This Can't Be Happening!

The New York Times called Mitt Romney a liar today, but not CIA Director Michael Hayden.

Excuse me, but I have to vent here.

Having grown up in a college town (Storrs, CT, home of UConn), and then having attended college in two cities that were not my hometown, in both of which places I voted in local elections (Middletown, CT and New York City), I want to take issue with the candidates, like Hillary Clinton, and the people in the Democratic Party leadership in Iowa, who are claiming it's somehow untoward for a candidate, like Barak Obama in this case, to urge students who are from out of town or , god forbid, out of state to vote in the Iowa caucuses. Officials in other states have made the same kind of complaint.

President Bush got run off the track by the CIA analysts over at the Langley, who apparently, after being trampled by Vice President Dick Cheney and his Neo-Con and AIPAC-backed hordes into twisting intelligence into lies about Iraq’s non-existent nuclear and WMD programs in 2002, decided that they wouldn’t do the same thing this time on Iran for two lame-duck warmongers.

The new book Murdered by Mumia, by Maureen Faulkner and right-wing Philadelphia radio talkshow shock jock and Bill O'Reilly wannabe Michael Smerconish, due out this Thursday, got top billing in the feature section of the Philadelphia Inquirer on Sunday with an excerpt headlined “A Widow Speaks,” which implied that the wife of slain Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner was finally breaking her silence. In fact, Faulkner has been quite vocal for a quarter of a century in her tireless campaign, backed by the Fraternal Order of Police, to have Abu-Jamal, who was found guilty of murdering her husband, executed.

The New York Times had a news article about Venezuela in Thursday’s edition, but it was about Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez saying he would cut diplomatic ties with neighboring Colombia. There wasn’t a word about a memo from a CIA operative in Caracas to CIA Director General Michael Hayden, uncovered yesterday, outlining a plan for interfering with a Venezuelan referendum set for Dec. 2, and laying out the steps for instigating and backing a coup.

I’m looking out my window here in southeastern Pennsylvania at a cherry tree that, on November 28, is still covered in green leaves. A butterfly bush nearer to the house is still blooming. We have yet to have a “killing” frost this year in this part of Pennsylvania, though just five years ago and earlier, such frosts were the rule by mid October, and sometimes even came at the end of September.

There are three things I want you to do over Thanksgiving weekend:

1. Go to the "I Quit This Party" page via the link to the left and quit the Democratic Party. We need a movement to tell the Democrats that if they don't impeach Bush and Cheney, and if they don't do cut all funding for the Iraq War and do what Gen. Sanchez (ret.) says to do (i.e. get the hell out of there), then we're gone. Then organize a de-registration march on the board of elections in your community, and alert the media to the event.

The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White House briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.

--Excerpt from Scott McClellan's forthcoming book "What Happened"
(Public Affairs Books, due out in April 2008)

With that one little statement, released on the Public Affairs Books website this week, all excuses for not impeaching President Bush and Vice President Cheney, not to mention indicting Cheney (who of course has no immunity from prosecution while in office), have evaporated.

This article appeared initially in the Oct. 22, 2007 issue of American Conservative magazine.

By Dave Lindorff

The unauthorized Aug. 29/30 cross-country flight of a B-52H Stratofortress armed with six nuclear-tipped AGM-29 Advanced Cruise missiles, which saw these 150-kiloton warheads go missing for 36 hours, has all the elements of two Hollywood movies. One would be a thriller about the theft from an armed weapons bunker of six nukes for some dark and murky purpose. The lead might be played by Matt Damon. The other movie would be a slapstick comedy about a bunch of bozos who couldn’t tell the difference between a nuclear weapon and a pile of dummy warheads. The lead might be played by Adam Sandler, backed by the cast of “Police Academy III.”

So far, the Pentagon, which has launched two separate investigations into the incident, seems to be assuming that it is dealing with the comedy version, saying that some incredible “mistake” led to nuclear weapons being taken inadvertently from a weapons-storage bunker, loaded into launch position on a bomber, and flown from North Dakota to Louisiana.

As someone who has been writing about this crazed administration's plans to launch an attack on Iran now for over a year, I have always noted that the real sign that it might happen would be when oil industry analysts started to worry about it.