Nuke Saudi Arabia. Do It Now.

Steve M. says President Obama will probably send ground troops to the Syria/Iraq Permanent Hellhole of Futility after the election.

I think he's right, and I think the only way to stop it is to turn the real trouble-maker in the region into a giant sheet of glass.

I mean it. There is no reason not to and and infinite number of reasons to do it.

Revenge for 9-11, three-quarters of the terrorists of which came from Saudia Arabia?  Nuke Saudi Arabia.

Shut off the money flow to Islamic terrorists worldwide?  Nuke Saudi Arabia.

Punch the fossil fuel industry in the nuts, maybe long enough to get renewable energy really off and running?  Nuke Saudi Arabia.

Eliminate the economic, social and religious source of the 9th-century backward bullshit that enslaves a billion women and children around the world?  Nuke Saudi Arabia.

Kevin Drum:

I don't think the world has a Muslim problem. It has a Saudi Arabia problem. The closer a country is to the warped influence of Saudi Arabia, the more violent and illiberal it is. Go west to Tunisia and Morocco and Islam becomes more moderate. Go north to Turkey and it becomes more moderate. Go east to India and Indonesia and it becomes more moderate.

Obviously this is hardly a perfect correlation. If you want to find exceptions, you can. But generally speaking, Saudi Arabia is the epicenter of Islam's problems, a country that stands for virtually everything that the liberal West condemns. It is almost feudally anti-democratic. It is corrupt. It is theocratic. It treats women and gays horribly. Its legal system is barbarous. It is intolerant of any religion other than its own fundamentalist strain of Wahabi Islam. It is no coincidence that 15 of the 19 terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 came from Saudi Arabia and the rest came from nearby countries. Saudi Arabia is a country that, by rights, should be shunned by every government on the planet.

But they're not. For historical reasons, we've instead forged a longtime alliance with the princes of Riyadh. The world is paying a high price for this.

QOTD: Useless Air Strikes

Kevin Drum:

But guess what? The Iraqi army is still incompetent. America's allies still have their own agendas and don't care about ours. Air campaigns still aren't enough on their own to stop a concerted ground attack. This is the way things are. There are no magic wands. If you want quick results against ISIS, then speak up and tell us you want to send in 100,000 troops. If you're not willing to do that, then you have to accept that lots of innocent people are going to die without the United States being able to offer much help. Make your choice now.

"The United States cannot and should not intervene every time there’s a crisis in the world"

Nor can nor should the United States send American service men and women to die in some hellhole to protect the profits of multination corporations that don't even pay American taxes. Gather up the warmongers giving you bad advice and treat them to a showing of "Good Morning America."  Where Indochina was 50 years ago is we are right now in the Middle East, and it's not fucking funny.




Full transcript here.

Grimes Talks Sense on Iraq

I'll be damned.  Alison passing up the opportunity to bash President Obama on a current event.

Maybe she's seen the graves of some of the 115 Kentuckians who died for Smirky/Darth's Excellent Adventure in Iraq and Afghanistan.

From the AP:

Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes says she would not support sending U.S. troops back to Iraq.

Islamic militants once linked to al-Qaida have taken Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, and have vowed to advance on Baghdad. In a statement released Friday to The Associated Press, Grimes called the situation very dangerous and concerning. But she said ultimately the fight is up to the people of Iraq. Grimes said the United States should play a supportive role by providing useful intelligence.

Who Got the Missing $6.6 Billion in Iraq ?

I'm going to take no risk and all and say at least half of it went into the pockets of U.S. contractors like Blackwater and Halliburton and KBR. Do you really think those motherfuckers were satisfied with the billions they were stealing directly from U.S. taxpayers?

Scarecrow at Firedoglake:

Suppose the US decided it wanted to invest $6 billion or so in the economy by paying people to fix stuff and rebuild the infrastructure of a destroyed economy. How would you do it?

Well, supposedly the people who understand these things would start with an account in an established, honest bank. Let’s call it the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The US Treasury would direct the Feds to credit that account with the $6 billion or so, and then disburse money from the account as directed.

The Fed would then follow the instructions it was given, with electronic transfers accomplished through recorded debits here and credits to the accounts of the bank of the intended recipients, or those authorized to make the dispersants. There would be electronic records to account for every dollar. None of this would require a single actual dollar or hundred dollar bill to be created, deposited or transferred. That is not how it’s supposed to work in this millenium.

