American Newsreel

Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, the corrupt bribe-taker who quit rather than face the music, started a blog today.

But it shut down a few hours later so they could clean off all the comments from people who told DeLay just what they thought of him.

The blog is back up but comments are now moderated but you can find them on another site.

And one other thing. DeLay told Mike Barnicle on MSNBC’s Hardball that he doesn’t write his own blog.

“I’m not a writer,” he said. “I have ideas and others write them for me.”

Hmmmmm.

Mary Cheney, the openly gay daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney, is pregnant.

President George W. Bush’s talk of energy independence sure sounds good as a TV sound bite but, as they say, reality bites.

From the Chicago Tribune:

If America is addicted to oil, as President Bush said Tuesday night in his State of the Union speech, the treatment plan he sketched out is likely to be long and costly.

And even if the country achieves the goals Bush set in his speech, the United States would remain heavily dependent on oil imports from volatile regions for years to come.

Bush proposed making ethanol, a corn-based fuel that currently is more expensive and less efficient than gasoline, competitive with gas within six years.

“Six years is really ambitious,” said Mark Edelman, an economist at Iowa State University. “That’s really going to take some ramping up of research and funding.”

Edelman said Bush’s proposed $59 million increase in research funding to $150 million in 2007 is significant but that many of the most promising ethanol technologies “at this point are pretty much in the beginning stages of research,” Edelman said.

If that goal is met, and other breakthroughs are achieved, the United States would cut its reliance on oil from the Mideast by 75 percent by 2025, Bush said in his speech.

That’s a big cut, but not nearly as large as it sounds. The United States gets only 20 percent of its oil from the Middle East, according to the Department of Energy. Far more oil comes from Africa and Venezuela, where governments also are either unstable or unfriendly to the United States.

But while journalists were unimpressed, Americans were downright angry:

Americans reacted with skepticism and anger at President Bush’s fifth State of the Union address Tuesday night, reflecting a national mood that reflects serious reservations about the controversial war in Iraq, revelations about the administration’s secret domestic spying program, and missteps following Hurricane Katrina.

At an Uptown neighborhood bar in New Orleans, both Republicans and Democrats paused to watch with at least one common hope: Rebuilding the Gulf Coast will be a top issue for the federal government.

But neither Tom Short, 75, a Republican and a Korean War veteran, nor attorney Todd Hebert, 38, a Democrat, found much to cheer about in Bush’s address.

After Bush mentioned the Gulf Coast in one or two sentences deep into his speech, Short exclaimed, “Did I miss something? I think that’s a crying shame.”

Editorializes the San Jose Mercury News on Alito’s confirmation:

To no one’s surprise, the Senate has confirmed Samuel Alito Jr. to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the U.S. Supreme Court. He was sworn in shortly after the partisan 58-42 vote.

A last-ditch attempt by the liberal wing of the Democratic Party to filibuster Alito’s nomination in the Senate failed miserably, as it should have. There was no overriding reason to use a filibuster against Alito.

Thanks to a group of seven Republican and seven Democratic senators, the Senate was persuaded not to use the filibuster against court nominees except in extreme cases. The agreement paved the way for a full Senate vote on several Appeals Court nominees and avoided a fight over the use of the filibuster itself.

Too often Democrats used the filibuster against lower court nominees. As a result, many Republican senators threatened to change the Senate rules to eliminate any filibusters on court nominees.

The agreement to use the filibuster sparingly was a sensible one. Unfortunately, 24 Democratic senators and one independent did not agree and voted to filibuster Alito. That was a misuse of the filibuster and a breech of the agreement to use the vote-delaying tactic only in extreme situations.

There is no doubt that Alito has been a conservative judge. But in his 15 years on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in Philadelphia, he demonstrated a firm knowledge of constitutional law and was hardly an extremist.

From The Voice of America:

The U.S. Senate has confirmed Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court in a largely party-line vote. He is poised to become the 110th justice on the high court, succeeding Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

Senator Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican, announced the vote as he presided over the Senate.

STEVENS: “On this vote, the ayes are 58, the nays are 42. The president’s nomination of Samuel A. Alito, Jr. of New Jersey to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States is confirmed.”

The vote fell generally along party lines, with all but one of the Senate’s majority Republicans voting in favor of Judge Samuel Alito. All but four of the Democrats voted against the nomination.

The lone Republican who opposed Alito was Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, who is facing a tough reelection battle this year in the Democrat-leaning state.

The confirmation vote culminated weeks of often bitter, partisan debate over the nomination at the start of the mid-term election year.

We always knew the Bush administration was power mad but a revelations in today’s Washington Post show how the White House tried to take over the National Guard in Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

According to the story by Spencer S. Hsu, Joby Warrick and Rob Stein:

Shortly after noon on Aug. 31, Louisiana Sen. David Vitter (R) delivered a message that stunned aides to Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D), who were frantically managing the catastrophe that began two days earlier when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast.

White House senior adviser Karl Rove wanted it conveyed that he understood that Blanco was requesting that President Bush federalize the evacuation of New Orleans. The governor should explore legal options to impose martial law “or as close as we can get,” Vitter quoted Rove as saying, according to handwritten notes by Terry Ryder, Blanco’s executive counsel.

Thus began what one aide called a “full-court press” to compel the first-term governor to yield control of her state National Guard — a legal, political and personal campaign by White House staff that failed three days later when Blanco rejected the administration’s terms, 10 minutes before Bush was to announce them in a Rose Garden news conference, the governor’s aides said.

“Why,” an emailer wanted to know, “do you hate Bush?”

Sorry pal. I don’t hate President Bush. I am, however, saddened by what he and his policies have done to the country I love.

Freedom, as we used to know it, is vanishing in America, disappearing rapidly because of the rights-infringing actions of the Bush administration and a Congress that has rubber-stamped far too many of his policies.

The USA Patriot Act is, in my opinion, the greatest single threat to the future of this country ever devised by the idiots we too often elect to office. Promoted as a weapon to fight terrorism, it has — instead — become a tool the government uses to spy on virtually any American, monitor their financial records in real time and track their travel habits. The Department of Justice issues 30,000 “national security letters” a year to obtain information about Americans from employers, banks, libraries, credit bureaus and other sources.

Meanwhile, the war on terror is not being fought on the real fronts. Osama bin Laden’s zealots have been able to regroup in Afghanistan while our military resources were diverted to Iraq. In Iraq, where Bush proclaimed “Mission Accomplished” two years ago, dozens upon dozens of Iraqi civilians and American militrary personnnel die daily.

Hate? No. Sadness? Yes. Disgust? Yes. Frustrated. You betcha.

I believe we are close to meltdown in this country. Our society is divided as never before, pitting Republicans against Democrats, liberals agains conservatives, right against left. At the center of all this is George W. Bush and his Iraq war, a war based on deception of the American people, Congress and our allies.

Is there a way out? That remains to be seen. In a strong society, there should always be a way out but I’m not so sure the America we have today is all that strong.

It remains to be seen and I’m not sure I want to see the outcome.

Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) came back from Vietnam with two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star but that service to his country didn’t stop a nitwit like Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-Ohio) from calling him a coward because he wants the troops brought home from George W. Bush’s dirty little war in Iraq.

Now Schmidt is under fire in her own district and the bimbo can’t understand why.

“I am amazed at what a national story this has become,” she said in a statement. “I have been attacked very personally, continuously since Friday evening.”

You have to wonder how dumbshits like this get elected.

Sometimes you almost have to feel sorry for George W. Bush. While trying to duck a reporter’s question in Beijing, the increasingly gun-shy President tried one of his quick exits from the stage, only to find the door locked.

Reuters reports:

At the end of a day of meetings with Chinese President Hu Jintao and other Chinese officials, Bush held a session with a small group of U.S. reporters and spoke at length about issues like religious freedom, Iraq and the Chinese currency.

The final reporter he called on critiqued Bush’s performance earlier in the day when he stood next to Hu in the Great Hall of the People on Tiananmen Square to deliver a statement.

“Respectfully, sir — you know we’re always respectful — in your statement this morning with President Hu, you seemed a little off your game, you seemed to hurry through your statement. There was a lack of enthusiasm. Was something bothering you?” he asked.

“Have you ever heard of jet lag?” Bush responded. “Well, good. That answers your question.”

The president then recited a list of things of that he viewed as positive developments from his Beijing meetings, including cooperation on North Korean nuclear disarmament and the ability to have “frank discussions” with his Chinese counterpart.

When the reporter asked for “a very quick follow-up,” Bush cut him off by thanking the press corps and telling the reporter “No you may not,” as he strode toward a set of double doors leading out of the room.

The only problem was that they were locked.

Poor Dubya. He can’t even run and hide without screwing things up.

Sounds like the anger and dissent that so divides America today is alive and well in the halls of Congress where a debate on whether or not to pull out of Iraq turned the House of Representatives into a free-for-all that looked more like Britian’s rowdy Parliament than the stately halls of power in Washington.

Some may decry this lack of civility.

I don’t. The only way we can effect change and start taking the steps necessary to do something about the madness that controls our country is by getting mad — really mad. Leave the civility to those who teach manners to debutantes. This is war — outright war — and you don’t win wars by being nice.