Tapped's Sam Rosenfeld notes that if you look closer at the Allen-Tumulty Time article on Bush's search for a "new groove" it seems less like a new gameplan and more like some sort of stalling tactic until people come around and see what an amazing transformational leader the president is. 

My suggestion is just go balls out, Mr. President!  Why wait for after the mid-terms to unveil your new overhaul of Social Security, Medicaid and, yes, Medicare when you could be out pushing those issues now and showing just what your administration and the Republican Party are made of!  Hell Ya!!!   Now that's what I call leadership!

Much has been written over the last couple days about former Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy who died on Saturday at the age of 89.  Most of it centers around the courage of his supposed takedown of Lyndon Johnson in the 1968 New Hampshire primary (which Johnson actually won despite not even being on the ballot or campaigning in New Hampshire...) or his later futile presidential runs.  I always think of the man who wrote so eloquently about playing amateur baseball in the Great Soo League of rural central Minnesota.    I think of the native son who rose quickly with other MN political heavyweights (Humphrey, Mondale, Freeman, etc.) in the newly created post-war Democratic-Farmer Labor party who nevertheless through spite and aloofness wore out his welcome and was never forgiven for helping torpedo Humphrey's short run against Nixon in 1968.  I think about the self-styled politician-intellectual-poet who so often reveled in being on the losing end of a political contest because of his commitment to the proposition that politics was less about power and more about a commitment to morality. 

Clearly McCarthy was an infinitely complex man but it was one of the things I think that made him interesting to me.  I was alway a fan of his wry sense of humor and wit as well as his uncommon ability to dissect the body politic that was as fresh as it was sometimes curmudgeony.  If you want just a taste of that wit and wisdom check out the Ezra Klein's link over at Tapped to McCarthy's 15 Commandments for choosing a presidential candidate and see what I mean.

Minnesota retains its no.1 ranking as the healthiest state in the Union!  Woo hoo!  I know, I didn't know there was a competition either?

This is our new CEO President:

But when it comes to fresh and concrete ideas, the list of what Bush will actually try to accomplish in 2006 is so modest that one bewildered Republican adviser calls it "an insult to incrementalism."

Maybe we'll be going back to Mars.

Christopher Hitchens waxes nostalgic for a bygone age of journalism by going through a litany of fictional journalist types which inspired him.  Hopefully the new generation of journalists will be less inspired by fiction and more inspired by the truth.

Terrible:

Amtrak certainly knows how to lose money, but the railroad says it can lose less if only it can get out of the business of hauling cars of "premium" freight like perishables behind its cross-country trains.

Instead, Congress has told Amtrak to increase sharply the number of carloads it hauls or forgo $8.3 million in additional federal money.

Whose at fault?

The order, contained in the transportation bill signed by President Bush last month, was inserted late in the process by Representative Joe Knollenberg, an appropriations subcommittee chairman from Michigan. The Detroit businessman who owns the only company that supplies such rail cars happens to be a large donor to Mr. Knollenberg, a Republican, and other Michigan lawmakers.

Congress established the railroad in 1971 as a private, for-profit corporation and has intermittently promised company managers a free hand to run it like a business. But lawmakers continue to exercise influence because Amtrak must curry political favor to maintain its subsidy.

Look at the numbers:

Mr. Knollenberg acknowledged that the order, known in Washington as an earmark, was likely to help the businessman, Anthony Soave, and his company, ExpressTrak. But he said the main goal was to help Amtrak make money by hauling freight.

There are also other problems. ExpressTrak, which is in bankruptcy, and Amtrak, which will get about $1.3 billion from Congress to keep it out of bankruptcy, have been jousting in court for years over a 15-year contract they signed in 1999 requiring the railroad to haul premium freight like fruits and vegetables.

The $8.3 million is notable for another reason: it is almost precisely the amount that ExpressTrak's lawyers seem to have identified as a minimum target figure for settling the company's lawsuit against Amtrak, records show.

A 2003 agreement between ExpressTrak and the law firm Foley & Lardner, which handled the company's dispute with Amtrak and also lobbied for the $8.3 million earmark, called for a sharp reduction in the law firm's fees if ExpressTrak received less than $8.2 million.

That's right--its about a lobbyist's fee.  Coincidence?  I think not.  Time to throw the current leadership out.  We need heavy lobbying reform.  And campaign finance reform.  Why do we allow the existence of legal bribery?

Castro Benefits from America's Moral Slide on Guantanamo.

When trying to convince people you've done nothing wrong, don't act guilty.

CONDOLEEZZA RICE challenged European leaders to back controversial American anti-terrorism tactics yesterday as she robustly defended the CIA’s extrajudicial seizure, transportation and interrogation of thousands of suspects.

Really, if there is nothing wrong with it, why do you run and hide?

Read 'em and weep:

CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll. 803 Adults (713 Registered Voters). December 1-4, 2005. MoE +/- 4%

If Tom DeLay runs for re-election in 2006, in general, are you more likely to vote for the Republican candidate Tom DeLay or for the Democratic Party's candidate for Congress?

