John Lennon
“Instant Karma”

Another rat jumping ship. I’m sick of hearing “win.” What are we to win? The Iraqi oil? What’s a stalemate? “Stave off defeat.” Define defeat in Iraq for me. Would that be a situation where we DON’T get the oil?

From Daily Times

SAN ANTONIO: The man who led coalition forces in Iraq during the first year of the occupation says the US can forget about winning the war.

“I think if we do the right things politically and economically with the right Iraqi leadership we could still salvage at least a stalemate, if you will - not a stalemate but at least stave off defeat,” retired Army Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez said in an interview.

Sanchez, in his first interview since he retired last year, is the highest-ranking former military leader yet to suggest the Bush administration fell short in Iraq. “I am absolutely convinced that America has a crisis in leadership at this time,” Sanchez said after a recent speech in San Antonio, Texas.

“We-ve got to do whatever we can to help the next generation of leaders do better than we have done over the past five years, better than what this cohort of political and military leaders have done,” adding that he was “referring to our national political leadership in its entirety” - not just President George W Bush.

Sanchez called the situation in Iraq bleak and blamed it on “the abysmal performance in the early stages and the transition of sovereignty”. He included himself among those who erred in Iraq’s crucial first year after Saddam.

Sanchez took command in the summer of 2003 and oversaw the occupation force amid an insurgency that has sparked a low-grade civil war in Iraq. He was in the middle of some of the most momentous events of the war, among them the dissolution of the Iraqi army and barring millions of Baath Party members from government jobs: two actions seen as triggering the rebellion among Sunni Muslims, who fell from power with Saddam Hussein.

Sanchez is also most closely identified with the Abu Ghraib scandal, which occurred on his watch.

By CARRIE ANTLFINGER, Associated Press Writer

MILWAUKEE - No one was believed to have survived the crash of a small plane that was carrying a six-member organ transplant team and their cargo of donor organs, authorities said Tuesday.

Searchers found human remains during a search in Lake Michigan, about six miles northeast of Milwaukee, a Coast Guard official said Tuesday.

The team’s lifesaving mission - carrying unspecified organs from Milwaukee for transplant to a patient in Michigan - was cut short Monday when the Cessna Citation went down in 57-degree water shortly after the pilot signaled an emergency.

Those on board were two surgeons and two donor specialists from the University of Michigan Health System and two pilots who regularly fly their transplant missions.

“The condition of the aircraft debris and human remains found indicate a high’speed impact,” said Coast Guard Capt. Bruce Jones at a news conference. “We believe this to have been a non’survivable crash.”

Dr. Darrell A. Campbell, chief of staff of the University of Michigan Hospitals and Health Centers, said the thoughts of the university community were with the families of those involved.

“We take consolation in the fact that the team was on a mission to help another,” he said.

The patient who was to have received the transplant organs was in critical condition, the university said. Jay Campbell, executive director of the Wisconsin Donor Network, declined to say which hospital the team was working with, citing privacy regulations.

read more at YAHOO! NEWS

It’s official. Only in America can a hungry, homeless man get more prison time for stealing food than that of someone committing treason. Our Founding Fathers must be roiling in their graves!

What’s worse, Libby won’t see one day behind bars.

CNN.com:

Libby Sentenced To 30 Months In Prison

WASHINGTON (CNN) – I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was sentenced Tuesday to 30 months in prison for lying to investigators about what he told reporters about CIA operative Valerie Plame, whose name was leaked to the media in 2003.

He also was fined $250,000. Libby was convicted March 6 of four counts in a five-count indictment alleging perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements to FBI investigators. He plans to appeal the verdict.

Libby was found guilty in March of lying to investigators about what he told reporters about Valerie Plame, whose identity as a CIA operative was leaked to the media in 2003.

Libby has maintained his innocence ever since he was indicted and resigned in October 2005.

On Tuesday, the judge released dozens of letters written to him by Libby’s supporters and detractors, including former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton.
[...]

Another person, whose signature was redacted, wrote, “I am writing to urge that Scooter Libby receive the maximum possible sentence. Due to the crimes for which he was convicted, we may never know of the more substantial criminal activities for which he served as a firewall.”

