or two.  Could McCain be losing his base?  While it's still a trickle, the number of pundits who are disenchanted with St. McCain is growing.  First it was Joe Klein, then Howard Fineman and Jonathan Alter who discovered feet of clay at the base of their hero's statue.  Now it's  Maureen Dowd, who actually writes a serious hard hitting column about McCains "a noun, a verb, and POW" campaign.

CNN is running a poll asking if illegal immigrants should be given driver's licences here. Currently the nos stand at 90%.

Ok, so I've been lisenting to all the accounts of the two decisions yesterday on two Guantanmo prisoners. Mostly what I'm hearing is that the judges in the cases came to the same conclusion - that neither of the prisoners had been designated "Unlawful Combatants", so they couldn't be tried under current law.  This is acknowledged to be a setback for the Bush Administration, but no one seems to be focusing on the real problem here.  There is no definition for unlawful combatants because it is a term Geroge Bush, Karl Rove, and John Ashcroft created to remove prisoners of war from the protection of the "quaint" Geneva Conventions.

I just watched "The News Hour" weekly discussion with Mark Shields and David Brooks.  The first topic dealt with was Bush's "change of position" on Global Warming in advance of the G8 Summit.  Depressingly, Brooks and Shields agreed that the boy king deseved great credit for changing his tiny little mind, and were disappointed that those mean old Democrats were withholding praise for this great act of humility.  Then they went on to the topic of Immigration ...

Did you think that Repblicans had run out of ways to soak the poor?  Well, guess again.This article, which appeared in yesterday's Atlanta Journal Constitution describes how Republican State Representative Rich Golick sponsored a bill to allow insurance companies to use credit scores to set automobile and homeowner's insurance rates.  The bill sailed through  the Republican dominated legislature.  What does your credit score have to do with your likelyhood of having an accident?  Good question.

Like most people, Golick couldn't then — and can't now — explain the connection. Why would information about credit card bills and mortgage payments predict someone's driving habits?"I work in this business. It is not obvious to me," said Golick, who in addition to his legislative job is an attorney for Allstate Insurance Co. "I do know that the data is conclusive that there is absolutely a correlation."

Well, I started this over at Cheers and Jeers and redlami thought it was worth a diary, so here goes.  I know it's short, but I still think it's worth doing.  Republicans have been quite successful at defining Democrats as "Cut and Runners" and "Defeatocrats".  Now its our turn to brand them. Post your suggestion as to what GOP stands for.  I initiated the C & J thread with "Grasping Old Predators".  Submit your entry and/or vote for one in the poll.  The winner gets a pony.  Or maybe pie.

I turned on the BBC at 6:00AM last week to see our president in a joint news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel as a prelude to the G8 Summit.  I don't remember many specifics - yes the pig was mentioned - but I was struck by the fact that he continually referred to this head of state as "Angela", not even bothering to pronounce it correctly.  It seemed to me that this was not only disrespectful, but intentionaly dismissive.

So, when he gave the Chancellor a "back rub" (if you haven't seen it you must:http://www.crooksandliars.com/... I was, shall we say, shocked, but not surprised.

It seems to me that more and more trolls are using the fact that there is no mechanism to take down offensive diaries to post obnoxious views with impunity.  This diary:http://www.dailykos.com/... currently on the recent diaris list (if I get this done soon enough) is a perfect example.  The diary is disgusting, and the title is worse.  The poster does no put up a tip jar and carefully offers no comments, so there is no way to register disapproval and/or get the diary taken down.  What's the answer?  

I don't see anything on the Diary Board about this.  Data on millions of veterans was stolen from the home computer of a Veterans Affairs employee. Yahoo is running the story now:http://news.yahoo.com/...

The number one question I have right now is What was this employee doing taking this information home?  Could it have been a Data Mining project?

My next question: Are they just incompetent, just evil, or evil and incompetent?

A couple of weeks ago South Dakota State Senator Bill Napoli described the type of rape victim who might be eligible for an abortion under South Dakota's new law:

A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.

