May 2006

Bush's puppet does it again:

Prime Minister Tony Blair caved in to White House pressure by sharpening language on Iran and softening it on global warming in a speech he delivered Friday at Georgetown University, according to a British press report Sunday that Blair's office immediately denied.

According to the Sunday Telegraph, Blair made "significant" last-minute changes to his major foreign policy address and that "objections by President George W. Bush's inner circle played a key role in the alterations." An official at Blair's 10 Downing Street office, speaking on condition of anonymity as is standard practice here, said it was "categorically untrue that any White House objective played any part" in the speech.

Blair is frequently criticized in Britain for his close relationship with Bush, who is extremely unpopular among Britons. The prime minister is particularly faulted for his alliance with Bush in the Iraq war. Critics have complained that Blair seems too eager to please Bush in what many here view as a lopsided relationship that has benefited Bush far more than Britain.

Rumors are that Blair will be out by the end of the year. I am really starting to wonder if he will make it that far. Last month's elections were devastating for him and he lost a number of towns in the U.K. I just wish we could force a President out here so easily.

Today's New York Times looks at the battle over the search of Jefferson's office and brings up some points that are interesting:

Speaker J. Dennis Hastert is moving publicly to put his constitutional showdown with the Justice Department in the past, but many on Capitol Hill believe that the bitter confrontation will resonate in the coming months.

Lawmakers and senior officials say Mr. Hastert's determined challenge to the Justice Department's court-authorized search of a Congressional office arose as much from frustration at missteps and slights by high-level administration officials as it did from outrage over what he saw as a gross violation of Congressional turf.

He and other Republicans were already upset at the Treasury Department for what they saw as the botched handling of the Dubai ports deal. And they held John D. Negroponte, the national intelligence director, responsible for what they considered the humiliating dismissal of Porter J. Goss, the popular former House member who was forced out as director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The F.B.I. demand for access to the Rayburn House Office Building suite of Representative William J. Jefferson, a Louisiana Democrat under investigation in a corruption case, was seen as the last straw by Republican leaders worried about holding their majority in the House in the November elections, particularly with President Bush's flagging popularity.

"We are five months away from an election, and we can't afford to make high-profile mistakes," said one senior Republican official who was granted anonymity because he did not want to be identified discussing sensitive party strains. "There is a sense of tension in the air."

Yesterday we were hit with this story:

House leaders acknowledged Friday that FBI agents with a court-issued warrant can legally search a congressman's office, but they said they want procedures established after agents with a court warrant took over a lawmaker's office last week.

"I want to know exactly what would happen if there is a similar sort of thing" in the Senate, Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said Friday, shortly after summoning Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to his office.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., concurred: "I am confident that in the next 45 days, the lawyers will figure out how to do it right."

Gonzales was similarly optimistic. "We've been working hard already and we'll continue to do so pursuant to the president's order," he told The Associated Press.

So after the noise all week about the "constitutional crisis" of the search, Hastert now says it is ok. But wait - he wants procedures put in place for future searches. I am sure he does. He wants a warning system in place so he can clear documents out of his office before they raid him.

Now what really gets interesting is to see how bad the cry babies of the Bush administration are:

We constantly hear how Marijuana is bad for you. One of the things they try to tell us is that is causes lung cancer. Well not anymore:

The largest study of its kind has unexpectedly concluded that smoking marijuana, even regularly and heavily, does not lead to lung cancer.

The new findings "were against our expectations," said Donald Tashkin of the University of California at Los Angeles, a pulmonologist who has studied marijuana for 30 years.

"We hypothesized that there would be a positive association between marijuana use and lung cancer, and that the association would be more positive with heavier use," he said. "What we found instead was no association at all, and even a suggestion of some protective effect."

So it is possible that smoking pot will actually protect you from lung cancer. Of course if they did legalize pot it would cause cancer. That is because the corporations would start growing it and using god knows what chemicals to fertilize it and then we would have cancerous pot.

Now lets some up: