Maybe it started as a blunt commentary by Orange County denizens on the idea of publicly subsidized rail transit and other such hippie nonsense? But now it looks like a family-friendly butt fiesta which sells out the entire day’s trains.

This Saturday, June 12, all day. For those with a sense of daring-do, the “night mooning” session involves flashlights and coleman lanterns.

Mugs Away Saloon
27324 Camino Capistrano, #102
Laguna Niguel

It’s fascinating to watch Bush supporters try to deal with an admission of his deceit. So little personal agency ascribed to our once-decisive Leader. So many unseen forces at work.
Eugene Volokh on the initial CBS story:

(1) the allegation is about “the White House,” not “Bush,” and (2) the allegation is that the White House knew that the information “might not be true,” not that it was “false.”

I haven’t been following the uranium/Niger/Iraq/State-of-the-Union story closely, but I’m perfectly prepared to believe that there were serious intelligence screw-ups, stretches by government officials, or even intentional attempts to mislead people on some people’s part. Among other things, I’m perfectly prepared to believe that because that’s the way governments (or, for that matter, human beings) often operate. If this happened, then it’s bad, and it’s right that people should try to get to the bottom of things.

See there? It was the White House giving the State of the Union address, not the President. And even if it “”might not be true”, it was still just a wee error. Perhaps a “screw-up.” Might go so far as to call it a “stretch.” It certainly was not a deception with thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars on the line. It was rather just a gentile “attempt to mislead.” It wasn’t the most carefully studied speech in the world, but rather something vague done “on some people’s part.”

It’s almost like Volokh is describing George W Bush as some kind of expensive but poorly functioning puppet.

Imagine that.

Glenn Reynolds:

I probably should take these more seriously, just because the mainstream media are pretending to. But it’s hard to take it seriously when it looks like the same bogus crap from the same desperate people, who — as Randy Barnett notes here — want to blur the line between “mistakes” and “lies” in a way that they certainly never did during the Clinton Administration.

It’s partisan backstabbing, pure and simple, and it doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously.

Ah, yes. Bogus crap. Desperate people. Clinton….

mistake : lie
cum stain : nuclear weapons
blowjob : ongoing warfare and bloody reconstruction
potayto : potahto….

Besides, it’s not even worth taking seriously. There’s no reason to discuss it. Why talk about it at all? What is there to even talk about?? Let’s just not talk about it!!

Since Bush and Rice are now blaming pointedly mentioning George Tenet, I wonder if the CIA is going to agree that this is nothing serious and not worth talking about? [also Kos]. Maybe if everyone only talks about it in passive voice.

Something was done on someone’s part and people should get to the bottom of things. And it’s partisan bogus crap. Shhhhhh…

No seriously. What the fuck is going on?

The purpose of the three day secret conference in January 2000, which was monitored by Malaysian police at the CIA’s request, was to discuss details of how the hijackers should train and hide in the US and how the attacks should be carried out.

“This was the first planning meeting of the 9/11 operation. It was to review the progress they had achieved on the operation and to map out their future course of action,” Rohan Gunaratna, a leading expert on Osama bin Laden, said after appearing before the US commission investigating the attacks.

Agonist is treating this story as suspect, because it seems to imply that the CIA was aware of “Operation Holy Tuesday” almost two years in advance?

Lambert at Eshaton runs with this for a minute and speculates that if it were verifiable, the sudden admission of Bush “misspeaking” about uranium from Niger would be a strategy of hiding massively terrible news by publicizing some merely bad news. Of course the way things are going, this would be an incredibly stupid strategy.

All the Macintosh key sequences.
All of them.

(Apparently setting the date to 20 Sep 1989 on a IIci and booting with cmd-opt-c-i gets a graphical easter egg. Hot damn!)

[ via slorp ]

Yesterday’s Capital Hill Blue story with dramatic quotes of Bush demanding lies about Iraq has now been retracted. Apparently there is no “Terrance J. Wilkinson” and there never really was. However Doug Thomson, the publisher of Capital Hill Blue, claims that he knew someone who used that identity for nearly twenty years:

He said he had served in Vietnam with Army Special Force, worked for Air America, later for the FBI and as a consultant for the CIA. He said he had helped other Republican members of Congress I called some friends in other GOP offices and they said yes, they knew Terry Wilkinson.

“You can trust him, he’s one of the good guys,”  one chief of staff told me. When I left politics and returned to journalism, Wilkinson became a willing, but always unnamed, source.

But immediately after going on the record for the very first time — coincidentally with a dramatic insider quote exposing Bush — Terry’s phone and email stopped working. And then…

Then a friend from the Hill called.

“You’ve been had,” she said. “I know about this guy. He’s been around for years, claiming to have been in Special Forces, with the CIA, with NSA. He hasn’t worked for any of them and his name is not Terrance Wilkinson.”

