The End of July

It's the weekend. Enough about George & Karl, U.S. history & the sad state that is Florida. Get out and enjoy that wonderous star we call the sun; enjoy it in the company of good friends; and enjoy it with fine food & wine.

For your "end of July" soundtrack, I highly suggest a few tunes currently running "in heavy rotation" on my iPod (summertime classics, all):

Saint - Texas

Ben's Letter - 54 Seconds

Talk - Coldplay

Be Yourself - Morcheeba

Fool's Paradise - The Sylvers

Seven Days In Sunny June - Jamiroquai

Sausalito Summer Night - Diesel

I'm off to L.A. and will return to the blogosphere on Monday. Enjoy your weekend.

Sad State of Affairs

Excellent commentary from Noel this Friday over the sad state of affairs in the education of United States history among American middle school students.

Author and historian David McCullough was the key witness at [a congressional] hearing and expressed two major concerns: history text books, and teacher training. As a middle school history teacher I can tell you that these are indeed two of the biggest problems when teaching history. Take a look at several different history books and you'll see that they're all the same, very basic and very boring descriptions of various events throughout the course of American history. Descriptions that barely scratch the surface and don't tell the whole story. McCullough has evaluated school history books and found another problem and trend, "typeface in those books is growing larger, the illustrations are more lavish, and the content is shrinking." It seems as though the textbook companies are assuming students don't like to read, or aren't good readers.

If we don't learn of (and from) our past, it will be awfully hard to face the challenges of the future.

But history isn't the only subject in which our students find themselves underperforming. Sadly (and perhaps more importantly), science, math and engineering education in the United States is woefully inadequate. As columnist Thomas Friedman puts it:

If we don't do something soon and dramatic to reverse this "erosion"...we are not going to have the scientific foundation to sustain our high standard of living in 15 or 20 years.

And of course our Republican-controlled government doesn't help. They slashed National Science Foundation funding in this year's budget. The way they see it, who needs science? The fables of the Bible are sure to secure our place as the world's super-power. Right?

How do math and science education secure our place as the leader of the free world, you ask? Again, Mr. Friedman:

You give me an America that is energy-independent and I will give you sharply reduced oil revenues for the worst governments in the world. I will give you political reform from Moscow to Riyadh to Tehran. Yes, deprive these regimes of the huge oil windfalls on which they depend and you will force them to reform by having to tap their people instead of oil wells.

Sure, it would require some sacrifice. But remember J.F.K.'s words when he summoned us to go to the moon on Sept. 12, 1962: "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win."

But if his 5 years in the White House are any indication, George W. Bush won't step up to the plate. After all, rather than summon us to do great and extraordinary things in the days after 9/11, Georgie Boy asked us to "go shopping."

The man is a true visionary.

Sad State of Affairs, Part 2

The red states wonder why we blue-staters look down on them. I present Exhibit 1 from the Orlando Sentinel:

Paul Day and Christopher Robertson knew life as gay men in Polk County could be rough. They had been called names and taunted by neighborhood teens before.

The couple never thought it would get so bad as Monday, when they returned home from errands to find their house in Kings Manor Mobile Home Park in Lakeland torched and the words "Die Fag" spray-painted on the front steps.

Statewide, though, there is an upward swing in the amount of violence reported toward people because of their sexual orientation. In the latest state report, for instance, hate crimes based on orientation accounted for a higher percentage of all hate crimes than ever before.

Remember, this is Florida. The same state where 21 year-old Ronnie Paris is charged with torturing his 3-year old son to death because he thought the child was gay.

People who commit these sort of atrocities are really no different than men who fly planes into crowded skyscrapers.

Bin Missin', Bin Forgotten

News item: British police investigating a series of failed bomb attacks in London said Wednesday they had arrested four men in the English city of Birmingham.

News item: Security forces in Egypt have made 35 arrests in connection with the bomb attacks on the Red Sea resort of Sharm-al-Sheikh in which at least 88 people were killed. The arrests took place several hours after the blasts.

News item: 9/11 mastermind, an Arab man who is 6 feet 5 inches tall, with a long white beard, walking around the mountains of Pakistan with a dialysis machine, remains at large almost four years after U.S. attacks.

Van Gogh Killer Sentenced to Life

And will now face terrorism charges, say prosecutors in the Netherlands.

Ibrahim Parlak

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Carol Marin takes the Bush administration to task over its unwarranted detention of Turkish immigrant Ibrahim Parlak.

