It's back !! The bankruptcy "reform" act was recently attached to legislation concerning debt relief for farmers, and is, unbelievably, even worse than the legislation killed in committee last year. Among the new provisions: a "reform" that would permit investment bankers to be employed in bankruptcies involving companies for which they worked. Neat trick, that; you sell securities on behalf of a company that tanks, then you get to decide whether holders of those securities get paid by the bankruptcy court. Ch-ching !!!

What Judith Miller did was ten times worse than anything Andrew Gilligan has been accused of. At least Gilligan's story was accurate; his problem was that his source didn't say what he said he did. Miller, either knowingly or recklessly, quoted sources of questionable veracity, and put out false and misleading information about Iraq's WMD capability to the public. To date, she has not offered to resign [link via Atrios].

"The big fight right now between John Kerry and George W. Bush is over their military service. And Bush is on the attack - he's accusing John Kerry of ducking time in the Texas Air National Guard once a month by hiding in the jungles of Vietnam.''
--Jay Leno

Bush's Nuts 'n Sluts Defense: It is absolutely shocking that this judge will be the co-chair of the President's Committee investigating pre-war intelligence. Someone who theorized that Anita Hill was a "lesbian acting out" fantasies over her former boss when she testified at the Clarence Thomas hearings will no doubt be a vigorous and neutral arbiter when it comes to Dick Cheney. Any power exerted by Laurence Silberman in this context will almost certainly be used to whitewash the Oval Office.

You have to admit this is a novel attack on John Kerry: claiming that he was a "war profiteer" because he risked his life in Vietnam even though he questioned the war at the time, and (even worse) attended an Ivy League school where many of his compatriots opposed the war. A traitor to his class, indeed.

Thank God that after 9-11, our nation was blessed with conscientious men of principle like Perle, Wolfowitz, DeLay, Lott, Bush, and Cheney, who had refused to similarly profit from the Vietnam War, instead courageously manning the trenchs, tunnels and swamps of college. Because of the sacrifice those fratboys made, their less-privileged brethren were given the opportunity to reap the fruits of battle, and if they were (in the infamous words of the Wall Street Journal op-ed page) "lucky duckies", to "profit" by having their names posthumously etched on a black wall in D.C.

In the end, though, it's an issue of character, and Karl Rove will surely have the last laugh. John Kerry selfishly put the interests of his country ahead of his own skepticism about the cause back in 1966, and now he wants to be President? If there's one thing we know in the blogosphere, it is that true courage and patriotism is to be found not on the battlefield, fighting for your country and risking your life to save your countrymen, but must instead be sought behind a computer terminal, playing junior orwell in the war against the islamofascists and their idiotarian, fifth-columnist allies.

So far, the most accurate polls in the primary season are coming from much-derided Zogby, according to Daily Kos.

Finally, the President comes clean on why we went to war with Saddam....

The Washington Post tackles the Bush-AWOL flap. This is a pretty significant article, not for what it reports (it's pretty much just an exegesis of past articles from other newspapers on the subject), but for the fact that it was even printed. As one blogger noted, the Post is pretty much our national version of Pravda, a newspaper that publishes the party line of the Ins (especially on its editorial page) pretty much verbatim. Writing that there is no documentary evidence that Bush completed his service shows that the President is starting to lose his Beltway support, and could be in for much tougher media coverage than he received back in 2000.

For what it's worth, I don't remember Mondale ever leading Reagan in the polls taken in 1984, or, for that matter, Dole leading Clinton in 1996. So for Kerry to lead at this stage isn't entirely meaningless [link via CalPundit].

Matt Welch reports on how you can be a daddy, and owe child support, without ever having met the mom. It's all because of a scam of convenience, in which the state has a vested interest (thanks, in no small part, to the 1995 Welfare Reform Act) in enforcing thoroughly bogus default judgments against men who have the same name as a deadbeat dad. Whoever said that the law had anything to do with justice?

Those of you who have Jeff Jarvis on your blogroll may be interested in this little gem, where he ridicules the clinical depression of another blogger. As someone who has battled that disease, my anger at such wanton cruelty towards another should be obvious. I mean, can you imagine the flack I would get if I were to express my disagreement with the political views of Andrew Sullivan by making an AIDS joke? Is this what the blogosphere is coming to?

As a follow-up to Friday's post about our "Type-A" President, George Bush is now calling for the establishment of a commission to look into the "intelligence failings" that led to the fiasco in Iraq. Frankly, this should have been done months ago, after the CIA concluded that there were no WMD's in Iraq, but better late than never. By implicitly conceding that he made a mistake, he is in better position to take the issue off the table when he goes before the voters, and certainly is a more honorable course of action than having your shills debate whether or not you ever said Saddam was an "imminent" threat.

He is still trying to have his cake and eat it too, by limiting the focus of the commission, as well as mandating that it not issue a report until after the November election. But "investigations" like the one conducted by Lord Hutton are a rarity here; there is an expectation in Great Britain that an official inquiry will be used to defend the government, as the Hutton Commission did, while in America, the expectation is usually that any comparable inquiry, such as the Tower Commission, will try to uncover official malfeasance. And as Matthew Yglesias writes, any investigation into intelligence breakdowns will necessarily have to deal with the pressure the Administration brought to bear on the CIA before the war to exaggerate WMD claims. Bush's earlier attempt to stack the inquiry looking into 9-11 by nominating Henry Kissinger to head it failed disastrously, and any similar move here will discredit the commission before it starts.

Prof. Johnson has a modest proposal on how to solve one state's budget shortfall.