Sen. Joe Biden on Tuesday was incredulous over President Bush’s statement that he learned only last week that a recent intelligence estimate says Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003. “If that’s true … he’s one of the most incompetent presidents in modern American history.” Biden said.

Joe, ya dun went and made the prezdent cry…

Thank you, Joe!

It’s been reported that Dick Cheney’s head exploded last night……..and the pacemaker blew right out of his chest.

A new assessment by American intelligence agencies released Monday concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains frozen, contradicting a judgment two years ago that Tehran was working relentlessly toward building a nuclear bomb.

Senator Harry Reid said the assessment was “directly challenging some of this administration’s alarming rhetoric” on Iran.

The conclusions of the new assessment are likely to reshape the final year of the Bush administration, which has made halting Iran’s nuclear program a cornerstone of its foreign policy.

The assessment, a National Intelligence Estimate that represents the consensus view of all 16 American spy agencies, states that Tehran is likely to keep its options open with respect to building a weapon, but that intelligence agencies “do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.”

More at the New York Times

“Yes: I TOLD YOU SO”

[...]The primary subject about which I would have such thoughts is the one that ought to concern everyone, the only subject that matters now in terms of what it could mean for the future of the world, and of the United States: the probability of an attack on Iran.
[...]

[Impeachment] is the one method the Democrats will categorically, absolutely not utilize — because the Democrats are a crucial, inextricable part of the identical authoritarian-corporatist system that has led us to these horrors. They have all worked toward this end over many decades, Democrats and Republicans alike, and now the horrors manifest themselves explicitly, without apology, even with the sickening boastfulness of the mass murderer who is proud of what he has done, and who vehemently believes he is right.

Visit Arthur’s Once Upon A Time… web blog. I guarantee you’ll be adding him to your Favorites/Bookmarks folder!

An interview with Noam Chomsky from Information Clearing House (video here):

Read more »

You may want to invest in one. It might end up being a very cold winter ahead of us.

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said on Saturday that oil prices could more than double to $200 per barrel if the United States attacked Iran over a standoff about Tehran’s nuclear program.

“If the United States is crazy enough to attack Iran or commit aggression against Venezuela … oil would not be $100 but $200,” Chavez told an OPEC summit in the Saudi capital Riyadh. His remarks were translated into Arabic.

U.S. defense officials have signaled that up-to-date attack plans are available if needed in the escalating crisis over Iran’s nuclear aims, although no strike appears imminent.

The Army and Marine Corps are under enormous strain from years of heavy ground fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Still, the United States has ample air and naval power to strike Iran if President Bush decided to target nuclear sites or to retaliate for alleged Iranian meddling in neighboring Iraq.

Among the possible targets, in addition to nuclear installations like the centrifuge plant at Natanz: Iran’s ballistic missile sites, Republican Guard bases, and naval warfare assets that Tehran could use in a retaliatory closure of the Straits of Hormuz, a vital artery for the flow of Gulf oil.

More at Military.com

Yeah, everybody’s got a bomb
We could all die any day
But before I’ll let that happen
I’ll dance my life away

Better hurry up with that Mukasey confirmation… Iran’s centrifuge tally has just hit the big 3,000.

“We have now reached 3,000 machines,” Ahmadinejad told thousands of Iranians in Birjand in eastern Iran, in a show of defiance of international demands to halt the program believed to be masking the country’s nuclear arms efforts.
[...]

Centrifuges are used in enriching uranium, a process that can produce either fuel for a nuclear reactor or material for a warhead.

Associated Press

In an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, the Amsterdam-based military historian Gabriel Kolko talks about the prospect of war with Iran and argues that many in the US military now view the White House as being ‘out of control.’

From the interview:

Many in the US military think Bush and Cheney are out of control. They are rebelling against Bush and Cheney. Washington Post reporter Dana Priest recently said in an interview that she believed the US military would revolt and refuse to fly missions against Iran if the White House issued such orders.

Full interview at Spiegel This is a good interview……go read it.

It would appear Condi’s meeting with Putin was a bust. I wonder what Chimpy’s reaction to this will be.

