George W. Bush’s Severed Head Disrupts DVD Shipments

George W. Bush’s Severed Head Is No Longer on HBO Go, iTunes -- Vulture: 

The network is also holding shipment on any DVD sets featuring the commentary that started the controversy.

I got mine day one. W's severed head, and the discussion thereof, will remain in my collection.

I Don't Feel Safer #TenYearsLater

cryptonaut-in-exile: I Don't Feel Safer:

Bush proposes Dept. of Homeland Security . Yesterday, the bureaucracy was bad. Today it's good and we need more. Which is it?

Did we need it then? Do we need it now?

Hodor.

Game of Votes. - Ghost in the Machine: 

... this was too on-the-nose not to share ...

Yes, indeed it is. Just a sample to encourage you to check out the whole thing:

Why the Health Care Challenge Is Wrong by Ronald Dworkin | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books

Why the Health Care Challenge Is Wrong by Ronald Dworkin | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books:

Image via NYRB

Every American already has health insurance; the mandate only requires that he pay for his insurance rather than free-loading on those who do pay. A federal statute and several state statutes require hospitals to provide emergency medical care to people who cannot pay for it, and America’s traditions of compassion mean that doctors will not let people die in pain when they can easily save or help them. In practice, this means that the uninsured will go to costly ER facilities when they need medical help. Congress found that health care for uninsured patients cost $43 billion in 2008; these costs were paid, through higher premiums, by those who do buy insurance. 

Congress surely has the power to make people pay for what, out of human decency, the law and practice provide for them.

Dworkin makes a very strong case here; I could have pulled any number of quotes from the article supporting the argument for the mandate, whatever you may think of it, being Constitutionally acceptable.

That said, I think we are getting an improved health care system as a result of the ACA. However, it is an improvement on a massive failure by only being a mitigated failure. National health insurance was the correct answer and we missed, I think, an opportunity to get it. What we have instead is, to a large degree, a gift to the insurance companies. [Update: Lawrence O'Donnell makes the case more eloquently than I ever could. ↬ PNHP.org]

I don't think it will be the end of the world if the Supreme Court strikes down the individual mandate. Not-so-secretly, I hope it re-opens the door for us to look at the major overhaul that was our missed opportunity. A ruling against the mandate though will be the end of the myth of an apolitical Supreme Court. Or, it ought to be. That myth really should have died when the Supreme Court effectively installed George W. Bush as President.

Late Update:

Justice Scalia on Bush v Gore: “Get over it… It wasn’t even close.”

Justice Scalia on Bush v Gore: “Get over it… It wasn’t even close.” Oh really? | The Political Carnival: 

#OccupyScalia image via The Middletown Press

One person asked about the Bush-Gore case, where the Supreme Court had to determine the winner of the election. 

“Get over it,” Scalia said of the controversy surrounding it, to laughter from the audience.

*Takes blood pressure meds*

*Deep breath*

"Get over it"?! And you fuckers think that's funny?!

LMAO I hate America*

Possibly facing arrest for torture, Bush skips visit to Switzerland.

Bush's Swiss visit off after complaints on torture | Reuters:

Bush was to be the keynote speaker at Keren Hayesod's annual dinner on February 12 in Geneva. But pressure has been building on the Swiss government to arrest him and open a criminal investigation if he enters the Alpine country.

The Toilet Online - Leave It To Bush! (In praise of archive.org.)

The Toilet Online - Leave It To Bush!

I do this thing occasionally, maybe you've noticed, where I dip back in the archives to rehash something I posted ten year ago; well, I happened to see from the referral logs that somebody had landed on an old post from 2005 and couldn't remember from the title what the post was about, so I went back to it and the link I'd blogged, of course, was dead -- but, thanks to the Wayback Machine, I was able to find the original page. So, long story long, after all that, and not wanting to wait four more years to mark the ten year anniversary of first linking it, I give you Gary Busey, some ferrets with crosses carved in their foreheads, and George W. Bush saying some crazy stuff.