Tom DeLay: 36%
The Democrat: 49%

Voters' Opinion of Tom DeLay:

Favorable: 37%
Unfavorable: 52%
Unfamiliar: 11%

Based on what you have heard or read, do you think the charges against DeLay are definitely true, probably true, probably not true, or definitely not true?

Definitely True: 15%
Probably True: 40%
Probably False: 26
Definitely False: 8%

That's right, only 32% of his own constitutents think the charges are not true.  And he's running at 36%.  Wow.  To be frank, I never thought he'd lose support in his own district.  Looks like I was wrong.

No sir:

The nation's top military man, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, said American troops in Iraq have a duty to intercede and stop abuse of prisoners by Iraqi security personnel.When Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld contradicted Pace, the general stood firm.  Rumsfeld told the general he believed Pace meant to say the U.S. soldiers had to report the abuse, not stop it.  Pace stuck to his original statement.  "If they are physically present when inhumane treatment is taking place, sir, they have an obligation to try to stop it," Pace told his civilian boss.  The unusual exchange occurred during a discussion at a news conference about the relationship between U.S. forces in Iraq and an Iraqi government considered sovereign by the United States.

Nobody should be on board with torture, torture-light, whatever you want to call it.  Its wrong.  End of story.

Boom.  Our very own 18 1/2 Minute gap:

But those close to the probe tell RAW STORY that Fitzgerald obtained documentary evidence showing that other unrelated calls transferred to Rove’s office by the switchboard were logged. He then called Ralston back to testify.

Earlier this month, attorneys say Fitzgerald received additional testimony from Ralston -- who said that Rove instructed her not to log a phone call Rove had with Cooper about Plame in July 2003.

We shall see on this one.  This is so explosive that it might not be true.  Its almost too good to be true.

Wow.  Again.  Now Bush is touting his own withdrawal plan--despite the fact it called the author of a similar withdrawal plan as  "endorsing the policy positions of Michael Moore and the extreme liberal wing of the Democratic party."

There is a strong consensus building in Washington in favor of President Bush's strategy for victory in Iraq. As the Iraqi security forces gain strength and experience, we can lessen our troop presence in the country without losing our capability to effectively defeat the terrorists. Today, Sen. Biden described a plan remarkably similar to the Administration's plan to fight and win the war on terror.

Looks like Bush is trying to work his way into the Cut and Run Crew.^TM  Wonder how long it will be before he's demanding that he turn over all of the documents on pre-war intelligence and demanding that Alito step down because of his "conservative views."

What's been going on here for some time now is a negative 100 days.  Political scientists have often looked to the first 100 days of a presidency as a barometer to what that presidency may become.  Here we have the opposite, an unraveling of almost everything that this president has done over the last five years in a similarly short period of time.  Few falls have been as precipitous.  None will ever be as memorable.  Our children will ask us about these days.

Seems like everyone is on the pullout bandwagon of late.  Obama, the Iraqis, you name it.

Update: 12:22 Wed: Jesus!  Bill O'Reilly joins the cut-and-run crew. 

Idiot.

PRESIDENT Bush planned to bomb Arab TV station al-Jazeera in friendly Qatar, a "Top Secret" No 10 memo reveals.

But he was talked out of it at a White House summit by Tony Blair, who said it would provoke a worldwide backlash.

Bush disclosed his plan to target al-Jazeera, a civilian station with a huge Mid-East following, at a White House face-to-face with Mr Blair on April 16 last year.

At the time, the US was launching an all-out assault on insurgents in the Iraqi town of Fallujah.

Again, idiot.

Apparently the Iraqi government thinks that the insurgents have a right to target U.S. troops.

Leaders of Iraq's sharply divided Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis called Monday for a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S.-led forces in the country and said Iraq's opposition had a ``legitimate right'' of resistance.

The final communique, hammered out at the end of three days of negotiations at a preparatory reconciliation conference under the auspices of the Arab League, condemned terrorism, but was a clear acknowledgment of the Sunni position that insurgents should not be labeled as terrorists if their operations do not target innocent civilians or institutions designed to provide for the welfare of Iraqi citizens.

 The participants in Cairo agreed on ``calling for the withdrawal of foreign troops according to a timetable, through putting in place an immediate national program to rebuild the armed forces ... control the borders and the security situation'' and end terror attacks.

Can't exactly say these guys are off the reservation, can we?

The conference was attended by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and Iraqi Shiite and Kurdish lawmakers, as well as leading Sunni politicians.

In Egypt, the final communique's attempt to define terrorism omitted any reference to attacks against U.S. or Iraqi forces. Delegates from across the political and religious spectrum said the omission was intentional. They spoke anonymously, saying they feared retribution.

Though resistance is a legitimate right for all people, terrorism does not represent resistance. Therefore, we condemn terrorism and acts of violence, killing and kidnapping targeting Iraqi citizens and humanitarian, civil, government institutions, national resources and houses of worships,'' the document said.