Parlak is the Harbert, Mich., restaurateur who until June of this year was locked up for 10 months in an immigration jail because the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had suddenly decided he was a terrorist. Never mind that back in 1992, the United States granted him political asylum. Back then immigration officials saw him as a Kurdish freedom fighter who had been persecuted, imprisoned and tortured. We welcomed him into this country.

But in the post-9/11 war on terrorism, a lot of things got redefined and one of them was Ibrahim Parlak, whom the feds arrested in July of 2004. Because the Kurdish resistance movement to which he once belonged had been reclassified by the State Department as a terrorist enterprise, suddenly Parlak was reclassified too.

Because immigration judges work for the Department of Homeland Security and the attorney general of the United States, they are in no way part of an independent court system. Parlak lost every one of his battles in immigration court. It was not until a truly independent judge, Avern Cohn in U.S. District Court in Detroit, got the case that he had a chance. Judge Cohn made mincemeat of the government's ridiculous assertions that Parlak was a threat to anyone and released him.

And now the U.S. is trying to deport Parlak's brother.

U.S. Immigration Court Judge Robert Newberry has just ruled that Huseyin Parlak, 38, be deported to Turkey. Officials want him out of the country in 90 days. Huseyin Parlak, who was here on a student visa, had also applied for but was denied political asylum, even though he faces the same danger his brother does if he returns to Turkey, where the Parlak family is known to be sympathetic to the Kurdish resistance.

Why exactly did immigration officials decide to throw the book at Huseyin Parlak? Could it have anything to do with the fact that they lost their latest battle with Ibrahim Parlak?

"No," says Greg Palmore, spokesman for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in Detroit, "these are two separate cases. It is not the government reacting to Ibrahim Parlak's case."

I'm sure.

This is an administration that doesn't know how to admit mistakes. Not mistakes about intelligence failures or weapons of mass destruction or estimates about the cost or duration of an Iraqi war. And certainly not mistakes about whom we arrest and whom we detain in behalf of making us feel safe within our own borders.

Marin concludes:

Somewhere along the line, we need to remember once again that we are a nation of immigrants. And even in times of terror, we have to keep our head about who is a threat and who is not. And care about making careful decisions.

Amen!

NBC Unveils Fall Line-Up

Attempting to regain traction after finishing the 2004-2005 television season in fourth place, NBC has unveiled its fall line-up. The highlights:

"The Apprentice: Martha Stewart"

I can't stop laughing at this one. Can you say "desperation?" I can hear Martha now: "You're fired, bitch!"

"Three Wishes," which NBC calls "an uplifting wish-fulfillment series starring Grammy winning entertainer Amy Grant."

Hmmm. The choice of a host here is interesting. Amy Grants wishes? C'mon, guys!

Other highlights:

September 21: The premiere of "E-Ring." This is a Jerry Bruckheiemer-produced series. It will be interesting to see if the "CSI" magic follows him to NBC.

September 29: "Will and Grace" begins its final season with a live episode. Many of the key players are stage veterans so this should be quite interesting to watch.

November 13: "Saturday Night Live: The 80's" The SNL clip shows are cheap to put together and usually win NBC respectable ratings.

November 20: "The Poseidon Adventure." This Hallmark-produced remake was scooped up by NBC in advance of Wolfgang Petersen's big screen version which is due out next summer. NBC's 3-hour "TV event" stars such C-list has-beens as Steve Guttenberg and C. Thomas Howell.

November 27-28: "10.5 - The Apocalypse." Apparently November marks the return of the disaster movie as NBC follows "The Poseidon Adventure" with this sequel to the earthquake mini-series of last season.

At first glance, I don't see much here that will move NBC out of fourth place. The mighty peacock is in for another embarassing season.

More from the Futon Critic.

"Eight Days In July"

Frank Rich continues his excellent commentary on the Rove/Wilson scandal.

Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For You

From Sunday's New York Times:

The Bush administration's rallying call that America is a nation at war is increasingly ringing hollow to men and women in uniform, who argue in frustration that America is not a nation at war, but a nation with only its military at war.

From bases in Iraq and across the United States to the Pentagon and the military's war colleges, officers and enlisted personnel quietly raise a question for political leaders: if America is truly on a war footing, why is so little sacrifice asked of the nation at large?

There is no serious talk of a draft to share the burden of fighting across the broad citizenry, and neither Republicans nor Democrats are pressing for a tax increase to force Americans to cover the $5 billion a month in costs from Iraq, Afghanistan and new counterterrorism missions.

There are not even concerted efforts like the savings-bond drives or gasoline rationing that helped to unite the country behind its fighting forces in wars past.

