The Surge is working. No matter what.

While Bush was paying lip-service to the notion of democracy at the UN yesterday, his administration continues to undermine the practice of democracy at home:

The State Department has interceded in a congressional investigation of Blackwater USA, the private security firm accused of killing Iraqi civilians last week, ordering the company not to disclose information about its Iraq operations without approval from the Bush administration, according to documents revealed Tuesday.

In a letter sent to a senior Blackwater executive Thursday, a State Department contracting official ordered the company “to make no disclosure of the documents or information” about its work in Iraq without permission.

In 2004 Bush’s Viceroy for Iraq, Paul Bremer, enacted Iraqi laws which exempted Blackwater from Iraqi criminal laws. Now, Bush is putting the kibosh on any Congressional oversight into the company’s operations.

Bush is also acting to block Congressional investigation into corruption in the current Iraqi government we are supporting at a cost of hundreds of lives and tens of billions of dollars a year:

In his letter to Rice, Waxman also objected to a move by the department to bar its officials from speaking with committee investigators about corruption inside the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki.

An e-mail received by the committee Monday night indicated that the State Department was treating information about corruption as classified, suggesting it might undermine bilateral relations.

“The scope of this prohibition is breathtaking,” Waxman wrote. “On its face, it means that unless the committee agrees to keep the information secret from the public . . . the committee cannot obtain information about whether Mr. Maliki himself has been involved in corruption or has intervened to block corruption investigations.”

Waxman said that previous official reports of corruption within Iraqi ministries were treated as “sensitive but unclassified.” The State Department retroactively classified the reports after his committee requested them, Waxman said.

We’re told the surge, which was supposed to give the Maliki government time to stabilize its grip on Iraq, is working but at the same time Bush is blocking inquiries into whether that government has the capacity to coalesce into an honest, stable government.

Shrub, from yesterday’s speech at the United Nations:

Finally, the mission of the United Nations requires liberating people from poverty and despair. Article 23 of the Universal Declaration states: “Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, [and] to just and favorable conditions of work.”

Not as I do:

Table 2. Poverty Status of People by Family Relationship, Race, and Hispanic
Origin: 1959 to 2006
(Numbers in thousands. People as of March of the following year.)

2006…… 296,450 36,460 12.3 245,199 25,915 10.6
2005…… 293,135 36,950 12.6 242,389 26,068 10.8
2004 14/.. 290,617 37,040 12.7 240,754 26,544 11.0
2003…… 287,699 35,861 12.5 238,903 25,684 10.8
2002…… 285,317 34,570 12.1 236,921 24,534 10.4
2001…… 281,475 32,907 11.7 233,911 23,215 9.9
2000 12/.. 278,944 31,581 11.3 231,909 22,347 9.6

From Bush’s speech yesterday at the UN:

Every civilized nation also has a responsibility to stand up for the people suffering under dictatorship. In Belarus, North Korea, Syria, and Iran, brutal regimes deny their people the fundamental rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration

Not as I do:

Bush didn’t mention the U.S. prisons in Afghanistan or at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. practice of holding detainees for years without legal charges or access to lawyers, or the CIA’s “rendition” kidnappings of suspects abroad, all issues of concern to human rights activists around the world.

“At first read, it’s little more than an exercise in hypocrisy. His words about human rights ring hollow because his credibility is nonexistent,” said Curt Goering, the deputy executive director of Amnesty International USA. “The gap between the rhetoric and the actual record is stunning. I can’t help but believe many people in the audience were thinking, ‘What was this man thinking?’ “

From yesterday’s speech by Bush before the United Nations:

Second, the mission of the United Nations requires liberating people from hunger and disease. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration states: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food and clothing and housing and medical care.”

Not as I do:

A broad House majority gave final approval last night to a $35 billion expansion of the popular children’s health insurance program, with members from both parties brushing aside a stern veto threat from President Bush to vote their support, 265 to 159.

The Senate will take up the bill later this week and is expected to send it to the president with a veto-proof, bipartisan majority. But amid furious White House lobbying, even Republican advocates in the House ruefully conceded that they will probably fall short of the 290 votes they will need next week to override the promised veto.

“Everyone,” it seems, does not include American children.

Hell, we’ve all been there - what bartender/waiter/waitress hasn’t wanted to do this? Maybe he smelled!