As the recipient bank received instructions for disbursements, it would in turn credit the accounts of the ultimate recipients, who could then use those credited accounts to pay the workers and providers of ultimate goods and services. The workers would have their own bank accounts, and their paychecks could even be credited to them directly, still with no actual dollar bills being required and all transactions fully recorded and traceable.

But that’s not how the Bush Administration did things in Iraq. Instead, they had the NY Fed literally stack up cash, $6.6 billion of it, into several truckloads of $100 bills, haul them to an AF base, where these huge bundles of cash were loaded onto AF planes and flown to Iraq. Once there, the bundles were thrown in sacks and distributed somehow to. . . . Uh, we have no clue. We can’t find the money and have no idea where it went.

This is mostly old news, but good grief!! It is as though they deliberately designed a plot to make it easy to steal $6.6 billion. And everyone who had anything to do with planning or approving this mindless action turned scandal should be named, shamed, and banned from any government position, forever. Many should be under arrest, or held as material witnesses to possibly the most reckless plan or egregious bank heist in history, at least until the 2008 bailouts.

What is the matter with these people?

Whatever do you mean, scarecrow? There's nothing wrong with them. They are the epitome of republican corporatism - shining examples to the world of how not to do capitalism. Or democracy.

Help Big Ass Fans Bring Iraq Donkey to America

Big Ass Fans is a local Lexington manufacturer that is doing well, even in this recession. They also have a good sense of humor, illustrated by the name and their logo image of the rear end of a donkey.

In 2008, Bluegrass Field, the Lexington Airport, rejected the company's proposed sign "Welcome to Lexington, Home of Big Ass Fans" and the company ridiculed the decision in a press release. Since then the company and the airport have reached an accommodation, but the incident stands as a reminder that Lexington is not quite as cosmopolitan as some of us would like to believe.

But now, Lexingtonians, Kentuckians and Big Ass Fans fans worldwide can show their apprection by helping Big Ass Fans bring a donkey from Iraq to the United States.

For years, Lexington-based Big Ass Fans has provided financial support to a Colorado donkey shelter as a tribute to the company's mascot, Fanny. Now the company is taking it a step further. It plans to help pay for the rescue of a donkey that befriended American soldiers in Iraq and is destined to become a therapy pet for families of military members who were wounded or killed in battle.

Smoke, as the donkey is called, was malnourished when he was adopted by military personnel based near Fallujah in August 2008, said retired Col. John Folsom, who founded and leads Wounded Warriors Family Support.

Folsom said soldiers would send photos of Smoke to their children, and the smoky-gray donkey would get care packages and fan mail from the kids.

Follow Smoke the donkey on twitter here.

A Last Fuck-You from the Loyal Bushies

Zandar brings us the bad news:

And the charges against the Blackwater Five have been thrown out.

A federal judge dismissed manslaughter charges Thursday against five Blackwater security guards in the 2007 deaths of Iraqi civilians in a Baghad square, finding that prosecutors wrongly used the men's own statements against them.

The September 2007 shootout in Baghdad's Nusoor Square left 17 Iraqis dead and two dozen wounded. The killings led Iraq's government to slap limits on security contractors hired by Blackwater, now known as Xe, and other firms.

U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina found that the government's case was built largely on "statements compelled under a threat of job loss in a subsequent criminal prosecution," a violation of the Fifth Amendment rights of the five men charged.

"In their zeal to bring charges against the defendant in this case, the prosecutors and investigators aggressively sought out statements the defendants had been compelled to make to government investigators in the immediate aftermath of the shooting and in the subsequent investigation," Urbina wrote in a 90-page decision.

Federal prosecutors "repeatedly disregarded the warnings of experienced, senior prosecutors assigned to the case" in doing so, he found.

Urbina also sharply criticized prosecutors and federal agents who developed the case, calling their explanations for using the guards' statements "all too often contradictory, unbelievable and lacking in credibility."

So that's it then. 17 dead and there's not enough evidence to even convict on manslaughter charges. Of course it's not like it mattered...they're just Iraqis, after all. Why would anyone think that would matter?

