Dixie Chicks, Bush Relents, Iraq No Nukes, Haditha, Bush Bite Hand That Feeds Him and Homeland Security?

Despite the right's best efforts at putting the kibosh on their new album, it opened number one with 525,829 copies sold.

Three cute girls showing the world they have what it takes, by handing the blow-hard, testicularly-challenged right's butts back to them on a plate.

Democrat leaders could learn a lot from the Dixie Chicks, but unlike the Chicks, they're a gutless bunch of suck-ups.

Back home, the Chicks were denounced as traitors on right-wing talk radio.
Country music deejays, apparently seeing jingoism as a good career move, not
only denounced the Chicks but refused to play their music. Some said they were
just responding to listeners who threatened to boycott stations that dared to
broadcast the Dixie Chicks' sweet harmonies.

Conservatives may not keep all their promises, but they kept this one. With the
approach of the late May release date for Taking The Long Way, the group's first
album since Maines spoke up in London, the trashing began. At an Academy of
Country Music awards ceremony in March, singer Reba McEntire read a scripted
line about how she could host the event because, "[If] the Dixie Chicks can sing
with their foot in their mouth, then I can do anything!" Rush Limbaugh, Hannity
and the rest of the right-wing ranters picked up the chorus and, by the time of
the CDs finally hit the stores the official line was that the Chicks were
finished as major stars. Country fans would abandon them. Country radio would
not play unapologetic tracks such as the single "Not Ready to Make Nice."
Congressman Kingston --who, it should be said, maintains the most entertaining
offical blog of anyone in Washington--used his "Jack's Blog" to muse that Maines
and her compatriots made a big mistake when they started talking politics.

In a rare case of George Bush not getting his way, the U.S. has joined with five other world powers to offer Iran an incentives package to toe the nuclear line. Now if Bush will just toe the line, we may be saved even more embarrassment for our country.

Diplomats feared Iran would immediately reject any invitation to bargain if
the threat of sanctions was explicit, officials involved in the discussions said
on condition of anonymity because the seven-party negotiations were
private.

The foreign ministers' statement threatens unspecified "further steps"
in the Security Council.

The group's statement also contained no details of the incentives to be
offered to Iran in the coming days. Diplomats previously have said the package
includes help developing legitimate nuclear power plants and various economic
benefits.

According to the head of the IAEA all this is much ado about nothing, because Iran is nowhere close to having nuclear weapons capability. Remember when we went though this same crap with Iraq?

IRAN does not pose an immediate nuclear threat and the world must act
cautiously to avoid repeating mistakes made with Iraq and North Korea, the head
of the UN nuclear watchdog agency said yesterday.

"Our assessment is that there is no immediate threat," the winner of the
2005 Nobel Peace Prize told a forum organised by the Monterey Institute of
International Studies.

Investigators are going to exhume the bodies of the civilians killed in Haditha. We have to do a thorough job on this investigation if we are going to maintain any credibility in the world.

A source close to the inquiry said Naval Criminal Investigative Service
officials have interviewed families of the dead several times and have visited
the homes where the shootings allegedly occurred to collect as much evidence as
possible. Exhuming the bodies could help investigators determine the distance at
which shots were fired, the caliber of the bullets and the angles of the shots,
possibly crucial details in determining how events unfolded and who might have
been involved.

Over at The Nation, the editors agree that this investigation has to be the real deal, if for no other reason than to see how things got this far out of control.

What happened in Haditha and how it was covered up is only half the story. The
rest is yet to unfold: whether Haditha kindles a long-overdue reckoning with the
moral catastrophe of this war or the shock gets defused by low-level
Congressional inquiries; whether Haditha turns out to have been the low point of
the US military venture in Iraq or a foreshadowing of worse to come. What we
need is not the "picture of what happened" promised by the White House but a
full-scale investigation both of the massacre in Haditha and of the climate of
impunity that allowed it to happen and to be ignored for so long.

Of course the chickenhawks on the right see all this as a way for the left to make the troops look bad.

BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! We came, we saw, we whipped ass.
Trying to tar and feather
the entire military based on the alleged misdeeds of a tiny handful of soldiers
is too little, too late. I’d give both my legs to see these dipshits just once -
JUST ONCE - be as concerned about violent crime in my own Goddam
neighborhood.
Just another load of hot air (pardon the pun) from a bunch of
mad, desperate libs who are desperate as hell to claw out anything resembling a
victory in ‘06.
If anything they’re mad as hell that Afghanistan and Iraq are
now Democracies - because that means it blows the moral paradigm they built
around Viet Nam COMPLETELY THE F*CK OUT OF THE WATER and now the spineless
bastards can’t look at themselves in the mirror or sleep well at night.

It's a confused bunch over on the right.



Bush told a business group that that "unscrupulous" employers have contributed to the illegal immigration by hiring illegals. He's right. But it's hard to take him seriously, considering that his immigration plan is nothing more than a way to supply business with cheap labor so they won't have to pay living wages to Americans.

President Bush told the nation's most prominent business group yesterday that
"unscrupulous" employers have contributed to the illegal immigration crisis in
the United States by knowingly hiring undocumented workers, and called for steep
new penalties on those exploiting the shadow economy.

These guys are just flat out too stupid to govern. The nation's capitol and largest city are no longer considered to be major potential terrorist targets. This expert opinion comes from the same Bush Administration that has created enough terrorists over the last three years to become Al Queda's wet dream.

The Department of Homeland Security has ranked the District in a low-risk
category of terrorist attack or catastrophe, putting it in the bottom 25 percent
of U.S. states and territories, as part of a decision that will cost the city
millions in anti-terror funds, according to city and federal officials.

The news came as irate officials from New York and Washington demanded
explanations for why the department slashed funds in a separate urban
anti-terrorism program by 40 percent for the metropolitan areas hit hardest by
the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.