The Blog From Another Dimension: GOP & The Election Archives

Here They Go Again

Republicans are trying to steal elections again. They have proposed that California's electoral votes, instead of going all to the winner of the state like almost all other states, would be divided according to whomever wins each district.

While this sounds great and is, to a degree, in principle, it is vote-stealing because it is not a call for such democratic vote-distribution nationwide--only in the biggest electoral state in the union, which also happens to vote Democratic every election year nowadays.

If there was a proposal to do this nationwide--for every state to divide their electoral votes--I'd likely vote for it--though a better system would simply be to use the popular vote, a strict numerical proposition.

But that's not what the proposal is for. If you suggested doing this in the South, especially in Texas, then Republicans would fight it tooth and nail. Nor would they ever propose this in California if it voted conservatively. They don't want votes to be fairly and evenly counted--they just want to win elections, no matter how crookedly.

Not that this should be any surprise: Republicans tried this same tactic three years ago, and failed. (Though I am surprised that neither the AP writer not Kevin Drum seemed to remember this.) And I'm pretty sure that Californians are not so stupid that they'd let Republicans use Californians to steal yet another election.

Running Scared

Oh, this is too precious: Republican candidates are running scared from the YouTube debate! Yes, that's right, this is the same party that pilloried the Democratic candidates for being "afraid of journalists" because they did not allow the propaganda arm of the Republican Party to run a debate for them.

It wasn't enough for them to run scared from black people when all but one of them steered clear of the NAACP debate. Now they apparently are running scared from the actual people of this country, likely because it's a debate where citizens ask questions without having their Republican credentials assured before they can be allowed in.

But hey, how can you blame them? If you were Rudy Giuliani, would you want to open yourself up to having a NYFD firefighter come on live TV and expose you for being a complete fuckup?

Not that a YouTube debate would really help them that much, even if potentially damaging questions were weeded out beforehand. Giuliani is so easily uncovered as a corrupt fraud that he'd be easily beaten by virtually any of the top Democratic candidates. Mitt Romney isn't far behind, with massive flip-flopping and dissembling. John McCain's campaign is pretty much a walking corpse (which is probably why is is signing on, in hopes of reversing his fortunes), and even Fred Thompson, once seen as the savior of the GOP in 2008, is now falling apart (due to fundraising woes, his lobbyist past becoming more public, and other credibility issues).

So can you blame them for running like scaredy-cats from any audience that isn't pre-filtered for Republican bias? Well, actually, yes you can... but you can't claim any measure of surprise when doing so.

The GOP on Civil Rights

Here are the Democratic candidates at the NAACP presidential forum to discuss civil rights. All of the candidates showed up:

Ricardo Thomas / The Detroit News

And here's the Republican turnout, just a few hours before:

Carlos Osorio / AP

Notice anything different? Yep, that's right--Tom Tancredo was the only GOP candidate to appear. He made the best of it, throwing out quips such as, "Do you think we should wait a few minutes to see if these other guys show up?" and "This is my kind of debate. ... Do I know something they don't know?"

The Republicans don't even have the ability to say it was an unfriendly forum, after conservatives continuously slammed Democrats for not allowing Fox News, a propaganda arm of the Republican Party, to frame, host, moderate, and deliver a debate for them. You can't have it both ways; either candidates are "afraid" of a forum for not showing up, or they aren't. And the NAACP is less of a threat to Republicans than Fox is to Democrats; the NAACP is issue-oriented, and would lean to the right if the GOP addressed their concerns better. Fox, on the other hand, is unabashedly anti-left for the sake of being pro-right. And it's not as if the GOP doesn't want to attract voters from the minority community, either, nor has the NAACP shown open hostility to visiting conservatives before. Take this 2004 function when GOP head Ken Mehlman spoke to the NAACP; they were not antagonistic, there were no protesters. Hell, the NAACP sees the Democrats as taking them for granted, and would welcome Republicans to the table if for no other reason than to light a fire under the Democrats. The GOP candidates faced a far friendlier challenge with the GOP than the Democrats did with Fox.

Not that the right-wing press hasn't taken the opportunity to be hypocritical here; take this NewsBusters article, which slams a CNN commentator for saying that the GOP is "scared of black folks"--despite the right wing massively playing up the story that "Democrats are afraid of journalists" because they didn't agree to the Fox debate.

And this is not the first time their hypocrisy has been shown up, either; Republicans got all antsy when one debate, hosted by MSNBC, with mostly right-leaning journalists, included Keith Olbermann on the commentator front, even though he didn't even get close to the candidates.

So, is the media playing up this story? The image of Tancredo standing there among nine other empty lecterns is a money shot, to be sure. But instead, the media is apparently all gaga over David Beckham showing up in the U.S., so the story conveniently slides into obscurity.

McCain Continues Implosion by Publicly Acting Like Technology Idiot

John McCain showed himself to be pretty damned stupid when he claimed that the streets of Baghdad were safe to stroll through and then, to prove his point, went there with a hundred troops, five helicopters, and a flak jacket. Now that he's gotten that out of the way, he attended a conference on technology and quickly made an ass of himself there as well.

First of all, he came out against Network Neutrality. You know, the protocol that was probably one of the most responsible for making the Internet successful. The one that has kept the Telecoms from turning the Internet into their private piggy bank, making everyone pay for everything and throwing their weight around worse than Microsoft does.

McCain, a self-described "free trader" and "deregulator" apparently does not understand what the hell "Network Neutrality" is. To be against Network Neutrality is virtually the opposite of free trade on the Internet, allowing a few companies to have constrictive proprietary control over the system. And it's not "deregulating," because there's no tome of regulation or any bureaucracy involved--just a simple rule, that everyone is truly equal and free on the Internet. McCain's statements were virtually spot-on to the scripts written by the Telecom lobbyists.

But then McCain made an even bigger fool of himself, by saying that he would put Steve Ballmer on his cabinet to advise him on technology issues (apparently unaware that such a cabinet position does not exist), and said he'd consider Ballmer for an ambassadorial position, maybe in China. The latter has been noted as a "joke," but probably because no one in his or her right mind could believe that a person could be so monumentally stupid as to seriously suggest such a thing. But then, was McCain's statement about having Ballmer as a technology advisor also a joke? Nobody thinks so, though pretty much everyone sees the idea as ludicrous. Who knows, maybe McCain seriously promoted the idea of Ballmer on his cabinet, then either because of laughter from the audience or an internal realization of how stupid the idea was, then tried to turn it into a joke by mentioning the China spot.

Either way, McCain is poison to technology. The man is dropping like a dead weight--sorry to see after he seemed so enticing in 2000. Either it was a sham then too, or McCain realized that the only way to be taken seriously was to sell out, big time.

Hollywood Elitism

The right wing simply can't stop being enraged by Hollywood! The Hollywood Elite! Actors who try to get involved in politics! Just some of the buzz, all actual quotes: "the 'Hollywood elite' are openly hostile to the attitudes, opinions, and values of millions of Americans" ... "anti-Americanism and a rejection of traditional morality are positives in the glitter capital of the world" ... "The problem with celebrity elitism is not the idiocy of the ideas that are expressed by the stars... but the blindly arrogant expectation that somehow their views deserve to be taken seriously merely because they are famous" ... "creators of false images (i.e., movies, TV) live in their heads and their imaginations" ... "they can afford, socially and economically, to live like moral reprobates" ... "Hollywood should JUST SHUT UP" ....

Wait... Arnold Schwarzenegger could run for president if only we amended the constitution? Fred Thompson is thinking of running now? Really??

HOO-ray for HOL-LYwood!!!!

Giuliani: Taxing the Rich Would Be Unthinkable

Crooks and Liars has a take on this so good that I almost didn't make this into a blog post, as it would be superfluous. However, I thought that the quote by Giuliani is more than worth commenting on. Here's the source quote:

In a potential preview of next fall’s presidential contest, Mr. Giuliani, who is seen as the front-runner for the Republican nomination, directly attacked the leading Democratic candidate, Mrs. Clinton, over a speech she gave Tuesday in New Hampshire bemoaning the return of "robber barons" and promising to pursue "shared prosperity" by increasing taxes on Americans making more than $200,000 a year.

"This would be an astounding, staggering tax increase," Mr. Giuliani told reporters yesterday after a visit to a restaurant on the edge of California’s Silicon Valley. "She wants to go back to the 1990s…. It would hurt our economy. It would hurt this area dramatically. That kind of tax increase would see a decline in your venture capital. It would see a decline in your ability to focus on new technology."

As C&L rightly points out, this is the kind of tax increase that Bill Clinton executed near the start of his presidency... and we experienced a technology boom, even "irrational exuberance" from investors, which was so successful that we erased the federal budget deficit altogether, a task unthinkable before Clinton. Furthermore, the more level playing field saw to it that the rising tide raised all boats--unlike Reagan's boom, or Bush's anemic upswing--and most certainly it did nothing to discourage people from pouring money into research & development of new technologies. According to our experience, we have seen that the kind of tax hike that Hillary is touting is not only not destructive, it is perhaps even essential, as it boosts federal revenue in the least painful way, thus creating the most healthy form of market confidence.

The problem is, Giuliani might have the upper hand with the voters. Even the most constructive tax hike, even when only applied to the richest of the rich, is easily attacked in a way that makes it look like you're going to raise everyone's taxes. A corollary to this rule is that you can similarly make everyone believe that a tax cut aimed 99% or even 100% at the rich is something that everybody wants and needs, which is where Bush went and Giuliani will likely follow. It's the same appeal to fear that the NRA uses when they turn even the most reasonable gun control into a "gun ban." I hate to say it, but the American people are so easily duped by this kind of scare appeal that it is ludicrously sad.

What Hillary needs to do is follow her husband's example: don't say you're going to raise taxes at all, even on the rich... then do it after you're elected. I remember in 1992, my conservative landlord in San Francisco (I was an SFSU student then) said that he didn't like Bill Clinton because he felt Clinton would raise his taxes after he got elected... but later voted for Clinton anyway because he felt that it was the right thing to do, and that a tax hike would help the economy. And he was right.

Brownback on Evolution

Sam Brownback, one of the Republican contenders for president in 2008, has an op-ed in the New York Times on the topic of evolution. Perhaps he wants to clarify his stand on the issue because he was one of the three Republican candidates who raised his hand when the question "who does not believe in evolution?" was asked. In the op-ed, he says this:

The question of evolution goes to the heart of this issue. If belief in evolution means simply assenting to microevolution, small changes over time within a species, I am happy to say, as I have in the past, that I believe it to be true. If, on the other hand, it means assenting to an exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the world that holds no place for a guiding intelligence, then I reject it.

The nod to "microevolution" is creationists' way of getting past a strong argument in favor of evolution. Creationists sometimes argue that if evolution is real, why don't we see it happening now? Well, that's exactly what "microevolution" is. So creationists will dodge, saying, oh, those are small changes. Why haven't we seen a horse change into an elephant in recorded history?

So they accept "microevolution" as a given, so long as it doesn't mean that they have to concede that life was formed via evolution. And that shows in the latter half of Brownback's paragraph, when he says that he accepts evolution only so long as it does not contradict his theology. Of course, he and many others ignore the view held by many religious people that evolution is God's way of creating life and it did not all have to happen within a six-day time span. That would satisfy Brownback's "place for a guiding intelligence," but it's pretty clear that Brownback is lying here and his real judge is either the six-day myth, or it is his right-wing Christian voter base that he feels it necessary to please. Either way, Brownback is guilty of an either-or fallacy here in rejecting what I suppose he would call "macroevolution."

But the distinction between "micro" and "macro" evolution is in itself no more than a disingenuous method of denying facts in evidence. Both "types" of evolution are in fact the same thing; one happens over small periods of time, the other over long periods. The distinction, however, allows creationists to dismiss the process as it happens before their eyes by claiming that it's not real because they don't see the process as it happens over millions of years. It's kind of like seeing a watermelon fall past your 30th-story window, then getting up and looking out the window to see it scattered over the sidewalk--and then postulating that the watermelon did not traverse the lower 29 floors, instead that god willed it into and out of existence just long enough to pass by your window, and then god magically created a squashed watermelon on the street below. When a person then shows you the video of the watermelon falling the intervening 29 floors (e.g., fossilized evidence of transitionary life forms), you claim that because the video consists of 1/30th-second frames and does not show every nanosecond of the fall, it is not valid evidence.

The reasonable middle ground in the fight between what the Bible literally says and what the world literally shows us is to believe that God created the universe, that the Bible tells us this in mythical terms, and that science reveals the technical details of god's achievement which were too complex and intricate to be chronicled in an ancient text written by a scientifically primitive people. But we can't have that crazy nonsense in our churches, now, can we?

But Brownback doesn't stop there:

There is no one single theory of evolution, as proponents of punctuated equilibrium and classical Darwinism continue to feud today. Many questions raised by evolutionary theory — like whether man has a unique place in the world or is merely the chance product of random mutations — go beyond empirical science and are better addressed in the realm of philosophy or theology.

These statements fall into the category of disingenuous wordplay, exercises in dishonest semantics. The grandaddy of this category is the claim that evolution is "only a theory," therefore it hasn't been proven yet. Which is baloney because evolution is a "theory" in the same way that gravity is a "theory." We know they both exist, the theories are about how they work. Brownback's argument here is simply a variation, dismissing evolution because the details haven't been worked out yet. Well, there are different theories of gravity as well, but I don't see Brownback flying off the ground yet.

Meanwhile, his statement about "whether man has a unique place in the world or is merely the chance product of random mutations" is the same either-or fallacy I demonstrated in the prior paragraph, little more than code for "whether man was created by god or not." Brownback also is either confused or lying here when he suggests that empirical science is posing the question. It is not. Science is not saying "god did or did not do this." Science is only saying, "this is what we see and here is how it could have worked in specific mechanical terms." It makes absolutely no statement about whether or not the observed processes were designed or simply came into being out of nowhere.

I could go on and on dissecting every statement in the piece, but I don't have time, so let me end with this choice quote:

Ultimately, on the question of the origins of the universe, I am happy to let the facts speak for themselves. There are aspects of evolutionary biology that reveal a great deal about the nature of the world, like the small changes that take place within a species. Yet I believe, as do many biologists and people of faith, that the process of creation — and indeed life today — is sustained by the hand of God in a manner known fully only to him.

Read that again, this time noting how Brownback transitions from letting "the facts speak for themselves" on how the universe was created, to saying that the universe and life are "sustained by the hand of God in a manner known fully only to him." And then explain to me how the "facts can speak for themselves" when they are known only to god? And, of course, what "empirical" facts support the existence of god in the first place? Exactly what facts are being spoken here?

In any case, Brownback is a bible-thumping creationist who, like most in that category, defies observation and reason, instead preferring to obfuscate enough so that a confused audience will settle down comfortably. In short, a strong Republican candidate.

Bush: Seven Years in Office = Blame for High Gas Prices

Texas Governor George W. Bush, June 23, 2000, blaming the Clinton administration for high gas prices because they were in office for seven years and gas prices were rising:

There seems to be an effort out of Washington to blame me for rising energy prices. And the American people don't buy that. It's the -- Clinton-Gore administration's been there for seven years, we're more dependent now than ever before on energy from foreign sources. And I am amazed that they're trying to shift the blame away from the people that are holding the office. And I resent that kind of politics, and so will the American people. ... And this is typical of an administration that refuses to accept responsibility. This is amazing. They've been in office for seven years, the price of gasoline has gone up during their period of time.

The price of gas that very week: $1.68 per gallon.

Now, the Bush administration has been in office for six and a half years. Prices at the pump have almost doubled since Bush blamed Clinton and Gore, reaching $3.10 a gallon (hitting over $4 in some areas). Well, under Bush 2000's logic, the president is to blame. Think that Bush 2007 would agree to that evaluation now? Think he would be willing to "accept responsibility"?

And it's not as if he's really been trying or anything, as if he's been on the case since day one. Only in the past year or so has Bush even made sounds about acting on high gas prices, and so far virtually nothing has materialized. Bush's biggest policy proposal, called "20-in-10," suggests that we cut fuel consumption by 20% over the next ten years. No relief for today or anytime within the remaining year and a half of this administration. Although refinery capacity was identified (PDF) from the start of the Bush administration as one of the biggest culprits of rising fuel prices, Bush has done absolutely nothing to remedy the problem, and today, the refinery shortage is worse than ever.

Bush 2007 says:

Our dependence on oil creates a risk for our economy, because a supply disruption anywhere in the world could drive up American gas prices to even more painful levels.

Boy, it's too bad that Bush didn't think about lessening dependency on foreign sources of crude oil back in 2000. Bush 2000, don't you agree?

I think we ought to make sure that we become less dependent on foreign sources of crude oil. I'll have an energy policy.

Oopsie! Too bad you let Cheney get the heads of the oil companies to write that policy!

You might expect that conservatives would argue that, after all, being in office for any amount of time does not equal culpability. But then, who expects conservatives to do anything but blame Democrats?

Fox News Headline: "Pain at the Pump: Gas Prices Rise on Democrats' Watch." Yes, apparently those damn Democrats have had a 51% majority in Congress for four months and gas prices have shot up during that time! Damn those Democrats! It's all their fault!

Color Blinders

There is a certain level of schizophrenia involved in conservative views about race, especially in light of the candidacy of Barack Obama. While he is delighting massive crowds of liberals and independents--and even some conservatives--the far right wing is going apoplectic over the whole affair. Wingnuts scramble to find racism in liberals' appreciation of Obama, at the same time that they strain to see disapproval from the mainstream African-American community.

For the Far Right, everything about Obama is about race. The same voices that claim they envision a color-blind society (by essentially ignoring the racism that exists and allowing it to run unchecked) are the same ones who see nothing but race where Obama is involved--but in classic projection, they claim that it's the liberals who are obsessed with race. Obama isn't white enough, he's not black enough, he's a way for liberals to assuage their racial guilt; apparently, Obama's popular only because he biracial, but at the same time, liberals don't like him because he's biracial. It's a confusing barrage of half-baked excuses to make Obama be all about race, while in the background, the standard-bearer for the Far Right, Rush Limbaugh, continues the "color blind" drumbeat by playing and re-playing the racist melody, "Barack the Magic Negro."

The real irony here is that people who like Obama are the actual ones who are color-blind. They're the ones who have listened to him speak, have appreciated his charisma and the appeal of his personality, the power of his speaking style and strong talent for communication. It's not because he's black, any more than it was because Bill Clinton was white. Obama appeals to people because of who he is.

But here's how bad things have become on the flipside: a major news network has been forced to completely disable comments from site visitors for stories about Barack Obama. The reason: persistent, voluminous racial epithets--so many, that CBS can't keep up with them and eliminate them on a one-by-one basis.

So, who is posting these comments? His liberal fans? Umm, not too likely. No, it is probably the "color blind" right-wingers, the ones who don't "see race," and who accuse the liberals of rampant racism where Obama is involved. The attacks and threats have become so bad that Obama has been given Secret Service protection earlier than any other candidate in history.

Just look at the right wing's criticisms of Obama. Try to find one that isn't somehow connected to race, or act in some way to make his race or ethnicity an issue. You'll have a hard time doing so. This might be because there's just not that much about Obama that they can attack. But personally, I think it goes deeper than that. It's more about the far right's inability to handle the idea of a liberal man of color taking power, so they focus on that--in a similar fashion that they have always responded to Hillary Clinton's being a woman.

It's not pretty, but it is what's there.

They Were Saying...