This will be a very short diary, but I've got to post it somewhere, and it would get lost in the open thread. I don't post many diaries, so maybe it will be forgiven. The All Things Considered news headline just described Cheney's victim as "The man who got between Cheney and the quail he was shooting." Words fail me. Does this crowd ever take responsibility for the havoc they wreak, and does the media ever tire of carrying their water?

From New York Magazine via :Talking Points Memo >

Bush-administration officials privately threatened organizers of the U.N. Climate Change Conference, telling them that any chance there might've been for the United States to sign on to the Kyoto global-warming protocol would be scuttled if they allowed Bill Clinton to speak at the gathering today in Montreal, according to a source involved with the negotiations who spoke to New York Magazine on condition of anonymity

More below the fold

A while back I was lamenting the Intelligent Design attack on teaching evolution  to a good friend of mine who happens to be a teacher.  Imagine my dismay when she said, "Well, I just believe in putting all the theories out there, and letting the kids make up their own minds."  She is an old and dear friend, so I bit back the snarky retorts like, "Do you teach them the flat earth theory, too?" - which left me with little to say.  The conversation has stayed with me, however, because it has become obvious that there are a lot of people out there like her - intelligent,religious people who aren't that scientifically literate - who have bought the argument that Intelligent Design and Evolution are both theories and therefore equivilant. Clearly, the current efforts to explain the difference are not working. More...

I went to a local drug store to fill a prescription today, and while I was waiting  decided to browse the Birthday Cards as I am cursed with a plethora of December birthdays among my family and friends.  Imagine my surprise and delight when I came upon this card (I''m really sorry I don't have a scanner but I'll do my best to describe it): Condaleeza Rice's head is on the front with a baloon saying, "Sorry, this birthday card is late..." When you open the card, it says. "Our Intellgence sources, at the time led(sic) us to beleive there was a high probability  that it was today"

More below the fold.

For over 20 years part of my job has been to find and administer health insurance for a small business(less than 50 employees)in Georgia. The last time I was offered a contract with a lower premium than we had paid the year before was 1993, the year that the insurance industry was working hard to kill Hillary's health care bill.  Since then a "good" year has been one in which the rate increase was in single digits and there haven't been many of those.  We were having trouble even getting quotes from anyone besides Blue Cross/Blue Shield which was using its near monopoly position in the state to raise rates 15 to 20 percent a year.

Then, a miracle happened.

Yes, I know white phosphorous is not technically a chemical weapon since it only burns the flesh down to the bone.  Still, I'd like to see Don Rumsfeld explain this distinction to the victims in Fallujah.  Go here:http://edition.cnn.com/ to vote in CNN's poll.  Currently only 65% say that White Phosphorous should never be used in Iraq.  So much for winning hearts and minds.

On Sept. 3, this diary http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/9/3/161344/5839
reported David Brooks impassioned comments on PBS's The News Hour as evidence of a concientous conservative.  Some of us demurred.  I have followed Brooks over the past few years, so I was not surprised to read his current sophistry. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/opinion/11brooks.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd %2fOp%2dEd%2fColumnists%2fDavid%20Brooks

It goes like this:

1. Government made elaborate plans for a hurricaine hitting New Orleans.

2. The plan didn't work.

3. Therefore Government is not the answer.

The money quote: "But liberals who think this disaster is going to set off a progressive revival need to explain how a comprehensive government failure is going to restore America's faith in big government."

Brooks fails to mention that the plan didn't work because the funds to implement it were unavailable.

Rock Eagle, a 4H Camp in central Georgia, is serving as a center for Katrina evacuees. At lunch today my mother told me of an acquaintance who had taken food, toiletries, etc. to the camp with other members of her church. They were turned away at the gate by law enfocement personell who told them that there was rioting and lawlessness in the camp and it was not safe to let anyone in.  This story was so similar to the one related in this diary: http://spud1.dailykos.com/story/2005/9/9/2713/11295 about a church camp in Oklahoma that I had to wonder.  To my knowledge, there have been no newspaper of TV news stories of riots and violence at Rock Eagle.  Is this a deliberate program to isolate and demonize the poorest victims, or a  response to acutal problems that have occured?  I would like to know if any of you have camps like this in your area and what you are hearing about them.