Thieves in the Temple.

maybe it's time to start catblogging.

No time for a lengthy post today, due to a morning appointment -- just thought I'd say how strange it is to live in a world where Arlen Specter is a Democrat.

Is it stranger than the world where Tom Coughlin actually won a Super Bowl ring? It may well be.

snark at the speed of sound!

I have no urgent action alerts today, nor urgent penny rants percolating, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to note that Senator Specter turned against the Employee Free Choice Act yesterday, citing the bad economy, etc., and promising to reconsider when the economy returns to "normalcy." Senator Specter's move is, of course, completely unexpected. And by "completely unexpected," please understand that I mean "what he always does when he's the deciding vote on something that will displease his party."

National Intelligence Estimate: Iran not making nukes.

Crow sandwich, Mr. Bush? To go along with your crow soup and your crow salad and your tall glass of iced crow?

Obviously, I don't interpret the NIE to mean that Iran will never, ever pursue nuclear weapons. I interpret the NIE to mean that Iran is not the imminent threat to world security Mr. Bush and his corporate cronies want us to think it is, and, moreover, that any desire Iran has for nukes could be contained by, you know, multilateral disarmament treaties and the like. And if rage-addled Bush supporters, in the face of this report, continue to attack the rest of us as "weak" or "reality-addled," I will continue to interpret their behavior as projection.

how to win the Iraq war.

One, institute a draft, so we can triple our fighting forces in Iraq. General Shinseki said we'd need that large a force to lock Iraq down, and he was fired (or "forced into retirement" or whatever) for it, so he must have been on to something.

Two, institute a massive income tax increase on the top one-fifth of one percent of the population. From 33% to 93% should do it. One ought to fund a war one wants to fight, and one ought to fund it at the expense of those who'd benefit the most financially therefrom.

Chickenhawks who do not have the will to do these things can take their "traitor" and "defeatocrat" and "surrender monkey" and "helper of terrorists" and "objectively pro-Saddam" and cram it.

UPDATE. Paragraph one rewritten, so you don't think General Shinseki called for a draft, which as far as I know he didn't (he just thought we should move a lot more troops into Iraq).

we all fall/even Jack the Lad.

Just when you thought Mitt Romney couldn't find new ways to pander, he goes and does this.

Let me guess: "I didn't know what was on the sign."

the cradle rocks above an abyss.

I understand that the party of Useful Idiots for al-Qaeda is, how do we put this, getting a bit desperate. Here's Rick Santorum comparing the war in Iraq to The Lord of the Rings. He'd prefer the Eye of Mordor to be over there rather than over here, never mind what the good citizens of over-there might have preferred. And there's Ken Blackwell spreading rumors about Ted Strickland's sexuality on the flimsiest of pretexts; Blackwell couldn't even find or fake a text message. And then there's the truly amazing Cliff Kinkaid, ready with 27 questions at the next News Corporation stockholders' meeting because he thinks Fox News is trending left. You know, because they occasionally say something Cliff Kinkaid doesn't want to hear, which phenomenon is the very definition of bias. With men like these bearing the standard of righteousness, the terrorists just might win.

And with men like these bearing the standard of righteousness, Karl Rove may well have an October surprise in the pipeline so odious, so shocking, so disgusting that he's going to taste holy toe cheese for all eternity.

"certainly happening at the right time."

Washington Wire suggests that falling gas prices could benefit Republicans on Election Day.

Er, not if Americans think that there's a special relationship between falling gas prices and said Election Day.

just a good ol' boy/never meanin' no harm.

Senator George Allen's team of crack linguists fails him at a rally.

Allen's campaign later said that "macaca" isn't a racist remark per se but is just a word he and his gang of crack linguists made up to mean "shit-head."  Well, that's much better.  And when he wore that Confederate flag pin on his lapel as a youth, he wasn't being a racist; he was being a rebel.  How quickly right-wingers embrace post-structuralist ambiguity about the relationship of signifier and signified when it's their ass in the fire.

UPDATE. Hey, everybody, I apologize for dropping one of the Seven Words in the above paragraph. I just couldn't think of another way of getting the point across. Thus endeth a streak of some 315-odd days without uttering a single Really Bad Word in this blog, though I've been tempted plenty of times, what with the way Congress acts and all.

quick snark.

Mr. Bush's "special assistant and personal aide" gets into Harvard Business School despite having attended only one year of undergraduate studies.

Well, thank God Bush opposes affirmative action!

special programming note!

We're almost halfway through Our Vacation From Congress -- they'll be off until March 27. So enjoy it while you can.

Yes, I'm aware that Mr. Bush has been getting some tough questions on his little PR tour. But, as I've suggested before, I wouldn't put it past Tha Bush Mobb to have planted those, too.

why I did not send money to the Democratic National Committee for the four hundredth time.

Because in an otherwise sympathetic letter I received on Friday, Dr. Howard Dean said, "Democrats have to win to lead." And he underlined it.

I'm tired of hearing how Democrats can't do anything unless they have a majority.

Democrats don't have to win to lead.

They have to lead to lead.

Philadelphia Freedom!

More proof that talking plain and being smart and having moral values can all coexist happily in the same place:  the Friday edition of the Philadelphia Daily News juxtaposes two related items on page three.  On the left, we read about the impending marriage of Elton John and his beloved in Great Britain; and on the right, we read about the impending divorce of that mid-thirties boy-band guy and that mid-level pop singer who played Daisy Duke in that Dukes of Hazzard remake.

Just to reiterate:  happy gay couple to get married after twelve years of committment, unhappy hetero couple getting divorced after three years of getting far too much publicity for their marriage, and the Daily News puts them right next to each other.

Ha, ha, ha.

But I guess I shouldn't laugh too hard.  Mr. John and Mr. Furnish are getting married in Great Britain.  In America we have religious bigots to "protect" marriage from people like Sir Elton.

(Officially, registration required to read these two articles, but again, I had no trouble reading them without registering today.)

"Ex-FEMA Head Starts Disaster Planning Firm."

Yeah, he'll be planning some disasters all right.

My favorite paragraph is this one:

"Brown said officials need to 'take inventory' of what's going on in a disaster to be able to answer questions to avoid appearing unaware of how serious a situation is."

You mean you don't need to "take inventory" of what's going on so you can prevent the disaster from spiraling out of control?  He hasn't learned a damn thing, has he?

That's what you get from "conservatives" these days -- all they care about is how they look.  They never care about what they do.  Hence Accountability One, who can't manage a budget or a war.

In other news:  Pat Robertson starts international conflict management consulting firm.