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Rolling Stone takes a look at the Worst Congress Ever:

But the 109th Congress is no mild departure from the norm, no slight deviation in an already-underwhelming history. No, this is nothing less than a historic shift in how our democracy is run. The Republicans who control this Congress are revolutionaries, and they have brought their revolutionary vision for the House and Senate quite unpleasantly to fruition. In the past six years they have castrated the political minority, abdicated their oversight responsibilities mandated by the Constitution, enacted a conscious policy of massive borrowing and unrestrained spending, and installed a host of semipermanent mechanisms for transferring legislative power to commercial interests. They aimed far lower than any other Congress has ever aimed, and they nailed their target.

“The 109th Congress is so bad that it makes you wonder if democracy is a failed experiment,” says Jonathan Turley, a noted constitutional scholar and the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington Law School. “I think that if the Framers went to Capitol Hill today, it would shake their confidence in the system they created. Congress has become an exercise of raw power with no principles — and in that environment corruption has flourished. The Republicans in Congress decided from the outset that their future would be inextricably tied to George Bush and his policies. It has become this sad session of members sitting down and drinking Kool-Aid delivered by Karl Rove. Congress became a mere extension of the White House.”

Unfortunately, the article is loaded with vicious characterizations of some Republicans that undermine its well-documented central point. House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner is called a “legendary Republican monster” and “an ever-sweating, fat-fingered beast” — not the kind of language that gives a fair-minded reader confidence. It’s important to give the reader confidence, because so much of the truth about this Congress defies belief:

Last year, Sensenbrenner became apoplectic when Democrats who wanted to hold a hearing on the Patriot Act invoked a little-known rule that required him to let them have one.

“Naturally, he scheduled it for something like 9 a.m. on a Friday when Congress wasn’t in session, hoping that no one would show,” recalls a Democratic staffer who attended the hearing. “But we got a pretty good turnout anyway.”

Sensenbrenner kept trying to gavel the hearing to a close, but Democrats again pointed to the rules, which said they had a certain amount of time to examine their witnesses. When they refused to stop the proceedings, the chairman did something unprecedented: He simply picked up his gavel and walked out.

“He was like a kid at the playground,” the staffer says. And just in case anyone missed the point, Sensenbrenner shut off the lights and cut the microphones on his way out of the room.

Or this story about House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas:

The lowlight of his reign took place just before midnight on July 17th, 2003, when Thomas dumped a “substitute” pension bill on Democrats — one that they had never read — and informed them they would be voting on it the next morning. Infuriated, Democrats stalled by demanding that the bill be read out line by line while they recessed to a side room to confer. But Thomas wanted to move forward — so he called the Capitol police to evict the Democrats.

These excerpts only scratch the surface. Read the whole article. Grit your teeth through the irrelevancies and the Nixon-strength expletives peppered throughout. It’s not hard to sort fact from opinion in this piece, although a better editor would have weeded out the stuff that sheds no light. There’s plenty of fact here, and voters should know about it.

Good job, bad job, it’s all relative. When George W. Bush told Michael Brown he was doing a “heckuva job” after Hurricane Katrina, he wasn’t wrong, from his own perspective. When you’re as horribly, mind-numbingly incompetent as Bush, mere terrible incompetence looks like dazzling success.

Brownie does a “heckuva job,” and Bushie leaves “a helluva mess“:

Former Secretary of State James Baker, one of the most ardent Bush family loyalists, is heading up a commission to review our policy in Iraq. According to the BBC, Baker was “visibly upset” during a recent visit to Iraq, calling the country “a helluva mess.”

But Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld insist we’re making progress. There are many ways to measure progress. This chart, from Think Progress, shows one of them:

In Sept. 2003, President Bush promised that he would help Iraqis “restore basic services, such as electricity and water, and to build new schools, roads, and medical clinics. This effort is essential to the stability of those nations, and therefore, to our own security.”

But three years later, electricity levels in Baghdad are at an all-time low. Residents of Baghdad are receiving just 2.4 hours of electricity this month, compared to an average of 16-24 hours of electricity before the U.S. invasion.

We can hope that when Baker’s Iraq Study Group gives its recommendations — after the elections, of course — that our policies in Iraq will finally change in ways that help the Iraqi people and salvage America’s wrecked reputation all around the world.