This was a major issue for me last November when I argued against President Bush's re-election:

During the dark days of September, 2001 - with 3,000 of our own citizens dead - we Americans were desperate for true leadership. We wished for a president who, in the spirit of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, would rally the nation to our new calling. Instead, all we got from President Bush was a request to "go shopping." As an American, I couldn't have been more insulted. As a member of the world community, I couldn't have been more embarrassed.

Of course it is hard to rally a nation to the cause when you ship their sons and daughters around the globe to fight a war based on bogus claims.

But even before Iraq, Mr. Bush never stepped up to the plate. Columnist Thomas Friedman sums it up in his latest book, "The World Is Flat":

When we got hit with 9/11, it was a once-in-a-generation opportunity to summon the nation to sacrifice, to address some of its pressing fiscal, energy, science, and education shortfalls - all things that we had let slide. But our president did not summon us to sacrifice. He summoned us to go shopping.

Mr. Bush's lack of vision, among many other things, will not serve his legacy well. America deserves better.

What Bible Study Taught My Daddy

From Tampa, Florida:

Ronnie Paris would shake, wet himself and vomit as his father forced him into a box and repeatedly slapped him on the head in an effort to prevent him from being gay, the child's mother, Nysheerah Paris, testified Monday.

"He was trying to teach him how to fight," the boy's aunt, Shanita Powell, told the court. "He was concerned that the child might be gay."

"He didn't want him to be a sissy," Shelton Bostic, the defendant's Bible-study friend, testified.

The heartbreaking story here.

I'm speechless.

Sick to my stomach, and speechless.

Justice Otto Roberts

From John Roberts' 2003 Senate confirmation hearing:

Senator: Sir, did you or did you not experiment as an actor early in life? And during that brief career move, did you or did you not take on the roll of an inflatable autopilot named Otto in the movie "Airplane?" And finally, in that roll did you or did you not receive fellatio by Julie Haggerty?

Roberts: Surely, you can't be serious.

Senator: I am completely serious, Mr. Roberts. And don't call me Shirley.

(Hat tip: World Wide Rant).

What Goes Around...

Here is the lowdown on the Bloomberg article: Karl Rove, senior adviser to the President and deputy White House chief-of-staff, and Lewis Libby, chief-of-staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, are being investigated for having lied to a federal grand jury about how they learned the identity of a covert CIA agent.

And now it looks as if former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer might be in trouble.

Me thinks George, Karl, Dick, et.al. are poopin' their pants right about now.

(Courtesy of Think Progress.)

Welcome to the Blogosphere, Sista Girrrl

Great new blog, with a little bit of everything, from Chicago's own Noel. Check it out.

The Weekend Starts Here

MOVIES:

My partner and I saw the trailer for "Murderball" recently and thought it looked like an excellent documentary. And now Roger Ebert confirms it.

He also recommends "Hustle and Flow."

TELEVISION:

Game Show Network is re-airing the first (2001) season of the CBS hit "The Amazing Race." Starring "Team Guido" and bald-headed Kevin and Drew, I remember the first series well. For those "Race" fans who came into the show in later seasons, I highly recommend a glance at this first season.

And on Saturday and Sunday "Good Times," a spin-off of "Maude" (which was a spin-off of "All in the Family"), joins TV Land this weekend with a 48-hour marathon.

BOOKS:

I plan to settle in Saturday and get through as much of "Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince" as I can. My partner picked it up last Saturday and finished the 670+ page adventure by Sunday night.

Cheers!

F is for Fan

From tonight's Countdown with Keith Olbermann:

The Wall Street Journal will break the news tomorrow that not only was the damning State Department memo reported today labeled "secret," it was classified as "top secret."

And, according to WSJ National Political Editor John Harwood, the memo also lists the Plame revelation as "SNF," or "Secret, No Foreign," in terms of parties to whom the information can or cannot be disclosed.

Shit, meet fan.

"Trickle-On" Economics

News Item (May 13, 2005): Kodak CEO receives 12.8 percent pay raise and bonus of $150,000.00.

News Item (July 21, 2005): Kodak will cut 10,000 jobs.

Rove Ass-terisk

Courtesy of the American Prospect:

More Explosions in London's Tube

Follow the details via the BBC.

S is for Secret

The Karl Rove investigation is back on the front page. Via the Washington Post:

"A classified State Department memorandum central to a federal leak investigation contained information about CIA officer Valerie Plame in a paragraph marked '(S)' for secret, a clear indication that any Bush administration official who read it should have been aware the information was classified, according to current and former government officials.

