When Nancy Pelosi stated that this Democratic Congress would be “the most honest, ethical, and open Congress in history”, I’ll admit I was skeptical though hopeful. Not long ago, I wrote that the much touted ethics reform seemed to be missing in action but today it looks like the Democrats have delivered much of what they promised with the passage of a comprehensive Ethics Bill.

While it appears that the bill may have omitted some of the reforms that have been discussed and suggested, for the most part, the legislation should be a huge step towards limiting the practice of purse string politics. Additionally, passage of the measure should help to bolster the dismal approval ratings of Congress and provide the Democrats with another achievement to tout in their 2008 election efforts.

The bill, drafted by Democratic leaders, passed by a vote of 411 to 8. It would require House and Senate members to disclose those lobbyists who raise $15,000 or more for them within a six-month period by “bundling” donations from many people. It also would bar lobbyists and their clients from giving gifts, including meals and tickets, to lawmakers.

Senators seeking targeted spending projects or “earmarks” would have to publicize their plans 48 hours before the Senate votes on the proposals in publicly available data bases, and declare their families would not directly benefit financially. The House made similar changes to its rules governing earmarks in January.

House members approved the new legislation even though some privately grumbled that it would complicate their fundraising efforts. Senate leaders expect opposition from some conservative Republicans, but they predicted final passage of the measure by week’s end.

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma, signaled the bill will meet resistance in the Senate. It “guts key earmark reforms that both houses of Congress approved overwhelmingly,” he said.

Coburn particularly objected to a revision that would allow committee chairmen or the Senate majority leader — not the Senate parliamentarian — to rule on whether earmark disclosure requirements have been met.

No doubt there will be efforts to subvert the intent of the bill as politicians, driven by the need to raise campaign funds, will look for loopholes to exploit. Hopefully, the measure can be the first step towards refocusing elected officials on public service and good governance rather than the perpetual need to pander to powerful interest groups who dangle perks in exchange for pledges of financial support.

More importantly, I would hope the renewed focus on ethical behavior would begin to shift voter perceptions. Unfortunately, many voters have become so disenchanted with the state of affairs in Washington that they see little difference between the two parties and therefore even less reason to vote. That complacency has become a tacit acceptance of the bad behavior and an opportunity for politicians to further push the limits of propriety.

Lastly, while many constituents have grown to accept pork barrel politics…the practice of attaching earmarks to legislation for the funding of pet projects intended to benefit those they represent, perhaps politicians can begin to think beyond the narrow objectives that have made it more difficult to pass important measures.

For example, when efforts to require vehicles to achieve better mileage efficiencies are repeatedly defeated by politicians from those districts in which automobile manufacturing is a mainstay of the economy, the goal of reducing our dependence on foreign oil is thwarted. When that happens with virtually every issue, progress on overarching national issues becomes cumbersome, if not impossible.

Hopefully, this step towards reform will reduce the influence of special interest groups and allow elected officials to address important issues that have become mired down in the minutiae of manipulative lobbying.

For this legislation to work, voters will also need to adjust their “what’s in it for me” mindset. The days of overlooking the unethical actions of one’s representative because he or she was able to “bring home the bacon” must cease to exist. While it is easy to blame our elected officials, isn’t it also time for voters to admit our role as enablers and recommit ourselves and our country to the advancement of the greater good?

Cross-posted at Thought Theater

I understand the desire to be optimistic about the situation in Iraq but when each day brings a new scandal, a new article detailing the growing obstacles, or a call for more time to achieve our objectives, I simply cannot muster a smile. Frankly, if it weren’t such a serious situation, it would be laughable.

Try as they might, the war apologists simply lack the ability to plug each emerging hole in a rationale that is long on rhetoric and sorely lacking in reality. Today’s news about the rampant corruption in the fledgling Iraqi government is more of the same.

Supplies and medicine in strife-torn Baghdad’s overcrowded hospitals have been siphoned off and sold elsewhere for profit because of “untouchable” corruption in the Iraqi Ministry of Health, according to a draft U.S. government report obtained by NBC News.

The report, written by U.S. advisers to Iraq’s anti-corruption agency, analyzes corruption in 12 ministries and finds devastating and grim problems. “Corruption protected by senior members of the Iraqi government remains untouchable,” the report sad.

