Specifically, the baton of the secular progressive agenda…

MANCHESTER, N.H. —- Rudy Giuliani said if a Democrat is elected president in 2008, America will be at risk for another terrorist attack on the scale of Sept. 11, 2001.

But if a Republican is elected, he said, especially if it is him, terrorist attacks can be anticipated and stopped.

“If any Republican is elected president —- and I think obviously I would be the best at this —- we will remain on offense and will anticipate what [the terrorists] will do and try to stop them before they do it,” Giuliani said.

The former New York City mayor, currently leading in all national polls for the Republican nomination for president, said Tuesday night that America would ultimately defeat terrorism no matter which party gains the White House.

“But the question is how long will it take and how many casualties will we have?” Giuliani said. “If we are on defense [with a Democratic president], we will have more losses and it will go on longer.”

Story. Now let’s see, which party was in the White House on 9-11-01? It was so long ago, the mind plays tricks … but clearly no Republican would have let such a thing happen …

I’m not sure that people necessarily understand how much work goes into any one of these little cartoons of mine. To give you some idea of the process, this is an unstaged photo of my desk as it appears at nine p.m. on a Tuesday night after two days of working on rough drafts of various ideas. (As you can see, the writing comes first, the artwork, later.) From this mess, I’ll narrow it down to one that I think is most effective, and then spend another day working on the art and refining the writing. In a typical week, if all goes well, it usually takes me three days to get a single cartoon out — with all other projects and obligations that arise from running a solo business squeezed into the time remaining.

Not complaining about any of this, of course. I love my job. But it does take more time than you might think …

After a series of delays, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), a candidate for president in 2008, announced a series of charges against Vice President Dick Cheney in Washington, DC, late in the day. Kucinich alleged that the Vice President had committed a series of impeachable offenses, and he was therefore introducing Articles of Impeachment against Cheney in the Congress today.

* * *

A reporter asked Kucinich why the Vice President should be impeached, and not President George W. Bush.

“There is a very practical reason - each and every charge relates to Vice President Cheney’s conduct or misconduct in office,” he said. But he added, “It is very important that we start with Mr. Cheney because if we were to start with the President, Mr. Cheney would then become president.

He also noted, “We’d have to go through the constitutional agony of impeaching two presidents consecutively.”

More.

Charles Davis, a freelance print and radio reporter, briefly interviewed Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) last Wednesday. Rockefeller, Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, made this startling statement about how our government really functions:

ROCKEFELLER: Don’t you understand the way Intelligence works? Do you think that because I’m Chairman of the Intelligence Committee that I just say I want it, and they give it to me? They control it. All of it. All of it. All the time. I only get, and my committee only gets, what they want to give me.

I’ve stuck the long background to this—which is truly a matter of war and peace and life and death for millions of people—on my site. Included is a transcript and mp3 of the entire Davis/Rockefeller exchange.

Building on Tom’s latest strip (which perfectly satirizes up every gun control “debate” that I’ve seen in the past week), it’s important to look beyond the conservative talking point that firearm regulations “don’t work” and ask why gun laws failed to prevent the tragedy at Virginia Tech. In the case of Seung-Hui Cho, the murder of 33 people was aided by - cue the passive voice - “legal loopholes” :

When a judge deemed Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho a danger to himself due to mental illness in 2005, that ruling should have disqualified him from buying a handgun under federal law.

It didn’t.

And his slaughter of 32 people last week has raised questions about the efficacy of instant background checks for firearms purchases by the mentally ill.

Under federal law, anyone who has been judged to be a danger to himself or others because of mental illness, as Cho was, should be prohibited from buying a gun.

His status should have been noted in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, a database of people disqualified from gun purchases.

But, in Cho’s case, his mental status never went in the system.

That’s because the federal government relied on Virginia to provide the information, and Virginia law disqualifies a person from buying firearms only if they have been involuntarily committed to a mental hospital.

Cho was ordered to undergo outpatient treatment, but he was never committed. His appearance before the judge and his evaluation at a mental health facility did not show up when he bought the guns.

To view this disturbing news through the eyes of a second amendment zealot, Cho just slipped through the system. Whoops! There’s no way that anyone could have predicted this particular scenario. Since our best efforts to keep guns out of the hands of crazy people aren’t working, then the only logical answer is to give guns to everybody so they can protect themselves from the psychopaths who are “going to get guns anyways”.

