Don’t you just know already that morons like Chris Matthews and many of his cable ilk will celebrate Judy Miller’s post-jail conversational finickiness as a sign of Princess Judy’s evolved sensitivities toward news peas buried in her reporter mattresses?


The secret source

According to the New York Times, the strange elfin news waif who helped burnish the swing of the illegal Bush drive to war, said following her 3 hours of testimony before Patrick J. Fitzgerald’s Grand Jury:

"Oh boy, am I happy to be free and finally able to talk to all of you.”

Princess Judy, not quite as free as her statement indicated, then proceeded to clam up and refused to name the source her very lawyers and her source’s lawyers had previously identified to the assembled media, the euphonious VP chief-of-Staff I. “Scooter” Lewis Libby.
Additionally and curiously, the source and his lawyer have stated that they freed Judy from her journalistic obligations and then-looming jail time last year in written correspondence with the infamous NYT star reporter and her counsel Floyd R. Abrams.
Judy, ever-fussy Gray Lady news maven she hopes, apparently has difficulty parsing simple declarative sentences and according to this morning’s New York Times’ reporting:

"The message you sent to me was viewed by Ms. Miller as inherently 'mixed,' " Mr. Abrams wrote. He said Mr. Libby's failure to contact Ms. Miller as the case proceeded had also led her to conclude that he did not want her to testify.

Another of Judy’s vast legal team, a New York Times staff counsel, suggested Judy, in a triumph of retro teen angst, chose a long stretch in the slammer because Mr. Libby did not telephone and release her secrecy oath personally:

The phone call between Ms. Miller and her source had been crucial... "This was a call," he said, "that lasted about 15 minutes, and Judy could measure the timbre and tone of the source's response and real feelings regarding whether or not he was being coerced and whether or not he really wanted her to testify."

Additionally, in a recent letter from secret source Libby to Miller, according to the Times, the powerful Cheney aide repeated his desire that Judy testify and, tellingly, that “he expected her testimony to help him.”
All this, culled from various places in two different articles in this morning’s New York Times, is a bit too much and, to use a favorite TV pundit phrase, defies credulity.
Are we expected to believe that Princess Judy’s highly refined Manhattan 5-star restaurant taste buds freely chose 12 weeks of eating 3 squares off a jail tray because she lacked a personal evaluation of her source’s “timbre” and “real feelings”?
Oh PA-LEEZE!
Our dear Judy had no such delicate qualms over rushing every secret source and Ahmed Chalabi WMD fib-alabi into page one boldface so why, when faced with the loss of her personal freedom, was she even fussier than her own vast legal team?
Princess Judy and the corrupt administration she’s protecting are demonstrably more interested in defending the concept of storyline rather than overarching principals of truth with these tissue-thin oaths of protection, secrecy and, most importantly, deniability.
The gasbags of the pundit class, Bush enablers and aficionados of self-aggrandizing convolutions, are sure, over the next few weeks, to fall prostrate before Princess Judy’s veracity-stained and now prison flip-flop-less feet.
We pray Mr. Fitzgerald’s case is airtight and fatally damaging to the continued power and pretensions of these self and mutually-grooming elitist baboons.

Modified Image: Sacramento Bee
- posted by Sean @ 9:20 AM 0 comments  

 
"Hic!"


President Bush and Rummy sleep off a champaign buzz this afternoon in Arlington, VA

Modified Image: Reuters
- posted by Sean @ 8:22 PM 0 comments  

 

According to the Washington Post, Princess Judy said:

"My source has now voluntarily and personally released me from my promise."

What's up with the old gray fairy?

Modified Image: Walt Disney Productions, New York Times, WhiteHouse.gov
- posted by Sean @ 11:07 AM 0 comments  

 
Let's Be Blunt


As Washington’s massive disaster failures are being tidied under our lumpy national carpet, good old-fashioned backstabbing, food poisoning politics galloped back into America’s bizarre capitol, yesterday, with the smoking indictment of Thomas Dale Delay.
High school wrestling coach Denny Hastert, unable to save Delay with a highly controversial House rule change, had laid plans for the succession and possible restoration of Mr. Delay with the anointing of the safe, do-as-you’re-told, politically submissive House Rules Committee chairman, David Dreier.

