Oh, yeah, we're winning:

One person is being assassinated in Basra every hour, as order in Iraq's second city disintegrates, according to an Iraqi Defence Ministry official.

The number of violent killings in Basra is now at a level close to that of Baghdad, and marks the failure of the British Army's three-year attempt to quell violence there. Police no longer dare go to the site of a murder because they fear being attacked....

Majid al-Sari, an adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of Defence, describing the situation in Basra to the daily al-Zaman, said that on average one person was being assassinated every hour....

And also:

A quarter of all Iraqi children suffer from chronic malnutrition, according to an Iraqi government survey of more than 20,000 households, backed by Unicef's Iraq Support Centre.

The number of children between six months and five years old suffering from acute malnourishment rose from 4 per cent in 2002, the last year of Saddam Hussein's rule, to 9 per cent in 2005, Unicef said.

All this is becoming almost invisible in the U.S. media, consigned to the middle pages of newspapers and single sentences dropped into TV news broadcasts. We're bored with it. But it's a series we can't cancel. It's still going on.

(Via DU.)

Somehow, I don't think Hillary Clinton would care that she made this list. I think Ann Coulter would care a lot.

(Probably not work safe.)

OUR FIRST M.B.A. PRESIDENT

I just saw this little detail in an AP story about Bush and Cheney's annual financial disclosure statements:

Bush ... reported salting away between $1,000 and $15,000 into a health savings account through Aetna Inc.

He did?

For the love of God, why?

Bush and his wife have free health care from the government for the next thousand days. After that, the taxpayers will pay up to 75% of the cost of his health plan, and he can get treatment in any U.S. military hospital. He'll have a six-figure yearly pension in addition to, almost certainly, many lucrative honoraria; he and his wife will surely be offered seven-figure book deals. This is in addition to the current wealth AP reports:

The disclosure said Bush's 1,583-acre central Texas ranch was worth between $1 million and $5 million. The president also reported having at least $3.95 million in Treasury notes, $945,000 in certificates of deposits, $153,000 in checking and money market accounts and at least $1 million in investments held in a blind trust. Bush owns the mineral rights valued at up to $15,000 on property in Reeves County, Texas. He also owns a tree farm, which is not expected to have commercial sales until 2007, which has a value of just over $700,000.

What -- he's worried about not having the money to cover the copay on a prostate exam in 2009?

I can only guess that he started this account just so he could use it as a political prop. ("See? I have one myself. You should get one") But I didn't know he had the account. Did you? It's rather pointless to do something like this for effect without telling anyone you've done it. And if he had told anyone he'd done it, most people would just react in the logical way: "Aren't we going to pay for your health care for the rest of your life?"

So it's just money wasted.

And we trust this guy with our money?

Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times is so obviously trying to get the job of ghostwriting Bush's post-presidential memoir:

...Mr. Bush first met Mexican immigrants at public school in Midland, Tex., where Hispanics made up 25 percent of the population. Later, when he owned a small, unsuccessful oil company, he employed Mexican immigrants in the fields. When he was the managing partner of the Texas Rangers, he reveled in going into the dugout and joking with the players, many of them Hispanic, in fractured Spanglish.

...The Sept. 11 attacks suspended the push on the issue until late in the first term, but in a speech in January 2004 Mr. Bush threw himself into the subject with personal passion.

"As a Texan, I have known many immigrant families, mainly from Mexico, and I have seen what they add to our country," Mr. Bush told hundreds of wildly cheering Hispanics at a gathering in the East Room of the White House. "They bring to America the values of faith in God, love of family, hard work and self-reliance, the values that made us a great nation to begin with."

Every generation of immigrants, he added, "has reaffirmed the wisdom of remaining open to the talents and dreams of the world." ...

All she has to do is search for "he" and "Mr. Bush" and replace them with "I" and the immigration chapter is already half done.

