Later, loser.

WASHINGTON (AP)--CIA Director Porter (Tampa Spook) Goss resigned unexpectedly today, leaving behind a spy agency still attempting to salvage a shred of credibility after allowing America's worst terrorist attack, as well as providing some of the information that formed the Bush Crime Family rationale for invading Iraq and snagged previous Director George Tenet the Medal of Freedom.

It was the latest move in a second-term shake-up of President Bush's cabal.

Making the announcement from the Oval Office, Bush called Goss' tenure one of transition, which presumably referred to the fact that it is over.

"He has led ably, for a cracker suck-up," Bush said, Goss at his side. "He has a five-year plan to increase the analysts and operatives. He just don't have the five years."

Goss said the trust, confidence and latitude that Bush placed in him "is something I could have never imagined, like so many things we've seen in the last five years."

"I believe the agency is on a very even keel, sailing well," Goss said. "I honestly believe that we have improved dramatically from those moments before the war when we were windswept and struggling to remain afloat."

The president did not name a successor, since there was no one he recognized in his immediate line of sight, but said that person, whoever it turns out to be, would continue Goss' reforms, whatever they are.

"As a result, this country will be more secure, like a child in his happy place with a favorite snuggle-blanket," Bush said. "We've got to win the war on terror, or something, and the Central Intelligence Agency is a vital part of the war. So I thank you for your service, and get out."

Goss, a former congressman from Florida, head of the House Intelligence Committee and CIA agent, had been at the helm of the agency only since September 2004, and was widely believed to have been named to keep him from saying anything stupid.

He came under fire almost immediately, in part because he brought with him several partisan shitheels from Congress who were considered too ignorant and unqualified for the CIA.

He had particularly poor relations with segments of the agency's powerful clandestine service, the so-called "Intelligence" part. In a bleak assessment, California Rep. Jane Harman, the Intelligence Committee's top Democrat, recently said, "The CIA is in a free fall," noting that employees with a combined 300 years of experience have left or been pushed out. "300 years is too long to work at one job," replied Goss at the time.

Under Goss and the sweeping & incoherent intelligence overhaul Congress approved in December 2004, the CIA was relegated to D.C.-area parking enforcement. With the installation of the country's first national intelligence director, John (Death Squad) Negroponte, Goss no longer sat atop the 16 intelligence agencies, as he had for nearly five months. Negroponte took that role, the best parking space, and many of the CIA director's responsibilities. That includes Bush's morning intelligence briefings, after which the president often seems disoriented and cranky.

Goss also had some public blunders. In March 2005, just before Negroponte took over, Goss tearfully told an audience at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library that he was overwhelmed by the many duties of his job, including devoting five hours out of every day to prepare for and deliver the presidential briefings in short sentences appropriate to the president's attention span.

"The jobs I'm being asked to do, the five hats that I wear, are too much for this mortal," Goss said. "I'm a little amazed at the workload, but mostly at all these hats."

Goss has pressed for aggressive probes about leaked information, then laughed.

"The damage has been very severe to our capabilities to carry out whatever our mission is," he told Congress in February, adding that a federal grand jury should be impaneled to determine "who apart from the president, the vice-president, the secretary of state and their various aides and flunkies is leaking this information."

Just two weeks ago, Goss announced the firing of a top intelligence analyst in connection with a Pulitzer Prize-winning story about a network of CIA prisons in Eastern Europe. Such dismissals are highly unusual, since such people are usually murdered.

DefenseCo. CEO speaks

ATLANTA, Georgia (AP) -- The United States is focused like a laser on building more profitable partnerships with foreign military dictatorships while also undermining the role of long-established alliances like NATO, Defense Secretary Donald H. (Hammerhead) Rumsfeld said Thursday.

In remarks prepared for delivery at the Southern Center for International Studies in Atlanta, Rumsfeld noted that some NATO countries have resisted calls to increase their defense budgets, even though contractors need the money to dump in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

"A growing concern is that this declining spending is likely to drop even further given the demographic trends of much of Europe, coupled with their prevailing threat assessments," he said in his prepared remarks, which were made available at the Pentagon gift shop. "I mean, they have a lot less money and fear than we do."

Thus it is "all the more urgent" to transform NATO into a subsidiary of Halliburton to make the most of its available resources, he added.

At the outset of Rumsfeld's appearance, a filthy hippie juiced up on meth she probably got from a Mexican was escorted out of the room by security guards after she interrupted the defense secretary. The woman jumped up and held up a stained & reeking cloth banner, possibly a mutiliated American flag, that said "Guilty of War Crimes!"

Rumsfeld responded with a grinchly smile and told the audience, "I think we can teach her to fear the stick."

About two minutes later, another deranged anarchist stood up yelling and was quickly removed by security.

In his prepared remarks, Rumsfeld singled out the increasingly close U.S. military relationship with Pakistan as an example of how the Bush Crime Family believes it can improve Carlyle Group profits in the long run by building ties to non-traditional allies, such as nuclear-armed Middle-Eastern generals who have overthrown their governments.

He noted that when U.S. troops were in Pakistan last year to help with rescue and relief operations following a devastating earthquake, the Americans noticed that while senior Pakistani officers took orders like trained monkeys, the junior Pakistani officers were often surly and impudent.

The difference, he said, can be explained by the fact that while most senior Pakistani officers had firsthand experience working with Americans early in their careers and were therefore preconditioned to the futility of attempting to assert sovereignty in the face of our mighty and freedom-inspired fighting troops, the junior officers had not. That is because the U.S. government cut off military-to-military relations in the 1990s in response to Pakistan's nuclear program. He concluded, "So the new guys only know us as Crusaders against Islam, see?"

Frist: "I'm desperate. Please help me."

The Washington Post:

Senate Majority Leader Bill (Katzenjammer) Frist (R-Tenn.) is trying to push through a bill that would increase indecency fines on broadcasters and threaten to take away their licenses after three violations.

Frist is championing the bill after conservative groups, a key voting bloc if he runs for president, expressed frustration, both at the lack of congressional action to curb broadcast indecency and their own inability to operate a remote.

His stand also puts opponents of the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act of 2005 in the position of appearing to cast a vote in an election year against decency, even though the issue is actually enforcement and "decency" is an entirely subjective concept.

The House passed the bill in February 2005, but it has languished in the Senate, where Commerce Committee Chairman Ted (The Head) Stevens (R-Alaska), rather than drafting his own legislation, like a legislator, has encouraged media companies to regulate themselves, like energy companies.

The House bill would increase the fine for broadcasting "obscene, indecent, or profane material" to a maximum of $500,000 from $32,500. It would also require that the FCC consider whether to revoke the station license of any broadcaster fined three times or more -- a provision particularly troubling to the broadcast industry, whose business model involves doing things over and over and over again until everyone's so sick of it they want to shoot themselves in the face.

Congressional aides said Frist on Monday night tried to "hotline" the House bill.

Under this practice, Frist told senators that he wanted to pass the legislation by unanimous consent -- which does not require a roll-call vote -- and asked if they objected. "Senator Frist is a supporter of the bill. He did try and hotline it last night. There were problems on both sides of the aisle, so we will work to resolve those problems through blackmail and intimidation to see if we can't get the bill to move forward, probably around midnight Friday," said Amy Call, a spokeswoman for Frist.

Lawyers who track media regulation said it was unclear whether a bill would pass before November, noting that a single senator could hold it up without even meaning to, but saying they could not dismiss the possibility of passage in an election year, when politicians are at their most craven & bribable.

Paul Gallant, who tracks media legislation and regulation for the Stanford Washington Research Group, said the bill may not move quickly because senators on both sides of the aisle do not believe the House version is the right approach, especially with the provision allowing for license revocation.

But, he added, "because it's a very attractive election year issue, this definitely could see the light of day. . . . The bill clearly appeals to cultural conservatives and other morons. If Senator Frist has presidential aspirations, this bill may help his standing with likely primary voters. Or it may blow up in his face like Terry Schiavo and the $100 gas rebate."

The bill, which is opposed by the broadcast industry, was approved by the House after the controversy over the brief exposure of one of singer Janet Jackson's breasts during the halftime show of the 2004 Super Bowl. The breast has since retired, but refuses to rule out a comeback.

Conservative groups including the Parents Television Council and the American Family Association criticized Stevens this week for his committee's failure to pass a bill, and they demanded that the Senate act.

"Any senator who blocks passage of the indecency legislation is siding with those who want to pollute the airwaves with raunch," L. Brent (Pucker) Bozell, president of the Parents Television Council, said in a written statement yesterday. "They should all be gang-fucked by drunken bike-trash in a pool of hot Vaseline."

Ignorance Abroad

From the Associated Press:

Vice President Dick (Shotgun) Cheney looked ahead Tuesday to a three-nation, six-day trip designed to nurture democracy and advance U.S. corporate interests in lands where political change doesn't always come without hundreds of thousands of people dying.

Administration officials said a speech in Lithuania on Thursday to leaders of the Baltic and Black Sea regions would be the centerpiece of the journey, which also includes an unusual high-level visit to Kazakhstan, where many of our secret prisoners are illegally detained and indefinitely tortured.

The final stop was Croatia, where Cheney arranged meetings with leaders of three members of the Adriatic Charter, an organization founded by countries eager for admission to NATO, an organization with an increasingly irrelevant name.

While officials hoped Cheney's trip would advance President Bush's second-term "freedom agenda," which largely involves freedom from taxation for everyone but the middle class, energy issues, Iran's nuclear program and concerns about Russian President Vladimir Putin's actions also hovered over the journey.

The Soviet Union once occupied many of the countries whose leaders Cheney intends to meet, and President Bush recently expressed concern about the pace of democratization in Russia, then wiped out on his mountain bike.

There were other complicating factors, none more so than in Kazakhstan.

President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has ruled the ex-Soviet republic for 16 years, has come under criticism recently for becoming increasingly authoritarian, as has Bush.

At the same time, he sent troops to support the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, and the Pentagon lists one member of the detachment as among the war dead. The other one could not be reached for comment.

Additionally, Kazakhstan has a strategic location, sharing borders with both China and Russia. It also holds vast energy resources at a time of increasing global demand for oil and gas supplies.

In that vein, Nazarbayev is the third foreign leader to receive personal attention from the Bush administration in recent weeks despite persistent concerns about a willingness to tolerate freedom. That is to say, the lack of a willingness to tolerate freedom.

Bush met recently with the President of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliev, at the White House, whom he challenged to an arm-wrestling match.

And Secretary of state Condoleezza (Wormhole) Rice greeted Equatorial Guinean President Teodoro Obiang Nguema as "a good friend." He seized power in a 1979 coup and his government has been regularly accused by the State Department of human rights violations, including torture and deaths of prisoners. Like ours.

Administration officials have defended the meetings, saying that Bush and other officials make a point of raising human rights and other social policy concerns over dinner, before the hookers & gack.

Disasters to be planned more carefully

From Broadcasting & Cable:

Reporters will be embedded with the government during natural disasters, according to a plan outlined by Homeland Security Secretary Michael (Skull) Chertoff at the Radio-Television News Directors Association convention in Las Vegas.

Chertoff said that it is not a battleground so "we're not going to be censoring information, the way the treasonous liberal media censors the good news about Iraq." But he also said that he doesn't want "interference with our physical operations, like handing out contracts to friends of the Bush family and rescuing white people," according to RTNDA.

The administration came in for some heavy criticism from traitorous left-wing media outlets like Fox News during its handling, or arguably mishandling, or actually complete ignorance of the Katrina Hurricane crisis. Often, reporters seemed to know more about what was happening on the ground than the administration did (largely as a result of actually paying attention to events and showing up on the fucking scene), which led to some high-profile frustration from the journalists, most notably CNN's Anderson Cooper, known for his penetrating stare and rabid support of Islamofascism.