The paragraph identifying her [Plame] as the wife of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV was clearly marked to show that it contained classified material at the "secret" level, two sources said.

Anyone reading that paragraph should have been aware that it contained secret information..."

Whoever saw this memo knew that the information was not to be revealed.

C is for Condi

Josh Marshall thinks one of his Reader Blogs is onto something: Did then-National Security Advisor Condi Rice push the "Wilson's wife sent him" story? The TPM Cafe entry is here.

DubyaSpeak

Today's Bushism, courtesy of the staff at Geoffrey's:

"When you ride hard on a mountain bike, sometimes you fall. Otherwise you're not riding hard." - Auchterarder, Scotland, Jul. 7, 2005

Contemptuous George

Well, well, well...the President rushed one of the most important decisions of his presidency - a nominee to the highest court in the land - so that media focus would move away from the Rove/Wilson/Plame/We-lied-to-go-to-war scandal. From Bloomberg:

"Bush accelerated his search for a Supreme Court nominee in part because of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into the leak of a CIA agent's name, according to Republicans familiar with administration strategy."

Again...should we be surprised by the behavior of Contemptuous George?

Q & A: John Roberts

NPR has a great Q&A session with political editor Ken Rudin about the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court.

Fox Hound

Bill Hemmer, the former pretty-boy CNN anchor announced this morning that he has signed a multi-year, $1 million deal with Fox Jazerra.

In June CNN offered Hemmer the roll of senior White House correspondent - a pretty nice assignment, if you ask me. Instead, Hemmer left CNN saying he wanted to remain in New York for "personal reasons."

The Death of Gerry Thomas

Gerry Thomas, a guy whose name you have probably never heard, has died at the age of 83. Thomas, like Bill Clinton and Madonna after him, was accused by many white male conservatives of destroying the moral fabric of the American nuclear family.

What on earth did he do, you ask?

Gerry Thomas invented the TV dinner.

Rove Rage

OK. Bush has nominated his Supreme Court pick. That process will take a few months to play out. Let's get the real news back front & center.

Karl Rove lied to the FBI about his alibi.

Santa Barbara Forecast: Hot

CHLOE will want some ice cream.

Right Wing Ramblings

Right-wing nut job Ann Coulter hates Bush's pick.

Mr. Roberts

President Bush yesterday nominated Judge John G. Roberts to the United States Supreme Court.
Many legal talking heads are saying that this is a strong selection by the President; that Judge Roberts’ resume prior to being put on the bench (he’s only been a judge for two years) is quite strong. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor described Roberts as "fabulous" and a "brilliant legal mind, a straight shooter, articulate, and he should not have trouble being confirmed by October." (Frankly, I think the President could have found someone with a longer judicial track record. We're talking about the highest court in the land!)

MSNBC reported yesterday that former Clinton White House counsel Lloyd Cutler called Bush’s selection a decent choice; and this morning on N.P.R. Robert Bennett, Clinton’s impeachment lawyer, said that this was a good nomination. Bennett stressed that the Republican candidate won the election last November and that this is the sort of candidate we would expect from such a president.

That seems to be the overall consensus; that Roberts is a decent, respectable choice coming from a conservative Republican chief executive and that the Senate is likely to confirm the nomination.

Liberal groups are coming out in strong opposition to the choice. Roberts has argued for pro-life forces in front of the high court and his wife is a member of some sort of "Feminists for Life" activist group. The judge is also a member of the Federalist Society, a right-wing legal group who helped fund the anti-Clinton smear campaigns of the 1990s.

If I were a senator I’d be holding any sort of judgment. Granted, a Republican president sits in the White House. As such we should expect a conservative nominee (just as we would expect a more center-left candidate from a Democratic president). But plenty of questions need to be asked of the judge – and answered by him.

"The president is a man of his word. He promised to nominate someone along the lines of a Scalia or a Thomas, and that is exactly what he has done," Tony Perkins, president of the radical-right Family Research Council, said yesterday.

Scalia and Thomas are what I consider to be "activist judges”" who "legislate" Fascist social policy from the bench. If during the confirmation process Roberts turns out to have a similar judicial temperament, his nomination should be defeated promptly.

If confirmation hearings show that he is a strong federalist and a defender of judicial restraint, then the Senate should give the Republican president his associate justice.

But, for now, I’ll take a wait and see approach. On to the hearings.

RELATED STORIES:
NY Times editorial.
USA Today editorial.
Andrew Sullivan's take.

