Bush Loses His Edge

Andrew Kohut, of the Pew Research Center, has this interesting take on what last November's elections mean.

Issues the Republicans stressed paid few dividends: Most notably, the many voters concerned about terrorism backed GOP candidates over Democrats by only the modest margin of 5 percentage points. The threat of terrorism is still much on the public's mind, but voters are no longer persuaded that Republicans know best how to deal with it. Discontent with Iraq has taken terrorism off the table for the Republicans. By a margin of 59%-35%, voters said that the war in Iraq did not improve U.S. security.

Britain never thought Saddam was threat - diplomat

· UK warned US that chaos would follow tyrant's fall
· Evidence repudiates claims in run-up to war

Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian

The British government never believed Saddam Hussein posed a threat to British interests and warned the US that toppling him would lead to "chaos", according to a Foreign Office diplomat closely involved in negotiations in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

Damning repudiation of the government's public claims in the run-up to the war is contained in secret evidence to Lord Butler's committee on the abuse of intelligence over Iraq by Carne Ross, a diplomat at Britain's UN mission in New York.

His evidence, in which he says the government privately assessed that Iraq possessed no significant quantity of weapons of mass destruction, has been published on the Commons foreign affairs committee website. Mr Ross gave evidence to the group last month but some MPs had been reluctant to have it published.

Mr Ross told Lord Butler he read UK and US human and signals intelligence on Iraq every working day during the four years he spent in New York up to 2002, and spoke at length to UN weapons inspectors.

"At no time did [the government] assess that Iraq's WMD (or any other capability) posed a threat to the UK," he told the Butler committee. "On the contrary, it was the commonly-held view among the officials dealing with Iraq that any threat had been effectively contained ... At the same time, we would frequently argue, when the US raised the subject, that 'regime change' was inadvisable, primarily on the grounds that Iraq would collapse into chaos."

Mr Ross continued: "Iraq's ability to launch a WMD or any form of attack was very limited. There were approximately 12 or so unaccounted-for Scud missiles; Iraq's airforce was depleted to the point of total ineffectiveness; its army was but a pale shadow of its earlier might; there was no evidence of any connection with any terrorist organisation that might have planned an attack using Iraqi WMD."

Mr Ross said he repeatedly questioned Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence officials about their threat assessments of Iraq. He said: "None told me that any new evidence had emerged to change our assessment; what had changed was the government's determination to present available evidence in a different light." Referring to the government's weapons adviser who later committed suicide, he added: "I discussed this at some length with David Kelly in late 2002, who agreed that the Number 10 WMD dossier was overstated".

Bush on Path to Defeat

These strong words come from a Republican senator, Gordon Smith of Oregon.

I "do not support policies, nor should the American people support policies, that lead us down a path to defeat," Smith said. "And I believe that that's what we've been pursuing."

Smith first broke with his party over the issue of Iraq on Thursday night, when he delivered an emotional speech about the state of the war just before Congress recessed for the end of the year.

"I, for one, am at the end of my rope when it comes to supporting a policy that has our soldiers patrolling the same streets in the same way, being blown up by the same bombs day after day," said Smith before a mostly empty Senate chamber. "That is absurd. It may even be criminal. I cannot support that anymore."

"When you get to being policeman in a sectarian civil war, that is not what the American people enlisted for. That's not what I voted for," said Smith. "I voted for toppling a chief terrorist and tyrant, ridding him of weapons of mass destruction, but not for being target practice in the middle of a sectarian strife."

House Ethics Whitewash on Foley

The folks who blab incessantly about family values could not bring themselves to admit they'd done anything wrong in protectly child predator and former GOP Congressman Mark Foley.

Willful Ignorance But No Rules Broken

The House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct released its report investigating the scandal surrounding the inappropriate contact former Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) had with congressional pages, finding that "a pattern of conduct was exhibited among many individuals to remain willfully ignorant" of Foley's behavior though no "current House Members of employees violated the House Code of Official Conduct."

The chairmen of the ethics committee, Reps. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) and Howard Berman (D-Calif.), effusively praised each other and the bipartisan committee's work over the previous nine weeks, but would take no questions, preferring to let the 89-page report speak for itself. They said their investigation was completed after 50 interviews and depositions, 3,000 pages worth of transcribed interviews, and more than 100 hours of testimony and deliberations.

