A sweltering fog still shrouded the East Coast & Hamriah Co. labor camp when, dressed in the equivalent of their Sunday best, the migrant workers set out after dawn Tuesday. They didn't shower beforehand. Water was cut last year to their shantytown, now abandoned by their employer. They didn't eat breakfast. They have no electricity to cook.

The most recent of the articles is an article suggesting that Cheney will retire after the mid-term elections. This, after a couple of articles suggested that Cheney, based on "anonymous sources" was taken out of the loop on Bush's foreign policy decisions. We know that Karl Rove is a master of whisper campaigns. I suggest that he is planning to save his own skin. We know that Bush and Rove had a rift after Plamegate broke out. I suggest that they have patched up their differences the best they could and are now working together to tag team Cheney.

Temara itself already has a fearsome reputation among former inmates. Binyam Mohammed, an Ethiopian-born Briton later sent to Guantanamo Bay, told Amnesty International that interrogators there cut his chest and penis when he refused to answer questions.

Mohammed said he was held at Temara for 18 months before being flown to another "black prison" in Afghanistan in January 2004, and then on to Guantanamo Bay.

Now, the Bush administration is building a new facility in addition to Temara. Details are below.

If we legalize Marijuana, that will mean new industries will spring up to meet the legal demand for the product. New industries will mean more jobs and therefore, more money for the government to put into jobs, the economy, education, health care, and the environment.

The right-wingers talk all the time about how they are so pro-family. The Fundamentalists label bills as either pro-family or anti-family. But what the Bush administration did was blatantly anti-family. Therefore, when the right-wingers talk about family values, they are simply not credible, unless they acknowledge that what Rove and Libby did was wrong.

The province in question was Ninevah, a heavily Sunni province. Initially, Cole reported that Ninevah went 75% yes on October 17th. I questioned the result at the time, wondering why an ethnic group so suspicious of the US suddenly turned around and voted yes. Now, Cole's latest figures show a 55% no vote. A two-thirds no vote would have sunk the Constitution.

Not only does the Espionage Act directly cover the treason of Rove and Libby, it covers Bush's concealment of Rove's action by failing to report his knowledge of the affair to Patrick Fitzgerald.

The Washington Times editor Wes Purden guffaws this morning about how incomprehansible to the average person this is and how Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame were living a glamourous lifestyle. But the joke is on him, since he focused on the Espionage Act and I looked it up.

The Republicans have already done most of the work for us, with their spectacular implosion and criminal corruption. But for us to complete the task of winning in 2006 and 2008, we need to give people vision. To many people, the situation looks hopeless, with the rising war, budget deficits, peak oil, and a lower standard of living in the future.

If we fail to gain any seats, that tells me that many people think the situation is hopeless, that the Democrats are no different than the Republicans, and that politicians are just a bunch of crooks. So, we must do what FDR did in an apparently hopeless situation for our country during the Great Depression -- he proposed a bunch of ambitious plans that brought us back to our feet again.

Bush did so by promoting policies that favored wealthlier White people over less-wealthy Black people. He also showed his racism by looking the other way as others, including his own mother, revealed their stereotypes of Black people.

In addition, the Guardian reports that Bush's bungling could turn this into an international row with Britain, normally our strongest ally. They report on many UK citizens trapped in New Orleans with no way to get out.

Abraham Lincoln once said that we, as a country, need to ask ourselves whether we are on God's side; we cannot assume that God is on our side. I think the reason people, even on the left, are so uncomfortable with Galloway is because he raises the possibility that we are not on God's side, but that the resistance fighters in Iraq are. That is a thought extremely frightening for even us leftists to contemplate. But we must discuss this possibility regardless of anybody's personal feelings about George Galloway.

British PM Tony Blair's stance on deportation is becoming more troubling. He unveiled measures which would deport groups he deems as being too radical for the UK. While he is careful to point out that this is a blow to extremism rather than Islam, and he actively engages Muslim leaders he deems as "moderate," he is now deporting groups which repudiate Bin Laden's calls for violence.

Here is his definiton of groups which would be deported:

Clerics who preach hate and Web sites or book shops that sponsor violence would be targeted, Blair told a news conference. Foreign nationals could be deported under the new measures.

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By the year's end, Blair also wants to pass legislation that would outlaw "indirect incitement" of terrorism -- targeting extremist Islamic clerics who glorify acts of terrorism and seduce impressionable Muslim youth.

The proposed law would ban receiving training in terrorist techniques in Britain or abroad. A new offense of "acts preparatory to terrorism" would outlaw planning an attack and activities such as acquiring bomb-making instructions on the Internet.

All of which sounds good on the surface, especially if you believe in law and order. But, as Blair's actions have shown, these definitions are subjective and dependent on his whims.

Ted Baiamonte, a right-wing Rove apologist, calls us "Dumb Democrats" and calls the coverage on Rove nothing but a bunch of partisan political attacks. Yes, he's right. I am dumb.

CNN Columnist Anthony Sebok writes that Valerie Plame has possible grounds to sue Karl Rove. Courts have generally given the government sovereign immunity from lawsuits. However, Sebok writes that there is an exception to that under the Federal Tort Claim Act. Plame could not sue Rove for implementing a policy. But she could sue Rove for the way in which he put the policy into action:

In his recent national address, George Bush claimed that Iraq was a democratic government which will inspire democracy to spread around the Middle East. However, this has turned out to be yet another lie. I wonder if the Bush administration thinks the Biblical commandment "Thou shalt not bear false witness" is quaint and obsolete.

The Iraqi government has arrested Khalid, an Iraqi blogger who has been speaking out against the American occupation in Iraq. They have failed to charge him with a crime. I suggest that the Iraqi government is holding him hostage in order to frighten the rest of his family, the rest of them bloggers, from speaking out. He is the son of Faiza, an outspoken critic of the war, whose work I have highlighted elsewhere.

I welcome the call by Blair to promote dialogue between Muslims and non-Muslims not only in Britain, but around the world. I also welcome his condemnation of people vandalizing Mosques in retribution and right-wingers like the British Nationalists, who would exploit these bombings for political purposes.

Things are coming to a head in the Valerie Palme case. Her husband, Joseph Wilson, wrote an article debunking the administration's claims that Iraq was trying to obtain Uranium from Niger. In retaliation, reporters Robert Novak of the Chicago Tribune, Matthew Cooper of Time, and Judith Miller of the New York Times were provided information by someone in the White House that Palme was a CIA agent. This is a felony under American law.

The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal ruling that Miller and Cooper have to go to jail for not revealing their sources to special prosecutor Scott Fitzgerald. In response, Time Magazine provided Cooper's notes to Fitzgerald. However, Miller and the NYT refuse to do so; meaning possible jail time for Miller.