I enjoyed this article from 'The Autralian'

What is it that has caused people to absolutely lose their minds, and create this mythical towering enemy from a fairly backwards culture of Islam.

We are hugely overestimating our supposed enemy. We are overlooking the fractures and potential fractures within it..

.....while missing the fractures and corruption within our own nation.

Rotting Empire vs Inept Enemy

I am by the same token nervous that the American empire may lurch dangerously around for decades to come. For the rest of us, as we contemplate these dysfunctional beasts, the best advice is that offered to his country (when the US really was at a zenith) by president Harry Truman, as the Soviet imperium headed for its afternoon: containment, not confrontation, is the wisest policy.

America's mistake has been to underestimate the guile, energy and willpower of international Islamism. If only the US and its allies had fully understood and squared up to the devil they were facing, he laments.

Have we not noticed how incompetent are Islamic governments and organisations the world over?

Via Kevin Drum the NY Times has a report on the privatized portion of the 2003 medicare package.

What was the result?

If you guessed "higher costs, worse service, and flagrant abuse" you win the prize.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2007_05/011257.php

Just one more datum that shows that privatization of essential services is a terrible, in fact down right criminal, idea.

sniffing out terrorist coinage.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,270413,00.html

on "pork" in the emergency funding bill here -- check it out.

Made it into a DKos diary.

What shocked me the most in this trip was how the city looked like Baghdad. New Orleans looked like Baghdad after the war in 1991; I swear I kid you not. The devastation, empty houses, the people returning to their life in the city, the "rituals" people practice before they completely come back, the bumps in the streets and the smell of destruction (it has a distinctive smell people. Yes it does.)

I arrived to New Orleans Thursday. On the way to the hotel, I saw the same thing I saw on tv two years ago, destroyed buildings. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Two years later and the scene is the same? Where are we? A government that spent hundreds of billions of dollars on wars overseas is not capable of dealing with a crisis on its own soil! A crisis that all what it needed was money!

The idea is this: the Dem Caucus will be providing periodic progress reports on all the different investigations and oversight stuff that's going on in Congress. Election Central got an advance copy of their first installment.

"This report is part of what will be a continuing series of Democratic Caucus updates on our efforts to conduct real oversight," it reads. "This feature will spotlight recent Democratic oversight efforts and successes, and provide an update on upcoming hearings and investigations Democrats will lead in the coming weeks. We promised to be accountable to the American people, and part of being accountable is letting the country know what you are doing in Washington."

http://electioncentral.tpmcafe.com/blog/electioncentral/2007/may/04/hous...

Remember, you can't tell the players apart without a scorecard.

It's under consideration , but there's a lot of opposition:

Even avowed supporters of the death penalty in murder cases think the Texas proposal would be a bad idea. "If you give the same sentence for molesting a little girl as for molesting and killing a little girl, it seems an incentive to go ahead and kill her," said Michael Rushford, head of the pro-death penalty Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in Sacramento, Calif.

We can't figure out how to deal with child molesters once they're released, but harsher penalties have their own problems. Not sure what the solution is here... too bad we can't ship them all to Australia or something (and yeah, that's been suggested ).

Having summarily dispensed with those pesky constitutional concerns , I want to return to a question related to school vouchers.

Is it reasonable and fair for Liberals to take a position that tax dollars should be used to fund abortions (something the Christians consider to be murder), yet object to having it paid as School Vouchers which might be used to fund religious schools?

Thoughts?

Congressional Research Service on the arguments for and against Congress being able to limit or end the war against the President's objections:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33837.pdf

Some excerpts

As a procedural matter, it is more difficult for Congress to terminate
authorization for a military conflict than to limit appropriations necessary for the continuation of hostilities. As in the case of ordinary legislation, congressional declarations of peace and rescissions of military authorization have historically taken the form of a bill or joint resolution passed by both Houses and presented to the President for signature.76 Like other legislation, such measures are subject to presidential veto, which Congress may override only with a two-thirds majority of each House.77

...

Although Congress has the power to rescind authorization of a military conflict
or enact a declaration of peace, the practical effect that such an action might have on the President’s ability to continue a military conflict may nevertheless remain difficult to predict. Historically, courts have been unwilling to interpret a congressional rescission of military authorization as barring the executive from
continuing to wage a military campaign, at least so long as Congress continues to
appropriate money in support of such operations.

...

Congress has ample constitutional authority to enact legislation that restricts the scope of military operations. If Congress can enact a limitation on the conduct of military operations directly, it can do so through appropriations. The larger question remains whether the limitation enacted amounts to an unconstitutional usurpation of the actual conduct of war.

Some commentators agree that Congress has the authority to cut off funds for
military operations entirely, but assert that a partial cut-off or limitation on the use of funds would amount to an unconstitutional condition by interfering with the President’s authority to conduct battlefield operations.146 There has been some suggestion in the past that the President’s responsibility to provide for troops in the field justifies further deployments without prior authorization from Congress,147 with some arguing that the President has an independent implied spending power to carry out these responsibilities.148 These arguments do not easily square with Congress’s established prerogative to limit the scope of wars through its war powers, and do not conform with Congress’s absolute authority to appropriate funds.

Which to me sounds like congress can defund the war, apply restrictions to how money is used, and even recind the AUMF. Although in that last case nothing is likely to change unless they also defund or at least restrict the funds appropriated.

...Iraq turns it's lonely eyes to you...

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Iraq's top Sunni official has set a deadline of next week for pulling his entire bloc out of the government -- a potentially devastating blow to reconciliation efforts within Iraq. He also said he turned down an offer by President Bush to visit Washington until he can count more fully on U.S. help.

Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi made his comments in an interview with CNN. He said if key amendments to the Iraq Constitution are not made by May 15, he will step down and pull his 44 Sunni politicians out of the 275-member Iraqi parliament.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/05/07/iraq.sunnithreat/index.html (found via Kevin Drum)

That's 16% of the government that is about to walk, next week, if a major breakthrough doesn't happen. Maybe he's bluffing and maybe he can be stalled but there's no reason in the world to believe that the Sunni bloc's concerns are going to be dealt with by this fractious and inefficient government.