Bush is impeachable on the bare facts of the case

* reason:

"It’s true: Bush is impeachable on the bare facts of the case, without any recourse to party differences. Back on Planet Earth, he’s invulnerable as long as his party continues to control both houses of the Congress. If these Democrats and their supporters are serious about bringing him to account, they’ll need to learn how to win elections. To make that happen, they might start by impeaching a few of their own leaders—not for high crimes and misdemeanors, just for incompetence."

* btw - i hadn't heard sibel's speech at the PEN awards before. mp3 here (10mins). it's worth listening to. what a woman.

* wowsers. Arnaud de Borchgrave via henley re the Sears7:

The indictment stretched credulity. It had all the earmarks of an overzealous FBI informant creating crime by conditioning impressionable poor blacks looking for a cause against a system they had grown to hate. It’s not rocket science to understand what produces the self-hating American syndrome among some blacks who constitute more than a third of America’s 2.2 million prisoners, the largest per capita incarcerated in Western democracies.

Sixty percent of all drug offenders are black. In nine U.S. states, simple possession accounted for 50 percent of all drug offenders. State and federal prisons are often a horrific experience for young blacks who get raped repeatedly by older convicts. One-third of the entire black population of some 30 million will pass through the criminal justice system at one point in their lives. Katrina’s thousands of black victims huddling in the New Orleans arena without food or water were a grim reminder of an underclass that is not enamored of an administration that can spend almost half a trillion dollars on a war of choice disapproved by 60 percent of Americans.

* and yglesias via henley:

"Obviously, one of the things terrorism is supposed to do is, well, terrorize people. The actual risk of dying in a terrorist attack is very, very, very low but terrorism is scary in a way that, say, the risk of getting of dying in a random car accident isn’t. One of the things the government needs to be doing is trying to keep people reasonably calm about the general security of the United States (while, of course, focusing on preventing truly catastrophic attacks). Instead, Bush’s impulse is always to do the reverse — blow things out of proportion and scare people."

* nyt's steve erlanger was on lehrer regarding the israeli invasion of gaza. he used the word 'invasion' - i was most surprised. for one reason or other, lehrer's website doesn't have the transcript. I went to check whether he had used that term in the nyt - it turns out that he was co-by-lining with ian fisher - but nope, the articles refer to an "incursion."