Ten Years Later: Still Dislike the Electoral College

cryptonaut-in-exile: Do We Really Need The Electoral College?

Stolen Elections Make Me Angry, Too

Ten years ago, I was concerned our electoral process was deeply flawed and hoped four years of Bush incompetence would prompt change. Little did I know we were in for eight years of mismanagement, corruption, scandal, and illegal war. The Supreme Court was able to hand our country over a right wing goon and his cronies thanks to existence of the Electoral College. Nothing has changed. The idea that small states should get more say than large states in the Presidential election is alive and well. It's a shameful farce. Nobody's vote should count more than mine! And mine should count for no more than anyone else's. As we used to say on TC quite a bit back in the day, "Anger Rising!"

I should have seen it coming. (Bush Plagiarism Edition)

George Bush Book 'Decision Points' Lifted Passages From Advisers' Books:

Many of Bush's literary misdemeanors exemplify pedestrian sloth, but others are higher crimes against the craft of memoir. In one prime instance, Bush relates a poignant meeting between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and a Tajik warlord on Karzai's Inauguration Day. It's the kind of scene that offers a glimpse of a hopeful future for the beleaguered nation. Witnessing such an exchange could color a president's outlook, could explain perhaps Bush's more optimistic outlook and give insight into his future decisions. Except Bush didn't witness it. Because he wasn't at Karzai's inauguration.

Kicking myself for not forecasting this would happen, given the inevitability. Mendacious, entitled, lazy conservative to publish memoir? It screams, "plagiarism alert!"

Lesson learned. Now just need to wait for word that (spins the big wheel of Republican hot-shot names and gets ...) John McCain is writing a memoir to make that call.

via @joshuamneff

Don't do the crime if you can't do the time. Ex-President Edition.

ACLU Clamoring for Criminal Probe of Bush After Waterboarding Admission:

"In our system, no one is above the law or beyond its reach, not even a former president."

Actually, certain people are, especially in that administration. Also, it's not just the ACLU "clamoring," it's every single person who believes in the rule of law demanding accountability. He should have been impeached during his first (unelected) term. And then the criminal cases should have started.

It'll never happen though. There's no appetite in this country for justice. Obama will be impeached for being a Kenyan Muslim socialist liberal fascist illegal alien before Bush and Cheney are held accountable for making a fraudulent casus belli and every death resulting from that fraud.

George W. Bush doesn't get it. Never will.

George W. Bush Talks With Matt Lauer - TV Watch - NYTimes.com:

Mr. Bush ruefully acknowledged that he mishandled the Hurricane Katrina crisis, even writing a new script for his first trip to the disaster area. “I should have touched down in Baton Rouge, met with the governor, and, you know, walked out and said, ‘I hear you,’ ” he said. “And then got back on a flight up to Washington. I did not do that. And paid a price for it.”

If he thinks that was the problem with his administration's response to Katrina, and I take him at his word, then he remains incapable of understanding the concept of duty and unwilling or unable to practice critical thought. History's judgment will not change: worst President ever. That is, until Sarah Palin, or Rick Perry, or Mitt Romney, or Eric Cantor, or Marco Rubio are elected. He may not hold that title for long.

What he said ...

'Follow' anyday: @rudepundit

Never Forget -- Just Don't Lose Perspective

Zakaria: Why America Overreacted to 9/11 - Newsweek:

"I do not minimize Al Qaeda’s intentions, which are barbaric. I question its capabilities. In every recent conflict, the United States has been right about the evil intentions of its adversaries but massively exaggerated their strength. In the 1980s, we thought the Soviet Union was expanding its power and influence when it was on the verge of economic and political bankruptcy. In the 1990s, we were certain that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear arsenal. In fact, his factories could barely make soap."

So, It Would Be Cheney's Voice?