Remember how Republicans were all criticizing Democrats for not taking part in a debate hosted by Fox News? Remember how Democrats were supposed to be "afraid of journalists," and were threatening the freedom of the press itself?

Get a load of this. When MSNBC--a network with a bevy of conservative pundit shows--hosted the Republican debate, and Keith Olbermann, a noted critic of the right wing, quarterbacked the coverage of that debate, it prompted protest from the Republican front-runner as well as other candidates:

The Giuliani campaign privately expressed its concern to NBC News about Olbermann’s role in the days leading up to last Thursday’s debate.

... MSNBC spokesman Jeremy Gaines said a Giuliani campaign representative had called NBC News to complain about Olbermann being part of the debate telecast following his commentary. Olbermann was not told about the protest until after he came off the air Thursday, he said.

Other GOP presidential campaigns have expressed concerns about Olbermann to NBC News, according to a New York political strategist who requested anonymity to protect his clients.

Isn't that just precious? Here you have the Republicans blasting Democrats for not wanting to have their entire debate, moderators and all, hosted by a rabid right-wing propaganda outfit, but when Republicans have to deal with a debate hosted by a network with someone not even on the debate floor being a left-wing pundit, they all start whining.

Every single ounce of criticism against Dems for not wanting Fox News propagandists in every corner of their own debate just melted into slag. After Republicans protested about a left-winger commenting on their debate, how could they possibly criticize Dems for not wanting something ten times stronger? Maybe that's why all the complaints made by the Republican campaigns were made privately.

I'd comment on the utter hypocrisy we're seeing from the right wing here, but since it's been established that such behavior is the status quo from that crowd, I guess it'd be pretty much redundant to do so.

Voter Fraud Fraud

This is something that I have touched on in the past, but Josh Marshall, as part of his coverage of the US Attorney scandal, has an excellent, must-read post on how rare cases of voter fraud have been exaggerated beyond sanity as a political tool by this Republican administration (you should also read this NY Times article). In essence, "voter fraud" is a non-issue, represented almost entirely by (a) people paid to register voters who fraudulently sign up non-existent people, something which results in zero fraudulent votes, or (b) people who filled out forms in error, most of whom never even attempted to vote.

But Republicans have pretended that it is an epidemic of untold proportions, and have used the now-politicized Justice Department and their US Attorney cronies to "crack down" on it. The real aim: to bring back new versions of Jim Crow laws at the national level, discouraging or preventing minorities and low-income citizens from voting. And as a fringe benefit, they can remove people's attention from their own widespread election fraud while making Democrats seem guilty.

What happened was that US Attorneys, acting as GOP attack dogs, specifically tried to make cases against Democrats (just as they lopsidedly prosecuted Democratic officials and left Republicans alone), but for all their effort, could only find 86 people to convict over 5 years (of which a third were for local elections, like sheriffs buying votes in small-town campaigns), barely more than one conviction per month nationwide--not enough in total even to swing the razor-sharp Bush-Gore deficit in Florida in 2000, even had all 86 been located there. Compare that to thousands of Democratic voters disenfranchised illegally by bogus "felon" lists, or Republicans signing up Democrats for voter registration and then destroying the forms--acts which, to the best of my knowledge, never ended in indictments or arrests, just like dozens of other well-documented cases of Republican election fraud. Meanwhile, the Republican effort to arrest Democrats for voter fraud wound up with people being deported or imprisoned for what amounted to clerical errors, while acquittals peppered a large number of the indictments.

Maybe they'd find more fraud if they stopped ignoring Republican offenders.

Yet another step towards a Brave New Conservative Country.

Progress

Breaking news: on 60 Minutes this week, John McCain will say that it is a "sign of progress" that he only needed three Blackhawk helicopters, two Apache gunships, 100 armed troops and a caravan of armored Humvees so he could go shopping in Baghdad. He calls this "progress" because he claims that they wouldn't have let him do this at all in times past.

Ironically, there was a time when you could go shopping there, or just strolling, completely unarmed and unprotected. It was when Saddam Hussein ran the place.

Now, that's irony.

When it gets safe enough to go shopping with only one Apache gunship and a twenty-troop escort, let me know.

Party of Family Values and Dignity, So We Are Told

So. John McCain (adulterer, divorced & remarried younger heiress) now looks like a fool on Iraq, has flip-flopped on half the issues in an attempt to suck up to the religious right, and is doing dismally at raising funds for his campaign. Oh, and it looks like he approached several Democrats over the years, inquiring about becoming a Democrat.

Rudy Giuliani (adulterer, twice divorced & twice remarried, annulled his marriage to his second cousin, announced second divorce to the press before telling his wife) is getting less and less of a rosy image as people see how tissue-thin his real rep as "America's 9/11 Mayor" is. His infidelity and dalliances, his associations with Bernard Kerik, his screwups in New York (like putting the emergency response center in the WTC after the WTC bombing), his history of backing the police on outrageously criminal violence cases, and his less-than-hardcore-conservative credentials (he supports public funding for abortions, as one example) are making him less and less appealing to Republicans.

And Newt Gingrich (adulterer, twice divorced & twice remarried, served divorce papers to his former wife when she was in a hospital bed suffering from cancer), aside from having past negatives far in excess of anything Hillary has to fight, is already botching up his chances before he even had had the opportunity to announce his intentions for running. His recent (and very belated) admission that he cheated on his wife and lied about it at the same time that he attacked Clinton for doing the same doesn't help much, of course. However, more recently, he spoke out against bilingual education, saying that it encouraged "the language of living in a ghetto." To clean up the mess, Gingrich denied that he meant Spanish (which is the obvious inference which he clearly did mean), and instead said that the word "ghetto" "historically had referred as [sic] a Jewish reference originally." Well. That's much better.

So far, Mitt Romney is the best candidate in the quickly-self-destructing GOP field, but his Mormon beliefs will likely keep the Christian right-wing core away from the polls.

But hey, Republicans seem to be forgiving of personal flaws. After all, they elected (kind of) a drug-snorting, drunk-driving, McCain-smearing, draft-dodging, hypocritical, cruel, bloodthirsty, perjuring, silver-spooned, and ultimately corrupt nitwit to the White House, at a time when "character" was supposed to be the most important thing in a president. So maybe there's hope for the Scarlet Letter candidates after all.

The GOP's shining hope? Actor Fred Thompson. Swell. Another actor.

The Next Florida Election Could Be Interesting... in a Good Way

After years of election-year crimes under the Jeb Bush administration, the air finally seems to be clearing. The new governor, also a Republican, is talking like a Democrat. He'll be addressing global climate change, lower property taxes, and better funding of education. But most importantly, he said that he'll insist on a paper trail for ballots, and will restore voting rights to felons who have served their time, with exceptions for rapists, murderers, and major drug traffickers. Why that pattern? Because most "felons" are minorities who are made felons not by their actions, but by racist disparities in the law. Whites use powder cocaine more (just ask the president), while minorities more often use crack cociane, and:

Current policy generates a 100 to 1 penalty ratio for crack-related offenses. For instance, possession of only 5 grams of crack-cocaine yields a 5 year mandatory minimum sentence, however it takes 500 grams of powder cocaine to prompt the same sentence. Moreover, crack-cocaine is the only drug for which the first offense of simple possession can trigger a federal mandatory minimum sentence. Yet "simple possession of any quantity of any other substance by a first time offender - including powder cocaine - is a misdemeanor offense punishable by a maximum of one year in prison."

Which means that whites get to keep their right to vote while minorities get deprived of theirs, even if the whites get caught with far more drugs on them. That's what the reversal of the felon's voting rights issue really is all about--though you can positively expect that conservative pundits will paint this as a "Democrats love criminals" issue. The irony in that is palpable: the wingnuts want to block cocaine users from voting because of their politics and/or color, but on the pretense of their being "criminals" because they used cocaine--while they are more than happy to elect president someone who used a lot more cocaine.

Florida Republicans are not so enthusiastic about their new governor, however:

The result was an odd tableau in the packed House chamber as Democrats seated in the back recesses rose repeatedly to applaud Crist's speech as front row Republicans slowly joined them.

"It's great to have a Democratic governor,'' said Rep. Keith Fitzgerald, D-Sarasota. "You could see the standing ovations start in the back row and move forward. You could actually see some of the representatives in the front looking over their shoulders, feeling uncomfortable and then standing up.''

Yes, the return of honest vote-counting and letting minorities vote should be worrisome to Florida Republicans. Who knows, we might even have a major election in Florida where a bogus "felons list" will not be generated so as to disenfranchise tens of thousands of Democratic voters who never committed a crime. Wouldn't that be something?

Of course, this all depends on Crist keeping to his word, and Florida Republicans not going full-throttle to block it. So, we'll see.

The Moral Low Ground

Breaking news: Newt Gingrich, apparently setting up his 2008 presidential bid, has finally admitted that he was having an extramarital affair with a congressional aide 20 years younger than he was, and that this was going on in 1998, when he was ramming through impeachment hearings on Bill Clinton.

But he says that he should not be considered a hypocrite. Why not? Because Clinton committed the crime of perjury in his extramarital affair.

Conservatives always bring this up to show how their own extramarital affairs are not as bad as Clinton's, but they always lack the depth of conviction necessary to give them the moral high ground. First off, the tests are very different: Gingrich, for example, was not sued and put under oath and then asked about his sexual dalliances, which, if answered truthfully, could end his career. Had he been in that situation and then answered truthfully in full public view, then he would have the moral high ground. But to press for a president to be impeached for lying about an affair when he was having an affair and lying about it himself is nothing but hypocritical; that Clinton lied under oath about it is not part of the equation because Gingrich never faced the same situation. Moreover, Gingrich had multiple affairs before that aide, one of whom reported that Gingrich preferred getting blow jobs so he could deny "having sex with that woman."

The second circumstance that sheds a different light on the matter is the nature of the legal case against Clinton. Put simply, the entire Paula Jones lawsuit was a sham, a major abuse of the legal system which was instigated for a single purpose: to politically assassinate the President's character, to attack him using the courts as a bludgeon.

The Paula Jones case began under the flimsiest of pretenses: some obscure, little-read right-wing rag published the initials "PJ" in speaking about one of Clinton's affairs, and Jones claimed that since she was then outed, she had no choice but to sue Clinton for sexual harassment. From the beginning, Jones' legal team consisted of and was financed by conservatives; one of the members of her team was none other than Ann Coulter. Right-wing fingerprints are all over the case from start to end.

While Democrats agreeably appoint Republicans to prosecute Republicans so as to maintain a sense of objectivity, Republicans gleefully appoint Republican attack dogs to prosecute cases against Democrats. Kenneth Starr was the worst sort, using all manner of illicit ways and means to take on the Clinton case, from using legal blackmail to elicit false accusations against Clinton (for which Susan McDougal went to prison because she refused to lie) to leaking embarrassing details all over the media in clear violation of legal ethics.

In the end, the incident where Clinton lied under oath was the ultimate "Gotcha" moment, the essence of entrapment. When the prosecution found proof that Clinton had an affair with Lewinski, they did not release it--instead, that proof quietly in hand, they set Clinton up for perjury. Seriously--if there is any sitting politician who is having an affair which they can still deny, where the admission would cause them great harm, is there any possibility that the politician will admit to it, even under oath? One can be certain that Gingrich would have lied about it. And in the entire legal proceedings after 9/11, Bush and Cheney adamantly refused to be put under oath because they knew they could get charged with perjury for the lies they planned to tell. Clinton's was simply forced to make the lie while under oath in a sham trial, a distinction that is entirely technical in nature, having nothing whatsoever to do with morality. Clinton was wrong for lying, but the mitigating circumstances were about as strong as one could possibly imagine, which is why so many people never saw it as a big deal.

So for Gingrich to admit to his affair a decade after the fact, for him never to have been under the pressure of being under oath, never having faced the choice of committing perjury or losing his career, to say he wasn't hypocritical... well, it's pretty damn shameless.

And let's not forget that that affair was not the only sin committed by this "family values" champion. He married his high school Math teacher, whom he would later ask for a divorce as she lay in a hospital bed with cancer. He had many extramarital affairs, and divorced his second wife by telephoning her on Mother's Day. And now he wants Christians to like him because he's an evangelical and should be forgiven his (multitudinous) sins.

In a way, I hope that Gingrich becomes the front-runner and wins the Republican nomination. Any candidate in the Democratic field would wipe the floor with him. And it's not such an impossibility, either--Gingrich is a favorite of the evangelic crowd, the Republican base; look what they did to McCain in 2000 in order to get their boy Bush in the lead.

It is also incredibly hypocritical for three Republican favorites--McCain, Giuliani, and Gingrich--to be vying for the family-values Christian vote when all three had extramarital affairs and divorces. But then, as we saw with all of the sins and crimes that George Bush committed before running for president, you can sin all you want so long as you praise Jesus and ask for forgiveness when you're finally caught.

And that's not hypocritical, is it?

Debunking Fox

Wow. Very rarely does the media go for actually defending a Democratic candidate rather than joining en masse to repeat the smear. Usually the media just gloms on to a lie like this and then goes silent when the truth is made clear.

This time it is a rumor that Barack Obama attended an Islamic Madrassa school, like those in Pakistan, which teach hardcore Islamic hatred of Christianity and the West. The rumor was released by a right-wing site (owned by the Washington Times), which in a double-whammy claimed that the rumor came directly from Hillary Clinton, despite naming no names and producing no documents to back that up. Fox News immediately jumped all over the story, gleefully broadcasting what amounted to a huge smear on both front-running Democratic candidates, and the deepest right-wing elements of the media and blogosphere began their swarm.

As for the Hillary part of the smear, Insight.com is standing by its story, saying that they had direct contact with "researchers connected to Senator Clinton" who said that:

"Ms. Clinton regards Mr. Obama as her most formidable opponent and the biggest obstacle to the Democratic Party’s 2008 presidential nomination. They said Ms. Clinton has been angered by Mr. Obama's efforts to tap her supporters for donations."

When you consider this, it comes across as the biggest load of crap ever heard. One of the things about Clinton is that she is a savvy political operator, and her campaign doesn't make completely idiotic newbie mistakes. So for her own researchers to go to a right-wing organization, and to say, "hey, tell everyone that Hillary hates Obama and wants to trash him!" is so stupidly and transparently a lie as to be laughable.

This is where organizations like CNN usually chime in with the popular smear, ignoring little details like the one I just mentioned and foregoing things like investigating the truth first. In a turnabout from their usual routine, however, CNN is now savaging the rumor, calling it, accurately for once, a right-wing smear. Wolf Blitzer is even making a big deal about it, saying that "CNN did what any responsible news organization should do," which is investigate the claim. Yeah, as if that's what they have always done. Instead, this time, they actually went to Indonesia, discovered that the school was not a madrassa but instead a normal school where Christianity was taught side-by-side with Islam (but only once a week for both), and that there's nothing subversive or dangerous about anything there--nor was there ever. But CNN didn't stop there, they also went to lengths to show where the smear was coming from; Blitzer repeatedly mentioned Fox and "right-wing" news organizations and blogs as being responsible for spreading the story, and pointed out the connection between the conservative Washington Times and the web site that began the rumor.

Well, better late than never.

McCain the Flip-flopper

If Republicans had a field day labeling John Kerry as a "flip-flopper," then Democrats should have a bonanza with John McCain. After having been smeared by Bush with the assistance of the far right, McCain realized that he'd have to kowtow before the extremists if he wanted to be president, and has been busily prostrating himself before them, abandoning his prior "maverick" status. The Carpetbagger Report lists 15 significant McCain flip-flops over the past few years.

McCain used to support reproductive rights, gay marriage, campaign finance reform, and grassroots lobbying reform; now he's against all those things. McCain used to be against torture, tax cuts for the rich, and ethanol subsides; now he's for all of them. McCain used to disapprove of people like Jerry Falwell, Sam and Charles Wyly, Henry Kissenger, and Grover Norquist, but now he's warming up to them for support. He has also flip-flopped on Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday as a holiday, state support for the Confederate flag, and politicians visiting Bob Jones University. And he now claims that he always thought that the Iraq War would probably be "long and hard and tough," even though he originally said that we would win the conflict easily.

Who knows, there might even be enough video material in there to make a good commercial. But one thing is for certain (and I've said this before), McCain is no longer someone who will appeal to Democrats or Independents like he did in 2000. He may now have the support of the far right and the religious extremists, but he has hobbled himself for the rest of us--and 2006 demonstrated that the extremist right is no longer what it used to be.

McCain 2.0: No More Straight Talk Express

John McCain ain't what he used to be. He used to be palatable to most people, an alluring face in the scary crowd of right-wingers. Back when he rode the Straight Talk Express, he was the kind of dream candidate we often imagined--willing to talk for as long as necessary, speaking freely even on controversial issues. Not hiding and creating a plastic facade, like Bush did, not giving the usual practiced political sound-bite double-talk-and-run-off garbage. He was the Republican candidate that most Democrats would have been comfortable with, a true uniter-not-a-divider.

But that John McCain died when Bush smeared him all the way to South Carolina and back, in particular pushing the suggestion that McCain's adopted daughter (a Bangladeshi girl from Mother Teresa's orphanage) was his own illegitimate black child. Other rumors spread by Bush and his far-right and fundie allies included that McCain was gay and his wife a drug addict, and that McCain was insane even possibly a traitor.

Since then, John McCain learned a valuable lesson: don't cross the extremists in the Republican Party. And he has been practicing that wisdom in his ongoing-though-unofficial campaign, no longer allowing for straight talk, and paying obeisance to the religious extremists he once criticized, and has reversed himself on a number of issues he gained political capital for opposing in 2000. The message he is sending is, "I learned my lesson and I'll be a good boy now."

Although McCain is hoping to hang on to some of the appeal he gained back in 2000--and indeed, many on the left still feel more comfortable with him because they remember those days--it is about as clear as it can get that McCain has shifted remarkably to the right, chumming up to Bush and the religious right, and backing that up with his voting record, suggesting that he would still stay bought by the right-wing extremists even after he would be elected president. And it certainly doesn't help with many on the left that McCain is new best buds with Joe Lieberman, with some even saying McCain might even consider Lieberman as a VP candidate.

There is no more Straight Talk Express, no more centrist McCain, just a compromised, politicized shell. Mind you, he would still be ten times better than Bush, and there is still the hope that enough of the old McCain remains to make a difference in office. But the old McCain is gone, and what remains is too Bushified to be all that appealing.

Addenda: then there is also McCain's latest weasel: McCain was the first to come up with the idea of escalation in Iraq, back in October. At the time, he said that 20,000 troops would be sufficient, though he did say for "long term" deployment. When Bush first came out with the "Surge™" plan, McCain did not object--not for quite some time; even a day ago, he said he was not sure what numbers would do the job.

But now, he is now coming out and distancing himself from the whole idea--saying, in effect, that his idea was for 30,000 troops to be "sustained," not 20,000 troops for a season or two. This is pretty clearly a weasel, not just because McCain previously said that 20,000 troops would be enough, but because it was clear what Bush has been thinking for a week, maybe two, but McCain only now is saying his plan was different--only after pretty nearly universal opposition to Bush's plan has made itself evident, with no one believing that it will make a difference, except to possibly escalate the violence. And certainly, McCain has brought forth no evidence as to how an extra ten thousand or so troops for a few more seasons could achieve that would make the difference.

But McCain is still trying to have it both ways: though he has made it clear that "his" surge would need more troops for longer, and therefore if Bush's surge doesn't work it's not a "McCain" surge--he still is supporting Bush's surge. Probably for the same reason he came out for an escalation in the first place: because he wants to look like Bush wants to look, like he could do the job, but without the responsibility or the liability if the plan doesn't work.

So it's hard to see his new stance being anything but a weasel.

Minority Bill of Rights

Just when you think that Republican lawmakers can't become any more like whiny, hypocritical, infantile brats than they already are:

The ranking Republicans on two committees complained to the incoming Democratic chairmen Tuesday that the plans for the first 100 hours restrict their ability to participate. Several more Republicans are planning a news conference today to introduce a "minority bill of rights" they say is based directly on a plan that Pelosi proposed in 2004 while Democratic minority leader.

Not only are Republicans, who virtually shut out Democrats from making any laws over the past six years, whining now that they will be shut out for four days, they are demanding that the Democratic leadership pass a "minority bill of rights" which Republicans refused to pass when they were in the majority.

The depths to which they plumb are so breathtaking as to leave me speechless.

The Difference a Word, or a Piece of Paper, Can Make

It's interesting how things change when you see history from two different perspectives. See below two recountings of the 1984 election results from Indiana's 8th District. It has come up because of the situation in Florida's 13th District and the close vote there, and the options the Democrats have of simply not seating the Republican, who seems to have won by malfunctioning fiat of the paperless voting machines.

Here is the first telling of the '84 tale:

[In 1984, there was] a vicious dispute [in the House] over a contested election, this time in Indiana. After a recount, Republican Richard McIntyre was declared the winner by 34 votes over Democratic incumbent Frank McCloskey. The Indiana secretary of state, a Republican, certified the McIntyre victory, but the Democratic House refused to seat him and left the seat vacant for four months while a special task force recounted all the ballots. The task force decided--and the full House agreed along party lines--that the Democrat had won by four votes. Republicans charged that the Democrats had recounted the ballots until their man was ahead and then promptly shut down the count. Newt Gingrich, the future House speaker, labeled the refusal to seat the certified winner "the Watergate of the House," and led a walkout of GOP members from the chamber.

And here is the second:

In the 1984 election, Rep. McCloskey faced conservative state senator Rick McIntyre. Buoyed by President Reagan's strong coattails, McIntyre trailed McCloskey by only 72 votes after the initial vote count. A tabulation error, however, resulted in an overcounting of McCloskey votes and the Republican Indiana Secretary of State certified McIntyre as the winner by 34 votes, ignoring other recounted tallies that actually showed McCloskey was in the lead. The Democratic-controlled House refused to seat either McIntyre or McCloskey and conducted their own recount. In the end, the House seated McCloskey after declaring him the winner by just four votes (116,645 to 116,641). The vote was largely along partisan lines and in response every Republican House member marched out of the chamber in protest.

This is what makes it so hard to judge from the sidelines: which story is true? Are both? That's possible. The first story was told in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, and the slant is obviously that the Democrats overturned a valid vote. The second is the Wikipedia telling, which adds elements that make the Republican Secretary of State sound crooked. So how are we to take this story?

One disturbing thing is that were you to read just one of the two stories above, you would come out with the impression that one side played fair and the other did not. Another disturbing fact is that the full story is not easily findable; I know it must be out there, but probably not on a web page anywhere. But with the casual leaving out of a single fact (that the Indiana Secretary of State ignored other recounts, that there was a charge that Congressional Democrats stopped counting once their man won), the story takes on considerably different tacks.

However, there is something striking about this story: what the Republicans howled over in 1984, what Newt Gingrich later built his leadership upon ten years later, what they called an unacceptable injustice--pales in comparison to what that same party did in 2000. The Floridian Secretary of State using a ginned-up "felons" list, and then prematurely--and repeatedly--calling the race for the candidate of her own party. Ironically, this echoes not just what Republicans claimed the Democrats did in 1984, it echoes even more closely what the Indiana Secretary of State--a Republican--did to precipitate the crisis in the first place.

And now we come to the same impasse: in Florida's 13th, the seat vacated by Katherine Harris, by ironic coincidence, the election is in serious question. Voting machines (which left no paper trail) were reported by a large number of people to have left out the House race, or not recorded the vote; these reports took place in Sarasota County, where the majority of affected voters were Democrats; and in those same areas, impossibly large undervotes were recorded. All point to the conclusion that the voting machines malfunctioned (I only reluctantly restrain myself from using scare quotes around the word "malfunctioned"), and the clear winner was the Democrat. However, the Republican state government "verified" the undervote and certified the Republican candidate to be the winner.

This leaves House Democrats in a difficult position: do they repeat 1984 and refuse to seat the Republican? If the Wikipedia telling is to be trusted, the situations are closely similar, in that Republicans in the state government ignored valid evidence and instead certified their party's candidate to be the winner--but the Democrats stand to be tagged as the bad guys if they essentially do the exact same thing--even though they have far greater justification.

But Republicans have learned that in situations like this, possession is 9/10ths of the law; by having done their crookery first, they get to slag the Democrats for doing it later.

Hopefully, the courts will intervene and demand a special election--the only solution that is really viable. Here is a PDF file which lays out the argument very well. After all, the undervote was clearly not legitimate, and a special election (which Republicans thought was fine and dandy when the duly and legally elected California governorship was not to their liking) will serve to clarify the issue.

This time, without paperless voting machines, thank you very much.

Republican Values Roundup: Hypocrisy, Corruption, Terror, Fraud, and Violence

Bush opposes Democratic plans to allow Medicare to negotiate for drug prices so seniors will not be gouged for medication costs. The rationale: "What [Democrats] really want is government-run health care." Because private industry is doing such a great job. Democrats want to enable Medicare to have pharmaceutical companies duke it out for contracts, driving down the prices. Bush says that's bad.

At the exact same time, Bush is pressuring the British to open up their own government-run health care system to more American pharmaceutical firms. Why? Because "Allowing all new drugs to be used in the NHS would result in the companies 'fighting it out' on price," says a Bush administration official.

Somehow those two stories don't mesh right, but I can't quite put my finger on why that is....

Who's the person who likely sent white powder to liberal politicians and left-leaning media personalities? Who might act like a terrorist? One of those liberal al Qaeda lovers, perhaps? Nope. A right-wing Freeper, that's who. Wingnut Chad Castagana has been arrested on suspicion of having mailed the powder. I can only imagine the talk on the Free Republic: "Let's face it, David Letterman had it coming!"

Pennsylvania Republicans knowingly scammed minority voters, hiring 300 African-Americans to hand out bogus fliers to voters in mostly-black districts which identified the top Republican candidates as Democrats. This was not an isolated abuse, it was "calculated strategy," and an official one.

A sterling example of Republican's choice for representation: freshly re-elected Republican Congressman Mark Olson. Now arrested for beating his wife.

USA Today confirms Newsweek's poll: Bush fell 5% in their new poll to 33%. Expect other polls to mirror these results.

Though for the life of me, I can't imagine why his numbers are going down.

A Little Reminder

As part of their campaigning, Republicans warned America that if Democrats won the election, they would use their control of the Congress to investigate the Bush administration, and even try to impeach him. They painted this as an unacceptable outcome.

Crooks & Liars reminds us that twelve years ago, Newt Gingrich promised that if Republicans took control of Congress, that is exactly what they would do: investigate Clinton to death. And that is one promise he kept, right up to the impeachment.

Funny. A 15-year-old real estate deal and an extramarital affair justified massive investigations and a culture of abusing oversight for partisan political purposes; conservatives felt righteous in campaigning on that, and even more justified in carrying out innumerable investigations. But, a dozen years later, endless lies to start a war, endless corruption with big business and lobbyists, and endless violations of the Constitution are not cause to investigate a Republican president--and conservatives warn Democrats they'd better not even think of investigating Bush, or they'll smear them as partisan attack dogs.

Like I said, funny.

Plummet

The first post-election poll results are out, and Newsweek has Bush at (for them) an all-time low of 31%. It will bear watching for more results; Newsweek, while no a total outlier, is usually on the low end of results. Bush, having rated 35-41% in the week before the election, may not get a score higher than 36% this week, if the previous range of figures holds. No one is missing the fact that the poor showing in the midterm elections and the Rumsfeld resignation are mostly responsible for scoring palpable hits on his popularity (what little of it he has left). Both of these are bound to hit Bush hard, as both are things that will upset his base as much as, if not more than, anyone else.

Moonbats at Midnight

Some conservative pundits are acting even more bizarrely than usual, which is to say that they are meeting my expectations of them. Rush Limbaugh out-and-out admitted that he was lying to his audience about the Republican candidates (Olbermann video here), and that in fact, he hated the Republicans he was supporting (he calls what he did "support"?), but that he lied to everyone because "the stakes were high."

Meanwhile, Jonah Goldberg wrote a concise narrative on what Bush should do. The final scene: Bush stands in front of the press corps dressed in nothing but a loincloth, his face bloody and his torso bearing the claw marks off a bear he just killed, as he throws the bear skin over Helen Thomas. And, no, I am not making that up.

Ann Coulter, meanwhile, shows no change from normal as she criticizes the Democrats for not assailing the Diebold company after their "paltry" win. Apparently, she's not paying attention to what we're saying, though she never does anyway. She then uses the "sixth year" of Lyndon Johnson and Gerald Ford's tenures to show how the pickups by the Democratic Party were "the death throes of a dying party." Seriously, you can't make stuff like this up.

Michelle Malkin backs up Coulter's assertion that just because the Democrats won control of both houses, that means Democrats don't think that Diebold machines are objectionable. What neither she nor co-moonbat Coulter realize is that Democratic candidates won these races despite all the election fraud, not because of it. What, they actually believe that Diebold machines are solid and unimpeachable, or somehow actually helped the Democrats this year? Yeah, right.

Among most conservatives, however, the party line is that Republicans deserved to be taken out to the woodshed and maybe this will beat some sense into them, that this is cathartic and will be a rebuilding term for them, while the Democrats really didn't win, they just benefitted from the Republicans' loss. Not entirely inaccurate, but it's also not much more than the best attempt to put a shine on the turd Republicans laid this year.

More Irregularities

Already there have been more than enough reports from more than enough places to raise serious suspicions about electronic voting machines. Machines switching people's votes to Republican candidates have been reported so far in Colorado, Arkansas, Missouri, Broward and Miami Counties in Florida, and in three places in Texas including San Antonio and Dallas.

Obviously, vote-hopping is not happening on every touch-screen voting machine, and it's not happening to every voter on machines that are affected. So, what is happening?

Jamie Holly on Crooks and Liars gives a clue when reporting on her own voting experience. On her county's ballot, there is a referendum ("State Issue 1") that was disqualified but was too late to remove from the ballot. However, an odd thing happened:

I just got back from voting and we suffered from a "glitch". As I was voting, my ballot started off with governor and then worked down through the list. After voting for all the politicians, up next were the issues. My first issue was State issue 1, an issue dealing with Ohio's Worker Compensation. I was expecting to see this, but knew my vote didn't count on it...

So after my voting experience went smoothly, the person I went down with had her turn to cast her ballot. She had the same ballot, the same ballot (iso) card, and the same machine, but her ballot did not appear the same. Instead her ballot started out with a blank blue screen and then went onto the candidates and the state issues, but issue 1 was not on her ballot. She called the poll worker over who said that "this has been happening on some machines". Well our polling place only has three machines and she was on the same machine as I just got done voting on, and this problem did not happen for me. ...

The most interesting thing I kept thinking of was Ken Blackwell on CNN this past weekend saying the machines do not have any problems, it was the poll workers. Well this poll worker did everything the same as she did with me (programmed the card for ballot 84), yet our ballots appeared differently. This machine was a Diebold touch screen machine, and as a programmer I can tell you that it is a definite software glitch. The poll worker did the exact same thing she did for me and all the end user variables were the same.

If the same machine, programmed in the same way, using identical ballots, one right after the other, acts in two different ways, that's an indication that someone has been dicking around with the programming.

One machine acting the same way with all voters will get shut down or fixed. But have the machines switch things around at random, and it can be explained away as a transient glitch. If it is reported more than once, poll workers are trained to identify it as some mere mechanical problem and follow a handbook set of instructions to "repair" the machine.

The reported vote-hopping incidents may indeed be a glitch, but not because of the vote-hopping. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I don't believe that the confirmation screens always show what is really being recorded on the machine--a machine which leaves no paper trail. Maybe when the vote-hopping is shown on the confirmation screen, the glitch is that the vote hopping should have been recorded and not shown to the voter for confirmation.

There is no hard evidence for this. Nothing except massive irregularities. Poll workers taking home voting machines. Voting machines being consistently proven to be wide open to hacking. Nationwide instances of voting machines acting in ways they have no business acting. The voting machines made by a company run by politically involved Republicans dedicated to delivering votes to the Republican Party--a company that fights tooth and nail to keep their machines from issuing a paper trail which can be compared to the electronic vote count. And a political party which has demonstrated an open contempt for election laws: sabotaging Democratic phone banks, illegal fake robocalls that masquerade as Democratic politicians but harass voters, illegally telling Democratic voters they will be arrested/deported if they vote, handing out bogus instructions to lead Democratic voters to the wrong polling place and on wrong dates, illegally impersonating election officials and calling Democratic voters to tell them they are not registered, "mistakenly" striking legitimate Democratic voters from voter rolls by claiming they are "felons," the list goes on and on and on.

Yep. No hard evidence, none at all. Call me wacko paranoid conspiracy theorist. I got nothin'.

Here We Go Again

Remember how Republicans wanted "every vote to be counted"? Well, there's a difference between saying it, and doing it.

The standard Republican policy in any election is simple: keep Democrats from voting. Get police (or people pretending to be police) to knock on doors and patrol streets in minority neighborhoods and intimidate people on election day. Send out mailers telling minorities and immigrants that they'll be jailed, deported, or otherwise penalized if they vote. If possible, create "felon lists" (filled with non-felon Democrats) and revoke their voting rights without informing them (in Florida, of course, they kept Hispanics off the list to protect Cubans who vote Republican). Rig the voting machines across the country to switch votes for other candidates over to Republicans (and never the other way around; keep track of these stories here), and call it a fluke. Undersupply voting machines in strongly Democratic districts to cause long lines and delays to discourage voters. And on election day, send armies of Republican operatives to polling places, demand that all voters be asked for restrictive IDs (while at the same time, hypocritically opposing voter-motor registration laws), and challenge as many Democrats as possible to scare people off and create logjams in the lines of voters. And more. One Republican in 2004 even talked openly about suppressing the vote in mostly black neighborhoods.

It has become so open, so blatant, and so common that it defies belief that nothing is done about it.

Republicans then have the gall to accuse Democrats of cheating--but what it comes down to is unsubstantiated claims, mostly based on bogus Republican challenges to suppress votes, a very small number of individuals or small groups with only the most tenuous connection to the Democratic Party committing fraud that only affects a handful of votes, and "signs" of voter fraud, like more people registering to vote in Democratic districts. Virtually no hard evidence, never systematic, and never claims about police, voting machines, or other officials or equipment directly involved in election matters.

Look, when one voting machine switches votes from one candidate to another, it's likely an error. When voting machines across the country consistently switch votes exclusively from non-Republican to Republican candidates, that's no coincidence. If one election official is found to be doing something fishy, it's an isolated incident; but when police, election officials, and candidates themselves are caught in illicit activities that overwhelmingly favor Republican candidates, it's a pattern. And sorry, but Democrats registering to vote is not "election fraud."

There is a massive amount of evidence of election fraud committed nationwide to win elections for Republicans, but it seems that people are unwilling to prosecute or even believe it because of what it would mean to the legitimacy of our Democracy. This attitude came forth in the 2000 elections, when we were willing to overlook egregious election fraud in order to maintain stability and avoid a constitutional crisis--and Republicans have been running with it ever since, using that fear of chaos as a tool to rig elections.

There is a point where "maintaining stability" costs far too much.

Just Like Professional Soccer

Remember that blogger who was violently grabbed, dragged, and thrown and pinned to the ground after he asked Senator Allen a question? The men who assaulted him were, to the best of my knowledge, even asked anything by the police, much less arrested or charged.

Well, it seems that the blogger (Mike Stark) tried to see Allen again, and Allen's supporters formed a human chain to stop him. When the blogger tried to get past, he "brushed" the side of one of the people, who, apparently just like those soccer players who feign torturous pain at every contact from an opposing player, promptly fell to the ground. Several sheriff's deputies immediately handcuffed and dragged away the blogger.

Not hard to see who the local constabulary backs. Unfortunately, this might even work for Allen; had the blogger not tried to do anything again, the one violent incident may have made people see Allen as surrounded by thugs. For the blogger to do something like this again will paint him, in the eyes of most people, as the one responsible for any trouble.

Success Has a Thousand Parents But a Political Liability Is an Orphan

Remember how Enron's Ken Lay was George Bush's best pal and biggest contributor in Texas, until the Enron scandal, and the Bush had never heard of him? Remember how Abramoff was the kingpin of Republican lobbyists, until he was indicted, and then no one in the Republican Party, especially the White House, ever recalled meeting him? (In fact, some Republicans whispered that he was actually serving Democrats.)

Now Merle Ted Haggard, an evangelical leader, has been implicated in a drug and sex scandal. (Haggard is credited with rallying conservative Christians behind Bush in get-out-the-vote rallies, and is said to be included in weekly phone conversations with Bush.) So far, Haggard has admitted only that he bought crystal meth but didn't use it and never had sex with that gay prostitute. Which probably won't go over well with conservatives, who have practically made a mantra out of criticizing Bill Clinton for his statements that he smoked pot but never inhaled, and never had sex with that woman.

But here's the inevitable reaction from the White House, which has close connections with Haggard:

He had been on a couple of calls, but was not a weekly participant in those calls. I believe he's been to the White House one or two times. . . . But there have been a lot of people who come to the White House.

Who would like to take the side of any bet that Haggard was part of only 2 or 3 calls and not more?

I know that it's a natural political reaction to distance yourself from a political liability, but how many times can you claim that you had never heard of a close friend, ally, or advisor who has fallen from grace before people start to wonder?

A side note on the affair: it seems like the media has finally gotten a juicy story (read: sex and/or drugs involved) to replace the Kerry non-story. Strange, I would have thought that the Bush administration publishing how-to documents on building a nuclear weapon on the Internet and keeping them there for weeks for terrorists, rogue states and dictators to read would maybe have qualified--but then, I'm not a news editor, so what do I know?

When Will Bush and Congressional Republicans Apologize for Spilling Nuclear Secrets?

Last week, Kerry misspoke and unintentionally said something that could be interpreted as a slight on the soldiers. After protesting that his intent was clearly and provably different, within a day or two, he apologized to the soldiers and the country, yet the media still makes a huge deal out of this.

Now it seems that the Bush White House, in a political election-year effort to make the Iraq War seem legitimate, released documents on the Internet from around the first Gulf War when Iraq was actually engaged in nuclear research, as well as more recent documents given to the U.N. in 2002 to ensure that Iraq was not building an atomic bomb then. The documents were not so relevant to Bush's war as they were to the first war; it is a common Bush tactic to try to confuse the two, as Hussein was a much more legitimate target back then.

The problem? The new documents publicly released on the Internet contain information on how to build a nuclear weapon.

According to the New York Times article:

The documents, roughly a dozen in number, contain charts, diagrams, equations and lengthy narratives about bomb building that nuclear experts who have viewed them say go beyond what is available elsewhere on the Internet and in other public forums. For instance, the papers give detailed information on how to build nuclear firing circuits and triggering explosives, as well as the radioactive cores of atom bombs.

