Laughing at Reagan. Today we're taking the day off to laugh at the president who should have been impeached for Iran-Contra, and reviled for his anti-labor stances and, among dozens of other things, this:

The most memorable Reagan AIDS moment was at the 1986 centenary rededication of the Statue of Liberty. The Reagans were there sitting next to the French Prime Minister and his wife, Francois and Danielle Mitterrand. Bob Hope was on stage entertaining the all-star audience. In the middle of a series of one-liners, Hope quipped, "I just heard that the Statue of Liberty has AIDS, but she doesn't know if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island Fairy." As the television camera panned the audience, the Mitterrands looked appalled. The Reagans were laughing. By the end of 1989, 115,786 women and men had been diagnosed with AIDS in the United States--more then 70,000 of them had died.

"The Reagans were laughing."

Today we are too.

{ 9:20 AM }

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Ken Lay vs. Martha Stewart. This is new. One — a CEO billion-dollar thief, Bush-Cheney mega-contributor, and secret architect of US energy policy — remains unindicted, while the other — a Democratic woman who made a couple hundred thousand on an insider trade — is framed by the Secret Service:

A federal grand jury indicted a government ink expert on charges he lied during his testimony in the Martha Stewart trial, his lawyer said Wednesday.

Larry Stewart [no relation], who was the chief forensic scientist for the U.S. Secret Service, was arrested last month and accused of perjury during his testimony in February.

Manhattan federal prosecutors said Larry Stewart lied when he testified he examined a document the government offered into evidence.

The chief forensic scientist for the US Secret Service lied under oath to put Martha Stewart away.

Let's say that again, this time together: The chief forensic scientist for the US Secret Service lied under oath to put Martha Stewart away.

{ 9:27 AM }

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Leaking toward Bermuda. Now that Bermuda-based Accenture's right to a $10 billion "homeland" security contract is being challenged, take a look at Ethel the Blog's overview of offshore banking and the concept of financial "leakage."

{ 9:25 AM }

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The interest in torture went straight to the top. The White House couldn't link Hussein with Al Qaeda, but We the People can link Abu Ghraib with the White House, starting at least as early as September 2003:

The head of the interrogation center at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq told an Army investigator in February that he understood some of the information being collected from prisoners there had been requested by "White House staff," according to an account of his statement obtained by The Washington Post.

Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, an Army reservist who took control of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center on Sept. 17, 2003, said a superior military intelligence officer told him the requested information concerned "any anti-coalition issues, foreign fighters, and terrorist issues."

Oh, and Reagan is still dead.

{ 1:33 PM }

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Washington Post editorial: "The logic of criminal regimes." "The news that serving U.S. officials have officially endorsed principles once advanced by Augusto Pinochet brings shame on American democracy."

{ 10:42 AM }

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"Watch what I say, not what I do." More hot air from John Ashcroft (WSJ, sub. req'd.):

Under sharp questioning from Democratic senators, Attorney General John Ashcroft reiterated Bush administration claims that it doesn't allow prisoners to be tortured to extract information.

But he also refused to release internal policy documents that assert the president's power to disregard laws and international conventions prohibiting torture.

[...]

When pressed by Sen. Edward Kennedy to say whether he agreed with the conclusions of the internal legal memo, Mr. Ashcroft declared that "first of all, this administration rejects torture."

But, of course, "...he declined to say what advice he has given the president or the Pentagon on the topic."

The administration says what it thinks we want to hear in public and disregards laws and international conventions in private, secreting all evidence of its actual attitudes and behavior. The precedent of flagrant lawlessness was set when Dick Cheney allowed campaign contributor and Enron chairman Ken Lay to determine national energy policy, six months before 9-11-01. And everything the administration has done since then, from the tax cuts to the Medicare bill to the environmental policies to the whopper, the Iraq invasion, furthers the pattern.

{ 10:20 AM }

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Don't torture Lea Fastow either. TalkLeft is correct: the sentence for Lea Fastow is too harsh:

Lea Fastow shouldn't receive special treatment, but she also shouldn't be treated more harshly than anyone else serving the same sentence. What's next, will Martha Stewart be sent to MCC Manhattan? This is overkill. The Bureau of Prisons should reconsider.

Skimbleland is not exactly a teacup of sympathy for the Fastows, but neither do we wish Abu Ghraib on her, despite her complicity as part of Enron in creating the conditions for this administration to produce those two ugly new household words and all they symbolize.

{ 6:40 PM }

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Politicizing the dead. Interesting that the United States can be wallpapered from coast to coast with images of Reagan's coffin, but none of these:

829

{ 2:20 PM }

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Timing is everything. According to AdRants, the $226 million Homeland Security advertising campaign was delayed for 17 months to coincide with the launch of the Iraq war, creating a false sense of linkage between the domestic duct tape hysteria and the attacks on Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do with 9/11 or the anthrax postal crisis of 2001. Via Plep.