In what some critics see as a way of letting his colleagues' behavior off the hook, Hastings in prepared remarks said that "20/20 hindsight is easy" and that "doing the right thing...can be very hard and difficult."

Attack of the Pregnant Lesbian

Who Got Mary Cheney Pregnant?

Some Washington insiders are betting on the guy Dick Cheney shot in the face last February.


Mary Cheney and Heather Poe are having a baby. The Republican's religious right base is furious. The couple lives in Virginia, where just last month voters made it one of 27 states that ban gay marriage.

Bush's War Zips Toward Another Sad Milestone

The 9/11 terrorist attacks killed 2,973 victims in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

As President Bush clings to his "Stay the Course" mantra, the U.S. death toll in the mindless civil war in Iraq has now claimed the lives of 2,964 U.S. soldiers. No weapons of mass destruction have been found -- and Osama bin Laden is resting comfortably in Pakistan.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Four U.S. Marines died when a Sea Knight helicopter plunged into a lake in volatile Anbar province, the military said Monday, raising to 13 the number of American troops killed during a bloody weekend in Iraq.

It was the second military aircraft to go down in a week in Anbar, a stronghold of Sunni insurgents, although the military said mechanical problems rather than gunfire had forced the emergency landing on Sunday.

The deaths came on a weekend in which nine other U.S. troops were killed, including five in Anbar.

Rummy's Lowered Expectations

A revisionist inside the White House has "leaked" to The New York Times a memo by Donald Rumsfeld in which the now-inoperative defense chief allegedly suggests NOT staying the course in Iraq. See -- he had the right idea all along.

Rumsfeld Memo Proposed ‘Major Adjustment’ in Iraq

By Michael R. Gordon and David S. Cloud, New York Times

WASHINGTON, Dec. 2 — Two days before he resigned as defense secretary, Donald Rumsfe ld submitted a classified memo to the White House that acknowledged that the Bush administration’s strategy in Iraq was not working and called for a major course correction.

“In my view it is time for a major adjustment,” wrote Mr. Rumsfeld, who has been a symbol of a dogged stay-the-course policy. “Clearly, what U.S. forces are currently doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast enough.”

Nor did Mr. Rumsfeld seem confident that the administration would readily develop an effective alternative. To limit the political fallout from shifting course he suggested the administration consider a campaign to lower public expectations.

“Announce that whatever new approach the U.S. decides on, the U.S. is doing so on a trial basis,” he wrote. “This will give us the ability to readjust and move to another course, if necessary, and therefore not ‘lose.’ ”

“Recast the U.S. military mission and the U.S. goals (how we talk about them) — go minimalist,” he added. Mr. Rumsfeld’s memo suggests frustration with the pace of turning over responsibility to the Iraqi authorities; in fact, the memo calls for examination of ideas that roughly parallel troop withdrawal proposals presented by some of the White House’s sharpest Democratic critics.

Bush Hack Promotes Fraud and Waste

GSA Chief Seeks to Cut Budget For Audits

Leave it to Republicans, who constantly shoot off their mouths about waste in government, to appoint a former contractor to oversee the government agency responsible for $56 billion worth of contracts. And wouldn't you know it -- the contractor wants to cut back on audits!

Contract Oversight Would Be Reduced

By Scott Hingham and Rober O'Harrow Jr., Washington Post

The new chief of the U.S. General Services Administration is trying to limit the ability of the agency's inspector general to audit contracts for fraud or waste and has said oversight efforts are intimidating the workforce, according to government documents and interviews.

GSA Administrator Lurita Alexis Doan, a Bush political appointee and former government contractor, has proposed cutting $5 million in spending on audits and shifting some responsibility for contract reviews to small, private audit contractors.

The GSA is responsible for managing about $56 billion worth of contracts each year for the departments of Defense and Homeland Security and other agencies.

Doan compared Inspector General Brian D. Miller and his staff to terrorists, according to a copy of the notes obtained by The Washington Post.

"There are two kinds of terrorism in the US: the external kind; and, internally, the IGs have terrorized the Regional Administrators," Doan said, according to the notes. Before joining the GSA in August 2005, Miller served as a federal prosecutor and worked on the government's case against al-Qaeda terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui.