A Small Victory for the Grownups

Finally.

The United States is ready to hold new direct talks with Iran on the deteriorating security situation in Iraq, the State Department said Tuesday. The Bush administration accused Tehran of supporting Shiite insurgents there.

"We think that given the situation in Iraq and given Iran's continued behavior that is leading to further instability in Iraq, that it would be appropriate to have another face-to-face meeting to directly convey to the Iranian authorities that if they wish to see a more stable, secure, peaceful Iraq, which is what they have said they would like to see, that they need to change their behavior," spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters.

By grownups, I mean the not-completely-batshit-crazy people.

I am going to take this to mean that war with Iran is off the table. I can hardly believe that was something that was keeping me up at night, but it really was because this administration has proven itself to be capable of things - like, fabricating a war - that I had previously thought unimaginable. This is not to say that everything is smoothed over for good, but I think the probability of war significantly dropped.

I am sure fourthbranch is on his umpteenth consecutive heart attack right now.

E. Coli Conservatives

Government is the problem:

Congressional investigators are expected to tell a House subcommittee today that the Food and Drug Administration's ability to ensure the safety of the U.S. food supply is "minimal" and agency plans to overhaul its inspection regime could make a bad situation worse.

FDA officials, under fire for the recent string of high-profile food scares involving both domestic and imported foods, have been asked to appear before a House Energy and Commerce investigations subcommittee hearing to discuss the agency's food inspections.

Committee staff reviewed the system extensively and found that a shrinking inspection staff examines less than 1% of all imported food. A typical inspector in the
FDA's San Francisco office examines nearly 1,000 food entries a day -- roughly one every 30 seconds, the committee report found. The agency, it says, allows importers to take possession of their high-risk goods and arrange for testing by a private laboratory. Before melamine-contaminated pet food killed and sickened thousands of pets, the FDA had never inspected those ingredients from China.

Government is not the problem, rather, people who believe government is the problem and act towards emasculating it, otherwise known as conservatives, are the problem. Or, in Grover Norquist's words, "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." Because that worked so well with Katrina.

Private industry cannot be counted on to work for the benefit of the public. Heck, they cannot even be counted on to work for their own paying customers (see Sprint). All they are good for is their own profit.

A Dark Day

Indeed.

Louisiana became the first U.S. state to outlaw a late-term abortion procedure Friday, when the governor approved legislation allowing doctors to be prosecuted for performing the surgery.

The new law allows so-called "partial birth" abortions in only one situation: when failure to perform it would endanger the mother's life. The procedure would be a crime in all other cases, even if the pregnancy is expected to cause health problems for the mother.

Democratic Gov. Kathleen Blanco signed into law criminal penalties for doctors who perform the surgery: fines of between $1,000 and $10,000, and jail terms of between one and 10 years.

Making it illegal for women to make their own decisions about their own bodies.

The term "partial birth" is a complete misnomer. There is no birth, partial birth, or any birth involved. I am so glad our media continues to accurately characterize things.

War?

Oh yeah, that war.

Twin suicide car bombings exploded within 20 minutes of each other in the northern city of Kirkuk on Monday, killing at least 80 people and wounding around 150 in attacks targeting a Kurdish political office and ripping through an outdoor market, police said.

The attacks began around noon when a suicide bomber detonated his explosives-packed truck near the concrete blast walls of the headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the party of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.

Nobody tell Joe Lieberman.

Axis of Evil

Iran has lifted its ban on visits to a nuclear facility by United Nations experts and will now allow them to inspect the site, the International Atomic Energy Agency said Friday.

The U.N. nuclear monitor also said Tehran was ready to answer key questions on past experiments that the international community fears could be linked to a weapons program. The IAEA said Iran promised the concessions earlier this week in a meeting between its officials and a senior delegation from the Vienna-based agency.

It is refreshing to see someone acting like an adult. As opposed to a certain someone's press conference yesterday. I can hardly wait for the right wing to lose their shit over this. "They're hiding WMDs somewhere else!!! It's like the Red Cross visiting Teresienstadt!!! YAAAAAHHHHRRRRRRR!!!!!!"

Just did a quick check, no one has posted about it yet.

Link.

Showdown at the OK Corral

Things get interesting.

The Bush administration says the president's immediate advisers are absolutely immune from having to appear before Congress, but legal scholars say the issue isn't that clear cut.

The question grew more pressing Wednesday as President Bush ordered former White House counsel Harriet Miers to defy a congressional summons in the controversy over the administration's dismissals of federal prosecutors.

The Democratic chairmen of the Senate and House judiciary committees have said they would consider introducing contempt of Congress citations against any subpoena recipients who resist.

Bush thinks he is king. That notion is antithetical to democracy. Anyone who supports Bush needs to come out of the closet and admit that what they really want is a militaristic dictatorship and tyranny that outlaws all dissent. Otherwise they are lying through their teeth.

Decidering Away

This is ridiculous.

Also shows how much this government acts on "it isn't our problem!" when it does not want to do so.

When Is Poop Not Poop?

When it's rape.

In a case that's getting national attention, the Nebraska Supreme Court may have to decide if a woman can use the word "rape" in her alleged attacker's trial.

A Lancaster County district court judge told her she can't use it.

"I refuse to call it sex, or any other word that I'm supposed to say, encouraged to say on the stand, because to me that's committing perjury. What happened to me was rape, it was not sex," said Tory Bowen of Nebraska.

Truthy bad, truth good.

h/t Feministing

Freedom to Be Free

What Digby said.

I bought The Trap last night and am looking forward to reading it. Will let you know how it is.

How Evil Can You Get?

This evil, apparently.

The White House said it would veto a college-cost-reduction bill that made its way to the House floor Wednesday, claiming that it fails to help the neediest college students and creates programs with long-term costs for taxpayers.

The College Cost Reduction Act of 2007 would boost college financial aid by about $18 billion over the next five years and cut federal subsidies to lenders in the college-loan industry. The proposed legislation would also invest in minority institutions, control repayment rates and create loan-forgiveness programs, among other actions.

Under the act, the maximum value of the Pell Grant scholarship would increase by $500 over the next five years. The act would also cut interest rates on need-based student loans to 3.4% from 6.8%.

"This costly proposal only benefits students once they leave school, when they can already take advantage of flexible repayment options available under current law and reduce the effective interest rate they pay through the existing tax deduction for student loan interest," according to a statement from the White House.

Costly proposal (n.) - a proposal that does not bring large returns to administration cronies (White House abridged dictionary, 2007 ed.)

Neediest college students (n.) - college students who are children of administration cronies (White House abridged dictionary, 2007 ed.)

This is more of the same fanatical and hysteric blubbering about how any government spending - on programs that help people, instead of letting them flounder, which is commonly referred to as "pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps" or "building character" - is inherently wrong. When your governing party's ideology explicitly states that government is bad, and cannot and should not do anything, of course you are going to get horrible governance. It is that simple.

(Emphasis mine)

Update: I have to point out what a stellar piece of reporting this is. Ruth Mantell, the reporter, managed to write an entire article on a bill written by Democrats without quoting a Democrat or providing any color for the Democratic position on the bill. All she did was vomit back the White House's talking points. Did it not occur to her to contact any Democrats or get a rebuttal as to why the White House might be full of crap? The article is nothing more than a convenient whine-fest for the White House. Mantell either only spoke to her sources in the White House or just pulled whatever their press release was and did some stenography. Either possibility is unacceptable and reflective of lazy and shoddy reporting.