The other toady branches of our federal government continue to roll over and appease Junior without fail.  Apparently Stephen Breyer thinks that habeas corpus protection can be gutted simply by having Congress enacting a piece of legislation to that effect.

MSNBC:

In Wednesday’s argument before the high court in the case of Boumediene vs. Bush, the latest attempt by detainees to win their release, Justice Stephen Breyer indicated three times that it would be possible for Congress to enact a law that would provide the basis for holding the detainees indefinitely without trial.

Breyer seemed to suggest to Solicitor General Paul Clement that long-term detention might pass muster with the Supreme Court under "some special statute involving preventive detention and danger, which has not yet been enacted."

More below...

Before Petraeus was elevated to his current position of Junior's man in Iraq, he was involved in writing the infamous Counterinsurgency Field Manual that was pimped in the news media as a major piece of scholarship.  Part of Junior's "new strategy" involved ramming Petraeus through the Senate while riding high on the publication of this field manual.

Now Petraeus may see his credibility demolished by allegations that the field manual he was involved in creating was in fact yet another example of plagiarism by the Bush regime and its enablers.

More below...

Junior proved again today that he is as heartless and cruel as we expected.

CNN:

WASHINGTON (CNN)  -- President Bush on Wednesday vetoed legislation expanding a children's health insurance program by $35 billion over five years.

Bush exercised the veto at 10 a.m. ET before leaving the White House for a trip to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to discuss the federal budget and taxes.

...

The program gives coverage to parents who make too much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to buy private insurance for their children. Critics have said their concern is that parents might be prompted to drop private coverage for their children to get cheaper coverage under the bill.

Read on...

Without question, one of the most despicable individuals in the Republican Party is Newt Gingrich.  He remains one of the most despicable individuals despite not being directly responsible for war crimes of this Republican administration, which is saying a lot.  Today, he provided further evidence of just how much of a dangerous maniac he actually is.

Junior's handmaidens in the mainstream US media continue to pimp the administration line that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, and in a recent Time magazine article, are pondering what war with Iran would look like.

So what would it look like? Interviews with dozens of experts and government officials in Washington, Tehran and elsewhere in the Middle East paint a sobering picture: Military action against Iran's nuclear facilities would have a decent chance of succeeding, but at a staggering cost.

Time Magazine is full of fucking shit.

I've always suspected that Junior plans to destroy America by turning this country into a police state and bankrupting the federal government.  The deadline of the deliberate boondoggle of a Medicare program that has just passed is further evidence of that.  Paul Craig Roberts, former treasury secretary of the Reagan Administration, had this to say yesterday:

The neoconservative Bush regime has adroitly used 9/11 to create fear of terrorism among Americans that blinds Americans to the Bush regime's assault on our constitutional system.  Americans have meekly acquiesced to the Bush regime's brutal assaults on civil liberties, human rights, the separation of powers, and statutory law, because Americans have been brainwashed to believe that the "war on terror"  takes precedence and cannot be waged under the rules established by the Founding Fathers.

More below.

Since America's once robust manufacturing economy has been hollowed out by free trade policies, the principle driving forces behind the economy include fast food, Wal-Mart, and the production of suburban sprawl.

More below.

The Bush Administration policy in the Middle East is insane and schizophrenic. It is obvious that they are not serious about non-proliferation and the prevention of terrorism. If they were, they wouldn't be granting amnesty to hordes of illegal aliens, ignoring border/port security, or cutting funding to non-proliferation efforts. But they are doing all of those things.

More below.

It's difficult to have faith in the American electorate when you see how easily the public are manipulated to ill ends.

Take for example, the latest ABC News Poll.

To prevent Iran from developing nuclear technology, would you support:

International sanctions?           71%           26%
U.S. bombing?                        42              54

I have to admit, I was at first relieved to see that at least a majority do not support bombing Iran.  But, reading on revealed some disturbing details.

More below.

Perhaps I haven't been paying attention, but I haven't seen a single diary here dedicated to the circumstances surrounding the death of Slobodan Milosevic.  Milosevic's death is raising a lot of interesting questions, such as how a high profile prisoner such as himself could have died while in UN custody at The Hague.  The UN insists, of course, that he was receiving the best medical treatment possible.  Yet, preliminary autopsies reveal that Milosevic was poisoned.  The UN has said that Milosevic's medication was altered, but his lawyer denies this.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (CNN) -- A lawyer for Slobodan Milosevic has denied news reports that the former leader of Yugoslavia altered his medication to discredit medical care at a Dutch detention center and be allowed to seek treatment in Russia.

More below.

While Bush hardly addressed anything of substance in the 2006 State of the Union Address, one proposal that he discussed made me very uneasy:

I am pleased that members of Congress are working on earmark reform, because the federal budget has too many special interest projects. (Applause.) And we can tackle this problem together, if you pass the line-item veto. (Applause.)

While I fully agree with the first statement, the idea that delegating more power to the executive will solve the problem of special interest projects is not only laughable, but downright dangerous.

More below.

I'll be honest - I'm not convinced.  Every day here, I read the blogs about how we should support this or that Democratic candidate to roll back some of the awful legislation and check the thuggery of the Bush administration.  Yet, if we look back on the track record of the Democratic Party in Congress over the past year, we see a real failure on the part of the supposed opposition party to resist some of the most key elements of Junior's erosion of the Constitution and march to fascism.

Read more below.

Bush's speech in which he demanded more power in the form of a renewed Patriot Act and the line item veto demonstrates again how dangerous he is.  The progressive bloggers here have done a great job demolishing Bush and tearing him up on this issue.  By no means I aim to downplay the importance of yet another Presidential power grab.

But I'm afraid, as usual, we have overlooked another key element of Junior's speech - and that was his failure to correctly prescribe a realistic solution to our country's oil addiction.

Further research into this possibility will be required, but it appears that the CIBC has concluded that conventional oil supplies did indeed peak in 2004:

Alberta will sit on one of the most valuable energy sources in the world by that time, and one of the few still open to private investment, said Jeff Rubin, chief economist at CIBC World Markets, the bank's wholesale banking arm.

He added that conventional oil production around the world apparently peaked in 2004.

If this is true, it means that the peak arrived sooner than the pessimistic estimate made by retired geologist and Princeton professor Kenneth Deffeyes, who projected that global production peaked over Thanksgiving in 2005.

And yes, this is an Extremely Bad Thing.

The Samuel Alito nomination will no doubt stand as an important footnote in the history books that may one day cover the slide of the United States into a fascist state.  While civil libertarians have fretted over the threat Alito poses to individual freedoms, the truth is that the fate of our country has been sealed ever since the fraudulent election of 2000 - a dress rehearsal for the ultimate farce, the 2004 election.  Yet, the blatant nature of these twin frauds are unsurprising given the delusional thinking that afflicts America.  The collective failure of this nation to detect such a poorly concealed theft is endemic of exactly the type of delusional thinking that would lead some people to deny the crisis of Peak Oil, to attempt to establish a theocracy to replace a representative republic, or to host a political convention in Las Vegas.