Gosh, it's almost like the Bushies put together such a terrible, incompetent case in 2007 that it was destined to fail, then handed it to Obama.

Now, where have I seen that play before?

Unfortunately, this won't be the last fuck-you from Smirky/Darth and the loyal bushies. Until and unless the White House faces the necessity of rounding up every single one of the lying motherfuckers and prosecuting them for war crimes, shit like this is going to poison and destroy everything President Obama tries to accomplish.

The Things We Leave Behind

So. U.S. troops met the supposedly impossible June 30 deadline to withdraw from Iraqi cities. Out-of-Iraq-now fanatic that I am, why aren't I celebrating? Because what we've left behind is far, far worse.

Anybody remember the death squads the U.S. trained in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala? The tens of thousands of natives they massacred? The nuns they raped and murdered? The democratic governments they destroyed? The civil societies they set back decades?

Yeah, they were such a huge success the U.S. military has transplanted them to Iraq, where they're already terrorizing the population.

The light is fading from the dusty Baghdad sky as Hassan Mahsan re-enacts what happened to his family last summer ...

He walks over to his three-foot-tall daughter and grabs her head like a melon. As she stands there, he gestures wildly behind her, pretending to tie up her hands, then pretending to point a rifle at her head. "They took the blindfold off me, pointed the gun at her head and cocked it, saying, 'Either you tell us where al-Zaydawi is, or we kill your daughter.'"

SNIP

They accused him of being a commander in the local militia, the Mahdi Army, before they dragged him off, telling his wife he was "finished." But before they left, they identified themselves. "We are the Special Forces. The dirty brigade," Hassan recalls them saying.

The Iraq Special Operations Forces (ISOF) is probably the largest special forces outfit ever built by the United States, and it is free of many of the controls that most governments employ to rein in such lethal forces. The project started in the deserts of Jordan just after the Americans took Baghdad in April 2003. There, the US Army's Special Forces, or Green Berets, trained mostly 18-year-old Iraqis with no prior military experience. The resulting brigade was a Green Beret's dream come true: a deadly, elite, covert unit, fully fitted with American equipment, that would operate for years under US command and be unaccountable to Iraqi ministries and the normal political process.

When the US Special Forces began the slow transfer of the ISOF to Iraqi control in April 2007, they didn't put it under the command of the Defense Ministry or the Interior Ministry, bodies that normally control similar special forces the world over. Instead, the Americans pressured the Iraqi government to create a new minister-level office called the Counter-Terrorism Bureau. Established by a directive from Iraq's prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, the CTB answers directly to him and commands the ISOF independently of the police and army. According to Maliki's directive, the Iraqi Parliament has no influence over the ISOF and knows little about its mission.

SNIP

Trombitas gets to the issue of human rights before I do. He assures me that US Special Forces take allegations of human rights abuses very seriously--two Iraqi men were let go for prisoner abuse since he took over in August last year, he says--but he won't comment on specific cases. I raise the issue of accountability and bring up one well-documented mission that caused waves in the Iraqi Parliament: in August the ISOF raided Diyala's provincial government compound, reportedly with the support of US Apache helicopters. They arrested a member of the Iraqi Islamic Party, Iraq's main Sunni Arab party. They also arrested the president of the university, also a Sunni, and killed a secretary and wounded four armed guards during the night.

I barely get the word "Diyala" out of my mouth before the American operatives standing around us start to grumble nervously and a translator jumps in. "For the reputation of the ISOF, please, let's cut that off," he says.

Read the whole thing.

There Is No War In Iraq

There is no war in Iraq.

There is an illegal occupation.

There is criminal profiteering.

There is a sectarian bloodbath.

There is a human, economic and Constitutional catastrophe.

But there is no war in Iraq.

To refer to what is happening in Iraq in terms properly applied to war – “the enemy,” “missions,” “battles,” "combat,” “tactics,” “bases,” and “victory” is to engage in deliberate misdirection.

Or to fundamentally misunderstand what America has done to Iraq.

We are oppressing a civilian population that posed no threat to us and did nothing to us to justify this oppression.

Illegally and in defiance of the specific pleas of our allies around the world to refrain, we launched an unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation that had made no threat against us, had not even the capacity to threaten us at all.

We are the aggressors.

We are the bad guys.

We are in the wrong.

