I'm struck by today's news that President Bush has designated an ecological treasure that's underwater a national monument. You can bet they made sure there was no oil there.

Also oh so ironic: Justice Antonin Scalia's Supreme Court majority opinion today that uses all sorts of ends-justify-means rationalizations to undermine a key provision of the Fourth Amendment. Scalia has just redefined judicial activism. To hell with the law -- and forget all that Founding Fathers crap -- just look at all my good reasons why we should ignore the law -- just look at the police academy!

At least the Republicans in Congress were in their usual self-righteous form today, using cheap rhetoric to try to score political points while doing everything to avoid talking about the disaster in Iraq. A lot of peacock feathers there.

In case you missed it on Wednesday, Zbigniew Brzezinski on the NewsHour [video | mp3]addressed what the Republicans won't:

Well, the president opened his press conference by make a statement, which I suspect most Americans didn't quite fully interpret correctly. This is what he said: "I have just returned from Baghdad. I was inspired to be able to visit the capital of a free and democratic Iraq."

[Holds up a map of Iraq, with a small dot on it.]

Now, this is what the president actually visited. This is an aerial map of Baghdad and, within it, the viewers can see a small spot. That is the so-called Green Zone, a fortified American fortress housing the American embassy, the American high command, and all the major institutions of the Iraqi, as he said, free and democratic government, in an American fortress....

And then, last but not least is the fact that the so-called Iraqi government, three years after the beginning of the occupation, still sits in an American fortress. It cannot venture outside of it. To call it a government is to misuse the word "government."...

[W]e have to get rid of the mindset, which is really by now totally ahistorical -- we no longer live in the age of colonialism. We no longer have to assume "the white man's burden" in order to civilize others, and I'm using these phrases in quotation marks....

Well, how many thousands of Iraqis will die in the meantime? How many hundreds, how many thousands of Americans will die in the meantime?

How much will our prestige internationally decline? How many billions of dollars will we spend on this?

Good questions. Questions the Republicans don't even want to ask, let alone answer.

But I'm sure the newly non-indicted Karl Rove will come up with some good anger points to turn citizen against citizen. Nothing stirs up the ire of the GOP like American citizens.

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