Goota love the way this man plays defense: “‘I think it’s a load of crap,’ said the Spurs’ Duncan. ‘I understand what they’re trying to do with the hats and do-rags and jerseys and stuff. That’s fine. But I don’t understand why they would take it to this level — I think it’s basically retarded.”

Just what the blogging world needs, another post about posts about Fitzgerald, Libby, and Plame. They are so hard to come by…

But seriously, I read so many this weekend. As I plowed along through my favorites — TPM, Political Animal, Whiskey Bar, War and Piece, Just World News, Kos… — I noted my favorite points. And in the end I looked and saw that almost all that I recorded were by Digby and Tristero on Hullabaloo. Coincidence? I think not. They just put the finest point on what has happened. No offense to the others who are all over the story, and the back-story of the incredible corrupt putresence of Dick Cheney’s administration. They’re all doing good work. But Hullabaloo digests all the layers of the story and puts it in plain, strong English. If you want to read at length from one place. Skip the rest of this and just read Digby and Tristero.

Or let me indulge you with my favorite passages:

Headline of the Year:

The Big Picture:

If the Republican leadership of congress weren’t spineless Bush toadies and insane religious fanatics they would do their job and investigate this honestly for the good of the country. But they won’t. They are nothing more than braindead fatcats gorging at the pork barrel with a fistfull of C-notes in one hand and a bible in the other.

The Republicans will do anything to advance their agenda. They are fundamentally undemocratic — they do not believe that the people have a right to vote, to see their elected politicians allowed to serve a full term, to know the reasons for their government’s policies or even why they are going to war. They believe that they can do anything. That’s what this case is about.

Rove Must Resign, Too

Karl, stop wasting my taxes and go back to whatever rock you crawled out from under. Oh, and one more thing. Fuck you, traitor.

On or about…:

Can there be any doubt that the Bush administration bet the farm on the idea that the press would keep their mouths shut? And can we all see that they were very close to being right? If Fitzgerald hadn’t been willing to take it to the mat, they would have gotten off scott free.

The Republican (Washington) estabishment very wisely have figured out that they can use the press to disseminate anything they choose and the press will either eagerly report it or ‘decline’ to follow up. They consider the press a cog in their noise machine and the press is willing to be a cog as long as they are given access.

Turdblossom In The Punchbowl

Karl Rove is spinning like Tanya Harding at the nationals right now, telling everyone who will listen that he wasn’t part of any conspiracy to leak Plame’s identity to the press, that he has a major case of CRS disease (can’t remember shit.) But it just doesn’t hold water.

Do I want to see Rove indicted? Is the pope Catholic? Do bears shit in the woods? But would it be enough for me to have Libby locked up and skinned by the media? As long as his story told, sure. I’ll take it.

But you can bet I will be celebrating even more if Rove goes down in flames.

Did you hear that the White House (someone working for Harriet Miers no less!) has demanded that The Onion stop using the presidential seal? Who’s bright idea was that? Well, the Onion is having fun with it. (Was there any doubt? Earth to Bush: don’t mess with educated satirists.) In fact, they’re getting all rude on the royal family: “I Just Wish I Could Stop Shitting Blood”. The sacred seal of the POTUS is still displayed proudly on their parody Weekly Radio Address. This week is a sorta funny one about Halloween. Put that in your litigating pipe and smoke it, idiots!

OK, the Halloween joke wasn’t that funny, but this audio clip is: Catholic Nutritionists Warn Of Transubstantiating Fats. “holy lipids”, “Bile of Christ”, love it…

PhysicsWeb, a site that features news of physics research, has this cool bit of news: Particles come to life:

What does a quark, a photon or a gluon look like? No one knows for sure but Jan-Henrik Andersen, an artist at the University of Michigan in the US, has created a series of visual images of elementary particles based on conversation with physicists at Michigan.

Totally weird, but cool.

The Freeway Blogger was one of my heros during the 2004 election. Turns out she moved to Bernal a while back and is now active in my hood. And she’s opened up a freeway blogging yahoo group! Right on.

Kevin Drumm gets this just about right: Wall-Mart and Healthcare:

In any system that doesn’t cover the entire population of a country, each individual insurer has an incentive to cherry pick only the healthiest workers and leave the sick ones to someone else. This problem is rarely stated as baldly as it is in the Wal-Mart memo, but it’s always there. Our entire system is built around an incentive to make sure that it’s always someone else who’s responsible when someone gets sick.

SFUSD is faced with the threat of a strike that is laregely about healthcare costs. It just drives the truth of this home to me. We so need universal health insurance. How long ’til the entrenched health care status quo can be routed and real reform happens?

Kevin Drum, who has been advocating for establishing a timetable for withdrawal from Iray, offers this repot of Kerry’s plan for getting out: Benchmarks for withdrawal:

….John Kerry is calling for a withdrawal plan from Iraq based on concrete benchmarks:

The insurgency will not be defeated unless our troop levels are drawn down,’ Kerry, D-Mass., said in a speech at Georgetown University.

To undermine the insurgency,’ he said, ‘we must instead simultaneously pursue both a political settlement and the withdrawal of American combat forces linked to specific, responsible benchmarks. At the first benchmark, the completion of December elections, we can start the process by reducing our forces by 20,000 troops over the course of the holidays.’

…blogging about this subject has persuaded me that a benchmark-based plan retains most of the advantages of a timetable approach (reduces support for the insurgency, forces the Iraqi government to take security seriously, relieves strain on the American military) while avoiding some of the drawbacks (primarily that it gives the insurgents a withdrawal date to hold out for).

Why oh why isn’t this man in the White House now?

Paul Begala dishes up one of the most enjoyable blog reads in recent memory over at TPM Cafe. While we all wait for Fitzgerald to drop his bomb, check out this Clinton vet’s take on What It’s Like:

The pressure of a federal criminal investigation - especially one in the media spotlight - is bone-crushing… Already we hear rumors of President Bush exploding at his aides, at the President blaming Vice President Cheney, Karl Rove, and anyone else in sight for his woes.

This I know first hand: when The Boss explodes like that, there are two kinds of aides — those who fight and those who flee. When he came to Washington, Mr. Bush surrounded himself with tough-minded people who seemed not to be afraid to stand up to him. But now his team is loaded with weak-kneed toadies, and Mr. Bush is home alone. Karl Rove, of course, is fending off a potential indictment. His prodigious brain has not entertained another thought in months…

Mr. Bush would do well to augment his current staff, a C-Team if ever there was one, with some stronger characters. But to read the Bush-Miers correspondence is to gain a disturbing insight into Mr. Bush’s personality: he likes having his ass kissed. Ms. Miers’ cards and letters to the then-Governor of Texas belong in the Brown-Nosers Hall of Fame. You can be sure the younger and less experienced Bush White House aides are even more obsequious. The last thing this President wants is the first thing he needs: someone to slap his spoiled, pampered, trust-funded, plutocratic, never-worked-a-day-in-his-life cheek and make him face the reality of his foul-ups.

Yeah, I know, this is the same Begala that brought us the debased WWF-style politics of Crossfire — and it was just as much Begala’s baby as Carlson’s. So shrill bombast is his stock and trade. But you gotta love reading “slap his spoiled, pampered, trust-funded, plutocratic, never-worked-a-day-in-his-life cheek”.

So many leaks: “The limbs keep moving even after the head is severed, but not with the same coordination.”

Have I railed enough about how blogs chasing the meme-of-the-moment? How they all flock to whatever story is hot right now? I hate it.

So let’s take a second and check up on Captain Ian Fishback. A few weeks ago his story broke and helped compel Congress to pass legislation banning Bush’s torture insanity. Well, time passes, blogs move on, and the law is in jeopardy and Captain Fishback apparently remains incarcerated in an Army brig.

Andrew Sullivan has the most recent update on Fishback and the risks to the anti-torture legislation:

I’m still forwarding emails of support to Ian Fishback, who tried for months and months to get clear guidance from his superiors about treatment of military detainees, and whose letter to Senator McCain helped shift momentum to pass an amendment to codify the existing ban on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of any prisoners. President Bush and especially vice-president Cheney are determined to prevent the amendment from becoming law. Senator McCain is hanging tough. If you want to send a message of support to Fishback, you still can: supportfishback@aol.com.

The political blogs are on fire with the story, The Plame Game. Rather than link hither and thither, I’ll point you to Digby. First with the chance that Cheney is caught lying:

Normally, I would be outraged at the thought that someone not under oath could be indicted for lying. I thought Martha’s case was a total sham because the underlying crime was insignificant and commonplace. I’m not big on ’send a message’ prosecutions. But I’m willing to make exceptions when it comes to a group of criminal thugs who are bamboozling the press and stealing elections to gain power so they can start wars for no reason and bankrupt the country. I just don’t know what else can stop these people.

I’m fine with it too. But then he goes and turns it into bad news with this: And now for something completely different.

Atrios reports that the rumor that there are rumors that Cheney might resign are true. Got that?

Well let’s just say Cheney does resign (be still my beating heart!). Who do you think Bush would choose to replace him?

Now unfortunately, the link Atrios chose mentions my first choice, Condoleeza Rice. So for those of us who say Condi as the new Veep, I don’t want you to be left out of all the fun and games. Here’s a question for youse (as we used to say back in Jersey):

If Condi becomes the Veep, how many hours/weeks/months/hours will it take for Bush to resign, Condi to become president, and all the Democratic hopes for a weak opponent in 2008 to be dashed?

Condi ‘08? A small price to pay for cleaning out Cheney’s Augean Stables and ridding the union of the dangerous idiot Shrub. Oh how I hope this turns out to be true!!!

Another New Scientist story puts some more mortar on the climate change edifice, Antarctic glaciers calving faster into the ocean:

The edges of the Antarctic ice sheets are slipping into the ocean at an unprecedented rate, raising fears of a global surge in sea levels, glaciologists warned on Monday.

The findings confound predictions made just four years ago, by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that Antarctica would not contribute significantly to sea level rise in the 21st century.

Something tells me that we don’t really understand the sea level equation well enough yet. Another recent story talked about the Amazon basin sinking about three inches under the load of a rainy season drainage — which makes me wonder if the continental crust isn’t somehow more adaptive — maybe even buoyantt — than we think. Maybe all the ice melting into the ocean will just cause some tectonic compensation?

Or maybe it’s a bad time to invest in low-lying coastal land…