Any discussion of what to do next in Iraq that does not begin by acknowledging the irrefutable facts above is nothing other than a farce based on lies.

And if you still don't understand that the only terrorists in Iraq are the ones our illegal invasion and occupation created, then you need to put the mouse down and back away from the computer slowly.

Don't come back until you're back on your meds.

For details, here's Fred Kaplan on how Bush is guaranteeing defeat in Iraq, and here's Glenn Greenwald on how the war hawks still haven't learned their lesson.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.

Put Your Civil Liberties Down and Back Away Slowly

I have just finished reading Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy by Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage, and can sum it up this way:

The phrase "we are so completely fucked" is the understatement of the century.

Over the past two years, as one outrage after another by the Smirky-Darth administration has come to light, the cumulative impact has been numbing: Abu Graib, torture, rape and murder of innocent civilians, American citizens secretly and indefinitely detained, warrantless wiretapping of anyone and everyone, hundreds of billions of dollars stolen from taxpayers to enrich bush/cheney cronies, laws ignored, laws broken, the Constitution shredded.

Even the death of our last hope - the self-strangling of the "Democratic" Congress - is just one more hardly-felt blow to a body politic already at death's door.

The great revelation of Savage's meticulously documented book is just how thoroughly, successfully and permanently this maladminstration has stripped power from citizens, from Congress, from the bureaucracy and from the courts, until there is legally and literally nothing anyone can do to stop this or any other president from exercising the absolute power he has finally acquired.

Right now, this minute, if Smirky took it into his head to declare martial law, dispatch Blackwater to round up everyone who objects and throw them into Guantanamo forever or just summarily execute them, there is nothing - nothing - to stop him.

Martial law? Specifically authorized by Congress in the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

Secret and indefinite detention of citizens? Once it was stopped only by the prospect of a Supreme Court decision on Jose Padilla, but Congress specifically stripped the courts of jurisdiction in such cases in - you guessed it - the MCA.

"The Republican-led Congress used the Military Commissions Act to virtually eliminate the possibiity that the Supreme Court could ever again act as a check on a president's power in the war on terrorism. The bill aslo granted a congressional blessing, in statute, for many of the hugely expanded executive pwoers that the Bush-Cheney administration had previously seized onb its own, ensuring that they would be even more difficult to roll back."

The "Commander in Chief" of America now has powers over his own citizenry that dictators like Pinochet, Somoza, and Mugabe, who slaughtered thousands of their countrymen, could only dream of.

Because the powers of the "Commander in Chief" of America were handed to him on a silver platter by a Congress democratically elected by the people.

We asked for it, we deserve it, we got it.

Forgive us, Ben: you gave us a Republic, but we couldn't keep it.

If you're thinking about next year's elections, don't bother. Seriously, if you'd spent seven years accumulating unprecedented power, the kind of power that allows you to straddle the world as a colossus and do exactly as you damn well please, would you just give it up and walk away? Especially if it meant handing all that hard-won power to someone who stands for everything you hate, despise and loathe?

And if you were that someone, suddenly handed, by virtue of having won a democratic election, power on the level of that wielded by medieval kings, would you demand that Congress take it away from you? Especially when you need all the power you can get to undo the damage done to your beloved country and the world over the previous eight years?

The kind of power that we, the people, have handed to the Commander in Chief of America is the kind of power I wouldn't trust in the hands of anyone. Not Obama, not Edwards, and certainly not Hillary.

Hell, that kind of power would turn even gentle, Department-of-Peace-creating Dennis Kucinich into a monster.

We are lip-deep in the quicksand, people, and sinking fast. This one is not going to be fixable in a year, or a decade, or a generation.

No, I don't have the answer. I don't think a real, bullets-flying revolution is practical, much less winnable. Nor do I think continuing to elect "Democrats" who perpetuate the status quo is going to cut it.

But because so many of these dictatorial powers are tied to Smirky's claims of inherent and exclusive executive powers in prosecuting the "war on terror," the key may be taking that excuse away.

I've argued for a long time that the Iraq occupation and the temporarily derailed attack on Iran have nothing to do with terror, oil or even enriching cronies. They are all about creating and perpetuating permanent war. And permanent war is the one irreplaceable ingredient in establishing and maintaining a dictatorship.

Leaders at peace are leaders with minimal power. Leaders at war have carte blanche.

