While W vacationed

Newsweek wants some answers:

[T]he Bush administration faces some immediate, urgent challenges—and serious questions about its response to the disaster. For all the president’s statements ahead of the hurricane, the region seemed woefully unprepared for the flooding of New Orleans—a catastrophe that has long been predicted by experts and politicians alike. There seems to have been no contingency planning for a total evacuation of the city, including the final refuges of the city’s Superdome and its hospitals. There were no supplies of food and water ready offshore—on Navy ships for instance—in the event of such flooding, even though government officials knew there were thousands of people stranded inside the sweltering and powerless city.
Then there’s the speed of the Bush administration’s response to such disasters. Just one week ago the White House declared that a major disaster existed in Louisiana, specifically most of the areas (such as Jefferson Parish) that are now under water. Was the White House psychic about the disaster ahead? Not exactly. In fact the major disaster referred to Tropical Storm Cindy, which struck the state a full seven weeks earlier. That announcement triggered federal aid for the stricken areas, where the cleanup had been on hold for almost two months while the White House chewed things over.
Now, faced with a far bigger and deadlier disaster, the Bush administration faces at least two difficult questions: Was it ready to deal with the long-predicted flooding of New Orleans? And is it ready to deal with the long-predicted terrorist attack that might some day strike another of our big cities?

Refugees from their refugee camp

Let's hope the next one doesn't hit Houston.

With much of New Orleans under floodwaters and power supplies deteriorating, relief officials have decided to move 25,000 people -- most of them being sheltered at the city's Superdome -- to the Astrodome in Houston, officials said Wednesday.

Wrecking FEMA

This doesn't inspire much optimism. The Bush junta's prime directive has been undoing everything the Clinton administration accomplished. From The Washington Post:

SEATTLE -- In the days to come, as the nation and the people along the Gulf Coast work to cope with the disastrous aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, we will be reminded anew, how important it is to have a federal agency capable of dealing with natural catastrophes of this sort.
This is an immense human tragedy, one that will work hardship on millions of people. It is beyond the capabilities of state and local government to deal with. It requires a national response.
Which makes it all the more difficult to understand why, at this moment, the country's premier agency for dealing with such events -- FEMA -- is being, in effect, systematically downgraded and all but dismantled by the Department of Homeland Security.
Apparently homeland security now consists almost entirely of protection against terrorist acts. How else to explain why the Federal Emergency Management Agency will no longer be responsible for disaster preparedness? Given our country's long record of natural disasters, how much sense does this make?

Help the victims

Here is the place to give. And remember, hurricane season lasts through November.

Predicted

It just gets worse. Hope he's wrong.

NEW ORLEANS - The mayor said Wednesday that Hurricane Katrina probably killed thousands of people in New Orleans.
"We know there is a significant number of dead bodies in the water," and others dead in attics, Mayor Ray Nagin said. Asked how many, he said: "Minimum, hundreds. Most likely, thousands."

No WMD, no Qaida ties

Freedom? Democracy? Not exactly. Why then?

"If Zarqawi and bin Laden gain control of Iraq, they would create a new training ground for future terrorist attacks; they'd seize oil fields to fund their ambitions; they could recruit more terrorists by claiming an historic victory over the United States and our coalition," W said.

This, too, dumbfounds

Almost. The Bush junta has turned Iraq into hell on earth. Saddam was a brutal dictator, but I don't recall Iraq having a significant problem with suicide bombings under his rule.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 31 - In the highest one-day toll since the American invasion, more than 800 people died this morning after rumors of a suicide bomber led to a stampede in a vast procession of Shiite pilgrims as they crossed a bridge on their way to a shrine in northern Baghdad.
Most of the dead were crushed or suffocated, witnesses said, but many also fell or jumped into the Tigris River after the panicking crowd broke through the bridge's railings.
The pilgrims were among a throng of hundreds of thousands who had converged on the capital over the preceding day to mark the anniversary of the death of Imam Musa al-Kadhim, one of Shiite Islam's holiest figures.
Fear had begun spreading in the crowd an hour earlier, after insurgents fired rockets and mortars near the shrine, killing seven pilgrims and wounding two dozen, and leading to a counter-attack by American military helicopters.
But the stampede appears to have been caused by unfounded rumors of a man wearing a suicide belt in the crowd.
At least 841 people were killed and at least 323 were injured, an Interior Ministry official said early this evening in Baghdad, the greatest loss of life in 24 hours since the war began in March 2003.