KIEV, Ukraine - A mass grave holding the remains of thousands of Jews killed by the Nazis has been found in southern Ukraine near the site of what was once a concentration camp, a Jewish community representative said Tuesday.

The grave was found by chance last month when workers were laying gas pipelines in the village of Gvozdavka-1, near Odessa, said Roman Shvartsman, a spokesman for the regional Jewish community. He said that Nazis established a concentration camp near the village in November 1941 killed about 5,000 Jews at or near the site.

“Several thousand Jews executed by the Nazis lie there,” Shvartsman told The Associated Press.

Ukraine’s Jewish population was devastated during the Holocaust. Babi Yar, a ravine outside the capital Kiev where the Nazis slaughtered some 34,000 Jews over two days in September 1941, is a powerful symbol of the tragedy.

By SINAN SALAHEDDIN, Associated Press Writer
from YAHOO! NEWS

BAGHDAD - Alert guards gunned down a black-clad woman at a police recruiting station Tuesday, a would-be suicide bomber who then exploded before their eyes. But another bomber succeeded, detonating an explosives-laden car at a checkpoint in Ramadi and killing six policemen.

The U.S. commander here acknowledged sectarian violence was on the rise.

Meanwhile, the U.S. command insisted it would continue the search for two abducted U.S. soldiers despite the release of a video Monday by insurgents linked to al-Qaida claiming they had killed the two, along with a third missing soldier whose body was found previously.

The command’s attitude was reflected in the field.

“It really doesn’t change a thing,” said Capt. Aaron Bright, a 10th Mountain Division company commander whose men have spent many days on the search since the soldiers were seized in an ambush south of Baghdad on May 12. Four other American soldiers and an Iraqi were killed in that attack.

“We’re still going to continue our search and we’re never going to stop until they’re found. We’ll continue to assume they’re alive,” Bright said in an e-mail to The Associated Press.

The insurgent video displayed the two missing soldiers’ identification cards. “The Americans sent 4,000 soldiers looking for them,” an unidentified voice said. “They were alive and then dead.” It offered no proof.

Among the attacks Tuesday, gunmen assassinated a local leader of Muqtada al-Sadr’s radical Shiite Muslim faction south of Baghdad, and to the north insurgents ambushed an Iraqi army vehicle, killing an undetermined number of soldiers.

As the sun rose, reports also began filtering in of headless corpses and other bodies found dumped around Iraq, many presumed victims of the relentless Shiite-against-Sunni bloodshed.

read more at YAHOO! NEWS

“It’s not so much that he is an embarrassment, it’s that there is an exhaustion,… People are tired of defending him.” -GOP analyst Rich Galen, on President Bush

Yet the GOP continues to back Bush every inch of the way. Hypocrite much?

The Unsilent Treatment

Bush fatigue in the GOP.
(Howard Fineman, Newsweek)

June 11, 2007 issue - Knowing Newt Gingrich, I was a little alarmed when his secretary told me where he was. “He’s in Hawaii, doing Pearl Harbor,” she said. I envisioned him in Snoopy goggles and scarf, strafing the islands in a biplane, shouting slogans at liberals below. Turns out “Pearl Harbor” is his latest historical novel; our hero had deployed himself to the Pacific theater for book promotion and a vacation.

As for bombs, he’d dropped them back in Washington-on the White House. The former Republican Speaker denounced his own party’s sitting president as a hopeless incompetent, a Jimmy Carter clone. “You hire presidents, at a minimum, to run the country well enough that you don’t have to think about it …” he told The New Yorker (clearly thinking about it). The news wasn’t what Newt said, but the silence that followed.

Karl Rove not only didn’t call Gingrich on the carpet, he did not call at all-not because he agreed with him, of course, but because what was there to say? None of the GOP’s innumerable 2008 candidates defended George W. Bush, whose name they rarely utter in any context, anywhere. In Congress, Republicans privately called to thank Gingrich, claims his press aide, Rick Tyler. “The general view was that it was long past time for someone to speak up,” he says.