Sure, Bush has never shown a willingness to heed good advice. He doesn’t want advice even from his own father. But this time — after the election, when the voters no longer have the power to object — this time will be different, right?

I see this photo from the signing of the Constitution Repeal Act of 2006 (via Attaturk), and I can’t help thinking of a song:

Bad boys
Bad boys
Whatcha gonna do?
Whatcha gonna do
When they come for you?

If Democrats win this election, it’s time to come after these bad boys.

If we lose, they’re certainly going to be coming for us.

Words of wisdom from Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders:

[Y]eah, we all want to be perfect, but first we just have to suck less…

The compulsion to be perfect, immediately and eternally, is one of the most profound causes of procrastination for the garden-variety human, and it most certainly gives each of us all the reason we’ll ever need not to even try.

“Not even trying” is a huge time-saver, believe me.

Some people believe that elections were stolen in Florida in 2000 and in Ohio in 2004, through malicious mischief by those states’ secretaries of state — the officials responsible for running elections. Many voters worry about the potential for stolen elections this year, too. I’ve said the cure for this worry is to win big: it’s much easier to steal a very close election than a blow-out. Given the record of the Republicans in recent years, most races shouldn’t be close at all.

It turns out some Republicans here in Ohio have thought about that, and have a plan B:

Voters in Ohio can be forgiven if they feel they have been beamed out of the Midwest and dropped into a third-world autocracy. The latest news from the state’s governor’s race is that the Republican nominee, Kenneth Blackwell, who is also the Ohio secretary of state, could rule that his opponent is ineligible to run because of a technicality. We’d like to think that his office would not ultimately do that, or that if it did, such a ruling would not be allowed to stand. But the mere fact that an elected official and political candidate has the authority to toss his opponent out of a race is further evidence of a serious flaw in our democracy.

Ted Strickland, the Democratic nominee, is leading Mr. Blackwell by as much as 28 points, according to one recent poll. In their panic, some Blackwell supporters have hit on the idea of trying to prevent the election from occurring. One of them filed a complaint alleging that Mr. Strickland, who is a member of Congress, does not live in the apartment where he is registered to vote.

A few years ago, I would have laughed this off. Now, I can’t. I’m convinced there’s nothing these guys wouldn’t do.

From CNN:

President Bush personally assured Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki Monday that he has no plans to pull troops out…

Al-Maliki took no comfort from Bush’s attempt at reassurance. Bush had no plans for post-invasion Iraq, either, and we all know how that worked out.

Unstructured play is vital for children, the American Academy of Pediatrics recently reported.

Aaron Swartz may have uncovered why play is important:

There’s an interesting little experiment you can do. If you have a classroom of kids and you give them a bunch of tasks they can work on of varying difficulty, the kids will pick the tasks that are just outside their level, that stretch them to do a little bit more. (This is, of course, if they aren’t getting graded on this. If they’re getting graded, they’ll always pick the easy ones.)

When I first heard about this experiment, I just assumed it was because they were good kids. But now I think there’s a different explanation. It’s because doing this is fun.

Children are built to grow — they want to stretch and learn. Is it possible that our current relentless focus on testing is exactly the wrong prescription for real education?

From MSNBC’s Countdown, Keith Olbermann talks to Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, a Navy lawyer forced out because he did his job too well. He was assigned by his superiors to provide legal representation to one of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Apparently he was supposed to lose his case.

“All I ever wanted was to make a difference — and in that sense I think my career and personal satisfaction has been beyond my dreams,” Swift said [in a newspaper interview].

In the Olbermann interview, Swift paraphrases Thomas Paine, who wrote:

He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

Thomas Paine also said this:

Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.

For too long, we’ve relied on men and women in uniform to secure liberty for us. But “these are the times that try men’s souls.” Now it’s time for the rest of us to step up and take our share of the burden, and to defend our rights and our Constitution from those who would despoil and defile them.

I’m expecting gasoline prices to rise after election day. I’ve predicted five-dollar gas by the end of the Bush-Cheney administration. But maybe I’m not sufficiently pessimistic:

Those falling prices at the gasoline pump may only be temporary. Indeed, they could signal the start of an era in which, forecasters say, “the death of cheap, abundant crude might unleash war and plunge the world into a second Great Depression.”

