The Wednesday ‘BushWhack’ing

• New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a former Democrat who was elected as a republican, has officially left the republican party yesterday while declaring himself free of a “rigid adherence” to ideology. The move has stoked further speculation that he will mount an independent bid for the White House and would use his multibillion-dollar fortune to avoid having to pander… (Hmmmmmm, this race may be getting interesting very, very soon. Stay tuned…)
• Remember how yesterday’s ‘BushWhack’ing included the item about Congress blaming the State Department for an incredibly large passport backlog? Well, now they’re promising “passport solutions”… way to be vague there guys…
• Just when you think the saga of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff has died down, someone does something to bring it back into the American conscience. Former deputy interior secretary J. Steven Griles, who was found guilty of obstructing the Senate's investigation into Abramoff. Now Griles’ attorneys are asking a federal judge to turn-over the government's recommendation of jail time in favor of three months of home detention. (With the Scooter Libby sentencing still fresh in people’s minds, the chances of Griles getting a lighter are unlikely, but still very possible…)
• Seriously? People are going to base who they might vote for on a video making fun of the series finale of The Sopranos??? Stop the world I want to get off…
• There are 200 U.S. Foreign Service Officers at the Baghdad Embassy. Out of those 200, TEN are proficient in Arabic… (that seems like poor plannning on someones’s part, doesn’t it? Oh right, poor planning thy name is Bush…)
• A new Gallup poll shows that 70% of Americans believe that the economy is getting worse, which is the “the most negative reading in nearly six years”…(but don’t tell Bush that, he’s still under the impression that everything is hunky-dory)
• And have we mentioned? That you can chalk up yet another former general who has taken the Bush(whacked) Administration to task for past transgressions. The latest is retired (“kicked out” is more apt) two-star General Antonio Taguba, the man who investigated the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison. He looks past the rose-colored glasses and says the top of the pecking order is where the faults lay. Said the General;

  “There was no doubt in my mind that this stuff was gravitating upward. It was standard operating procedure to assume that this had to go higher. The President had to be aware of this ... [W]e violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.”