Read this to find out. Here’s a tidbit I didn’t know: many if not most are there on scant real evidence, as they were turned over to US forces by rival Afghanis with little or no documentation. Don’t like your neighbor? Tell the Yanks he works for Osama!

No, really. More here. Short version: he’s trying to bully Obama, and Obama is schooling him. Whatever he once was, he’s become just another tool of the Administration; clearly, he’s either forgotten who they are, or he no longer cares because he wants that office for himself.

By now, everyone who’s paying attention is aware of the NASA story wherein a 24-year-old political hack tried to get references to Intelligent Design inserted into discussions of the Big Bang, and further attempted to change all references to said Bang to “Big Bang Theory,” etc.

We’ll just point out that it came as no surprise to us to learn that said jackass is an Aggie.

Either that, or he’s a principle-free hack who cares nothing about his country and everything about his party staying in power.

We know this because of this story, which opens with:

WASHINGTON — CIA Director Porter Goss said Thursday that the disclosure of President Bush’s eavesdropping-without-warrants program and other once-secret projects had undermined U.S. intelligence-gathering abilities. “The damage has been very severe to our capabilities to carry out our mission,” Goss told the Senate Intelligence Committee. He said a federal grand jury should be empaneled to determine “who is leaking this information.”

Um, Porter? What makes you think AQ doesn’t suspect we’re listening in? Isn’t it pretty much a given than communications would be intercepted in wartime? Don’t they, as a matter of course, have to assume that we might be listening, especially given the very-prosecution-friendly character of the FISA courts illegally circumvented by this Administration? How, exactly, has disclosure of this program damaged our intelligence gathering capability? We see clearly how it’s damaging to your boss, to whom you are indebted politically, and to others involved in the clearly felonious affair, of course. Maybe that’s what you meant to say.

Alas, he continues:

Goss complained that leaks to the news media about the surveillance program and activities such as reported CIA secret prisons abroad had damaged his own agency’s work.

Emphasis ours. Sweet God in Heaven, this hack is whining about the fact that people now know the CIA maintains a gulag system.

But he’s still not done.

“I also believe that there has been an erosion of the culture of secrecy and we’re trying to reinstall that,” Goss said.

An erosion? This Administration is the most secrecy-addicted one in recent memory. They want everything locked up, and everybody in the dark, so that no one can tell what laws they’re breaking. They view oversight as a problem, and behave accordingly; that’s the whole point behind the domestic spying issue — there exists a court to oversee these sorts of surveillance operations, but Bush & Co. decided not to bother with it. The culture of secrecy is the problem, Porter. And you are part of that problem.

(Thanks to Triple-F for the tip!)

And in re: more serious matters than a blowjob, too.

In January, he testified before Congress and under oath that “it is not the policy or the agenda of this president to authorize actions that would be in contravention of our criminal statutes.” By that point, however, he had already approved the warrantless domestic spying plan in direct violation of US law. Q.E.D.

Russ Feingold’s letter prompted the normally lapdog Post to cover this. Let’s see if it goes anywhere. We do, however, wonder just how far these people will have to go before the media actually wakes up and realizes the degree of contempt the Administration has for the rule of law, checks and balances, and the principle on which this country was founded.

Via ThinkProgress.

From NYT via Captain Telescope:

WASHINGTON, Feb. 1 — The Bush administration is rebuffing requests from members of the Senate Judiciary Committee for its classified legal opinions on President Bush’s domestic spying program, setting up a confrontation in advance of a hearing scheduled for next week, administration and Congressional officials said Wednesday.

As RN put it, “it’s legal because we say so, and for reasons we can’t tell you.” Er, no.

Quiet Agent, an online job search firm, gives us this gem.

Remember how Bush said all that about reducing our dependence on foreign oil in the SOTU?

Yeah, he didn’t mean it:

Administration backs off Bush’s vow to reduce Mideast oil imports
By Kevin G. Hall
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON – One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America’s dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn’t mean it literally.

Fitz thinks they’re holding back on email evidence in re: the Plame affair. Does this remind anybody else of certain gaps in certain tapes?

No, really.

In a talk at Duke Law School, Ben Ginsberg, who was Chief Counsel for both Bush campaigns, said:

Just like, really, with the Voting Rights Act, Republicans have some fundamental philosophical difficulties with the whole notion of Equal Protection.

There’s video. Via MeFi.

Ever notice that the pro-life folks also tend to go apo-goddamn-plectic when we talk about easy access to contraception? Doesn’t make much sense, does it? Just go read this.

Cindy Sheehan was arrested at the Capitol yesterday despite having an invitation to the SOTU because her t-shirt had the number of Americans killed in Iraq on it.

What country is this?

Go read this.

However, the most important question is not the threat, per se, but whether we are at war. If we are indeed at war, the state has a qualitatively different set of options, regardless of the actual severity of the threat. The Bush administration is trying to justify extraordinary expansion of executive power not only because terrorists might hurt us (like hurricanes, or bird flu), but because we are literally at war. War powers aren’t justified simply as a function of the threat posed by the enemy. Congress doesn’t need to prove a threat in order to declare war. A war fought for convenience, greed, or strategic gain is just as much a candidate for war powers as a war fought to defend against a grave threat to the American way of life. One rationale for war powers is partly that when the country decides to fight, for whatever reason, it needs special resources in order to do so. The fact is that we’re not at war on terrorism, let alone against terror. Terrorism is a strategy. Actually, it’s a normative assessment of a family of tactics. In the current climate “terrorism” refers to any political violence the speaker doesn’t like. We aren’t at war with terrorism and we never have been. We were at war with Iraq, and now we’re fighting the Iraqi insurgency. We are engaged in a global struggle against terrorism by Islamic extremists. But we can’t even declare war on Al Qaeda, though the use of force against them has been authorized. We can’t declare war against Al Qaeda for the same reason that we can’t declare war against Columbia drug cartel or the mafia. These groups, however nefarious, aren’t states. If we were to destroy these organizations, new groups with the same mission would take their place. War is a metaphor for any all-out struggle against a serious problem: poverty, cancer, drugs, terrorism… Sometimes we use military hardware and tactics to further that struggle. Sometimes we even fight real wars as part of our strategy. The idea that the so-called war on terror justifies dramatic expansion of presidential power is extremely dangerous. Terrorism is never going to go away. If we accept that we are literally at war with terror, we are signing on to perpetual war for perpetual peace.

It may well be too little, too late, but Alito is so hostile to Privacy that this may be the only answer. Party discipline alone will sustain a filibuster; the GOP majority is only 55, but that would require (almost certainly) the support of Harry Reid — who has said he won’t back a filibuster. What the fuck, Harry? What about Alito don’t you understand? We’ve got enough milquetoasts in the damn party; don’t join Joe Lieberman’s ass-kissing posse, man. Sheesh.

In case you missed it, as we did, here’s the Daily Show’s bit on the taint of corruption.