So the first step in restoring the Constitution is to not just end the Iraq occupation, but change the "war on terror" into what it should have been from the beginning: a criminal investigation, with law enforcement making arrests and civilian courts trying suspects before civilian juries.

It's going to be a long, hard slog through the enemy jungle, dodging snipers, drinking fever-water, eating our boots.

But it's one we've faced before, and one that the smartest sumbitches who ever lived (thank you Molly) knew we'd face again. One of them spoke the words that gave them strength then, and give me strength now:

Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death."

Happy New Year.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.

Yet Another Coverup of a Murdered Soldier in the "War on Terra"

If you liked the Pat Tillman case, you'll love this one.

The Angry Independent, guest-posting on The Rude Pundit (no permlink - scroll down to America's Forgotten Soldier) details the horrific case of Private Lavena Lynn Johnson.

Young Pvt. Lavena Johnson, was killed in Iraq on July 19th, 2005. Evidence in the case points to assault and murder. However, the Army has been covering up the killing, calling the soldiers death a suicide instead. The Army has refused to provide the family with key documents, and has ignored the families attempts to find answers in their daughters death.

(SNIP)

My theory on what may have happened to this young soldier? She was likely a victim of a rape or sexual assault of some kind, likely by superior officers or enlisted soldiers. In an effort to cover up their crime and keep her from telling anyone, they decided to kill her. The evidence in the case shows that the suspect (s) attempted to destroy evidence at the crime scene, including an attempt to try to set the crime scene on fire. The new information also shows that there was a blood trail leading outside from Lavena's tent. If she shot herself in the head with an M-16, then she would not have been able to get up and walk outside of her tent to create the blood trail. Another person would have had to do that.

OR an alternate scenario could be that Lavena was a witness to or knew of serious criminal activity involving officers or senior enlisted folks over there. She must have saw something or heard something, and her superiors knew that she could be a witness against them. In an effort to guarantee that she would not tell what she knew, someone decided to have her killed.

____________________________

Fast Forward to May of 2007

Lavena Johnsons body was exhumed and an independent autopsy was performed. The final report is still pending. The Army is still stonewalling the family and Congress regarding documents and other evidence in the case.

This is currently where the case stands.

The publics help is still needed to get this story on the national stage. Once in the spotlight, pressure could be brought to bare to force officials into action.

Please call or write your member of Congress. If you are a journalist or the editor of a newspaper or magazine, you could help by covering the story and getting the word out.

Incredibly depressing post-script: Need I mention that unlike non-hero Jessica Lynch, Pvt. Johnson is neither white nor blond?

Even Worse Than We Thought

In Salon, Juan Cole lays bare the lies behind the claimed reduction in violence in Iraq during July.

By the time all the casualties were counted and reported (not until early August), icasualties.org was giving the July toll as 80, only one less than in March, during the opening stages of the surge.

Worse, comparisons to previous months in the spring don't take into account the searing summer environment. Baghdad in July is one of those torrid colonial locales of which Noel Coward was speaking in his 1923 song when he wrote that only "mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun." The dip in casualties is always substantial in July, since guerrillas usually prefer not to operate with heavy explosives when it is 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade.

And as a tally noted on Foreign Policy magazine's blog, the number of U.S. troop deaths in July, compared with previous years of the war, is anything but a turn for the better:


July 2003: 48
July 2004: 54
July 2005: 54
July 2006: 43
July 2007: 80

(SNIP)

What has surged is not calm or political compromise, but rather the number of guerrilla attacks, the number of U.S. troop deaths compared to the same months in previous years, and the number of Iraqi casualties. That some of the U.S. media and the U.S. public have allowed themselves to be manipulated into thinking the "numbers" from Iraq are a cause for optimism echoes the sloppy and wishful thinking that got U.S. into this mess in the first place.

Iraqi access to electricity and even food and water has fallen, 2 million have been displaced internally and another million abroad since April of 2003. That is not encouraging, to say the least. The "national unity government" of Prime Minister al-Maliki is on the brink of total collapse, as the bad news piles up.

Indeed, the power of positive thinking is an old American value. But sometimes it causes people to fall for pyramid schemes, or even worse.

