OT again. While I am glad that Dana Priest broke the Walter Reed story, I just wanted to point out the following:

1) Walter Reed is located not near but in the nation’s capital.

2) It is located only a few miles from the White House, the Congress, and the offices of the media.

3) This story could have been written anytime from late 2004 onwards as American casualties mounted.

My guess is that this falls under the category of an open secret. The situation was known but nothing was done about it because no one cared. Only when it hit the headlines and a public disgusted with the war and the hypocrisy of its leaders read about conditions at Walter Reed did the nation’s media and leaders realize that they were shocked, shocked I tell you, that it was going on.

The Walter Reed scandal happened because the media are lazy and slow to investigate anything and the politicians are fecklessness personified.

Amen. (Sigh)

Nice post.

Let’s have an Office of Faith-Based Emergency Medicine–Dick Cheney could stand forward as a testament to its effectiveness. When his pacemaker cacks out, Emergency Prayer Teams will think about him really hard while praying. No other action required.

I was going to suggest an Office of Faith-Based Law Enforcement, but the Department of Fatherland Insanity’s already got that covered.

Maybe an office of Faith-Based Economics … sorry … forgot–in the Bush White House it’s called “economic policy”.

How about a Department of Faith-Based Impeachment?

Ms K8 – FYI I am making a donatiion to FDL in your name as soon as I submit this. I am seriously ahead of the time indicated on comments (by about 1/3 day) so I only get the earliest part of your day there and must read comments the next day here. I will make the donation identifyable by using my vintage year, that and the time should indicate sum donated in K8’s behalf.

Warnings should be posted – Serious Head Candy Involved in this Posting, Warning May Cause Addiction, Withdrawal Symptoms Severe

Magnificent Postings and Comments CHS (and everybody else too).

Do these EPU comments ever get looked at? All the best……

The legislative branch must pass the laws that collect money from all U.S. taxpayers, and unquestioningly hand it over to the executive branch which will spend it any way it wants according to the dictates of God.

All hail God. Er, all hail the Christian God. Ahem, all hail the evangelical, orthodox, hard-core rightwing God. Or maybe the Catholic God. Ummm, or the Mormon God.

Damn, I guess we’ll just have to wait for the elections next year to find out which God we’ll all be forced to worship starting in 2009, depending on which Godly candidate steals the next election…and tells Congress and the Supreme Court to “Go F**K Yourselves”…along with all the U.S. citizens and taxpayers who might not belong to this Godly candidate’s religious denomination.

Oh well, God has spoken. All hail God.

(Is God crazy, or are just some of his followers stark-raving crazy? I guess we’ll know after the Supreme Court rules either in favor of religious tyranny and against religious freedom in America, or for religious freedom in America and against religious tyranny.)

This is what makes my mind sit up and pay attention…and why I keep returning to FDL.

Thanks.

The best part of this oral argument is at the start where Chief Justice Warren Burger tells the Defendant’s attorney that the Court is familiar with the case and that the attorney does not need to “dwell on the facts” in his presentation to the Justices. You can almost see the gears turning in the lawyer’s head as he thinks to himself, “How many times will I ever get to throw the F-word around in front of the United States Supreme Court?” So, he gives them a brief, but fully descriptive replay of the relevant facts, including the unedited content of the jacket. Greatness.

If things your government does can be said to NOT have a direct affect on your life, then they can pretty well do whatever they want overseas (for example) and you would never be able to challenge them.

Ever notice how they keep cutting back on taxes due from the poor and then saying all tax cuts should go to the Rich because they’re the people who really pay taxes? Well, consider this, if they’re the only ones paying taxes then they’re the only ones who have any standing in court on issues related to government spending — including Iraq & Iran war spending. Lovely, eh?

I’d love to hear Scalia try to explain who has standing in the Supreme Court when it’s not written in the Constitution and he ONLY reads the text and never interprets what a word means — it’s just one letter after another.

BTW, I find it sad that a judge has to tell the jury they can’t use a dictionary. If no word can be honestly understood to mean what the dictionary says it means, then the Law loses it’s meaning and Lawyers and politicians can redefine the language to mean anything a barnyard pig would want it to mean.

Or from Alice in Wonderland, (paraphrasing) ‘A word means what I say it means.’

Let Bushies eat cake icing!

cake icing: noun, same thing as dung except prettier; synonym for turd-blossom

Oklahoma kiddo @ 106

(AP) Just hours after floating the idea of cutting $20 billion from President Bush’s $142 billion request for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan next year, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad was overruled by fellow Democrats on Thursday.

Which fellow Democrats overruled Conrad?

From AP:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Just hours after floating the idea of cutting $20 billion from President Bush’s $142 billion request for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan next year, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad was overruled by fellow Democrats Thursday.

‘’It’s nothing that any of us are considering,’’ Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., told reporters.

See? This is what I mean…The republican machine will come in in ‘08 and say that the democrats have not ended the war, they’ve had two years to do it, and now they will promise to end it. And Americans will swallow it.

Is it my imagination, or is the argument that “separation” only applies to acts of the legislature and not executive orders…well, specious?…Hollow?…disingenuous? It appears to my unlawyerly eye, that the Solicitor General was trying to accomplish a couple of things…first, they were taking their “imperial presidency” case out for a test drive by saying if the “unitary executive” does it, then it can’t possibly be wrong (or challenged for that matter.) and, they were trying desperately to give the conservatives a fig leaf behind which they could hide their fawning over their wonder boy….

okay, okay, okay….I’m a frustrated lawyer wannabe….

and I’m proud of it too, dammit……