These documents contained sections in the clear which had actually been redacted when given to the U.N.!

One can be assured that these documents have been downloaded by any number of rogue nations, aspiring nuclear dictators, and terrorist groups, putting them that much closer to developing an atomic weapon.

And yet, this story is not stirring the media nearly as much as the bogus Kerry non-story.

Nevertheless, we have the president making public dangerous nuclear secrets, at the urging of Republicans in Congress. Yes, it was an error, but then so was Kerry's statement; the difference is that Kerry's statement only bruised some feelings, and then only because the president, the GOP, and the media whipped up a frenzy about it.

So, when are President Bush and the Republicans in Congress going to apologize to the whole world for putting it into mortal danger?

I don't see Wolf Blitzer asking that question three dozen times a day.

"You've" Got to Be Kidding Me

"You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. And if you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."

The GOP is trying to avert some attention away from their multiple scandals and massive mismanagement by trying to turn the spotlight on Kerry. the above remark was included in a session where Kerry was joking about how bad things are under the Bush administration.

Actually, Kerry mangled the line. According to his script, he was supposed to say, "I can't overstress the importance of a great education. Do you know where you end up if you don't study, if you aren't smart, if you're intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq." In other words, it was supposed to refer to Bush himself, not the troops.

But Kerry did mangle the line--it came out as something else. But let's consider for the moment as if Kerry had actually intended to say what he said.

The criticism is that, the GOP is claiming, Kerry was essentially saying "all soldiers are stupid." Which, of course, is an intentional misreading of even the misstatement, for maximum negative play. And once again, the GOP is using the honor of the soldiers as cover for their own sorry political asses--as if Republicans weren't knifing soldiers in the back while using them as political props.

The fact is, in "you get stuck in Iraq," the "you" does not even apply to soldiers: it applies to Bush. Bush gets stuck in Iraq. But hey, let's run with what the conservatives have played the line into, and assume Kerry was talking about the troops.

It is fact that the military is discarding virtually all qualifications for recruiting, and that they commonly target people who have no good options after they graduate from high school; it is similarly accepted that if you have no good options, the military might be one of the only ways out for you. None of this means "all soldiers are stupid," nor does it even mean that people who fail in school are poor soldiers--the military trains you well, and gives you ample motivation to become a lot more than what you were. The "uneducated" part applies only before the military trains you, not to active soldiers in the field, which is what the GOP is hoping to play this into.

So, the conservative misreading of what Kerry was misspeaking in jest was about having so few options that the military--previously a good alternative--is now a terrible one because you're likely to be jammed into the streets of Baghdad. And if that were such an attractive option, then why are so few MIT and Harvard grads signing up for duty?

What Kerry is made out to have said has real applications in practice--and the irony is, it's because of Bush's stretching the military beyond its limits that this is true.

The Republicans are excellent at taking remarks out of context and vilifying them. Look at Al Gore's "inventing the Internet" comment. He never said that, but did that stop conservatives? The guys credited for actually inventing the Internet said Gore's statement was accurate, and he deserves lots of credit. Gore's political contributions were in a large part even responsible for the multi-trillion-dollar Internet boom of the 90's; Republicans rewarded his efforts by taking a single statement, misquoting it, re-interpreting it, and then ridiculing him for it.

And if the Republicans have to take an intentional misinterpretation of an unintended misstatement by someone who's not running for office nor is a party leader, in order to try to smear the whole party in an election, you know they're low on ammo. That the press is running with this non-story (damn that liberal media!) is simply testament to their attraction to flash and not substance.

Short version: Kerry was right, in every interpretation of what he said. Doing poorly in school can leave you fewer options, one of the least favorable is to get sucked into the Iraq conflict. If that offends conservatives, they should consider why it is true.

Diebold and Broward: Stealing the Election Starts Early

If you hear the two names "Diebold" (the voting machine company) and "Broward" (the county in Florida) together in a news story, then you know it's going to be about election fraud.

And so it is--even a week before election day.

Diebold, of course, is run by a fervent Republican and Bush supporter who promised to deliver Ohio for Bush (and he probably did), whose voting machine company is not only incredibly reluctant to leave paper trails, but their machines are dead easy to hack and are infamous for "mistakes" in tabulation which "coincidentally" always favor Republicans.

Broward County was one of the two in Florida in 2000 which illegally allowed Republican Party operatives to take home invalid Republican absentee ballot forms and, again illegally, alter them to qualify. In 2004, the county went gung-ho in following an order to invalidate voter registrations over technicalities (PDF file) which would weigh against legitimate voters who were less literate (e.g., immigrants), which disproportionately disqualified Democrats.

So, seeing both these names in a news story today, what could possibly be going wrong?

Well, it seems that Diebold machines in Broward County are mysteriously switching votes from one candidate to another candidate. And again, coincidentally, it is switching votes for Democrats into votes for Republicans. What a shock!

Debra A. Reed voted with her boss on Wednesday at African-American Research Library and Cultural Center near Fort Lauderdale. Her vote went smoothly, but boss Gary Rudolf called her over to look at what was happening on his machine. He touched the screen for gubernatorial candidate Jim Davis, a Democrat, but the review screen repeatedly registered the Republican, Charlie Crist.

It took the man three attempts, with the help of a poll worker, to get the vote correct.

But this was not an isolated incident:

Mauricio Raponi wanted to vote for Democrats across the board at the Lemon City Library in Miami on Thursday. But each time he hit the button next to the candidate, the Republican choice showed up. Raponi, 53, persevered until the machine worked. Then he alerted a poll worker.

All the incidents reported were, coincidentally, people trying to vote Democratic and instead being recorded as voting Republican. And frankly, I would not trust that even the final "corrected" vote was recorded in the machine's records accurately, just because the confirmation screen said so.

And what was the lame-ass explanation? According to Broward Supervisor of Elections spokeswoman Mary Cooney, the "screens on heavily used machines to slip out of sync," leading to the wrong vote being recorded.

How the hell can a screen "slip out of sync"? These machines rely on the same technology used on ATMs, which are used in similarly heavy fashion; have you ever heard of the screens on ATM machines "slipping out of sync"? Have you ever asked for $40 and gotten $80 instead? Not to mention that, even if your machines are of such crappy quality that "slipping" occurs, you would naturally space the virtual buttons apart widely enough so that a vote for one candidate would never register as for another--that it would, instead, not register at all, or register as an error, immediately alerting the voter, and not waiting for the voter to hopefully catch the slip-up at the end of the process. Bad engineering on top of bad engineering--unless, of course, it is deliberate engineering.

But not to worry: the easy-to-follow "15-step process is outlined in the poll-workers manual."

Also, Cooney said that it's all OK because "It is resolved right there at the early-voting site."

Yeah, all the slip-ups that are noticed and corrected. The others, however, go on record as votes for Republicans by Democrats.

Coincidentally.

The Saddam Verdict and Political Timing

Karl Rove is probably crapping his pants in rage over this news: the chief prosecutor in the trial of Saddam Hussein says that the court is encountering difficulties and may have to delay the announcement of the verdict. The original date set for the verdict was November 5th, a date clearly influenced (despite all the fervent denials) by the Bush administration, as it would turn the American news cycle pro-Bush and perhaps pro-Republican for two days just before the midterm elections.

In a perfect world, the verdict should not benefit Bush. It should remind people that Iraq is a disaster, that Saddam Hussein, even as the butcher that he was, was less bloody a despot in Iraq than Bush is turning out to be. And let's face it, does anyone doubt what the verdict will be? It's practically as formulaic as any Hollywood script could be, the mother of all anti-climaxes. But it's a PR show piece, just as fake as the now-legendary toppling of Hussein's statue, but also just as illogically influential on public opinion.

One has to wonder at the possible delay in the verdict: are the Iraqis responding to the criticisms that they are political puppets of the Bush administration and holding back the verdict as a way of showing that they run the show? Or is it simply yet another case of events in Iraq not running as the administration planned? It would certainly serve them right--if the Bush administration can't make Iraq function correctly, why should they expect their political machinations there to work any more smoothly?

Meanwhile, the "liberal" media, instead of investigating the timing of the event, and instead of reporting on legitimate domestic concerns about the Bush administration's hand in the timing of the verdict's scheduled release, and instead of noting how time and again, the Bush White House has timed and orchestrated event after event in Iraq on a political calendar--instead of any of that, the press is highlighting a complaint by Saddam's attorney that the timing of the verdict is political. Instead of paying attention to the compelling facts which lead one to the obvious conclusion that this is indeed all timed politically, the "liberal" media is branding that idea as one held prominently by Saddam Hussein--a decision that could not be better designed to make people disbelieve in what is clearly the truth.

Gay Marriage--Will It Work for the GOP Again?

Running out of options and heading for the doghouse but fast, the GOP was heartened by a New Jersey Supreme Court judgment the other day which said that while gay couples are not entitled to marriages, they are entitled to equal benefits. The GOP was not heartened by the denial of marriage, they were filled with joy that a high court gave any union rights at all to gay couples--that gives the GOP ammunition to scare the evangelicals with. While the ruling was not in favor of gay marriage, it was close enough for a desperate Republican Party to grab it and run with it. Gay marriage having worked so well to their advantage in the past, they're hoping it will work the same way again.

There may be a problem with that, however. In light of David Kuo's new book which uncovered the contempt that Republicans have for the religious right, tied together with the fact that while gay marriage is trotted out every election year to scare people, after the election the GOP abandons the issue (having gay marriage even be possible is too valuable for them to actually outlaw it), evangelical voters might actually be catching on, finally, to the scam.

And, as it has been pointed out, gay marriage has been legal in Massachusetts for two years now, and there has been no sign of heterosexuals abandoning the ceremony because gays can marry. The stats for marriage (PDF file) in Massachusetts in 2003-2005 tell the story. In total, 36,225 couples were married in 2003, 41,549 in 2004, and 39,074 in 2005. In 2004, 6200 gay and lesbian couples got married as soon as it was legalized there; 1900 gay and lesbian couples married there in 2005. Subtract those numbers from the totals, and you have:

2003: 36,225 heterosexual marriages
2004: 35,349 heterosexual marriages
2005: 37,174 heterosexual marriages

Average out the numbers for 2004 and 2005, and it equals 2003 almost exactly (36,261.5). So far, the stats bear out the notion that gay marriage has zero effect on heterosexual marriage. None whatsoever. You might argue that the effects could be long term--but you would have no evidence to back you up. The only data out there so far points in the opposite direction.

Not that Republicans ever had any problem with using a good scare tactic that was completely unsubstantiated by fact.

Stay the Course

Check out the latest Democratic ad, which nails Bush for denying he ever said "stay the course" about Iraq. The ad compiles no fewer than 15 times Bush, Cheney, and Snow said that we must "stay the course" in Iraq--11 of those times Bush himself said it. Were it not for the ominous music, it would play like a Daily Show segment, because right after seeing Bush repeat "stay the course" so many times, the ad shows Bush saying, "look, we've never been 'stay the course.'" Outstanding.

One critique--the ad should have changed the music and looming titles at the end when it says to vote Democratic. But that's a small nit. Otherwise, the ad is perfect; it not only points out the failed strategy in Iraq, a resonating theme among voters this Fall, but it also shows Bush up as the liar he is. Not so much a criticism of congressional candidates, but as a criticism of the party--which has followed Bush's lead almost slavishly--it should work quite well.

Update: apparently, the ad only had limited time to show Bush saying "stay the course" 11 times. Keith Olbermann (via C&L) showed Bush saying it 29 times, after Tony Snow claimed he could only find eight such instances--all this after Bush claimed he never said it. A Google search of the White House press release directory found 160 hits for the term.

Republicans Use the Troops, but Clearly Hate Them

I pointed out here, here, here, and here, Republicans disrespect and work against the interests of Americans serving in the armed forces. While they use them shamelessly as campaign props and human shields, Republicans then turn around and cut their pay and their benefits, whilst doing little or nothing to get them sufficient body armor or other supplies (no shortage of resources sent to Halliburton), not to mention giving a crap about any strategy in Iraq or Afghanistan beyond their own self-serving political agenda.

But now there's new startling, hard, cold evidence beyond the newspaper reports and uncovered scandals: a non-partisan veteran's organization took a list of bills presented in the Senate which would impact troops and veterans (veterans' benefits, healthcare, medical research dedicated to injured soldiers, etc.), and rated senators based upon how they voted on these matters. Although the veteran's group did not show the rankings by grade, Bob Geiger published an ordered list sorted by how each senator performed--and the results are striking:

As you can see, the top of the list is dominated by Democrats--with only independent Jim Jeffords breaking up the monopoly--and Republicans exclusively fill up the bottom of the list. No Democrat scored worse than "B-," and no Republican scored better than "C." The strongest veterans' advocate among the GOP faithful scored worse then the lowliest Democrat. (This list is strikingly similar to one showing how Republican and Democratic presidents performed in job creation--with the worst Democrat outperforming the best Republican, with Republicans populating only the bottom half of the list.)

There's your proof, right there. Republicans will use the troops for their selfish political manipulations, but they won't lift a finger to actually support veterans who have served our country.

This leaves no doubt: if you want to support the troops, vote Democratic. If you want the troops to get shafted, vote Republican.

Hat tip to DKos.

Are the Republicans Planning an October Page Surprise?

Republicans are self-destructing over the Foley page scandal, and have desperately, crazily been trying to find some way, any way at all, to smear the Democrats with this so they can say, "See? It's not Republicans, it's the Congress as a whole!" This way, voters will not be turned away from Republicans at the polls any more than they'll be turned away from Democrats.

This technique worked like a charm with the Jack Abramoff scandal. Abramoff worked exclusively for Republicans, and because the GOP runs both houses of Congress, almost all the graft was Republican. But there is always graft on both sides, no matter how lopsided, and so Republicans didn't have much trouble portraying the whole thing as a problem the Democrats somehow shared in equally. Since the media is always afraid to be tagged as "liberal," whenever a conservative scandal breaks they are more than willing to trump up any Democratic involvement, no matter how minor, as somehow being equal; this they did in the Abramoff scandal, and the public bought into it.

The Foley scandal is different: a Republican committed the initial offense, Republicans leaked the story, Republicans accused each other, and Republicans covered it up--Republicans were the only ones involved in the commission and publication of the scandal, from beginning to end. Conspiracy theories blaming Democrats failed for lack of any evidence whatsoever. Attempts to smear Democrats with the same Bush sounded lame, as you had to go back decades to find a Democrat guilty of the same offense as Foley--and the main charge against Republicans is not just the emails and IMs, but that the Republicans knew and covered it up.

But recently, there are hints that Republicans might try to accuse a Democratic politician of having his own page scandal. So far, the hints have been nebulous, and do not even mention party affiliations--only that the congressman is male and the page is female. It started less than two weeks ago when Tucker Carlson leaked that a new scandal may be breaking: "Foley's not the only one who behaved in an inappropriate way with pages - there is at least one other, a heterosexual, and his name, I believe, will come out."

And now, today, Republican congressman Jerry Weller of Illinois is saying that he has information on inappropriate actions by a fellow congressman with a page. Again, no party affiliations are mentioned.

This might not be the same thing Carlson was talking about, and Carlson may have just been repeating a wild rumor without foundation. But seeing as how Republicans have been trying every conceivable sham to smear some of their own excrement onto their Democratic colleagues, I would not be in the least bit surprised if this were building up to something. And the fact that this is coming only from Republicans also smells suspicious. When they accuse their own, they blurt it out, they don't build up to it for weeks.

The fact that it is taking so long to be revealed makes sense, especially if it's a bogus charge; it would benefit Republicans to wait until the last week before elections to spring this, so they could go full-force with a campaign to say, "See? Democrats are just as bad!" without giving enough time for the truth about the allegations to come to light.

Hopefully, I'm just being paranoid. But when it comes to Republican election tactics, being paranoid is usually a pretty safe way of seeing things.

That Damned Liberal Media!

A conservative "watchdog" group has a new twist on the Foley scandal: smear the Democrats and the media at the same time:

The establishment media has a double standard when reporting the sexual proclivities of Republicans versus Democrats, a media watchdog group found in a report on the Mark Foley scandal.

Over the past 12 days, more than 150 stories on Foley aired on morning and evening news shows on ABC, CBS, and NBC, the Media Research Center, parent company of Cybercast News Service, found. Compare that to 19 stories over one year in the scandal involving Mel Reynolds - a Democratic congressman from Illinois convicted in 1995 of having sex with a 16-year-old campaign worker.

"The numbers are clear and shocking: 152 stories on Mark Foley over 12 days, yet only 19 stories on Mel Reynolds over an entire year. This double standard reeks of political partisanship and proves how far the liberal media will go to downplay the sexual degeneracy of a liberal Democrat and trumpet the sexual degeneracy of a Republican," said MRC President Brent Bozell in a statement.

The biggest difference between the two cases that these clowns are intentionally ignoring is that in the Foley case, virtually the entire Republican Party leadership was indicted as knowing about Foley and yet doing nothing. That element was missing from the Reynolds case. The "Media Research Center" conveniently glosses over the fact that this difference puts a wide chasm between the two stories. Had the Foley scandal been just about Foley, it would have gotten, at most, the same play as the Reynolds story. The story would have died out within days.

It's the complicity of major House players which is the real story, and that's why it has legs.

Tempting Faith: It Just Keeps on Coming

More good news for the Republicans: now their core is revolting. Rather, I should say, it probably will in the next series of revelations coming out about the Republican Party. And like the Foley scandal, the shots are coming from the right, not the left, making the charges that much more significant.

If you read the political blogs, you'll have heard about Tempting Faith, a book written by former Bush White House staffer David Kuo. Kuo used to be a "special assistant to the president," and was the number-two man in Bush's "Office of Faith-Based Initiatives." Kuo's primary charge is that while the Bush White House claimed to be loyal to the evangelicals, behind closed doors they ridiculed them, and continued to make promises they knew they would never back up.

“Tempting Faith’s” author is David Kuo, who served as special assistant to the president from 2001 to 2003. A self-described conservative Christian, Kuo’s previous experience includes work for prominent conservatives including former Education Secretary and federal drug czar Bill Bennett and former Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Kuo, who has complained publicly in the past about the funding shortfalls, goes several steps further in his new book.

He says some of the nation’s most prominent evangelical leaders were known in the office of presidential political strategist Karl Rove as “the nuts.”

“National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs and described as ‘ridiculous,’ ‘out of control,’ and just plain ‘goofy,’” Kuo writes.

More seriously, Kuo alleges that then-White House political affairs director Ken Mehlman knowingly participated in a scheme to use the office, and taxpayer funds, to mount ostensibly “nonpartisan” events that were, in reality, designed with the intent of mobilizing religious voters in 20 targeted races.

Kuo credits this manipulation for winning 19 of those 20 races, and says the strategy was instrumental for winning Ohio for Bush. Certainly, in more states than just Ohio, the Christian turnout was largely credited for giving Bush and the Republicans the lift they needed. They don't call them the "core" and the "base" for nothing.

But now, things are changing. Evangelicals were already turning away from voting the Republican Party line before Kuo's claims were made public. The war in Iraq and the Foley matter are two issues which have turned them off; Kuo reveals that Republicans have also been stripping money from their pet social programs, and crassly used and manipulated the movement's leaders and followers while not really agreeing with or caring about their values. It probably doesn't help that Bush and the GOP so shamelessly use them as pawns in elections, as with the fake gay marriage issue.

