The Scotsman has obtained a previously unreleased copy of the police report of President Bush's bicycle accident in Scotland when attending the G-8 summit -- the one where he hit a cop. Aside from demonstrating he can't talk, pedal and wave at the same time, here's what it shows (Note that Bush is referred to in the report as a "moving/falling object."

It was "about 1800 hours on Wednesday, 6 July, 2005" that a detachment of Strathclyde police constables, in "Level 2 public order dress [anti-riot gear]," formed a protective line at the gate at the hotel's rear entrance, in case demonstrators penetrated the biggest-ever security operation on Scottish soil.

The official police incident report states: "[The unit] was requested to cover the road junction on the Auchterarder to Braco Road as the President of the USA, George Bush, was cycling through." The report goes on: "[At] about 1800 hours the President approached the junction at speed on the bicycle. The road was damp at the time. As the President passed the junction at speed he raised his left arm from the handlebars to wave to the police officers present while shouting 'thanks, you guys, for coming'.

Susie at Suburban Guerrilla -- using three of my all-time favorite tunes, particularly Volunteers.

A hundred thousand dead in Iraq. A little girl, drenched in her family's blood and screaming into the night. Naked men made to crawl like dogs, forced to listen to the cries of their wives and sisters being raped in the next cell. Icebergs melting, workers sickened and dying of poison at their jobs, bodies of the elderly floating in the chemical soup that used to be New Orleans and one f**king lie after another.

These greedy b**tards. These immoral motherf**kers.

If you're not outraged, there's something wrong with you. And if you're outraged, you need to do something. It's a moral f**king imperative.

We are the body politic.

by TChris

Almost unbelievable. Almost.

Secret Service agents guarding Vice President Dick Cheney when he shot Texas lawyer Harry Whittington on a hunting outing two weeks ago say Cheney was "clearly inebriated" at the time of the shooting.

Agents observed several members of the hunting party, including the Vice President, consuming alcohol before and during the hunting expedition, the report notes, and Cheney exhibited "visible signs" of impairment, including slurred speech and erratic actions.

Capitol Hill Blue responds here to claims that it "made the whole thing up."

[Comments now closed due to deterioration into personal attacks. Several have been deleted.]

by TChris

This shouldn't be surprising, given the president's refusal to pick up a newspaper:

President Bush was unaware of the pending sale of shipping operations at six major U.S. seaports to a state-owned business in the United Arab Emirates until the deal already had been approved by his administration, the White House said Wednesday. ...

While Bush has adamantly defended the deal, the White House acknowledged that he did not know about it until recently. "He became aware of it over the last several days," McClellan said.

by TChris

After the president inspected swithgrass samples at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory yesterday, he "picked up a bottle of clear-colored ethanol and smelled it." No word on whether the president then downed it like a shot of Jagermeister, but ethanol ingestion might explain the "mixed signals" that his administration was sending prior to his visit.

Two weeks ago, 32 workers, including eight researchers, were laid off at the lab. Then, over the weekend, just before Bush's planned visit, the government restored the jobs.

by TChris

The worst isn't that President Bush has acted beyond his power, in defiance of the Constitution, Paul Starr argues. The worst is that the president believes his power is limitless, and that Congress and the Supreme Court might join in his distorted view of our constitutional framework.

But there is something more dangerous than any of these specific abuses and usurpations, and that is the theory of inherent powers that Bush invokes to justify most of these actions and the possibility of its being effectively institutionalized by a meek Congress and, worst of all, by a deferential Supreme Court. ...

The real danger today is the loaded weapon that Bush and his defenders are willing to put in the hands of all future presidents. Even members of his own party ought to be able to see that danger, and act to stop it.

by TChris

Jenna Orkin just wants her government to tell the truth.

Within days of the World Trade Center collapse, someone ordered Environmental Protection Agency administrators to tell New Yorkers the air was safe. ... No matter that private tests showed the air remained full of lead, asbestos, mercury, benzene. No matter that, according to documents forced out of the EPA by a Freedom of Information request, the agency's own tests agreed that the air in Lower Manhattan--who wanted to bother with Brooklyn?--wasn't fit to breathe.

Orkin joined other plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the EPA, contending that her constitutional right to be protected from harm by government officials was violated when "Christine Todd Whitman, then the EPA administrator, and her staff made false statements and failed to carry out its cleanup duties." An initial ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Deborah Batts might pave the way for the truth to come out.

by TChris

Yes, impeachment is unlikely in a Republican controlled Congress, but Bonnie Erbe is nonetheless frustrated by "[m]edia inattention to the growing American pro-impeachment sentiment."

[G]rassroots passion for impeachment prompted by this president's circumvention of Congress and the Constitution is what's driving growing public support. And America's transition from "Bush fan" to "Bush foe" is being ignored by the mainstream media.

Surprisingly, the media did anything but ignore the Republican-led impeachment movement against former President Clinton, even when the public was decidedly more supportive of that president than it is of the current one.

As Erbe asks, why aren't members of the "liberal media" clamoring for Bush's impeachment?

by TChris

Recoiling from the open government philosophy of the Clinton administration, intelligence agencies have reclassified more than 55,000 documents since 1999 that had previously been declassified and, in some cases, published by the State Department.

But because the reclassification program is itself shrouded in secrecy -- governed by a still-classified memorandum that prohibits the National Archives even from saying which agencies are involved -- it continued virtually without outside notice until December.

Historians worry that the reclassification program will prevent them from accessing materials once available at presidential libraries and the National Archives. Some reclassification decisions may be based on the historian's nemesis: "an old bureaucratic reflex: to cover up embarrassments, even if they occurred a half-century ago." Some historians see "a marked trend toward greater secrecy under the Bush administration, which has increased the pace of classifying documents, slowed declassification and discouraged the release of some material under the Freedom of Information Act."

by TChris

Newsweek promises to take you "inside Dick Cheney's dark, secretive mind-set." A disturbing journey, that.

Cheney, the conservative that moderates once seemed to like, has strangely iced over in recent years. Even his old friends sometimes wonder if he has not grown angrier, more suspicious, even paranoid.

(Try to get past the description of Brit Hume as a "friendly but also serious and credible interrogator" of Cheney.)

by TChris

How ridiculous is this? The vice president shoots his hunting partner in the face (not to mention the heart), and when the poor guy gets out of the hospital, he apologizes to the vice president for getting shot.

"Gosh, Dick, I'm so sorry my face got in the way of your buckshot. Did you get the quail anyway?"

As a reality check, this story recounts the various discrepancies in the factual accounts of the shooting and its aftermath that eventually made their way to the public.

by TChris

Six clients of lobbyist Michael Herson received $50 million over four years after Sen. Arlen Specter inserted "earmarks" into military appropriations bills that benefited those clients. Herson, it turns out, is married to Vicki Siegel Herson, who served until recently as Specter's legislative assistant on the Appropriations Committee. Coincidence?