The morning after Bush's immigration speech might be a good time to go back to Richard Cohen's second post-Stephen Colbert column, the one about all those angry lefties:

The anger festering on the Democratic left will be taken out on the Democratic middle. (Watch out, Hillary!) I have seen this anger before -- back in the Vietnam War era. That's when the antiwar wing of the Democratic Party helped elect Richard Nixon. In this way, they managed to prolong the very war they so hated.

... war critics ... are so hyped on their own sanctimony that they will obliterate distinctions, punishing their friends for apostasy and, by so doing, aiding their enemies.

Punishing friends for apostasy and threatening to help political enemies. You mean, like this?

Bushito's Border Patrol, protecting the rights of illegal border crossers in, er, Illinois?

... there can only be one logical conclusion to this undermining of the sovereignty of the United States, undermining of the Constitution and providing intelligence to a foreign government:

Impeachment.

Let's give him a day or two to explain himself and stop it, NOT a few weeks or months, and then, if he fails to do so, let the hearings begin.

Or like these people?

It isn't enough simply to stay home. We must cut off all money to the RNC and open borders fanatics and work through the primaries and general elections to defeat those who won't secure our borders.

As for Bush, he needs either to resign or enforce the law. If he does neither, Rep. Tancredo needs to draw up an article of impeachment tomorrow.

****

Republicans in the House need to impeach him. The Senate will never convict, cause there a bunch of pussies. But we need to be honest with ourselves.... Bush has pissed on his oath of office, pissed on the American people, and pissed on our Constitution. He needs to go. How can we not support his impeachment for much much more serious offences than Clinton? But what Republican has the stones to start the proceedings?

****

The only way Repulbicans can maintain credibility in the coming election is by Impeaching Jorge Bush if he is not forced to sign the House Bill.

What Wii need is a Godfather moment here with Santino 'Sonny' Corleone=Sensenbrenner putting a gun="Impeachment" over to his head and force him to sign it.

Sorry, Richard. If there's a history-making group of rage junkies in this country, it's on the right. Rage is what's gotten them to the polls year after year to vote Republican and rage is what's making them turn on Republicans now. I'm sorry the fact that they go relatively easy on you makes you incapable of noticing this.

****

ALTHOUGH: I should point out that not everyone seriously talking about impeachment in that last link is necessarily anti-GOP:

If we do it quick, and put Cheney in charge, the troops would love it! And I have a sneaky suspicion Cheney would declare all out war on Mexico. Do you notice he says nothing in support of Bush’s immigration policy? I bet he’d put an end to this mess in about 30 days. Period.

Did I say "rage junkies"?

****

UPDATE: The Richard Cohens of the world might be confused by the fact that, when it comes to slurs, right-wingers and the rest of us don't even speak the same language. He doesn't know that the worst possible obscene insult, for right-wingers, is not a generally recognized four-letter Anglo-Saxonism, but rather the first word of this headline.

****

UPDATE: And now they're applying to Bush the second-worst slur in the wingnut language.

National Guard troops tapped for duty on the border with Mexico will not chase down illegal immigrants but instead will play behind-the-scenes roles in support of border guards, officials said Monday.

Among the tasks they are likely to perform over the coming year: training federal Border Patrol guards, building barriers near the border, improving roadways, providing support for aerial and ground surveillance, analyzing and sharing intelligence, and providing communications systems and transportation, the officials said....

--AP

Officials suggested their mission would be to play a supporting role by providing intelligence, training, transportation, construction and other functions, while leaving the actual guarding of the 2,000-mile line separating the United States and Mexico to the Border Patrol. The National Guard would be a stopgap force until the federal government could hire civilian contractors to take over administrative and support functions from the Border Patrol....

--Washington Post

Building barriers? Improving roadways? Is anyone thinking what I'm thinking -- that, after Bush has had his fill of strutting around looking martial and manly against a backdrop of uniforms, this is going to become yet another corporate-welfare program for Halliburton and other folks who supply goods and services to the military?

EVERY WORD HE UTTERS IS A LIE, INCLUDING "AND" AND "THE"

Presidential adviser Karl Rove blamed the war in Iraq on Monday for dragging down President Bush's job approval ratings in public opinion polls. "People like this president," Rove said. "They're just sour right now on the war."

Rove said that Bush's likeability ratings are far higher than his approval ratings. "There is a disconnect" because of the Iraq conflict, Rove told the American Enterprise Institute....

--AP

"Far higher"? Er, no:

CBS News/New York Times Poll, May 4-8, 2006:

favorable: 29%; unfavorable: 55%
job approval: 31%; job disapproval: 63%

USA Today/Gallup Poll, April 28-30, 2006:

favorable: 39%; unfavorable: 60%
job approval: 34%; job disapproval: 63%

NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll, April 21-24, 2006:

favorable: 39%; unfavorable: 52%
job approval: 36%; job disapproval: 57%

Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, April 7-16, 2006:

favorable: 40%; unfavorable: 57%
job approval: 35%; job disapproval: 55%

So he's no better than 5 points up in favorability in any poll taken in the last month or so that asks both questions, and his favorability is below his job approval in the most recent poll.

But watch this spin point get a new lease on life among the pundit elite, who want it to be true.

Stats: Polling Report (job ratings, favorability.)

****

UPDATE: Whoops, sorry -- Rove has mega-super-secret Republican polls, and they all say people love Bush. So Rove says. And don't you trust him?

I disagree with what Pam Spaulding says about Laura Bush's gay marriage remarks:

Uh oh, she's speaking out, which means there's a bit of discord in the White House bedroom....The question is, who does Dear Leader really listen to, Daddy Karl or "Mommy" Laura?

No -- this is all part of one elaborate song-and-dance.

Republicans are talking about a gay marriage ban, hoping to mollify restive fundamentalists but possibly scaring swing-voters and socially moderate country-club Republicans. So an administration figure who doesn't usually take a lot of questions gets sent out to take some -- and what do you know, it just so happens that that person is asked about gay marriage and denounces a consitutional ban! Instant compassionate conservatism! Instant mixed signals!

That's exactly how it worked in late August of 2004. The GOP convention was about to start, the party was about to approve a platform calling for a gay marriage ban -- and, of course, the campaign was being built around the support of fundamentalists, and around gay marriage bans strategically placed on state ballots. How to avoid scaring off moderates? Here's how:

Wednesday, August 25, 2004

DAVENPORT, Iowa -- Vice President Dick Cheney, whose daughter Mary is a lesbian, spoke supportively about gay relationships on Tuesday, saying "freedom means freedom for everyone."

At a campaign rally in this Mississippi River town, Cheney was asked about his stand on gay marriage -- an issue for which his boss, President Bush, has pushed for a constitutional amendment to ban such unions.

..."The question that comes up with the issue of marriage is what kind of official sanction or approval is going to be granted by government? Historically, that's been a relationship that has been handled by the states. The states have made that fundamental decision of what constitutes a marriage," he said....

I assure you the "ordinary citizen" who asked that question was an administration plant. This time it's Fox News's Chris Wallace asking Laura Bush the question. Each time, it's a Bush campaign worker eliciting the answer the administration wants moderates to hear. With that taken care of, it's time to go do what the base wants.

(Although I'm not sure the strategy will work this time -- the base wants the amendment to pass. But perhaps a loss that can be blamed on those perv-loving liberal Democrats who need to be defeated immediately will suffice.)

Border troops would be temporary, US tells Mexico

President Bush assured Mexican President Vicente Fox on Sunday he did not intend to militarize their countries' mutual border, but was considering sending National Guard troops there to temporarily support border control efforts....

--Reuters

Temporarily? When will the deployment end? November 7?

TITANIC DECKCHAIR ARRANGEMENT

If Karl Rove really is indicted, you know who's going to get some or all of his portfolio at the White House?

Karen Hughes.

Isn't it obvious? Do you think these people would ever consider reaching outside their cult?

It looks as if we're not going to have Ten Commandments judge Roy Moore to kick around anymore after Alabama's GOP gubernatorial primary -- as of last month, Moore was trailing by 44 points among potential GOP voters -- but a few Alabama far-right judicial candidates have a new plan: let's become judges who ignore the U.S. Supreme Court:

Several Republican justices on the Alabama Supreme Court, which one political expert considers the most conservative in modern history, find themselves under assault this election year -- from the right.

Justice Tom Parker is challenging Chief Justice Drayton Nabers in the June 6 GOP primary, and a like-minded slate is taking on three other Republican incumbents.

...Parker and his allies ... reject the notion that state courts must automatically bow to precedents of federal judges.

Parker, a protege of ousted Chief Justice Roy Moore, ... contends that the justices were wrong to intervene in a dispute between Moore and the plaintiffs who sued him over the [Ten Commandments] monument....

They have [also] faulted the incumbent justices for applying what they consider wrongly decided Supreme Court precedents. Exhibit A in their critique is the case of Renaldo Adams, a Montgomery man who raped and murdered a woman during a home invasion in 1997. Adams was 17 at the time.

The state Supreme Court last year reversed Adams' death sentence following a March 2005 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that executions are unconstitutional for defendants who were younger than 18 at time of the crime.

Parker said the state Supreme Court should have upheld Adams' death sentence....

"My oath is to the Constitution, not the U.S. Supreme Court." ...

How far to the right is this? It's to the right of Antonin Scalia:

Allowing lower courts to do so is "no way to run a legal system," Scalia wrote.

Scalia's opinion stated that allowing lower courts to ignore U.S. Supreme Court precedent makes case law unreliable.

"The result will be to crown arbitrariness with chaos," it states.

And Parker's opponent also makes a commonsense point:

"It would create chaos," he said. "Then 240 lower court judges in the state of Alabama could disregard the Alabama Supreme Court."

If the anger on the right continues to build, this is where some right-wingers could be headed: toward a belief in outright non-cooperation with the federal government. Remember, this is what rabble-rousers say when we have a federal bench dominated by Republican appointees. Think of what these people might propose if a Democrat wins in '08 and starts making judicial appointments.

I don't even know if this angrier-than-thou judicial slate has a chance in Alabama. But their philosophy is frightening, and someday it could spread.

If Jason Leopold's story is correct and Rove is about to be indicted, does that explain the timing of Bush's immigration speech? Is the speech scheduled for Monday night because the indictment's going to happen Monday morning, and the Bushies want to seize control of the news cycle? Just wondering....

*****

And speaking of distractions, via Atrios I saw this report yesterday:

A former intelligence officer for the National Security Agency said Thursday he plans to tell Senate staffers next week that unlawful activity occurred at the agency under the supervision of Gen. Michael Hayden beyond what has been publicly reported, while hinting that it might have involved the illegal use of space-based satellites and systems to spy on U.S. citizens....

And, well, what do you know -- today AP has a softball story on domestic satellite spying:

A little-known spy agency that analyzes imagery taken from the skies has been spending significantly more time watching U.S. soil.

In an era when other intelligence agencies try to hide those operations, the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, is proud of that domestic mission.

He said the work the agency did after hurricanes Rita and Katrina was the best he'd seen an intelligence agency do in his 42 years in the spy business.

"This was kind of a direct payback to the taxpayers for the investment made in this agency over the years, even though in its original design it was intended for foreign intelligence purposes," Clapper said in a Thursday interview with The Associated Press....

Yup, the satellites are watching you, but it's all about security at Super Bowls and political conventions and all that good stuff. Plus hurricanes! Very helpful on hurricanes. So even though you haven't been told anything bad, we can assure you that anything bad you might be told is just flat-out wrong. There's nothing to see here. Move along.