For several election cycles now, Republicans have brought up the gay marriage issue, because they know it energizes the base, and gets them to the polls. It alienates them from the Democrats, who vote the other way. But when the election smoke clears, the Republicans always turn out to have abandoned the issue; they only put forth gay marriage bills they know will not pass, all for show and nothing else. After being revved up so many times and then coming away with nothing, the evangelicals are probably starting to feel like Charlie Brown trying to kick Lucy's football.

This is not to say that Bush and the GOP are not the best friends of the religious right; the Christians will always get more of what they want from Republicans than they will from Democrats. Bush is actually with them on several issues, such as breaking separation of church and state and abortion, to name a few. But Bush and the GOP are clearly not willing to go nearly as far as the Christian conservatives want them to go. To liberals, the degree of separation between Republicans and the evangelicals may be one of an insignificant degree (they all blend in together from our vantage point, it seems), but that degree is a yawning chasm to many social conservatives, who are beginning to find out that money, business, and power are more important to the GOP than are faith and values.

The funny thing is, Republicans have always tried to steer blacks away from the polls by throwing out the idea that the Democratic Party takes them for granted; now, however, the shoe is on the other foot, as evangelicals are seeing that the Republican Party is taking them for granted. To boot, Democrats don't look down on blacks the way Republicans look down on evangelicals. Were it to come out that Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean, in private, called blacks "nuts," "out of control," and "just plain goofy," there would certainly be a backlash. Same difference here.

If anything, Kuo's book is going to turn more people off of the Republican Party. This won't make many evangelicals vote Democrat, but it will make them stay away from the polls and vote less enthusiastically for any Republican candidate or cause. And with the Christian base being vital for Republicans to win elections, that could be a nuclear bomb for candidates in tight races this November. Certainly, the timing of Kuo's book is not accidental--and like with the Foley scandal, however hard they try, Republicans won't be able to pin this one on Democrats.

The election is still four weeks away, and anything could happen. But if it ever looked like the right-wing chickens are coming home to roost, this is it.

Keith Olbermann, by the way, is all over this, breaking most of the story. Check out Part One of his broadcasts on the story at Crooks & Liars.

Wow, That's Really Reaching

So, to try to defend themselves in the Foley scandal, Republicans have tried to blame the media for conspiring to hold back the story until just before the election; the Democrats for doing the same; the homosexual "Velvet Mafia" for doing the same; and the victims, the pages, for doing the same. They have tried to claim that the emails were nothing, just over-friendly, then that they were consensual, and the pages were egging Foley on, and then that the Democrats had enabled Foley and sexual predators in general. They have claimed that this is a dirty trick, and that they didn't really know anything about it, but they're looking into whether their aides and staff did anything wrong.

They have also tried to smear the Democrats with the same brush; apparently, due to their success in blaming the purely Republican Abramoff scandal on Democrats, diffusing their own culpability by making it appear that Democrats are equally corrupt, they felt that they could do the same thing in this scandal as well. I have heard Republicans mentioning everything from the William J. Jefferson of Louisiana scandal (where he hid bribe money in his freezer), to the ever-popular joint-party page scandal of 23 years ago, as they try to present the idea that Democrats are just as bad as Republicans.

Apparently, none of that is working; people aren't buying that Democrats were either involved in this scandal, or that past scandals make them just as bad. Republicans are falling in the polls, and the number of GOP "safe seats" in the upcoming election are dwindling, as Democrats take bigger and bigger leads.

So, perhaps in desperation, another Republican is reaching ever farther back into the scandal bag, and has actually dredged up Chappaquiddick. Defending his seat in Connecticut's 4th District, Christopher Shays found an opportunity to defend Speaker Hastert when Ted Kennedy came to support his Democratic challenger, Diane Farrell.

"I know the speaker didn't go over a bridge and leave a young person in the water, and then have a press conference the next day," said Shays, R-4th District, referring to the 1969 incident in which the Massachusetts Democrat drove a car that plunged into the water and a young campaign worker died.

"Dennis Hastert didn't kill anybody," he added.

How long before some Republican is reaching back to Woodrow Wilson? "I know for a fact that the Speaker didn't sign the Treaty of Versailles! Dennis Hastert didn't start World War II, like the Democrats did!"

Diebold

I am still astonished that any state allows Diebold machines to be used. Wholly apart from the fact that Diebold's president was a Bush campaigner who promised to deliver Ohio for the president, Diebold's machines have always been known for (a) a lack of a paper trail, and (b) the ability to be hacked. Now that ability is demonstrated as being very, very easy to do. This post gives step-by-step instructions on how to hack a Diebold machine in four minutes, using only $12 in materials, without leaving a trace of manipulation (link via Engadget).

And with the hotly contested race in San Diego, where "Duke" Cunningham lost his seat due to corruption, the Democratic challenger lost by only 4% of the vote. Diebold machines were among those used in the election, and controversy erupted when it became known that election workers were taking the Diebold machines home for "sleepovers"--though with the machines being open to hacking with only 4 minutes' work, it is likely that even a sleepover wouldn't be necessary to throw the Diebold machines' results into question.

That elections results, however, are now moot, because the GOP leadership in the House illegally usurped San Diego's right to certify the election by swearing in the presumed Republican winner before local officials approved the election results. So, corruption and election-stealing all around--the Republican Party has this down to an art.

Lieberman Poll "Surprise"

The way CNN is reporting it, Lieberman has vaulted ahead in a super-duper surprise twist in the polls. Though he lost the primary, CNN is astounded that now Lieberman enjoys a 12-point lead in the polls (53% to 41%).

Apparently they don't know the difference between a Democratic primary where only Democrats vote, and a general election where Republicans are included. Since Bush and RNC chairman Mehlman have refused to endorse their own GOP candidate in the race and at least in spirit heartily endorse their fake patsy Democrat the independent candidate Joe Lieberman, and since the GOP candidate is running in single digits (4%, down from 9%) in the polls, Lieberman is picking up the large majority of Republican votes, enough to give him that apparent lead.

The real surprise is that Lamont, always a long-shot dark horse candidate, now has 41% of the votes, after winning only 52% of Democrats in the primary. Lieberman was ahead in universal polls, that was never in question. But now the news services seem content to run with the "Lieberman surge" angle to the story.

An Inside Look

Katherine Harris really is a peach, isn't she. Never mind that because of her, an election was overturned and our country subjected to years of a destructively corrupt administration. Read the linked article, and you'll get a better look at what an appropriately hideous person she is.

Too Bad the GOP Has No Sense of Irony

Recap: despite obviously fatal legal troubles, vanity and greed made Tom DeLay run for office this year anyway, and won the GOP primary, making him the sole Republican candidate on the ballot. When it became even more clear that he would have to get out of Dodge, he tried a slick trick to evade responsibility: move out of state, invalidating his candidacy--essentially allowing the GOP to hand-pick a candidate, invalidating the choice of the voters (gee, doesn't that sound familiar?).

The problem? DeLay didn't sell his Texas home, and on top of that, the "non-inhabitant-on-election-day" trap door was a legal fiction invented by the GOP to illegally subvert a legal election (they love subverting elections, don't they?). A local Texas judge ruled against him, meaning he would stay on the ballot as the GOP contender for his district. The uber-conservative 5th Circuit upheld the lower court, and now, ultra-uber-conservative Justice Scalia, acting for the Supreme Court out of session, upheld the 5th Circuit.

Now, remember, Tom DeLay engineered the whole extra-census gerrymandering in Texas that led to many seats being yanked out from under Democrats and put into GOP hands.

So how does the GOP react to the current situation? The attorney for the Texas Republican Party Chairman, who is arguing DeLay's case, put it this way:

Whatever action might be taken, “we’re not going to let the Democrats steal this seat,” Bopp said.

Is that just about the richest thing you've ever heard, or what? If the GOP takes seats by arbitrary gerrymandering, it's legit--but if the GOP can't illegally weasel out of a mess it created and a Democratic candidate wins in a popular election because the GOP candidate is a crime-breaking scumbag, then the Democrat is "stealing" the seat.

Sometimes the sheer audacity of Republican politicians and lawyers is simply dazzling.

GOP Politicians Play Politics with Class Warfare Again

Since it's an election year, GOP politicians are trying to find a way to blunt the Democratic weapon of the minimum wage. Since the GOP has consistently, for the past nine years, killed repeated attempts by Democrats to get a minimum wage hike passed, it's pretty clear in the minds of the working class who's on their side.

The GOP, however, hopes to muddy the waters by introducing a $2.10 (40%) increase to the minimum wage, but only if it is tied to slashing the estate tax, which would represent the Nth tax cut for millionaires and billionaires. Since Democrats have vowed to kill an such estate tax cut, Republicans in Congress know that the minimum wage tax is likely to fail, and so it's safe for most of them to vote for it (though some vow to vote against it anyway, being diametrically opposed to anything with a minimum wage hike in it).

The estate tax cut proposed would boost the exemption from $2 million to $5 million (from $4 million to $10 million for couples), and would cut the tax rate beyond the exemption to 15% up to $25 million and to 30% beyond that.

Hopefully the Democrats will be able to shoot down the GOP poison pill, and the voters will not be fooled by the inevitable subsequent campaign ads portraying Republicans as the champions of the poor and the Democrats as the villains who shot down their pay raises. Whatever the outcome, it was probably the best political move the Republicans could make--their forte (always better at politics than at serving the people's actual needs), and they'll need it since polls are increasingly showing that voters are ready to show the GOP the door this November.

Update: Apparently, Republicans are not being too subtle about all of this being a manipulative political ploy: from the NYT, via TPM:

Representative Zach Wamp, Republican of Tennessee, said Democrats were upset with the legislation because Republicans had found a clever way to link the two. “You have seen us outfox you on this issue tonight,” Mr. Wamp told Democrats in the floor debate.

Some Buy Into It, Some Don't

Some press outlets bought into the White House lie, simply regurgitating White House press releases:

An unexpectedly steep rise in tax revenues from corporations and the wealthy is driving down the budget deficit this year,... White House officials are expected to announce that the tax receipts will be about $250 billion above last year and that the deficit will be about $100 billion less than projected six months ago.

The rising tide in tax payments has been building for months, but the increased scale is surprising even seasoned budget analysts and making it easier for the administration and Congress to finesse the past year's run-up in spending.

Tax revenues are climbing twice as fast as the administration predicted in February, so fast that the budget deficit could decline this year.

But then, a few media outlets actually noticed the dog and pony show:

When President Bush releases the traditional midsummer update on the budget today, he is expected to announce that federal revenue has soared above predicted levels and that the deficit is headed for a welcome decline from earlier estimates — as much as 30%, or $125 billion, below the level projected just five months ago.

And the president will likely attribute the windfall to his tax cuts, which the administration says are stimulating economic activity and generating the torrent of tax revenue.

But the apparent good news will not strike some economists as surprising: This will be the third year in a row that the administration put forth relatively gloomy deficit forecasts early on, only to announce months later that things had turned out better than expected. To some skeptics, it's beginning to look like an economic version of the old "expectations" game.

In short, the White House has been underperforming, and after 5 years, still hasn't reached the revenue levels Clinton attained in 2000. So to hoodwink the media and the people, they first predict much lower revenue than expected, then they act like the numbers that come out are miraculously high.

What's more, the White House attributes the jump to all those tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. See? It worked!

Actually, no it didn't. The increase in profits came from outsourcing of labor and paying less than ever before for domestic workers, cutting corners and maximizing profits. The irony is, had taxes not been slashed for corporations and the rich, they would not have lessened their attempts to make money at all (if anything, they would have tried harder in order to meet their goals, but most likely the end result would have been the same), and the tax revenue would have been much higher. Without all those tax cuts, we probably would have a much smaller deficit than now.

As always, it's perception the politicians play on. Reality is a joke in those circles.

Fake Terror Scare #2

As I mentioned earlier, the fake terror scare is replacing the fake terror alert as a method of frightening voters in an election year, hoping they can be herded like cattle into the Republican fold, while at the same time trying to make the Bush counter-terrorism disaster look like it's actually foiling terrorism. Now there's a new one. FourWorlds pointed out this article by Larisa Alexandrovna at The Raw Story:

One former intelligence field officer says, and two other CIA officials confirm, that the alleged plot by Muslim extremists to bomb the Holland Tunnel in New York City was nothing more than chatter by unaffiliated individuals with no financing or training in an open forum already monitored extensively by the United States Government, RAW STORY has learned.

“The so-called New York tunnel plot was a result of discussions held on an open Jihadi web site,” said Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer and contributor to American Conservative magazine, in a late Friday afternoon conversation. Although Giraldi acknowledges that the persons involved – “three of whom have already been arrested in Lebanon and elsewhere - are indeed extremists," their online chatter is considerably overblown by allegations of an actual plot.

“They are not professionally trained terrorists, however, and had no resources with which to carry out the operation they discussed," Giraldi added. "Despite press reports that they had asked Abu Musab Zarqawi for assistance, there is no information to confirm that. It is known that the members discussed the possibility of approaching Zarqawi but none of them knew him or had any access to him.”

Two other intelligence officials with experience in the field on extremist operations concurred--and expressed concern that what could have been an operation to eventually track known extremists (should they eventually make actual contact with funds and training,) seems to have been exposed for political gain.

Unsurprisingly, the mainstream media is not picking up on this story, already a day old. It will probably not make much of it, just like they didn't make much of the truth that the Florida "terror cell" was just a bunch of jerk-offs doing nothing and going nowhere.

I expect, however, that right-wingers outraged at leaks that could hurt efforts to hunt down terrorists will call out the political opportunists in this case and brand them as traitors, as the political handling of this case may have prevented the discovery of actual terrorists who present a danger to us.

Snark! Yeah, right. That would call for consistency. As if.

SCOTUS: Gerrymander Away

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4, with Kennedy being the swing vote, that politicians may gerrymander the districts in their state at any time they want, so long as it does not disenfranchise ethnic populations. (PDF of ruling.) The case was about Tom DeLay's famous non-census gerrymander in Texas that helped Republicans stay in power.

The decision cuts both ways, of course: Democrats are no more restricted in doing this than Republicans are. This may even act as a signal for all parties in power in any given state to gerrymander and fortify their parties' positions.

Personally, I'm no fan of the gerrymander, whoever does it. And as I've said before, you can't have it both ways--you either accept all gerrymandering or none. Republicans, for example, gerrymandered the hell out of Texas, but then in California, tried to pass an anti-gerrymandering measure, because Democrats hold and have reshaped the state. You can't do that and not be a raging hypocrite. It's all or nothing.

And frankly, I'm for nothing. I think there should be a Constitutional amendment that breaks the back of redistricting. (Wow! A constitutional amendment proposal that actually means something! How about that!) There should be a random and mathematically logical sequence to it, something like, start in the northwest corner of the state and move south and east, drawing districts as you cover the number of people that will make up each district. Something like that, which will have no prejudice to party or even to race. Just have it work out randomly, and keep to that system.

If you really want to stir things up, do away with districts. Just randomly assign "virtual districts" to every new voter, irrespective of their geographical location in the state. It'd make campaigning and advertising harder, but it would also do away with redistricting.

Or here's a more radical system, reworking House elections and House voting altogether: for each state, all candidates are thrown together into one big election. Everybody gets to vote for one candidate. If a state has, say, 25 representatives, then the top 25 vote-getters are chosen. That's the primary. In the main election, people then cast their vote again for one of those 25 winners. Each winner then represents the percentage of votes in the state that were given to them in votes in the House. More complicated, but also a hell of a lot more representative in a true sense! Gerrymandering would lose all meaning in such a system, and the opinions of the voters would take on new importance.

Not that any of that is going to happen. But it would be far, far better than the stagnant and corrupt system we've got now. Gerrymandering is bad enough, but add to that the 98% reelection rate of incumbents, and what we have going on today gets downright sick. The way things work at present, with districts redrawn to predestine the outcome, and with lobbyists then making the people matter even less, it is becoming more and more the case that the people of the United States have no real sway or influence in their own government any more. A government "of the people, by the people, and for the people"? Hah! Maybe it never really was, but it sure as hell ain't so now. Not even close.

So along with a complete public election financing law prohibiting campaign contributions, and a ban on any political "buying of speech" of more than $20 per person, redistricting should be made illegal.

So I'm a radical. So what? I'm right.

Republicans Kill Minimum Wage Hike

As Republicans busy themselves in a flurry of attempts to shovel hundreds of billions of dollars of yet more new tax breaks to the wealthy, they have just won another victory: they killed any hope of a minimum wage increase. 46 Republicans in the Senate blocked an up-or-down vote on the minimum wage, knowing that it would pass. 8 Republican senators sided with all the Democrats on the up-or-down vote, and likely would have provided the votes necessary to give millions of Americans their first pay raise in almost a decade.

This is the ninth time that Democrats have tried to raise the minimum wage in the past decade, and the ninth time that Republicans have killed it. And they're still making the same lame, fake arguments that they always have--it'll mean people will lose jobs, it'll kill small businesses, it'll raise prices, it'll drag down the economy. All false--there is no evidence that any of that will happen, and in the past, the economy and job numbers have gone up as often as they have fallen after minimum wage hikes.

You'd think that a Republican would see it this way. They generally believe that if you shower the wealthy with money, they'll invest, creating more jobs. Of course, we tried that, and it didn't work. Rich people got richer, but the "recovery" is relatively jobless, with the new jobs being more and more often at the minimum wage. The results in the 80's were similar--the rich got richer, but there was no "trickle down."

Hiking the minimum wage would agree with that Republican throw-money-at-it philosophy, except that it would actually be logical, as opposed to the narrower throw-money-at-the-rich theory. Give rich people money, and there's no reason for them to spend it on domestic goods or invest domestically. Especially when one can avoid taxes by sending it to the Cayman Islands and other such dodges. Especially when the GOP is making it so easy and profitable to invest in exporting American jobs overseas. Wealthy people are, in fact, probably the least likely to spend the money at home.

On the other hand, if you give the money to working people by hiking the minimum wage, they are definitely not going to sock it away in the Caymans, invest in foreign stocks, or buy a Mercedes Benz. They're going to buy stuff right here, and it's going to be basic stuff, far more likely produced in the U.S., most definitely serviced here in the U.S. The money will go right back into the American economy, where it will do the most good--and where it will create more jobs than would be lost, as we've seen in the past. And guess what--the last time we hiked the minimum wage, jobs didn't take a nose dive. Unemployment did not rise. Small businesses did not shut down. Whaddaya know.

The sad thing is, people who make the minimum wage don't vote as much as other people do--and Republicans do their damnedest to make sure it stays that way, fighting like hell to kill anything like motor-voter registration (God forbid we should encourage people to vote). But if minimum-wage earners started voting like Cubans or the elderly, even Republicans would become their new best friends and discover a change of heart. Which is why Republicans want to stop that, they don't want to have to nuzzle up to working stiffs. Makes them feel dirty.

This Is Leadership

Oil is reaching $75 a barrel (up from $21.50 at the end of 2000, just before Bush took office, by the way), and Iran is threatening to devastate the U.S. economy with massive oil price increases if we do not stop interfering with their nuclear program. Peak oil further threatens our energy security, and energy companies are running off unchecked with tens of billions of dollars in usurious profits. The situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate, now with reports of American troops killing civilians destabilizing the local landscape even further, and giving America a dark and sickening image in Iraq and worldwide, as sectarian violence continues to escalate, with Iraqis killing Iraqis as well as our troops, the last two months being much bloodier than average in the continuing conflict. Meanwhile, the national budget continues with huge debt, deficits, and massive porkbarrel overspending as more and more widespread corruption among congressional Republicans is revealed and more tax breaks for millionaires flow from Washington. Meanwhile, tens of millions of Americans, especially children, don't have health insurance, American jobs are getting crappier, the minimum wage festers as more and more Americans drop into poverty after it declined under Clinton.