On the one hand, it looks like they are rejecting the foreign fighters--a first step to unity.  On the other hand, they are saying its OK for the insurgents to attack American troops.  I'm so not for this.

Back in the mid-1990s, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, aggressively delving into alleged misconduct by the Clinton administration, logged 140 hours of sworn testimony into whether former president Bill Clinton had used the White House Christmas card list to identify potential Democratic donors.  In the past two years, a House committee has managed to take only 12 hours of sworn testimony about the abuse of prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming

The GOP's stunt against Murtha fools no one.

Fineman, no Democrat, tells it like it is:

An Ohio backbencher named Jean Schmidt, eager to demonstrate coldbloodedness, was given time by GOP leaders to relate a phone call from a Marine whom she said wanted "to send Congressman Murtha a message: that cowards cut and run, Marines never do." Furious Democrats charged down the aisles, fists in the air, shouting that Schmidt's words had to be stricken from the record. "You guys are pathetic!" yelled Rep. Martin Meehan of Massachusetts, while Rep. Harold Ford of Tennessee charged into the GOP side to confront them. The melee was so intense that it brought the soothing presence of Rep. Tom DeLay from his secure undisclosed location, and Schmidt eventually apologized. By a vote of 403-3, the House ultimately rejected a bowdlerized version of Murtha's resolution, which the GOP had crafted (without Murtha's permission) to sound as cravenly antiwar as possible. Seeing the obvious trap, virtually every Democrat, including Murtha, voted against it.

Nobody's buying what they are selling anymore.

The German intelligence officials responsible for one of the most important informants on Saddam Hussein's suspected weapons of mass destruction say that the Bush administration and the CIA repeatedly exaggerated his claims during the run-up to the war in Iraq.  

But there's more:

The White House, for example, ignored evidence gathered by United Nations weapons inspectors shortly before the war that disproved Curveball's account. Bush and his aides issued increasingly dire warnings about Iraq's biological weapons before the war even though intelligence from Curveball had not changed in two years.

At the Central Intelligence Agency, officials embraced Curveball's account even though they could not confirm it or interview him until a year after the invasion. They ignored multiple warnings about his reliability before the war, punished in-house critics who provided proof that he had lied and refused to admit error until May 2004, 14 months after the invasion.

After the CIA vouched for Curveball's accounts, Bush declared in his 2003 State of the Union speech that Iraq had "mobile biological weapons labs" designed to produce "germ warfare agents." Bush cited the mobile germ factories in at least four prewar speeches and statements, and other world leaders repeated the charge.

CIA officials now concede that the Iraqi fused fact, research he gleaned on the Internet and what his former co-workers called "water cooler gossip" into a nightmarish fantasy that played on U.S. fears after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Curveball's motive, CIA officials said, was not to start a war. He simply was seeking a German visa.

But the story had holes.

"His information to us was very vague," said the senior German intelligence official. "He could not say if these things functioned, if they worked."  

But the CIA and the White House overlooked the holes in the story.

In a February 2003 radio address and statement, Bush warned that "first-hand witnesses have informed us that Iraq has at least seven mobile factories" for germ warfare. With these, Bush said, "Iraq could produce within just months hundreds of pounds of biological poisons."

They were warned:

Tyler Drumheller, then the head of CIA spying in Europe, called the BND station chief at the German embassy in Washington in September 2002 seeking access to Curveball.

Drumheller and the station chief met for lunch at the German's favorite seafood restaurant in upscale Georgetown. The German officer warned that Curveball had suffered a mental breakdown and was "crazy," the now-retired CIA veteran recalled.

"He said, first off, 'They won't let you see him,' " Drumheller said. " 'Second, there are a lot of problems. Principally, we think he's probably a fabricator.' "

Other warnings poured in. The CIA Berlin station chief wrote that the BND had "not been able to verify" Curveball's claims. The CIA doctor who met Curveball wrote to his supervisor shortly before Powell's speech questioning "the validity" of the Iraqi's information.

"Keep in mind that this war is going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn't say and the Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he's talking about," his supervisor wrote back, Senate investigators found. The supervisor later told them he was only voicing his opinion that war appeared inevitable.

And who was Curveball?

One CIA-led unit investigated Curveball himself. The leader was "Jerry," a veteran CIA bio-weapons analyst who had championed Curveball's case at the CIA weapons center. They found Curveball's personnel file in an Iraqi government storeroom. It was devastating.

Curveball was last in his engineering class, not first, as he had claimed. He was a low-level trainee engineer, not a project chief or site manager, as the CIA had insisted.

Most important, records showed Curveball had been fired in 1995, at the very time he said he had begun working on bio-warfare trucks. A former CIA official said Curveball also apparently was jailed for a sex crime and then drove a Baghdad taxi.

Its not like they weren't warned:

In December 2003, Kay flew back to CIA headquarters. He said he told Tenet that Curveball was a liar and he was convinced Iraq had no mobile labs or other illicit weapons. CIA officials confirm their exchange.

The article is the single most damning thing I have seen on this matter yet.