The frustrating thing about all of this is that all of these “loopholes” aren’t accidents. They’re inserted into our laws on purpose as the result of the arduous compromises that go into every piece of gun legislation to appease the NRA. You can bet that the language in Virginia’s gun laws to prohibit gun purchases to people “only if they have been involuntarily committed to a mental hospital” was carefully worded and written in such a way that the law would apply to as few people as possible. Cho was able to buy firearms because at some point in the drafting of Virginia’s gun legislation, some gun aficionado writing the ban on selling weapons to the mentally ill decided to make a distinction between “voluntary” and “involuntary” commitment to a mental hospital. And what we saw last week was the direct result of that decision.

WASHINGTON — Most of the time, an obscure federal investigative unit known as the Office of Special Counsel confines itself to monitoring the activities of relatively low-level government employees, stepping in with reprimands and other routine administrative actions for such offenses as discriminating against military personnel or engaging in prohibited political activities.

But the Office of Special Counsel is preparing to jump into one of the most sensitive and potentially explosive issues in Washington, launching a broad investigation into key elements of the White House political operations that for more than six years have been headed by chief strategist Karl Rove.

The new investigation, which will examine the firing of at least one U.S. attorney, missing White House e-mails, and White House efforts to keep presidential appointees attuned to Republican political priorities, could create a substantial new problem for the Bush White House.

First, the inquiry comes from inside the administration, not from Democrats in Congress. Second, unlike the splintered inquiries being pressed on Capitol Hill, it is expected to be a unified investigation covering many facets of the political operation in which Rove played a leading part.

“We will take the evidence where it leads us,” Scott J. Bloch, head of the Office of Special Counsel and a presidential appointee, said in an interview Monday. “We will not leave any stone unturned.”

Story.

Somebody’s having a wee bit of trouble keeping things in perspective:

I have lived on the other side of the gun barrel pointed by Media Matters for America for the better part of three years, and I know what it feels like when a bunch of crackpots with keyboards pull the trigger, backed by millions upon millions of dollars in funding from George Soros.

* * *

Like that mentally unbalanced and angry gunman at Virginia Tech, they’ll methodically march through the domiciles of the conservative movement, targeting the movement’s leaders for career elimination – until and unless we stand up and fight back against their campaign of mayhem against conservative leaders and causes.

And speaking of Soros, TBogg gives us the lowdown on the latest Bill O’Reilly meltdown. Worth the click.

From Dennis Kucinich’s press secretary:

Congressman Kucinich Will Hold Press Conference to Announce Introduction of Articles of Impeachment Relating To Vice President Richard Cheney

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) will hold a news conference tomorrow afternoon to announce the introduction of articles of impeachment relating to the Vice President of the United States Richard B. Cheney.

Where: Cannon Terrace (intersection of Independence Avenue and New Jersey Avenue)
When: Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Time: 12 p.m.

I think we can expect more news about this soon.

As long as we’re speaking of disasters (see below):

When I was in college, I first heard of Montserrat as the tropical haven where Beatles producer George Martin had set up a recording studio frequented by everyone from The Police to Elton John to Stevie Wonder to Lou Reed. I read a little about it, and it sounded fantastic, a faraway and exotic place I never imagined I’d see.

Unfortunately, the island was largely wiped out by its long-dormant volcano in 1995. The capital of Plymouth was completely engulfed, the airport was destroyed, and about two-thirds of the residents left and never came back.

These days, most of the island is a closed-off Forbidden Zone (actually, they call it the “exclusion zone,” but same thing).

In the last few months, the volcano has even started to get all rumbly again.

More from my visit here.

Henry Shearer points to some disquieting news out of New Orleans: According to the Times Picayune, The Army Corps of Engineers is restoring the 17th Street Canal floodwall with steel pilings 13 feet shorter than the originals.

Read the whole Picayune article, it’s some great science journalism.

The Corps insists that the shorter pilings pose no threat to the public because concurrent adjustments are being made elsewhere in the system to keep the water level from rising as high as it did in 2005.

However, professor Bob Bea of UC Berkeley, the marine engineer who lead the National Science Foundation’s post-Katrina flooding investigation, remains skeptical. He worries that the shorter pilings could be the "fatal flaw" that dooms the flood control system. (Bea was interviewed extensively for Spike Lee’s 2006 documentary When the Levees Broke.)

Bea and other experts are calling on the Corps to submit to more outside scrutiny and independent review of their flood-control strategy.