So with all this crisis, with so much threatening the well-being of our nation, what are Bush and congressional Republicans--who control the course of debate and voting in the nation's capital--deciding to spend time on?

A constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.

Their True Nature

Okay, here's where they go way, way too far.

In preface: President Bush has broken the law. And not just any stupid little law, one that directly impacts the fundamental rights of Americans. He acted in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, which in his his primary oath of office he swore to uphold, protect, and defend. Bush deliberately lied to the American people about intelligence reports in order to engage us in a war that Americans would not have entered into knowing the truth that Bush knew, sending us into a war that has killed two and a half thousand of our troops, tens of thousands of innocent foreign civilians, and alienated a previously sympathetic world from our country. He has blamed, abused, and distorted the intelligence-gathering institutions to the point where they are no longer functioning to protect the country and its people, but rather to support his own political agenda. His administration has blown the cover of a CIA agent engaged in discovering Iran's WMD production, over a matter of political retribution directly linked to the president's lies about the Iraq War.

These are the most significant but not by any means the entire list of charges that stand against Bush, and all of the above are absolutely, undeniably, and verifiably true. In any other administration, the president long ago would have been up on impeachment charges; Bush has escaped these by using the deaths of Americans and the fear of terrorism to claim that he is violating the highest laws of our country, stripping Americans of their rights, and destroying the intelligence infrastructure of our nation so that he may "protect" us.

And in this climate of fear and with the specter of being smeared in the midst of an election cycle, the Democrats are meekly pushing only to censure Bush, and only if they can win enough elections in November.

How does the right wing respond? Here's where they go outrageously too far:

They defend the actions of the lying, dangerous, and illegal president by attacking one of the most noble, hardworking, and effective ex-presidents in American history. They are calling to censure Jimmy Carter, because his diplomatic efforts have led him to meet with unsavory world leaders in the name of peace; since pictures of Carter with Arafat and Castro allow them to smear an honorable man in the name of defending the most vile and cowardly of political slime. The commercial (wmv file) they are running unbelievably claims that Bush is "wisely" wiretapping "terrorists," when it is millions of Americans they are listening in on, and then they lay vicious and untrue charges against Carter.

I am sorry, but this has got me majorly pissed off. This is beyond slime. This is beyond reprehensible.

In the past, I have kept relatively quiet about our need to impeach Bush, in light of how unlikely it is to happen, despite how necessary and justified an impeachment is. But now, I want nothing more than to shout it from the rooftops.

These people are not patriots, they are criminals by contribution and traitors to our country. Not for their political standing, but because they so vilely and dishonestly support and defend a president who is a criminal and who is working to destroy what America has always stood for and has always been, and because they do so by maliciously impugning the reputation of one of the most honest and patriotic men this country has had the honor to call one of our own.

This is what being in approval of Bush means. This crystallizes what Bush stands for, and why decent and truly patriotic Americans should not stand for this any longer.

Impeach. Bush. Now.

Because They Would Never Do It If the Tables Were Turned--Right?

You've gotta just love the new Republican strategy for winning the midterms this year: "if the Democrats win, they'll investigate President Bush." And maybe they'll investigate other Republicans, too.

And we all know that if Republicans were in control of Congress while a Democrat were in the White House, they would never ask for investigations!

The biting irony is that Republicans ran a virtual investigation madhouse for the entire eight years of the Clinton presidency, primarily investigating him on sexual matters and charges of alleged (yet despite massive investigations, never proved) bribe-taking dating back years before Clinton entered the White House. But they also demanded investigations on any rumor that floated up from the muck, no matter how spurious or unwarranted. And tragically, Clinton's actual governance during those eight years was excellent--yet it is remembered more for the investigations than for anything else.

And now, after this president has committed grave crimes in office, including an actual, clear violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, and other offenses that have endangered the security of the country, supposedly the thing we should most fear is the Democrats actually investigating this president! How dare they! It's not like Bush got a blow job or anything!

This Republican strategy is two-fold: not only do they hope to stir up public opinion against the idea of investigations against Bush and themselves, but they clearly hope to get Democrats to swear up and down not to investigate Bush or any Republicans if they take control of the House and/or Senate. The Republicans are masters at this--witness how, despite the fact that current corruption is almost exclusively Republican in nature, they have succeeded in fooling a whopping 76% of Americans into believing that Democrats are equally complicit in the GOP's graft.

Frankly, if Democrats do win and if they do start investigations, not only will it be fitting turnabout on Republicans--for them to be investigated for significant and damaging crimes after spending the 90's investigating Clinton for insignificant and often specious charges--but it will, hopefully, actually have the effect of curbing some of the costly, rampant Republican corruption and dangerous White House attacks on the rights of Americans.

And if the Democrats do investigate, they won't have to go back years for some Whitewater-like charge--though Bush's past is full of investigable stuff, like use of hard drugs, several SEC violations, and (oh, the irony!) lying under oath while Governor of Texas. No, there are charges galore they could look into that stem from Bush's behavior in the White House--though a single, focused investigation into Bush's Fourth Amendment and FISA violations alone would probably do it.

As for Congressional Republicans, it looks like the Democrats would have a field day there as well, with the Cunningham-Wilkes scandal apparently set to blow its lid sometime soon.

As far as I'm concerned, the Democrats shouldn't run and hide from this issue, as the GOP certainly hopes they will. They should turn around and campaign on it. Say, "you're damned right we're going to investigate! And we're not afraid of what those investigations will uncover." Then launch into detailed descriptions of the Republican corruption that has rotted Washington and cost Americans far more than just money.

Bedtime Stories to Chill the Soul

I've been hearing say that Republicans are going to try to scare people about how horrible things will be if Democrats get control of even one house of Congress, or even (say it quietly) take back the White House in 2008. Apparently, there will be, amongst other nightmarish scenarios, tax increases and military weakness.

Let's take a look at those, shall we? Tax increases. Like the one in 1993 when Clinton took office, I presume? Think back to that time, and the years following. Were you, or the people you know, devastated by sky-high tax rates? Were you bled dry? Or, by chance, did tax levels not affect you much differently than they do now? And considering that incomes for most Americans were better under Clinton than they have been under Bush 43, is it possible that if you were paying more in taxes, that it was simply because you were making more money when adjusted for inflation?

Democrats have promised to "raise taxes" only insofar as getting rid of the ludicrously extravagant tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. And if you want to bring the Clinton tax hikes up, consider that they too were aimed primarily at the wealthy--who, by the way, made out like bandits under the booming Clinton economy. And that the Clinton boom (stoked by the Internet industry, which in turn owed more to Al Gore than to any other politician) along with Clinton's well-targeted tax increases, as well as his sound fiscal/budgeting policies, led to actual federal budget surpluses--as opposed to the past six years of horrendously massive, uncontrolled Republican pork-barrel spending and skyrocketing deficits and debt.

Also considering that job creation has, for the past century, been highest under Democrats and just as consistently lowest when Republicans are in office, it is most probable that whether you are rich or poor, blue-collar or white-collar, you will be doing better economically under a Democrat than you would be under a Republican.

As for military weakness: let's see, military recruitment and retention are at historic lows. The military is stretched so thin that practically any military venture now would be impossible without Iraq immediately collapsing. And what have we gained for that, and for the loss of 2,432 American lives in Iraq? Is al Qaeda dying out? No, their recruitment is soaring, in stark contrast to our military's. Is Osama bin Laden behind bars? Nope. Saddam is, but we know that he was never really a threat to us, he was contained and not even remotely worth the price Bush has forced on this nation.

In short, Bush has achieved nothing, even worse than nothing, and in the process has shredded our military and led to our being less prepared now to fight any new conflict than we have been in living memory.

So, under Democrats, we've had good jobs and budget surpluses. Who would want to return to those horrors, and give up the jobless growth, surging gas prices, massive deficit spending, and rampant corruption we now enjoy? Especially when Democrats would actually (no!) repeal all those tax cuts for Paris Hilton and Bill Gates!

Under Clinton, our military was ready and able, and was directed well enough that we stopped ethnic cleansing and atrocities in the Balkans, at minimal cost to us in lives, money, and readiness. But why do that, when there was no oil to be found, and no corporate coffers to be filled with hundreds of billions in special war spending? Why go back to those days of woe when we see how well Bush has done for the men and women in uniform? Who gives a rat's ass about twisting intelligence and lying repeatedly to trick the public into a war that's become a quagmire, when Democrats might force the military to accept gays into their ranks? Have you no priorities?

And if a healthy military, good jobs, and fiscal responsibility aren't enough to scare the crap out of you, then wait till Karl Rove gets finished telling you about gay marriage and separation of church and state! You'll go screaming into the night, I tell you!

End of the Line for Katherine Harris

The woman who inflicted George W. Bush on America and the world, the woman who stripped tens of thousands of law-abiding Democratic Florida citizens of their voting rights and so stole the 2000 election from all the American people, is going down. And she is going down in flames.

The latest Rasmussen polls--a polling outfit that consistently gives George W. Bush approval ratings 5-10 points higher than other polls--has Harris down by no less than thirty points in her bid for a Senate seat. After robbing Floridians of their votes and grievously abusing her office of Florida Secretary of State (while simultaneously being Bush's Florida campaign co-chair) to repeatedly declare Florida for Bush--finally being backed up by the Republican majority of the Supreme Court--Harris was duly rewarded by the Republican Party, which gave her a Republican "safe seat" in the House of Representatives, where she stayed for four years.

She wanted to run for Senate in Florida in 2004, but was convinced not to by the White House--a wise choice for the GOP, as Harris would have lost the seat to Democrats (a Hispanic White House HUD secretary tapped for the race only narrowly won, 49%-48%). Harris was not so cooperative this year, however, as she decided to challenge incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson in Florida's other Senate seat; the GOP tried to stop her, but was unsuccessful. After several meltdowns and a pledge to use a large chunk of her personal fortune to fund her dying campaign, she is now pegged at 27% to Bill Nelson's 57%. The GOP still has about a month to enter another challenger, but it is unknown if they will be able to find anyone able or willing to challenge Nelson.

Either way, this will mark the disgraceful end to one of the most notorious political criminals of our day. Remember, had it not been for Harris, the 2000 election would not have been stolen. We would still be enjoying remarkable budget surpluses instead of record deficit and debt, Saddam Hussein would be safely contained and we would not be mired down in Iraq with 2372 of our soldiers dead. And despite how hard it is to imagine, 9/11 would most likely not have happened, as Al Gore would have continued the counter-terrorism practices of Bill Clinton that prevented the Millennium attacks in four American cities, and, as I have outlined, would have caught and stopped the 9/11 plotters before they struck. Gore would have engaged us in the Kyoto treaty and fought global warming from the start of the term he earned, the term that the American people granted him, the term which Katherine Harris despicably and illegally wrenched away, leading our nation to the ruin and despair we suffer today.

As you can probably tell, I have no great liking for Harris. And I will take no small pleasure in seeing her ignominiously crash and burn. It is far, far less than the punishment she so richly deserves.

Meanwhile...

Remember last week when two TV stations refused to air a factually correct political ad from MoveOn.org? Well, Republicans in Nevada are now running an ad with an easily-checked flat-out lie, and there's no word of any station so far that's refusing to air it.

"Reid's Democrat allies voted to treat millions of hardworking immigrants as felons," the ad says, "while President Bush and Republican leaders work for legislation that will protect our borders and honor our immigrants." [Source]

The felon clause was written by Republicans, who later tried to change it to a misdemeanor to avoid being justly criticized. Some Democrats voted against the change on the grounds that they did not want there to be any criminal penalties at all.

While this ad fits the Republican habit of blaming Democrats for Republican misdeeds, it is still a blatant lie. But while NBC stations claimed to object to the veracity of MoveOn.org's ads (while never specifying what was supposedly untrue), there is not a single media outlet reported so far that is even hesitating to take the money for this ad. More liberal media bias!

That's More Like It

This is what the Democratic Party has to do. House Democrats joined together on a common theme and started pounding on the Republicans, hitting their major weaknesses and using a biting and recognizable motif--in this case, "The Republican Rubber-Stamp Congress," something that has been around for a month or more but has not been getting too much attention until late. In a series of one-minute speaking allotments, different Representatives banged home on topics like prescription drugs, college aid, energy policy, hurricane Katrina, massive overspending and the deficits, the Iraq War, and Homeland Security. They pointed out that the Republicans in Congress have simply gone along with everything the Bush administration has asked for, and that has led to today's sorry state of affairs.

I think they've got a winner with this one. "The Republican Rubber-Stamp Congress" is a catchy, memorable phrase, it succinctly sums up the problem, it allows for demonstration of what Democrats have been trying to do right but were overruled by Republicans, can carry a message of what Democrats would do if they gained control again, it binds the Republicans in the Senate and House with a highly unpopular president, and it is an omnibus vehicle, allowing for any and all issues to be discussed and associated with it. It will also send Republicans running from the president, and hopefully into fractured disarray.

If Democrats across the country can simply have the wisdom to pound home on this them, use it again and again until election day, I believe they will have a unified campaign slogan even more effective than the '94 Republicans' "Contract with America." If the election were held today, Democrats would likely take over the House and come within a few seats of taking the Senate, despite strong non-census gerrymandering by Republicans. Even Newt Gingrich could suggest a slogan to defeat the Republicans: "Had Enough?" Although I do like the new catch phrase "Dangerously Incompetent," I think that "Rubber Stamp Republicans" is much, much better.

Already someone has put together a campaign to have people chip in and buy a $6.50 rubber stamp saying "Rubber Stamp Republican Congress," so that a multitude of them can be delivered to yet-unnamed congressional Republicans on the day that Feingold's censure of Bush is discussed in committee.

Let's hope the Democrats have it together enough to keep this slogan going, and to present a unified face to the public.

The Constitution and The Bible

Apparently, the Fundie Wingnuts are on the loose in Maryland. Republican Donald H. Dwyer Jr., member of the Maryland House of Delegates (the lower house of Maryland's state legislature), has been trying to force a same-sex marriage law on the state. Dwyer tried to impeach a Circuit Court judge, M. Brooke Murdock, because she ruled that a 1973 Maryland law banning same-sex marriage was unconstitutional. Dwyer wanted her impeached for "violating the public trust, abuse of power, incompetence, willful neglect of duty, and misbehavior in office." The Maryland legislature at least had enough sense not to go for it.

But Dwyer wants to imprint his religious beliefs on the state constitution, calling for an amendment that would ban all but "traditional" marriages. This is, after all, an election year, and gay marriage has proven to be a winning straw-man issue for Republicans to stir up the base and smear their opponents. But it may be backfiring.

In a hearing held by the legislature, Jamie Raskin, a professor of Constitutional Law at American University, was asked to testify on the matter. It's probably no coincidence that Raskin is running for state senate, and Maryland Republicans jumped at the chance to skewer the Democratic candidate by putting him on the stand and grilling him in an attempt to soil his name with the public. But it didn't work out the way they wanted. Republican State Senator Nancy Jacobs lectured, "As I read Biblical principles, marriage was intended, ordained and started by God - that is my belief. ... For me, this is an issue solely based on religious principals [sic]."

To which Raskin replied: "People place their hand on the Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution; they don't put their hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible."

Man, do I want this guy to be elected.

Scopes.com points out that Raskin was not the first to make this statement; Bill Maher said a year ago, relating to Bush's rush back to Washington D.C. to sign the Terry Schiavo bill, "Does George Bush remember that he put his hand on the Bible to uphold the Constitution and not the other way around?"

Still, it's a good quote, and true no matter who says it or how you state it. And a topic for the near future: what is "traditional marriage"? Maybe not what the Fundie Wingnuts think.

Problem: We Broke the Law. Solution: Attack the Other Guys!

In the midst of a tidal wave of Republican lobbying and bribery scandals, the GOP is moving into action. Will they curb any of the lobbying? No. Censure any of their own who did wrong? No. Limit their own corrupt fundraising in any way? Of course not. Hell, they're even supporting Tom DeLay for re-election this year, a Republican who has been indicted fer crying out loud. The GOP has simply shut down the Ethics committee, once used with gleeful impunity to attack Bill Clinton at every possible chance.

So what will they do to clean up their act? Why, cut off Democratic means of fundraising, of course! Specifically, the 527 groups, mostly effective on the Democratic side. Organizations like MoveOn.org, which advocate Democratic causes. Who cares if they're not involved in any lawbreaking or corruption? Who cares if the GOP leaves their own sleazy money machine intact despite massive illegalities? Who cares if the only "reform" the GOP has implemented so far has been one that will only increase lobbying to fill GOP coffers? This is an election year, dammit! We have to break laws and fill up on bribes while cutting the other side off at the knees!

Politics is perception. So long as the GOP can be seen as going after some kind of political action group, they figure Americans won't be able to tell the difference.

Are they right?

Bush Attempts to Hike Poll Numbers By Blowing Stuff Up, Promising to Blow More Stuff Up

Bush's numbers are in the tank. Even Fox has him under 40, along with NBC, CNN, CBS, Pew and the AP. In the past few weeks, only Rasmussen has him over 40, but the Rasmussen typically has Bush rated 5-10 points higher than the median. Pew has him at 33%, CBS at 34%. Even Republicans are starting to dump on him, and he's getting hit from all sides.

Time for a new war!

I wish that were a joke. Bush responded quickly to the new Nixon-during-Watergate poll numbers by bombing the crap out of Iraq, proclaiming that pre-emptive strikes will continue, and hey, Iran is really mean. Think I'm kidding? Think again. It would be a massive blunder to invade Iran, a debacle that would make Iraq look like jaywalking. But Bush needs Poll Juice, and short of a war or a terror attack within the U.S., it looks like he's not going to get what he wants. So this is the preliminary--bombing raids in Iraq and making noises like he's a macho war president. And if that doesn't work, get ready for bloodshed.

Remember those endlessly repeated videos of Saddam Hussein firing a gun in the air? Bush is trying to create that same kind of image, the tough guy, tough on Iraq, therefore tough on terrorism, remember that whole war thing, I'm the only one who can save you from terrorists, Saddam is evil, 9/11! 9/11! Heh heh heh.

One can only hope that this is simply posturing. Because it really would be a damn shame if tens of thousands more people had to die horrible deaths just because George can't get his polls up. Happened before. Gonna happen again, apparently.

His Own Bed

So the Bush administration screwed up again. They didn't pay attention to a deal being made that could affect port security, and they got caught with their pants down. You may not think that the UAE controlling the company that controlled the ports would be such a big deal, but this is the bed that Bush made for himself. He painted the scenario of fear, he made terrorism the bad guy, he touted even the thinnest connections of a Middle Eastern country to terrorists as a major threat--and then he approved the sale of U.S. ports to a country which has ties to 9/11.

So then Bush has to posture, because we all know the party line: Bush never makes a mistake. So instead of admitting that he was asleep at the wheel, he has to act like it's no big deal. So when Democrats in Congress say they'll try to block the Dubai ports deal, Bush says he's going to use the veto for the first time in over five years. But the some Congressional Republicans see that this looks bad in the press, and that Bush is taking a major hit on this, and so they start turning against the deal. Soon enough there's enough opposition to the deal that even a veto would be overridden.

Which means Bush is in a bind: he looks bad to the American people, is on the wrong side of the terrorism issue he himself defined, and then he'll look weak and ineffective when Congress overrides his only veto. So does he finally admit a mistake? Or does he stand on his principles and back up his initial claim that it's not a big deal and Congress is doing the wrong thing?

Neither. He goes behind the scenes and begs the UAE to take the initiative and pull out themselves. And so they do.

Politically, it was the best thing for Bush to do. But it does reveal what a shallow, inept, and superficial bunch these guys are. Bush will continue to pay for this, losing approval from his own base. Like I said, it doesn't matter if you think that foreign control over U.S. ports is a harmless thing. Bush chose to make people afraid of terrorism; he chose to make people see links based upon tenuous evidence; he chose to make this all about perception rather than fact. He made his bed, and now he's got to sleep in it.

Nitey-nite, George.

Remember What It's About

As Bush tries to divert attention by using fear in a new offensive against Congressional Democrats, the media seems to be buying into it, giving Bush good press and riffing on his themes. CNN ran a recent TV-headline titled "Bush's Staunch Defense," and failed completely to point out a number of facts completely contradicting Bush's claims.

But one item I think is worth noting is how this all got started in the first place. By now, most Americans have probably bought into Bush's recasting this as the Democrats trying to kill the Patriot Act--which is far from the truth. The politically-named act is complex and has many provisions. Many are needed, but some are controversial, and Democrats hold that those controversial provisions threaten Americans' civil liberties. One example of this is Section 215, which allows the government to look at the personal records of Americans, such as financial, medical, phone, internet, student or library records, without probable cause, in conflict with the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. Already, some sections of the act have been ruled as too vague or outright unconstitutional by courts.

The current mess came up when Democrats and some Republicans refused to agree to make many of these controversial provisions permanent, instead insisting on sunset clauses that would allow renewal of the provisions upon future review.

Let's make sure we understand that. The Democrats (plus some Republicans) were not trying to shut down the act. They were not even trying to shut down those provisions. They were only trying to make it so that the most controversial provisions would have to be renewed every few years. That's all. That's it.

So, why did the act almost expire? Because Republicans decided they would rather see the act expire than to agree to the sunset clauses on those few provisions. Because they saw they could make a political play--act like the Democrats were trying to kill the law, frighten people into thinking it would expire, and then blame the Democrats for everything.

Even as the Democrats were offering a temporary extension so debate could continue, Bush and the Republicans were screaming at everyone who would listen that the Democrats were trying to kill the act. When, in fact, the Democrats were ready to approve the full act for a number of years, and the Republicans were the ones refusing to accept these extensions.

Essentially, Bush and the GOP want everything or nothing: give us 100% of what we want, or we let the act die and blame the Democrats.

While I am sure they really want the provisions which threaten our civil liberties to become permanent, I am convinced that this is more about simple opportunism: the GOP is in bad shape for the 2006 elections, and Bush is in huge trouble with his domestic spying program, so they are fabricating a non-existent issue in hopes of eliciting fear among the American people. That's their way of gaining popularity, after all: frightening people. As Aaron Sorkin once wrote for the title role in The American President,

He is interested in two things, and two things only: making you afraid of it, and telling you who's to blame for it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections.

Sorkin got the Republican playbook down to a tee, didn't he? Because that's exactly what Bush and the GOP are trying to do here: make you afraid, and tell you who's to blame.

All of the People Some of the Time

See if you can decode this statement by John McCain to an MTV audience:

"Every young American should be exposed to every point of view. I'm not saying [intelligent design] should be taught in science classes. But I'm saying young people should be exposed to it. I also believe that God had a hand in creation. I certainly don't believe the Earth was created in seven days. But when I stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon and look at that grandeur, I detect the hand of God there in the time before time. I see no reason why students should not be exposed to all theories, recognizing that Darwin's theory's certainly one that is generally accepted in most of the scientific community. I think it's not inappropriate to say there are also people who believe this. Let the student decide."

This is what I hear: "Intelligent design blah blah blah I'm not getting behind this BS but I want to at least minimally please the right wing core blah blah blah students rock."

I mean, really--"let the students decide"? Decide what? Not whether to have ID in science class according to his earlier statement, but if not that, then what? Or is this code for "ID is not science and doesn't belong in the science class but let's get it in anyway wink wink"? In a true academic environment, the students don't decide the curriculum--but then, McCain's statement was probably never intended to mean that students should have any say, but rather that parents, and through them, right-wing school boards and churches should. Steve Benen commented on this aptly:

In related news, McCain said he'd like to see students decide whether to believe the earth is flat, the South won the Civil War, the value of pi is exactly 3, and one can contract the AIDS virus through tears and sweat.

Maybe all the parents who want their children to learn only what is popular and/or approved by the church or the right wing should get together and occupy a deep-red state so only their kids get this claptrap. And then they can collectively wonder at why their kids score lowest on tests, and can't think straight or get jobs when they grow up.

On the other hand, probably McCain's "let the students decide" is more like a general utterance designed just to please students and the MTV crowd. Just as the "ID is not science" to please those who want science to be secular, and "the hand of God" to please the fundies. You can't please everyone but it really sounds like McCain is trying.

That makes you believe he'll probably try a run for the presidency in 2008. And he'd be the smart choice for the GOP--but he also clearly is not willing to give the fundies what they demand, which is full obeisance and compliance. They're willing to forgive a veneer of independence, but not nearly as much actual free agency as McCain would probably need. Which means they may get Frist and trash McCain, in the style of when they backed Bush. Which would be great; while McCain is probably the least objectionable Republican to Democrats, he's also too much of a party man and a GOP apologist to stem the tremendous damage that the GOP would continue to inflict on the country. He'd be a hundred times better than Bush, but he'd still be bad as he'd fully enable the GOP. And if someone like Frist were the candidate, the Dems would stand a much better chance of winning.

Interlude

As we rest this week in the holiday season, we have a chance to ask what will inevitably happen in the NSA spying case. Colin Powell went on the air and was as damning as he'll ever be, considering the apologist he is for the administration. He said that it wasn't necessary to avoid the courts, but Bush didn't do anything wrong. That's about as much as you'll get out of him, but that is significant because of the tint. The shade of something off, which a few Republicans are already allowing.

One thing is pretty clear: Bush did violate the law. Can't really get around that. 4th Amendment and all that.

The question is, will Bush get nailed for it? Such a thing is always a political question, and as such, is unclear. During the holiday respite, less is being reported and done concerning all this. That will change after the New Year's break ends. But how will it progress? Where will things fall?

So far, Bush has been able to avoid general outrage by drowning the public in excuses, hoping everyone will find one or two that they'll accept. Republicans control the Senate, which means no impeachment; the Republicans control the Congress, which means no serious investigations. Naturally, the first thing that Bush will try is to ride this one out, and hope the media will avoid the temptation of a hot but damaging story, and that the public will not care enough. The second will be to fight it out, allowing the Congress to drag their heels and eventually begin "independent" investigations which won't get very far. Maybe accept censure, and act like that's enough. Or perhaps call for an investigation themselves, like in the Valerie Plame case, hoping that like Plame, it will drag out for so long that by the time it ends, it'll be 2008 already. That may be the best ultimate strategy: look like you're doing something, then string it out beyond the 2006 elections so the impact will be minimal. They should be able to obfuscate enough by denying access to most information on the grounds of national security.

That's the Bush-gets-away-with-it scenario, best as I can figure it. The other scenario, where Bush gets clobbered, involves events perhaps less likely, but nevertheless possible. Especially concerning details about the spying. If it included calls between Americans and other Americans, or especially if there was any political use of the eavesdropping, like monitoring communications by politicians, that could be enough to tip the scales and make even conservative Americans face the obvious. The media has pretty much been allowing the fiction of some semblance of legality to pervade, but if legal experts start pointing to statutes and precedents and say that Bush broke the law, that could create big problems for Bush and the GOP. If the Democrats are smart enough and crafty enough to keep the investigation in the limelight, this could become a major issue for the 2006 elections. If it's seen as bad by enough people, then Congressional Republicans--already in trouble with unpopularity and scandals even aside from this one--could find themselves looking really bad if they refuse to investigate, or otherwise cover for the president. That could force enough Republicans to agree to Democratic demands for openness and strong measures. And if the Democrats win back the Senate next year, that could open the doors for impeachment, especially if the investigation has progressed far enough to reveal some ugly stuff.

So, we have the range of Bush getting away scot-free, or Bush being impeached--and all possibilities in between. Depending on how the media, the experts, and the people react; how the right wing will balance this in an election year; and how much more information will come out, and how damaging it will be.

Lies, Lies, Lies

Okay, how many outright lies can you find in this statement by Bush today?

In order to protect America, the United States Senate must reauthorize the Patriot Act. The terrorists still want to hit us again. There is an enemy that lurks, a dangerous group of people that want to do harm to the American people -- and we must have the tools necessary to protect the American people. The Patriot Act passed overwhelmingly shortly after the September the 11th attack. It has been an effective tool; it has worked.

And the same as we protected the American people using the Patriot Act, we've also protected their civil liberties. There is extensive oversight on this very important program. The Patriot Act tore down the wall between law enforcement and intelligence communities, which makes it easier to connect the dots before an attack. The Patriot Act also gave law enforcement tools to investigate terrorism that they have already got to investigate other types of crimes.

The Patriot Act is scheduled to expire at the end of this year. The terrorist threat is not going to expire at the end of this year. The House has voted to reauthorize the Patriot Act, and they left town, because they thought their -- because their business is finished. The Senate is still debating this issue. A majority of the United States Senate supports reauthorization; a minority of senators is filibustering and preventing the Senate from voting to renew the Patriot Act. The Senate Democratic Leader recently boasted about killing the Patriot Act. This obstruction is inexcusable. The senators obstructing the Patriot Act need to understand that the expiration of this vital law will endanger America and will leave us in a weaker position in the fight against brutal killers. It's important that the Senate act quickly on these two bills.

Here is the most overwhelming lie: that the Patriot Act is being killed. It is not. The GOP tried to push through a version of the Patriot Act which makes permanent some provisions which threaten civil liberties. Democrats and some Republicans were against that, and simply want sunset provisions; the GOP and Bush utterly refused.

Here's where the lie is thickest: the Democratic and Republican coalition offered to extend the Patriot Act for three months so the details could be worked out. The GOP and Bush again utterly refused. But there was no reason for them to do so. It is completely within their power to extend the Patriot Act. They chose not to, so they could make political hay out of it. So the majority of what Bush is saying above is knowingly false.

What other lies are there? "We've also protected their civil liberties." Do I even need to explain? "A minority of senators is filibustering and preventing the Senate from voting to renew the Patriot Act." First, Cheney came back to D.C. specifically so he could cast a tie-breaking vote on this issue, unnecessary if it was just a "minority." In fact, now it is being reported that there is a majority who will vote for the 3-month extension, should the GOP leadership allow such a vote to occur. 52 Senators, including 8 Republicans, signed a letter urging the extension. So it is hardly a "minority" and absolutely no one is "preventing" the Senate from extending the act. They are preventing the passage of an extreme version of the act.

Most of the lies Bush spoke this morning, both specific and general, stem from these issues.

Impeach Bush

This story on MSNBC lays it out simply but well: Bush broke the law when he repeatedly authorized warrantless eavesdropping by the NSA within the United States. It is in violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, not to mention the fourth amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America.

His excuses are all as false as he is. He stated that revealing his violation of law only helps terrorists by alerting them that they're being listened in on--but this is something the terrorists are already well aware of. He made the argument that getting a warrant can be "too slow," and in cases like these (all several thousand?) we have to move fast--but that's an outright lie, as FISA not only provides warrants quickly and almost without exception, but they even allow investigators to apply for retroactive warrants, meaning they can act immediately and get a FISA warrant later. He claimed that such acts are within his Constitutionally mandated powers, but that is pure bull; he is granted no such powers. He said that Congress gave him the power--but the power they granted him was clearly military, and was not carte blanche for violating any law he pleased. Bush's spray of excuses mirrors his attitude before the Iraq War, when he made the claim that the Constitution gave him the power to go to war without congressional approval. He was wrong then, and he's wrong now.

Even John Dean of Watergate fame concurs: Bush is "the first President to admit to an impeachable offense."

So will Bush be impeached? God knows he deserves it. But Republicans control the Congress, and it is highly unlikely that they would allow for or vote for an impeachment of Bush, no matter how clearly he violated the law. So the only thing that could remain would be to press the issue and shame both Bush and the GOP. In what I read as a good sign, the Republicans have not issued their usually inevitable press releases and talking points, meaning that in an election year, they may not be too eager to cover up for him--though they will just as likely not trash him, either. Only should the Democrats win back the Senate next year, then impeachment could be a real possibility. But not too likely before then.

"Patriot" Opportunism

As predicted, Republicans are now wailing about how Democrats have destroyed the "Patriot" Act, and the country will be wide open to attack. Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said that "senators who oppose the extension will change their minds when they realize their stance could endanger lives."

Of course, the Democrats, along with some Republicans who voted with them, are offering a three-month extension of the act, as is, to cover the time necessary for debate and deliberations.

So if the act dies, it's the GOP that killed it. Don't forget that.

See?

Remember one week ago, when I opined that the "GOP way" is to blame their own faults on the Democrats? More evidence, from the Master of Malfeasance Tom DeLay himself:

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) implored Republican senators yesterday to stick with him while he addresses questions about his travel and his dealings with lobbyists, as House Democrats unveiled plans to try to make ethics a defining issue for the year. ...

Attendees said DeLay, in extremely brief remarks, told the senators that, if asked about his predicament, they should blame Democrats and their lack of an agenda.

'Nuff said.

Republicans: Divide and Conquer California

With California being the largest electoral state, and because it always goes to Democrats these days, Republicans are seeking out new ways to grab as much of the state as possible away from Democrats. First is a proposal by Republican lawmakers to divide the state's electoral votes: whomever wins in any one congressional district gets one electoral vote, up to the total of 53; the remaining two senatorial votes are given to the candidate winning the most votes statewide. Note that Republicans are not suggesting this be done in states like Texas.

Add to this the fact that Governor Schwarzenegger plans on "redrawing legislative and congressional district boundaries"--in short, non-census gerrymandering, just like in Texas, so as to stack the legislature with as many Republicans as possible and take the state into Red territory.

But add the two together: Schwarzenegger gerrymandering to turn districts Republican, and Republicans awarding electoral votes on a per-district basis. Begin to see a pattern forming? Republicans nationwide are doing everything they can, no holds barred, to solidify their power and make this a one-party country...

More Vote Irregularities in Ohio

In addition to the 4000-or-so extra votes one machine magically conjured up for Bush in Franklin County (only 638 people voted in that precinct), there are other problems that investigators are now finding in Ohio. One of them is the always-mysterious people-who-don't-vote-for-president, an unnaturally high 93,000 in Ohio. These ballots would have to be examined by hand, and most that can be read that way would likely go to Kerry, as most are in poorer areas with more minority voters, who were more often given punch-card machines which register such "non-votes" when the chad are not punched just right--sure you remember that mess.

There were also strong correspondences between minority areas and other voting machine problems. Almost all problems reported just happened to be in Kerry strongholds, primarily in areas with a high concentration of African-American voters; in the chart below, red areas indicate black population levels, blue dots are reported problems in Kerry districts, green for Bush districts:

Not hard to see the disparity. The same applies to vote spoilage:

Republicans will likely roll out the old "Democratic voters are stupid" riff like they did in Florida in 2000, but with numbers so disproportionately skewed, that chestnut will be nothing more than a lame insult to minority voters. But they'll make the charge anyway, most likely. But this absolutely harmonizes with the stated Republican goal of suppressing the minority vote.

I saw the CBS 60 Minutes report on voting machines recently, and in the report, it showed an rather easy way to misvote: if you have three buttons lined up vertically, and you push the top and bottom one at the same time, the middle button is selected on the computer screen. The representative for the voting machine company (or perhaps she represented the district) insisted that a voter would never press buttons like that. However, it is easy to see how she is wrong. Try this: point your index finger as though you would press a button. Now look at your hand: most likely, your other three fingers are curled up into your palm, with you thumb resting over your middle finger (some people actually have the thumb extended, more likely to hit a surface). Now look at the position of your thumb knuckle. When you press the button, the thumb knuckle will be protruding downward, and could come in contact with the surface at the same time your forefinger does. We usually don't hit anything with it as a usual button may be raised (or touching the surface below the button may be unimportant), but you should be able to see how the thumb knuckle could hit the flat surface of the touch-screen on the voting machine. That would generate a misvote, and explain why many people tried to vote for one candidate and kept seeing another's name coming up on the screen.

Harder to explain is the Pat Buchanan effect in Ohio. In many districts heavily weighted for Kerry, third-party candidates did far too well. In precinct 4F of Cleveland's East Side, the ultraconservative third-party candidate, Michael Peroutka, got 40% of the vote. In precinct 4N, the Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik captured 32.5% of the vote. It is highly unlikely that these candidates won such large percentages of the vote in precincts almost totally devoted to Kerry, meaning that there was obviously something wrong with the voting machines in those precincts.

In Florida in 2000, if one were to have given Gore all of the votes he lost due to vote fraud, vote spoilage, and machine 'malfunctions,' he would have won Florida and the election easily by tens of thousands of votes. Ohio may not be such a easy 'real' win for Kerry, but it could easily turn out that without all the 'errors' coincidentally all working against him, Kerry might very well have won the state, and again, the election. All of this making George W. Bush truly worth of the Thief of the White House.

Absolutely Something Fishy Here

This web site chronicles the fact that while one type of voting machine in Florida (E-Touch) recorded similar heightened turnout numbers for both Republicans and Democrats, another voting machine type (Op-Scan) almost universally recorded unbelievable turnout for Republicans--as high as 433% increases--while at the same time had Democratic turnout fall by large amounts--as much as 70%.

The Op-Scan machines made by Diebold and ES&S--both corporations with strong Bush connections--had voter turnout for Republicans increase an average of 135%, while Democratic turnout averaged a 22% decrease. The E-Touch machines recorded a turnout increase of 27% for Republicans, 23% for Democrats.

Sorry, but you can't tell me that's a coincidence. While the numbers I am looking at have not been confirmed, this is exactly the kind of thing I mentioned before about evaluating the voting machine results. If these numbers bear out, then this is virtual proof of vote-rigging on the part of Republicans.

Half-Crazed Paranoia

Sometimes it is both amusing and scary reading what the Freepers put up there:

KERRY MOVES TO SOLIDIFY CONTROL AND POWER

January 21, 2005 (the day after inauguration day)

One day after being sworn in as President of the United States, John Kerry moved to solidify his power and influence on every day America. Just two months after the Democrats stunned Republicans, conservatives and libertarians by winning the White House and regaining control of both the Senate and House of Representatives, Kerry announced massive changes to happen in the next 30 days. Among the many items that Kerry moved on were:

Immediately signed an executive order outlawing conservative talk radio. In that order, any talk deemed anti-democrat by the newly appointed Czar of the Airways, Al Frankton, and the stations would be immediately shut down and the show hosts arrested for hate speech. Targets include Rush, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, and Dr. Laura.

Signed an executive order outlawing the NRA and like groups. The NRA is to be disbanded immediately.

Signed an executive order outlawing all political parties other than the newly renamed Democratic Party, which is now to be called: The National Socialist Democratic Party of America. ...

