From the Daily Kos

The Daily Kos is one of my favorite internet hang-outs. It is a mostly liberal blog, with main articles and places for other members to post their diaries. I am going to present a sample of today's stuff. I have included a sample of each of the following:

1. An Informational Diary (non-political)
2. An Informational Diary (political opinion)
3. A Rant (some strong profanity used)
   
   

• Science Diary by Darksyde

Darksyde posts regularly about scientific topics and I "subscribe" to his diary, in that his new posts are always on the "recommended" list. Today he talks some about the evolution of the dinosaur:

Science Friday: Lets Talk Turkey by DarkSyde

Fri Nov 11, 2005 at 06:14:04 AM PDT

Nothing like Turkey on, well, Turkey Day. Drumsticks, creamy breasts, and crispy turkey skin, yum-yum! Not to mention the turkey sandwiches and turkey dressing and turkey gravy. If they had such a thing as turkey bread or turkey Ice Cream, I'd probably eat that too.
Now we all recognize the turkey as a bird, I dearly hope anyway creationists perhaps excepted, and many of us now recognize the turkey as a derivative of the raptorial dinosaurs. But how many of us would recognize the humble turkey as a holocaust and chemical weapons survivor? A high altitude explorer? Not many I bet, and yet, it may be true.
Join me on a voyage in time, in mind only; think of it as Science-Faction. Lets go back, over a quarter of a billion years, when the ancestors of Tom Turkey may have first distinguished themselves, not with brain or brawn, but with their wind, and came of evolutionary age in an environment that may seem surprising.

Interested in seeing the article? Then click on the link; the story itself is both well written and well illustrated.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/11/11/8144/4157

• Bush's Veteran's Day Statement that he didn't lie about WMD intelligence.

This is another type of story you are likely to see at the Daily Kos: someone read an article and wants to comment on it and to pass it on.

Article COMPLETELY REFUTES Bush's lies about WMD intelligence by kovie

Fri Nov 11, 2005 at 04:00:41 PM PDT
Today, of all days, George Bush decided to lie yet again about the pre-war intelligence that convinced a majority of senators to vote to authorize the war in Iraq. He claimed that both Democrats and Republicans had access to the same intelligence--now understood to have been flawed--that indicated that Iraq had and continued to develop and try to acquire WMD and was a clear and present threat to US security, and thus came to the same conclusion that authorizing the war was the right thing to do.
However, an article by Elizabeth de la Vega that was recently published in The Nation completely refutes these assertions, on a number of counts. Not only was the intelligence that Bush refers to fundamentally flawed, it was presented in a very skewed and cherry-picked manner that made it less than useless in determining whether to go to war against Iraq.
Here's the article: The White House Criminal Conspiracy
kovie's diary :: ::
Specifically, the article points to the final National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that contained the intelligence that Bush was referring to today that was used by senators to determined whether to vote to authorize the war, and asserts that:
It was rushed through at the WH's orders and thus seriously flawed. It was released the night before hearings on the war vote were to begin, which didn't give senators enough time to review it properly. The complete, classified version could only be examined under tightly controlled conditions with no notes to be taken or references to its complete contents to be made in public hearings on the war vote. The public version of the NIE--the version that senators were allowed to take with them and quote from in the public hearings on the war vote--was cherry-picked to support the WH's case for war and left out any evidence or arguments contained in the full NIE that might have challenged it. The previous version of the NIE, released in late 2001, which was not rushed and far more credible, was far less supportive of the WH's argument for war. Some key excerpts: By now it's no secret that the Bush Administration used the 9/11 attacks as a pretext to promote its war. They began talking privately about invading Iraq immediately after 9/11 but did not argue their case honestly to the American people. Instead, they began looking for evidence to make a case the public would accept--that Iraq posed an imminent threat. Unfortunately for them, there wasn't much.
In fact, the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) in effect as of December 2001 said that Iraq did not have nuclear weapons; was not trying to get them; and did not appear to have reconstituted its nuclear weapons program since the UN and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors departed in December 1998. This assessment had been unchanged for three years.
As has been widely reported, the NIE is a classified assessment prepared under the CIA's direction, but only after input from the entire intelligence community, or IC. If there is disagreement, the dissenting views are also included. The December 2001 NIE contained no dissents about Iraq. In other words, the assessment privately available to Bush Administration officials from the time they began their tattoo for war until October 2002, when a new NIE was produced, was unanimous: Iraq did not have nuclear weapons or nuclear weapons programs. But publicly, the Bush team presented a starkly different picture.
In his January 2002 State of the Union address, for example, Bush declared that Iraq presented a "grave and growing danger," a direct contradiction of the prevailing NIE. Cheney continued the warnings in the ensuing months, claiming that Iraq was allied with Al Qaeda, possessed biological and chemical weapons and would soon have nuclear weapons. These false alarms were accompanied by the message that in the "post-9/11 world," normal rules of governmental procedure should not apply.
...
When in September 2002 Bush began seeking Congressional authorization to use force, based on assertions that were unsupported by the National Intelligence Estimate, Democratic senators demanded that a new NIE be assembled. Astonishingly, though most NIEs require six months' preparation, the October NIE took two weeks. This haste resulted from Bush's insistence that Iraq presented an urgent threat, which was, after all, what the NIE was designed to assess. In other words, even the imposition of an artificially foreshortened time limit was fraudulent.
Also, the CIA was obviously aware of the Administration's dissatisfaction with the December 2001 NIE. So with little new intelligence, it now maintained that "most agencies" believed Baghdad had begun reconstituting its nuclear weapons programs in 1998. It also skewed underlying details in the NIE to exaggerate the threat.
The October NIE was poorly prepared--and flawed. But it was flawed in favor of the Administration, which took that skewed assessment and misrepresented it further in the only documents that were available to the public. The ninety-page classified NIE was delivered to Congress at 10 pm on October 1, the night before Senate hearings were to begin. But members could look at it only under tight security on-site. They could not take a copy with them for review. They could, however, remove for review a simultaneously released white paper, a glitzy twenty-five-page brochure that purported to be the unclassified summary of the NIE. This document, which was released to the public, became the talking points for war. And it was completely misleading. It mentioned no dissents; it removed qualifiers and even added language to distort the severity of the threat. Several senators requested declassification of the full-length version so they could reveal to the public those dissents and qualifiers and unsubstantiated additions, but their request was denied. Consequently, they could not use many of the specifics from the October NIE to explain their opposition to war without revealing classified information.
Read the whole article if you have the time. It's quite damning, and has a LOT more to say about the war and the false case made for it by the Bush administration.

