All right, you’ve covered your ass

The Department of Homeland Security put the secret hotline numbers it uses to communicate with state governors on the Do Not Call Registry.

China, switching its form of executions from firing squads to lethal injection, is buying death vans from a private company which someone tricked into thinking that a really good name for the website for its English-speaking customers would be bigbigbozo.en.ec21.com (couldn’t find the van listed on the site).


Bush said last night that “right now we’re doing hard work in Iraq.” Which is funny because he wasn’t actually in Iraq but in Washington DC at something called the President’s Dinner Gala (Gala >noun. A festive entertainment or performance. From the Old French galer ‘to make merry’.) I guess there’s hard work and then there’s hard work.

Speaking of hard work in Iraq, I’m so looking forward to hearing exactly how those two soldiers – no, let’s give them their names, Kristian Menchaca and Thomas Tucker – were tortured and killed. I’m sure this won’t make American soldiers even more trigger-happy.

Anyway, Bush’s Gala was to raise money for Republican candidates, because “It is important to have members of the United States Congress who will not wave the white flag of surrender in this war on terror.” He continued:

There is a debate here in Washington, and there should be. And I welcome the debate, and we should welcome the debate. But I want to remind you of the consequences if those who want to withdraw from Iraq happen to prevail in the debate. An early withdrawal would be a defeat for the United States of America. An early withdrawal would embolden the terrorists. ... An early withdrawal would embolden al Qaeda and bin Laden.

I guess there’s welcome, and then there’s welcome.

He said, twice, how important it is to keep Hastert and Frist in their positions. Other bloggers have pointed out that Kitty Killer is retiring.

Ron Suskind’s new book, The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 (reviews in NYT & WaPo today; I’ll probably wait for my library to get it) (Update: my review here), has one especially good interesting-if-true anecdote: that a CIA guy flew out to Crawford in the summer of 2001 because they were afraid “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside United States” was too subtle a title to strike Bush’s interest. Bush heard him out and said, “All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.”

I guess there’s a covered ass, and then there’s George W. Bush.