News Round-Up, Thursday, April 12, 2007

Thick smoke rises from the site of an explosion at Baghdad's Al-Sarafiyah bridge where a suicide bomber blew up a truck, 12 April, 2007. A suicide bomber has blown himself up in the Iraqi parliament canteen in Baghdad's Green Zone, killing three people in a major breach of security at the country's most heavily guarded site.(AFP/Ali Yussef)

A suicide/homicide bomber blew himself up in the Iraqi parliament cafeteria this morning. That would be in Baghdad, which the surge is supposed to be making safe, and within the heavily fortified U.S. Green Zone. George Bush's disaster continues.

The real story behind the US Attorney Purge, from Talking Points Memo. It's a giant Karl Rove operation designed to keep poor and black and Democratic voters from exercising their right to vote:

Republican party officials and elected officials use bogus claims of vote fraud to do three things: 1) to stymie voter registration drives and get-out-the-vote efforts in poor and minority neighborhoods, 2) purge voter rolls of legitimate voters and 3) institute voter ID laws aimed at making it harder for low-income and minority voters to vote.

The White House claims that all those off-the-books emails on the RNC/GWB43 servers have just disappeared. How convenient. Jesselyn Radack, a Justice Department lawyer who was hounded out of the department for challenging the prosecution of John Walker Lindh, has a dailykos diary on how emails are forever. (She found emails the Justice Dept. had erased in order to keep from producing them in response to a federal discovery order; when she revealed this, she was fired! Justice, Bush style.) 50 White House officials have used the RNC accounts; of course Karl Rove is one of them.

George Bush's Pentagon announced yesterday that EVERY U.S. Army soldier's tour will be extended from 12 to 15 months. George Bush is breaking the Army.

George Bush is looking for a 'war czar', but three generals he's approached have turned him down. As many bloggers have pointed out, isn't that his job? Or the Secretary of Defense? For a guy who complains about the bureaucracy all the time, Dubya sure does love to create it.

Media Matters for America has a timeline of the decline and fall of Don Imus. It took seven days. I think the timeline shortchanges the impact of the Rutgers women's basketball press conference. They made a powerful statement.

BoingBoing has some good links to audio and video of the late Kurt Vonnegut.