Everybody out

What to say about this? The enormity such a catastrophe is tough to grasp. And it seems likely to continue worsening for the foreseeable future.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- The governor of Louisiana says everyone needs to leave New Orleans due to flooding from Hurricane Katrina. "We've sent buses in. We will be either loading them by boat, helicopter, anything that is necessary," Gov. Kathleen Blanco said. Army engineers trying to plug New Orleans' breached levees struggled to move giant sandbags and concrete barriers into place, and the governor said Wednesday the situation was growing more desperate and there was no choice but to abandon the flooded city.

Warwick Sabin has some thoughts.

Each Wednesday

Gene Lyons:

Don’t hold your breath, but Democrats may be showing signs of life in the national debate over Iraq.

For most of three years, including Sen. John Kerry’s presidential campaign, party leaders have appeared fearful of challenging George W. Bush’s belligerent bungling. They haven’t wanted voters to mistake them for George McGovern, the World War II bomber pilot and 1972 Democratic presidential candidate who made the mistake of being right about Vietnam too soon. Now that may be changing.

Three weeks

Channel 51 has resumed broadcasting over the airwaves.

Tapping the SPR

AP reported yesterday that W was leaning toward releasing some supplies from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to make up for production losses from Katrina. This will probably make up his mind for him.

Spiraling gas prices and continuing bloodshed in Iraq continue to take their toll on President Bush, whose standing with the public has sunk to an all-time low, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll.
The survey found Bush's overall job approval at 45 percent, down seven points since January and the lowest ever recorded in Post-ABC surveys. Fifty-three percent disapprove of the job Bush is doing.
The war has been a drag on Bush's presidency for many months, but his Iraq approval ratings in the new poll were little changed from two months ago, despite widespread violence, a rash of U.S. casualties, anti-war protests outside the president's Texas ranch and a growing debate about reducing U.S. troop levels.
What may have pushed Bush's overall ratings down in the latest poll is pervasive dissatisfaction over soaring gas prices. Two-thirds of those surveyed said gas prices are causing financial hardship to them or their families. Gas prices stand to go even higher in the wake of Hurricane Katrina's rampage through the oil-rich Gulf Coast.
More ominously for the president, six in 10 Americans said there were steps the administration could take to reduce gas prices. Slightly more than a third say the recent run-up has been due to factors beyond the administration's control.

But I'm not sure we have the refining capacity for it to do much good in the short term. In other words, we're all screwed.

We can all use some help

"Steal what you want," Kos says. OK, thanks.

A robot that recognises up to 10 faces and understands 10,000 words is to be offered to Japanese consumers looking for a high-tech helper in the house.
The one-metre tall humanoid Wakamaru robot is being marketed as a mechanical house-sitter and secretary.
Japanese manufacturer Mitsubishi Heavy Industries expects the first robots to go on sale in September.
... The Wakamaru weighs 30kg (66lb) and is expected to cost 1.58m yen (US$14,300).

Big Easy up for grabs

Every man for himself:

NEW ORLEANS — With much of the city flooded by Hurricane Katrina, looters floated garbage cans filled with clothing and jewelry down the street in a dash to grab what they could.
In some cases, looting today took place in full view of police and National Guard troops.

Take that, Darwinists

I detect the presence of an occult hand at work in this Times story:

The scientific quest to make artificial gecko feet has taken a leap forward.
Geckos, lizards that are notorious for their sticky feet, can run up walls and across ceilings, and hang tauntingly by one toe. They have no suction cups, hooks or glue on their feet, so how do they do it?
Five years ago, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley; Stanford; and Lewis and Clark College found the secret: 500,000 minute hairs cover the sole of each foot, and the tip of each hair splits into hundreds more. The hairs are so elastic that they can bend or squish to conform to microscopic nooks and crannies under the creature's feet, even on the glass walls of an aquarium.
As a result, the tiny hairs touch so much surface area so closely that weak forces of attraction between molecules in the hairs and in whatever surface the animal is walking on add up and become sufficient to let the gecko hang on. The connection breaks when the gecko shifts its foot enough to change the angle between the hairs and the surface.

Help is on the way

W makes what, for him, is the ultimate sacrifice. AP reports:

WASHINGTON -- President Bush decided to cancel the rest of his vacation to concentrate on federal relief efforts for victims of Hurricane Katrina as his top disaster relief official lamented "catastrophic" damage in three Southern states.

Uh-oh

This is troubling. The Post reports:

NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 30 -- Hurricane Katrina and its rains have passed, but this city is filling with floodwaters.
The sense of relief that residents felt Monday morning when the city was not immediately inundated by a storm surge overflowing its protective levees was replaced late Monday night and Tuesday morning with dread because of a levee that was damaged by the hurricane.
Water flowing from the damaged levee near Lake Pontchartrain could have equally catastrophic effects, only unfolding more slowly.

'No Direction Home'

The New York Times has a lengthy review. Who among us doesn't love Dylan?

Has there ever been a rock star as contrary as Bob Dylan? When taken for a folk singer, interpreting traditional songs, he started to write his own. When taken for a topical songwriter who would dutifully put his music behind party-line messages, and praised as the spokesman for a generation, he became an ambiguous, visionary poet instead. And when taken for an acoustic-guitar troubadour who was supposed to cling to old, virtuous rural sounds, he plugged in his guitar, hired a band and sneered oracular electric blues.
That's the story told in two overlapping projects: the two-CD set "No Direction Home: The Soundtrack - The Bootleg Series Vol. 7" (Columbia/Legacy), to be released today, and "No Direction Home," a documentary directed by Martin Scorsese that will be released as two DVD's on Sept. 20 and broadcast on the PBS series "American Masters" on Sept. 26 and 27. (Despite the soundtrack designation on the CD's, versions of some songs differ between album and film.)
The CD's and the documentary both follow Mr. Dylan from his early years to his motorcycle accident in July 1966, and both focus on the two metamorphoses he made in the early 1960's: from Midwestern guitar strummer to Greenwich Village folk idol, and then, far more contentiously, from folk singer to electric rocker.

Bloggered

All the stuff in the sidebar moved to the bottom of the page. Weird.

All photos are Photoshopped

That's why newspapers have photo editors. My experience has been that pics that move on photo wires generally need to be lightened and sometimes sharpened a bit when toned. And sometimes they have a reddish or yellowish or blueish tone -- they move on the wire in RGB (red-green-blue) and must, for press purposes, be converted to CMYK (cyan-magenta-yellow-black). And they can differ between computer monitors. Kevin detects differences between Web sites. Look! They cropped them differently, too!

Knight Ridder Katrina coverage

KR always has some of the best hurricane coverage, led by the Miami Herald, Charlotte Observer and, in this case, Biloxi Sun Herald. Their mainbar, with a bunch of links, is here.

Haley Barbour was right

That wasn't easy. But 80 is "a lot."

Barbour said there were unconfirmed reports of up to 80 deaths in Harrison County -- which includes devastated Gulfport and Biloxi -- and the number was likely to rise. At least five other deaths across the Gulf Coast were blamed on Katrina.

Live TV

Lifting this from CJRDaily. They watch Fox News so I don't have to. Shepard Smith, in New Orleans, tries to interview a guy walking his dogs in the middle of a hurricane.

Smith: You're live on Fox News Channel, what are you doing?
Man: Walking my dogs.
Smith: Why are you still here? I'm just curious.
Man: None of your fucking business.
Smith: Oh that was a good answer, wasn't it? That was live on international television. Thanks so much for that. You know we apologize ...

Dumping Ann Coulter

The Arizona Daily Star has had enough:

[W]e've decided that syndicated columnist Ann Coulter has worn out her welcome. Many readers find her shrill, bombastic and mean-spirited. And those are the words used by readers who identified themselves as conservatives.

It's hard to believe anyone prints her crap.

'Prison Break'

Since "Antiques Roadshow" is a repeat and the NFL game includes Detroit and because this new show is supposed to be sort of modeled after "24," why not? Alessandra Stanley likes it. Tom Shales hates it. It's worth a tryout.

UPDATE: It's no "24," but it's pretty good. I'll keep watching.

Bush's 'ranch'

W, who is afraid of horses, bought his spread in Texas in 1999 so he could pretend he was a cowboy when he ran for president. The White House press corps must chafe at having to spend August baking in Crawford. Warren Vieth of the Los Angeles Times retaliates:

CRAWFORD, Texas — President Bush calls his Prairie Chapel Ranch "a slice of heaven," a special place where he can ride his mountain bike, fish his man-made pond and clear brush to his heart's content.
But is it really a ranch?
Here's a clue: The Secret Service agents now outnumber the cows.

