The Strident Centrist Blog

Ex-Republican Larry Johnson, who’s also Ex-CIA and Ex-State Department, offers some litmus tests so you can see if you qualify for party membership. He also has Illinois Congress candidate Tammy Duckworth’s response to GOP accusations that she’s advocating a “Cut and Run” policy in Iraq:

Meet Tammy Duckworth, Democratic candidate for Congress from Illinois and combat veteran. Tammy lost both legs in a helicopter crash. Hearing the charge that she wanted to cut and run, Tammy said:

“Well, I didn’t cut and run, Mr. President. Like so many others, I proudly fought and sacrificed,; Duckworth said. “My helicopter was shot down long after you proclaimed ‘mission accomplished.”

Here’s a sample of one of them. There are more. H/T to Echidne:

I GREW UP in Argentina during the rule of a military junta that disappeared more than 30,000 people. I know that when a president has the sole power to detain people he deems to be enemies, when he alone can set the rules for interrogation, when detained people don’t have the right to go to court, and when laws are written to immunize officials who have already committed torture, one is no longer living in a democracy but in a dictatorship.

LAURA ROTOLO
Medford

Josh Marshall, among others, is on the Foley case and as he notes here and several other posts, the slick of the scandal is spreading. It seems that key members of the House GOP leadership were aware of some of Foley’s earlier indiscretions, but not concerned enough to pull his chair at the head of the Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus out from under him. In a later update, Marshall notes that Majority Leader Boehner is hanging Speaker Hastert out to dry.

I never knew there was such a thing as a fresh-water jelly fish, let alone that it can be found in Minnesota lakes.  From the Strib:

DULUTH - Tiny freshwater jellyfish, rarely seen in the area, have been making appearances in northeastern Minnesota lakes this year.

In recent weeks, there have been reported jellyfish sightings at a few lakes including Little Sturgeon Lake north of Hibbing and Dodo Lake near Duluth.

The jellyfish spend most of their life as underwater polyps that live on or near lake bottoms.

On rare occasions, they develop into dime- to quarter-size jellyfish that can be seen floating and pulsing near the surface.

The “blooms” last only a few days, with most sightings occurring in August and September.

Howie Klein, who blogs at Down With Tyranny and also has a regular weekend gig at Firedoglake, has the skinny on just-resigned Congressman Mark Foley of Florida, who resigned today after being stung trying to hook up with a 16 year old male page.

The Senate has passed the Military Commissions Act that, among other things, eliminates habeas corpus protections for detainees, essentially guts the warrantless search and seizure protections of the Fourth Amendment, and gives the president wide discretion to determine what is and is not torture. With regard to the first two, we shall now begin to see more clearly the consequences of the Senate Democrats’ failure to block the Samuel Alito Supreme Court nomination with a filibuster. As for the thrid, the responsibility for these judgments the next two years will be in the hands of a man who as a child got his jollies by putting firecrackers in frogs and lighting them.

The Onion is on top of things on the torture legislation front:

WASHINGTON, DC—Led by a bipartisan group of senators critical of White House policy on suspected terrorists, the Senate passed a bill Thursday that prohibits interrogators from exceeding 100 amps per testicle when questioning detainees. . .

The Wayne Madsen Report has a piece up with some assertions about what’s behind the Sibel Edmonds affair. She, you may recall, is the Turkish-American woman who took a job as an FBI translator shortly after 9/11 (she’s fluent in Farsi and Azerbaijani as well as Turkish). She soon uncovered some suspicious activity on the part of another bureau translator, reported it to her superiors, was forthwith fired, and then served with a gag order soon after filing suit for wrongful termination. Madsen asserts that the suspicious translator was a Turkish intelligence agenat and - you guessed it - connected with people in the stratospheric reaches of neocondom. (Hey! I like that word. How about neo-condom? Anyway.) People such as Douglas Feith (”dumbest fucking guy on the face of the earth” as Tommy Franks wrote in his autobiography), and Richard Perle.

Among the revelations Madsen throws out is that Brewster-Jennings, the CIA front firm that Valerie Plame worked for, had its cover blown by one of the players in this cabal as far back as 2001. He also suggests that there may be a connection between the Turkish-American ring in question and the Abdul Qadeer Khan nuclear smuggling ring in Pakistan and that people at the very top reaches of our government are keeping the lid on investigations because the translator/agent’s husband, a career Air Force officer, has threatened to spill it all.

There’s a lot more here, but keep in mind that Madsen sometimes gets ahead of what can be verified. A tinfoil hat also comes in handy.

Also, Madsen’s website is not set up to enable linking to specific stories. So follow the link and look for the story beginning as follows: Sep. 28, 2006 — SPECIAL REPORT. CIA counter-proliferation front company’s cover blown . . .

Joe Galloway, military correspondent for the McClatchy papers, on the budget showdown between Chief of Staff General Peter Shoomaker and Field Marshall Rumsfeld:

The Bush administration and the Congress have so starved the U.S. Army of funds - in the middle of a war whose burdens fall most heavily on that Army - that push has finally come to shove.

Without major reinforcements, both in money and manpower, the Army won’t be able to provide enough units for the next rotations into Iraq and Afghanistan, much less provide the additional troops that many, if not most, officers think are needed to stave off disaster in both countries. The Marines aren’t much better off.

Put simply, the Army doesn’t have enough soldiers, equipment or money to do the jobs assigned to it, even as the administration and the Pentagon talk about a “long war” against global terrorism and the nation’s intelligence community warns that our policies are stoking the global spread of Islamic terrorism.

Once again Billmon pungently says it all with some pithy quotes, a few words, and Photoshop

Scientists and Engineers For America has recently been formed. For readers of a certain age who may be familiar with the science departments of St. Olaf College, the first person listed in the “Supporters” page, Nobel Laureate Phillip Agre, is the son of Courtland Agre who was a professor of organic chemistry in the 1950s and early 1960s.