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Via Crooks and Liars, here’s comedian Frank Caliendo on George W. Bush. It’s not deep, just funny.

Another pioneer of the civil rights movement is gone. Rest in peace, Coretta Scott King:

Coretta Scott King, who with grace and determination kept her husband’s legacy alive and emerged as one of America’s most influential voices for social change and human rights, died yesterday at an alternative medical clinic in Mexico. She was 78.

I don’t often agree with George W. Bush, but this time he’s absolutely right:

The only way to protect our people, the only way to secure the peace, the only way to control our destiny is by our leadership.

To call the Bush Administration’s record of leadership “dismal” would be to flatter. We need better.

Impeach Bush! He’s asking for it!

In George W. Bush’s America, on the night of the State of the Union address, only the president gets to exercise freedom of speech:

Peace activist Cindy Sheehan was arrested Tuesday in the House gallery after refusing to cover up a T-shirt bearing an anti-war slogan before President Bush’s State of the Union address.

“She was asked to cover it up. She did not,” said Sgt. Kimberly Schneider, U.S. Capitol Police spokeswoman, adding that Sheehan was arrested for unlawful conduct, a misdemeanor.

The charge carries a maximum penalty of one year in jail, Schneider said.

We all know that George W. Bush said FEMA Director Michael Brown did a “heckuva job” after Hurricane Katrina. An Interior Department report gives us a glimpse of what a heckuva job looks like:

Hundreds of federal search-and-rescue workers and large numbers of boats, aircraft and bulldozers were offered to FEMA in the hours immediately after Hurricane Katrina hit, but the aid proposals were either ignored or not effectively used, newly released documents show.

The Interior Department, which made the offers, also proposed dispatching as many as 400 of its law enforcement officers to provide security in Gulf Coast cities ravaged by flooding and looting. But nearly a month would pass before the Federal Emergency Management Agency put the officers to work, according to an Interior document obtained by The Washington Post.

…

Acting in the “immediate aftermath” of the hurricane, Interior officials provided FEMA with a comprehensive list of assets that were “immediately available for humanitarian and emergency assistance,” according to the memo, dated Nov. 7, 2005. Those assets included more than 300 boats, 11 aircraft, 119 pieces of heavy equipment, 300 dump trucks and other vehicles for clearing debris, as well as Interior-owned campgrounds and other land that could be used as staging areas or emergency shelters.

Also offered were rescue crews from the Fish and Wildlife Service and National Park Service, teams specially trained for urban search-and-rescue missions using flat-bottom boats.

“Clearly these assets and skills were precisely relevant to the post-Katrina environment,” the memo said. Yet, the rescue teams and boats were not considered in the federal government’s planning for hurricane disasters, the memo states.

There’s a rule called Hanlon’s Razor, which says, “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” But I don’t think the Bush Administration response to Katrina — or in many other cases where they’ve fumbled aid for non-wealthy Americans — can be adequately explained by stupidity. Incompetence, once again, is a cover story.

The Washington Post has a follow-up on Bush’s promises to “do what it takes” in the Gulf Coast after Katrina.

Twenty years ago today, the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after launch. The entire crew was killed: Dick Scobee, Michael Smith, Judith Resnick, Ellison Onizuka, Ronald McNair, Gregory Jarvis and Christa McAuliffe.

Former astronaut John Glenn, a U.S. Senator at the time, said what we were all thinking: that we always knew a day like this would come, but we always hoped it would not be this day.

This is a sad time of year for NASA. Yesterday, January 27, was the thirty-ninth anniversary of the Apollo 1 launchpad fire that killed Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee. Next Wednesday, February 1, is the third anniversary of the breakup on re-entry of shuttle Columbia, which killed Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, David Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark, and Ilan Ramon.

Our astronauts are truly the brightest and the best this country has to offer. The things that NASA tries to do are fundamentally difficult, and fundamentally risky. The astronauts are ready to face great risk in order to achieve great things, but they have no intention of throwing their lives away carelessly, and we must never expect them to do so.

Let’s remember the dead astronauts, and honor their memory in the only way that matters: by carrying on their important work with the utmost care for the lives of the living astronauts.

We always know that days like those will come. When the next tragedy comes, as it surely will, let it never be because we valued the lives of our best people too lightly.

Update: Via Slashdot, MSNBC has an eight-part article about the Challenger disaster, written by correspondent Jay Barbree.

Cartoonist Ruben Bolling is funny, but not in the same way as Ann Coulter.

He says, “You’ll be surprised to find out how helpful it is to have N.S.A. agents eavesdrop on your conversations,” he brings us Dick Cheney’s Philosophical Thought Experiment Legislation, and he compares Presidents Goofus and Gallant.