Katrina

Looks like New Orleans got lucky -- again. USA Today has a hurricane blog. Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour reports hearing that "there are a lot of dead people down there," but of course, who believes anything he says. Here's AP:

There were no immediate reports of deaths or serious injuries as of midday, but emergency officials have not been able to reach some of the hardest-hit areas.

Wes Clark blogs

Our man is posting at TPMCafe this week. Engage him in dialogue. I think we can all agree with him on this:

[W's] strategy of selling a painless war has backfired, and we can see it in the poll numbers and recruiting numbers for the armed services.

Boo, hoo, hoo

I could do 55 days standing on my head.

The New York Times reporter Judith Miller has now been in jail longer for refusing to testify than any reporter working for a newspaper in America.

Bon soir, N'Orleans

I barely remember you. Looks grim.

Top stories

From Yahoo! News:
Sunnis Reject Iraq's New Constitution (AP)
Bush Hails Iraqi Draft Constitution (AP)

People who think like me, but write better

Eric Margolis, Toronto Sun columnist, on "Robertson's fatwa." Clever, that.

Reverend Pat Robertson took time off last week from promoting a new protein pancake mix and scourging "ungodly" sodomites, Muslims, and Democrats to suggest the U.S. should assassinate Venezuela's president, Hugo Chavez.

Robert Parry of Consortium News on the stolen 2000 election (yes, still bitter), the media and the Iraq war.

Under traditional news judgment, the lead paragraph in American newspapers on the morning of Nov. 12, 2001, should have read something like: “If all legally cast votes in Florida were counted in Election 2000, Democrat Al Gore would have carried the state and thus won the White House, according to an unofficial tally of disputed ballots.”

Chickens roosting

The Washington Post, ignore the byline, has another long piece today about Jack Abramoff's lobbying shenanigans, this time involving one J. Stehen Griles, ex-No. 2 at Interior.

Indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff claimed in e-mails sent in 2002 that the deputy secretary of the interior had pledged to block an Indian casino that would compete with one of the lobbyist's tribal clients. Abramoff later told two associates that he was trying to hire the official.

A federal task force investigating Abramoff's activities has conducted interviews and obtained documents from Interior Department officials and Abramoff associates to determine whether conflict-of-interest laws were violated, according to people with knowledge of the probe. It can be a federal crime for government officials to negotiate for a job while being involved in decisions affecting the potential employer.
The two former Abramoff associates, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are under scrutiny in the investigation, said Abramoff told them in late 2003 that he was trying to arrange for his firm, Greenberg Traurig LLP, to hire J. Steven Griles, then deputy interior secretary. Federal investigators are interested in those discussions and in job negotiations Abramoff may have had with a second department official, according to sources.

For more on Griles, a transcript from an enlightening "NOW" segment on him is here. The people running our government are truly for sale to the highest bidder. With the titanic corruption of these megalomaniacs further revealed daily, one is forced to wonder how honest conservatives can vote for the kleptocrats who lead the Republican Party and then get up and look in the mirror the next day. It will take a generation to repair the damage these sociopaths are inflicting on my country.

'Tantalizing'

Juan Cole is in particularly good form today. With a bonus: He catches Sully in an embarrassingly poor choice of words.

Biden

Can't we find someone else to criticize the conduct of this war? His argument is always, if the administration had taken my advice, this have been a much more successful enterprise. Refresh my memory, senator. Didn't you vote in 2002 to authorize W to go to war to oust Saddam? Yes, you did. Now shut the fuck up.

Rich

Go, read:

ANOTHER week in Iraq, another light at the end of the tunnel. On Monday President Bush saluted the Iraqis for "completing work on a democratic constitution" even as the process was breaking down yet again. But was anyone even listening to his latest premature celebration?
We have long since lost count of all the historic turning points and fast-evaporating victories hyped by this president. The toppling of Saddam's statue, "Mission Accomplished," the transfer of sovereignty and the purple fingers all blur into a hallucinatory loop of delusion. One such red-letter day, some may dimly recall, was the adoption of the previous, interim constitution in March 2004, also proclaimed a "historic milestone" by Mr. Bush. Within a month after that fabulous victory, the insurgency boiled over into the war we have today, taking, among many others, the life of Casey Sheehan.

Shorter W: To demonstrate the infallibility of my decision to conquer Iraq, more Americans must die.