The draft report obtained by NBC said the Iraqi Ministry of Health, which oversees the country’s hospitals, is in the “grip” of the Mahdi Army, the anti-American militia run by Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

“Contract fraud and employee theft of medicines, food, vehicles are viewed by investigators as the greatest problems,” the report said, adding that “military sources have reported that the Mehdi Army [sic] finances operations from diverted medicines.”

In the Ministry of Oil — the most important agency for Iraq’s economy — the report said “corruption is a major problem” when it comes to refined oil products, such as gasoline and kerosene. The report said corruption in the oil ministry is partly to blame for lines of cars stretching for miles as Iraqis wait hours to fill up their tanks.

My recollection of the pre-war rationale was that Saddam Hussein was a corrupt tyrant who ruled the country with a strong and brutal military and an array of insider alliances…all of which led to great wealth for the chosen few and much less for the powerless masses.

As we approach five years of American occupation, I’m afraid little has changed for the Iraqi people. In reality, one can make an argument that the situation is no better than it was under the Hussein regime. Reports suggest that there is significantly less electricity, gas and oil are in short supply or rationed, unemployment is outrageous, security is at best sporadic, and a select few use their power and authority to amass wealth while depriving others of basic necessities.

Saddam may be gone but his absence seems to have provided little more than an opportunity for others to step in and fill the power vacuum…and assume the all important role of plundering the wealth that the Bush administration once suggested would not only provide for the comfort and care of the Iraqi people; but would also pay for our costs to prosecute the war.

Given the state of corruption being reported, as well as the $10 billion per month we are spending to maintain our presence in Iraq, I would suggest that we completely miscalculated the potential obstacles and underestimated the level of lawlessness that would ensue.

An entire battalion of Iraqi police “was found to be nonexistent” and corruption in the army is “widespread,” with ghost employees and a shortage of supplies, according to the report.

The law allows the prime minister to exempt Cabinet ministers from prosecution and allows ministers to exempt their employees from prosecution.

“This is tantamount to a get out of jail free card,” Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, told NBC.

The top Iraqi anti-corruption investigator, Judge Rahdi al Rahdi, told NBC that “in many important cases, ministers did not give us the permission to take their employees to court, the prime minister’s office did not give us permission to take ministers to court.”

Rahdi said the total amount of missing money involved in his investigations into government misconduct is $11 billion.

Corruption is so serious that it is difficult for the government to function, according to Ali Allawi, a former Iraqi government minister.

“The Americans who are supporting this political class, I believe really have no choice. This is a group they have been saddled with, or supported in power, and must grin and bear it,” he said.

History tells us that this isn’t the first time the United States hitched its wagon to a government of scofflaws with the thought that it would ultimately be to our benefit. Unfortunately, history also tells us that such regimes rarely endure as their greed and disregard for the people they govern makes them targets for overthrow…often by other groups intent on doing more of the same…all the while leaving the citizenry scrambling to survive while suffering through the excesses of each new governing body.

Delivering democracy and liberty may be a fundamental goal of George Bush, but the people of Iraq may be years away from embracing such a system. No doubt there are those who favor a fair and equitable society but as so often happens they are overwhelmed by those who have learned the art of manipulation and found their way into positions of power.

Sadly, in our efforts to achieve our objectives, we are likely supporting a number of people who could care less about the good people of Iraq and our noble goal. I may be a pessimist, but I’m at a loss to envision the process whereby the thugs and thieves that have infiltrated the Iraqi government will suddenly elect to enact an equitable democracy.

Cross-posted at Thought Theater

Mitt Romney decided last week not to participate in the YouTube debate. He said then he didn’t think it very dignified to accept a question from a snowman. (Of course, he’ll likely accept one from FauxNews talking head, but there’s no accounting for Romney’s smarts, is there.) Now Mr. Romney has come up with a new excuse as to why he won’t face public questions in the YouTube Debate. From the Chicago Tribune:

“YouTube is a website that allows kids to network with one another and make friends and contact each other,” Romney explained. “YouTube looked to see if they had any convicted sex offenders on their web site. They had 29,000.”

Actually, YouTube is the popular site that allows Internet users to upload and watch a variety of videos. The web site, which is owned by search-engine behemoth Google, also was a co-sponsor of the Democratic presidential debate held on Monday night.

The web site MySpace is the one to which Romney actually was referring. MySpace, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., said this week it had found 29,000 registered sex offenders who had submitted profiles to its site and removed them.

Let’s make sure we’ve got it straight. Romney won’t participate in the YouTube debate, but he already participates on MySpace, on several MySpace pages. Yup, this is his page, probably right next to some sexual predator there on the tubes of the internet.

The real thing here is that it becomes obvious that Romney knows nothing about his subject matter. Yeah, virtually every American is for keeping porn out of the hands of children and keeping a rein on sexual predators. It sure as hell isn’t a hard stand to take, and will get him cheers everywhere. This isn’t rocket science, but still he screws it up by maligning YouTube with false information. After falsely attacking the YouTube people, he’ll probably next say he’s a supporter of business. We shouldn’t believe that either.

So Bill “McCarthy Lite” O’Reilly threatened to bring down the Kossacks yesterday. And how, prey tell, would he accomplish such a feat you ask? Why by letting his 55+ median age viewers know that there are those with the knowhow and spare time to manipulate photographs via this new fangled software called “Photoshop”. Some even know how to (gasp!) post them online! The Horror!

Man, if O’Rarely right is this upset about a rather bland photo posted by an anonymous diarist, I can only imagine the hategasmic fits my own photoshoppery would send him into.

(X-posted at The Xsociate Files)

Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, write an upbeat assessment of the situation in Iraq in today’s New York Times…with an even more optimistic headline, “A War We Just Might Win”. After eight days in the war torn country, they conclude that progress is being made, troop morale is high, and sectarian groups are beginning to cooperate in order to bring security.

At the same time, the Iraqi parliament announced today that it would begin a lengthy vacation despite the lack of progress on a number of critical issues that have remained stalled in the struggling government. The vacation is scheduled to end on September 4th…just days prior to the much anticipated U.S. assessment intended to evaluate the effectiveness of the recent troop surge.

Perhaps O’Hanlon and Pollack failed to get the memo announcing the extended vacation…the same memo that suggests that even if the troop surge is able to bring improved security, the Iraqi government may well be incapable of stepping in and governing. Oh, and keep in mind that this is the same government that has refused to take control of numerous reconstruction projects that have been completed because they simply lack the ability and the expertise to do so.

From The New York Times:

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

Another surprise was how well the coalition’s new Embedded Provincial Reconstruction Teams are working. Wherever we found a fully staffed team, we also found local Iraqi leaders and businessmen cooperating with it to revive the local economy and build new political structures. Although much more needs to be done to create jobs, a new emphasis on microloans and small-scale projects was having some success where the previous aid programs often built white elephants.

Well that settles it…I need to call my representatives in Washington and urge them to support the President in his determination to stay in Iraq as long as he deems necessary. Look, I have no doubt the added troops have made some marked improvements but we’ve been here before and the problem remains the same…there are few reasons to believe that the Iraqi’s are going to be able to govern once we reduce our presence.

Well over four years into the conflict and the Iraqi security forces appear no more able to maintain the security of Iraq than they were each prior time the Bush administration projected that they would be. Perhaps O’Hanlon and Pollack received a personal assurance from the President?

From Reuters:

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq’s parliament went into summer recess for a month on Monday despite failing to enact a series of laws that Washington sees as crucial to stabilizing the country and reconciling warring Iraqis.

“We do not have anything to discuss in the parliament, no laws or constitutional amendments, nothing from the government. Differences between the political factions have delayed the laws,” Kurdish lawmaker Mahmoud Othman told Reuters.

“Bush cannot realistically go to Congress and say he has to keep U.S. troops there because the Iraqi government is doing a good job — because the government is largely absent. It places him in a very difficult predicament,” said Gareth Stansfield, an analyst at leading British think-tank Chatham House.

Washington has pressed the Iraqi government to speed up passage of laws that include measures to distribute Iraq’s oil reserves and ease restrictions on former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath party serving in the civil service.

It views such laws as key to reconciling disaffected members of Iraq’s Sunni Arab community, once politically dominant under Saddam and now locked in a vicious sectarian conflict with majority Shi’ites that has killed tens of thousands.

Is Reuters talking about the same country? Maybe I’m dense, but what would make the impartial observer conclude that success is just over the horizon? It looks like Reuters stopped their analysis one ridge short of the magnificent Mesopotamian miracle…you know…that place behind the curtain where the wizard walked O’Hanlon and Pollack through the tangible transformation that is taking place.

Frankly, if victory is proving that 160,000 American troops can have an impact on a nation in a virtual civil war…well…maybe we’re ready for a ticker tape parade. On the other hand, isn’t it possible that victory would best be equated with a certainty that, upon the withdrawal of U.S. troops, Iraq can thrive as a functional nation?

Even the rose colored glasses of O’Hanlon and Pollack only warrant the following conclusion.

In the end, the situation in Iraq remains grave. In particular, we still face huge hurdles on the political front. Iraqi politicians of all stripes continue to dawdle and maneuver for position against one another when major steps towards reconciliation — or at least accommodation — are needed. This cannot continue indefinitely. Otherwise, once we begin to downsize, important communities may not feel committed to the status quo, and Iraqi security forces may splinter along ethnic and religious lines.

How much longer should American troops keep fighting and dying to build a new Iraq while Iraqi leaders fail to do their part? And how much longer can we wear down our forces in this mission? These haunting questions underscore the reality that the surge cannot go on forever. But there is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.

Call me a cynic but the ongoing admonitions to “give it six more months”…the many assurances that “we’re beginning to see progress”…and the optimistic assertions that “the Iraqi people are happily embracing democracy” are all akin to lathering lipstick on a pig…you know, those animals that don’t have lips…those cuddly creatures that no one’s inclined to kiss even if they did.

I have empathy for the Iraqi people and I wish them well…but I’m struggling to understand how many U.S. soldiers should give their lives so that the Bush administration can take another shot at convincing the American public that our government is bringing home the bacon…as opposed to feeding us another batch of baloney.

Cross-posted at Thought Theater

They say it’s not nice to enjoy the misfortune of others…and while I generally support that notion…when it comes to politics, I’m willing to make some exceptions. I have to confess that a New York Times article discussing the predicament facing the Republican Party in the 2008 presidential election with regards to the issue of abortion makes me happy.

That is not to say that the issue of abortion should make anyone happy; rather it is to say that I’m pleased that GOP voters are having to confront the issue with a level of practicality that has been absent from their equation for many years. I find the potential for lessening the influence of absolutism a welcome change.

Six months before the Iowa caucuses, abortion opponents are trying to adjust to a strikingly different political landscape. For the first time in a generation, they face in Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, a front-runner for the Republican nomination who supports abortion rights.

Most of the Republican candidates are scrambling to demonstrate both their anti-abortion credentials and their ability to win. Phyllis Schlafly, the conservative stalwart, said she sensed “concerns” at the grass roots about all the candidates at the front of the pack.

What many abortion opponents say they crave these days is certainty. Analysts say the Supreme Court could now be just a vote or two away from a major rollback of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision declaring a constitutional right to abortion. But the next president will be crucial.

Hadley Arkes, a professor at Amherst College and a leading social conservative legal thinker, said he had recently gotten “feelers” from some in the Giuliani camp. But Mr. Arkes, an opponent of abortion, said he could not fathom a way the party could nominate Mr. Giuliani and remain the same “pro-life” party it has been for 25 years.

“You change the constituency of the party,” Mr. Arkes said — either by showing that anti-abortion voters are not necessary to win, or by showing that anti-abortion voters are willing to subsume their cause to other issues.

Even so, Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, said recent poll analysis suggested that some anti-abortion voters may be willing to consider that possibility.

For far too long the issue of abortion has been characterized as an all or nothing construct…one that ignores the realities of the human condition and that places an unwarranted emphasis on one narrow aspect of morality…which often disregards numerous other concerns deserving of consideration and attention.

I understand the argument made by those opposed to virtually all abortions and I realize that their beliefs are not apt to allow for some degree of flexibility. Notwithstanding, those beliefs do not comport with reality and if the 2008 election can force a meaningful dialogue that leads to the entertainment of some reconsideration, then I’m all for it.

Those opposed to abortion are frequently opposed to contraception, against comprehensive sex education, and in favor of abstinence pledges as a means to combat unwanted pregnancies…and the immorality they attach to sexuality. Portraying sex as wrong and immoral, in my opinion, contributes to the problem. Instead of giving young people a healthy perspective on sexuality, it promotes deceit and denial…both of which establish sex as a forbidden pleasure rather than as an expression of love.

If the 2008 election can serve as an impetus to change this antiquated construct and signal the beginning of the end to this virtual demonization of sex, perhaps we will have turned the corner on thirty years of the politics of regression and repression. I’m all for finding ways to reduce the number of abortions…but not by adopting the mentality of moral measurement and criminal consequence that has permeated the Republican Party.

If the current GOP candidates fall short of the ingrained standard, perhaps it will force fundamentalists to consider the views of those they routinely discount as inadequate and intolerable. Unfortunately, I’m afraid many Christian conservatives are going to have to be led to this newly emerging reality kicking and screaming.

In the meantime, pardon me for taking pleasure in the contortions that will inevitably illuminate the intransigence that has dominated the issue. My sarcastic side wants to watch the GOP candidates prostitute themselves to a constituency that seems to abhor all things remotely sexual. Indeed, before it’s over, it should make for some rather strange bedfellows. Rather tawdry, don’t you think?

Cross-posted at Thought Theater

Sometimes comparison proves to be the best means to understand the intentions of those who have been elected to public office…especially since the spoken word is often the tool by which politicians manipulate voters. When it comes to understanding President Bush, comparison is necessary…and the results offer a string of contradictions that defy the rhetoric of compassionate conservatism.

In a New York Times article, Paul Krugman provides readers a look into the position of the President with regard to the expansion of programs to cover uninsured children…programs that the President supported in the past…but programs that the President is opposed to expanding despite their success.

When a child is enrolled in the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (Schip), the positive results can be dramatic. For example, after asthmatic children are enrolled in Schip, the frequency of their attacks declines on average by 60 percent, and their likelihood of being hospitalized for the condition declines more than 70 percent.

Regular care, in other words, makes a big difference. That’s why Congressional Democrats, with support from many Republicans, are trying to expand Schip, which already provides essential medical care to millions of children, to cover millions of additional children who would otherwise lack health insurance.

But President Bush says that access to care is no problem — “After all, you just go to an emergency room” — and, with the support of the Republican Congressional leadership, he’s declared that he’ll veto any Schip expansion on “philosophical” grounds.

The House plan, which would cover more children, is more expensive, but it offsets Schip costs by reducing subsidies to Medicare Advantage — a privatization scheme that pays insurance companies to provide coverage, and costs taxpayers 12 percent more per beneficiary than traditional Medicare.

Strange to say, however, the administration, although determined to prevent any expansion of children’s health care, is also dead set against any cut in Medicare Advantage payments.

Well, here’s what Mr. Bush said after explaining that emergency rooms provide all the health care you need: “They’re going to increase the number of folks eligible through Schip; some want to lower the age for Medicare. And then all of a sudden, you begin to see a — I wouldn’t call it a plot, just a strategy — to get more people to be a part of a federalization of health care.”

Looking at this particular situation offers ample opportunities for relevant and informative comparisons. First, let me suggest that the President’s position is neither conservative nor compassionate. There has been little disagreement that George Bush’s Medicare prescription drug program was the largest expansion of entitlements in recent memory and most analysts believe it will cost far more than the original estimates.

On its surface, one might argue that adding a prescription drug benefit was an act of compassion…and to a degree that conclusion has some merit. However, this is where comparison becomes an enlightening tool.

It is well known that the President is in favor of privatizing entitlement programs and one could argue that the prescription drug benefit was a logical step in that direction and likely the only means by which he could initiate such a plan…given that is has the appearance of compassion. One can look at the high costs of the program as the essential seed money for turning the corner towards privatization.

As we know, the program has been viewed to have achieved mixed results but there is no doubt that it provided insurance companies with a subsidized entrée into the living rooms of millions of Americans. Let me attempt to explain. The prescription drug benefit allows those on Medicare to purchase the benefit from an array of private providers…a move that begins to put in place a ready made structure for further privatization.

Such a plan achieves two important goals for a President in favor of privatization. One, it begins to give insurance companies an expanding role in providing care for the millions of seniors on Medicare…a move that is good for large corporations in the business of health care…including drug manufacturers. Two, it is an important incremental step in taking the government out of the health care business and entitlement programs.

Coming back to the Schip program, one can begin to use comparisons to uncover actual motivations. The number of uninsured Americans is well documented as a politically charged issue. In approving a plan to cover a number of uninsured children, the President achieved points for compassion just as he did with the prescription drug benefit. These programs also helped to hold off calls for universal government health care…a direction which this President opposes.

When one looks at the Bush administration position on the relative costs for the Schip plan and Medicare Advantage, we see that compassion and conservatism are secondary to the ideology of privatization. Granted, one could argue that the ultimate goals of the measures endorsed by the President have conservatism at their core…meaning less government and more market determined programs and costs.

In that regard, perhaps these spending measures…which are seemingly incongruent with conservatism…and which have raised the ire of traditional conservatives…have been shrewd considerations and calculations on the part of the President intended to push the country towards more privatization.

Now, why should Mr. Bush fear that insuring uninsured children would lead to a further “federalization” of health care, even though nothing like that is actually in either the Senate plan or the House plan? It’s not because he thinks the plans wouldn’t work. It’s because he’s afraid that they would. That is, he fears that voters, having seen how the government can help children, would ask why it can’t do the same for adults.

And there you have the core of Mr. Bush’s philosophy. He wants the public to believe that government is always the problem, never the solution. But it’s hard to convince people that government is always bad when they see it doing good things. So his philosophy says that the government must be prevented from solving problems, even if it can. In fact, the more good a proposed government program would do, the more fiercely it must be opposed.

This sounds like a caricature, but it isn’t. The truth is that this good-is-bad philosophy has always been at the core of Republican opposition to health care reform. Thus back in 1994, William Kristol warned against passage of the Clinton health care plan “in any form,” because “its success would signal the rebirth of centralized welfare-state policy at the very moment that such policy is being perceived as a failure in other areas.”

But it has taken the fight over children’s health insurance to bring the perversity of this philosophy fully into view.

Krugman’s analysis is valid but perhaps it stops short of identifying the ultimate misconceptions that underlie such a philosophy. George Bush is no doubt a product of privilege and in that reality his ability to comprehend the struggles of those at the opposite end of the spectrum is undoubtedly insufficient.

There is an inherent risk for those who “have” to infer that those who “have not”…deserve not…that what they lack results from their lack of effort and that if they are coddled by the government, they will never demonstrate the necessary initiative to alter their situation absent the assistance of the government.

Clearly, there have been situations that have given such arguments credibility…particularly the welfare reform seen in the 1990’s (though one could argue that the strong economy played a larger role in that success than the simple act of refusing to toss people a government subsidized lifeline).

Regardless, refusing to provide care to needy children seems to be punishing the innocent amongst us for all of the wrong reasons. Ideology aside, children lack the ability or the autonomy to effect their status. Allowing them to be political pawns seems wrong by whatever comparative means one may choose to employ.

Sadly, I view this situation as one of many examples whereby George Bush has demonstrated his predisposition to implement and impose his absolute ideological views despite the detrimental impact they may inflict upon those who do not serve to advance his narrow objectives.

Cross-posted at Thought Theater

The US Armed forces, in the wake of the Bush debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, have been having problems for a long time in recruiting. They’ve extended tours, shrunk the time soldiers get to serve back in the State before being shipped back into Iraq. Heck, they’ve upped the age limits and lowered the education requirements. None of that’s working, so now they’re talking cold hard cash. $20K for you, if you sign up now, hit basic training in a month, and then get shipped off, pretty much ASAP. From WLWT in Cincinnatti:

The Army is now offering a $20,000 “QS” – or “Quick Shipper” — bonus to new and prior service recruits joining, selecting any job and shipping out for training within 30 days.

