More wishful thinking from people fighting the last $election...

Bush Is Now A Lame Duck
CBS' Meyer: Forget November, Forget '08; President Is Done

WASHINGTON, May 17, 2006-The great impulse of the punditocracy right now is to look at President Bush's swelling problems with the public and his party in the context of the elections coming up in November and then in 2008. Big mistake.

Short of another disaster on the scale of 9/11, George Bush no longer has the power, credibility or ability to effectively govern for the rest of his term in office. Contrary to what you hear on television, governing remains more important than campaigning. Government is more important than elections — to the extent the two can be differentiated anymore.

Bush's realm of efficacy will be limited to areas where he can make unilateral decisions, mostly in war and foreign policy. The tax cuts that oozed through Congress last week may well be his last "significant" piece of domestic legislation; I put quotations around significant because they are, in fact temporary. The entire menu of Bush tax tinkering is set to expire in 2010 on someone else's watch, an apt metaphor for this administration...

To this there's only one good response: never laugh at a live dragon. And the Bu$hCo beast isn't just one live one, it's a whole cabal of them.

So do lame ducks manage to pull off stunts like this?

New Presidential Memorandum Permits Intelligence Director To Authorize Telcos To Lie Without Violating Securities Law

In recent days, AT&T, Bell South and Verizon have all issued statements denying that they’ve handed over phone records to the NSA, as reported by USA today.

There are three possibilities:

1) The USA Today story is inaccurate;

2) The telcos left enough wiggle room in the statements that both the USA Today story and their statements are accurate; or

3) The statements from the telcos are inaccurate.

Ordinarily, a company that conceals their transactions and activities from the public would violate securities law. But an presidential memorandum signed by the President on May 5 allows the Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, to authorize a company to conceal activities related to national security. (See 15 U.S.C. 78m(b)(3)(A))

There is no evidence that this executive order has been used by John Negroponte with respect to the telcos. Of course, if it was used, we wouldn’t know about it...

I've heard sincere progressives calling Dear Leader a lame duck since November 2004. Since then, Roberts and Alito have become Supreme Court Justices, among other disasters that may effect the long term state of the Union. There's naivety, and there's willful stupidity, and there's misleading the public, and to think the criminals in charge are anywhere close to relinquishing power is to be one or more of the above.