MELBOURNE (Reuters) - An Australian “prankster” barmaid who served a patron a shot of disinfectant has appeared in court over what her lawyers said was a “misguided” joke.

Melbourne barmaid Emily Craig, 23, served a client a single 30ml shot glass of Pine-O-Cleen disinfectant in March during a 6 a.m. drinking bout at Evolution Nightclub, causing him to become violently ill, the Melbourne Magistrates court was told.

“This was a misguided joke at an ungodly hour,” Craig’s lawyer George Balot told the judge, according to reports on Tuesday in local newspapers.

Police told the court that Craig “was known for her prankster-style behavior” and once covered a bar in sticky tape. She “upped the ante” with her pranks by serving up the powerful floor cleaner after giving the man shots of pure water.

The patron developed ulcers on his skin after drinking the disinfectant shot from Craig, who has since lost her job and faces four charges of intentionally causing injury.

The case was adjourned until February.

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Source

Wolcott, again:

Fox News ran a one-hour special last night on General Petraeus that I somehow managed to miss through sheer dint of effort, though I hear that the scene in which Julie Banderas washed the general’s feet with her hair had a tender, sultry lyricism seldom seen in a cheapo documentary.

Tuesday AM: it’s still there. Last night, traffic was at a standstill at 7pm as two lanes were blocked off. CalTrans, news crews … the house was supposed to be moved. Well as of this morning, there it stands. More tags than ever. If you’re taking the 101 west from Hollywood, be warned.

Photo and more at the LAT.

Tony Keymetlian joked that the new digs were tantalizingly close to his work at a boulevard pizzeria. “I want to move in there,” he cracked. “It’s a very weird scene out there.”

PS. A reader just pointed out to me the graffiti’d “FUKE.”

David Halberstam, the journalist and author whose The Best and the Brightest remains a seminal work on the Vietnam War, died tragically in an auto accident last Spring, just days after sending what would be his final book to the publisher.

That book, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War, is being released tomorrow. A review in today’s Los Angeles Times:

“The Coldest Winter” incorporates all of that and seems certain to become the standard one-volume history of the Korean War, superseding even Clay Blair’s “The Forgotten War” and Stanley Weintraub’s “MacArthur’s War: Korea and the Undoing of an American Hero.” What sets Halberstam’s history apart is its stunning array of first-person interviews with Korean War veterans, its lucid evocation of battlefield maneuvers, its crystalline portraits of major figures such as Mao and Kim Il Sung and its description of how Douglas MacArthur’s whole willful — indeed, deceitful — prosecution of the war proved so costly. (Was there ever an American hero of MacArthur’s stature whose image has been so ravaged by history? His deliberate distortion of intelligence to justify his horrifically wrongheaded push to the Yalu River is bound to set contemporary readers’ heads shaking.)

And the New York Times review by Max Frankel:

Combining his typically prodigious research with more than a hundred interviews, Halberstam has graphically (if sometimes tediously) recreated the trench warfare up and down that frozen peninsula, juxtaposing accounts of the petty backstabbing and vainglorious posturing at the Tokyo headquarters of Gen. Douglas MacArthur and the catastrophic miscalculations by Truman, Stalin, Mao and Kim Il Sung of North Korea.

The result is an outsize but fascinating epic directed simultaneously to battle buffs and pacifists, history enthusiasts and political moralists. With sometimes numbing detail and elegant maps, it evokes the nobility and crazy heroism of outnumbered American grunts in a dozen of the war’s critical engagements, cinematic scenes that alternate with crisp essays about the mindless way the war began, the reckless way it was managed and the fruitless way it ended.

I’ll probably pick it up tomorrow. . .

Mary’s still trying to get partial custody of her kids.

Grandparents Dan and Diane Winkler contend Winkler is an unfit mother and the children have a better chance at a normal life* with them.

But Gold-Bikin said Winkler’s manslaughter conviction shows the jury believed her testimony about domestic abuse. Among other things, Winkler claimed she was forced to submit to sex acts she considered unnatural.

“Should we take these children away from a loving mother and give them to somebody who hates her?” Gold-Bikin said. “Here is a little backwoods woman married to a very popular preacher and her entire self-worth has been undermined. She’s been made to parade around in high heels and no clothes, to do things she considers perverted. And she’s got nobody to talk to because nobody is going to believe her.”

No trial date is set on the termination petition.

*Dan Winkler is also a Church of Christ minister.