Blunt, Hastert and Dreier confront the media

Unfortunately, Speaker Denny’s wheel-greasing efforts went for naught as uptight House conservatives reacted violently to Ah-nold’s flamboyant former campaign manager being shoved down their virginal throats.
According to the Washington Post, winner of this year’s award for inappropriate obtuseness:

There was one big problem…Dreier…too moderate.

Huh?
From voting record to the various positions he has held, Mr. Dreier is clearly marching in lockstep with the religious conservative Republican Party.
What, regarding poor Dave, could possibly upset all the super conservative fundamentalist House members and their supporters?
Gosh, I guess we’ll never know so “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”.
Roy Blunt, an Ozark replica of Texas’ favorite insect exterminator and House Majority Whip, quickly presented himself to the mat-pinned Hastert as the moderate successor to Hammer time.
So moderate and so adept with the shiv was Roy that many of the super conservatives swooned with blunt delight.
BeyondDelay.org has posted a few blunt particulars on the new House Majority Leader’s multiple marriages, unsavory associations and the misuse of his position to monetarily and politically favor members of his own family.
Ah, the fresh wind of change…it’s so, uh…well, kind of stinky, I guess.


Visit the site where I found this image of Blunt & Perlman for some gruesome images of DC after Dark

I particularly enjoyed the fact that Mr. Blunt divorced his first wife of 31 years and mother of his children, Roseann Ray, to court and marry a slim, bio-enhanced Phillip Morris lobbyist, Abby Perlman.
No doubt desperate to pay the looming 2003 nuptial costs, the love-struck Blunt unsuccessfully attempted to insert a provision into the Homeland Security bill that would have benefited Phillip Morris who, by the way, also employs sticky-fingered Roy's son Andrew as a lobbyist.
Another young son, Matt, as luck would have it, managed to snag a string of political jobs culminating in his present governorship of Missouri.
Yes, change is in the wind.
The smell of roasting reputations and a fresh harvest of patronage wafts gently though the crisp air of autumnal Washington.

What happened to Dreier?

Photos: The Hill, Washington Post, Washington Life
- posted by Sean @ 7:29 AM 2 comments  

 


Photo: Reuters
- posted by Sean @ 11:33 AM 0 comments  

 
"Like, I'm getting all misty."


The First Lady as a Beat Poet

Poor Laura Bush just cannot hit the right groove with many of our nation’s literary and artistic minds.
This past Sunday’s National Book Festival, conflicting with the very successful 150,00 person anti war protest, was another in what is becoming an annual slap by some of America’s literary set to the fresh pink face of former librarian Laura Bush’s much desired Poetry Symposium.
This year’s literary protest was soft-pedaled by none other than the infamous author of the New York Times’ White House Letter, Elizabeth Bumiller, as carried by the International Herald Tribune:

There was no escaping the reality that Iraq intruded on Bush's admired book festival…A handful of the 80 authors, poets and illustrators invited to participate in the festival's events declined a breakfast with Laura Bush at the White House and a dinner with her at the Library of Congress, saying they were too opposed to her husband to go.

Sharon Olds, winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award and a professor of creative writing at New York University, publicly rejected the First lady’s poetic advances in this week’s The Nation:

I tried to see my way clear to attend the festival in order to bear witness…against this undeclared and devastating war. But I could not face the idea of breaking bread with you. I knew that if I sat down to eat with you, it would feel to me as if I were condoning what I see to be the wild, highhanded actions of the Bush Administration…I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.

At the National Book Festival’s Authors’ Breakfast Mrs. Bush said, “Great books have brought many people through difficult times. A story's setting -- real or imagined -- can provide a much-needed escape.”
Over these next few years, as all Sunday’s protests have indicated, Mrs. Bush, emotionally alone, is going to require the escape services of many “great books”.

Modified Image: Google, The-Declaration.com
- posted by Sean @ 9:34 PM 0 comments  

 
Haunted Testimony


Michael Brown, former FEMA Director and current paid FEMA consultant, carries a final spear for his president by blaming state and local officials before the sham Republican-dominated Congressional inquiry into Hurricane Katrina.

Meanwhile, back at the spear's dull, gas-guzzling point...

Modifed Image: Reuters, Los Angeles Times
- posted by Sean @ 1:06 PM 0 comments  

 
The Lure


President Bush makes a beeline toward a normally obscured portion of the presidential podium today as the revolted Energy and Interior Secretaries look on.

The collector bottle?

Modified Image: Reuters, Spirituosenworld.de
- posted by Sean @ 8:37 PM 0 comments  

 
The Sweet Young Face of Death


A young American soldier displays a badly burned Iraqi arm

After a hectic day of personal business, and after personally reeling from the huge numbers of blog visitors over the weekend, I began an innocent late afternoon surf.
John Aravosis of AmericaBlog.com has been hinting of a major story and with a 6:46AM post he delivered the shocking story of American soldiers trading gruesome digital photos of Afghan and Iraqi dead for sexual images through the offices of a Dutch website called NowThatsFuckedUp.com.
I urge you to, at the very least, read John’s disturbing post for a flavor of the out-of-control hell America’s children face every waking moment in the war cauldron of the Bush administration’s incompetence.
I am the son of an Army veteran and I descend from a long family line service to country.
Twenty-seven years ago I was proudly a part of a vastly different United States Army.
This story makes me sick and ashamed.
I want my American and world readers to know that this horrible story does not reflect America’s values but rather the values of a heartless coterie of meritricious men and women occupying the highest reaches of the present American government.
I would urge my Dutch readers to petition the government of the Neatherlands to ban war porn from the digital files residing in your country.
While I know many Dutch citizens have supported Mr. Bush in the past, I cannot imagine such support for his war pornography.
This story is the horrendous harvest from the poisoned tree of Bush administration incompetence.
God may forgive these young men turned monsters but I doubt He will be so generous with the Dr. Frankensteins of our current federal bureaucracy.

Image: AmericaBlog.com
- posted by Sean @ 7:06 PM 0 comments  

 
Sir? (ahem!) Sir...?


President Bush makes a cat's cradle during a NORAD briefing yesterday at Northern Command in Colorado.

Modified Image: AP
- posted by Sean @ 2:43 PM 0 comments  

 
Ain't no time to wonder why...
--Country Joe & The Fish


Thousands mass along 15th Street and Constitution Avenue, NW

Knight-Ridder and the Miami Herald are reporting:

Tens of thousands of anti-war activists rallied near the White House on Saturday.

The New York Times, once so certain of Iraq WMD and under a soft-pedaled headline, reports:

Vast numbers of protesters from around the country poured onto the lawns behind the White House on Saturday.

The Washington Post says:

Organizers estimated a crowd of about 200,000 rallied at the Ellipse, then marched around the White House and along Pennsylvania Avenue. Police downgraded the count to about 150,000.


A closer shot of yesterday's protest

Among the broadcasters, coverage was practically non-existent.
The non coverage of a large series of national and international Iraq war protests was even more striking considering the non stop coverage of “minimal damage” from what became Tropical Storm Rita by Saturday afternoon.
On their web site, CBS News doesn’t even have a link to wire service reporting of the protest.
ABC, MSNBC/NBC and CNN all present a small headline link to the same Associated Press report.
If only the thousands of protesters had been searching for a missing white woman or advocating rights for the brain-dead instead of protesting an illegal war by a criminal administration enabled by these self-same corporate media fluffers.
AfterDowningStreet.org presents videos and more images of the protest.

Plus--What in God's name is the Pope doing?????

Photos, Reuters, Multied.com
- posted by Sean @ 9:59 AM 0 comments