If you've been living in a cave (or happen to be one of America's humorless Republicanists) the above video is a parody of this one.

As a side note, to those dead-ender Republicanists embarrassingly willing to display their desperation --- not to mention contempt for the first amendment --- with your fits of phony outrage over "General Betray Us," we'll join with Dick Cheney on this one by telling you to "go fuck yourselves."

Beyond that, we'll not be drawn into your quagmire of transparent attempts to hijack the real news, but will chose instead to move on to issues that actually matter. But nice try, losers!

George W. Bush did not --- I repeat, did not --- melt into a puddle of tears tonight on live television during his address on Iraq. It was stunning. I say it was a home run!

(NOTE: My pre-speech expectations may or may not have been lower than some of yours.)

Written "at the tail end of a 15-month deployment" in Iraq, seven U.S. service members filed a devastating opinion piece in the New York Times last August 19th, headlined "The War as We Saw It."

Their insightful, nuanced, and intelligent piece countered the simplistic "We're makin' progress!" message of the Administration, the Republicans, their Media Talking Heads, and General Petraeus. It began this way...

The troops on the ground concluded that "Four years into our occupation, we have failed on every promise," adding, "we have substituted Baath Party tyranny with a tyranny of Islamist, militia and criminal violence."

Yance T. Gray and Omar Mora of the 82nd Airborne Division, two of the service members who wrote the op/ed "at the tail end" of their 15-month deployment, were killed outside of Baghdad on Monday.

According to Editor & Publisher:

They are now, indeed, "heading back home."

Another of the seven, "Staff Sergeant Jeremy Murphy, an Army Ranger and reconnaissance team leader, was shot in the head while the article was being written. He was expected to survive after being flown to a military hospital in the United States."

(via A.J. Rossmiller at AMERICAblog)

Guest Blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review

During the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing today:

If the head of our military in Iraq doesn't know if the war there is making us safer, who does?

Guest Blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review

After months of hype, General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker testified before the House Armed Services Committee yesterday about the status of George W. Bush's war in Iraq. Although neither of Bush's men uttered the exact phrase, the essence of their testimony could be summed up in three little words: "Stay the course."

Republicans --- especially the half-dozen or so GOP senators facing election in unsafe seats next year --- will take comfort in Petreaus's promise to recommend ending the surge by next summer. But even if Petreaus recommends reducing deployments to pre-surge levels, and if Bush agrees to it, the only surprise will be that the surge strategy itself was not a false cover for a permanent troop build-up. (And that remains to be seen.)

The stark reality is that Bush's current Iraq policy draws heavily from the playbook of his predecessor from Texas, Lyndon Johnson. The Vietnam War decimated LBJ's presidency, forcing him to leave office with no resolution in sight. Just as LBJ left the mess he created for Nixon and Ford to clean up, now Bush intends to leave his war in Iraq to his successor. As Ken Pollack at Brookings put it: "Bush has found his exit strategy."

Nothing matters --- not the safety of the troops, the lives and well-being of Iraqis, the viability of the U.S. military, or, certainly, the anti-Iraq war sentiments of a majority of Americans --- none of it matters in the face of Bush's urgent desire to rewrite his epitaph so that it won't say the war he started based on deception, divisiveness, and rank ineptitude was lost on his watch.

This strategy is as flawed as it is cynical. Look again at Johnson. Handing Vietnam to Nixon did nothing to improve his legacy. What saved Johnson's reputation was the fact he signed the Civil Rights Act, plus his stoic leadership in the wake of the Kennedy assassination.

Bush has no accomplishments --- nothing --- to weigh against this disastrous war. And the fact that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of U.S. troops and innocent Iraqis will die for the impossible goal of salvaging his place in history just compounds his disgrace.

UPDATE FROM BRAD: The good Pokey Anderson sends us this toon, which meshes neatly with Jon's commentary above...

Plus...Liberal, terrorist-loving, America-hating, cut-and-run, surrenderer George Will says "the surge has failed"...

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Women serving in the military today are unlikely to share General Petraeus' rosy outlook given during his "Surge" testimony before Congress today. Because, as NOW on PBS reported last Friday, government compiled statistics show that nearly 1 in 4 active duty women in the military are victims of sexual assault. By contrast, during the much shorter first Gulf War, "about 15% of the women were raped."