Someone's lying

The New York Times has a he said/he said report today on the existence/non-existence of jihadi training camps in Pakistan. The spook's money is on existence. Musharraf can't subjugate the tribal areas, and these Pakistani fighters don't just materialize, self-taught, in Kashmir and Afghanistan.

Category 5

Crikey.
UPDATE: Via Kevin, who reminded me of this:

A direct hit from a powerful hurricane on New Orleans could furnish perhaps the largest natural catastrophe ever experienced on U.S. soil. Some estimates suggest that well over 25,000 non-evacuees could die. Many more would be stranded, and successful evacuees would have nowhere to return to. Damages could run as high as $100 billion. In the wake of such a tragedy, some may even question the wisdom of trying to rebuild the city at all.

Taibbi visits Crawford

On Thursdays, the spook looks for Matt Taibbi's column in the New York Press. This week it was missing, and now I know why. He was in Crawford writing about Cindy Sheehan for Rolling Stone.

Crawford, the home of President George W. Bush, is a sun-scorched hole of a backwater Texas town -- a single dreary railroad crossing surrounded on all sides by roasted earth the color of dried dog shit. There are scattered clumps of trees and brush, but all the foliage seems bent from the sun's rays and ready at any moment to burst into flames.
The moaning cattle along the lonely roads sound like they're begging for their lives. The downtown streets are empty. Just as the earth is home to natural bridges, this place is a natural dead end -- the perfect place to drink a bottle of Lysol, wind up in a bad marriage, have your neck ripped out by a vulture.
It is a very unlikely place for a peace movement to be born. But that's exactly what happened a few weeks ago, when an aggrieved war mom named Cindy Sheehan set up camp along the road to the president's ranch and demanded a meeting with the commander in chief.

'Doctor Who,' anyone?

Can't wait:

The BBC's TV channels will be made available on the internet, BBC Director General Mark Thompson has confirmed.
He announced plans for the MyBBCPlayer - which will allow viewers to legally download seven days of programmes - at the Edinburgh Television Festival.
He said he hoped the site would launch next year.

Monitoring the 'liberal media'

We are about to inundated with more attempts to link 9/11 with W's misguided misadventure in Iraq. Norman Solomon wonders if the media will once again be willing accomplices.

For a long time, the last refuge of scoundrels was "patriotism." Now it's "the war on terror."
President Bush and many of his vocal supporters aren't content to wrap themselves in the flag. It's not sufficient to posture as more patriotic than opponents of the Iraq war. The ultimate demagogic weapon is to exploit the memory of Sept. 11, 2001.
Next month, the fourth anniversary will provide the Bush administration with plenty of media opportunities to wrap itself in the 9/11 shroud and depict Iraq war critics as insufficiently committed to defending the United States. A renewed attempt to justify the war as a resolute stand against terrorism is well underway.

We'll be watching.

New Hendrix bio

The New York Times has a review, with an audio slideshow, of "Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix."

During one early gig attended by John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck and others, the singer Terry Reid ran into Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones outside the bathroom. Jones told him it was all wet up front. What? ''It's wet from all the guitar players crying,'' Jones said.

FRIDAY CATFISH BLOGGING -- At 9 feet and 646 pounds, this catfish from the Mekong River in Thailand may be the largest freshwater fish on record. (NYTimes photo)

Must be nice

John Nichols of The Nation compares our president's vacationing habits with yours:

While Bush has been taking almost one week out of every month off since assuming the presidency, a substantial proportion of Americans are lucky if they get one week a year of paid vacation. And millions of workers get no compensated time off.
The United States, unlike other industrialized countries, fails to set a base standard for paid holidays. European countries have long required corporations to provide workers with three, four or even five weeks of paid vacation time. "Even developing countries often force companies to allow employees some time to recharge their batteries," the Financial Times notes. "El Salvador, Indonesia and Mongolia have all established a minimum of 10 to 15 days paid leave a year."
That's hardly a break at all when compared with Bush's annual average of almost ten weeks of vacation. But its a good deal more than most American workers will ever enjoy under the current system. Indeed, Americans are now working almost 500 more hours a year than their Dutch counterparts and thirty-seven hours--almost a full week--more than the average worker in the famously overworked country of Japan.
That's a radical reversal of the circumstance that existed in the 1950s and early '60s, when the Japanese and the Europeans worked more hours than Americans--and when Americans enjoyed greater prosperity and, if polls are to be believed, a greater sense of satisfaction with their lives.

