Wonkette

“The United States urged Russia on Friday to halt aircraft and missile attacks in Georgia’s breakaway region of South Ossetia and withdraw its combat forces from Georgian territory as the situation in the former Soviet state verged on full-scale war. …Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called the parties involved in hopes of ending the fighting, and made plans to send a U.S. envoy to the region.” Many in the comments of this website have mentioned what a travesty it is that people aren’t talking about this due to the start of the Olympics. Well, no one cares about the Olympics. It’s more like: this is a problem between two countries far far away, not the United States’ problem at all, except for oil implications, so let’s stop pretending it is. Surely the folks in Georgia and Russia are caring about this plenty enough. Meanwhile, read this hilarious thread. [AP]

KARL ROVE IN CONTEMPT: “A U.S. congressional panel voted on Wednesday to find former presidential adviser Karl Rove in contempt for defying a subpoena to testify in its probe into suspected political meddling at the Justice Department.” [REUTERS]

YOU DON’T SAY: “The inspector general’s investigation found that Ms. Goodling and a handful of other senior aides to Mr. Gonzales developed a system of using in-person interviews and Internet searches to screen out candidates who might be too liberal and to identify candidates seen as pro-Republican and supportive of President Bush.” [New York Times]

Hey, has anybody seen David Gregory’s show on the MSNBC, called, uh, That Thing Between Episodes of ‘Hardball’? Yeah, us neither. Apparently it features bottled heads in a spaceship, with David Gregory being very self-important in front of them. Unsurprisingly, people do not watch this show, and the gentleman who made his bones being a comically aggressive dick to George Bush in press conferences now finds his star on the wane. MORE »

Rep. John Hall (Dirty Hippie, NY) became a congressman in 2006, when even a naked “soft rock” hippie seemed less dangerous than Mark Foley or Don Sherwood or John Sweeney. Problem is, hippiez r dum! Hall is now sending official congressional spam about the alleged Bush Administration plot to stop solar energy so the Oil Corporates can continue to rule the Earth. Are American enviro-leftists as gullible as the “God DAMN Muslim O’bama’s Christian Church” crowd? Let’s find out! MORE »

Today the Bush administration offered its brave response to the current financial crisis, as delivered by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. The administration has faced overwhelming pressure to give the government more oversight and regulation within the financial markets, since every major player (investment banks, hedge funds) keeps dying and then asks the government for money. And who better to ramp up regulation on investment banks than Henry Paulson, the former C.E.O. of Goldman Sachs! So what’s in his funny new oversight package, and how will it not do anything save the economy again? MORE »

Another loser official from the Bush Administration is stepping down to spend time with the family, but there’s something especially funny about the departure of Emilio Gonzalez from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency — because Gonzalez wrote a big whiny blog post (on the Department of Homeland Security blog, of course) about how the New York Times called him a loser! And then about a million people with varying degrees of English-as-a-Second-Language proficiency left hilarious comments! MORE »

Ex-chief of staff to Dick Cheney, known perjurer and wuss jail-dodger I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby has been disbarred, according to a D.C. Court of Appeals ruling. The cut-and-running court explained: “When a member of the Bar is convicted of an offense involving moral turpitude, disbarment is mandatory.” Yes, dumb old Scooter was a textbook case of “moral turpitude,” that old scourge of an offense. Remember when he lied all those times? They were the most morally turpitudinous lies since the great Turpitude Outbreak of 1913. [WTOP]

Retiring, anti-war Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel said in a speech yesterday that “this is one of the most arrogant, incompetent administrations I’ve ever seen or ever read about.” And he had just been seeing or reading about every administration on YouTube or Wikipedia! [WP]

“Three days after Americans saw the Bush administration’s counterterrorism chief say the Iraq war has likely not made the United States safer from terrorism, the official announced his resignation, citing health reasons.” [ABC Blotter]

A private spy company worked for years tracing Al Qaeda’s Internet and video distribution network, and was finally able to grab terrorist propaganda before it was released to the public. So it was a proud moment when the intelligence contractor, SITE Institute, presented the White House with a brand new Al Qaeda video — Bin Laden with his “Just For Men” beard dye job — on the condition that it be kept secret until Al Qaeda made it public.

Within hours, the Bush Administration had leaked it to Fox News, and “ruined years of clandestine work to find and exploit al Qaeda secrets on the Internet.”

Leak Severed Link To Al Qaeda’s Secrets [Washington Post]

Have you heard the story of the man who is secretly the most powerful and evil member of the Bush administration? It is one of Washington’s best-kept secrets, which means that all the major and minor news magazines have run lengthy profiles on him, calling him secretly one of the most powerful and evil members of the Bush administration. His name is David S. Addington, he was Cheney’s lawyer, and now he is Cheney’s chief of staff. MORE »

It’s almost too depressing to mention again, but let’s recap the Pat Tillman revelations from Army medical examiners and internal Pentagon reports released last week and find out what happens when famous football stars turned Army Heroes become anti-war critics: MORE »

Back in the late ’70s, two kindly yet inept gentlemen were elected as president and vice president, simply because their names weren’t Nixon, Agnew or Ford. One of those men, former VP and failed 1984 Dem presidential nominee Walter Mondale, now wants you to know that Dick Cheney isn’t the only super-powerful Dr. Evil in recent presidential history. Turns out Walter Mondale kicked a lot of ass back in the day, but he did it with the utmost gentility and old-fashioned midwest manners. MORE »