Unless you are a paid subscriber at Salon.com, you will need to click for a “site pass,” which requires you to watch an ad to gain full access to Salon content for one day.

What a kidder that Ann Coulter is:

Conservative commentator Ann Coulter, speaking at a traditionally black college, joked that Justice John Paul Stevens should be poisoned.

Coulter had told the Philander Smith College audience Thursday that more conservative justices were needed on the Supreme Court to change the current law on abortion.

Stevens is one of the court’s most liberal members.

“We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens’ creme brulee,” Coulter said. “That’s just a joke, for you in the media.”

Ann Coulter is a laugh riot. I’ll bet she cracks ’em up at airports, the White House and the Capitol building when she jokes about carrying a bomb, too. Man, that stuff never gets old. Any old liberal fuddy-duddy who doesn’t find Ann’s death threats funny just doesn’t have a sense of humor, and should probably be taken out and shot.

Just kidding. Heh.

A little dash of democracy will fix up everything, George W. Bush told us. Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne says it’s not that simple:

In two elections this week, voters tossed incumbents out of power. One election made barely a ripple internationally. The other broke like a tsunami over the entire world. The response to each vote should teach us the danger of pretending that elections alone can make democracy happen.

In Canada’s quiet election, Stephen Harper ended more than a decade of Liberal Party rule.…

In the elections for the Palestinian Authority, the voters also rose up against the incumbents. But in the process, they gave a majority to Hamas, a party that has embraced terrorism and would obliterate Israel.

…

From this tale of two elections, it’s possible to take the wrong lesson, which would be to walk away from America’s long if inconsistent quest to promote free elections and human rights. You don’t have to agree with Bush’s decisions to believe that an important goal of American foreign policy should be to expand the number of nations that live under democratic rule.

But since the invasion of Iraq, administration spokesmen and supporters have offered a utopian and decidedly unconservative view of how American power could be used to change the world — and quickly.

…

The polls suggest that Hamas did not win because a majority of Palestinians bought into its terrorist program. Hamas won, precisely as Bush said, because voters were so unhappy with the status quo. But shouldn’t Washington ask itself why it didn’t take more dramatic steps, over a much longer period, to change the Palestinian status quo? Taking action in Iraq was not going to do the job.

A working democracy north of our border requires a degree of hope for the future now lacking among Palestinians. The Bush administration once thought it could take a holiday from complexity and remake the world through a few bold strokes. But democratization is hard, complicated and frustrating. It requires the patient building of institutions and attention to detail. There are no short cuts. You wonder if the president will come to terms with the flaws in his own status quo.

Hamas’ victory isn’t good news. But this was the first chance at a real election in a long time for the Palestinians. I like to hope that self-government, all by itself, can help give people a sense of civic responsibility. It doesn’t happen in a single election. It grows slowly, as hope grows that voters can influence their own destiny.

Hope I’m right.

Via John Moltz, Digby comments on John Kerry’s announced plan to filibuster the Alito nomination, and on the reaction from many Democratic bloggers:

If we carp when our elected politicans take risks just as we carp when they don’t take risks, they have no motivation to listen to us at all.

Kerry and Kennedy stepped up today. They aren’t going down without a fight. This is worth doing and if we lose it, we should reward them and those who stood with them with our gratitude and support not another round of complaints about how they are a bunch of losers.

We have to fight to protect this country and the Constitution from the monarchists, even if we might get beat.

The U.S. Secretary of the Interior is supposed to protect the nation’s natural resources. But James Watt, Ronald Reagan’s first Secretary of the Interior, opposed virtually every effort at environmental protection. This is what he told the House Interior Committee in 1981:

That is the delicate balance the Secretary of the Interior must have: to be steward for the natural resources for this generation as well as future generations. I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns; whatever it is we have to manage with a skill to leave the resources needed for future generations.

His reassurances were lip service. However you might characterize Watt’s failure to protect our environment and natural resources, it wasn’t incompetence. Watt was a conscientious proponent of extraction, and an enemy of conservation. The environment was something to exploit, to bleed dry, never something to preserve and protect. He never had any interest or intention to defend our natural resources.

Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson makes some good points when he writes about Bush the Incompetent:

Incompetence is not one of the seven deadly sins, and it’s hardly the worst attribute that can be ascribed to George W. Bush. But it is this president’s defining attribute. Historians, looking back at the hash that his administration has made of his war in Iraq, his response to Hurricane Katrina and his Medicare drug plan, will have to grapple with how one president could so cosmically botch so many big things — particularly when most of them were the president’s own initiatives.

In numbing profusion, the newspapers are filled with litanies of screw-ups….

It’s the president’s prescription drug plan (Medicare Part D), though, that is his most mind-boggling failure. As was not the case in Iraq or with Katrina, it hasn’t had to overcome the opposition of man or nature. Pharmacists are not resisting the program; seniors are not planting car bombs to impede it (not yet, anyway). But in what must be an unforeseen development, people are trying to get their medications covered under the program. Apparently, this is a contingency for which the administration was not prepared, as it has been singularly unable to get its own program up and running.

Initially, Part D’s biggest glitch seemed to be the difficulty that seniors encountered in selecting a plan. But since Part D took effect on Jan. 1, the most acute problem has been the plan’s failure to cover the 6.2 million low-income seniors whose medications had been covered by Medicaid. On New Year’s Day, the new law shifted these people’s coverage to private insurers. And all hell broke loose.

…

No such problems attended the creation of Medicare itself in the mid-1960s. Then, a governmental agency simply assumed responsibility for seniors’ doctor and hospital visits. But, financially beholden to both the drug and insurance industries, the Bush administration and the Repsublican Congress mandated that millions of Americans have their coverage shifted to these most byzantine of bureaucracies.

This is, remember, the president’s signature domestic initiative, just as the Iraq war is his signature foreign initiative.

How could a president get these things so wrong? Incompetence may describe this presidency, but it doesn’t explain it. For that, historians may need to turn to the seven deadly sins: to greed, in understanding why Bush entrusted his new drug entitlement to a financial mainstay of modern Republicanism. To sloth, in understanding why Incurious George has repeatedly ignored the work of experts whose advice runs counter to his desires.

I think Meyerson is mistaken in attributing the Bush Administration’s many failures to incompetence. There’s plenty of that, too, I suppose. But over and over again, I find myself thinking, when the Administration drops the ball on helping people in need, that they never had any interest or intention to succeed. They are governed by a malign will that’s partly disguised by Bush’s stumbling “aw, shucks” public persona. Incompetence is a cover story.

“Bush the Incompetent?” That’s letting this Administration off too easy.

So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.

— Franklin D. Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address

Where, in our current dark hour, is leadership of frankness and vigor?

Conservatives didn’t have a very good opinion of Franklin Roosevelt back in 1933. They called him a “traitor to his class“. They’re still trying to dismantle the New Deal. And, as cartoonist Tom Tomorrow shows, they embrace fear.

The only thing they have to fear is the end of nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.

On January 20^th last year, George W. Bush put his left hand on a Bible, raised his right hand, and, repeating after Chief Justice Rehnquist, spoke the following words:

I, George Walker Bush, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God.

We know now that he didn’t mean it. By that time, he had already decided that Constitutional guarantees like search warrants and due process of law are outdated and meaningless in our present time of peril.

The presidential oath of office is specified in the obsolete Constitution itself, so Bush probably didn’t feel much of a twinge of conscience in just mouthing the words last January.

The Constitution was written quite a long time ago — more than two hundred years ago, in fact. As we’ve all learned from listening to countless memoirists, the past was a more innocent time. Two-hundred-plus years ago must have been a really, really innocent time. There’s no way the framers of the Constitution could have foreseen that a day would come when this country would confront bad people who want to hurt us. Bills of Rights, limited powers, judicial review, check and balances all may have made sense in the halcyon agrarian world of the Founders, but times have changed, and we understand the world so much better these days than the simple folk who wrote the Constitution ever could have. They never met Osama bin Laden, so they gave us a president, not a king. George W. Bush is fixing that, now, just as fast as he can.

Still, I can’t help wishing that the framers of the Constitution had been men with vision and foresight. I can’t help wishing they had understood the dynamics of power as well as — heck, even better than — we do now. I can’t help wishing they had written a Constitution that could stand the test of time — a Constitution that could withstand even the death of 3,000 civilians in a vile sneak attack by a murderous enemy. I even wish — do I dare even think it? — that they had given us a Constitution that could withstand a rotten power-grubbing president who wanted to be a king.

Cartoonist Mark Fiore says: Say goodbye to the good ol’ U.S. of A., and say hello to Greater Georgelandia.

L. Paul Bremer, formerly head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, was on The Daily Show last night:

Bremer: As you know, I did support the war. I supported the war because I’ve been involved in the fight on terrorism for twenty-five years now, and I was concerned that the new terrorists, the guys who showed their face here on 9/11, would get their hands on really bad stuff: nuclear, chemical or biological. And I think we need to be very concerned about that. I think that is the preeminent threat to American security.

Jon Stewart: I definitely think we’re still going on that problem. I feel that it would be nice, for once, if the debate we have in this country about our actions is the actual debate that’s going on, and not the one that was invented by the marketing guys.