Molly Ivins: Bad news drops into Bush's punchbowl

[Dudley_DUright]

Good grief, the tree's not down yet, the bills aren't due and the diet doesn't start until the bowl games are over, so what's with the unseemly haste? Not even time to take a deep breath here in 2004, and already we're like the white rabbit -- behind, breathless and late.

Not that I suspect this administration of managing the news -- horrors, no -- but a number of unusual objects were dropped into the holiday punch bowl whilst the rest of us were still caroling and wassailing, including quite a few bad news items for the Bush team.

One interesting piece of information that got completely lost earlier in the capture of Saddam Hussein was the resignation of David Kay, the guy in charge of the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The search for WMD in Iraq has effectively ended. (Liz Carpenter said, "I must have seen 20,000 shots of them looking through Saddam's hair and into his mouth -- they're not gonna find the WMD in there.")

Among the items that got buried in the holiday rush were three court of appeals decisions that go against the delusions of grandeur of the Bush team. No, the president alone cannot detain U.S. citizens as "enemy combatants"; no, the "enemy combatants" we have held for three years at Guantanamo cannot be denied the right to seek court review of the legality of their detention; and no, the statute criminalizing undefined "material support" to designated "terrorist organizations" is not constitutional.

more...

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=16232

[BuckeFushe]

1. Without fanfare, without any announcement, very quietly under the radar

David Kay slips quietly into the night. Wonder what happens to the $300+ million budgeted by Congress to find weapons this year?

[izzie]

2. And did you hear this on c-span?

Home grown terrorist picked up in Texas with bombs. It was half gone before it hit me. Where was that on Ashcrofts TV show of terrorist? I would like to read more on that.

[Dudley_DUright]

3. Was it about this guy?

<snip>

It began as a misdelivered envelope and developed into the most extensive domestic terrorism investigation since the Oklahoma City bombing. Last month, an east Texas man pleaded guilty to possession of a weapon of mass destruction. Inside the home and storage facilities of William Krar, investigators found a sodium-cyanide bomb capable of killing thousands, more than a hundred explosives, half a million rounds of ammunition, dozens of illegal weapons, and a mound of white-supremacist and antigovernment literature.

“Without question, it ranks at the very top of all domestic terrorist arrests in the past 20 years in terms of the lethality of the arsenal,” says Daniel Levitas, author of “The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right.”

<snip>

more...

http://www.world-crisis.com/more/317_0_1_0_M/

[CatWoman]

4. Dudley

check this out from today's Washington Journal:

Washington Journal Entire Program
Orlando Figueroa, NASA, Director, Mars Exploration Program & Director, Solar System Exploration Division
Chester Crocker, Georgetown Univ., Strategic Studies Chair & U.S. Institute of Peace, Chairman of the Board
Daniel Levitas, Author, "The Terrorist Next Door"
1/6/2004: WASHINGTON, DC: 3 hr.

you want to listen to the item in bold.

www.cspan.org

[Dudley_DUright]

5. Thanks, actually the whole show looks pretty interesting