Memnison Journal

..of the Bush administration, a casualty of the war on terror, troubled and victimized soul that he is.

W. Mark Felt obituary in the Washington Post.
“As Deep Throat, Felt helped establish the principle that our highest government officials are subject to the Constitution and the laws of the land,” the prosecutor, John W. Nields, wrote in The Washington Post in 2005. “Yet when it came to the Weather Underground bag jobs, he seems [...]

Details after the cut.

From the Bailout plan: Sec. 8. Review. Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.
So we give you 700 billion dollars without any kind of accountability or oversight?  To spend [...]

Seems that the lack of vetting that McCain did was the same that Bush did. (starts singing from Fiddler on the Roof here)
Next time around, I suggest that they use a divining rod or the Urim and Thummim - especially if it’s Romney.

Julia Child, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Arthur Goldberg - spied for America. Amongst others…

Very good article that explains the real limits of Chinese power down the road.  Here’s a mix of his points and some of my thoughts on the matter:

Cheap labor and fair access to markets is about their main strengths.  Quality is not as important if the manufacturers can slide by.

Labor is starting to [...]

Susan and I recently added HBO onto our cable lineup to catch RECOUNT and the JOHN ADAMS series, amongst other stuff.  The RECOUNT-connected documentary HACKING DEMOCRACY was on, and we found it fascinating and troubling.
The story of the documentary was about a woman who founded a citizen’s group called Black Box Voting, which concerns itself [...]

Want a secret passage in your house so that you can decamp off to your Batcave or private library?  Try these guys.  They Don’t Work Cheap.
(h/t to Ysabetwordsmith, who is a golden god of blogging neat stuff.)

The Veteran’s Affairs Department’s head of mental health states that there’s no suicide epidemic amongst returning Iraqi War vets - and gets caught with top-secret internal emails that admit that the stated amounts are BS, and that around 1000 suicide attempts a month take place:
But in this e-mail to his top media advisor, written two [...]

Yes, the man’s a ferocious hypocrite, and what he did was unethical and illegal and he prosecuted people running prostitution rings as a DA.
But why isn’t David Vitter’s butt similarly on the line?  Both of their involvement was as johns only, and both portrayed themselves as Defenders Of What Is Good and Right.   The [...]

The real reason that Bush is demanding the Telco immunity clause in the FISA-oid act has nothing to do with suits against the telcos that helped him spy on people - in regard to the telcos being hurt monetarily by the suits.  The telcos were indemnified by Bush.   What the result of the suits [...]

Someone page Dick Cheney and the Glomar Explorer. Five undersea cables that carry internet traffic in the Middle East have been cut one by one in sequence. I thought this was weird, and Terry Karney is telling us what his thoughts are - as in someone wanted to tap the suckers. Can’t [...]

There was a fire in Cheney’s office this morning. The shredder must have overheated with all those tapes from the CIA going through it.
The reviewers say: two thumbs up with special merit for sinking fast in the Potomac.

“It is by my order and for the good of the state that the bearer has done what has been done.”
Cardinal Richelieu, in The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
See inside for an analysis of the fallout  I expect from the CIA  torture tapes destruction.