y copy of Playboy has just arrived. This month's interview is a candid conversation with the godfather of political humor, Bill Maher, about war, the president, sex crimes and all sorts of political incorrectness. He nailed it with the very first answer to the initial question... which was "After the Democratic upset in the midterm election and with a year and a half left for the Bush administration, are you feeling more optimistic abut the country's direction?"
The response: "Are you kidding? It's a disaster. Unmitigated. Every day we're killing more American soldiers for an immoral and unwinnable war based on lies, We're killing innocent Iraqis. The environment is disintegrating. It's one debacle after the next. We're infinately less safe than we were before 9/11. Other than that, everything's great".
Bill Maher becomes more important and sharper with every appearance.

David Letterman said it, and he's correct, "James Cameron thinks that he found the tomb of Jesus Christ. To me, that's very interesting. Who would have guessed that they'd find Jesus...before bin Laden".

I wonder how long it will take before the loud-mouthed talk-radio right-wingers find a way of blaming Speaker Nancy Pelosi, or even past president Bill Clinton, for the disgraceful conditions at Walter Reed medical center. Walter Reed had a reputation for being the jewel of the veterans' health system. Which means, surely, that conditions are just as bad or possibly worse at the 154 Veteran's Administration hospitals across the country.
I wonder how this situation might tie in with the White House attitude of pretending that this war in Iraq has no costs - remember they have banned 'photos of returning coffins, and getting the maimed and injured out of sight. Mr. President, you need to learn that the horrors of war cannot be hidden away and denied.

What's the whole Scooter Libby story really all about? It's been three-and-a-half years since the gang in the White House set out to trash the reputation of an Iraq war critic, former ambassador Joseph Wilson. Libby has been found guilty of perjury, lying to the FBI and obstruction of justice by a Washington jury. Now, maybe, special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald (and mainstream journalists) will get down to the real business of discovering why the entire White House smear operation was unleashed on a minor state department official and just why they went so far as to violate federal law and expose his CIA-operative wife, Valerie Plame and, of course, in the process destroy her entire network of contacts for monitoring the spread of nuclear weapons in the Middle East.
Going back to what Ambassador Wilson did in the first place, that so bugged or scared the President and Vice President was that he went to Niger, one of the world's poorest nations, to prove that there was no truth to a set of forged letters on the letterhead of the Niger embassy in Rome; supposedly receipts for 400 tons of Niger uranium ore allegedly being sought by Saddam Hussein. They were cheap forgeries. Wilson knew it, and so did the White House.
If Libby should serve time, maybe the President and Vice President should too. They won't, of course.
Remember our president was pushing for war almost immediately after he finished reading "My Pet Goat" to the children following the 9/11 attack.

Mortimer B. Zuckerman, editor-in-chief of U.S. News and most knowledgeable man of business posed the right stock market question in his most recent editorial; "In the perpetual struggle between bears and bulls - between fear and greed - fear suddenly seemed to be dominant in the worldwide volatility of the stock markets. But how scared should we be? In a sentence he put it clearly "Despite all the talk about overheated Chinese markets, American stocks are still a solid value, and investors have no reason to rush to the exits." We didn't have a crash but simply a contraction, and it turned out to be a modest one amounting overall to less than 5% of the Standard and Poor's 500 index.
Beyond that inflation is low, real consumer spending firm, unemployment is low, business investment is rising and overall it appears that the American economy appears to be in pretty good shape.

It has been several years that the Bush administration has been under pressure to do more about climate change, believed to be the result of human caused greenhouse gases. Environmentalists, scientists and other countries have been begging us to do more. Now, at long last, in recent days, the administration's own research shows US greenhouse-gas emissions increasing at a steady rate.
We are on a path to exceeding levels of global warming that will cause catastrophic consequences, and we really need to be seriously reducing emissions, not just reducing the growth rate as the president is proposing. The administration's own research shows US greenhouse-gas emissions increasing at a steady pace; 11% between 2002 and 2012, just about the same as the previous decade.
We must do more and the science now very clearly calls for a mandatory program that establishes a price for greenhouse gas emissions.

Lots more - later,