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Ron Reagan, who supports stem cell research, put forth a really whacky idea on The Colbert Report:

Most scientists who are working this field will tell you that embryonic stem cell research is the way to go, and I tend to trust people who know what they’re talking about.

That’s never gonna fly in the modern Republican Party.

Reagan: President Bush does seem to like the idea of pretending to be someone else, and that somebody else seems to be my father.

Colbert: Isn’t the president, in some ways, all of our fathers? And he’s driving us to freedom, and we’re in the back seat, and he’s saying, “Shut up and let me drive!”

Democracy is for Iraqis. We’re just not ready for it here.

Via Boing Boing: Chirag Mehta visually maps out “the popularity, frequency, and trends in the usages of words within speeches, official documents, declarations, and letters written by the Presidents of the US between 1776 – 2006 AD.” The results are enlightening and sometimes — but not always –surprising.

A government auditor in Iraq will have to close up shop:

Investigations led by a Republican lawyer named Stuart W. Bowen Jr. in Iraq have sent American occupation officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy charges, exposed disastrously poor construction work by well-connected companies like Halliburton and Parsons, and discovered that the military did not properly track hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces.

And tucked away in a huge military authorization bill that President Bush signed two weeks ago is what some of Mr. Bowen’s supporters believe is his reward for repeatedly embarrassing the administration: a pink slip.

The order comes in the form of an obscure provision that terminates his federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, on Oct. 1, 2007. The clause was inserted by the Republican side of the House Armed Services Committee over the objections of Democratic counterparts during a closed-door conference, and it has generated surprise and some outrage among lawmakers who say they had no idea it was in the final legislation.

What an oversight! Somehow, a tiny bit of oversight got into Iraq. Well, nobody is allowed to shed light on this administration’s handling of Iraq. Not Congress, not an auditor, not anybody.

See, the kind of tyranny the Bush administration is trying to establish is very delicate. It can’t flourish in the light.