Yet more evidence than ever before that, as Kevin Drum has argued, the continued American occupation of Iraq is NOT postponing - much less avoiding - a civil war bloodbath, but rather aggravating it.

Red State, My Ass

As House and Senate Republicans search their souls in preparation for the inevitable veto override votes on bringing troops home from Iraq, perhaps they should ponder this:

New polling in red state Kentucky shows that people are overwhelmingly against the Usurper and on the side of the Democrats on Iraq.

Highlights:

• 64 percent favor starting to bring troops home this summer, and have them all home by summer 2008.
• 59 percent oppose - 45 percent strongly oppose - the Usurper's Surge.
• 67 percent rate the Usurper's handling of the war in Iraq negatively - 27 percent "not so good" and 40 percent poor.

Are you listening, Sen. Mitch McConnell? Sen. Jim Bunning? Reps Whitfield, Lewis, Davis and Rogers? You all voted with Dear Leader and against the majority of the Kentuckians you represent. All of you except Bunning are up for re-election next year. Do you really want offer up another opposition campaign commercial on a platter?

The 2008 Victory Train is leaving the station, y'all, and Friends of George will not be allowed on board.

Thanks to mcjoan at Daily Kos for bringing this Democratic Senate Campaign Committee poll to our attention.

The Surge Hits Kentucky in the Gut

57. Specialist William G. Bowling, 24, of Beattyville, Kentucky. He died 1 APR 07 in Baghdad, Iraq, when an improvised explosive device detonated near hisvehicle during combat operations. He was assigned to the 2nd Brigade Special Troops Battalion,2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, Fort Drum, New York.

There it is. The latest entry - posted just about an hour ago - in the list of Kentucky's sons and daughters killed while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Kentucky's 57th casualty since the first, in November 2003. It's been 10 weeks since the 56th, on January 17.

Specialist William G. Bowling. Twenty-four years old. From Beattyville, Kentucky, where he was no doubt born and raised.

Beattyville is the county seat of Lee County, in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky.

This week, the mountain forests are sprinkled with the purple of flowering Redbud trees, set off by surrounding white blooms of Dogwoods. When the wind blows, the Dogwood blooms swirl and fall like snowflakes.

Lee County nestles on the western edge of one of the poorest regions in the country, and consistently scores in the lowest 10 of Kentucky's 120 counties on just about every measure - employment, education, economic opportunity.

For all I know, Specialist Bowling comes from a well-off family. For all I know, he chose the Army out of a sense of duty and patriotism, rather than lack of alternatives. For all I know, he was following in the footsteps of his father and grandfathers.

But whether Specialist Bowling was rich or poor, blessed with alternatives or seeking an escape, I know this much:

Kentucky has lost 57 William Bowlings too many.

Beattyville couldn't afford to lose him.

He didn't deserve to die.

Do me a favor. Take a few minutes to find the web page of your state's Department of Veterans Affairs. It probably has a link to the list of your neighbors who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. Read it. Slowly.

Whatever is the last number on the list, write your Congressional Representatives and Senators and demand they make sure that that entry is the last.

Meet Mitch's Nemesis

Update Below

If you heard this morning’s Democratic Response to the latest blatherings of the Usurper, remember it. You may have heard the voice of …The Man Who Takes Down Mitch McConnell in 2008.

McConnell, Minority Leader of the U.S. Senate, has owned Kentucky since he beat two-term incumbent Dee Huddleston in 1984 with one of the original attack ads (bloodhounds searching the U.S. Capitol for Huddleston, who had a tendency to miss votes.)

But his star has been fading since his hand-picked Boy Guv, Ernie Fletcher, shat on the Governor’s Office carpet in 2004 by breaking state civil service laws to get his idiot cronies into state jobs.

Now national Democratic leaders have seen fit to reach deep into Kentucky politics to lift up Iraq War Veteran and retired Marine Lt. Col. Andrew Horne to give the Democratic response to Dear Leader’s weekly radio address today.

Horne lost the Democratic primary for Kentucky’s 3rd District Congressional seat (Louisville) last year to John Yarmuth, who went on to take down five-term incumbent Anne Northup, another McConnell protégé.

Yarmuth is now the heartthrob of Kentucky progressives, who hang on word of his Washington doings like prepubescent teens following Britney Spears.