“Peak oil is a reality,” says Willem Kadijk, a hedge fund adviser quoted by Bloomberg Markets magazine. He is just one of many who believe that global oil production is now at or near its peak, and the only place to go is down.

“Once the flow crests and starts to decline, and some geologists say it already has, oil will no longer be able to slake the world’s growing thirst for energy,” Deepak Gopinath writes in summarizing the argument. “The result will be the oil shock to end all oil shocks.”

The price of a barrel of crude oil, which closed yesterday at $58.68, “will spiral to $200 — and keep rising,” he writes.

That “boom” you hear is not the economy.

Bob Geiger has another batch of political cartoons.

You know, I keep linking to anti-Bush cartoons. Maybe I should broaden my horizons.

Here are some cartoons by Bob Lang. Gee, he really nails the Dems with that “Uh, national what?” cartoon, doesn’t he?

Mallard Fillmore is always a laugh riot.

Gary Varvel says it’s all good news for the GOP until Foley came along.

Democrats forgot what they were supposed to remember, says Jim Huber.

Colin T. Hayes has a strip called “The Leftersons.”

Paul Nowak has some more traditional-style political cartoons.

From Thinking Liberal:

Republicans are the party of family values.

They’re the party that protects the sanctity of marriage. Their morality is stronger than their opposition.

So say the Republicans. But the statistics say differently.

Of the top 15 states for divorce rates in 2005, all 15 voted for Bush in 2004. All fifteen.

Of the 12 lowest states for divorce rates, 10 voted for Kerry.

Massachusetts, where gay marriage is allowed (and where, according to Republicans, civilization would fall apart), has the lowest divorce rate in the country.

No, no, no… you’ve misunderstood. The Republicans are the party of Corleone Family values.

There were clues, people. There were clues.

Take the White House web page announcing Bush’s final ultimatum before he launched the Iraq war. I looked at it several times before I noticed the graphic logo.

They told us just what they were doing, and we missed it.

Although, to be fair, they started with deception and later moved to denial.

In December 2004, when a national guardsman asked why the troops in Iraq were getting inadequate equipment, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said:

As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.

He said it as if it were a well-known military dictum — something famously said by Caesar or Napoleon or Rommel, perhaps — but it sounded a bit odd. What might have made some sense right after the shock of Pearl Harbor or 9/11 seemed like the wrong excuse, more than 20 months into a war against a country that hadn’t attacked us — a military conflict that we had “commenced at a time of our choosing.”

I was puzzled. Who was Rumsfeld referencing?

In his book Against All Enemies, former anti-terrorism chief Richard Clarke tells about a meeting the day after the terror attacks in Washington and New York:

By the afternoon on Wednesday, Secretary Rumsfeld was talking about broadening the objectives of our response and “getting Iraq.” Secretary Powell pushed back, urging a focus on al Qaeda. Relieved to have some support, I thanked Colin Powell and his deputy, Rich Armitage. “I thought I was missing something here,” I vented. “Having been attacked by al Qaeda, for us now to go bombing Iraq in response would be like our invading Mexico after the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor.”

Powell shook his head. “It’s not over yet.”

Indeed, it was not. Later in the day, Secretary Rumsfeld complained that there were no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan and that we should consider bombing Iraq, which, he said, had better targets. At first I thought Rumsfeld was joking. But he was serious and the President did not reject out of hand the idea of attacking Iraq…

It occurs to me that maybe Clarke or somebody gave Rumsfeld some good advice:

You go to war with the enemy you have, not the enemy you might want or wish to have at a later time.

but Rumsfeld’s hearing aid was on the blink.

Yeah, maybe that’s the explanation.

Bush and Hastert campaign together:

President Bush is campaigning with House Speaker Dennis Hastert…

“Oh, that’s a winning strategy,” I thought, chuckling. Then it hit me — Karl Rove’s an acknowledged political genius — could he be sending Bush and Hastert out to campaign for… Democrats?

Could it be that all the screw-ups and abuses of the last six years have been a deliberate effort to turn Bush and other top Republicans into pure political poison, just so they could sabotage Democratic candidates with their support?

Look, look, I know it sounds pretty outlandish. But… but Karl Rove’s a genius. He could think of stuff like this, easy.

Via Crooks and Liars: