...or "Al Gore is a pansy"

Punt!

    After yesterday's Netroots Nation 2008 session with the Speaker of the U.S. House, I went up and shook Nancy Pelosi's hand and asked her directly whether impeachment and censure are still off the table. She answered that no, censure is not off the table (or even "definitely" not off the table, maybe); and as for impeachment, she again stepped aside from the question, as she did during her answers on the stage, by saying that (inherent) contempt was up to John Conyers. (Earth to Nancy: "contempt" and "impeachment" are separate issues...)

    So, while NP offered No Palaver about impeachment, the silver lining is that, as per my (non-used) question from askthespeaker.org, censure is still possible.

    (more)

The bush administration is trying to muddy the waters about Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki's quotes in Der Spiegel that he supports Barak Obama's 16-month timetable for a withdrawal of US troops from his country.  Despite claims of "translation errors," even Fox News made Iraq's position clear:

July 8, 2008 AP Report
Iraq Insists on Withdrawal Timetable for U.S. Troops
Iraq's national security adviser said Tuesday his country will not accept any security deal with the United States unless it contains specific dates for the withdrawal of U.S.-led forces.
The comments.. were the strongest yet by an Iraqi official about the deal now under negotiation with U.S. officials. They came a day after Iraq's prime minister first said publicly that he expects the pending troop deal with the United States to have some type of timetable for withdrawal.  President Bush has said he opposes a timetable. The White House said Monday it did not believe Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was proposing a rigid timeline for U.S. troop withdrawals.

1872 - Mahlon Loomis patents wireless radio

1969 - Neil Armstrong walks on the Moon

COINCIDENCE? I think NOT!

Quote:
"It is natural that people should differ most, and most violently, about the unknowable. . . . There is all the room in the world for divergence of opinion about something that, so far as we can realistically perceive, does not exist."
-- E. Haldeman-Julius, speaking on christianity

From the Church of Ineffable Stupidity:

The following parody news story appeared seven years ago today. It was published and distributed by Yossarian Universal News Service (YU), the world’s first satiric news syndicate founded in 1980.

YU News Dispatch 033
Yossarian Universal News Service 072001
5:01:45:103 PM PST
START

BERLUSCONI OPENS G-8 SUMMIT AND MAKES OFFER NO ONE CAN REFUSE
Bush Learns To Speak Italian By Listening To Government Surveillance Tapes Of John Gotti

Genoa, Italy (YU) -- Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, dressed in the traditional black shirt and white tie of his ancestors, welcomed delegates, dignitaries and hundreds of other invited guests from all over the world to the Group of Eight summit in Genoa today, by ordering everyone to empty their pockets, lie face down on the ground and remain very still as select members of his special security forces demonstrated precisely how globalization worked.
   

It's no newsflash that there is a tremendous amount of anxiety and uncertainty in and about the U.S. economy.  And there is plenty of good reason for such anxiety and uncertainty.  Unfortunately, however, the economic irrationality that accompanies the psychology of economic bubbles also accompanies the pscyhology of bear markets.

Yes, the FDIC will place banks that have mismanaged assets into conservatorship.  Yes, banks and investors have and will continue to realize losses due to bad loans and menacing conditions in the commercial and consumer lending markets.  But no, the U.S. banking system will not collapse, and the average American's deposits are safe and secure (provided the deposits are FDIC insured and under $100,000 in the aggreggate).

The MSM, however, has created panic by talking about instability in the banking industry and showing the run on IndyMac.  Sadly, we live in a country beset by lack of knowledge about macro-economics and micro-economics.  And that includes the talking heads on the news.

Barack Obama advocates engaging the Iranians diplomatically as a more useful strategy than saber-rattling and refusing to talk to them.  Obama is called an appeaser and (much) worse with great disdain by both the administration and the McCain camp for daring to even suggest it. This week, the US sent a diplomatic envoy to the Iran-Europe talks as "an observer" for the very first time.  Hmmm.  You say coincidence?

'Cos I move like THEY do...

Sorry guys. this is just one picture, but I really had to do a diary on it. b/c it's funny.

See title.

I would have more to say, but the flouride in my water, the genetically modified foods in my stomach, and the trans fat in my blood has my ability to think limited.

  Tom Friedman, who gets paid far too much money for what he writes, and takes up far too much valuable editorial space in the NY Times has done it again. 9/11 and 4/11 is his complaint that Bush has wasted too much time while doing nothing that might actually  work with regards to the energy situation. Friedman is 'outraged'

I am reliably told by a Bush administration official that there is an old saying in Texas that goes like this: “If all you ever do is all you’ve ever done, then all you’ll ever get is all you ever got.”

Could anyone possibly come up with a better description of President Bush’s energy policy? America is in the midst of its worst energy crisis in years and what is the big decision our Decider has decided? Drum roll, please: Our Decider decided to lift the executive orders banning drilling for oil and natural gas off the country’s shoreline — even though he knew this was a meaningless gesture because a Congressional moratorium on drilling passed in 1981 remains in force.

Well DUH!

If you're wondering why the Maliki "correction" issued by CentCom doesn't sound like a "correction" and doesn't specify what needs to be "corrected," you're missing the point.Bush and McCain aren't trying to get Maliki to retract the  his statement in terms of the policy he endorsed, they just want to salvage a meme they have been carefully cultivating since the beginning of the month: namely, that Obama has supported some mythical position called "precipitous withdrawal" and that the reiteration of his old position over the July 4th weekend constituted a "flip-flop." Now, with the insanity surrounding Maliki's statements, we can clearly see that this campaign wasn't just an effort to make Obama look indecisive and inconsistent. The campaign, facilitated by a shamefully compliant media (and even some progressive bloggers), was intended to give McCain cover to steal Obama's policy.

This diary is composed of two sections.  In the first half, I will recap some of what we know about the immense impact of media narratives in Presidential campaigns, and argue that the emergence of the recent "flip-flop" narrative on Obama has done more damage than most people realize, reducing his lead by more than 3 million votes.  In the second section, I will argue that a new narrative is forming right now, based on a fortuitous combination of inexplicable reversals on foreign policy by the Bush administration in the direction of Obama’s long-held policies at the very moment that Obama begins his high-profile trip abroad.  Now is the time for us to do what we can to spread this narrative, and if done correctly, it could potentially leave McCain in a position from which he cannot recover.

Follow me over the fold for the full argument...

On a day of victory for the Democrats, America suffered yet another setback against it's reputation, and November can not come soon enough.

Now even the UK, a stalwart American ally, can not trust what they are told when it comes to assurances on torture - and in my opinion, by extension of this, a great many other things as well.

"The committee's conclusions amount to saying that we can no longer rely on assurances from a US administration that purports to uphold the civil and political standards of behaviour, while in fact kidnapping people and taking them to places where they may be maltreated." - Andrew Tyrie MP

Neocon godfather Irving Kristol once famously said that "a neoconservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality."  By that standard, the political right will need to coin an altogether new term to describe John McCain in the wake of the beating he has taken over the past several days.  In the span of just two weeks, McCain has seen Barack Obama's call for a strategic refocus from Iraq to Afghanistan validated by the Pentagon and in Baghdad.  And now, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has come out in favor of Obama's approach to drawing down U.S. forces in his country.

After last week’s adventure in craziness, watching my "team" descend into the same hysteria that Limbaugh and (I love Keith’s name for him) Bill-o the Clown propagates, I announced that I could not consort with the sort of seriously bonkers crowd that hangs around Daily Kos, and would henceforth move my invaluable wares to the TPM Café.  I decided to post my unbelievably boffo essay about how the New Yorker cover was likely to cost Sen Obama the election since it would be taken as proof positive by the rubes out there that what they thought to be true had been proven on both sites.   Amazingly, the crazies found it at both places and said roughly the same thing.  (One poster sought to assure me that the cover wasn’t so bad that Senator Obama could still recover from it.  I thanked him).

However you define leadership, Barack Obama has an overabundance of it and has done something unprecedented with his ability, no pun intended.

1848 - The first women's rights convention, called by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia C. Mott, was held in Seneca Falls, New York.

1870 - The Franco-Prussian war began.

COINCIDENCE? I think NOT!

Quote:
"In the early days of woman-suffrage agitation, I saw that the greatest obstacle we had to overcome was the bible. It was hurled at us on every side."
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton, at Seneca Falls, 1848

From the CHURCH OF INEFFABLE STUPIDITY: