Congress approved another emergency 90-day extention for a contentious grant program to support abstinence-only education ahead of the September 30 fiscal year deadline.

Spared de-funding after an earlier reprieve in June, Title V, Section 510 funding is not without controversy.

This summer's legislative sausage-making to either modify or de-fund the program entirely has pitted reproductive health groups against one another into camps of "no funding" hardliners and "work with the Congress you've got" consensus-builders.

During the 2004 presidential campaign, Republicans expressed shock, shock, when John Kerry disparaged George Bush's pretense that a "Coalition of the willing" had joined the invasion of Iraq. Kerry described it as "trumped-up, so-called coalition of the bribed, the coerced, the bought, and the extorted."

I recalled that feigned Republican outrage the other day while perusing the so-called Spanish Downing Street memo.

File this in the "It was only a matter of time" folder:

From BeliefNet.org

The God-o-Meter (pronounced Gah-DOM-meter) scientifically measures factors such as rate of God-talk, effectiveness—saying God wants a capital gains tax cut doesn't guarantee a high rating—and other top-secret criteria. Click a candidate's head to get his or her latest God-o-Meter reading and blog post. And check back often. With so much happening on the campaign trail, God-o-Meter is constantly recalibrating!

Crossposted with permission from Colorado Confidential.com by investigative reporter Erin Rosa.

The job has never been easy, and it won't be getting any easier.

Right now a general consensus from the workforce of correctional officers (COs) residing in one of the nation's most notorious prisons is that "we're basically screwed." So says a veteran officer working at the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX) in Florence, Colorado.

On top of low staffing levels that are reportedly turning the facility into a concrete tinderbox, there's also the issue of the real people who work the prison, and the consistent fear that they won't come home from an 8-hour shift. But you might not guess this with the image of stability and security portrayed by the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), an agency that workers say doesn't take kindly to the idea of COs talking to the media.

Proponents of comprehensive sex education scored a small victory Friday when the U.S. Senate stripped a $100 million provision to fund a controversial abstinence-only grant program that was tacked onto the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) bill.

But the celebration will be short-lived as President Bush renewed his vow late Friday to veto the compromise bill that extends health care coverage to more children.

And it was.

Remember back in October 2005, when the nation was reeling from the Katrina disaster? And the Administration took action, as only this Administration can, by suspending Davis Bacon for clean up workers . . . i.e. letting them get away with paying rock bottom wages? And even changing an Agency's stated mission to make this possible?

If you were a federal government agency who wanted to use the private sector to do government work and to get this done discreetly and with no pesky oversight or evidence that it is less expensive and more efficient to use them, you have options. And they are completely legal!!

Last week smintheus posted a great overview of the surge and it's inanities. Among them was a description of the assassinated Abu Rishi - hope of Anbar - that just defied what has been coming out from the main stream media. Look's like smintheus got it right.

Only 57 Senators voted to move forward on the bill to give DC a vote in Congress, so the effort is dead for now. (DCist reports here and here)

Mitch McConnell claims that he opposes the bill because it’s unconstitutional. Here’s how he explained his position yesterday:

In a stunning fourteen-page letter, which ought to be read in its entirety, Rep. Henry Waxman accused Howard J. Krongard, the State Department Inspector General, of obstructing and undermining a string of important investigations concerning Iraq. Waxman charges Krongard with having "interfered with ongoing investigations to protect the State Department and the White House from political embarrassment."

The Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has the goods on Krongard. Seven current and former employees of the IG's office have offered damning testimony about Krongard's frequent, partisan, and improper interference into investigations. These include the former Assistant IG for Investigations, John DeDona, and his Deputy, Ralph McNamara, both of whom resigned after Krongard "halted or impeded investigations undertaken by their office." They've also given Waxman plenty of documentation, including some extremely embarrassing inter-office emails among investigators who resented Krongard's abuse of his office.

Tomorrow, the Senate will hold a cloture vote on the bill that would finally give DC residents voting representation in Congress. (The bill gives DC its first vote in the House of Representatives, and an extra House seat to Utah; the number of House seats will go back down to 435 after reapportionment following the next census.) The bill passed the House and will likely pass the Senate – that is, if Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell doesn’t filibuster.

DCist Martin Austermuhle makes an eloquent plea to the Senator:

In today's Washington Post, Walter Pincus calls attention to a very interesting document. It suggests that the rosy scenario of "progress" in Iraq, as painted last week by George Bush and his favorite general, David Petraeus, might actually have been a tad overdrawn. I wonder as well whether this document is related to another odd thing I was puzzling over last week—the outsourcing of the oversight conducted by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.

One pernicious trend in higher education is to charge higher tuition to students who take majors that are perceived as likely to lead to higher paying jobs. Why not? the thinking goes. After all, when they get their law / medical / engineering degree they will make a lot of money and easily pay back their student loans.

And that's not just the unbossed talking. Those are the findings in a new report : Road Privatization: Explaining the Trend, Assessing the Facts, and Protecting the Public U.S. PIRG Education Fund (Fall 2007).

On June 19, 2007 unbossed told the tale of a large punitive damage award given by a Colorado jury against Qwest in Jury's Punitive Damages Award to Send Message. Well, now trial judge - who saw all the evidence - has decided the jury's punitive damages award was too small. She has, therefore, decided to more than double the penalty from $39 million to $84 million.

A few months ago, without fanfare, former Senator Lincoln Chafee left the GOP—something that I had predicted was virtually unthinkable within his social circles in Rhode Island.

“It’s not my party any more,” he said

States that have been categorized as conservative but now have Democratic governors - and legislatures - are undergoing massive changes. They are addressing human needs and putting them above greed.

Reading the press releases from the Governor's office in Kansas shows how far things have moved from two years ago. Protecting gay rights, placing primary importance on health care, promoting renewable resources. That's today's Kansas.

Unless I'm mistaken, the CIA and the Bush administration generally have always refused to confirm or deny that they employ the torture technique to which they've applied the euphemism "waterboarding". Even after Dick Cheney endorsed it in a radio interview last October (a story broken at unbossed.com), the administration tried to pretend that he had done no such thing.

This evening, ABC News is reporting that (anonymous) current and former CIA officials have stated that the CIA has now banned the use of waterboarding. It would seem to be the closest thing yet to official confirmation that the Bush White House authorized waterboarding of prisoners.

Milo rang last night to suggest I repost this piece written a few years ago. He thinks new readers might still find it relevant. Milo believes that Bush administration policies on Iraq never really go out of style, as I too discovered in the past. So without further excuse, "The view from the ground" (lightly revised).

I don't want to badmouth anybody, but I think he was misleading you. It's much worse than he's letting on. The whole situation is a mess. It's not going to just get better by itself, you can see for yourself that it's broken beyond repair. It's up to you of course whether you want to trust him. But I think he's leading you down the path, making you think you can get off easy, then dropping the bad news on you later.

It's just not possible to do it his way. And they won't let us anyway even if it would work, which it won't. He's already wrecked so much of the...well, I don't want to badmouth anybody, but take it from me it's beyond repair.

It could be coming soon, if Bush doesn't decide to face reality and cave in.

Together with the Maliki government, General Petraeus is campaigning aggressively to convince reporters and the public that his claims of diminished sectarian violence are based on sound statistics. The GAO, the Associated Press, McClatchy and others have found that the Pentagon is undercounting and underreporting deaths and violence generally. The credibility of Bush and Petraeus, and their prescription of more-of-the-same, won't stand up if their statistics are revealed as nothing but a load of hooey.

We are all rightly focused on what is happening in Iraq, but to make all that work, the military needs a huge and properly functioning backup infrastructure. So what's going on there?

Today some Bush administration mouthpieces floated so far free of logic, reason, and fact that they must now count as extraterrestrial objects.

Have you had the sense deep inside your thumos, right in the very core of your truthiness, that saint General Petraeus' behavior as a Bush administration shill is just a little bit, well, odd? Composing a flagrantly political op-ed for the Washington Post in the dying days of the 2004 campaign? Pressing hard for a "surge" that he'd been highly skeptical of? Ignoring a mental health survey on the effects of prolonged deployments in Iraq, until it was made public half a year later, and then expressing shock, shock at its findings. Lying flat out to Congress about the extent of continued violence in Iraq—and meanwhile suppressing the statistics? Failing even to submit a written report? Calling his behavior "odd" is putting the matter charitably.

The resourceful Patrick Cockburn may have identified the explanation that makes sense of it all finally: Petraeus has his eyes set on the White House.

The civil war in Iraq has become sexy again and the love-struck are everywhere today.

Amidst all the sad news this week, we learn today that Alex the Grey Parrot has died at the age of 30. For those who have never heard of Alex, you may think this is a spoof or snark, but it's not. I've written about Alex and his groundbreaking role in helping us understand more about the cognitive abilities of nonhuman beings. So take a moment to remember Alex or learn why he deserves recognition.

George Bush assured Americans more than half a year ago that his proposed "surge" had twin goals. The diplomatic goal was to give Nouri al Maliki's government "breathing space" during which to advance the cause of sectarian reconciliation. Nearly everybody, including Bush's ambassador in Iraq, agrees that nothing significant has been achieved toward that goal.

And the military goal of the "surge"?

CEOs aren't the only ones among us who get paid. They just get more of that pay. So how are the non-CEOs among us doing? Given the job figures that came out last week and the crashing housing market, this may be the best year for many of us for a long time to come.

You may have had your doubts this was true when you heard it from Lefty Blog unbossed reporting on CEO pay findings from a lefty group like United for a Fair Economy a couple weeks ago.

By now you'll have heard that Gen. David Petraeus, in typically disingenuous testimony to Congress, announced immediately that under his leadership the military objectives of the "surge" are being met and coalition forces "have achieved progress in the security arena". He then bolstered this nonsense with a series of outlandish lies.

It's worth reprising a point I made in June in a post that, I regret, did not attract much attention: "Progress in Iraq". In it I showed that the phrase "progress in Iraq" has been a constant rhetorical trope going all the way back to the very beginning of the Bush administration's excuse-mongering about the disastrous occupation. Bush & Co. did not turn to fictional "progress" after other excuses had failed to convince. "Progress" has been their constant companion, as they have tried to explain away or deny all the unpleasant facts that are in front of our eyes.

From the outset "progress" was most definitely an excuse, nothing more. For over two months after declaring victory in Iraq, as I showed, Bush avoided acknowledging in public the burgeoning Iraqi insurgency. In late June 2003 he finally was forced to discuss it—in a radio address that emphasized the "progress in Iraq" being made. It immediately became Bush & Co.'s favorite catch-phrase for the (failure of the) occupation. And it remains ever thus.

Crossposted from Colorado Confidential.

Under a special arrangement with the Denver-based public affairs program, The Aaron Harber Show, and KBDI-TV Channel 12, Unbossed readers are invited to submit questions to General David Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq. Select questions will be posed during Aaron's exclusive interview with Gen. Petraeus at the Pentagon this week.

Jot your questions here and we'll send them along to Aaron and his producer. Deadline for submissions is Wednesday at 5pm Mountain Daylight Time.

Where would unbossed be without the system of federal inspector generals? Where would we all be without them? Do you want to live through the answer to those questions?

I've argued that Fred Thompson's shady work as a lobbyist before and after his Senate career was likely to scuttle his presidential campaign once voters learned some details about his work on behalf of foreign countries. And just days after Thompson entered the race, it looks like his campaign has been blown out of the sky.

The NY Times reveals today that Thompson was paid in 1992 to advise lawyers defending Libyan intelligence officials who were accused of masterminding the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Think of that. The Republican's knight in shining armor worked for Libyan terrorists (one of whom is now serving jail time for the bombing).

This excellent bit of sleuthing is the work of blogger wu ming. Crossposted with permission from wu ming's blog, surf putah

So, I get this flyer (well, two actually) from some group that calls itself "Californians for Fire Safety." Hmm, I say to myself, I wonder who they are, and why they mailed me this glossy flyer? The flyer opposes those nefarious boogymen, "Sacramento politicians" trying to pass AB 706, which:

will ban material used to make flame retardant products that help to prevent fires - and keep our homes and families safe

Immediately I get curious. What materials are these? Why would they be proposed for banning? What chemicals in particular are in question? Who makes them? Who is for this bill, and who is against? Who is funding this flyer?

I look again at the flyer, and get nothing.

I am bitterly disappointed that in his most recent tape, Osama bin Laden did not cite unbossed as one of his sources. We are, after all, a Lefty Blog.

Yes, opportunity is in the wind. So says FedBizOpps.gov - the place to go when you want to buy or rent a piece of the federal government . . . and it is all legal!! For sale today: hurricane relief. Hyperion Beetle Snuff, anyone?

On Friday September 7, 2007, the Government Accountabilty Office released the fourth version of its short Iraq study. The first were released September 4. One long report was also released September 4. Why four of what seems to be an almost identical report?

You thought the Bush & Co. legerdemain had run its course when it was revealed last month that the White House rather than (saint) General Petraeus would write the much-anticipated report on Iraq to be given to Congress—though based, we were told, upon Petraeus' report to Bush. But you underestimated their duplicity once again, didn't you? Today we're told that Petraeus won't produce an actual report at all.

According to Al Kamen, something distinctly odd is afoot with Stuart Bowen's Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. The Army is in the process of outsourcing some and perhaps all the work of doing the investigations that Bowen oversees.

As I predicted yesterday, based upon a pre-publication summary by CNN, the new report to Congress by the Jones Commission tries to soft-peddle the unfolding disaster in Iraq. Sure it’s a mess, the commissioners say, and there’s little sign of political reconciliation among Iraqi factions, but we should remain bogged down there anyway (only less so).

This is a follow up to a post just below on the revelations coming out on the Colorado Northwest Parkway a/k/a Tollroad lease. I started to put it into comments, but the details are too long for a comment.

Part one of a multi-part series on Colorado toll roads crossposted from Colorado Confidential.com.

Local activists are calling it the "Broomdoggle."

The sale of the financially troubled Northwest Parkway to Brisa Auto-Estradas de Portugal S.A. and Brazilian partner, Companhia de Consessoes Rodoviarias (Brisa/CCR), has residents and public officials alike up in arms.

That remarkable statement finally made its way today onto the pages of the Washington Post, buried though the article was on page A 16. The statement comes from last December’s Iraq Study Group Report, and presented such a damning indictment of the administration that the ISG held it back until the final page of its report. The Associated Press’ military analyst Robert Burns wrote an article highlighting the ISG allegation that the Bush administration deliberately under-reports violence in Iraq. Yet few papers printed his story. Most large newspapers, like the Post, ignored it.

Nine months later, the allegation finally merits attention.

Yesterday GAO released its assessment of the operation of No Child Left Behind - No Child Left Behind Act: Education Should Clarify Guidance and Address Potential Compliance Issues for Schools in Corrective Action and Restructuring Status GAO-07-1035 (Sept. 5, 2007)

This would get filed in the Not laughing any longer folder, except my disk space has been exceeded.

A report to Congress by the Independent Commission on Security Forces in Iraq, obtained today by CNN, demonstrates how far backwards the supposedly serious people in Washington will bend to avoid declaring forthrightly that the occupation of Iraq, and now the escalation, is a disaster. When the ICSFI report is released publicly tomorrow, I think we'll see that it satisfies all Parties with that on-the-one-hand-but-then-on-the-other game.

How absurd are the results? The Commission (composed mainly of retired military officers and headed by Gen. James Jones) actually claims that two virtually non-existent branches of the Iraqi military are making significant progress towards fanciful goals.

Yesterday's news included the release of GAO's assessment of progress in Iraq. Here are a link to the report, and its summary and recommendations, plus a link to the classified report order form.

This post has a more detailed followup posted Saturday, September 8, 2007.

I have written in the past bout efforts to find useful alternatives to the truly horrid US News and World Report college rankings. For example, both the Atlantic Monthly and Washington Monthly have been engaged in this process. links here and here.

True, George Bush has put America's military in an almost untenable position in Iraq and then undercut the armed forces at every stage through his political ineptitude. Still, the military's top brass has also displayed a wondrous capacity to bungle its response to a low-tech guerilla insurgency. They really don't care much for guerilla war, that could hardly be clearer. Instead, the Pentagon prides itself on what critics view as its almost monomaniacal pursuit of high-tech war "systems".

It turns out though that the Pentagon isn't entirely competent with high-tech stuff, either. Today we learn from the Financial Times that in June a Pentagon computer system was badly breached by Chinese military hackers, who managed to shut it down for over a week.

On March 24, 2006, unbossed asked: Who Put the Cracker in Cracker Barrel? There we explored this faux-ol' timey business' Illinois agreement settling a case of gross race and sex discrimination.

Well, some traditions die hard.

Earlier we had a serious contemplation on work, poverty, and the work of Dr. Martin Luther King. But life and work can have their humorous sides even when it's humor about very bad bosses. To find out which boss won, why, and to take the test questions, click this link.

Seven months from tomorrow - April 4, 2008 - marks the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King's death. He was a marked man, and he could have been assassinated anywhere, but, as it turned out, where he was killed was getting ready to march in support of striking sanitation workers in Memphis.