Permit me to introduce myself. My name is Coyote. Wile E. Coyote, genius.

There's an almost surreal quality to the outgoing Bush administration publicly warning president-elect Obama that terrorists see transitions between governments as a good time to attack.

This is after all the administration that ignored multiple warnings about the 9/11 attacks from Clinton administration officials like Sandy Berger, Richard Clarke or George Tenet in order to focus on the important issues like renewing Star Wars missile defense program. Berger warned Condoleeza Rice months before the attacks that terrorism would "consume far more of her time than she would have imagined."

“For the next 75 days, all of us must ensure that the next president and his team can hit the ground running,” Mr. Bush said in an emotional speech to hundreds of employees of the executive branch on the South Lawn of the White House.

Dude, the next president isn't going to just hit the ground running. He's going to leave your worthless team in the dust. You're about to see what he feels like to be the Coyote trying to catch the Roadrunner.

I did find this a bit annoying:

Mr. Bush has said he is determined to conduct an orderly transition. The White House wants to avoid a repeat of the kind of news reports that plagued President Bill Clinton when he left office amid questions about whether members of his staff, irked at having to turn their offices over to Republicans, removed the letter W from some computer keyboards.

How nice of the author of this article to underplay what exploded into a major vandalism scandal only a few days after Bush took office. It included accusations that the outgoing Clinton administration cut telephone wires, wrecked computers, left graffiti on the walls, stole presidential seals and even towels off of Air Force One. A General Accounting Office investigation found most of the accusations to be bunk.

"Certainly people inside the [Bush] administration fed this story," says an angry John Podesta, Clinton's former chief of staff. "At least they got what they wanted out of it."

A close look at the way the scandal mushroomed bolsters Podesta's view: The Bush administration helped the vandal scandal along, publicly appearing to try to douse the flames, while privately fanning them with detailed, off-the-record allegations of damage. On Tuesday, after the GAO's review was made public, Fleischer was left trying to spin himself out of a very deep hole, insisting he had tried to "knock down" the vandal story when it first emerged.

But a transcript of Fleischer's Jan. 25 briefing on the issue contradicts him. It shows the Bush spokesman coyly encouraging reporters' suspicions about the vandal scandal, while refusing to confirm or deny the reports of damage. According to one leading White House reporter, the story was also nudged along by two unnamed Bush aides.

Yesterday, Bush was referring to this "scandal" when he told his staff without any sense of irony to “conduct yourselves with the decency and professionalism that you have shown throughout my time in office.”

After 8 years of this administration we've seen decency and professionalism as something that are in short supply at this White House. Lying about their opponents and bare-knuckled politics are the way they conduct business. They have been from the start.

I was not put on this earth to listen to meat!

Gilliard does a terrific job of tearing apart Boston's Aqua Teen idiocy yesterday. The entire city was brought to a standstill by Lite-brite and the idiocy of Mayor Menino combined with the overreaction of the media.

Menino is going on TV and insisting he's going to send a 27-year old artist to jail for not breaking any law, because his police department overreacted and wasted a million dollars feeding a media frenzy and terrorizing the population of his own city. That's a cowardly act of self-preservation, and were he not threatening the life of an innocent young man it would be laughable.

The whole think has me hankering for a little Adult Swim.

I came over for a snoop, uh, a scoop of sugar. I hope I'm not disturbing you.

This column in yesterday's Oregonian pretty much made my head explode.

School bus drivers being trained to watch for terrorism signs

4/18/2006, 12:00 a.m. PT
The Associated Press

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — School bus drivers and transportation officials across the state are being trained to spot possible terrorists and other signs of danger.

The training, given to more than 1,000 Oregonians so far, is part of the national School Bus Watch program, which teaches drivers to identify, evaluate and report suspicious activities around school buses and along bus routes.

Bus drivers are taught to look for little signals that something could be awry: For example, a man at a bus stop wearing a long trench coat on a hot summer day; a person photographing students boarding or departing; a person videotaping school buses from a freeway overpass or sketching the layout of school buildings.

The online version of the article appears to be annotated with much of the money quotes that appeared in the print version conspicously absent. The fact that the program is part of a $50 million dollar Department of Homeland Security grant is missing from the portion I linked.

$50 million dollars that could have gone to mounting geiger-counters on every crane at every port in the U.S. but instead went to training school bus drivers in the hinterland to spot junior-jihadists who sneak onto their buses.

You'd be surprised to know that thus far the program hasn't turned up any terrorist plots but I can just imagine the interview with the first bus driver that breaks a al-qaeda cell: "He was a kid I'd never seen ride the bus before, see. I could just tell he was up to something and not just because he was six feet tall with a full-on beard."

At one point the print version of the article mentions some of the how-to-spot-an-evildoer-training was conducted for average citizens in Medford. Medford. The number one target on Bin Laden's operation map, I'm sure.

Get over you bad selves, Medford. Nobody, least of all the enemies of the United States, care about you.

This is another telling graf:

Tom Slavin, a veteran school bus driver for Portland Public Schools who is also certified to train bus drivers, said the program teaches drivers to be observers, not law enforcement officers. Slavin said all drivers volunteering for the training program must go through an extensive criminal background check but are not required to sign a loyalty oath.

No loyalty oath? That is SO pre-9/11. Loyalty oaths are all the rage these days.

What the heck would they swear loyalty to? Good driving? Bus safety? Not throttling the noisy little brats?

I'm actually am fairly close to someone that's been through this training for bus drivers. One of the things they're taught is that if they suspect someone of preparing to do something nefarious to a bus they should radio in a secret code and continue business as usual until law enforcement determines what to do. In other words: if you suspect someone has a bomb on the bus keep picking up students in case they suspect you're on to them and set off the bomb.

Only the Bush administration could come up with something that asinine.