Blogger is misbehaving

I couldn't get a post to publish yesterday, and today blogger is being very contrary. So I'm going to put a few things together in one post and hope for the best and then go enjoy the rest of the beautiful day.

DeLay's apology timed to discontent

He's apparently made a lame apology for his remark about judges. Perhaps, unlike Emperor Snippy, DeLay reads the papers.

Former Rep. Pete McCloskey, whose eight terms in Congress ended before DeLay arrived in 1984, said Friday that he will meet in Houston this month with perennial DeLay opponent Michael Fjetland and "any Republican who is willing to challenge Mr. DeLay."

[...]

"The stench coming out of the DeLay operation" does not represent the GOP that he served with in Congress, McCloskey said.

He called his effort the "revolt of the elders."

McCloskey and nine other Republicans who are former House members complained in a letter delivered Friday to House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., that recent changes in House ethics rules were an obvious move to protect DeLay.
  Houston Chronicle article

And I'm sure Mr. Hastert will be touched. Butthead, in the meantime, thinks DeLay is the tops.

President Bush called DeLay a very effective leader this week and applauded his offer to answer questions about his conduct to the ethics committee.
  Houston Chronicle article

I think his answer was: "It's just the Democracts' attacking me."

Republican Christopher Shays, from Connecticut, had said he did not believe DeLay would survive as majority leader.

Now another Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives, Thomas Tancredo, of Colorado, said on Friday that DeLay may need to step aside for the good of the party -- at least until the ethical questions are resolved.

"I believe that all of the charges against Tom DeLay I have seen to date lack merit. However if the majority leader were to temporarily step aside so that these trumped up charges can be dealt with in a less hostile environment, as they have proved to be an unnecessary distraction, it may be a productive move," he said.
  Earth Times article

That's a pretty slick way to oppose him without opposing him.

Meanwhile, 10 former Republican lawmakers wanted a reversal of the new House ethics rules that they alleged were changed to protect DeLay from further investigation.

Maybe these assholes have been given enough rope to hang themselves.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean disclosed that his party would make use of the Terri Schiavo case against Republicans in the 2006 and 2008 elections. Dean, who has called congressional intervention in the Schiavo case, had accused DeLay for his leading role in the matter.

Said Dean: "We're going to have an ad with a picture of Tom DeLay saying, 'Do you want this guy to decide whether you die or not? Or is that going to be up to your loved ones?' "

Bad idea, Dean. Stupid move. I suggest you let that alone.

From worse to .....?

A group of masked, armed men believed to be Sunni extremists reportedly is threatening to kill a group of Shiite Muslim hostages in a central Iraqi town unless Shiite residents leave their homes, according to a police officer and Shiite Muslim officials.

Many details of the apparently still-evolving situation in Mada'in, a town about 30 southeast of Baghdad, remain unclear, including the number of alleged hostages, how and when they were seized, and how Iraqi police and armed forces are responding.

[...]

Mada'in has a mixed population of both Sunni and Shiite Muslim families. But there, as elsewhere in Iraq, tensions between the two groups have worsened as the predominantly Sunni insurgency that is battling U.S. and Iraqi military forces has also targeted Shiite civilians.
  WaPo article

A rescue effort to free about 150 Shiite Iraqi hostages, including women and children, has begun, an Arab TV station is reporting.

Al-Arabiya was citing an Iraqi security official as its source. The station had no further details.
  CTV article

I can't recall now who I was reading making the case why there would not be a civil war in Iraq.

BushCo winning the "War on Terror"

WASHINGTON - The State Department decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after the government's top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered.
  Daily Kos post

More about Bolton - our next ambassador to the UN

"Im with the Bush-Cheney team, and I'm here to stop the count."

Those were the words John Bolton yelled as he burst into a Tallahassee library on Saturday, Dec. 9, 2000, where local election workers were recounting ballots cast in Florida's disputed presidential race between George W. Bush and Al Gore.

Bolton was one of the pack of lawyers for the Republican presidential ticket who repeatedly sought to shut down recounts of the ballots from Florida counties before those counts revealed that Gore had actually won the state's electoral votes and the presidency.

  The Nation article

Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska signaled Friday that his support for the nomination of John R. Bolton as U.N. ambassador was wavering after new reports that Bolton ordered an intelligence analyst removed from his job.

The analyst, a State Department employee who now works on Hagel's Senate staff, is the third intelligence analyst reported to have been threatened or intimidated by Bolton, who has served since 2001 as undersecretary of State for arms control and international security.

"Sen. Hagel is likely to be supportive [of Bolton] but he needs to be assured there are not additional serious areas of concern," Hagel spokesman Mike Buttry said, adding that Hagel was troubled by the new information.
  LA Times article

Iraq's missing weapons are surfacing

Remember when we charged into Baghdad and set up guards at the oil ministry, leaving everything else to be plundered, including munitions sites?

Equipment plundered from dozens of sites in Saddam Hussein's vast complex for manufacturing weapons is beginning to surface in open markets in Iraq's major cities and at border crossings.

[...]

For more than a year, large quantities of scrap metal from some of the sites have routinely been filling the scrap yards of Iraq and neighboring countries like Jordan. But with this new emergence of a huge panoply of intact factory, machine and vehicle parts, it appears that some looters may have held back the troves they stole two years ago, waiting for prices to rise.

Interviews with people who identified themselves as arms dealers or members of the resistance in Baghdad, Falluja and other Iraqi cities indicate that a parallel black market operates in the explosives looted from some of the same sites. In fact, sketchy descriptions by members of the Iraqi resistance suggest that the arms market is also a highly developed enterprise with brokers, buyers and looters who have stockpiled their products, including artillery shells, mortar rounds and Kalashnikov rifles.
  NY Times article