The problem is compounded because many female soldiers fear the consequences of reporting such incidents. Also, little appears to happen when assaults are reported. According to the broadcast, there were 1,400 investigations of sexual assault last year which have resulted in only 72 court-martials.

Must hit the road for a bunch of hours today (Utah here we come! For a few hours, anyway.) so I'll leave you with the following press release from Zogby sent out this morning, with some interesting numbers concerning both 9/11 and Impeachment...

Blogged by Brad from Boulder, CO...

Must get off the grid today very shortly (and will be gone until after Labor Day), so not much time for comment here. Rather, I'll give you quick pointers to three superb editorials in today's papers as the voices of the good guys return to counter the charlatans and propagandists who've been dominating the media pages for far too long.

Please read on, for some heroic cries for accountability --- finally --- from the hopelessly compromised U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), Election Officials in general, and Sequoia Voting Systems in particular, all found in the op/ed pages today from Coast-to-Coast!...

Former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega, author of United States v. George W. Bush et al, sends us the following comments on the resignation of Alberto Gonzales...

Ditto. A fish rots from the head down.

UPDATE: One additional thought. Gonzales finally resigned once his potential impeachment by the Democrats seemed where all of this might be heading. We might suggest the same outcome --- resignation --- would be likely for George W. Bush and/or Dick Cheney, once they began to see impeachment as likely, giving them both the chance to claim they were being good guys by 'stepping aside for the good of the country.' What say we give them that out? Dems ought to reconsider their Constitutional duty of bringing accountability to the Executive Branch for the many demonstrated acts of High Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Guest-blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review

U.S. Attorney Gen. Alberto Gonzales has resigned.

Word of the resignation, which was submitted to George W. Bush last Friday has been leaked to the press, apparently by officials at Bush's vacation home in Texas:

In a series of congressional hearings earlier this year, Gonzales appeared to have perjured himself on multiple occasions. His dissembling and supposedly poor memory about his own actions related to the firing of nine U.S. attorneys and on other matters outraged members of Congress in both parties, some of whom were reportedly considering a move to impeach him this fall.

During a press conference earlier this month, Bush dismissed the idea of firing Gonzales, charging that Congress had found no wrong-doing. "Why would I hold someone accountable whose done nothing wrong?" Bush asked in response to a reporter's question.

Speaking of impeachment, early speculation suggests Bush might nominate DHS Sec. Michael Chertoff, a former judge, as Gonzales's replacement. Chertoff first achieved national notoriety by appearing on cable shows as a virulent anti-Clinton, pro-impeachment talking head in the 1990s. His chief qualification to be attorney general is his status as one of a very few loyal Bush cronies who has won Senate approval in the recent past and therefore could win approval now.

Another name in the mix earlier this year was that of former Bush solicitor general Ted Olson. Olson has even closer ties to the right-wing conspiracies a decade ago. A longtime friend of Clinton prosecutor Ken Starr, Olson served as the de facto chief operating officer of the Arkansas Project, a smear campaign against the Clintons that was funded by Pittsburgh millionaire Richard Melon Scaiffe and was operated out of the offices of the American Spectator magazine. Olson also successfully argued Bush v. Gore at the Supreme Court, for which he was rewarded with the post of solicitor general.

UPDATE: Joe Scarborough, former Republican Congressman turned MSNBC commentator, said of Gonzales moments ago on the cable news channel that Gonzales "has done a terrible job. His position was based on loyalty, not on competence."

"The question is," Scarborough said, "will this president have the courage to appoint someone [to replace him] based on integrity and competence, rather than loyalty."

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

This short preview clip from tomorrow night's NOW episode shows a former Iraq war medic who sought conscientious objector status after, among other incidents, witnessing an innocent Iraqi man killed for driving too close to a convoy: "We're unfortunately hurting people who are in the wrong place at the wrong time. This individual obviously had no intention of harming us. There was nothing in his vehicle that was found. Yet, someone doesn't have a father. So that's a memory that really stuck with me."

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review

When you hear the sound bites from George W. Bush's speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars today in which he compares his botched war in Iraq to the Vietnam war, think about what he was doing while thousands of U.S. soldiers were wounded and killed in the mud of Southeast Asia.

As is well known, rather than serving in Vietnam, George W. Bush spent the war years in a cushy assignment to the "Champagne Unit" of the Texas Air National Guard. There are witnesses from that era who say Bush's main preoccupations then were doing drugs, chasing women and driving drunk. There are also rumors he seriously damaged a fighter jet while taxiing it on a runway.

Conversely, no witnesses have ever been found who can verify that he completed his service with honor --- and there is circumstantial evidence that he did not. Around the time he was in the TNG, the Pentagon began requiring drug testing of all military pilots. The record indicates that Bush never submitted to a physical after the drug testing was required — and thus was never honorably discharged.

Today, in what may be his most astoundingly outrageous speech to date, Bush had the temerity to lecture the American people about lessons the country should have learned from Vietnam:

And:

Just when you think there is nowhere lower Bush can go to try to fool people into supporting his illegal and misbegotten war, he finds a way to make us even more disgusted with him, the people who work for him and their rank incompetence --- as well as with our leaders who insist on allowing him to remain in office.

Update: Flip-flop alert: In 2004, Bush bristled at comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam: "I think the analogy is false. I also happen to think that analogy sends the wrong message to our troops, and sends the wrong message to the enemy."

Update 2: The complete text of Bush's speech is here. The excerpt about Vietnam follows below the fold:

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

By Brad Friedman from St. Louis, MO...

ED NOTE: Story now updated with additional information and statement from Secretary of State Debra Bowen.

"ES&S sold nearly 1,000 voting machines in California without telling the counties that bought them that they had never been certified for use in this state," CA Secretary of State Debra Bowen announced in a statement released moments ago. (Complete statement now posted at end of article).

"Given that each machine costs about $5,000, it appears ES&S has taken $5 million out of the pockets of several California counties, that were simply trying to follow the law and equip their polling places with certified voting machines."

"Not only did ES&S sell machines to California counties that weren’t state certified, it’s clear the machines weren’t even federally certified when the company delivered them to California,” Bowen continued in the no-holds-barred statement. "While ES&S may not like California law, I expect the company to follow the law and not trample over it by selling uncertified voting equipment in this state."

She went on to add that she intends "to go after the company for the full $9.72 million in penalties allowable by law, along with the original $5 million the company took from counties’ pockets."

She ain't kidding! ES&S, the country's largest distributor of voting machines, looks to be in a lot of trouble in California.

Earlier we reported that a public notice from the CA Secretary of State's office was posted this morning by Thad Hall of CalTech announcing that the company "has violated" CA Elections Code by modifying "hundreds of units of a version of the AutoMARK ballot marking device" without certification or permission of the Secretary of State...

Blogged by Brad from St. Louis...

Finally! Someone in the mainstream media asks the question that's been answered long ago. At least to those paying attention.

Kudos to Steven Harmon of the MediaNews Sacramento Bureau for finally discussing it out loud in the several mainstream California media outlets that ran his excellent story over the weekend.

Please go read it.

And feel free to laugh out loud at the embarrassing comments by Steve Weir, Registrar of Voters for Contra Costa, CA, and President of the CA Association of Clerks and Elections (CACEO), when he says: "Is the relationship between clerks and vendors an indication of something?...Is it pervasive and nefarious? I don't see it."

Though in the next breath Weir says: "It's been a tight-knit community for years and years, and that relationship might have been too close." Oh, do ya think?

Then comes the following guffaw, courtesy of Sequoia's professional liar/damage control expert/document doctorer, Michelle Shafer, when she says: "There's nothing odd about our relations with our customers...We support conferences and educational events that election officials and staffs attend. Without this support and sponsorship, it would be very hard for these organizations to conduct conferences or have meaningful programming."

(Please note, Shafer is now also the lead lobbyist for the Electronic Technology Council (ETC), the desperate voting machine company trade group.)

Andrew Gumbel, author of Steal This Vote, gets it absolutely right in reply when he says: "[The voting machine companies] went about selling their machines by schmoozing people into believing this would be a great American solution...Now, after they bought into this, county registrars can't tell if the system doesn't work, because it suits them so well from a bureaucratic point of view. They spent a lot of money and don't want to admit they were wrong."

Bingo.