Skank

Newsday reports:

In the 23 years since New Jersey reinstated the death penalty, the law has cost taxpayers about $253 million and executed no one, according to a new study. "Money For Nothing? The Financial Cost of New Jersey’s Death Penalty" was released Monday by New Jersey Policy Perspective, a research group…..From a strictly financial perspective, it is hard to reach a conclusion other than this: New Jersey taxpayers over the past 23 years have paid more than a quarter of a billion dollars on a capital punishment system that has executed no one.

The study is available here:

http://www.njpp.org/rpt_moneyfornothing.html 

Reaching out to the Sunni Arab community, Iraqi leaders called for a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S.-led forces and said Iraq’s opposition had a "legitimate right" of resistance.

The communique — finalized by Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni leaders Monday — condemned terrorism but was a clear acknowledgment of the Sunni position that insurgents should not be labeled as terrorists if their operations do not target innocent civilians or institutions designed to provide for the welfare of Iraqi citizens.

Two things:

1. Why is it wrong for us to leave if the Iraqi leaders want us to?

2. How is it that it’s OK to kill American soldiers but terrorism to kill Iraqis?

The sooner we leave the better. If Bush and Cheney want the US to stay let them relocate the White House in the Baghdad Hilton. 

"While the Democrats are focusing on how we were misled to war, Bush is focusing on how to mislead us out of it. …  If we were wrong about why we went in, we have to be wrong about why we’re leaving.  Otherwise it sends our enemies the message that America lacks the will to remain incorrect."
—Rob Corddry on The Daily Show

Sounds about right. 

!http://skank.tanglebones.com/wp-content/makeupbush_01.jpg!

You can see the ad here: http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/5404/relgionfree0cm.jpg

One little caveat that I’ll point out. If you look at the bottom right corner you’ll see the words GOOD NEWS. Hmmm. Where have I seen those words before? What do they mean in a Christian context? Is this a trick? Will purchasers discover that their DVD player isn’t really an atheist? We’ll have to wait and see.

The following Letter to the Editor appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune on 11/12/05:

The naive bleeding hearts who oppose Vice President Dick Cheney’s efforts to secure an exemption to the ban on the use of torture when interrogating those who are a threat to our security need to wake up to reality. This is the post-9/11 world. If some evildoer needs to be squeezed a little to obtain information that will potentially save American lives, we need to do it. The torture of Lewis (Scooter) Libby should begin this minute and continue until he gives up every neocon-man, war profiteer, misguided zealot, shock-and-awe peddler and lying politician who participated in the conspiracy to manufacture this war in Iraq. —GERRY MITCHELL, MINNETRISTA

Sounds like a plan, Gerry. 

Disastrous principles.

A great article with relevance today by Josh Marshall even though it was written in 2003. Read it.

Edit: I thought I’d add a few links by others that say the same sort of things about Cheney.

Daniel Benjamin in Slate
James Carroll in the Boston Globe
Digby at Hullabaloo

Bill Kristol, 11/14/2005: “After all, the bipartisan Silberman-Robb commission found no evidence of political manufacture and manipulation of intelligence.”

Silberman-Robb Commission Report, 3/31/05: “[W]e were not authorized to investigate how policymakers used the intelligence assessments they received from the Intelligence Community. Accordingly, while we interviewed a host of current and former policymakers during the course of our investigation, the purpose of those interviews was to learn about how the Intelligence Community reached and communicated its judgments about Iraq’s weapons programs–not to review how policymakers subsequently used that information.”

Tip of the hat to Josh Marshall at TPM.

John Dean does a careful reading of Libby’s indictment and comes to the conclusion that the ultimate target of Fitz’s investigation is Cheney. Libby is Cheney’s firewall.

Cheney deserves it, not only for destroying Plame’s career and endangering the lives of many, many folk who were a part of her clandestine network of spies but also because of his support of torture and undermining of the NSC. According to Wilkerson:

Vice President Dick Cheney’s office was responsible for directives that led to U.S. soldiers’ abusing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, a former top State Department official said Thursday.

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, then the secretary of state, told National Public Radio he had traced a trail of memos and directives authorizing questionable detention practices up through Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s office directly to Cheney’s staff.

“There was a visible audit trail from the vice president’s office through the secretary of defense, down to the commanders in the field,” authorizing practices that led to the abuse of detainees, Wilkerson said . . .

Wilkerson also told National Public Radio that Cheney’s office ran an “alternate national security staff” that spied on and undermined the president’s formal National Security Council.

He said National Security Council staff stopped sending e-mails when they found out Cheney’s staff members were reading their messages.

Time to put an end to the Cheney administration.

Here is the set up from the Washington Post:

“President Bush has ordered White House staff to attend mandatory briefings beginning next week on ethical behavior and the handling of classified material after the indictment last week of a senior administration official in the CIA leak probe.”

Create your own punchline…