Torture Memo Probe to be released

Get ready for the circus o' fun...

The Justice Department is nearing the end of its probe into Bush administration lawyers who wrote secret memos approving harsh interrogation techniques.

The Associated Press obtained a copy of a letter from the Justice Department informing two members of Congress that a key deadline in the inquiry expired Monday.

The inquiry has become a politically-loaded guessing game, with some advocating criminal charges against the lawyers, and others urging the matter be dropped.

The letter did not indicate what the findings of the final report will be. Jay Bybee, John Yoo, and Steven Bradbury worked in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel and played key roles in crafting the legal justification for techniques critics call torture.

Read more at HuffPo.

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We don't "torture"...

The military agency that provided advice on harsh interrogation techniques for use against terrorism suspects referred to the application of extreme duress as 'torture' in a July 2002 document sent to the Pentagon's chief lawyer and warned that it would produce 'unreliable information.'

Read more at washingtonpost.com.

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Rice, Cheney Approved Waterboarding

I'm not saying it's a surprise.... I'm just sayin'....

Then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice verbally OK'd the CIA's request to subject alleged al-Qaida terrorist Abu Zubaydah to waterboarding in July 2002, a decision memorialized a few days later in a secret memo that the Obama administration declassified last week.

Read more at Rice, Cheney Approved Waterboarding

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Seymour Hershalleges secret ‘assassination wing’ � - Blogs from CNN.com

In an interview on CNN's The Situation Room, Seymour Hersh said the group — called the Joint Special Operations Command — reported to Vice President Dick Cheney and was delegated authority to assassinate individuals based on their own intelligence.

'The idea that we have a unit that goes around and without reporting to Congress — Congress knows very little about this group, can't get hearings, can't get even classified hearings on it…goes around and has authority from the president to go into a country without telling the CIA station chief or the ambassador and whack someone, I am sorry Wolf, yes I have a problem with that,' Hersh said in the interview with Wolf Blitzer."

Read more at CNN Political Ticker.

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What Bush was up to...

Oh, please, please, please, can't we prosecute?

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

New documents show the CIA destroyed nearly 100 tapes of terror interrogations, far more than has previously been acknowledged.

The revelation Monday comes as a criminal prosecutor is wrapping up his investigation in the matter.

The acknowledgment of dozens of destroyed tapes came in a letter filed by government lawyers in New York, where the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit seeking more details of terror interrogation programs.

"The CIA can now identify the number of videotapes that were destroyed," said the letter by Acting U.S. Attorney Lev Dassin. "Ninety two videotapes were destroyed."

Yeah, but wait, there's more. You also get a suspension of First Amendment rights...

the memo from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel—along with others made public for the first time Monday—illustrates with new details the extraordinary post-9/11 powers asserted by Bush administration lawyers. Those assertions ultimately led to such controversial policies as allowing the waterboarding of terror suspects and permitting warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens—steps that remain the subject of ongoing investigations by Congress and the Justice Department. The memo was co-written by John Yoo, at the time a deputy attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel. Yoo, now a professor at the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, has emerged as one of the central figures in those ongoing investigations.

In perhaps the most surprising assertion, the Oct. 23, 2001, memo suggested the president could even suspend press freedoms if he concluded it was necessary to wage the war on terror. "First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully," Yoo wrote in the memo entitled "Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activity Within the United States."

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Bob Cesca: President Obama Is Driving Republicans Insane

I love this guy -- he's hilarious!

"Seriously, have you ever seen the Republicans more twisted and kerfuffled than they are today? Movie metaphors aside, I've been hard pressed to find greater examples of insanity from the far-right than have been exhibited in the past week alone. Here we have a Republican Party that's been discredited and bloodied, and yet in the face of an enormously popular president who is confounding conventional wisdom while building a working consensus among American voters, the Republicans appear to be reflexively coughing up the most intellectually violent chunks of hooey on record."

Here's my favorite line though: "Speaking of John McCain, he was pilfering extra helpings of rich, creamery crazy from Michelle Malkin this week."

Read more of Bob Cesca.

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Bush Chief Of Staff To Obama: Put On Your Jacket On (VIDEO)

Andy Card wants Obama to wear a suit jacket while in the Oval Office.

"I do expect him to send the message that people who are going to be in the Oval Office should treat the office with the respect that it has earned over history.'"

This is rich. Respect for the office? From the guy whose boss made a gag video about looking for WMDs under the desk in the Oval Office.

Whatever.

In my humble opinion, we're doing just as well without your little country club "Jacket and Tie" only privileged trust-fund baby attitude... Better, in fact.

More absurdity plus video on HuffPo.

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Shoes for the ex-President

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We should have known about Bush

Will Ferrell tried to warn us....

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BUH-bye to Bush

Bush's brilliant farewell address, courtesy of Dave Letterman.

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New Lang Syne 2008

Thank God It's Over indeed.

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What George Bush Did

ARE YOU FREAKIN' KIDDING ME?

George Bush proclaims his accomplishments in a Legacy Booklet.

Think I'm gonna barf.

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A President Forgotten but Not Gone

Op-Ed Columnist - A President Forgotten but Not Gone: "WE like our failed presidents to be Shakespearean, or at least large enough to inspire Oscar-worthy performances from magnificent tragedians like Frank Langella. So here, too, George W. Bush has let us down. Even the banality of evil is too grandiose a concept for 43. He is not a memorable villain so much as a sometimes affable second banana whom Josh Brolin and Will Ferrell can nail without breaking a sweat. He’s the reckless Yalie Tom Buchanan, not Gatsby. He is smaller than life."

Read more on NYTimes.com.

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Obamas locked out of the White House

The Caucus reports:

The White House has turned down a request from the family of President-elect Barack Obama to move into Blair House in early January so that his daughters can start school on Jan. 5.

The Obamas were told that Blair House, where incoming presidents usually stay in the five days before Inauguration Day, is booked in early January, a spokesperson to the Obama transition said. “We explored the idea so that the girls could start school on schedule,’ the spokesperson said. “But, there were previously scheduled events and guests that couldn’t be displaced.”

It remained unclear who on Bushes guest list outranked the incoming President.

“It’s not a public schedule,” said Sally McDonough, spokeswoman for First Lady Laura Bush, in refusing to disclose who was staying at Blair House. “It’s not a question of outranking the Obamas. Blair House will be available to them on January 15.”

Read more here.

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Bush early report card

ProPublica has an early report card on Bush, by the Numbers:

"The final report card for George W. Bush won’t be in the mail for another few years. (Nixon’s is still being revised -- and, for that matter, Lincoln’s.) But with just a few weeks to go before the 43rd president moves back to Texas, it’s not too early to measure the impact of his policies across American life.

Bush campaigned on a promise of smaller government, a pledge he kept only in part. He stripped staff members and resources from areas like environmental, health and corporate regulatory enforcement. But the extended wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the worst financial crisis in decades swelled the national debt to its highest level in absolute terms, and its highest since the 1950s relative to GDP."

National Debt on Election Day

2000: $7.1 trillion

2008: $10.6 trillion

Adjusted to 2008 dollars. Source: Treasury Department.

Percentage of Americans without health insurance

2001: 14%

2007: 15%

Source: Census Bureau

Read more here.

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George who?

Oh Jon, don't make me cry....I won't miss Bush at all when he's gone.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

End Times Countdown - Bush Exit Interviews

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

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Karl Rove makes me angry

Nope, I'm still not able to stomach him.

Rove: We Wouldn't Have Invaded Iraq If We Knew The Truth About WMDs: "In what was a remarkable admission that contradicted - to a large extent - the past statements from his onetime boss, former Bush strategist Karl Rove said on Tuesday evening that had the President known Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction, the United States would not have gone to war.

'In the aftermath of 9/11 the concern was about a tyrant accused of enormous human rights abuses,' but who also possessed weapons of mass destruction, said Rove. 'Absent that, I suspect that the administration's course of action would have been to work to find more creative ways to constrain him like in the 90s.'"

Type your summary here

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Bush's final defeat: A timetable for withdrawal

Looks like a timetable, smells like a timetable. Yep, after saying he'd never agree to a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, Bush has quietly agreed to a timetable. At this point though, he's so irrelevant that hardly anyone even noticed.

Peter Galbraith, a top Iraq expert and former ambassador to Croatia, issued a statement today on the status of forces agreement recently signed by the United States and Iraq...."The agreement represents a stunning and humiliating reversal of course by the Bush administration, which had vehemently opposed any timetable for withdrawal from Iraq," said Galbraith.

Iraqi and American negotiators have been working on the security agreement for over a year. The Iraqi parliament is expected to vote on the pact on Wednesday. To pass, the agreement needs to get 138 votes out of 275 Iraqi lawmakers and also must be ratified by the Iraqi presidential council.

"For the last two years, President Bush has pretended that Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki is a democrat and an American ally. In fact, Maliki is a sectarian Shiite politician who heads a government dominated by pro-Iranian religious parties," remarked Galbraith. "The U.S. presence now no longer serves the interests of Iraq's ruling Shiite religious parties or their Iranian allies, so we are now being asked to leave."

The agreement mandates that "all U.S. combat forces" withdraw from urban areas in Iraq by June 30, 2009, and that "all U.S. forces" withdraw from the country by December 31, 2011. The agreement upholds Iraq's "sovereign right" to demand the departure of U.S. forces anytime and recognizes the United States' "sovereign right" to remove its forces earlier than the end of 2011.

....The agreement also bars permanent American bases in Iraq, prohibits the United States from using Iraqi territory to launch attacks against other nations, and bars any residual U.S. forces in Iraq beyond the end of 2011.

Galbraith concluded: "While U.S. withdrawal is made easier by the fact that both the Iraqi government and the new U.S. administration want American troops out, the confluence of events leading to the agreement underscores the folly of President Bush's lost Iraq war."

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Thanksgiving Snapshots

Where was Bush?

Phoning it in.

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Make the Pie Higher Edition

"Senator Obama is more interested in controlling who gets your piece of the pie than he is in growing the pie."
--John McCain at a rally in Harrisburg, PA, October 21, 2008

Make the Pie Higher

by George W. Bush

I think we all agree, the past is over.
This is still a dangerous world.
It's a world of madmen and uncertainty
and potential mental losses.

Rarely is the question asked
Is our children learning?
Will the highways of the Internet become more few?
How many hands have I shaked?

They misunderestimate me.
I am a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity.
I know that the human being and the fish can coexist.
Families is where our nation finds hope, where our wings take dream.

Put food on your family!
Knock down the tollbooth!
Vulcanize society!
Make the pie higher! Make the pie higher!

In case you're wondering if, indeed, he said all that, the answer is yes, at one time or another... he did.

Poor George Bush. So irrelevant now.

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