Iginla should win the Hart and the Conn Smythe

Tired from staying up late to watch the Calgary Flames gut out a 3-2 win over the Tampa Bay Lightning in OT last night. New York Times, NHL.com, the Boston Globe, Calgary Sun. Jerome Iginla was immense. I wonder if he could hear me? I was sitting in front of the TV shouting "You're the Captain! This is your game! You must produce!" on his every shift. And he didn't let me down. (Maybe he heard me?) That last shift was amazing. I couldn't believe he was still on the ice. A long shift after over 70 minutes of hockey, helmet knocked off, checked again and again, Iginla kept getting up and forcing the play until he took the shot that was so hard Khabibulin gave up the rebound that Saprykin knocked in the for the winning goal. (Whew! What a sentence!)

Go Canada!

Treason

Capital Hill Blue is reporting that Prances in Flightsuit has hired a lawyer because witnesses have told the grand jury investigating the Plame case that he KNEW her name was going to be leaked. LINK

Helen Thomas is right: He's the worst President in the history of the country.

Polygraph Express

I'd pay to see Wolfowitz & Feith getting their polygraphs today. LINK

The whole Iran-sent-a-cable-using-the-code-Chalabi-gave-them story doesn't make sense to me though. Why would they burn such a valuable source of information? If Chalabi has been slipping them US secrets for years, why when he gave them the big one would they throw it away? Why would they suddenly question the value of his information now if he's been telling tales on us for years?

I wonder if this is Karl Rove's exit strategy from the neocon mess. Just a convenient way to dump Feith or Wolfowitz and say, hey, I know we had bad intelligence on this Iraq thing, but that's done with! We've sacrificed the bad guy! Now move on and vote for Shrub.

I used to be such a trusting person.

The Game is Fixed

20 of the 73 companies approved to sell those bogus drug cards by the government have been convicted of, charged with or are being investigated for defrauding the government.

Guess why those 20 still got contracts? First two guesses don't count. You're right, they gave big bucks to the Bushies. As a matter of fact, those 20 companies gave 60% of the money Bush raised from drug card companies. 60% of the over five million dollars those companies gave to Bush since 2000 came from those dirty 20 companies.

You gots to pay to play. Read all about it in this American Progress article. LINK

Torture Works!

What to make of today's Justice Department press conference detailing Jose Padilla's supposed intent to blow up apartment buildings and hotels in the United States? It couldn't have anything to do with the fact that Justice is terrified of losing Padilla's appeal before the Supreme Court, especially after the Deputy Solicitor General arguing before the Supremes claimed the U.S doesn't torture prisoners -- just hours before the Abu Ghraib pictures were released? LINK

The Abu Ghraib revelations also clashed with remarks Deputy Solicitor General Paul D. Clement made to the court during oral argument in the Padilla case.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg posed a scenario for Clement's response: "Suppose the executive says mild torture, we think, will help get this information," she said. "It's not a soldier who does something against the code of military justice, but it's an executive command. Some systems do that to get information."

"Well, our executive doesn't," Clement, the administration's second-ranking Supreme Court advocate, replied. "Where the government is on a war footing . . . you have to trust the executive to make the kind of quintessential military judgments that are involved in things like that."

In today's Padilla case press conference, Deputy Attorney General James Comey said the majority of the information in the Justice Department's case against Padilla came from interrogation of Padilla and other prisoners, and they've been dying to tell us about it:

Comey said his announcement followed an intensive government effort to declassify information gained from the interrogation of Padilla and others.

LINK

Translation: The new rules of interrogation worked with Padilla. He told us how bad he was. So you see? Torture works! Torture good! Quit complaining about that quaint old Geneva Conventions and get off our backs!

Can't wait to hear Padilla's lawyers press conference.

Ding, Dong, Witchcroft is Gone?

Time magazine reports in this week's issue that John Ashcroft may indeed be headed out of town even if Bush (gasp) does win re-election. The article also speculates that Ashcroft's former #2 at Justice, Larry Thompson, would be named to replace him. I don't know much about Thompson, other than that he is an African-American Republican, which is much like being a Log Cabin Republican, kind of mysterious to me.

"Stop lying about my record, George Bush"

Who of a certain age (me among them) could forget Dan Ackroyd's imitation of the furious Bob Dole debating George H.W. Bush with these immortal words: "Stop lying about my record, George Bush!"

Will Bob step in (aided by his use of male-performance-enchancing drugs, one hopes) to help out John Kerry as Little Bush does the same?

Today's Washington Post article:
From Bush, Unprecedented Negativity
Scholars Say Campaign Is Making History With Often-Misleading Attacks

As in, Little Bush, lying about John Kerry's record.

Will any Republican have the guts to call him on it? McCain spoke up when they attacked Kerry's patriotism, but I hear an eerie silence from the other side of the aisle now....

A Woman Scorned

Right after I finally get to see Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, I can't wait to read this book.

"A new book on the Bush dynasty is set for release just six weeks before November's knife-edge presidential election. The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty by Kitty Kelley will have an initial print run of 500,000, and the main source is believed to be Sharon Bush, the ex-wife of Neil, President George W Bush's wayward brother."

Now we all remember Neil Bush as the scoundrel who absconded with hundreds of thousands of dollars from Silverado Savings & Loan in the 1980s, LINK and "in 1988 Silverado went belly up, leaving U.S. taxpayers holding the bag for $1.3 billion in debts." LINK

Another astute economic mind in the Bush family.

But the really fun part of the Kitty Kelley book should be over Neil Bush's family values, which included LINK sex with prostitutes in Thailand (who just showed up at his door mysteriously) and telling his wife of 22 years that he wanted a divorce -- via email. LINK

Should be fun.