I really don't care if McCain's trophy wife is proud of her country. She is just another GOP Stepford Wife as vacant as the previous ones. Whoopie for anorexic-looking Cindy McCain in her red $5000 Yves St. Laurent power suit, with her triple string of cultured pearls, her bleached blond hair and her shiny new face-lift telling us she's proud of America. Prouder of America than--- hmmmm, let's say Michelle Obama.

Former publishing idiot savant Judith Regan is suing the News Corporation for $100,000,000 for smearing her personal reputation in her recent firing at head of ReganBooks division at Harper Collins.  The Harper Collins publishing house is a wholly owned subsidiary of the News Corporation which is wholly owned by the uncontested master blaster of the fake newz: Rupert Murdoch.

Ms. Regan is alleging that an unnamed party or parties at News Corporation offered her hush money to conceal her tryst with Rudy Giuliani’s longtime sidekick Bernie Kerik from Justice Department investigators. When Ms Regan refused the hush money and flipped on Bernie to federal prosecutors, Ms Regan alleges the order to dismiss her came from the top of News Corporation’s food chain. The termination order for Ms Regan may have even been the sultan of schlock newz himself, Rupert Murdoch. Rupert claims to personally authorize the firings of all division heads, so what gives?  Is Rupert involved in offering a hush money payment to Ms. Regan to obstruct justice in an ongoing federal investigation?

Bush is going soft in the head.  Halfway through the match, Bush wants to kick over the table the chess board is on and start a brand new game of chess. Is this not a manifest symptom of senile dementia? Nope! Rules are made to be changed until you find the rules you can win with. If you can't win under your own house rules, make up new ones!

Bush has failed at nearly every benchmark the he (not Congress) established to evaluate the progress of the surge, so now five years into the war and half dozen failed mission statements later, it's time for New Rules Vol. 5 (the 2007 Al Anbar edition)

March 20th, 2003 was invasion day at the start of the Iraq war. It was on that day that I lost my religion. I listened on NPR as the first American troops to landed in Iraq and instead of seizing WMDs the American forces made a beeline to secure the refineries of the Basra oil field. Basra, Iraq is the home of the second most productive oil field on the face of the earth. If imminent danger from WMD was the cause of the war,why did the U.S. military secure the oil fields first and wait several months to even begin any search for WMDs?

After March 20th, 2003 there was no doubt in my mind that Bush had begun a war to plunder the oil resources in Iraq. To this day nothing Bush has said or done has persuaded me to believe in the Bush's lame platitudes about democracy and freedom as the goal of the Iraq war. The thought that Bush is planning to call his presidential museum the Freedom Institute makes my skin crawl. The only monument Bush deserves is a Tower of Babel built from the debris and rubble from the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina.

A moderate Republican friend mine my was feeling a wee bit celebratory about Rove’s handling of his Meet the Press interview with NBC White House correspondent David Gregory.  He sent my this fairly perceptive email on how Rove managed to get the upper hand in the interview (unedited):

our affection for him is probably similar, but we differ regarding the appreciation of his intellect.  given the very poor political position he and his party are in he was never touched by the russert's stand in.  

while vulnerable on the discussed topics ... the 2006 election results, iraq, 9/11, immigration & social security reform failures, cheney's flip-flop of the '94 position against an iraq invasion, miscalculation of the costs of the war and the ability of iraq revenues to cover it, his treasonous Plame disclosure, and avoidance of testimony because of executive privilege ... rove never took a hit.  

he even used the national broadcast as an opportunity to point out all of hillary's negatives as the demo front runner.   while a correspondent of the calibre of Moyers or Schieffer would never have let rove assume such control of the interview, that bush's brain emerged from that discussion unscathed speaks to his malignant brilliance.

Guess what? The American public is about to get sandbagged again. The latest "gotcha" from George W. Bush is backing down from his good faith agreement to allow a September assessment by General Petraeus to be the basis for evaluating the progress of the surge. Instead the White House is censoring the Petraeus evaluation and issuing its own report card on Iraq.  

I'm a member of the Perspectives bi-partisan forum and recently criticized the Bush administration for losing track of 190,000 weapons that were issued to the Iraqi Security to forces. My theory was that those weapons were stolen by members of the Iraq security force and put into the hands of various competing factions waging war against the American military in Iraq.

A fellow who calls himself Conservative Virginian wrote this reply:

He is the Commander In Chief, not an employee in the warehouse.  According to the Government Accountability Office the blame is shared between Congress and the Department of Defense.  Of course it is still the big evil George Bush's fault right?  Is there anything that occurs in this country which is not Bush's fault?  Last poll I saw had George Bush's Iraq approval ratings higher than Congresses, explain that away.  The reality simply does not support the irrational claims of the Bush Haters.

A video from YouTube which I also saw on MSNBC shows a rare moment when George W. Bush is at a loss for words, even stupid words.

In doing research among the vast archives of Watergate tapes, I stumbled across this little gem of a consversation between Richard Nixon and Donald Rumsfeld. The time stamp on the tape is June 22, 1971 between 11:36 am and 12:28 pm. The tape runs only five minutes or so but part of the conversation has been excised from the tape, for reasons unknown to me. The President does most of the talking as Rumsfeld behaves like a sycophant, laughing on cue to the president's jokes and agreeing with the nuggets of wisdom his boss imparts to him.

I've been running the Pathetic Republican poll at my home forum for a couple of years now but I thought it would be fun to debut it on the Daily Kos. Just post any write-in votes or comments on the thread.

An article by Michael Kranish in the July 4th edition of the Boston Globe adds some fresh perspective on Fred Thompson's role as Watergate prosecutor:

Thompson tipped off the White House that the committee knew about the taping system and would be making the information public. In his all-but-forgotten Watergate memoir, "At That Point in Time," Thompson said he acted with "no authority" in divulging the committee's knowledge of the tapes, which provided the evidence that led to Nixon's resignation. It was one of many Thompson leaks to the Nixon team, according to a former investigator for Democrats on the committee, Scott Armstrong , who remains upset at Thompson's actions.

For those of you who have yet to witness Ann Coulter's meltdown on Chris Matthew's Hardball last evening, your dessert is on me today: Link to Video Footage of Coulter Meltdown

Listening is a lost art in America.

Nearly everything I know about the world was learned by listening. When I first worked as a community organizer I was assigned to work in an impoverished all black Fairgrounds Park neighborhood of North St. Louis in the Seventies,.  I was a middle class white kid from suburbs barely out of my teens. I hadn’t even gone to college back then.  What the hell did I know about impoverished black folks?

I'm pretty much middle of the road on the immigration issue. Organized labor along with the vast majority of Americans don't want corporate America outsourcing or insourcing skilled jobs that could be performed by American citizens. Hiring immigrants from underdeveloped nations has a long term effect of depressing American wages, thus transforming our entire economy into Wal-Mart business model of a serf driven economy where educated workers, skilled trades workers and unskilled and uneducated workers are all paupers under the same feudal oligarchy of global capitalism.

Conservatives say, "Fred Thompson is just like Ronald Reagan!"

The conventional wisdom says, " Yup, Fred Thompson is just  like Ronald Reagan ....Without ideas, charisma, passion, experience, hair, sense of humor, political savvy or an age appropriate wife."

I'm going to break with progressive political protocol and comment on the omnipresent celebrity news item of Paris Hilton's "political" imprisonment. I've seen the minds of the greatest journalists of my generation destroyed by Paris Hilton's demand for constant attention. Even the Olbermann Nation at MSNBC has been caught in the grip of Paris madness.

Keith Olbermann will tell you his extensive coverage of Paris is a parody of tabloid celebrity newz,but how do you parody Paris Hilton, a pseudo-celebrity who is already a parody of herself? The best parody of Paris Hilton is Paris Hilton and while Olbermann's parody might bump up his ratings, he can't compete with the the hilarity of Paris' own parody of herself. Kieth Olberman's efforts are a second hand parody of parody.  

Even liberal populist like myself, finds a great deal to appreciate about Lou Dobb's appealing lunch-bucket, everyman’s populism on CNN. Even if Dobbs sometimes strays into xenophobic right-wing clap-trap in his commentaries, he is a voice in the wilderness committed to telling the truth. At least that's what I thought until the New York Times reporter David  Leonhardt discovered that Dobbs has been playing fast and lose with the truth on his show.
http://www.nytimes.com/

In addition,  Leonhardt uncovered Dobbs' cult popularity among white supremacist websites and his use of racist guests on his show as uncovered by the Southern Poverty Law Center. In fact since the SPLC has pointed out Mr. Dobbs' ongoing flirtation with the white supremacist movement, I've been switching over to MSNBC when his show comes on CNN. Sorry about that  Lou, but your quirky populism falls flat when you start acting like a spokesman for a Christian identity militia.
http://www.splcenter.org/...

I'm not in the habit of posting the full content of an op-ed piece but this one by Professor Frank Bowman at the University of Missouri deserves the attention of the readers of the Daily Kos. Impeaching Alberto Gonzales is an option that Congress should exercise if only to serve notice to Bush that what Congress giveth to the President, can also be taken away.

Read on the argument for impeaching Gonzales for yourself and you decide.