The link to The Nation story and a link to the above Daily Kos story:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051114/delavega
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/11/11/18041/330

• Rants: a good Rant from a fellow Annapolis Alum.

Those who are shy about harsh language should skip the following rant. But this rant from a fellow USNA grad describes very well what was in my heart as I listened to parts of Bush's speech today:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/11/11/163926/13

Fuck you, Mr. President.

by Anglico

Fri Nov 11, 2005 at 02:39:26 PM PDT

Inspired by Carnacki

Dear George.
I am a Vietnam-era graduate of the US Naval Academy. I served in the Navy for nine years, three of them working with airborne Marines and the 82nd Airborne at Fort Bragg. And I am so fucking angry I could scream.
Your piss-poor speech today - of all days - proves that you don't know jack shit about the military and the needs of men and women in uniform. You took a sacred occasion and turned it into a political soapbox to cover your chickenhawk ass. Fucking coward.
It's no wonder though. While serious people with real commitments were out fighting for this country honorably, you were a fucking liar and a deserter. You drank and snorted your way through a cushy-ass TANG assignment with your blue-blood daddy lying to cover your crimes. While the rest of us matured and grew into responsible adults, you fucking slid along like always, spending other people's money and passing the buck. You never learned the truth about leadership. It's all a fucking game to you.
Anglico's diary :: :: Now you're spending other people's lives. That's right, fuckhead. OTHER PEOPLE'S LIVES. Do you understand what an embarrassment you are to real veterans? Do you understand what a blight your administration is to honest, hard-working military professionals all over the fucking world? Do you understand anything besides how to shuck and jive and blame somebody else for your stupidity and incompetence? You make me sick.
It's a good thing our military is made up of true and tested professionals, because if they were cut from the same piece of shit as you, there'd be a full-scale coup with your head on a fucking stake. I know more than a few senior officers in the Navy and Marines . . . and they all think you're a fucking disaster. Many can't wait to get out from under your criminal command. Many more would just as soon frag you as look at you.
If you were an honorable man, you'd resign from office and apologize to the world for your lies and incompetence. But we know you are not an honorable man.
That's why we're going to take back Congress. And then we are going to impeach your lying ass. That's right, asshole, you are going down.
Anglico...
NOTE TO Secret Service: This is not a threat, nor is it an incitement for anyone to commit violence. I do not want George Bush hurt. I want him out of office. This is a peaceful call for regime change the old fashioned way - at the ballot box.

Unfortunately, I disagree that "Bush is going down." For Bush to get impeached, it will have to be proven that he lied about the reasons for going to war and that he knew that he was lying. What I think happened is that Bush was really convinced that this war was "the right thing to do" and therefore just blew off all evidence to the contrary.

Of course, I think it was his desire to be a "wartime president"; the ambition to be THE ONE who singlehandedly brought democracy to the Middle East drove him to make the conclusions that he did. Yes, I think that he is egotistical and selfish and possibly criminally negligent and incompetent. But I don't see him getting impeached, even in the (unlikely) event that we win back both chambers (I do see us making some modest gains in 2006 but not much more than that).

Yes, Clinton was impeached for something of far, far less consequence (lying under oath in a civil trail during irrelevant testimony that was later thrown out was what they could get him on, but let's face it: it was about consentual oral sex. High crime or misdemeanor? I think not!).

We have to remember that we do NOT have a parliamentary system and we shouldn't think of the impeachment process as some sort of a vote of no confidence.