, when a lot of people were saying, ‘The problem is Islam,’ I was thinking, It’s something deeper than that. It's about human social networks and the way that they operate."

That's David Kilcullen, an Australian lieutenant colonel who may just be our last best hope in the long war.

"The Islamic bit is secondary. This is human behavior in an Islamic setting. This is not ‘Islamic behavior.’"

“People don’t get pushed into rebellion by their ideology. They get pulled in by their social networks."

In the 1 December issue of Jane's Intelligence Review, John Horgan writes (sub req'd):

People who leave terrorist groups or move away from violent roles do so for a multitude of reasons. Horgan explains why greater understanding of the motivations behind this so-called 'disengagement' will help in developing successful anti-terrorism initiatives.

The reality is that actual attacks represent only the tip of an iceberg of activity.

Here's the abstract of a recent RAND working paper:

In the battle of ideas that has come to characterize the struggle against jihadist terrorism, a sometimes neglected dimension is the personal motivations of those drawn into the movement. This paper reports the results of a workshop held in September 2005 and sponsored by RAND’s Center for Middle East Public Policy and the Initiative for Middle East Youth. Workshop participants discussed the issue of why young people enter into jihadist groups and what might be done to prevent it or to disengage members of such groups once they have joined.

Now, back to the Packer piece:

The odd inclusion of environmentalist rhetoric, he said, made clear that “this wasn’t a list of genuine grievances. This was an Al Qaeda information strategy." ... “bin Laden’s message was clearly designed to assist the President’s reëlection.” Bin Laden shrewdly created an implicit association between Al Qaeda and the Democratic Party, for he had come to feel that Bush’s strategy in the war on terror was sustaining his own global importance.

You may recall the speculation that Bush would produce bin Laden's head just in time for the last elections. Perhaps the living bin Laden is a more valua... [ Read More (0.6k in body) ]

Knowing the Enemy | George Packer in The New Yorker

Whether the name of the game was liberation or dominion, Iraq was a crucial test case. Iraq's transformation into the first Arab democracy — or (depending on your point of view) its conversion into a compliant protectorate — promised to validate the Bush administration's concept of global war.

Victory in Iraq would also affirm key assumptions underlying that concept: that U.S. forces are invincible and unstoppable; that preventive war works; that the concerns of other major powers or the absence of a UN Security Council mandate need not constrain American freedom of action.

In short, Iraq constituted step one. Success there would pave the way for the Bush administration to proceed along similar lines to steps two, three and four.

The disappointments and frustrations resulting from that first step now leave the entire project in a shambles. If the United States cannot democratize Iraq, then to imagine that democracy will emerge from the barrel of an American gun in Iran, Syria, Egypt or Saudi Arabia is simply fanciful. If U.S. troops cannot pacify Iraq, then only the truly deluded would court a further military showdown that could oblige American forces to pacify Iraq's neighbors as well. The United States already has too much war for too few soldiers.
...
As if tacitly acknowledging that they have spent all their ammunition strategically, Bush and his lieutenants now preoccupy themselves with operational matters that ought to fall within the purview of field commanders. Will sending another half-dozen combat brigades into Baghdad secure the Iraqi capital? How about if we make it 10? That issues like these should now command presidential attention testifies to the administration's disarray. It's as if Franklin Roosevelt had tried to manage the Battle of the Bulge from his desk in the Oval Office.

Fighting the Battle of Baghdad does not qualify as presidential business. Devising an effective response to the threat posed by Islamic radicalism does. On that score, however, the most pressing question is this: Does open-ended global war provide the proper framework for formulating that response? Or has global war, based on various illusions about American competence and American power, led to a dead end?

Bacevich is known for solid analysis out of BU. No dummy, and no friend of W (although I'm not sure anyone still is these days).

Bush's illusions - Opinion - International Herald Tribune

The communications director for Montana's lone congressman solicited the services of two men he falsely believed to be criminally minded hackers-for-hire -- with the expressed goal of jacking up his college GPA

To quote the wascawy wabbit, "What a maroon!"

Congressional aide admits trying to hire hackers -- to boost his college GPA | NetworkWorld.com Community

But Tehran was profoundly disappointed with the United States response. After the 9/11 attacks, xxx xxx xx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxxx xx set the stage for a November 2001 meeting between Secretary of State Colin Powell and the foreign ministers of Afghanistan’s six neighbors and Russia. xxxx xxxxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxx xxxx xx xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxx xxx xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxx xxxxx xxxxx xx xxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxx Iran went along, working with the United States to eliminate the Taliban and establish a post-Taliban political order in Afghanistan.

The x's are what the White House told the Times to chop out. A second article here talks about those deletions. This goes beyond ridiculous. George Orwell would see 1984 coming to fruition in the Bush administration.

Redacted Version of Op-Ed on Iran - New York Times

"It is not a matter of if there will be an attack, but how bad the attack will be," an intelligence official told ABCNews.com.

Okay, there are a couple of things about this report I find interesting. First, it's 100% US officials leaking information purportedly given them by the Brits. Mind you, the Brits are still pissed off at us for botching their work on the "gel-bombers" and now we're leaking data?

One of two things is going to happen/is happening here. First is the possibility that this is all bullshit designed to scare the crap out of us at Christmas just like they've pulled every year and there is actually nothing going on. The second possibility is, there really IS something going on and by leaking it we've just blown yet another operation the Brits have going, and British intel is going to tell us to get stuffed.

There are other possibilities, but those seem to be at the top of the food chain.

And oh yes, lest I forget, if you want to see terror in action, read the reader comments below the fold. Good lord.

The Blotter: Attack expected in London?

What is going on there? I think you have a president totally isolated from reality, totally delusional, kind of paranoid, figuring that everyone‘s against him, including his own Joint Chiefs of Staff, figuring that history 30, 40 years from now is going to prove him correct.

Here's the assessment from Mike Barnicle of MSNBC on the current state of mind of W. The video of the whole segment is here. It has gone beyond the emperor has no clothes, to the emperor is insane. Bush is being compared unfavorably to even LBJ in 1968 or Nixon during Watergate.

There may be a solution to Iraq for us, get the hell out and try to keep the mess from spreading (Lebanese Civil War on a larger scale?), but we're now looking at a much worse issue. The current resident of the White House has lost contact with reality. This is where things get really murky.

There are two ways for a President to be removed from office against his will other than invoking the Harrison, Lincoln or Nixon precedents, neither of which has ever gone through. First, standard impeachment, failed twice but would have gone through with Nixon, who saw the light at the end of the tunnel was an oncoming train that was going to force him out of office. Second, and wow is this getting weird, Section 4 or the 25th Amendment which reads:

Section 4. Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

I'm not certain I could forsee Cheney ripping this bloody skinned rabbit out of his hunting hat, but he did shoot that guy in the face...

'Scarborough Country' for Dec. 20 - Scarborough Country - MSNBC.com

Under the Bush administration, such programs have received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding.

"It would be more effective," Finer said, "to provide young people with the skills and information they need to be safe once they become sexually active — which nearly everyone eventually will."

Why not make the headline honest? 90%+ of Americans will have premarital sex. I imagine a few of them will even have postmarital sex. Promoting abstinance is like promoting... Well, nothing. I can't think of a single similar thing. Promoting something useless and obviously rejected over something useful and with a point? I would say it's like the cigarette companies pushing the "no link" crap, but it wasn't the government pushing it.

Most Americans have had premarital sex - Yahoo! News