(And the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is not the agency whose unlawful activity we're reportedly going to learn about -- it's part of the Defense Department, not the NSA* -- but whoever planted the softball AP story is counting on you not to figure that out.)

UPDATE: I don't check Drudge all that often, so it took me until now to realize that Drudge has a screaming banner headline pointing to this softball story. Doing his bit too, I see, just like AP.

*UPDATE, SUNDAY: Oops -- as mouse notes in comments, both the NSA and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency are part of the Defense Department. (See this New York Times chart.)

ROVE, STILL GETTING RESULTS

From "Rove Revamps the Republican Strategy," by Howard Fineman, Newsweek Online, May 10, 2006:

Then there is the attention being paid -- and it's just starting -- to obscure Democratic characters such as Rep. John Conyers of Michigan.

... before this election season is over, Republican and conservative voters are going to know a lot about Conyers. To hear the GOP tell it, the impeachment of the president will be the number one priority if Conyers gets his say, which of course Rep. Nancy Pelosi will be only too happy to give him.

Righty columnist and radio host Dennis Praeger on CNN's Larry King Live, May 12, 2006:

PRAGER: ...I think that most Republicans will not act like children and say because I didn't get everything I wanted from my party, I will stay home [on Election Day]. Some will. I don't consider that particularly sophisticated or mature, but so be it. People are very emotional creatures and they may not show up that day. By and large, the thought of John Conyers and Nancy Pelosi running the Congress will push Republicans to vote.

Tee-hee:



(The accompanying editorial is tiresome, however.)

AS IRAQIS STAND UP...

Oh, yeah, we're going to be able to stand down any day now, you betcha:

Clashes erupted Friday between two Iraqi army units following a roadside bombing north of the capital, and Iraqi police said a Shiite solder was killed in an exchange of fire with a Kurdish unit.

...But Iraqi police 1st Lt. Ali Ibrahim said four were killed and three others wounded. He identified the soldiers as Kurdish but did not specify their unit.

You're going to love the sequence of events:

According to both accounts, the wounded were rushed to the U.S. military hospital in Balad. Police said that when the Kurdish soldiers drove up to the hospital, they began firing weapons to clear the way, and one Iraqi Shiite civilian was killed.

When security rushed to the scene, the Kurds decided to take their wounded elsewhere, Iraqi police said. Iraqi troops from a separate Shiite unit tried to stop them and shots were fired, Iraqi police said.

The U.S. account said that an Iraqi soldier from the 3rd Battalion, 1st Brigade was killed in a "confrontation" as the other Iraqi troops were trying to remove their wounded. Iraqi police identified the dead soldier as a Shiite. But the U.S. statement did not say what prompted the soldiers to try to take wounded comrades away from a hospital -- the best equipped American medical facility in the country.

A third Iraqi army unit set up a roadblock in the area and stopped the soldiers who were leaving with their wounded, the U.S. statement said. American troops intervened at the roadblock and calmed the situation....

Three years. This is how much progress has been made after three years.

At the Mahablog, Barbara says:

As an exasperated Jack Cafferty asked on CNN yesterday, “Why don’t you go find Osama bin Laden and seal the country’s borders and start inspecting the containers that come into our ports?”

My answer is that the Bush Administration is all about grand gestures and magic bullets, not about doing the practical, basic, unglamorous, hard-slogging things that actually need doing.

I think that's absolutely right. However, I'd add that that isn't the only explanation for the administration's obsession with extralegal domestic surveillance.

Remember the history of the Right and the Republican Party after World War II: Nixon versus "the Pink Lady," Joe McCarthy, None Dare Call It Treason, and on through the days of Nixon's enemies list and Watergate.

That's the soil that nurtured the most important members of the current White House crew. Note the fixation on "the enemy within."

Recall George W. Bush's loathing of the campus left when he was a Yale undergrad. Note that he and his family seem never to have gotten over a slur on the elder Bush's good name reportedly uttered by the Reverend William Sloane Coffin to W. when the latter was at Yale.

Nothing's changed. In Bushworld, the real enemy is right next door.

****

This is convenient, of course, because, as Barbara says, Bush wants to succeed not through patience and hard work, but by hitting a "big gusher" and achieving instant success. Go read what she has to say.)

BUSH TO SNATCH DEFEAT FROM THE JAWS OF VICTORY

Bush might actually have gotten a bump from the NSA story, to judge from the snap ABC/Washington Post poll, which says the public supports phone-data mining -- but I think he's about to lose his base:

President Bush will address the nation on immigration reform Monday night from the Oval Office....

Bush will lay out an immigration proposal on how to deal with the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants currently living in the United States. The president has been a strong advocate of some type of guest-worker program, where immigrants would come to the United States to work for a few years -- with the proper paperwork -- then would have to return to their respective home countries at some point.

Legislation to address the controversial issue has suffered many setbacks in Congress, but lawmakers hope to reach a deal by Memorial Day....

Unless he flip-flops in the speech -- dropping the guest-worker program and rejecting any path to citizenship for undocumented workers, which would mean rejecting what could soon be approved by the Senate -- he's going to infuriate the rage junkies who put him where he is today. They hated Clinton, then he made them hate Saddam; now they hate immigrants and he just doesn't understand that they don't want him telling them not to.

I love it that he's sticking his neck out even further for this (along with his party's collective neck), making it a prime-time media event. I say this all the time, but if this goes all the way -- if a guest-worker/citizenship bill is signed into law -- the rage junkies will not come out in November to vote Republican. Meanwhile, as far as the base is concerned, he has a Harriet Miers/Dubai situation on his hands, except in this case he seems to be acting more determined to get his way, rather than backing off.

One Moussaoui juror rejected the death penalty, and a genius at Free Republic has a theory as to why:

Jury tampering? Hmmmmmm. In an age where guys like Saddam Hussein have hundreds of billions of dollars available to them to purchase compliance on the part of reporters, publishers and entire governments, it is possible, of course.

Stuck on stupid.

RIGHT-WING LOGIC

It was an act of treason to leak the NSA phone-data-mining story to USA Today, which was old news anyway, so why is everyone so worked up about it?

Most. Incompetent. Administration. Ever.

Donnie Darko director investigated for terrorist links

According to his official biography, Richard Kelly is the director of the acclaimed Donnie Darko, the writer of the less acclaimed Domino and a contender for the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes film festival. According to the Department of Homeland Security he is a suspected terrorist who may now be prevented from travelling to Cannes next week.

Kelly, 31, appears caught in bureaucratic limbo after his passport was reportedly "held under review" by the US government. Sources suggest that the film-maker has been confused with another man, "James Kelly", who is on the terrorist watch list. Kelly's full name is James Richard Kelly

Born in Virginia, the son of a NASA technician, Kelly made his feature debut in 2001 with the black comedy Donnie Darko, starring Jake Gyllenhaal. His latest picture, Southland Tales, is set in a dystopian Los Angeles paralysed by economic and environmental collapse. Ironically, the film is implicitly concerned with security measures taken by the US government after the events of September 11 2001....

Let's see: A few months ago we found that the no-fly list included Dr. Robert Johnson, a Democratic congressional candidate from upstate New York. Before that it was James Moore, coauthor of Bush's Brain, a book on Karl Rove. Before that, it was Senator Edward Kennedy.

James Kelly, Robert Johnson, James Moore, Edward Kennedy. I see a possible explanation here: The people running this program are too freaking stupid to tell people apart who have very common names.

Either that or they figure they can do whatever the hell they want to you if you have a common name and you're (a) a Democrat, (b) a Bush critic, and/or (c) from Hollyweird but not rich and famous, which means you're automatically a pinko but you're not too newsworthy to harass.