Why are they such sellouts? Can someone please explain this to me? Oh wait, they had to go on vacation and the King said they had to approve this before leaving. And whatever Georgie wants, Georgie gets.

House Roll Call here

From Reuters:

The Democratic-led U.S. Congress yielded to President George W. Bush on Saturday and approved legislation to temporarily expand government’s power to conduct electronic surveillance without a court order in tracking foreign suspects.

Civil liberties groups charged the measure would create a broad net that would sweep up law-abiding U.S. citizens. But the House of Representatives gave its concurrence to the bill, 227-183, a day after it won Senate approval, 60-28. The action came amid warnings of possible attacks on the United States.

Key points in the surveillance bill passed by Congress this week:

_Expands the administration’s powers to eavesdrop, without a court order, on foreign suspects’ communications passing through the United States.

_Requires new wiretaps to be approved by the director of national intelligence and the attorney general, not just the attorney Ggeneral.

_Requires a court-issued warrant when a U.S. resident is the main target of surveillance.

_Requires Congress to reconsider the law in six months.

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Jerry Lee Lewis, Kid Rock
“Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On”

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By Walter Shapiro
from SALON.COM

In a Salon interview, the super-hawk senator talks about his “liberation” from the Democratic Party, John McCain’s campaign nosedive, and why Clinton, Obama and the other Dems are wrong on Iraq.

It may have been collateral damage, but the fiery end to Joe Lieberman’s political career as an orthodox Democrat ranks among the most dramatic casualties of the Iraq war on the home front. A year ago this week, Lieberman, the 2000 Democratic vice presidential nominee, lost a high-voltage Senate primary race in Connecticut to antiwar challenger Ned Lamont. But then running as an independent in the general election, Lieberman, an unstinting champion of the war, romped home to his fourth Senate term.

The national 2006 Democratic sweep left Lieberman, who now calls himself an Independent Democrat, as the ultimate swing vote in the narrowly divided Senate. By choosing to caucus with the Democrats, Lieberman, in effect, elected Harry Reid as Senate majority leader. But even as Lieberman continues to vote with the Democrats on most domestic legislation, he has been moving steadily away from any identification with the party, saying that he might not endorse the party’s 2008 presidential nominee and refusing to categorically rule out someday becoming a Republican.

Wednesday afternoon, Salon interviewed Lieberman in his Senate office. Sitting in an armchair with his suit jacket off, tapping his right foot for emphasis, Lieberman reveled in his status as the most independent man in the Senate. (The interview transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length.)

It is almost a year to the day since you lost the Connecticut Democratic Senate primary to Ned Lamont and filed for reelection as an independent. Are you happier now politically then you were as a Democrat?

We joke about “Liberation Day” [the day he filed as an independent], but there’s a lot of seriousness to it. I have felt liberated. It’s interesting because I have always felt that I was an independent-minded senator. It was in part what got me into the difficulty I was in among my fellow Democrats about Iraq.

There is no question that I have felt totally liberated and have enjoyed the freedom that came in some sense because the Connecticut Democrats who voted in the primary last year gave me my release by refusing to renominate me.

read more HERE

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He was emperor at the apogee of the Aztec civilization, the last to complete his rule before the Spanish Conquest. But Ahuizotl’s tomb has never been found. No Aztec ruler’s funeral chamber ever has. But Mexican archaeologists believe that has finally changed.

Using ground-penetrating radar, they have detected underground chambers that could contain the remains of Ahuizotl, who ruled the Aztecs when Columbus landed in the New World.

The find could provide an extraordinary window into Aztec civilization at its peak. Ahuizotl (ah-WEE-zoh-tuhl), was an empire-builder who extended the Aztecs’ reach as far as Guatemala.

Accounts written by Spanish priests suggest the area was used by the Aztecs to cremate and bury their rulers. But no tomb of an Aztec ruler has ever been found, in part because the Spanish conquerors built their own city atop the Aztec’s ceremonial center, leaving behind colonial structures too historically valuable to remove for excavations.

One of those colonial buildings was so damaged in a 1985 earthquake that it had to be torn down, eventually giving experts their first chance to examine the site off Mexico City’s Zocalo plaza, between the Metropolitan Cathedral and the ruins of the Templo Mayor pyramid.

More at YahooNews

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FORWARD OPERATING BASE WARHORSE, Iraq - The sign taped to the men’s latrine is just five lines:

“US MILITARY CONTRACTORS CIVILIANS ONLY!!!!!”

It needed only one: “NO IRAQIS.”

Here at this searing, dusty U.S. military base about four miles west of Baqouba, Iraqis - including interpreters who walk the same foot patrols and sleep in the same tents as U.S. troops - must use segregated bathrooms.

Another sign, in a dining hall, warns Iraqis and “third-country nationals” that they have just one hour for breakfast, lunch or dinner. American troops get three hours. Iraqis say they sometimes wait as long as 45 minutes in hot lines to get inside the chow hall, leaving just 15 minutes to get their food and eat it.

It’s been nearly 60 years since President Harry Truman ended racial segregation in the U.S. military. But at Forward Operating Base Warhorse it’s alive and well, perhaps the only U.S. military facility with such rules, Iraqi interpreters here say.

It’s unclear precisely who ordered the rules. “The rule separating local national latrines from soldiers was enacted about two to three rotations ago,” Maj. Raul Marquez, a spokesman for the 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 1st Cavalry Division, from Fort Hood, Texas, wrote in an e-mail. That was before his brigade or the 3rd Stryker Combat Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division, from Fort Lewis, Wash., the other major combat force here, was based at Warhorse.

Full article at McClatchy

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Isn’t that grand? We sell weapons to all these countries so they can blow each other up and our arms manufacturers can make billions of dollars. What a deal!

When the United States sells state-of-the-art weapons systems to Arab nations, it invariably provides even more lethal and sophisticated arms to its steadfast ally, Israel, in order to help counter the firepower of its neighbors.

So, when Egypt gets the M60A3 and M1A1 Abrams battle tanks, Israel gets the TOW-2A and Hellfire antitank missiles to blow up the Egyptian vehicles - in the event of a military confrontation between the two countries currently wedded to the 1979 Camp David peace treaty.

Likewise, when the United States grudgingly provides McDonnell Douglas F-15 fighter planes to Saudi Arabia, Israel is armed either with Sidewinder and Sparrow air-to-air missiles or Hawk and Stinger surface-to-air missiles to bring down the US’supplied Saudi aircraft.

Every US government has ensured that no weapons sales to Arab nations would undermine Israel’s traditional “qualitative (military) advantage” over its perceived rivals.

Last week, the administration of President George W. Bush ran true to form when it announced its decision to simultaneously sell arms both to Israel and seven Arab nations: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and the United Arab Emirates.

The package, which is also expected to include one set of weapons to counter the other, includes equipment worth some 20 billion dollars to Saudi Arabia and five other Gulf states, plus 30 billion dollars in military assistance to Israel, and 13 billion dollars in similar grants to Egypt, mostly for purchases of US-made weapons systems.

More at Antiwar.com

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He was probably hoping to see some dead bodies floating in the water…..he’s so into death. The heartless bastard. He doesn’t give a crap about these people any more than he cared about the victims of Katrina. A difficult time for them, but hey , they’ll get through it. Done.

“This is a difficult time for the community in Minneapolis, but the people there are decent and resilient, and they will get through these painful hours.”

Flying over Minneapolis’ collapsed highway bridge, President Bush got a bird’s-eye view Saturday of the concrete slabs and twisted steel that once spanned the Mississippi River.

The president’s Marine One helicopter circled the site several times during a 10-minute tour, allowing him to gaze down upon the muddy waters where some people still are tapped. He saw pieces of the highway still littered with vehicles, including a school bus hugging a guard rail. Rescue boats below helped in the search for victims.

A cloudy sky and slight drizzle greeted Bush upon his arrival. He planned to take a walking tour, receive briefings on recovery efforts and meet with families and some of the victims.

Still criticized for his administration’s sluggish response to Hurricane Katrina, Bush hurried to Minnesota soon after the I-35W bridge buckled on Wednesday. The collapse sent dozens of cars sliding in the Mississippi River, killing at least five people and injuring about 100 others.

“Clearly, this was not something that we expected to happen,” said his transportation chief, who flew with the president on Air Force One.

In his weekly radio address, tape Friday and released before the trip, Bush said: “This is a difficult time for the community in Minneapolis, but the people there are decent and resilient, and they will get through these painful hours.”

More at the Boston Globe

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The extraordinary secrecy surrounding the spying operations revealed in Alberto Gonzales‘ Senate testimony is not aimed at al-Qaeda, but at the American people.

The dispute over whether Attorney General Alberto Gonzales committed perjury when he parsed words about George W. Bush’s warrantless surveillance program misses a larger point: the extraordinary secrecy surrounding these spying operations is not aimed at al-Qaeda, but at the American people.

There has never been a reasonable explanation for why a fuller discussion of these operations would help al-Qaeda, although that claim often is used by the Bush administration to challenge the patriotism of its critics or to avoid tough questions.

On July 27, for instance, White House press secretary Tony Snow fended off reporters who asked about apparent contradictions in Gonzales’s testimony by saying:

“This gets us back into the situation that I understand is unsatisfactory because there are lots of questions raised and the vast majority of those we’re not going to be in a position to answer, simply because they do involve matters of classification that we cannot and will not discuss publicly.”

Discussion closed.

Please do read the rest at Alternet

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I (by accident!) caught the tail end of Rush’s radio program yesterday. Rush spoke of the Minneapolis bridge collapse tragedy. In it he said, basically, that America’s infrastructure woes are all made up. I couldn’t find that quote anywhere on the ‘net, but did find this:

Tim Pawlenty has a different take:

Either Pawlenty isn’t a true-blooded republican… or Limbaugh is being his typically normal asshole-ish self. You decide!

These people really should get their talking points straight.

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Are we sure they are “former” enemies. No.

FORWARD OPERATING BASE ISKAN, Iraq Inside a brightly lit room, the walls adorned with memorials to 23 dead American soldiers, Lt. Col. Robert Balcavage stared at the three Sunni tribal leaders he wanted to recruit.

Their fighters had battled U.S. troops. Balcavage suspected they might have attacked some of his own men. The trio accused another sheik of having links to the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq. That sheik, four days earlier, had promised the U.S. military to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq and protect a strategic road.

“Who do you trust? Who do you not trust?” said Balcavage, commander of the 1st Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division, his voice dipping out of earshot.

Enlisting former enemies
An hour later, he signed up some of America’s newest allies.

U.S. commanders are offering large sums to enlist, at breakneck pace, their former enemies, handing them broad security powers in a risky effort to tame this fractious area south of Baghdad in Babil province and, literally, buy time for national reconciliation.

More at MSNBC

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