Wes Clark's plan for Iraq

Wes Clark writes about Iraq in today's Washington Post:

In the old, familiar fashion, mounting U.S. casualties in Iraq have mobilized increasing public doubts about the war. More than half the American people now believe that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. They're right. But it would also be a mistake to pull out now, or to start pulling out or to set a date certain for pulling out. Instead we need a strategy to create a stable, democratizing and peaceful state in Iraq -- a strategy the administration has failed to develop and articulate.

He proceeds to articulate such a strategy, for what it's worth. Don't expect the Bush junta to try anything pragmatic. They're still feverish with neocon fantasies. On the other hand, they've previously dismissed Democrats' ideas only to adopt them as if they're their own (think 9/11 commission).

W jokes

It predates this blog, I think, but then so does half the stuff in my refigerator. Anyhow, I remembered this from McSweeney's, which has something for everyone. "Although I like a good George W. Bush joke as much as the next guy, some of them seem gratuitous and mean-spirited," by Matt Alexander. Sample:

Knock-knock.
Who's there?
Under the Patriot Act, we don't have to tell you that.

High Noon

James Wolcott visits Peggy Noonan in the asylum:

The anniversary of September 11th approacheth, and you know what that means, buoys and gulls.
Yes, it's time for Peggy Noonan to give lyrical Jeanette Macdonald voice to her full blow dementia.
I hadn't read the Noon the Loon in a spell, which may explain how my brain cells had regained their lustrous shine. I'm going to ration my reading of her in the future to prevent a relapse, but her most recent column is too nutty to ignore.
"Think Dark" is the title, and when Noonan thinks dark, it's a total eclipse.

Plumbing new depths

As Jed Clampett (the TV character, not the musician) used to say, "lower than a snake's belly in a wagon rut." Fox News let this guy ID an innocent family's home as the home of a terrorist. How anyone mistakes these clowns for journalists escapes me. During the Iraq war, you know, the one Bush declared over on May 1, 2003, I remember multiple times when they reported the WMD had been found. Now this:

For the last 2 1/2 weeks, the lives of the couple and their three children have been plunged into an unsettling routine of drivers shouting profanities, stopping to photograph their house and — most recently — spray-painting a slogan on their property.
... In what Fox News officials concede was a mistake, John Loftus, a former U.S. prosecutor, gave out the address Aug. 7, saying it was the home of a Middle Eastern man, Iyad K. Hilal, who was the leader of a terrorist group with ties to those responsible for the July 7 bombings in London.
Hilal, whom Loftus identified by name during the broadcast, moved out of the house about three years ago. But the consequences were immediate for the Voricks.
Satellite photos of the house and directions to the residence were posted online. The Voricks told police, who arranged for the content to be taken down. Someone even removed the street sign where the Voricks live to provide some protection.

Compare and contrast

Sidney Blumenthal, writing in Salon (watch the ad), wants GOP senators to ask the Bush administration some questions.

In February 1966, Sen. J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, held the first hearings on the Vietnam War, which were televised nationally for six days. The public was riveted by the penetrating questioning of administration officials and the debates among the members of the committee. Fulbright had been a friend of President Lyndon Johnson for years. Johnson, after all, had been the Senate majority leader, and Fulbright was a fellow Southerner. But the escalation of the war and the absence of a clear strategy of resolution prompted Fulbright to call the hearings. ... Fulbright believed that it was his constitutional duty to exercise oversight of the executive.
No similar Senate hearings on the origins, conduct and strategy of the Iraq war have been held. During the Johnson period, the Democrats controlled both chambers of the Congress. But Fulbright did not feel that partisan discipline under the whip of the White House was a higher principle than performing as a check and balance. Fulbright was a Democrat raising pointed questions about the policy of a Democratic president. But no Republican Senate chairman has seen fit to follow the Fulbright example. The one-party Republican rule of the Congress has resulted in the stifling of inquiry. Abandoning its powers and duties, the Republican Senate as a body refuses to hold the executive accountable.
The Democrats, suffering the debilities of the minority, are a congressional party without authority to initiate committee hearings. They cannot set an agenda or command television cameras. Their Republican colleagues have shunted them to the sidelines; the White House is deaf to their entreaties. ... The opposition party cries in the wilderness.

Some were not so fortunate

Because the girls who were electrocuted are, by definition, dead.

Fortunately for the girls, the study said electrocution hinders their learning ...

Chavez turns the other cheek

Robertson first denied he said "assassinate" before finally