Blow Hard

Jonathan Antin, focus of the Bravo realty hair piece "Blow Out," is the most self-centered, dramatic "straight" man I have ever had the displeasure of seeing on TV.

It's John G. Roberts

It'll be a middle aged white male Republican. Go figure.

CNN and NBC are reporting that President Bush will nominate U.S. Court of Appeals judge John G. Roberts to the United States Supreme Court. More on him here (scroll down). Initial talking-head reaction is along the lines of "well, he's ok for a conservative."

Only a judge for 20 months, but high ratings from the American Bar Association and Clinton White House counsel Lloyd Cutler says Bush has made a decent choice.

We'll see.

ABC News: It's Not Clement

From ABC News:

Judge Edith Clement — perceived by many observers as a potential frontrunner for the Supreme Court seat vacated by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor — is not President Bush's choice for the high court.

An informed source told ABC News they had spoken with Clement and said she received a phone call from the White House this afternoon. According to the source, Clement was thanked for meeting with the president and sharing her views on the Supreme Court, but that the administration has decided to go in a 'different direction.'

A "different direction?" Clement seems pretty moderate. A "different direction" by Mr. Bush means only one thing: "right turn."

Bush Will Announce Supreme Court Nominee Tonight

UPDATE, 11:35AM: Home for lunch and just heard a talking head on MSNBC mention that Judge Clement is a member of the Federalist Society, a right-wing think-tank.

From the AP:

By Deb Riechmann, Associated Press
July 19, 2005

WASHINGTON - President Bush has decided whom to nominate to succeed Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court and was poised to announce his pick in a prime-time Tuesday night address.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said the Bush administration was asking television outlets to broadcast the speech live. Bush's spokesman would not identify the president's choice. But there was intense speculation that it would be Judge Edith Clement of the U.S. Court of Appeals in New Orleans.

The televised speech was scheduled for 9 p.m. EDT.

The tension was palpable in the West Wing of the White House; after a day of intense speculation, McClellan walked into the press briefing room and said bluntly: "The president has made a decision and will be announcing his nominee to the Supreme Court at 9 o'clock." McClellan said the American people expected that the Senate confirmation process would be a dignified one.

At Clement's office in New Orleans, a man who identified himself as a law clerk said the judge was not available. "That's what I've been instructed to say," he told a caller who asked if she were in Washington.

A prime time address? It seems to me that ol' George is trying to take the focus off of the Rove/Wilson/We-lied-to-go-to-war scandal by putting this nomination front and center.

Not to worry Georgie Boy. We here in the blogosphere will keep Karl's fire burnin' for ya.

Andrew Sullivan has done some excellent grunt work trying to find out more about Judge Clement.

Get ready folks...here we go.

Colin, Colin, Colin

Poor Colin Farrell. He films himself having sex with a girlfriend two-and-a-half years ago and doesn't expect the tape to find its way into the public eye.

Puh-leez!

This is the guy that did full frontal nudity in "A Home at the End of the World," so we know he has serious exhibitionist qualities (never mind that the scene wound up on the cutting room floor).

So Colin, quit your whining and put the tape in the VCR! Inquiring minds want to see!

White House: It won't be Gonzales

The Hill is reporting that White House officials have assured conservative leaders that Alberto Gonzales will not be the President's nominee to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the U.S. Supreme Court.

This is good news. The same qualms I had about Mr. Gonzales, mainly over his role in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, should have kept him from becoming Attorney General. A seat on the nation's highest court is out of the question.

Hillary as Commander-in-Chief?

According to USA Today it's an idea that is not as far-fetched as many would believe.

Andrew Sullivan commented on the idea two years ago.

Lucas On 'Poseidon'

Empire Online has an exclusive chat with "Sweet Home Alabama" hottie Josh Lucas who is currently filming the Wolfgang Petersen big screen remake of "The Poseidon Adventure."

Bush's Strategery

According to the Associated Press,

"President Bush said Monday that if anyone on his staff committed a crime in the CIA-leak case, that person will 'no longer work in my administration.' His statement represented a shift from a previous comment, when he said that he would fire anyone shown to have leaked information that exposed the identity of a CIA officer."

"Committed a crime" vs. leaking information?

Umm, 'scuse me? But who exactly is the flip-flopper now, Mr. President?

Anyone who knows how contemptuous this administration can be shouldn't be surprised.

UPDATE: Kos calls George on his bullshit.

