The Wednesday ‘BushWhack’ing

It’s the middle of the week; run!

• Iraq wants a timetable for US troops to leave… (how dare they think they know what’s better for their own nation… we know what’s best for them, and what’s best is for our troops to stay in Iraq as long as WE want them to; Iraq’s preferences be damned. So that’s what it feels like to talk like a republican… now I need a shower)
• Iran feels threatened so they test-fire nine missiles… this should end well
• Sen. McCain is dismissing a timetable for leaving Iraq… even though Iraq’s government wants it… but what do they know, right?
• Sen. Obama’s campaign is releasing a new ad that targets McCain’s proposed energy policies while tieing McCain in with Bush. The ad states; “McCain and Bush support a drilling plan that won’t produce a drop of oil for seven years. […] McCain will give more tax breaks to big oil. […] He’s voted with Bush 95 percent of the time. Barack Obama will make energy independence an urgent priority.” (Game on)
• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is calling on “President” Bush to release some of the US’ petroleum reserves, an action that Bush has refused to do in the past. (While not a cure-all, it’s a good temporary, short-term solution that would go a long way in helping ease gas prices in the country. While tapping into the reserves isn’t normally done in order to regulate prices, opening them has caused crude prices to drop in the past… so explain to me why it’s not an option?)
• Former Clinton strategist Mark Penn is teaming up with former Bush strategist Karen Hughes (ewwwwww) and together they will create a “bipartisan consulting organization” that will advise corporations that are in crisis. (Wait, what? Due to Penn’s tunnel vision, he’s the primary reason Sen. Clinton’s campaign crashed and burned… and Hughes failed at everything she did in the Bush White House… I can sum up the results of this partnership in two words; Epic Fail.
• CNN headline: “McCain looking to fix mojo problems” eeeeewwwwwwwwwww. Oh wait, they mean political mojo don’t they? Thank God…
• Mitt Romney is being tightlipped about what role the president will have at the republican convention… and you’re asking Romney this question becauuuuuuuuuuse???
• And have we mentioned? That Vice President Dick Cheney hates the environment? But you knew that already, didn’t you? A former EPA official says that Cheney pushed for major deletions in congressional testimony on the public health consequences of climate change because he was worried that the testimony by a leading health official might make it harder to avoid regulating greenhouse gases. Last October, CDC Director Julie Gerberding testified about climate change. It was later discovered that six pages were cut from her testimony and the White House maintained that the changes were made because of reservations raised by White House advisers about the accuracy of the science. But now the truth (which is easy to believe because it’s Cheney we’re talking about here) has come out as Jason Burnett, a lifetime Democrat and a former senior adviser on climate change to EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson, says that Cheney and his office was deeply involved in getting nearly half of the CDC's original draft testimony removed… (why the hell is this allowed to happen? For a party that spouts off about government being too involved in things, this administration certainly likes being involved in everything, don’t they?)