I didn't think it would happen and DP World pulling out of the deal saved the President from looking like an even bigger idiot.  Yet for a man who supposedly stands so much for strength, integrity and principle he definitely talks a good (at this point, pretty "tired") game but in the end he really doesn't have the guts to pull the trigger on such a controversial losing proposal. 

What is interesting is how the White House massaged the President's stand-tough image up to the end: Get Karl Rove on the line with the people in Dubai, tell them to withdraw from the deal, send the President out the next morning to reiterate his intention to veto all the bills coming out Congress trying to overturn the deal, DP World announces its pull-out a little later that evening and the President gets to say its too bad but Congress wasn't going to go along the next day.  Classic Bush White House.

Did I miss something or doesn't he look bad either way?  Ahh leadership!

I know straw polls from the Southern Republican Leadership Conferences don't mean much now but let's hope this one has some traction!  Bill Frist?  A Party in disarray, indeed.

This Administration.  It never does settle down into normalcy, does it?  People will ask us what it was like to live in these times. 

Claude Allen.  The President's Assistant for Domestic Policy until an abrupt resignation last month.  Turns out he was about to be arrested for low-level retail return fraud.  This is a man who George W. Bush had nominated to sit on the Fourth Circuit.

George W. Bush.  A whirling ball of unlucky incompetence.

Guest writer Bill Leighly -- poet/prince of the Midwest -- logs in:

Turn Away from the Machine

I  got home from work yesterday and grabbed a busch light and turned on the news... preface this with the fact that I have been in intense pain since Wed. after having a fucked-up root canal, and that the right side of my face has swollen to the size of a moderate softball (yes I am now on strong antibiotics and I have some vicadin if necessary) and that my mood under severe pain and sleep-deprivation always swings into the intensely cynical... anyways I had walked home from work thru the rain, picked up some drugs at Walgreens and then a six-pack and some smokes at the Licka Stoh (no I am not an alcoholic... I only drink on certian days at certain times... the same goes for the smokes... actually I am a long-distance runner but somehow started smoking only while drinking beer, I now have a hard time separating the two activities)... so I had arrived at my decrepit flat, exhausted as hell from no sleep Wed. night (that night I spent moaning in misery and watching my face swell up while popping codeine pills every hour to absolutely no effect) and flipped on the goddamm tube... I don't watch too much T.V., hardly any in fact... but because I had arrived home early (leaving work due to the discomfort) I was in time to catch the World News on one of the networks (I don't have cable)... I believe it was NBC... I lit up a Camel and took a sip of beer and leaned back to relax... after absorbing 30 minutes of theWorld News on NBC I had come to the conclusion that it was nothing but propoganda interspersed with multitudinous automobile commercials... later that evening I headed out into the cold rain for a beer or two at my pub... there I watched more goddamm automobile commercials interspersed with a basketball game... anyways the purpose of this rambling blog is that I am FED UP with American middle class society, FED UP with the gluttony, the wastefulness, the materialism, the mindlessness that constitute its foundation... FED UP with this modern existence under the Empire where every original thought has been extracted as ruthlessly as the root from my throbbing tooth...so I shall turn away from the Machine...

Overlooked by probably every single casual male opponent of abortion:

I just realized that those nuts in South Dakota might be having an unanticipated effect. I am working today and this guy said to me over lunch, "I can't believe that these people are really serious." He's a bit of a putz and he admitted that he'd believed women were exaggerating the threat. I said "I hope you're ready to be daddies, boys. Last time abortion was illegal they didn't have DNA testing" and they all looked stunned.

Its an attack on men's liberty of intimate association too.  Especially when they go after birth control, which is next.

Two final members:  Bush and Blair.

J. Scott Barnard can be a most keen observer of politics.

During a dissection of Tom Goldstein's take on the war, Sifu Tweety cuts to the heart of the matter--Bush has always seen the primary battlefield in our current spate of wars as the United States.  No wonder he hasn't won over there--he's wasting his time fighting "Demmycrats" over here instead of actually paying attention to the war over there:

Here’s my little translator’s key to this emerging talking point: Republicans attach incredible importance to media criticism of the war, because they genuinely believe that the war is won and lost IN THE MEDIA. The American media, that is. Their partisan selves are so thoroughly embedded in the culture-jamming electioneering of the Rovist personality cult the GOP has become that they genuinely don’t recognize the difference between actually achieving peace and a non-doomed secular democracy in Iraq, and just being able to plausibly claim that peace on American TV.

The gang that couldn't shoot straight.

Remember this ditty about the three virtually empty Carnival Cruise ships meant to house Katrina survivors that cost the government over $230 million.  Well, Henry Waxman, having gone through e-mails provided by former FEMA head Mike "Brownie" Brown, is asking why it appears Florida Gov. Jeb Bush had a big hand in pushing the deal through. 

Before you ask, yes, Carnival Cruise lines is a big donor to the Florida and National Republican parties.

Nancy Grace of CNN has an annoying habit of bending the truth.  A lot.  Its no suprise then that the New York Observer has found that her struggle with truth is endemic to her very existence.  (Thanks, Atrios).

In February, Ms. Grace’s staff was ordered to attend a three-hour workshop on reporting basics to help remedy “lax journalistic standards,” according to a CNN source. The session covered issues such as the meaning of “off the record” and the number of sources it takes to confirm a piece of information.

[I]n 2005, the 11th Circuit Court in Georgia declared that Ms. Grace had “played fast and loose” with facts in her 1990 triple-murder prosecution of Herbert Connell Stephens. In 1997, the Georgia Supreme Court overturned an arson-murder verdict, finding Ms. Grace had withheld evidence from the defense; in 1994, the same court had overturned her conviction of a heroin trafficker, finding problems with her closing argument.

Its only a matter of time before she really steps into it.