(Why is it always GOP good guys who end up as the deceptive assholes?)

So since someone was apparently using an elaborate fake identity to pass along “inside” knowledge, it’s fair to call this a conspiracy of some kind. Taking it to the next level, who would possibly benefit when a negative source about Bush is dramatically proven fake? And what better way to make a story seem outlandish than to add a dash of spooky charade?

Follow-ups about the Talented Mr. Wilkinson would be fascinating — for example does the GOP chief of staff who called him a good guy still exist? What about this person on the Hill who “knows” him? It’s fun to wonder what was important enough to allegedly blow a twenty-year cover identity, even if it is just with a small-time website. It’s also fun to wonder if there are other “inside sources” out there who are actually sleepers, waiting for the right story to explode like journalism suicide bombers. Maybe Wilkinson will even resurface next week claiming that “They” are after him for revealing the truth. Very cinematic.

But I suspect any other information revealed about “Terry” would be just as circuitous and weird. Almost as weird as having your dad run the CIA. So as colorful as all the red herrings might prove to be, it’s probably best to let Terrance J. Wilkinson fade away into the shadows of the bogus intelligence community. The Bush posse has done plenty on their own.

New York Times:

“It’s very easy to pick one little flaw here or one little flaw there,” said Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, the second-ranking Republican leader in the House of Representatives. “The overall reason we went into Iraq was sound and morally sound. And it’s not just because somebody forged or a made a mistake on whether Saddam Hussein was looking for nuclear material from Niger or whatever.”

Or whatever.

Washington Post:

Whatever the case, the argument that it is a good thing that Hussein is gone and the argument that the Bush administration may have lied to or misled the public on the issue of weapons of mass destruction are not mutually exclusive. Both could be true. And if they are, the former fact won’t exonerate the president if the latter is true as well.

[ via eshaton ]

Show the sad boy in eye shadow who’s boss with a serious game of strip rock-paper-scissors.
(also with new ro boy)

Or maybe try to dodge the dildo storm.

Or play catch-the-hearts, suspiciously similar to the old Popeye game, sans Olive.

Hello sailor!

CNN:

“This may be the first time in recent history that a president knowingly misled the American people during the State of Union address,” Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe said.

“Either President Bush knowingly used false information in his State of the Union address or senior administration officials allowed the use of that information,” McAuliffe said. “This was not a mistake. It was no oversight and it was no error.”

Free Republic:

If Bush lied, well at least he toppled one of the world’s first class jerks in the process, and isn’t that what we wanted? A president with better reasons to bomb other countries than covering up Oval Office sodomy?

Sounds like a snappy campaign slogan.

Update
Eshaton, TAPPED, and Talking Points Memo who also posted a transcript of Ari Fleisher’s initial incoherent game of dodge ball.

Washington Post:

The Bush administration acknowledged for the first time yesterday that President Bush should not have alleged in his State of the Union address in January that Iraq had sought to buy uranium in Africa to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program.

New York Times:

Asked about the accuracy of the president’s statement this morning, Mr. Fleischer said, “We see nothing that would dissuade us from the president’s broader statement.” But when pressed, he said he would clarify the issue later today.

Tonight, after Air Force One had departed, White House officials issued a statement in Mr. Fleischer’s name that made clear that they no longer stood behind Mr. Bush’s statement.

Update
Capitol Hill Blue:

An intelligence consultant who was present at two White House briefings where the uranium report was discussed confirmed that the President was told the intelligence was questionable and that his national security advisors urged him not to include the claim in his State of the Union address.

“The report had already been discredited,” said Terrance J. Wilkinson, a CIA advisor present at two White House briefings. “This point was clearly made when the President was in the room during at least two of the briefings.”

Bush’s response was anger, Wilkinson said.

“He said that if the current operatives working for the CIA couldn’t prove the story was true, then the agency had better find some who could,” Wilkinson said. “He said he knew the story was true and so would the world after American troops secured the country.”

** story retracted **
Terrence J Wilkinson ceases to exist…

[ via Daily Kos + retraction ]

Also CalPundit who suggests Yellowcake-Gate.

On June 25th, the RIAA announced it would start suing individual music sharers. After a brief drop, file sharing has gone up 10% and the major file sharing networks are forming a trade association to help defend users and lobby for legal rights. The legal threats have even turned file sharing into a noble cause.

This current generation of sharing systems — decentralized and totally legal — are themselves a result of obliterating the more centralized and easily controlled Napster. Such selflessness! Rather than capitalize on downloads by offering cheap and abundant content over Napster while it was the one system everyone was using, the major media companies have been furiously driving innovation towards ever more anonymous and diffuse networking.

Gotta hand it to the RIAA. They’ve probably done more to nurture the digital transfer of free music than any other cultural force.