Coming from someone always on the cutting edge of cutting people down, Gingrich’s bombing run signals a new twist in the GOP’s every-man-for-himself ‘08 survival strategy: it may not be enough to ignore Bush; you may need to attack him to prove your bona fides to the public at large. “It’s not so much that he is an embarrassment, it’s that there is an exhaustion,” says Rich Galen, a GOP analyst who has worked for both of the Bushes and Gingrich. “People are tired of defending him.”

Article at MSNBC.com

Commentary: As the verdict for Scooter Libby fast approaches, a former federal prosecutor considers his fate. - By Elizabeth de la Vega

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com

If the memorandum filed by defense attorneys in anticipation of former top White House adviser I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s June 5th sentencing is any indication, it appears that Libby — one of the highest White House officials ever convicted of a felony — has learned precisely nothing from his trial and conviction on charges of false statements, obstruction of justice, and perjury.

Libby’s lawyers admit — because they have to — that their client, a man with three decades of executive-level federal government service, disseminated classified information about the status of CIA Agent Valerie Plame Wilson in response to public criticism of the Bush administration by her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson. They nevertheless insist that this, at best, reckless (and, far more likely, intentional) act is not only not illegal, but not even wrong.

Unfortunately for Libby, this in-your-face position also has a certain shoot-yourself-in-the-foot quality. Libby is arguing for a probationary sentence, which is considerably more lenient than that called for by the Sentencing Guidelines. An essential factor every judge must consider in deciding whether to depart from the guidelines to impose such a light sentence is whether it would sufficiently deter others from similar misconduct.

Having aggressively argued that there was neither crime, nor misconduct, how do Libby’s lawyers then address the issue of deterrence? They argue that Libby has experienced a “very public fall from grace” and that this “dire consequence” alone would be enough to “warn the public — and high ranking government officials in particular — that it is important to take FBI and grand jury investigations very seriously.” This is an exquisite expression of the entitlement and arrogance that spawned the administration’s smear campaign against Joseph Wilson in the first place. It could only be more pointedly evocative of utter contempt for the rule of law if it were followed by a sneer emoticon.

read more at Mother Jones

from Think Progress

“It’s as big as Vatican City and makes the foreign embassies dotting the tree-lined streets of Washington, D.C., look like carriage houses, but the barely-finished U.S. embassy in Baghdad is already primed for expansion.”

According to Dave Foley, spokesman at the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, more Americans are still working at the embassy than initially expected, mainly because the overarching security problem in Baghdad has slowed and complicated efforts to rebuild the country and help establish a functioning central government there. […]

As designed now, the 619 blast-proof apartments may not be enough to accommodate some of the estimated 4,000 regular employees, contractors and local Iraqis working for the embassy, plus congressional and other diplomatic visitors who visit the capital on a regular basis.

By STEPHEN LABATON
from The New York Times

WASHINGTON, June 4 - If President Bush and Vice President Cheney can blurt out vulgar language, then the government cannot punish broadcast television stations for broadcasting the same words in similarly fleeting contexts.

That, in essence, was the decision on Monday, when a federal appeals panel struck down the government policy that allows stations and networks to be fined if they broadcast shows containing obscene language.

Although the case was primarily concerned with what is known as “fleeting expletives,” or blurted obscenities, on television, both network executives and top officials at the Federal Communications Commission said the opinion could gut the ability of the commission to regulate any speech on television or radio.

Kevin J. Martin, the chairman of the F.C.C., said that the agency was now considering whether to seek an appeal before all the judges of the appeals court or to take the matter directly to the Supreme Court.

The decision, by a divided panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York, was a sharp rebuke for the F.C.C. and for the Bush administration. For the four television networks that filed the lawsuit - Fox, CBS, NBC and ABC - it was a major victory in a legal and cultural battle that they are waging with the commission and its supporters.

Under President Bush, the F.C.C. has expanded its indecency rules, taking a much harder line on obscenities uttered on broadcast television and radio. While the judges sent the case back to the commission to rewrite its indecency policy, it said that it was “doubtful” that the agency would be able to “adequately respond to the constitutional and statutory challenges raised by the networks.”

The networks hailed the decision.

read more at THE NEW YORK TIMES