Stygius

Bolton resurrection

The White House is exploiting the Middle East crisis to push recess-appointed John Bolton through the Senate for a confirmation vote. Committee hearings are already scheduled. All that and more at The Washington Note and Bolton Watch.

Roberts the hack

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts has been colluding the the White House for years to block a meaningful accounting of the political abuse that led the nation to war. The vice president's office overruled other White House staff to block the release of his office's papers to the committee. It led to a dramatic showdown last November in the Senate. Yet Roberts still refuses to release a report that last October was reported to be "in the ending stage."

Via Josh Marshall, from Spencer Ackerman learn that the good Senator intends to never release this report, let alone get any actual intelligence reform done.

A particular bone of contention is what the committee should say about Douglas Feith's famous Pentagon intelligence operation, which sought to highlight mostly-illusory links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

Death of an ARMPAC

TakeBacktheHouse crows shamelessly:

The AP is reporting that DeLay’s Americans for a Republican Majority PAC will pay a $115,000 fine and shut its doors under a July 7 agreement with the Federal Election Commission made public this week.

The obscenity of ARMPAC-TRMPAC and Tom DeLay's wretched rule of Congress is part of what propelled my own blogging. It's a pleasure to see long-held hopes coming true.

Meanwhile, Tom DeLay remains in an exquisitely crafted quandry of his own making. May he run like hell to keep that seat.

Air Safety: Management Breakdown

It's been a consistent theme for years that asinine policies at TSA undermine the Federal Air Marshals. In an impressive investigative report, Denver's Channel 7 talks to some marshals.

All of the air marshals attacked management for systematically exposing their covert status, willingly compromising their undercover assignments, and ultimately risking the safety of air passengers from coast to coast.

"Our anonymity is the only thing we have as a defense. Without anonymity, we might as well wear our guns on the outside of our shirts and announce where we're sitting," said an air marshal in Las Vegas.The air marshals said policies and procedures established at headquarters are compromising their security in airports, on airplanes and in the hotels where they stay.

Ralph Reed: Done

Stick a fork in Ralph Reed. NYT:

Ralph Reed, the former director of the Christian Coalition and a former Republican lobbyist involved in the Jack Abramoff scandal, suffered an embarrassing defeat in his effort to win the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor on Tuesday.

Mr. Reed conceded defeat before 10 p.m., with his opponent leading by more than 10 percentage points.

The "defeated" Taliban

New York Times:

Afghan officials said “foreign and Afghan terrorists” were pouring into southern Helmand Province from neighboring Pakistan. The operation is among the most audacious by Taliban forces and their allies since the ouster of the Taliban government by the American-led coalition in 2001.

The spokesman for the coalition, Col. Tom Collins, told reporters in Kabul that “decisive operations will begin soon” to reclaim the area from the insurgents, but offered no details.

In the past, the Taliban have seized towns for a few hours before being routed by coalition and Afghan forces. This time, the insurgents have retained control of a town in the district of Garmser for two days, and government forces have fled.

Immigration hearings a bust

According to the New York Times, congressional Republicans' immigration field hearings are having unanticipated consequences, by often exposing the fault lines within the party rather than generating wild-eyed enthusiasm among the base.

A hearing before a House subcommittee on Tuesday was supposed to highlight conservative support for House Republicans’ position on immigration legislation. But the results were decidedly mixed.

The panel had lined up four witnesses to voice backing for a House-passed bill focusing on border security and making it a crime for illegal immigrants to be in the United States.

But though expressing support for the legislation, one witness, the Christian conservative advocate Phyllis Schlafly, devoted most of her testimony to her assertion that President Bush had betrayed Americans by supporting a rival Senate bill that offers a route to citizenship for most illegal immigrants already in the country; the House measure has no such provision.

GAO: No plan for victory

Michael Roston on the GAO's overview of the non-strategy.

At a specifical (sic) level, GAO first found that the Bush plan "assumed that Iraq would have a permissive security environment" which never materialized. The danger form the insurgency in particular "threatens to undermine the development of effective Iraqi governmental institutions."

Specifically:

The agency also sees that the US "assumed that the Iraqis and the international community would help finance Iraq’s developmental needs." But, "these expectations have not yet been met, and Iraq’s estimated future reconstruction needs vastly exceed what has been offered to date."

GAO also found shortcomings in American plans to pay for and implement reconstruction activities. Particularly, they found that "neither DOD nor Congress can reliably determine the cost of the war, nor do they have details on how the appropriated funds are being spent or historical data useful in considering future funding needs," and that "little guidance is provided to assist implementing agencies in resolving conflicts among themselves, as well as with other entities. In our prior work, we found that delays in reconstruction efforts sometimes resulted from lack of agreement among U.S. agencies, contractors, and Iraqi authorities about the scope and schedule for the work to be performed."

More at Roston's blog.

Our shame

Call it the "unitary executive", the "New Paradigm", the "War Paradigm", or whatever . . . I'm left bitter. Whether to salve their own consciences or to flatter their own vanities, they did the unthinkable: They theoretically legitimized torture and murder.

A must-read by Steve Clemons on the institutionalization of extra-constitutional torture. As the Bush Administration continues it's slow-motion political and moral collapse, one theme that consistently emerges is that it was often military officials who tried to thwart this administration's assumption of ultimate "military necessity."

In their dry cellar

Eric Martin provides a succinct round-up of the hollow men, "Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!"