Bush: Make it an even half-trill, losers

WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP)--President Bush Monday told Congress to run another $46 billion through his money-laundering operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and said he wants the money approved by Christmas or he'll have his people call them traitors. The fighting in Iraq, in its fifth year, has already cost more than $455 billion of your grandchildren's money.

Democrats, who gained control of Congress by pretending they would oppose the president's disastrous policies, said Bush should not expect lawmakers to rubber-stamp the request just because they always do.

"The colossal cost of this war grows every day in lives lost, dollars spent, and to our reputation around the world," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, as if this were a new trend. "The choice is between a Democratic plan for responsible redeployment of our troops, hopefully in the next ten years, and the president's plan for a 10-year war in Iraq. We must begin to discuss the possibility of starting to think of a way to begin to end this war."

Announcing his latest demand for bales of hundred-dollar bills, Bush sneered at the nation's disenchantment with the war, which has claimed the lives of more than 3,830 members of the U.S. military, maimed 50,000 more, killed at least 100,00 Iraqi civilians and displaced millions more, resulting in the largest ongoing humanitarian crisis in the world.

"Our men and women on the front lines should not be caught in the middle of partisan disagreements in Washington," the president said. "It is far more important that they remain in the middle of the civil war in Iraq."

With stepped-up military operations resulting in an endless flow of money to the president's friends and relatives in the defense industry, the war is costing about $10 billion a month.

Top House lawmakers have said they do not plan to give Bush the money before Christmas unless he has his media operatives suggest that they are Soft On Terror™, in which case they'll cut the check next month. Bush said failing to approve the money would prove that they hate America and deserve to have their heads cut off and their virgins raped.

"I know some in Congress are against the war and are seeking ways to demonstrate that opposition without seeming rude," Bush said. "I recognize their position and they should make their views heard. But don't fuck with my money."

"Congress should not go home for the holidays while our troops are still waiting for the funds I need to keep them in Iraq forever," he said.

Bush made his war-spending request in the Roosevelt Room after posing for photographs in the Oval Office with carefully-screened leaders of friendly veterans' service organizations, a fallen Marine's carefully-vetted Republican family and Republican military personnel who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On Tuesday, Bush is delivering a speech on the various aspects of his defense strategery. His remarks at the National Defense University in Washington are to cover the wars, the Patriot Act, terrorist surveillance and the establishment of dozens of new Supermax prisons for housing his enemies.

Drunken rant not a "declaration"

WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP)--The Bush Crime Family said Thursday that Junior was simply making "a rhetorical point" when he suggested that if Iran refused to promise never to learn how to make nuclear weapons, it could lead to World War III.

"The president was not making any war plans, and he wasn't making any declarations; he wasn't even thinking about what he was saying," said tiny Bush press tart Dana Perino. "He was just making a point, and the point is that we do not believe--and neither does the international community believe--that Iran should be allowed to pursue nuclear weapons, whether they are or not."

If Iran suddenly acquired nuclear weapons, she said, "that would lead to a very dangerous--a potentially dangerous situation, and potentially lead to a scenario where you have, for instance, World War III. But he was using that as a rhetorical point, just words he could say because the microphones were on and he was confused...not, you know, making a declaration."

The Bush Family and its henchmen accuse Iran of secretly trying to build a nuclear weapon, but they have no evidence and nobody believes them.

Bush, at a news conference on Wednesday, said, "I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon. Possibly by bombing their universities or infiltrating their internets."

Iran denounced Bush's comment. "This sort of policy is what you'd expect from a dry-drunk cowboy shitheel, and is a barrier for peace," the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Mohammad Ali Hosseini, said in a statement.

Hosseini said Bush is "an asshole" who "talks shit" to divert the American public's attention from White House failures on international and domestic issues, such as everything they touch.

Harpy hates Hil, loves Dick

WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP)--Neoconservative gila monster Lynne Cheney says she would be uncomfortable with Hillary Rodham Clinton as president--and wishes the Democratic front-runner were more like her own husband, a corporatist war profiteer with the morals of a truckstop meth whore.

"I'm certainly not going to be a supporter of Mrs. Clinton's and I have been troubled by the fact that you can't know what sort of president she would be, particularly with respect to war crimes prosecutions of the previous administration," Cheney, wife of Actual President Dick Cheney, said in an interview with The Associated Press Wednesday.

"It makes me uncomfortable," she said, squirming with an audible scrape. "I kind of like politicians that are more in the Dick Cheney mold, who say what they mean and mean what they say and don't know the difference between right and wrong."

The actual president's wife reflects on her husband's character in her latest book, Blue Skies, No Fences, Dick, a memoir about her youth in Wyoming. In the book, she details life on the Plains and in the Casper high school she and her husband attended.

She describes her first impression of him as "this smart, great-looking guy I sat next to in chemistry class." Now 66, she writes about their first date--he asked her to a formal dance in 1958--and how much her mother liked him. Later, he knocked her up to get out of going to Viet Nam.

"He didn't talk a lot, but it wasn't hard to get him involved in a game of Risk and feel that he was comfortable with it," she writes. "As long as we were in a secure undisclosed location."

She describes the era as a simpler, more confident time, when the Cold War and the burgeoning military-industrial complex were symbols of hope.

"Part of what gave us confidence in the 1950s was we didn't understand the threat that lay ahead," she said, possibly referring to the Civil Rights Act. "Now I think, at least I hope we are, more cognizant of the threats that face us. We need to be aware that there are people out there who want to destroy us and destroy our way of life, and they're called Democrats."

In that vein, she says the Bush administration's legacy will be in its efforts to consolidate their power and undo every human rights advance of the last eight centuries after their terrorists attacked us on September 11, 2001.

"They've done the most important thing that leaders can do, which is keep the country safe and secure," she said with a straight face, her dead reptilian eyes staring a hole in the air.

She says she becomes "impatient" with the Iraqi government her husband's Blofeldian machinations forced on that nation, and often considers urging their replacement. But she says when she looks back at our own history, she can always find a way to justify the mass murder and extremely profitable chaos her husband and his friends have introduced there.

The Battle of Yorktown, the final major battle of the Revolutionary War, was won in 1781, she notes, and it took several years after that for the country to form a constitutional government. She evidently thinks we would've done it much faster if the British Army and all their mercenaries had continued to occupy our colonies and kick in our doors while we fought among ourselves with bombs.

"I think people are like me, you know, they are impatient, they want our troops to come home, we all want that," she said. "But of course if you look at the situation in detail like I do when I review our offshore accounts, you understand that's simply not possible right now."

She says she isn't sure what she and her husband will do if he ever leaves office. They plan to have a house in Virginia near Rummy and keep their home in Wyoming, where her husband hopes to spend his declining years huffing butyl nitrate and shooting caged animals.

Whining prick still in spotlight

MINNEAPOLIS, MN (AP)--Self-hating, closeted Republican bathroom troll Senator Larry Craig asked the Minnesota Court of Appeals Monday to overrule a county judge who refused to allow him to withdraw his guilty plea in connection with an arrest in an airport bathroom sex sting.

Craig's appeal was filed at the court in St. Paul less than two weeks after Hennepin County Judge Charles Porter refused to overturn the guilty plea, saying it "No backsies, you silly little man."

Craig, a hysterical closet case from Idaho, pled guilty to disorderly conduct in August in an attempt to keep it secret that he was arrested trying to get a cop to have sex with him in a bathroom at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport in June. It didn't work, so now he wants to change the deal, which is all the proof anyone should need that the man is totally Republican.

The four-page filing did not detail the basis for the appeal, which is expected to include the same emphatic denials of homosexuality the Senator has been issuing, unsolicited, for the past twenty-five years.

In an interview on Sunday with KTVB-TV in Boise, Idaho, Craig repeated that he will not resign his post in the Senate and said he has the same right to pursue his legal options as any other straight, completely straight, never-been-gay American.

"It is my right to do what I'm doing," said Craig, whose tireless campaigning against gay rights has struck some as a pathetic overcompensation for his secret quirk. "I am pursuing my constitutional rights," he added, apparently without irony.

Before overturning a ruling, the appeals court must find there's been an "abuse of discretion" by the trial judge--in other words, that some aspect of the ruling (which in this case consisted of allowing Craig to plead guilty to disorderly conduct rather than go through a public trial which would expose the hypocrisy of his political stances and the nature of his bathroom-trolling buggery bent) was decided improperly. Ron Meshbesher, a longtime Minneapolis defense attorney, said earlier this month that the standard for an abuse of discretion is vague but that such a ruling is fairly rare, especially when the defendant got what he wanted out of the court in the first place.

"It's not frequent, let's put it that way," Meshbesher said. "It certainly is a steep hill to climb, no matter how wide your stance."

It would most likely be well into 2008 before the Court of Appeals rules on the case. Craig's Senate term ends at the end of 2008, or whenever Mitch McConnell is able to procure photographs and/or video.

Fuck you, legalize me

WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP)--President Bush said Wednesday that he will not sign the new bill legalizing some of his secret crimes if it does not grant retroactive immunity to campaign contributors who helped him break the law by spying on their customers without court orders.

A proposed bill unveiled by Democrats on Tuesday does not include such a provision. Bush, appearing relatively sober on the South Lawn as that measure was taken up in two House committees, said the measure is unacceptable because of the suffering it might cause helpless multinational telecommunications corporations.

"Today the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees are considering a proposed bill that, instead of getting my friends and me off the hook, actually makes them liable to prosecution," the president complianed.

Bush wants legislation that extends and strengthens his unaccountable dictatorial power, a temporary version of which passed in August. Democrats want a bill that that makes it a little harder for the Bush Crime Family to spy on their political opponents, a group which includes more people every day.

Under pressure to get out of town in case various GOP operatives weren't kidding about another attack on the capital, Congress hastily passed the horrendous temporary bill then ran home to try and deny to constituents that they've been giving the president everything he wants. Democratic leaders in Congress set the law to expire in six months so they could pretend to be against it after they were for it, and civil liberties groups are saying the changes they've already legislated give the Family more than they initially asked for, and what the fuck, over?

The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act governs when the government must obtain eavesdropping warrants from a secret intelligence court. Warrants are virtually never denied and may be obtained after the surveillance has begun, but the Family doesn't want a paper trail when they bug their enemies.

Lying to increase the pressure on the Democratic-controlled Congress, Bush said the new act has already been effective, allowing intelligence professionals "to gather critical information that would have been missed without this authority and save America from a tragedy of unimaginable proportions, worse than anything we've done yet."

"Keeping this authority is critical to keeping America safe," he said, all squinty and tough. "America's a nice country. It'd be a shame if something was to happen to it."

Bush detailed criteria that the bill must meet before he would sign it, including the immunity provision for all the millionaires involved and the broad requirement that it "magically ensure that protections intended for Republicans are not extended to terrorists overseas who are plotting to harm us with the weapons we sell them."

"Congress must make a choice," he said. "Will they help us subvert the Constitution by making this law permanent. Or will they force us to write things down, thereby limiting our ability to collect this intelligence and stay a step ahead of the liberals who want to attack us."

Congress prepares to cringe

WASHINGTON, D.C. (NY Times)--Two months after pretending that they would roll back the shiny new eavesdropping powers they gave the Bush Crime Family, Democrats in Congress appear ready to roll over again in an effort to keep Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck from calling them pussies.

Bush Family goons say they are confident the spineless Democrats will give the worst president in history everything he wants, including but not limited to the broadened authority to spy on his political enemies that they secured temporarily in August as Congress rushed home to brag about how tough they are. Some Democratic officials concede that they may have screwed the pooch on this one already.

As the debate begins anew this week, the emerging measures reflect the reality confronting the Democrats, which seems to be that the will of the electorate and the rule of law are meaningless and they have no more power now than they did when they were in the minority.

Although willing to take a chance and stand with the 200 million Americans who oppose the Bush Family on Iraq, they remain nervous that they will be called pussies, faggots, or traitors if they insist on trying to preserve the few remaining shreds of the Fourth Amendment.

A bill to be proposed on Tuesday by cowardly House Democrats would maintain forever the absolute authority for eavesdropping that the fascists secured temporarily in August by threatening to bomb Congress.

Paying lip-service to concerns over civil liberties, the bill would require more active rubber-stamping by the special foreign intelligence court that oversaw this sort of thing in the old days.

A competing proposal in the Senate, still being dictated by lawyers from Texas, will provide retroactive immunity for the crimes committed by the telecommunications utilities that took your money and sold your information.

No one is willing to predict exactly how the Democrats will cave. Some low-level clerks and paid-up members of the Beltway cocktail circuit said the final result will probably be even worse than what happened in August, despite the Democrats’ insistence that they would not support the legislation they supported.

“Many members continue to fear that if they don’t support whatever the president asks for, they’ll be perceived as soft on terrorism,” said William Banks, a professor who specializes in terrorism and national security law at Syracuse University. "But if they do, they'll be perceived as soft on fascism."

The August bill, known as the Protect America Act, was approved in the final hours before Congress fled the capital after veiled threats from the Bush Family of an imminent terrorist attack on Washington. The measure cut the foreign intelligence court out of the loop and broadened the NSA’s ability to obey the president unquestioningly.

NY Times to be declared "terrorist organization"

WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP)--President Bush defended his administration's methods of kidnapping and torturing terrorism suspects on Friday, saying they are both successful and lawful. He was lying.

Bush, in an emergency spin session from the Oval Office, employed his typical kneejerk denial in response to a report on two secret Justice™ Department memos that authorized torture in 2005, while the Congress was publicly de-authorizing it. "This government does not torture people," the president lied.

The two Justice™ Department legal opinions from 2005 were disclosed in Thursday's editions of The New York Times, whose editorial board is known to hate America and whose publisher longs for the day when Shari'a law will be imposed here.

The secret opinion re-legalizing torture came one day after Alberto Gonzales was confirmed in the Senate as Attorney General, a post for which he was not qualified unless you consider blind devotion to George Bush a useful trait.

The second Justice™ opinion was issued later in 2005, just as Congress was working on what should have been an unnecessary and redundant anti-torture bill. The opinion declared that none of the CIA's interrogation practices would violate provisions in the legislation, The Times said, citing interviews with unnamed current and former officials who are too ashamed to speak publicly.

Though both memos remain in effect, the White House insisted they represented no change from the 2004 policy, whatever that was.

"We stick to U.S. law and international obligations," Bush lied, refusing questions after a brief denial photo-op.

Speaking emphatically, as if explaining to a lightly retarded golf caddy how he wants his margarita prepared, the president noted that "highly trained professionals" conduct any questioning, which was also true throughout the Middle Ages. "And by the way," he said, with a look of petulant complacency, "we have gotten information from these high-value detainees that have helped protect you."

"The American people expect their government to take action to protect them from being slaughtered in their beds by the murderous brown horde of evildoers who hate their freedoms and want them to vote for Democrats," Bush said.

He also claimed that the techniques used in U.S. torture chambers "have been fully disclosed to appropriate members of the United States Congress," including some Republicans who demanded video they could take home with them.

Bush Family press tart Dana Perino said that "the policy of the United States and the practices do not constitute torture," but refused to define what would be considered torture, or off-limits, in interrogations.

"I just fundamentally disagree that that would be a good thing for national security," she said. "I think the American people are stupid enough to believe that there are secret needs that the federal government has, to keep certain information about what we're not doing private...We cannot provide more information about techniques we're not using. It's not appropriate."

But House and Senate Democrats suspect that the president is full of shit, and are demanding to see the memos.

"Why should the public have confidence that anything these cocksuckers do is either legal or in the best interests of the United States?" Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller wrote in a letter to the Justice™ Department.

House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers and Representative Jerrold Nadler promised a congressional inquiry, possibly to include polite questioning, toothless subpoenas, and a tearful plea from Nancy Pelosi that we all just try and get along.

Another Bush Crime Family goon, meanwhile, criticized the leak of such information to the news media and questioned the motivations of those who do so.

"It's troubling," Tony Fratto said Friday. "I've had the awful responsibility to have to work with The New York Times and other Islamofascist propaganda organizations on stories that involve the release of classified information. And I can tell you that every time I've dealt with any of these stories, I have felt that we have chipped away at the safety and security of our Decider."

Fuck them, they are poor

WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP)--President Bush once again declared his contempt for the working classes Wednesday, dragging his veto crayon across a bipartisan bill that would have dramatically expanded children's health insurance.

It was only the fourth veto of Bush's presidency, and the first directly benefiting his friends in the insurance racket. Some Republicans fear his position could carry steep risks for their party in next year's elections; others realize that the party is already dead, and are desperately trying to distance themselves from the policies they supported until recently.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) decried Bush's veto as "heartless" and burst into tears.

Bush cast his veto behind closed doors without any fanfare or news coverage, signaling that he knows he's an elitist piece of shit but can't help himself.

The State Children's Health Insurance Program is a joint state-federal effort that subsidizes health coverage for over 6 million people, mostly children, from families that earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to afford lobbyists.

The Democrats who claim to control Congress, with significant support from the Republicans who actually do, passed the legislation to add $35 billion over five years to allow an additional 4 million children into the program. It would be funded by raising the federal cigarette tax to $1 per pack. Unlike wars, health care has to be paid for in advance, even though it has proven significantly cheaper to insure people than to kill them.

The president had promised to veto it, saying the Democratic bill was too humane, took the program too far from its original intent of paying lip-service to the problem, and would encourage people currently at the mercy of profit-driven, private sector health-care to switch to government coverage, which might actually cover something. He wants only a $5 billion increase in funding, so he can say he cares without diverting too many valuable resources from the Carlyle Group.

Bush argued that the congressional plan would be a move toward socialized medicine, which would allow the terrorists to win.

It took Bush until last summer to veto his first bill, when he blocked expanded federal research using embryonic stem cells because life in a Petri dish is far to precious to be wasted in the pursuit of medical advances for actual people. In May, he vetoed a spending bill that would have required troop withdrawals from Iraq because war is far too precious to be abandoned just because it doesn't work and never will. In June, he vetoed another bill to ease restraints on federally funded stem cell research because some people just don't fucking get it.

In the case of the health insurance program, the veto is a bit of a high-stakes gambit for Bush, pitting him against not only the Democrats who have controlled both houses of Congress since January, but also many members of his own party and the vast majority of Americans. But he's the decider, and you're all scum.

Highest-paid death squads in the world

WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP)--Blackwater chairman Erik Prince vigorously rejected charges Tuesday that mercenaries from his private army acted like a gang of punks with no regard for human life while collecting absurd amounts of money for protecting State Department personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"I believe we acted appropriately at all times," said Prince, a 38-year-old right-wing Christian nutcase and former Navy SEAL with long-standing financial ties to the GOP, testifying before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

His testimony came as the FBI is investigating Blackwater thugs for their role in a September 16 orgy of gunplay that resulted in 11 dead Iraqis who will not be counted as "official" dead Iraqis. This incident and many others, including a shooting by a drunken Blackwater goon after a 2006 Christmas party, led to pointed questions by lawmakers about what the fuck the government is doing, hiring unaccountable private-sector hitmen for work that could be done cheaper and better by U.S. military personnel, like it used to be.

"We're not getting our money's worth when we have so many complaints about innocent people being shot," said Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA), committee chairman, at the conclusion of a nearly six-hour hearing. "And it's unclear whether they're actually being investigated by the State Department, because the president's girlfriend runs that joint and the bitch won't tell us anything."

The committee agreed not to look into the September 16 incident during Tuesday's special hearing about the September 16 incident, after the Justice Department requested that Congress wait until a suitable cover-up can be arranged.

Prince cast his company--which has received billions of dollars in federal contracts as a result of his family's tireless financing of Bush Crime Family political operations--as a scapegoat. He said his staff was comprised of courageous individuals who face the same threats and high-stress environment as U.S. military personnel, but for a lot more money and with no accountability to military justice. He made it sound like a real bummer.

Often leaning back to hear his lawyer tell him his haircut didn't look gay, Prince repeatedly refused to say whether people he fired for random murders were guilty of murder, and said it should be up to the Justice Department to pursue charges against them.

In the case of the Christmas eve shooting, Prince said the company fired and fined the individual, as well as recommending that he seek treatment for his alcohol and anger-management issues.

"But we, as a private organization, can't do any more," he told the House panel. "We can't flog him. We can't incarcerate him. If he was some random Iraqi, we could shoot him in the back of the head and ditch him in the street, and he wouldn't even make the count. What do you want from me? Money?"

The Blackwater chairman said he would be willing to pay for legislation that would guarantee that his employees and other private goon squads working for the State Department are subject to prosecution in U.S. courts if the president would then commute their sentences. The House is expected to consider such a bill on Wednesday, if everyone isn't too busy condemning the free speech our brave soldiers and venal mercenaries are killing and dying to protect.

At the same time, Prince said the government's decision to include the FBI in the investigation of the September 16 incident is proof that oversight and accountability already exists. Everyone laughed.

State Department officials said Tuesday the criminal prosecution of such cases was out of their hands and should be handled by the Justice Department, which would not be allowed to because of national security.

"The president's girlfriend has made clear that she wishes to have a probing, comprehensive unvarnished examination of the overall issue of security contractors working for her in Iraq," said David Satterfield, the smirking Iraq point-man for the State Department. "Which will be much better for us than any kind of investigation of specific events."

Waxman also cited a November 2004 plane crash in Afghanistan--by jacked-up, joyriding Blackwater pilots who didn't know where the fuck they were and crashed into a canyon wall, killing everyone on board--as an example of what he said is the company's cavalier attitude toward its murderous disasters.

Prince acknowledged pilot error led to the crash, but said his company's aviators often fly missions in difficult conditions, such as ignorance or drunkenness. He said the military violated its own rules by loading people and explosives on a booze-cruise canyon run. But Blackwater flew the mission anyway because that's what its government customer wanted, he said, and go fuck yourself.

"There is no FAA in Afghanistan," he said. "What crashes in Afghanistan stays in Afghanistan."