In another brief moment of clarity, Bush cited the reason, in his mind anywoay, for the mortgage debacle.  He blames Wall Street. The NYTimes reports:

 “Wall Street got drunk — that’s one reason I asked you to turn off your TV cameras,” the president said at the fund-raiser, held at a private home on Friday to benefit Pete Olson, the Republican who is challenging Representative Nick Lampson. “It got drunk, and now it’s got a hangover. The question is, How long will it sober up and not try to do all these fancy financial instruments?”

 Bush was at a political fundraiser for held at a private home on Friday to benefit Pete Olson, the Republican who is challenging Representative Nick Lampson.  The video tape "surfaced" from a amature video, then onto the local station in Houston (an ABC affiliate).  BBC World news broadcast it tonight, thus reinforcing the redneck nature of our current leadership.

A White House employee accidentally sent out an email titled "Iraqi PM backs Obama troop exit plan".  Ooops.  So much for the inexperienced Obama.  Especially since Bush himself has announce support for an Iraqi pullout on a schedule he’s calling a "general time horizon".  So much for not surprising the enemy with a withdrawal timetable.

According to Bloomberg,

Obama’s 16-month window is “the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes,'’ Maliki said in interview with Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine published on its Web site yesterday. U.S. troops should leave the country “as soon as possible,'’ Maliki said.

The McCain camp responded quickly and shamelessly tried to take credit for the whole situation.  Tucker Bounds, McCain spokesman (until he sticks his foot in his mouth, aka Phil Gramm) sent out an e-mail response statement:

The only reason that the conversation about reducing troop levels in Iraq is happening is because John McCain challenged the failed Rumsfeld strategy in Iraq and argued for the surge strategy that is responsible for the successes we’ve achieved and which Barack Obama opposed.

Shameless indeed. 

You hear this thrown around just about every day coming out of every pundit’s mouth, but what are the real numbers? First you need to know there are basically two types of public debt - public and intergovernmental.  Public debt is a mix of t-notes, savings bonds, t-bills, etc.  This is the debt that is owned by foreign countries.  Intergovernmental debt consists of medicare obligations, military retirements, the FDIC program, etc.  According to the Treasury Department as of May 2008, there was $5.3 trillion in public debt and $4.1 trillion in intergovernmental debt.

How much can we spend?  Congress sets the limit.  Congress just raised the debt ceiling in September of 2007 by $1 trillion dollars, raising it to $9.815 trillion from $8.965 trillion.  From the May 2008 numbers above you can see we quickly used our new credit limit.

To get an idea of who owns the public debt, let’s look at t-notes.  The US Treasury department released a report of major foreign holders of Treasury Securities.  As of May 2008, there were $2.6133 trillion dollars in outstanding Treasury Securities.   Here are the top 4 foreign owners by percentage:

1. Japan owns $578.7 billion, or 22.1%.
2. China owns $506.5 billion, or 19.4%. 
3. The United Kingdom owns $272.5 billion, or 10.4%. 
4. The next category is oil exporters that own $164.3 billion or 6.3%.  The oil exporters category includes Qatar, Oman, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, Bahrain, Indonesia, Venezuela, and Eqcuador.

Next time you are at a cocktail party, you can whip this out over a frozen margarita.

There is not much written about McCain’s first wife, Carol.  With good reason.  The story is a sickening example of a childish man stealing his buddy’s wife, then abandoning her, crippled and tattered, wife for a beauty queen beer heiress.   It sounds like a cruel political sound bite, but it is frightenly true.

Carol McCain gave the London mail an interview.  Here she tells of her car accident, recovery, and gaining weight all while McCain was a POW.  McCain returned from capture to cast Carol aside.  Carol says of the marriage:

My marriage ended because John McCain didn’t want to be 40, he wanted to be 25. You know that happens…it just does.

Carol McCain, strapped financially by the accident, has a clause in her divorce settlement barring her from being vocal about the terms of the separation.  Carol’s marriage to McCain was not her first.  She was married to an Annapolis classmate of McCain and had two children.  McCain felt it was sporting to lure her away and married her….only to dump her for the next heiress that came along.

With values like that, we should all hide our loot should McCain become president.

In an interview with Wolf Blitzer of CNN yesterday, Nancy Pelosi called Bush "a total failure". 

God bless him, bless his heart, president of the United States — a total failure, losing all credibility with the American people on the economy, on the war, on energy, you name the subject

Anybody born and raised in the south knows that "bless his heart" is polite code used to describe a person that just a bit pitiful.  As Pelosi speaks frankly about the leader of the free world (sigh), I look forward to the end of his reign as he limps pitifully, bess his heart, into the sunset.  Hopefully he will make it there without screwing anything else up.

No, this is not an April fool joke (the headline, not Bush).  George W. Bush, in his fruitless effort to make something of his presidency, is on the road trying to flex his foreign policy muscles.  Why just last week he invited former soviet states Kiev and Georgia to become NATO members.  He gave a singing endorsement that the US would not oppose such a membership, thereby pissing off the rest of NATO.

On it’s face it seems to be a nice little gesture, but as usual he speaks before he thinks.  No that the US has such a dastardly reputation, when you are invited to join NATO, you are invited to be occupied by the US.  The rest of NATO does not think it is a good idea.  If fact, George’s buddy, Putin (dictator of Russia), said if Kiev and Georgia become members of NATO and host the US, he will point his nukes at them (see CNN article).

The evil, fork-tongued Robert Novak of the Chicago Sun Times reported today:

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who has gone public with criticism of President Bush’s Iraq policy, is caustic in private about the proposed ‘’surge'’ of 30,000 additional U.S. troops.

Powell noted that the recent congressional delegation to Iraq headed by Sen. John McCain heard from combat officers that they wanted more troops.

‘’The colonels will always say they need more troops,'’ the retired general says. ‘’That’s why we have generals.'’

A footnote: Senior Republican senators are trying to get word to the president that any troop surge would be dead on arrival in Congress.

When the breeze blows another way, Novak is there with the wind in his face. 

As Bush gets his lilly-white, Texas ass spanked by the Iraqi insurgents, he has found himself within a rock and a hard place.  In an attempt to quell the Iraqi civil war, Bush must kiss the ring of the "axis of evil" leaders.  The BBC reported today that there is a much-rumoured leak that the US needs to engage with Iraqi neighbours Iran and Syria to enlist their support for ending the insurgency.

The Iraq Study Group (ISG) co-chair,James A. Baker, III, said last October (before the elections….):

(Baker) expected the panel would depart from Mr. Bush’s repeated calls to “stay the course,” and he strongly suggested that the White House enter direct talks with countries it had so far kept at arm’s length, including Iran and Syria.

“I believe in talking to your enemies,” he said in an interview on the ABC News program “This Week,” noting that he made 15 trips to Damascus, the Syrian capital, while serving Mr. Bush’s father as secretary of state.

“It’s got to be hard-nosed, it’s got to be determined,” Mr. Baker said. “You don’t give away anything, but in my view, it’s not appeasement to talk to your enemies.”

 Bush is not prepared to do the right thing.  He still insists that the US can win and that he has been chosen by God to lead the greatest country on earth.

Remember when Bush had to use a recess appointment to get the evil John Bolton appointed as the United Nations Ambassador?   You remember - the guy that bullied his underlings and generally treated folks like crap?

Bush used his presidential power to appointed Bolton in August 2005 while the Senate was in recess. With that sneaky move Bush was able to appoint Bolton without Congressional approval.  After that appointment on Boltons first day of work, he was boo’ed by the public on his way into his new office in New York.  If the people don’t approve, who gives a shit?

Friday Bush received Bolton’s resignation letter.  Bush said he was “deeply disappointed” that a “handful” of senators had blocked the appointment. 

A "handful"??!  That was last August.  After the November elections, Bolton knows there is much more than a "handful" to deal with so he does what Republicans do in the face of a real challenge - Bolton turns tail and runs.  Subpeona power can be intimidating.

First Rumsfeld, now Bolton.  This is the begin of the long, slow, slide of Bush down to the dredges of truth and humiliation.

I wonder if Barbara will bother to pollute her beautiful mind with all this angst generated from her offspring.

In a bold move by Matt Lauer of ABC’s Today Show, ABC has announced, before God and the world, that Iraq is in a "Civil War".  This break in the press from using terms such as "approaching Civil War" has had an orgasmic effect that has rippled through the press world.  Jaws are dropping across American and even across the pond.

Pundits across the nation are stunned, not only at the obviousness of the announcement,  but at their own abstinence in formally recognizing the true situation in Iraq.  It’s as if the scales have been lifted from their eyes.  Clarence Page of the Chicago tribute wrote:

With that (announcement by Matt Lauer), in my view, NBC showed a keen grasp of the obvious. A civil war is a fight between factions or regions within the same culture, society or nationality for political power or control of an area. Iraq appears to have fit that description for much of the past two years.

Welcome to the World of the Real. (Morphius, The Matrix, 1999). 

In rebuttle to the common sense of most Americans, Bush has stayed the course on his position that Iraq is not actually in Civil War, but the culprit behind it all is Al Qaeda.  In a press conference in Estonia on Monday, Bush has the following words of wisdom to offer on the subject:

No question, it’s tough.  No question about it. There’s a lot of sectarian violence taking place — fomented, in my opinion, because of these attacks by al-Qaeda, causing people to seek reprisal.

Sooner or later the Press will realize the jig is up.  Hopefully it’s sooner.