In a surprising turn of events, and a dramatic confirmation of the story that cost CBS News anchor Dan Rather his job, President George W. Bush has been returned to active duty in the Texas Air National Guard. President Bush will resume his duties as an F-14 pilot, at the rank of First Lieutenant, although if he is able to meet the ANG’s stringent performance standards, he “stands an excellent chance of securing a promotion to Captain, and possibly even Major”, according to Col. Dwight Liggett, public affairs officer of the Texas Air National Guard.

Ironically, it was the Dan Rather story that brought this about. “Once the Dan Rather story came out, and we started getting FOIA requests, we started reviewing our old records,” Liggett said. “It turns out that Rather was right. Lieutenant Bush was a full year short of his commitment. The National Guard is not in the habit of wasting a million dollars plus of pilot training.”

President Bush, who will be known as “Lt. Bush” during his year of active duty, will be paid the standard lieutenant’s salary of $88,977.44, which is a cut from his Presidential salary of $400,000. Like his presidential job, though, his new job as a pilot comes with health insurance and a housing allowance; unlike his presidential job, as a National Guard pilot Lt. Bush will not have to buy his own uniforms.

It was just two weeks ago that President Bush was speaking wistfully of his wish to return to active duty, so that he could be “fighting for freedom alongside our brave men and women in Iran-I mean Iraq, ” and now it appears he will get that chance.

Col. Liggett said, “You know, even with the Dan Rather story, we might never have thought of this until he landed his plane on that flattop. He’s beyond our enlistment age limit, but he keeps himself fit and he can still stick those landings!”

It is unclear whether Bush will be able to maintain his presidential duties while on active ANG duty, and if he isn’t this will mean problems for the Republican administration, as Vice President Dick Cheney will be returning to his job as president of Halliburton. Apparently, a little-known clause in his separation agreement, tied to the value of his stop options, gives Halliburton the right to recall the Vice President if the value of his holdings goes above $1 billion; flush with profits from the Iraq war, Cheney said that “with any luck” he will reach this milestone in mid-May.

It should happen this morning: Bush's secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Alphonso Jackson, is expected to announce his resignation at a press conference at 9:45 this morning.

I'm not sure why it is, but I think part of the problem is that the Republicans are at least neutral, if not actively hostile, to the mission of HUD. If that's the case, and if your agency isn't doing anything that really should be done, why not use it as your personal piggy bank, or as a way to funnel profit opportunities to your friends, or as an opportunity to punish your enemies?

That's what they did when Reagan was president, and that's what Jackson did under Bush, and now, as when Reagan was president, Jackson's been caught. 

So HUD is once again a hotbed of corruption, local housing authorities don't know from one month to the next how much they're going to get to run their vital programs, and homelessness is still getting worse.

 Once again, they've proven Howard Dean right: the Republicans can't be trusted with money.

We had some great news from the Supreme Court yesterday: they threw out a pot conviction because of an illegal search.

Okay, that doesn't sound that wild, but the circumstances were. The defendant lives over in the Green Mountain National Forest, off a forest road that only he and the Forest Service, and he was conspicuously doing everything he could to keep people away from the place. “No trespassing” signs all over the place, told the local Forest Service guys that he didn't want anyone, including the Forest Service, coming onto his property. This is one guy who's serious about his privacy.

If you're the cops, and you see a guy who's serious about his privacy, you figure he must have something to hide, right?  

The local forest official  suspected that defendant was responsible for marijuana plants that were growing in the National Forest (not on defendant's property) because he found defendant's insistence on privacty to be “paranoid”. The forest official suggested to the State Police that a Marijuana Eradication Team (“MERT”) flight over defednant's property might be a good idea.

What that means is they put a state trooper and a National Guard pilot in an army helicopter and flew over his place, where they circled and hovered, maybe 120 above the ground for up to an hour. Witnesses described the noise as “deafening”, another said he could feel the concussion from the helicopter's main rotor, and they all testified that the police were lying when they claimed they never went below 500 feet, which is the legal limit.

When they were all done they found three plots of marijuana.

The defendant's attorney, my old friend Bill Nelson, moved to suppress the results of the search, the trial court rejected the argument, but the Supreme Court said he was right, threw out the search, and reversed the conviction.  They concluded that this extremely intrusive overflight of a location where the owner had clearly expressed his subjective expectation of privacy, was a search, and since they didn't have a warrant it was illegal: 

We hold that Vermont citizens have a constitutional right to privacy  that axcends into the airspace above their homes and property.

So far, this is just regular good news: another guy not getting convicted and thrown in jail for a victimless crime. But what does Bobby Sand have to do with it?

