WTF Is It Now?!?

Coffee.

I was woken up at the crack of dawn this morning by Jaffa and Egon playing cat-pinball all over the bed. Boing boing bounce boing pounce fight bounce....

More coffee.


GRRRRRRRRRR
From Yahoo Nooze: Traveling by speedboat, the Clueless Cowpat took a few hours out of his seaside long weekend on Saturday to raise about $300,000 for U.S. Sen. Susan Collins and other Maine Republicans.

"Great way to travel," Bunnypants called out as the boat piloted by his father, Bush-the-only-slightly-smarter, arrived from Walker's Point, the family summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine where the Cretin of Crawford is spending the weekend with his parents as a kick-off to his month-long vacation.

"This probably is the first political event I've ever traveled to by boat and I want to thank the boat's captain - number 41," Bunnypants said, prompting laughter and applause from the audience of well-heeled, casually-dressed Republicans.

On the first full day of a month's vacation that he will spend largely outside Washington, the event was the sole item on the Smirking Squatter's schedule and was expected to raise $200,000 for Maine Republicans and $100,000 for Collins' reelection campaign.

"Daddy & his Suppository....Welcome to the Republican Brown-Nose Party. We can't help you with the economy, but we can help ourselves to your money. So donate to us, so we can financially bailout the corporations that screw you....." - by rumpel99957 at the yahoo message boards.


BUSH'S SHAME
By Thomas Friedman, NY Times:
Watching the pathetic, mealy-mouthed response of President Bush and his State Department to Egypt's decision to sentence the leading Egyptian democracy advocate to seven years in prison leaves one wondering whether the whole Bush foreign policy team isn't just a big bunch of phonies. Shame on all of them.

Since Sept. 11 all we've heard out of this Bush team is how illegitimate violence is as a tool of diplomacy or politics, and how critical it is to oust Saddam Hussein in order to bring democracy to the Arab world. Yet last week, when a kangaroo court in Egypt, apparently acting on orders from President Hosni Mubarak, sentenced an ill, 63-year-old Saad Eddin Ibrahim to seven years at "hard labor" for promoting democracy — for promoting the peaceful alternative to fundamentalist violence — the Bush-Cheney team sat on its hands.

The State Department, in a real profile in courage, said it was "deeply disappointed" by the conviction of Mr. Ibrahim, who holds a U.S. passport. "Disappointed"? I'm disappointed when the Baltimore Orioles lose. When an Egyptian president we give $2 billion a year to jails a pro-American democracy advocate, I'm "outraged" and expect America to do something about it.



BOMBING FOR POLL NUMBERS, the continuing story
From the UK Observer:
The question now appears to be not whether there will be a war, but when. The answer is that in war, as other matters, timing is all. For President George W. Bush that timing will be dictated by the demands of a domestic political agenda. With the economy in the middle of what now looks like a double-dip recession - and his room for manoeuvre on the economic front hobbled by his tax-cut commitments - Bush has been left with only two policies he can sell as a success: the war against terrorism and the war against Saddam

But when to act? Current thinking on both sides of the Atlantic is that Bush will not want to risk a war that does not begin until well into next year, as that would bring him too close to the time when he wants to be engaged in his campaign for re-election. That leaves this winter.

Analysts in Washington are also fast coming to the view that Bush will announce his decision to go to war in good time to allow the Republican candidates for the mid-term elections in November to campaign wrapped in the flag of war. Indeed, some Democratic campaign managers have so convinced themselves of the logic of this timing, and the inevitability of their candidate's defeat, that they are said to have all but given up hope in this election cycle.


NEWS YOU WON'T SEE ON TV - BECAUSE KARL SAID SO
"Bush on CNN just condemned the latest bombing, and then said 'now watch this drive.' . And he flourished his golf club. Didn't even miss a beat." - Melic in the BC Forum. CNN later edited the clip.