“The Q.S. letters means “quick shipper,” said Columbus Recruiting Battalion spokesperson Tom Foley in a news release. “And $20,000 means, well, it means a lot of seed money for new soldiers answering the Army’s call to duty. The Army is growing in size and we simply need more recruits for training, now.”

The $20,000 bonus is in addition to previous offers already in place.

My guess is that there won’t be a flood of Young Republicans, even in response to that offer of cold, hard cash. Well, they support the war, but they just might not be such money-grubbers that $20K will conquer their cowardice. Not all the columns in the world have swayed these Young Republicans to join, so I’m thinking $20K won’t help.

Certainly the New York Times gives us the possibility that Mr. Gonzales did not lie. Instead of talking about the eavesdropping on calls by Americans, he was in there with Ashcroft arguing for a different attack on our civil liberties, unfettered data mining. How could we not have noticed this? The problem here, once again, is Bush Administration incompetence. There are so many illegal attacks on our civil liberties that Mr. Gonzales is confused. they just haven’t organized those attacks on civil liberties. What we need here is some simple organizational structure so that Mr. Gonzales, and everyone he speaks to, knows to which illegal eavesdropping program or attack on our civil liberties he is referring.

I suppose we might just letter the different illegal eavesdropping programs. Attack on Civil Liberties A, Attack on Civil Liberties B, Attack on Civil Liberties C. But that may not be enough for Mr. Gonzales, who has a a real problem with remembering, if we recall his testimony in the US Attorney scandal, and this guy with a real hard time remembering is being faced with more attacks on civil liberties every single day, isn’t he? Heck, those attacks are both small and large, like this little one, where a small town government is following the example of the Bush Administration. I’m thinking we just might follow the example of the Disney company.

I’ve been in the vast, sprawling parking lots at Disney World, and They don’t use letters or numbers to help you remember what section of the acres and acres of parking lot you’ve parked your car. They use Disney characters. You may have parked in the Donald Duck section, or the Poomba section of the lot. And their system seems to work. If the parents don’t remember where the car is, the kids certainly will remember that they barked in Belle’s section of the lot. I’m suggesting the Bush Administration use a similar system to help Mr. Gonzales identify the particular attack on civil liberties he’s talking about.

So, what symbols to use? Since the vast majority of these attacks on cicvil liberties either are or should be considered crimes, I suggest they be labelled with the names of Republicans who have committed crimes. The breaking of the FISA laws? Let’s label that one after Jack Abramoff. So in the future, when Mr. Gonzales wishes to clear up his confusing statements for Senator Leahy, he can refer to the braking of the FISA laws as the Abramoff program. And when he wants to refer to illegal data mining, he can refer to it as the Duke Cunningham program. When he wants to refer to the FBI abuse of illegal wiretaps and surveillance, he can call it the Bob Ney program.

Simple, eh? There’s certainly no end to the number of attacks on our civil liberties by the Bush Administration, and so far I’m not seeing a limit to the number of Republican crooks, but if you run out of GOP crooks, maybe you could add in an historical list of GOP perverts to make up the difference. I just don’t know why nobody has thougt of this before. Maybe the Bushies are just too incompetent to borrow a clue from the Disney folks.

This morning, The Washington Post takes a look back and sees that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has been refining his selective amnesia technique for some time now. I particularly loved this part floating a trail balloon for why he’s done such a piss poor job of defending his tenure as head of the Department of Justice.

Bill Minutaglio, a University of Texas journalism professor and author of biographies of Gonzales and Bush, said Gonzales kept an “extremely, extremely low profile” in the three jobs Bush gave him in the Texas government — general counsel, secretary of state and judge on the Supreme Court — and had little practice before he came to Washington at responding publicly to stiff scrutiny. “The grilling he’s enduring right now is beyond anything he had ever experienced in his life. He was ill prepared for it,” Minutaglio said.

Poor Gonzo. I guess no one could have anticipated that being put in charge of one of the most important governmental departments in the US would mean he might have to face tough scrutiny of his job performance. Chalk this up to another thing the Bushies thought would be a cakewalk.

(X-posted at The Xsociate Files)