You rember the flap over the legalization or decriminalization of  marijuana earlier this year, right? One of the topics of debate was whether marijuana prohibition wastes too many governmental resources; after all, while they're chasing down pot smokers, or even pot dealers or growers, they're not going after real criminals, like drunk drivers or spouse abusers (two crimes in which your odds of committing it and then getting away with it are really pretty good). The law-enforcers' argument is that this is bogus, because they spend so few resources on marijuana that it really doesn't cost the state anything, either in police, prosecutorial, defense, court, or corrections expenditures.

On the other hand, we now see the reality. I don't know how much it costs to fly an army helicopter over to Goshen, hover over a guy's house for an hour, scare all the neighbors, and then bring the guy to trial, but I really have to say that it sounds expensive to me. Not to mention the court and lawyer time taken up defending the indefensible in the District Court and Supreme Court–after all, this case has been going on since 2003.

So go ahead, guys, and try to convince us that you're not spending anything chasing down marijuana cases, but I'm not buying it. 

Around here we think very highly of Peter Freyne and his work, so now that he's announced his retirement from his weekly reporting gig, take a listen to VPR's Vermont Edition today as they review his career.

Those are the words of Madeleine Kunin on VPR this morning, reacting to Sen. Patrick Leahy's argument that Hillary Clinton should drop out of the presidential race because she can't possibly win, and because her continued attacks on Barack Obama are hurting his chances of being elected once he wins the Democratic nomination, which is inevitable. Kunin also called the calls for Clinton to step down both unfair and patronizing.

With all the respect that Kunin is due, this is ridiculous for a couple of reaons. First, “it's not over till it's over” makes perfect sense in a baseball game, but not in a political campaign. A baseball game has a set duration: nine innings, assuming the game isn't tied after nine, and no matter how far ahead one team is, the team that's behind is never categorically eliminated from scoring enough runs to take the lead until the final out. Among other things, this means that even if you're so far behind that all the fans have filed out, and you wish you could go home too, the game still isn't over.

The primary campaign isn't like that. That's why all those other candidates, who figured out that they weren't winning any delegates and couldn't catch up, aren't still running. The primary campaign leads to the convention, but there is nothing that says that all the candidates have to stay in until Denver.

The other problem with what  Kunin said is the suggestion that somehow the party is patronizing Clinton by asking her to get out now that it's obvious that she can't win. It seems a bit patronizing to tell her 'Honey, you know you've got to drop out for the good of the Party.' Its obvious that there have been plenty of sexist attacks on Clinton during this campaign, but that's not what this is about. This is about taking her seriously, treating her like any other candidate or savvy politician, and expecting her to make the same kinds of judgments that other politicians would be expected to make.

It's time. Clinton can't win. She's hurting the party, and the country. She should go. 

John McCain loves to promote the canard that he is disarmingly frank, and obviously he has a lot of help from his suck-ups in the press. So you'd have to know I'd need a good reason to be sending you to his web page, right?

Well, I do. Everybody's talking about the Bear Stearns bailout, or liquidation, or whatever you want to call it, and since he wants to be president he has to also, even though everybody knows he has no interest in domestic policy, and, as he puts it, he knows nothing about economics. It's not like school, though. Once they make you president, you can't just say “Pass” when they come to something you're not interested.

Still, you would think that he might be a little more circumspect when it comes to proving he knows nothing about economics, wouldn't you?  Maybe that's the disarmingly frank part.

Anyway, if you're about to lose your house because of the subprime meltdown, he's got a simple message for you: too damn bad! I have always been committed to the principle that it is not the duty of government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly, whether they are big banks or small borrowers. . . .

In our effort to help deserving homeowners, no assistance should be given to speculators. Any assistance for borrowers should be focused solely on homeowners, not people who bought houses for speculative purposes, to rent or as second homes. Any assistance must be temporary and must not reward people who were irresponsible at the expense of those who weren't.

If you're wondering who the people who were irresponsible are, here's a little hint: if you bought your house with a subprime mortgage, it's you.

But that just shows that he's callous, not economically illiterate, You have to wait just a bit for that part, right after the “refreshingly candid maverick” part of the speech.

I will not play election year politics with the housing crisis. I will evaluate everything in terms of whether it might be harmful or helpful to our effort to deal with the crisis we face now. . . . In this crisis, as in all I may face in the future, I will not allow dogma to override common sense.

 So now for the no-dogma part of the speech:

One of the reasons that I and many other liberals supported John Edwards's candidacy for president is that he made the elimination of poverty the main theme of his campaign. I really think it's true that if you're not poor, and don't spend any considerable amount of time with poor people, it's very hard to get a realistic picture of how difficult life is for poor people in the United States.

Today we have the chance to get a good look at one aspect of this problem.  The Vermont Housing Council and the Housing Awareness Campaign have released Between a Rock and a Hard PLace, their annual study of housing and wages in Vemront, and unsurprisingly, they find that things continue to get worse for Vermont's poor. Among the findings:

 Vermont had the second tightest rental housing market in the nation in 2007. The rental vacancy rate was 4.9 percent. The homeownership vacancy rate was 1.0 percent, the lowest in the nation.11 Vermont had a shortage of 21,000 affordable rental units as of the most recent statewide housing needs assessment in 2005.12 Our state will need 12,900 more owner-occupied units by 2012. The current pace of housing construction is nowhere near what would be necessary to fill those gaps.

 Vermont has the highest rate of homelessness in New England,14 and the ength of time people spend in homeless shelters in Vermont is increasing apidly. In 2000, the average stay was 11 days. In 2007, it was 33 days.

 Forty-seven percent of Vermont’s renter households were paying more than  30 percent of their incomes for rent and utilities in 2006, and one-fifth of enter households were paying more than 50 percent of their incomes for ent and utilities.

In a crisis of such proportions, a well-intentioned leader would act, wouldn't he? After all, as the problem grows worse and worse, with no sign of relief, this would seem to be  a time when increasing state investments are needed. After all, we have seen that Vermont's investment in affordable housing has been incredibly effective,

Over the last twenty years the Housing and Conservation Board has created 8,500 units of affordable housing, helped preserve downtowns and historic sites, and conserved 365,000 acres of agricultural and recreational lands and natural areas. 

Douglas's response: slash the VHCB budget. While he has called housing costs part of his “affordability agenda” (remember that?), Douglas has proposed a $5.2 million cut in funding to the Housing and Conservation Board.  

When will people see through the smooth veneer to the vicious reality that is Jim Douglas?

Cross-posted from Rational Resistance.

Not too much to comment on here. I got it from PZ tonight, and not a moment too soon.

So remember, if you are planning on crucifying yourself or otherwise mortifying the flesh tomorrow, remember these simple tips:

==>Get a tetanus shot before you flagellate yourself;
==>Check the condition of the whip you're going to use to lash your back;
==>And above all, before you nail yourself to the cross, make sure the nails are properly disinfected by soaking them in alcohol!

And don't say you never got any useful health advice from Green Mountain Daily. 

In this election year, one of the key differences between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, at least among liberals, is that Obama was “right” on Iraq and Clinton was “wrong”. The differences don't end there, of course, but I heard of more than one voter on Town Meeting day saying that they wanted to vote for Clinton, but couldn't get past her vote on the war.

This distinguishes her from John Edwards, who cast the same war vote that Clinton did, but was able to get past it and get support from liberals because of his apology for his vote, but Clinton has refused to do the same.

Why is this such a key point for antiwar voters? In part I'm sure it's an emotional response, and by saying that I'm not suggesting that that would be illegitimate. It goes beyond that, however.  My concern is that this was the biggest vote of Clinton's political career, she was dead wrong at a time when many of us knew–absolutely knew–she was wrong, and it says something about her judgment.

If we could get some honest reflection from her about why she got it wrong, and what could make a difference the next time she's confronted with an important decision, it could make a difference in how we see her. Frankly, if war supporters won't say what they would do differently the next time it would send me a strong signal that they can't be trusted with important decisions.

The same is true not only of politicians but also of analysts and pundits. This week Slate is running a series about liberal hawks titled “Why Did We Get It Wrong?” and it features commentary from a broad range of writers, most of whom supported the war and, either soon or late, recognized that they had made a mistake.

As you read it, consider what Hillary Clinton might write in such a piece, and what difference it might make in your thinking. 

If you thought stepping down as governor was going to be the end of Spitzer's troubles, outside the house anyway, there's more:

ALBANY — Federal prosecutors are investigating whether Gov. Eliot Spitzer used campaign funds in connection with his meetings with prostitutes, including payments for hotels or ground transportation, three people with knowledge of the investigation said.

The governor’s lawyers have begun consulting with a campaign finance expert who has long worked for Mr. Spitzer’s political organization to see whether campaign money was spent on the trips, including some as recently as last month, a person briefed on the investigation said.

Whatever you think about whether prostitution is a victimless crime, this looks pretty bad. The patronizing prostitutes would be unlikely to cost Spitzer his law license, but I imagine if this pans out it might.