MAYBE BUSH WANTS TO MAKE IT UP TO DEMOCRATS FOR BEING SUCH A DICK FOR 6 YEARS. HE JUST HANDED THEM A WINNING ISSUE

As I was driving home from a great lunch at the Jade Cafe, a delicious and healthy raw food restaurant in Silverlake, I turned on KCRW just as the NPR news started. The first story, not unexpected, was about Frist's transparent attempt to head off the near-universal furor enveloping the Bush Regime's grotesque (and politically tone-deaf) decision to sell operations at 6 American ports-- including New York, Philly and Baltimore-- to a company owned by the despotic and reactionary royal family of Dubai (with whom the Bush family has intimate financial relations). The deal itself is so bizarre and weird, it's almost as though Bush were saying to Congress, "Just try to impeach me if you dare, you wimps!"

Yesterday I wrote a story about how posturing Republicans-- particularly Palm Beach drama-queen Mark Foley (R-FL) and right-wing loons Tom Corburn (R-OK) and Vito Fossella (R-NY)-- went screaming to the media about the horror, the horror. And I predicted that when push came to shove, they would back off rather than the support the bill Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and Bob Menendez (D-NJ) were offering to derail Bush's invitation to terrorists and his blatant war profiteering (it runs in his family). The Repugs always make noises like this when Bush tries to wreck the Constitution and endanger the country, but once Cheney and Rove threaten them, they always fold with a whimper and slink off into the night.

But maybe I was premature. the furor is so loud and so deafening, and Bush is so utterly distrusted by Americans at this point, that the Republicans, with their backs against the wall, may actually have to take a stand. I figured Bush would work out some compromise and then save face by saying the committee that approved this was out of their gourds (although the committee approved it at the insistence of the Bush Regime, of course).

But the next story on the NPR news report was about how Bush is holding firm and threatening a veto it the Clinton-Menendez bill or a copycat Frist bill tries to derail his dangerous and unpopular decision. A veto? I figured no one ever told him what that was. He's never issued one before-- despite the most corrupt and over-spending Congress in the history of America. What an odd thing to use his first veto on-- particularly since any congressman who votes to sustain his veto would probably be signing his own political death certificate. Is Karl Rove lost in a sewer somewhere? This is the worst domestic political blunder this crew of Mayberry Machievellis has ever made. It makes the ill-fated nomination of Harriet Miers look like a stroke of brilliance.

This seems to be generating as much outrage against the Bush Regime as the cavalier way Bush reacted to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. And, on top of the widespread outrage over something as relatively innocuous as the Cheney shooting spree (which has caught the public's imagination in a way that all the corruption, incompetence and venality hasn't), this actually is starting to look like curtains for the power of the tottering and desperate Bush Regime.


AFTERNOON UPDATE: BUSH CRONIES MUST LEARN NEW TAP DANCING STEPS FOR THIS ONE!!

Even that grotesque slug of a Speaker of the House, the Illinois Republican blob Denny Hastert, humself being investigated for taking bribes from Turkey, has asked Bush to place "an immediate moratorium" on the Regime's seaport deal. This is unprecedented for Hastert who has previously never seen a deal that screwed America that he didn't rush to embrace the way a hungry hog rushes to a trough. Meanwhile New York's right-wing newspaper, THE DAILY NEWS, is running a front page story that claims "The Dubai firm that won Bush administration backing to run six U.S. ports has at least two ties to the White House," one of whom is... Treasury secretary John Snow!! The other is a venal Bush crony, David Sanborn.

As the Bush Regime gears up for the counter-attack to preserve their ports deal, I suggest you read "Port of Entry" by former Reagan Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy, Frank Gaffney, Jr. He makes a very water-tight, iron-clad case for why the righteous indignation of the American people is completely on the mark about this absurd and dangerous deal Bush made with the Dubai. "How would you feel if, in the aftermath of 9/11, the U.S. government had decided to contract out airport security to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the country where most of the operational planning and financing of the attacks occurred?  My guess is you, like most Americans, would think it a lunatic idea, one that could clear the way for still more terror in this country.  You probably would want to know who on earth approved such a plan -- and be determined to prevent it from happening. Of course, no such thing occurred after September 11, 2001 .  In fact, the job of keeping our planes and the flying public secure was deemed to be so important that the government itself took it over from private contractors seen as insufficiently rigorous in executing that responsibility. Now, however, four-and-a-half years later, a secretive government committee has decided to turn over the management of six of the Nation's most important ports -- in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Miami, Baltimore and New Orleans -- to Dubai Ports World following the UAE company's purchase of London-based Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co., which previously had the contract."

When CNN's Jack Cafferty was on their morning show playing the role of old right-wing curmudgeon, I used to occasionally write in to the station demanding they fire him for parroting Bush Regime lies and propaganda. I guess they showed him my e-mails and told him to either shape up or ship out. In the last few months Cafferty has indeed shaped up-- big time. And today he went bonkers on BushCo for this outrageous ports nonsense. Actually, he's been going on about it all day but he just did one of his rantin' and ravin' things with straight-man Wolf Blitzer that is classic and nearly a NETWORK "Mad as Hell" moment.

"Wolf, this may be the straw that finally breaks the camel's back, this deal to sell 6 U.S. ports to a company controlled by the United Arab Emirates. There are now actually senators and congressmen and governors and mayors telling the White House 'You're not gonna do this.' And it's about time! No one has said "no" to this administration on anything that matters in a very long time. Well, this matters. It matters a lot. If this deal is allowed to go through, we deserve whatever we get. A country with ties to terrorists will have a presence at 6 critical doorways to our country. And if anyone thinks
that the terrorists, in time, won't figure out how to exploit that, then we're all done. Nothing's happened yet, mind you, but if our elected representatives don't do everything in their power to stop this thing, each of us should vow to work tirelessly to see that they are removed from public office. We're at a crossroads. Which way will we choose?"


WEDNESDAY MORNING UPDATE: BUSH INCREASINGLY ON A LIMB OVER DUBAI DEAL

With Rove lost in a sewer somewhere, Bush is waging the battle to make sure the lucrative (for him and his family and cronies) U.S.-ports-to-Dubai deal goes through. But he's really, really stupid and without Rove (aka- Bush's Brain, remember?), all he does is botch it up worse and worse. First he claimed that the deal-- increasingly under attack from the both political parties, congressmen, senators, governors, state legislators, mayors, as well as from the media and from concerned Americans-- had gone through a process of "rigorous review... for national security concerns." Turns out that was a another bold-faced lie and Bush was contradicted by no-less than his Secretary of Defense (who would be in charge of such a review), Donald Rumsfeld. Judd at Think Progress has the details, which include an answer from Rummy to the question about whether or not he is confident that there are no security problems inherent with this cockamamie deal: "I am reluctant to make judgments based on the minimal amount of information I have because I just heard about this over the weekend." Oh? And that leads to an even more serious problem.

The law of the land-- another one utterly disregarded by George "I am the Law" Bush-- states plainly that this kind of transaction requires a 45-day investigation. Well, that never happened either, as Bush rushed this through for his own and his cronies' own financial benefit. Again, Judd at Think Progress has put it all together for us.