Putin Visits Iran, Sends Warnings to US

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Russian leader Vladimir Putin met his Iranian counterpart Tuesday and implicitly warned the U.S. not to use a former Soviet republic to stage an attack on Iran. He also said nations shouldn’t pursue oil pipeline projects in the area if they weren’t backed by regional powers.
[...]

Putin has warned the U.S. and other nations against trying to coerce Iran into reining in its nuclear program and insists peaceful dialogue is the only way to deal with Tehran’s defiance of a U.N. Security Council demand that it suspend uranium enrichment.

“Threatening someone, in this case the Iranian leadership and Iranian people, will lead nowhere,” Putin said Monday during his trip to Germany. “They are not afraid, believe me.”

VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV, Associated Press

Source: AP

Russia = diplomacy
US = war-mongering

How did we get here? Oh, yeah… years of republican control.

So what Putin is basically stating here is that Iran is “innocent until proven guilty“. What a novel idea! Imagine how many lives would have been saved if our own elected officials practiced this philosophy.

Rice Says Iran ‘Lying’ About Nukes

SHANNON, Ireland (AP) – Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Thursday accused Iran of “lying” about the aim of its nuclear program, saying there’s no doubt Tehran wants the capability to produce nuclear weapons and has deceived the U.N.’s atomic watchdog about its intentions.

“There is an Iranian history of obfuscation and, indeed, lying to the IAEA,” she said, referring to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

“There is a history of Iran not answering important questions about what is going on and there is Iran pursuing nuclear technologies that can lead to nuclear weapons-grade material,” Rice told reporters aboard her plane as she headed to Moscow.
[...]

Russian President Vladimir Putin said this week there is no proof Tehran is trying to build the bomb. Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates are scheduled to see him in Moscow on Friday.

Matthew Lee, Associated Press

Source: AP

It’s very important to drill into the mind of the average American just how evil all of Iran is (even [perhaps] when just a handful of Iranians are helping to arm Iraqi dissidents). Keep on driving it home and, eventually, it becomes just another excuse filled with ‘truthiness’ (think ‘WMDs’) to further the republican/neocon agenda in the middle east… whatever that may be.

Petraeus: Iran still fueling war

Petraeus says Iran must prove it is no longer supplying weapons to Iraq militias.

FORWARD OPERATING BASE CALDWELL, Iraq (CNN) – Although America’s top general in Iraq called al Qaeda “the wolf closest to the sled,” he said sectarian fighting among militias fueled by Iran could be the biggest long-term challenge for Iraq.
[...]

“Al Qaeda remains the wolf closest to the sled, if you will. The enemy that is always bent on reigniting sectarian violence, causing the most horrific casualties, damaging the infrastructure in the most difficult way. So you cannot lose focus on al Qaeda.”

But, Petraeus added, there was “no question” that Iranian arms were ending up in the hands of the Iraqi militias and there was “no debate” that six Iranians detained by the U.S. military in northern Iraq are Iranian Quds force members, the Iranian unit accused by the United States of training and arming insurgents.

“There’s no question, absolutely no question that Iran is providing advanced RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades], RPG 29s,” Petraeus said.

“It has provided some shoulder-fired, Stinger-like air-defense missiles. It has provided the explosively formed projectiles and it has provided 244 mm rockets, in addition to mortars, mortar rounds and other small-arms ammunition.”

Petraeus also said the Iranians “are implicated in the assassination of some governors in the southern provinces.”

-Jim Clancy, CNN

CNN.com

He’d accept but the problem is he can’t speak.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has extended an invitation to U.S. President George W. Bush to speak at an Iranian university if the American leader ever traveled to the Islamic Republic, state-run television reported Friday.

As part of his controversial trip to New York, the hardline Iranian leader spoke Monday at Columbia University, where he faced hostile questioning and a combative introduction by the university’s president, who said Ahmadinejad exhibited “all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator.”

“If their president plans to travel to Iran, we will allow him to make a speech” at a university, Ahmadinejad told state TV before leaving New York to travel to South America earlier this week.

His comments were aired on state TV Friday and signaled an unusual readiness by Iran to receive an American president after more than a quarter century with no diplomatic ties.

More at the International Herald Tribune

By Rick Perlstein
Campaign for America’s Future

Here’s a big question that I want to start addressing in upcoming posts: what is conservative rule doing to our nation’s soul? How is it rewiring our hearts and minds? What kind of damage are they doing to the American character? And can we ever recover?

