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Why did Alito flaunt his membership in a Princeton alumni group that attempted to prevent women and minorities from receiving the same education he did?

It looks like our hired guns may be up to no good, shooting civilians for fun. But will the U.S. government do anything in response? All signs point to 'no.'

Young French North Africans say you've got to be a Jacques or Pierre, not a Karim or Mohammad, to get a job in Paris.

funny

PJ Media.

Something tells me it'll be Pace who finds himself up for early retirement, not Rumsfeld.

Our leaders are truly scum.

heh-indeedy.

The title is quite appropriate. In Groundhog Day, Bill Murray's character first tries to make the most of his lot by changing how he seemed to be. Eventually he began to change how he actually was.

Bush will of course never understand that.

Today, two and a half years after sending our troops into battle in Iraq, the President gave a speech at the US Naval Academy to defend the progress of the war. He also released a 35-page plan for victory in Iraq.

Yet, he once again failed to lay out a real strategy for success and a plan to bring our troops home safely. Instead, he offered up the same old rhetoric. We hope the next time the President decides to send our best Americans into battle and spend hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars that are needed here at home, he will consider coming up with a plan for victory BEFORE taking such an action.

The decision to commit troops into battle is the most sacred responsibility of any commander-in-chief. The fact that President Bush is only now unveiling his plan for victory today -- two and a half years after committing our forces into battle -- shows how incompetent, dishonest and frivolous his approach was toward this war in the first place.

The President is no longer entitled to our trust when it comes to discussing the execution of the War in Iraq because he continuously refuses to provide a real exit strategy. As a country, we need to take responsibility over this war by urging our leaders to support a responsible and coherent exit plan so we can bring our troops home and reallocate our resources toward an effective war on terror and our needs here at home.

President Bush, opening a new push to defend his embattled war policy, said Tuesday a U.S. military pullout from Iraq would be a terrible mistake.

Via Catch, Joe Dante discusses his Showtime show:

"This is a horror story because most of the characters are Republicans," director Joe Dante announced before the November 13 world premiere of his latest movie, Homecoming, at the Turin Film Festival. Republicans, as it happens, will be the ones who find Homecoming's agitprop premise scariest: In an election year, dead veterans of the current conflict crawl out of their graves and stagger single-mindedly to voting booths so they can eject the president who sent them to fight a war sold on "horseshit and elbow grease."
The dizzying high point of Showtime's new Masters of Horror series, the hour-long Homecoming (which premieres December 2) is easily one of the most important political films of the Bush II era. With its only slightly caricatured right-wingers, the film nails the casual fraudulence and contortionist rhetoric that are the signatures of the Bush-Cheney administration. Its dutiful hero, presidential consultant David Murch (Jon Tenney), reports to a Karl Rove–like guru named Kurt Rand (Robert Picardo) and engages in kinky power fucks with attack-bitch pundit Jane Cleaver (Thea Gill), a blonde, leggy Ann Coulter proxy with a "No Sex for All" tank top and "BSH BABE" license plates. Murch's glib, duplicitous condescension is apparently what triggers the zombie uprising: Confronting an angry mother of a dead soldier on a news talk show, he tells this Cindy Sheehan figure, "If I had one wish . . . I would wish for your son to come back," so he could assure the country of the importance of the war. The boy does return, along with legions of fallen combatants, and they all beg to differ. [...]

Dante and writer Sam Hamm (Batman) adapted Homecoming from Dale Bailey's "Death and Suffrage," a 2002 short story that puts a morbidly literal spin on the idea of the dead being used to pad the Chicago voting roll. (The film also owes something to the low-budget 'Nam-era Dead of Night, in which a "Monkey's Paw" wish brings an undead veteran back to his family home.) Though Bush is never named, Homecoming tailors its provocative scenario to accommodate a devastatingly specific checklist of accusations, from the underreporting of war casualties to last November's dubious Ohio count. As if in defiance of the Pentagon's policy to ban photographs of dead soldiers' coffins, Dante's film shows not just the flag-draped caskets at Dover Air Force Base but their irate occupants bursting out of them. "There's a lot of powerful imagery in this movie that has nothing to do with me," Dante says. "When you see those coffins, which is a sight that's generally been withheld from us, there's a gravity to it. Even though there's comedy in the movie, there's something basically so serious and depressing about the subject that it never gets overwhelmed by satire." [...]

"You don't have to be a rocket scientist to see what a fucking mess we're in," he continues. "It's been happening steadily for the past four years, and nobody said peep. The New York Times and all these people that abetted the lies and crap that went into making and selling this war—now that they see the guy is a little weak, they're kicking him with their toe to make sure he doesn't bite back. It's cowardly. This pitiful zombie movie, this fucking B movie, is the only thing anybody's done about this issue that's killed 2,000 Americans and untold numbers of Iraqis? It's fucking sick." While gratified by the warm reception to Homecoming in Turin, Dante says he's eager for the right-wing punditocracy back home to see it: "I hope this movie bothers a lot of people that disagree with it—and that it makes them really pissed off, as pissed off as the rest of us are."

The actress Dante found to play NotAnnCoulter eerily resembles the real thing.

IRAQ: A Public Relations Pitch Masquerading As A Strategy

Yglesias's take is about right. Contrary to all the recent chitchat Bush didn't lay the groundwork for any withdrawal from Iraq. It ain't gonna happen on his watch.

As Yglesias says, this adminsitration doesn't know how to do any of the things they want to do.

Matthews is wetting himself over Bush's masterful proposal for $3.9 billion in reconstruction funds Bush is proposing. I guess Halliburton needs another day of pay. We'd be better served if Matthews spent some time telling us what happened to all of the previous monies which were allocated for Iraq reconstruction.

Lovely.

Make sure to have all your right wing friends turn on Showtime on Friday.

As usual, the rhetoric surrounding the war in Iraq is about two elections – one there and one here. President Bush and the Republicans need the first one to succeed to have a chance of surviving the second. By Howard Fineman.

The infantalization of America continues.


Well, at least Chris Matthews will be able to undertand it.

There'll be no mutant enemy we shall certify. Political threads of sad remains will die.

Pelosi Backs Murtha Call for U.S. Withdrawal By Erin P. Billings Roll Call Staff Wednesday, Nov. 30 In a move likely to cause a stir among members of her divided Democratic Caucus, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) on Wednesday endorsed fellow Democratic Rep. John Murtha’s (Pa.) recent call to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq as soon as possible. [...]

There'll be no mutant enemy we shall certify. Political threads of sad remains will die.

New Hampshire Democrats launched a public campaign yesterday to preserve their first-in-the-nation presidential primary against intrusions from rival states and the work of a Democratic Party commission.