Coming to a Remainder Bin Near You!
"I'm going to put people in my place, so when the history of this administration is written at least there's an authoritarian voice saying exactly what happened." —former president George W. Bush, in Calgary yesterday, discussing the book he plans to write. [AP via Google]

Consensus Achieved

Bush's Amazing Achievement [NYRB]

One of the few foreign policy achievements of the Bush administration has been the creation of a near consensus among those who study international affairs, a shared view that stretches, however improbably, from Noam Chomsky to Brent Scowcroft, from the antiwar protesters on the streets of San Francisco to the well-upholstered office of former secretary of state James Baker. This new consensus holds that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a calamity, that the presidency of George W. Bush has reduced America's standing in the world and made the United States less, not more, secure, leaving its enemies emboldened and its friends alienated. Paid-up members of the nation's foreign policy establishment, those who have held some of the most senior offices in the land, speak in a language once confined to the T-shirts of placard-wielding demonstrators. They rail against deception and dishonesty, imperialism and corruption. The only dispute between them is over the size and depth of the hole into which Bush has led the country he pledged to serve.

Traitors

The right's explicit and candid rejection of "the rule of law"

'The rule of law has two defects, each of which suggests the need for one-man rule. That is what is on the Op-Ed page of The Wall St. Journal this morning. The article is then filled with one paragraph after the next paying homage to the need for a Great Leader who stomps on the rule of law when he chooses -- literally:

The best source of energy turns out to be the same as the best source of reason--one man. One man, or, to use Machiavelli's expression, uno solo, will be the greatest source of energy if he regards it as necessary to maintaining his own rule. Such a person will have the greatest incentive to be watchful, and to be both cruel and merciful in correct contrast and proportion. We are talking about Machiavelli's prince, the man whom in apparently unguarded moments he called a tyrant. . .
The president takes an oath "to execute the Office of President" of which only one function is to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." In addition, he is commander-in-chief of the military, makes treaties (with the Senate), and receives ambassadors. He has the power of pardon, a power with more than a whiff of prerogative for the sake of a public good that cannot be achieved, indeed that is endangered, by executing the laws. . . .
In quiet times the rule of law will come to the fore, and the executive can be weak. In stormy times, the rule of law may seem to require the prudence and force that law, or present law, cannot supply, and the executive must be strong.

In the course of explaining how the rule of law applies only in "quiet times," Mansfield also argues that "civil liberties are subject to circumstances," not inalienable, and that "in time of war the greater dangers may be to the majority from a minority." Thus, he explains -- in what might be my favorite sentence -- "A free government should show its respect for freedom even when it has to take it away."'
Link via GITM

Disturbing On So Many Levels

Daily Kos: ESPN FAKED STADIUM CHEERS FOR BUSH SR.

The Impolite Phrase is "Impeachable Offense"

Olbermann skewers W's shameful use of the 5th anniversary of 9/11 to continue spinning his indefensible war.

Worth keeping in mind: the 9/11 attacks happened on W's watch, not Clinton's; five years later Osama is still free; Ground Zero is still a hole in the ground; terrorism is not the biggest problem we face -- I'd feel much more secure if my tax dollars were being funneled into cancer research, fighting poverty, and improving our public schools than wasted on invasions and occupations; and yet W wants to stay the course, continue centralizing power, continue enlarging the federal government, continue shredding the Constitution, and maybe destroy Social Security if he can find the time.

This morning, Olbermann joined Dennis & Callahan's Axis of Terrorist Appeasing Evil. I want my apolitical sports radio back!!

Revisionism

W now admits Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11. After he answers the question, "what did Iraq have to do with the attack on the World Trade Center?" by blurting out what he's known all along, "Nothing," you can actually see the neuron fire right after it comes out triggering him to start dissembling and resume the smoke and mirrors dance to get back on the "Freedom Agenda" message.

Bring It On!

The W Stands for "Whateva!"
Also, stands for "yet."