It's About More Than Karl Rove

It should be obvious to anyone who has been following the story: Karl Rove, the architect of the John McCain slam-down in the 2000 Republican presidential primary in South Carolina and the "Ann Richards is a lesbian" rumours of the 1994 Texas gubenatorial race, trashed former ambassador Joe Wilson and outed his CIA operative wife. But for the life of me I don't understand why the media isn't taking this story to the next logical (and more important) step: That by overreacting to Mr. Wilson's 2003 NY Times op-ed piece debunking the administration's reasoning for going to war with Iraq, the Bush-Rove team have fueled the fires of speculation, long burning on the left, that they sent American's sons and daughters to fight a war on the wings of lie.

In his Sunday NY Times column, Frank Rich nails it:

"This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit - the big enchilada, to borrow a 1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the Nixon tapes - is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. That's why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative..."

An argument I had made with friends and family in early 2003 - Bush's Iraq war was misguided and would take the eyes off the real prize. It turns out that Wilson was right. No WMD's have been found, no nuclear weapons uncovered. Again, Mr. Rich:

"Once we were locked into the war, and no WMD's could be found, the original plot line was dropped with an alacrity that recalled the 'Never mind!' with which Gilda Radner's Emily Litella used to end her misinformed Weekend Update commentaries on Saturday Night Live. The administration began its dog-ate-my-homework cover-up, asserting that the various warning signs about the uranium claims were lost 'in the bowels' of the bureaucracy or that it was all the C.I.A.'s fault or that it didn't matter anyway, because there were new, retroactive rationales to justify the war. But the administration knows how guilty it is. That's why it has so quickly trashed any insider who contradicts its story line about how we got to Iraq, starting with the former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill and the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke."

So, Karl Rove may or may not lose his job. The man has no decency so he won't quit. It will be up to Bush to fire him but I would amazed if Dubya got rid of his political architect.

The real question is whether or not the media will "follow the uranium" and take the President to task on the lies he presented to the American people. Lies of the worst kind. Lies that have sent nearly 1,800 American soldiers to their graves. What was that Bob Dole campaign line from the 1996 presidential contest? Oh yeah..."Where is the outrage?"

In this American's eyes the whole stinking mess calls for the impeachment and conviction of both the President and Vice-President, followed by a war-crimes tribunal for both. For this reason (for many reasons actually, but for the lies especially) it is an easy call: George W. Bush and his minions are the worst presidential administration in the history of the United States.

RELATED STORIES:
A time line of the scandal from the Washington Post.

In his Sunday commentary, Face the Nation moderator Bob Scheiffer slammed Mr. Bush. The video can be seen here.

Joe Wilson on Karl Rove, from Friday's Today Show.

On Sunday morning RNC chairman Ken Mehlman was quite Nixon-esque in his defense of Karl Rove on Meet the Press.

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Carol Marin's excellent commentary on the attack of the free press by the federal government.

Quote of the Day

"Sometimes, in our pursuit of winning and of being right, we say some stupid things. That's what happened to Sen. Rick Santorum, who either is gearing up his 2008 presidential campaign and needs to rally his conservative base - or is on drugs."

-Rochelle Riley, in her review of Sen. Rick Santorum's (Fascist-PA) new book, ""It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good."

Well, Duh!

According to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, "for the first time in his presidency, more Americans give Bush a low rating (45 percent) on being 'honest and straightforward' than give him a high rating (41 percent)."

Where have these Americans been for five years?

Biden in 08?

More signs that Sen. Joe Biden (Democrat-DE) is gearing up for presidential run in 2008. He'd be a top tier contender and might well give the junior Senator from New York a run for her money.

Chicago Celebrates One Its Very Own

Mayor Richard Daley declared Monday "Roger Ebert Day" in Chicago. The Pulitzer Prize winning movie critic and columnist, who also received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame recently, truly deserves the accolades.

As Ron Magers, news anchor at ABC-owned WLS-Channel 7 said,

"When you listen to Roger, you know he's telling you what he thinks, and that he's telling you from his heart. And I think that translates no matter what the medium."

Here is a great interview with Ebert from a February, 2005 issue of the New York Times Magazine.

Hat tip, Noel.

Welcome

Welcome to the South Coast Journal. While the main focus of this venture will highlight major news stories with a dose of personal perspective (much like the old blog), I will also post news and thoughts on pop culture (mainly movies, music, and television) as well as random thoughts that may not fall into any particular category (thus the "journal" part of the title).

Read, don't read. Comment, don't comment. I am not trying to break major news stories or blow Blogger's bandwidth, rather I am simply using the Journal to record my own perspective...the way I see things.