New Years Observed Reading

Larry David reviews a movie he'll never go see:
And I love gay people. Hey, I've got gay acquaintances. Good acquaintances, who know they can call me anytime if they had my phone number. I'm for gay marriage, gay divorce, gay this and gay that. I just don't want to watch two straight men, alone on the prairie, fall in love and kiss and hug and hold hands and whatnot. That's all.

Matt Taibbi, as always, rocks:
God bless George Bush. The Middle East is in flames, and how does he answer the call? He rolls up to the side entrance of a four-star Washington hotel, slips unobserved into a select gathering of the richest fatheads in his dad's Rolodex, spends a few tortured minutes exposing his half-assed policies like a campus flasher and then ducks back into his rabbit hole while he waits for his next speech to be written by paid liars.
If that isn't leadership, what is?

Former CIA Agent Larry Johnson recommends a new book:
The book the CIA didn't want you to read, JAWBREAKER by Gary Berntsen, is out and it kills. ... Gary spent most of this year battling CIA censors, who were refusing to release the book. They insisted on excising parts of the story that have already appeared in other books about CIA operations in Afghanistan...
Gary Berntsen was the second CIA officer sent to Afghanistan and put in charge of directing the destruction of al Qaeda, and the hunt for Bin Laden. He arrived in the fall of 2001, replacing veteran officer Gary Schroen, who had led the first CIA element into Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Gary 2, i.e., Berntsen, built on Schroen's foundation and played a critical role in directing the offensive that broke the back of the Taliban and scattered al Qaeda.
The key news from Gary's book is that we had bin Laden in our sights, but Tommy Franks and JSOC Commander, Dell Dailey, dilly dallied and did not deploy US troops requested by Berntsen to the battle at Tora Bora. We could have had him; we should have had him; but we let bin Laden get away.

Ruth Conniff on Impeachment:
...
And now there also seems to be a groundswell of political interest in holding the President accountable. House Democrats John Conyers and John Lewis and Senator Barbara Boxer all raised the possibility of impeachment as Congress adjourned in December. Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, took the lead, drafting three bills: HR635, to set up a select committee to investigate the Administration’s intelligence manipulation, support for torture, and retaliation against critics, and HR636 and HR637 to censure of Bush and Cheney for blocking access to information on these acts.

Conyers’s bills spring from a report, released by the Judiciary Committee’s Democratic staff, entitled ”The Constitution in Crisis: The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution and Coverups in the Iraq War.”

Last May, the foreign press, progressive activists, and the leftwing media inside the United States shouted themselves hoarse over what they considered the smoking gun in Bush’s Iraq war deception--the Downing Street Memo. (That was the leaked report in which a British intelligence officer summarized a meeting in Washington during the lead-up to the war, saying,

”Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”)
It took months before the Downing Street memo began to receive serious coverage in the mainstream media. But a group called After Downing Street helped launch Cindy Sheehan’s crusade against Bush’s war. And activists like Tim Carpenter, director of Progressive Democrats of America, and John Bonifaz, author of a book on impeaching Bush and now a candidate for Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, continued to beat the drum for impeachment. Bonifaz began talking with Representative John Conyers’s office last summer about drafting articles of impeachment.

The Administration’s actions “clearly rise to the level of impeachable conduct,” Conyers writes in an introduction to the report on his website. “However, because the Administration has failed to respond to requests for information about these charges, it is not yet possible to conclude that an impeachment inquiry or articles of impeachment are warranted.” Instead, Conyers wants to establish an investigative committee that will refer impeachable evidence to Judiciary.

Among the grassroots supporters of Conyers efforts, there are those who would like to go further. “We support Conyers’s effort, but we really want articles of impeachment introduced now,” says Bob Fertik, president of ImpeachPAC, a political action committee dedicated to supporting Congressional candidates who favor impeaching Bush. “We really think there is sufficient grounds. Impeachment is the equivalent of indictment. The standard of proof is not beyond a reasonable doubt, it is probable cause. There is probable cause Bush lied about Iraq simply based on the Downing Street Memo.”
...

And the Onion goes through its Top 10 of 2005. My personal favorite is #5, and then there's always this that you might have missed earlier in the year.