He doesn't like you.

Of course the administration is in contempt of congress. They're in contempt of pretty much everybody that doesn't make up the shrinking base of Bush Dead-Enders these days.

Marty Lederman informs us congress has three options-

1) Ask the U.S. Attorney to prosecute. The administration signaled yesterday that they wouldn't allow that to happen. (Again with that confusion the President seems to demonstrate between the role of the Attorney General and the Solicitor General. One serves the President, the other serves the people. )

2) They could have the Sergeant at Arms arrest and put on trial those administration officials directly in contempt.

3) They could file a civil suit. This would take forever to resolve.

I vote for option 2 but apparently this is the least likely of the bunch. Odd. Considering the administration's complete unwillingness to work with congress and total stonewalling I'd suggest it was the best solution.

(For the REAL story on what happened to the guy who had his arm cut off by Obi-Wan watch the video below. It's all just a sad misunderstanding.)

When you do that Frankie, you're enemies don't respect you. You got no friends no more. You got nobody, Frankie.

Some comments on local stuff-

* There have been a ton of articles about the construction going on downtown but they don't come close to covering what a FUBARED mess planners have made out of the core. Bridges closed for construction, major roads down to one lane - it is a complete disaster and more that a little bit of a pain in the ass to those of us who work nearby. I literally took 45 minutes to get out of downtown last Friday and THAT was after planning a strategic route out of the city. Yuck.

* It looks like Gordo is in trouble in the polls with voters not buying his "I'm a moderate" bullshit. Check out Michelle Neumann's takedown of the Junior Senator from Oregon at the linked article. As a reminder - Gordo spent a lot of time in the last Presidential election calling John Kerry a waffler, particulary in regards to the war. Live by the bullshit soundbite, die by the bullshit soundbite I say. I'm going to permalink StopGordonSmith so you ought to check it out.

* I predicted Greg Oden would be a bust but even I'm surprised at how quickly I turned out be right. How many NBA players were able to stage a comeback after major tonsil surgery? I could count them on one hand.

Do you remember things that made sense? Things you could count on? Before we all got so lost? What are we gonna do, Charlie? What am I gonna do?

I think it was don snabalus who first pointed me towards Fark.com. I check that site a couple of times a day and really enjoy the saucy comments, photoshopped pictures of our leaders and smart ass exchanges that make up most of the discourse at Fark. Fark is the perfect site for the permanently sarcastic, terminally hip and nerds-in-denial that make up a good portion of the internet.

What Fark isn't is a site for serious debate and deep discussion of the issues (although I'm at a loss to think of a site on the internet that is.) Showing a little bit of your true self or letting your guard down there will get you burned. Big time.

That's why I was stunned to run into the following post by somebody going by the Fark handle cackylacky this morning-

This made me cry.

I'm so damn sick and tired of feeling like this. I hate that this stupidman has taken a life that I and my family were once proud of and made it conflicted and confusing and painful.

I hate sending my husband off to Iraq and looking at my kids and knowing that, if the worst happens, I can't even look at them and say "Your daddy died doing what was right."

I hate having conversations with him that start over some random snippet of news and end with me sobbing in his arms, begging him to get out, and having him hold me and ask me, "If all the good men leave, who will be left? And what will happen then?"

I hate feeling responsible for this. I hate it.

I was lied to, and I bought it. I couldn't believe that our entire government was lying to us. It seemed so impossible, sooo... tin-foil hattish.

I hate going to Target and seeing boys being pushed around in Naval Hospital-issued wheelchairs by their wives, while holding their babies.

I hate funerals.

How did we get here? He joined when it was all rescuing downed pilots and non-combatant evacs. Saving the world and all that rot.

I think I'm gonna be sick.I hope noone reads this. I'll read it later andbe ashamed. I don't care. It's early in the morning, late in the thread. Screwit.

http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=2939447

As Republican Senators spend last night and this morning pretending to be bored by the debate taking place in the Senate and the attempt to stop their obstruction I think of cacky, and people like her and I get pissed. Why don't you find her and yawn in her face Senatro Inhoefe?

In the world of advertising, there's no such thing as a lie. There's only expedient exaggeration.

Dear Senator Reid,

Don't jerk us around. We can smell bullshit a mile away. You don't have the same advantage that the Republicans do in that the progressive base that more often than not supports Democrats isn't stupid and isn't going to just fall in line because you go through the motions of doing what's right. You try and fake us out on this fillibuster and we'll walk.

Sincerely,

A pissed-off progressive.

Not all of us who drink are poets. Some of us drink because we're not poets.

Kagro X over at Kos slaps Congressional Democrats around pretty good for not standing up to Bush, but there's a certain sentiment I don't get with regards to how people have sized up the President.

And the reason it's important is that it also gives us a window into one of the other hot issues of the moment: how far will Bush go to stonewall Congressional oversight?

That's an issue in which, once again, most Congressional Democrats assume that the game will be played within the confines of the old rules, and that the president "wouldn't dare" instruct the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia not to prosecute anyone the Congress voted to hold in contempt for failure to comply with its subpoenas, for instance. Or that he "wouldn't dare" pardon (for all intents and purposes) Scooter Libby so far in advance of the end of his term. Or that he "wouldn't dare" to simply "defy" an Act of Congress.

I think that makes it a fair question for those of us who are concerned to ask whether there's a "Plan B" -- not for Iraq, but for Congress, in the event that Bush should "dare" to do any of these things the old rules of politics made us so sure he wouldn't.

One thing often ignored when we consider what makes George W. Bush, well, George W. Bush is that he's not a politician. He's not really much of anything when you stop and think about it. Here's a guy that spent most of his life up until his forties rich and drunk. He could give a rat's ass about politics up to that point. Then - when he did decide to involve himself in politics - it was more of a whim and because he really couldn't do anything else that he decided to run (unsuccessfully) for congress and later to be elected Governor of Texasistan.

Why would anyone expect a guy who clearly hadn't spent a single moment of his life contemplating the constitution, the shared values that make up the United States or the traditions and unwritten rules that are the glue that hold congress together and keep us from killing each other to be concerned with honoring any of those ideas if they stood in the way of something he wanted?

So much of what makes us who we are aren't things that are written down on paper but are things we agree to. That's the embodiement of patriotism. This is the most unpatriotic President we've ever had.

Women react to me in the way they do Don Octavio because they sense that I search out the beauty that lies within until it overwhelms everything else.

It's business time, baby.

Yes, it's true. This man has no dick.

Wow! The normally reasonable Josh Marshall sounds so shrill as he talks about Republican Senators rash of recent filibusters.

If anything it's worse than this as Senate Republicans have been filibustering just about everything. Everything on Iraq certainly. And this is the sense of 'filibuster' as it has been used more or less continuously for a decade.

The Dems are idiots on this. Reporters should note it, yes. But it's not really their job.

In the larger sense this is something that worries me in the abstract and I think Democratic Senators are really going to get a handle on for the future of the country and if we hope to get anything done legislatively after the next election.

Most political analysts see real opportunities for the Democrats to pick up as many as eight seats in the Senate in 2008. This would put the Democrats at, what, 58/ 59 Senators? Not enough for cloture.

So we could be facing a situation where we have a Democratic President, a solidly Democratic House and Senate and still aren't able to get a damn thing passed because Democratic Senators haven't got the balls to to stand up to the radical Senators in the Republican party.

Democratic leaders need to get a handle on this now. First step: force real filibusters on these issues and draw the jerks into the public spotlight.

We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery.

Last year I put the text of this speech up and just ran across the video on YouTube. Chaplin gives us a message of hope.

Don't point that finger at me unless you intend to use it.

Harry Reid's comments yesterday that there would remain thousands of troops in Iraq even after a withdrawal should not lead to all the gnashing of the teeth among progressives that it has.

The important thing is we begin pulling out troops as soon as possible. We can begin to cut deployments and rebuild our weakened military after that gets underway.

More importantly I have no doubt that there will come a point after we've withdrawn a majority of our troops when it will become politically impossible for us to keep any force in Iraq for long after. Events on the ground will accelerate and even under the best case scenario for resolution - a stable coalition government in Iraq - we will be asked to leave.

I want our troops out. The sooner the better. Nothing Reid said plays against that desire.

Wooorse? Or better?

I'm not sure I see the point to this unless it's the Pope's goal to drive even more of us away from the Catholic church.

ROME, July 7 — Pope Benedict XVI on Saturday authorized a wider use of the old Latin Mass, dismissing fears that its revival could divide the church or dilute the reforms of the Second Vatican Council that made standard worship in the languages of Catholics around the world.

In gentle but firm language, the pope acknowledged in an accompanying letter to bishops the depth of opposition to the change, voiced in recent months by European bishops and Jewish groups. He proposed, in fact, a review after three years to determine “if truly serious difficulties come to light.”

He's not diluting the Second Vatican Council. He's making it "better."

But the pope said that the change could both heal rifts with traditionalist groups that favor the Latin Mass as well as reconnect the church with a 1,500-year-old form of worship that faded since the Second Vatican Council, which ended in 1965.

Rigggghhht. Because the Catholics that have fallen away that the church needs to bring back into the fold are the Mel Gibson/ Opus Dei/ Traditionalist nutjob variety and not the millions of other Catholics worldwide who've been dispossessed by a church increasingly more concerned with tradition rather than living the gospel.

Jackass.


**For those of you unfamiliar with the quote it's from one of the greatest, most subversive cartoons ever - "Invader Zim." Here's the context - Zim, who is entirely insane, has just un-banished himself from the planet "Foodcourtia" to join his fellow alien invaders in Operation Impending Doom 2. Operation Impending Doom 1 met utter failure when Zim went crazy on the invader's own planet and set most of the capitol on fire.

Zim- "I put the fires out.."
Red Tallest- "You made them worse!"
Zim- "Wooorse? Or better?"