What can you say about the insanity of sheriff's deputies having sex with prostitutes on tax-payer dollars? Don't worry. It's all in the name of law enforcement, as reported by the Washington Post. Really.

For those who may still think that comparisons of modern America to totalitarian regimes is hysterical overstatement, we have this.  On Saturday, Editor & Publisher reported that a VA nurse had been investigated for sedition, based on a letter she had written to a local paper criticizing various aspects of George Bush's presidency.

Seems that the Bureau of Labor Statistics performed a little task last week that they cleverly call "re-benchmarking" of the jobs data going back to the year 2000.

I don't want to give the story away too early, but lets say that, after reading the description on Counterpunch you may want to resurrect the concept of a "Y2k crisis."

So the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) met the other day, with Ken Mehlman and Bill Frist reported to be prominent speakers, as was "the wan and ownly" Ann Coulter.  As Jane Smiley said far better than I could:

I understand that all the folks at the Conservative Political Action Conference this weekend are busy celebrating their accomplishments. Since they live in the same overextended, widely hated, and increasingly impoverished nation that I do, where the "president" and the "vice-president" think they can break the law with impunity, where the bureaucracy has been eviscerated of everyone who actually knows anything, and in a world where, in some circles, "US" is a byword for "torture" (did you notice that no one wanted to sit with Laura Bush at the Winter Olympics?), I can only assume that what I see and lament is the same thing they see and celebrate.

Name the last sitting VP to shoot a person.

Sometimes it helps to take a step back from the flurry of news items that spring on you with each and every new day.  Sometimes you need to take a slow and deliberate look at the collection of those items that have sped past you over a period of time.

Which I did this morning. And the only word, short of profanity, that comes close to capturing the spirit, character, and competence of our current government is:

D I S H O N O R A B L E  Defined by the Free Dictionary as:


Characterized by or causing dishonor or discredit.
Lacking integrity; unprincipled.

So our esteemed president spoke to the House Republican Caucus yesterday. And, the story goes, "someone" forgot to turn off the microphones that feed into the press room, allowing the press corps to hear a few minutes of Bush's comments that he expected "to stay in the room."  And if the news reports of this incident are to be believed, what did the Presdent say during this brief moment of exposure?  All the right things about protecting the country, ensuring the NSA program's legality, and the like.  Then the open mikeswere apparently discovered, and turned off.

Well color me just as skeptical as hell.  Paranoid even.  But it's too pat, too convenient, too contrary to the otherwise obsessive secrecy of the administration.

While we all consider the weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth and rending of garments by our conservative friends who were shocked and outraged by the four sentences uttered by two individuals at Coretta Scott King's funeral, let's see if we can find OTHER examples of political attacks that violated the decorum of someone ELSE's funeral.

Come on!  It'll be FUN!!!

Rumors and speculation continue that Karl Rove may yet have a problem stemming from Patrick Fitzgerald's Valerie Plame investigation.  That, however,  may eventually take a back seat to speculation over the likelihood that the Fitzgerald investigation may cause serious problems for Dick Cheney.

By way of Raw Story, two different media sources now document that Cheney: (1) authorized Libby to leak information that was still classified at the time of the leak, and (2) led the overall effort to discredit Joe Wilson.

Today's Wall Street Journal asks, in a subheadline on page one, if we are looking at "The End of Retirement?"

There are dual stories in the paper on the sorry state of retirement benefits from some of the largest American corporations, including today's announcement that GM has decided to "substantially alter pension benefits" for salaried workers (no details on how), and to cap health care benefits for salaried employees and their families at the 2006 levels.

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