But they also still carry a torch for Horne, whom they supported in the primary, before swallowing their pride after the primary loss and working their tails off for Yarmuth.

Horne was also endorsed in the primary by Change for Kentucky/Democracy for America, and I think I detect the brilliant hand of Democratic National Committee Chair and DFA founder Howard Dean in the selection of Horne for today’s response. Wouldn’t surprise me if Senator and Marine combat veteran Jim Webb had a hand in it too.

McConnell, who may be best known for his cast-in-stone opposition to campaign finance reform, has a reputation for campaign success second only to Karl Rove’s.

But we all know what happened to Karl in November.

And McConnell is up for re-election in 2008, at what will undoubtedly be his weakest point in 24 years.

Last week, we heard the first rumors here in Kentucky that Horne might take on McConnell next year. People leaped into action at the news, but one of his original supporters put a damper on it by saying Horne had made no decision yet.

I think we can start lining up campaign contributions now.

Update, April 1, 8:56 a.m.

Some choice excerpts from Horne's response to the Usurper:

" ... I am proud of my service, and very proud of those men and women currently in harm’s way who are doing their best in a terribly difficult situation.
...

"In short, the Commander-in-Chief has failed to properly lead the troops, and previous Congresses didn’t ask the tough questions, or demand accountability. The result is the mess we are in today

....

"... these bills both demand something that previous Congresses did not – accountability from the administration. Both bills demand that the President continue to verify that we are moving Iraq towards stability, and that we are on track to disengage our combat troops from the Iraqi Civil War by 2008.

...

"Accountability is something this administration has demanded of everyone else. Go to the website of the White House, and put in a search for the word “accountability.” What comes up is a list of nearly 2,000 pages on the site that mention the word.

...

"It's ironic that an administration that has touted its commitment to tying accountability to funding for things like schools or social programs is so opposed to any performance evaluation itself, especially with American lives on the line.

....

"Both Houses of Congress have done their jobs and will soon finish a bill that will provide for the troops. When they’re done, the only person who could keep funds from reaching troops would be the President. If the President vetoes this bill because he doesn’t want to formally demonstrate progress in Iraq, never in the history of war would there be a more blatant example of a Commander-in-Chief undermining the troops. There is absolutely no excuse for the President to withhold funding for the troops, and if he does exercise a veto, Congress must side with the troops and override it.

....

"As a loyal Marine who loves my country and my fellow troops and veterans, I ask you, Mr. President, please do not withhold funding from our troops because you are afraid to change course and show progress in Iraq."

More Money, Plus a Deadline

It looks like the House Dems may have come up with an Iraq bill the Usurper can't veto.

The House has passed a $124 billion war spending bill - wait, wait, it gets better - that sets an August 31, 2008 deadline for bringing the troops home.

The Washington Post initially managed to spin it as a defeat for liberals (seriously, why hasn't Ben Bradlee beaten the crap out of every editor there yet?), but dropped that nonsense after the final vote.

It's a military spending bill with a troop withdrawal deadline. Boy George has sworn to veto any Iraq deadline, but wouldn't vetoing the funding mean hurting the troops?

The vote was 218-212, with two Republicans voting yes and 14 Democrats voting no.

The two Republicans voting yes were Walter B. Jones of North Carolina and Wayne T. Gilchrest of Maryland. Seems to me I've heard good things about Jones before, in terms of being kool-aid-resistant, but why does Gilchrest hate America?

The 14 Democrats voting no were John Barrow (Ga.), Dan Boren (Okla.), Lincoln Davis (Tenn.), Dennis J. Kucinich (Ohio), Barbara Lee (Calif.), John Lewis (Ga.), Gene Taylor (Miss.), Jim Marshall (Ga.), Jim Matheson (Utah), Michael R. McNulty (N.Y.), Michael H. Michaud (Maine), Maxine Waters (Calif.), Diane Watson (Calif.) and Lynn Woolsey (Calif.).

I'd bet that Kucinich for sure and probably the California dems voted no because the deadline isn't yesterday, but does anybody know anything about the others?

Here in Kentucky, the vote broke along party lines. Not sure whether liberal John Yarmuth or Blue Dog Ben Chandler was more reluctant. I'm sure John hates the late deadline and Ben hates having any deadline at all.

Now it goes to the Senate. Who originally said that the Senate is where good bills go to die?