So: what is the American character? Hard to say, of course. But I daresay we know it when we see it. Let me put before you an illustrative example: one week in September of 1959, when, much like one week in September of 2007, American soil supported a visit by what many, if not most Americans agreed was the most evil and dangerous man on the planet.

Nikita Khrushchev disembarked from his plane at Andrews Air Force Base to a 21-gun salute and a receiving line of 63 officials and bureaucrats, ending with President Eisenhower. He rode 13 miles with Ike in an open limousine to his guest quarters across from the White House. Then he met for two hours with Ike and his foreign policy team. Then came a white-tie state dinner. (The Soviets then put one on at the embassy for Ike.) He joshed with the CIA chief about pooling their intelligence data, since it probably all came from the same people-then was ushered upstairs to the East Wing for a leisurely gander at the Eisenhowers’ family quarters.

[...]

Had America suddenly succumbed to a fever of weak-kneed appeasement? Had the general running the country-the man who had faced down Hitler!-proven himself what the John Birch Society claimed he was: a conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy?

No. Nikita Khrushchev simply visited a nation that had character. That was mature, well-adjusted. A nation confident we were great. We had our neuroses, to be sure-plenty of them.

But look now what we have lost. Now when a bad guy crosses our threshhold, America becomes a pants-piddling mess.

Iran’s president speaks at a great American university. That university’s president, in the act of introducing his lecture, whines like a baby bereft of his pacifier that his guest is a big meany poopy-head. City Council members, too, and a rabbi, make like ten-year-olds, giving their press conference in front of a sign with his face struck through and the legend “Go To Hell.” Up in Albany, Democratic leader Sheldon Silver treat the students of this great university like ten years olds, threatening to defund Columbia University lest censors like himself prove unable to shut the poor children’s ears to difficult speech. (What, was he worried they’d be convinced, join the jihad?) Then a Republican presidential candidate chimes in-bye, bye, federalism!’saying Washington should starve the school of funds, too. American diplomats used to have the gumption to spar face to face with dreaded foreign leaders. Now they go on cable TV and whine about what a “travesty” it would have been to visit a site which properly should belong to the world. Hundreds of foreign nationals died in the World Trade Center on 9/11 (maybe even some of the Iranian!). Yet we have to systematically repress that-as if our national ego would crack like fine crystal if we were forced to acknowledge the mingling of American blood with that of mere foreigners.

read more HERE

It’s essential to contact your senators about opposing the Kyl-Lieberman amendment to the FY 2008 Defense Authorization bill. The vote could be any day now, and it can’t get too much attention. Contact information is at the end of this post.

As Josh Marshall explains:

Did you hear about the War on Iran Authorization bill the Senate is going to vote on perhaps as early as today? No, that’s not how it’s getting billed. But that’s what the ‘Kyl-Lieberman’ amendment is. In fact, the supporters of going to war against Iran are using exactly the same strategy with this amendment that they did to lay the groundwork for the Iraq War.

You can watch Josh Marshall break it down on TPMtv here.

As Jonathan Schwarz wrote last week:
Read more »

By NAHAL TOOSI
The Associated Press

NEW YORK - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, facing protests and tabloid headlines calling him “evil” and a “madman,” stirred debate Monday about free speech ahead of his appearance at Columbia University.

Columbia President Lee Bollinger has promised to grill Ahmadinejad on subjects such as human rights, the Holocaust and Iran’s disputed nuclear program. The Iranian leader previously has called the Holocaust “a myth” and called for Israel to be “wiped off the map.”

Bollinger said Monday it was a question of free speech and academic freedom.

“It’s extremely important to know who the leaders are of countries that are your adversaries. To watch them to see how they think, to see how they reason or do not reason. To see whether they’re fanatical, or to see whether they are sly,” he told ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

Ahmadinejad is to speak and answer questions at a Columbia forum Monday, followed by a scheduled address to the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday.

The New York Daily News’ front page on Monday read: “THE EVIL HAS LANDED.” The New York Post called Ahmadinejad the “Madman Iran Prez” and a “guest of dishonor.”

read more HERE