Quick Hits

They need to stop making news so I can catch up:

-If the economy's doing so well, why is the Treasury Secretary resigning in a long-rumored move? Because he couldn't explain to Americans paying more for gas and heat and health care while their wages stagnate that "No, everything's going great, have you seen this corporate balance sheet?"

-Seymour Hersh offers more information on the massive illegal data mining program at the NSA. Key quote: "A security consultant working with a major telecommunications carrier told me that his client set up a top-secret high-speed circuit between its main computer complex and Quantico, Virginia, the site of a government-intelligence computer center. This link provided direct access to the carrier’s network core—the critical area of its system, where all its data are stored. 'What the companies are doing is worse than turning over records,” the consultant said. “They’re providing total access to all the data.'"

-Bob Kerrey, in the same article, calls the new CIA Director on his boldfaced lie that this kind of wiretapping would have prevented 9/11:

“That’s patently false and an indication that he’s willing to politicize intelligence and use false information to help the President,” Kerrey said.

Nice job pointing this one out, Democrats... oh wait, you didn't.

-Tom DeLay thinks Stephen Colbert is a hard-hitting conservative journalist. He thinks a guy on Comedy Central is not being satirical in any way. He SOURCED him at the top of his legal defense fund website and in an email to supporters.

Republicans don't know from satire.

-"The grownups are back": this is John McCain's brilliant strategy to end the war: “One of the things I would do if I were President would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, ‘Stop the bullshit.’”

And tell them to "get with the program" or you'll start "knocking heads," too. What a con artist. "Straight talk" without anything else is empty and foolish. Ezra Klein gets this exactly right.

Woo! That's bracing stuff! And then, after the hasty consultations with translators to make sure he actually said that, the participants would stare at him quizzically, wondering what the straight-talk solution to oil sharing, political representation, entrenched hatreds, and varying conceptions of secularism will be. So what is it? McCain demands that they "stop the bullshit." What are his next ten words?

-The closest thing to General Jack D. Ripper testifies in an Abu Ghraib trial. It sounds an awful lot like he was defending himself.

-I don't think the ACLU should be blocking criticism by its board, it's antithetical to their entire purpose and, if true, it would eliminate the possibility of any future contribution by yours truly. That said, this sounds suspiciously like something that pops up in a committee and ends up never happening, but that doesn't stop the "liberal media" from putting it in their paper.