{ 12:56 PM }

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Xymphora calls our attention to UnderReported.com.

The Chicago coffin protest was new to me, and I live here.

{ 9:57 AM }

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If you came here looking for Seth Glickenhaus, be sure to see this post from earlier today.

{ 5:52 PM }

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"The idea of using the Nuremberg trial as a field guide for committing war crimes and getting away with it has never occurred to me before. But then, I'm not a Bush administration legal appointee." —Billmon

{ 4:33 PM }

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We're #1 when you google the words "Chalabi Cheney golf."

{ 4:08 PM }

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66 Things to Think about When Flying in to Reagan National Airport, via Cursor.

{ 11:33 AM }

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"Mr Reagan also had the magic ability to appear to be achieving things when he was not."

{ 11:28 AM }

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The cracks in the facade are God's will, too. Who knows how much of this is true, but even if it's only a little, it sure is sickening:

The President's abrupt dismissal of CIA Directory George Tenet Wednesday night is, aides say, an example of how he works.

"Tenet wanted to quit last year but the President got his back up and wouldn't hear of it," says an aide. "That would have been the opportune time to make a change, not in the middle of an election campaign but when the director challenged the President during the meeting Wednesday, the President cut him off by saying 'that's it George. I cannot abide disloyalty. I want your resignation and I want it now."

Tenet was allowed to resign "voluntarily" and Bush informed his shocked staff of the decision Thursday morning. One aide says the President actually described the decision as "God's will."

God may also be the reason Attorney General John Ashcroft, the administration’s lightning rod because of his questionable actions that critics argue threatens freedoms granted by the Constitution, remains part of the power elite. West Wing staffers call Bush and Ashcroft “the Blues Brothers” because “they’re on a mission from God.”

“The Attorney General is tight with the President because of religion,” says one aide. “They both believe any action is justifiable in the name of God.”

But the President who says he rules at the behest of God can also tongue-lash those he perceives as disloyal, calling them “fucking assholes” in front of other staff, berating one cabinet official in front of others and labeling anyone who disagrees with him “unpatriotic” or “anti-American.”

“The mood here is that we’re under siege, there’s no doubt about it,” says one troubled aide who admits he is looking for work elsewhere. “In this administration, you don’t have to wear a turban or speak Farsi to be an enemy of the United States. All you have to do is disagree with the President.”

If polls are any indication, a majority of Americans are now enemies of the United States.

{ 9:55 AM }

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"Worse than zero." Seth Glickenhaus, Part 2. One of our favorite themes here in Skimbleland is Capitalists Against Bush, because they embody the fact that vendetta-based wars, crony-based dealmaking, and faith-based crime actually aren't good for business. Sandra Ward in Barron's (sub. req'd) interviews 90-year-old billion-dollar money manager Seth Glickenhaus, whose opinions move money in large amounts:

Barron's: Is this market keeping you young or making you older?
Glickenhaus: We like the market best when the pluses far outweigh the negatives, and we don't have overhanging fears of negatives that can bite us. […]

Q: Would you like to enumerate the pluses and minuses?
A: The political picture has never been as negative as it is today.

Q: Does that matter to the market?
A: It matters tremendously. If Kerry is elected, the doctrinaire Republicans will sell stocks for a day or two, but then the market will go up considerably.

Q: Because?
A: Because Bush has been worse than zero as a president. He is bush-league. No. 1, he got us into a war and spent billions of dollars, dollars unfortunately which don't have any positive offset in better housing, schools and infrastructure. And people are being killed. It is a war without any purpose other than to get rid of Saddam Hussein.

Secondly, he spent all his time campaigning for his next election, rather than overseeing the various departments of government. The military has many internal problems, which are surfacing in Iraq and Afghanistan. He hasn't consolidated and integrated the CIA and the FBI and his new department of Homeland Security, all the military intelligence, which he desperately needs to do.

He has alienated foreign countries. He has failed to address environmental concerns. And in his approach to the Israel-Palestine War, he has been unaware that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's policy of non-negotiation is destined to fail, resulting in increasing mutual hatred and many more deaths and no solution. Fiscally, Bush has been totally irresponsible.

Q: And Kerry?
A: Kerry is a mediocrity. He is a typical senator who votes for the moment. He isn't a statesman.

Q: If Bush gets re-elected, what happens?
A: If Bush gets re-elected, he will see it as a total affirmation of all his policies, and the deficits will grow. Perhaps we will have another war in addition to the two that exist, however preposterous this seems.

We wrote about Sandra Ward's coverage of Glickenhaus before.

{ 8:40 AM }

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