WMD Evidence

Via TBogg and the White House:

Justice, Texas-Style

YeeeeHawwww:

The Texas Commission on Judicial Conduct says Jefferson County Justice of the Peace Thurman Bartie told inmates he knew their home addresses and would have sex with their wives while they were locked up.

The report also says Bartie took off his belt and told parents to use it to beat their children and swore at those who appeared before him.

Why Paul Wolfowitz Deserves To Be Publicly Horsewhipped

Wolfowitz on the reason for war:

""For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on."

The Hunt For Snipe Weapons Of Mass Distraction Destruction

AP Reports

large new U.S. team heading into Iraq to search for weapons of mass destruction will shift its focus away from areas identified as suspicious sites before the war, the Army general heading the effort said Friday.

Instead, the searchers will focus on areas where documents, interviews with Iraqis and other new clues suggest biological or chemical weapons could be hidden, Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton said.

IOW, we're going to use the same intelligence that told us, before the invasion, Iraq was awash in WMD.

Good For Robert Byrd


Questioning the motives of a "desk-bound president who assumes the garb of a warrior," Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd on Tuesday reproached President Bush for flying onto an aircraft carrier last week to declare an end of major fighting in Iraq.

"I am loath to think of an aircraft carrier being used as an advertising backdrop for a presidential political slogan, and yet that is what I saw," Byrd said on the Senate floor.

Byrd, 85, of West Virginia, is the Senate's most senior member and was one of the most outspoken critics of the Iraq war.

Dressed in a flight suit, Bush was flown onto the USS Abraham Lincoln on Thursday, his small S-3B Viking jet making a tailhook landing. The ship was near San Diego on its return from action in the Persian Gulf.

With the sea as his backdrop, Bush announced that the United States and its allies had prevailed against Saddam Hussein.

White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said Byrd's criticisms are "a disservice to the men and women of our military who deserved to be thanked in person."

"Senator Byrd did not support the president at the beginning of this, and it is no surprise that he does not support the president at the end," Fleischer said. "Senator Byrd is a patriot, but on this we disagree."

Byrd contrasted the speech with the "simple dignity" of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address during the Civil War.

"I do not begrudge his salute to America's warriors aboard the carrier Lincoln, for they have performed bravely, ... but I do question the motives of a desk-bound president who assumes the garb of a warrior for the purposes of a speech," he said.

He said American blood has been shed defending Bush's policies. "This is not some made-for-TV backdrop for a campaign commercial," he said.

"To me, it is an affront to the Americans killed or injured in Iraq for the president to exploit the trappings of war for the momentary spectacle of a speech," he said.

Fleischer has rejected any suggestion that the landing was intended to provide campaign footage for Bush's re-election campaign.

Earlier Tuesday, he also said Bush decided to land on the carrier on a jet instead of his usual helicopter because the president wanted "to see an aircraft landing the same way that the pilots saw an aircraft landing. He wanted to see it as realistically as possible."

Via Associated Press

Ted Nugent Is The NRA


Two Denver disc jockeys stopped a live radio interview with rocker Ted Nugent after he used derogatory racial terms for Asians and blacks.

Rick Lewis and Michael Floorwax, morning talk show hosts on KRFX-FM, said that during an interview Monday, Nugent said one of the members of a group called the Funk Brothers years ago complimented his guitar playing by using a racist term for blacks.

"We've known Ted a long time and he's been on the show many times. So when he went down that road, we stopped him and gave him a chance to bail himself out, but he didn't take it," Floorwax said.

Nugent also used derogatory racial terms for Asians on the air.

The DJs said they got calls after the show from angry listeners, mostly from people saying they were glad Nugent was off the air. The station didn't receive any calls about it on Tuesday.

Nugent is past president of the National Rifle Association and is known for his outspokenness.

"Ted likes to shock people. He'll come on the show occasionally and drop a bomb like that and then step back to see the reaction it gets," Lewis said. "He loves that reputation of a shoot-from-the-hip kind of guy."

The two DJs said Nugent is on the show about three times a year, but won't be back any time soon.

A call to a Nugent spokeswoman was not immediately returned.

The Search For Weapons of Mass Distraction

It seeems our media might be awaking from its slumber to realize the primary rationale for invading Iraq was a lie.

Meanwhile, AWOL Dubya keeps repeating WMD will be found even as his handlers are now beginning a campaign of lowered expectations and deflection away from WMD as the primary reason.

We keep hearing that "Iraq is the size of California" as an excuse why WMD is proving so difficult to find.

This is more nonsense from Bush and his handlers. For a dozen years, following Opertion Desert Storm, Saddam Hussein had no control over nearly two-thirds of Iraq. So, that two-thirds of Iraq was pretty much under Allied control and, one would presume, off-limits for WMD storage.

But I guess saying the area in which Saddam might have secreted WMD away in is the size of Alabama isn't quite as dramatic.

We Report, You Decide

Is Dean Esmay a liar?

Background: Esmay on "Christian-Bashing:"

I remember watching the political conventions in 2000. I always watch as much of both the Democratic and Republican conventions as I can. At the Republican convention that year, an openly gay congressman got up to address the delegates. A smallish group of Christian Evangelicals who were also delegates to the convention stood together and bowed their heads to pray for him, because they considered his homosexuality sinful.


Commentators in the media virtually had conniptions at the show of "intolerance." All I could do was roll my eyes. Man, can you think of anything more awful than praying for someone? Gosh, what Nazis. Next it's concentration camps for sure!

Conniptions, Dean? Really?

Here's an account from an honest-to-God reporter working that convention:

Story time: I had the opportunity to cover the 2000 GOP convention when I was the morning guy on Working Assets' RadioForChange.com. Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-AZ) was the first Out homosexual ever to address a GOP convention. He wasn't talking about gay rights or civil liberties, of course -- he was actually discussing Free Trade with China -- but right in front of him, just below the stage, were several GOP activists, including a nice chunk of the Texas delegation, visibly and demonstratively praying for his Eternal Soul to release its wickedness.

Somehow the networks didn't manage to include that in their coverage.

The next morning, I interviewed the guy in person, live on the air. And just before we started, one of the GOP's media handlers let me know that for the purposes of the following discussion, Jim was not gay.

Here's the self-censorship thing you don't see in the media, and it happens all the time: right then, I had a choice: either push the issue, watch the interview end abruptly, guarantee I wouldn't have another GOP guest for the duration, and face down an hour of empty air time to fill... or just go along.

I decided to play along, and then tell the audience about the entire handling process right after the interview was over, and why I made that choice, which I figured would probably tell the listener more than they'd ever hear otherwise. I'm still not sure it was the right call, but there it is.

Incidentally, Jim's a great guy. We completely disagreed about almost every issue, but we did so with humor and respect and had a terrific time. It was one of the best interviews I ever did. And every time I ever see Rep. Kolbe or read his name in the paper, I always feel really bad for the guy, since his sincere beliefs about economic issues compel him to work every day with people who clearly think he's some sort of depraved freak.

Another Reason Not To Be A Republican

Richard A. Delgaudio:

Legal Affairs Council Inc., President
United States Intelligence Council, Chairman and Director
National Security Center Inc., President
Talk show guest, Conservative commentator

......and child pornographer.

Wonder when he'll turn up on the state of Virginia's Sex Offender Registry?

British Lawmakers Want Answers

Via The Guardian:

Tony Blair is facing the threat of a fresh rebellion from Labour backbenchers who are growing increasingly alarmed that the failure to uncover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq will confirm that the war was illegal.
As a 1,000-strong Anglo-American task force of inspectors prepares to search hundreds of suspicious sites, Labour MPs are demanding an inquiry to establish whether MI6 misled ministers about Iraq's weapons programme.

Backbench Labour MPs who feel they were duped into backing the war on the basis of questionable intelligence want the cross-party Commons intelligence and security committee to carry out an investigation. One well-placed former minister said: "The intelligence committee is raring to challenge the veracity of what the security services told them about Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons. They were told what he had and where it was. There may be a perfectly innocent explanation for all this, but they don't seem to be able to find the stuff."



Gee, why isn't the US Congress asking these questions? Answer: They won't like the answer. There are only two possible explanations: 1) the Bush regime lied, or 2) our intelligence agencies are ridiculously bad and unreliable.

Why Does The NRA Hate Americans?

Via the NY Times:

But last week the House of Representatives, at the urging of the National Rifle Association, passed a bill granting the gun industry nationwide immunity from virtually all lawsuits. The Senate is expected to take up the bill after the Easter recess.
..............................

There are also many suits by individuals, including one by two New Jersey police officers, David Lemongello and Ken McGuire, who are suing a pawnshop in West Virginia that sold a semiautomatic pistol used to badly wound them while they staked out a gasoline station that had been repeatedly robbed.

An investigation by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives determined that the gun had been sold to a gun trafficker, James Gray, who was legally prohibited from buying the weapon because he was a felon.

Mr. Gray went into the store, Will's Jewelry and Loan, in Charleston, W.Va., and handed thousands of dollars in cash to an accomplice after pointing out 12 guns he wanted to buy. The accomplice, who had no criminal record, then bought the guns for him, in front of the store owner, in what is known as a straw purchase.

Federal firearms law prohibits straw purchases, but they are one of the most common ways that criminals get guns.

Mr. Gray, who lived in New Jersey, resold the guns on the black market, court records show, including one to Shuntez Everett, a career criminal who soon used it to shoot the two officers at the gasoline station, in Orange, N.J. Mr. Everett died in a shootout with the police after shooting Officers Lemongello and McGuire, hitting both in the chest and the stomach and one officer in an arm and the other in a leg.

Lott/Reynolds/Kopel Update

The more these gunloons attempt to explain things, the fishier it smells.

Glenn Reynolds is the best reason to send your children to any college or university than the University of Tennessee.

Kopel, of course, is no stranger to penning articles with fictional personas.