You get the idea. You can read the rest if you want to. In short, Kerry becomes the new Adolf Hitler and Transforms the United States into the New Soviet Union overnight.

At first I decided not to post this because it seemed far too loony, way out there as half-crazed paranoia or over-the-top satire. It sat in my draft area for a while. And then on Talking Points Memo, I saw the following right-wing flier mailed out to Florida residents, and suddenly the Freeper post seemed a lot more in line with what the far-right wingnuts seem to take seriously:

Frankly, it is both amazing and alarming. I mean, I have strong fears about what will happen under Bush if he is re-elected, and I have real evidence to back that up, but I wouldn't go nearly this far. All the right-wingers have is their paranoia and imagination--and their public smear campaigns quickly get disgustingly ugly.

When Kerry wins, Republicans will almost certainly get more and more ugly--perhaps even topping the destructiveness they displayed under Clinton for eight years.

Such a Great Story, Too Bad They Can't Use It

While the GOP is putting on a big show about how much voter fraud there will be due to duplicate or false registrations by Democrats, none of their accusations have any real evidence to prove any of the allegations whatsoever. So you would think that when the Associated Press came out with a story about how 27,000 voters have duplicate registrations in Ohio and Florida and could vote in both elections, they would jump all over it. After all, this story has actual documentation behind it. But the Republicans are not touching this one with a ten-electoral-vote-pole. Why?

A majority of the double-registrants are Republicans.

11,000 are Republicans and 9,600 are Democrats, with 6,400 independents. And with Democrats out-registering Republicans, that only emphasizes how many more Republicans are double-dipping. Oops.

Because Bush Wants to Say It But Is Too Chicken

From the AP, in the SC State:

A new videotape of Osama bin Laden was meant to help elect Sen. John Kerry president, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson says.
...
"There's no question in my mind, and I think to anybody who knows how close this election is," Thompson later told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in an interview. "Osama bin Laden would not give out a video report 72 hours before the election unless he wanted to influence it."

The rest of the article shows the depth in which Thompson discusses his belief. The inappropriateness of such a bald declaration by an administration official is staggering; if, say, John Edwards or any Kerry campaign official had said that bin Laden wants Bush elected, we'd be hearing Bush decry the act as "shameful" all the way to election day.

The fact is, Bush has played into bin Laden's plans--and vice versa--almost so seamlessly that one can hardly fault the conspiracy theorists that believe they are in cahoots. Bin Laden gave a failing Bush presidency a gigantic boost, allowing Bush to get almost every political agenda point he could wish for rammed through Congress, and to this day provides Bush with his strongest rallying point; if Bush wins the election, it will be because of bin Laden. Conversely, Bush has provided bin Laden with exactly what he wanted: an administration with its eye off the ball so that the 9/11 attacks could be carried out (unlike Clinton, who foiled the Millennium attacks), propelling bin Laden and al Qaeda to stratospheric fame; Bush then alienated the U.S. from a sympathetic world, deprived his own people of their freedoms, and let bin Laden escape while they invaded Iraq, an action which drove tens of thousands of new recruits into the waiting arms of al Qaeda, whilst the Bush administration only succeeded in capturing a few dozen noted members of the terrorist organization. In short, both Bush and bin Laden have gotten exactly what they wanted through each others' actions.

Bin Laden does not want Bush re-elected because he quakes in his boots at the idea of a Kerry presidency; rather, he wants Bush re-elected because Bush's policies are what bin Laden wants: an isolated America, focused on a fracturing Middle East war that fuels terrorism while it does little to attack al Qaeda directly. Kerry, on the other hand, would bring America back into the world fold, strengthening its ability to fight terror, and would be more sympathetic in the eyes of the people of the Middle East--forming alliances and winning hearts and minds instead of invading nations and turning millions against him. The only way Kerry stands more of a chance to get bin Laden than Bush is in that Kerry will not put all his energy into Iraq or whatever next Big War Bush will get us into. But the whole point is not really to catch bin Laden, but rather to fight al Qaeda. And that's what Kerry will do better, and that's what bin Laden would prefer not happen. See this post for a longer explanation of why bin Laden prefers Bush stay in office.

There. I can say that, because I'm not an senior official in either campaign. Thompson is, which is what makes his statement reprehensible and worthy of note and attack by the Democratic side.

GOP Election Derailment

It looks like the GOP is going to throw an all-out nationwide election-sized monkey-wrench election derailment in the form of voter "challenges" based on their bogus lists. After stating that they would challenge as many as 35,000 Democratic voters in Ohio, and thousands more in Florida in addition to using copies of the scandalous felon list, they are now going to challenge 37,000 Democratic voters in Wisconsin. I would likely count on the thugs showing up in Pennsylvania, Colorado, and several other battleground states as well. The GOP is basing these lists on mailings sent to Democrats that were returned as "undeliverable" in the mail--assuming that a returned letter means a fraudulent registration, a baseless assumption. We don't even know if the GOP lists are anywhere near legitimate, just their say-so. But they will be using these lists in force at the polls on Tuesday.

What would this mean? Imagine thousands of Republican "observers" in each of those states, thick in Democratic strongholds, strangling the election process (which will already be jammed up by record turnout) by challenging a sizable percent of the people who walk through the door, demanding voters present identification and them forcing them to fill out a two-page legal form under the threat of prison for perjury, before they can cast a ballot. Can you imagine the chaos that will create?

The key question here is not "will they try it"--that much is established--but rather, "will they be able to get away with it"? What happens when the Republicans get out of line, and force hundreds, perhaps thousands of key heavily-Democratic polling places to become hopelessly jammed? Republican pundits will laugh and sneer, alleging that it proves Democratic election fraud, and see how those pathetic Democrats can't even vote, while things are going smoothly in Republican districts. Likely these challenges will lead to violence in many places, and this will further be used by conservatives to claim that Democrats are disrupting the process.

But most importantly, Republican officials will stand on the "legality" of the observers and their "right" to challenge anyone they like. If GOP "observer" operatives start abusing their position and jamming Democratic polling places, what will anyone do? Throw them out? That will lead to nationwide howls of protest by the GOP, wild claims of election fraud. What if the GOP operatives create such a mess that lines of Democrats wanting to vote will still be waiting when the scheduled closing time arrives? If any attempt is made to extend the hours for voting, Republicans will again start shouting hysterically about fraud, injustice, illegal tampering, and God knows what else.

In short, just like the fraud pulled off in Florida four years ago, the GOP knows that so long as it can disrupt the Democratic vote on election day, nothing else matters. If by the close of polls Tuesday evening they can succeed in preventing enough Democrats from voting, then there is no returning to it--no do-over, no changing what happened. This is a crime which can and has been committed by the GOP without any fear of punishment after the fact. That is what they are depending on.

Think about it. Let's say what I outlined happened. Maybe even just 3 or 4% of Democrats are kept from voting because Republican "observers" jam up the polling places, either shutting Democratic voters out or discouraging them from even trying. Then what? What is the recourse? As far as I can see, there is none. Who would be arrested? Very likely no one--on the face of things, GOP "observers" would be "within the law," however blatantly they abuse it. In short, the damage would be done. The Democrats would be disenfranchised--again--and no legal action could reverse any of that.

This is my greatest fear for the election--more than even a terrorist attack on the same day.

Ah, the Hypocrisy...

Bush commenting on how vile Kerry is to even mention Tora Bora after the bin Laden tape was released, suggesting Kerry was shameful for taking political opportunity from the message:

"Unfortunately -- unfortunately, my opponent, tonight, continued to say things he knows are not true -- accusing our military of passing up a chance to get Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora. As the Commander in charge of that operation, Tommy Franks had said, it's simply not the case. It's the worst kind of Monday morning quarterbacking. It is especially shameful in the light of a new tape from America's enemy."

Two GOP officials, meanwhile:

"We want people to think 'terrorism' for the last four days," said a Bush-Cheney campaign official. "And anything that raises the issue in people's minds is good for us."

A senior GOP strategist added, "anything that makes people nervous about their personal safety helps Bush."

He called it "a little gift," saying it helps the President but doesn't guarantee his reelection.

Meanwhile, new poll numbers out partially covering the period after the bin Laden tape was released favor Kerry a bit more than not, meaning the bin Laden tape probably will not have any negative impact. I would not say that it stands to benefit him, as his trend was already slowly upward.

When Bush Loses...

...what will happen?

Remember how the Bush administration claimed that when the came to occupy the White House, they discovered all kinds of vandalism, from the alleged missing "W" keys on the computer keyboards to much more serious damaging and pilfering? Remember how the GSA, which maintains the White house, debunked the story, saying that most of the damage claims were false, and the "vandalism" was "consistent with what we would expect to encounter when tenants vacate office space after an extended occupancy"? In other words, it was a Bush administration dirty trick after all--they just made it up as a way to attack the Democrats.

To be honest, I'm not worried about the Bush people pilfering all the "J," "F" and "K" keys from the keyboards when Kerry moves in. I'm much more worried about what damage his administration will do to the country and to the world in the three months they will occupy power whilst knowing they are leaving, and are going to be bitterly, angrily vindictive about it.

I do not consider Bush's father, H.W. Bush, to have been even nearly as bitter or vindictive, and yet look at what he did: after spending his entire presidency refusing to engage in any messy third-world quagmires, he chose one month after he lost the 1992 election to order 25,000 U.S. troops into Somalia--without an exit plan. Knowing that the start of the operation would appear victorious, strong, forceful and decisive, just as he knew that it would soon turn bloody, violent, and remorseful--on his opponent's new watch. Bush Sr. knew without a doubt that "winning" in Somalia was impossible; that if Clinton stayed in for too long that he would get caught in a quagmire, and that if Clinton pulled out, the Republicans could thoroughly attack him for weakness and being a "cut and run" president.

No president, unless under dire necessity, should ever begin such a military action, unilaterally, so close to exiting the White House. It was a low, mean and dishonorable thing to do--and violated the trust a president must keep with the military not to use them for political means.

We know that Bush Jr. has even less a problem with abusing the military to achieve his means. What will this Bush administration do when they know they can hand off any number of messy, bloody situations to an incoming John Kerry administration? Will they refuse to fund Iraq, leaving the troops in the cold, so Kerry's first move will have to be massive emergency funding for the Iraq conflict? Will they make a plethora of last-minute edicts on controversial issues so that Kerry's first move will have to be deconstructing presidential orders on flag burning, abortion counseling, the pledge of allegiance and other hot-button issues? Or will Dubya go whole hog like his father did and start a military action in a country where there is no chance of winning--say, the Sudan--leaving Kerry the option of watching our soldiers die in a quagmire, or looking weak by cutting and running?

Personally, I will not put thing one past this Bush administration.

There Goes All Doubt

Remember those soldiers that Bush claimed didn't find any explosives? He was talking about these soldiers:

These soldiers, who are on this video, at al Qaqaa, finding rooms full of explosives:

But hey, those could be any explosives, right? Maybe those are different explosives than the ones that the IAEA was talking about.

Oops.

According to the reports, the troops found "bunker after bunker" full of the explosives, having to break the IAEA seals to get into the buildings, the facilities left behind unsealed and unguarded because not enough troops were available, and with Iraqi civilians freely going in and out of the facility.

Meanwhile, Republicans are sinking to new lows to try to shift blame. After RNC chairman Ed Gillespie and George W. Bush himself falsely claimed that Kerry was blaming and denigrating the troops, GOP footsoldier Rudy Giuliani went on the NBC "Today" show and said the following:

''No matter how you try to blame it on the president, the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough? Didn't they search carefully enough?''

Enough said.

More Blame-Shifting and Excuses Fly as Evidence of Bush Incompetence Mounts

From the New York Times:

Looters stormed the weapons site at Al Qaqaa in the days after American troops swept through the area in early April 2003 on their way to Baghdad, gutting office buildings, carrying off munitions and even dismantling heavy machinery, three Iraqi witnesses and a regional security chief said Wednesday.

The Iraqis described an orgy of theft so extensive that enterprising residents rented their trucks to looters. But some looting was clearly indiscriminate, with people grabbing anything they could find and later heaving unwanted items off the trucks.
...
But the accounts make clear that what set off much if not all of the looting was the arrival and swift departure of American troops, who did not secure the site after inducing the Iraqi forces to abandon it.

"The looting started after the collapse of the regime," said Wathiq al-Dulaimi, a regional security chief, who was based nearby in Latifiya. But once it had begun, he said, the booty streamed toward Baghdad.

Meanwhile, Bush & Co. is desperately trying to throw up any and every theory about how the explosives were taken before the invasion--and failing badly. They tried to claim that soldiers who stayed overnight at the facility on April 10 with an NBC News team found the explosives missing, only to have that story contradicted and torn to shreds. The Washington Times is now trying to push the story that Russian special forces removed the explosives (is this or is this not sounding more and more desperate--Russian special forces? Please), but already that story has been shot down--the source is thoroughly discredited, and the Russian embassy in Washington is flatly denying that any Russian forces were in Iraq at all during that time frame.

So what next? Well, there was a group of other soldiers who went through the al Qaqaa complex on April 3, which the administration is now using. They say that those other troops "saw no signs" of the explosives. Case closed, right?

No, of course not. Josh Marshall, as usual, has the goods. It turns out that there was an April 5 news story, "the 3rd Infantry Division entered the vast Qa Qaa chemical and explosives production plant and came across thousands of vials of white powder, packed three to a box." The looted explosives, RDX and HMX, are white powders. An AP story the same day reported that "troops at Iraq's largest military industrial complex found ... a white powder that appeared to be used for explosives. ... A senior U.S. official familiar with initial testing said the powder was believed to be explosives."

In other words, Bush & Co. are claiming that the troops found no evidence of the looted explosives. However, they did find explosives that look exactly like the ones that were looted.

Really, I don't know if Bush & Co. really care at this point--I believe that they are just flinging out story after story, hoping that (a) people will have heard "it's not Bush's fault" so many times that they'll believe it, or at least they won't remember that all claims were thoroughly discredited, and/or (b) that they can keep the ball in the air--that is, produce a line of explanations that will take time to debunk--so that they can continue to say "it's not a fact" until the election goes by.

However, the debunking--especially by bloggers like Marshall--are acting so quickly that each story only survives a very short time, and as the explanations fly, the story gets bigger and bigger.

Bush's Reality Distortion Field is on Maximum Power, folks--set phasers to "disintegrate."

The Political Art of Shifting Blame

I have written before about the political art of shifting blame to others: when you've made a colossal blunder and it threatens your political career or agenda, if reporters ask you if you made an error, then twist the question to make it appear like they are blaming an honorable group of people. Reagan did this when the Marine barracks were blown up in Lebanon, making it appear that any accusation of wrongdoing was equal to dishonoring the soldiers who died, saying their deaths were in vain. In my prior article on the subject, I noted that a FOX reporter tried the same thing on Wesley Clark, implying that if Clark said that Iraq was a sideshow and Bush was missing the real target in Afghanistan, that was equal to belittling the troops in Iraq.

The Bush campaign is in full-gear blame-shifting mode this week. First was the criticism that Bush outsourced the hunt for bin Laden to the local warlords, who let bin Laden escape. Searching for a way to dismiss this cogent and damaging criticism, Bush said:

Now my opponent is throwing out the wild claim that he knows where bin Laden was in the fall of 2001, and that our military passed up the chance to get him in Tora Bora. This is an unjustified criticism of our military commanders in the field. This is the worst kind of Monday-morning quarterbacking.

In other words, if there was a blunder made, it wasn't me, it was the generals. And how dare he criticize the generals!

But they didn't stop there. Ed Gillespie, the chairman of the RNC, sent out a mass email to millions of people, claiming that the ultra-super-liberal media was at it yet again, daring to report that the explosives in Iraq were looted after the invasion, when in fact American troops found the cache had been looted already, on Saddam Hussein's watch, and that an NBC News crew had confirmed it, therefore making Kerry's criticism and the press coverage of it a howling outrage.

Of course, he was wrong: the troops only stayed at al Qaqaa for the night, they did not look for the weapons (and would not have been qualified to make that determination anyway), and the NBC crew in fact contradicted the claim that the explosives had been found already missing. CNN's report of the NBC team and the soldiers finding the weapons gone was not even based on an NBC report, it was in fact based on a Matt Drudge story, and we all know how reliable he can be. Josh Marshall is all over the story.

But the point in this entry is that Gillespie used this blame-shifting technique; note carefully the words in bold, as well as Gillespie's careful use of quotation marks:

John Kerry seized on the New York Times headline to launch a political attack on President Bush, saying U.S. troops "failed to guard those stockpiles" and that is "one of the great blunders" of the war.

Senator Kerry and the New York Times leave the impression that these weapons went missing recently and U.S. troops were derilict in their duty to guard the stockpile — neither of which is true.

Not only does this shift the blame to the troops instead of the president, but it also carefully misquotes Kerry, whose original quote was:

After being warned about the danger of major stockpiles of explosives in Iraq, this president failed to guard those stockpiles. ... Now we know our country and our troops are less safe because this president failed to do the basics, this is one of the great blunders of Iraq, one of the great blunders of this administration. The incredible incompetence of this president and this administration has put our troops at risk and put this country at greater risk than we ought to be.

Notice Gillespie's careful and intentional editing of Kerry's quote, cutting it off just so he can take the blame Kerry puts squarely on Bush, and make it appear like Kerry is criticizing the troops. When in fact, Kerry not once said it was the fault of the troops, and quite clearly blamed the Bush administration, not once but repeatedly--kind of hard for Gillespie to miss.

We know these people are lying bastards, folks... but it's hard not to use even stronger language when you see such blatant lies such as these--not to mention cowardly attempts to hide behind honorable people in order to save your own sorry political ass.

BBC: Bush "Caging List" in Florida Reveals Voter Intimidation Plan

From The BBC:

A secret document obtained from inside Bush campaign headquarters in Florida suggests a plan - possibly in violation of US law - to disrupt voting in the state's African-American voting districts, a BBC Newsnight investigation reveals.

Two e-mails, prepared for the executive director of the Bush campaign in Florida and the campaign's national research director in Washington DC, contain a 15-page so-called "caging list".

It lists 1,886 names and addresses of voters in predominantly black and traditionally Democrat areas of Jacksonville, Florida.

The BBC is presenting it as a big deal, indicative of illegal activity; I am not certain about that. It appears to be the same kind of plan that the GOP is outwardly carrying out in Ohio; the Bush campaign claims that it is a list of voters with questionable addresses that they plan to challenge. The charge of illegality is based upon the fact that "US federal law prohibits targeting challenges to voters, even if there is a basis for the challenge, if race is a factor in targeting the voters." And Jacksonville is predominantly black. Still, intent of racial bias may be hard to pin down in federal court, especially if the Bush campaign can produce similar lists for other counties (which they probably have).

I would be especially interested to know exactly who called it a "caging list"; the BBC article is not specific about that. If it was language used by the Bush campaign, then that word alone could be heavily charged.

When it comes down to it, I see this as yet another plan--just like in Ohio--to intimidate voters at the polling place. The list certainly details how the GOP operatives there plan to stop people, and forcing so many to sign 2-page legal affidavits at the polling place will at the least be a disruption, and at most could discourage a great many people from voting. And while the elections supervisor quoted in the BBC article is a Democrat and so bias must be anticipated, he nevertheless reveals an interesting fact: "not one challenge has been made to a voter "'in the 16 years I've been supervisor of elections.'" Which means that this Republican tactic is a new thing.

The BBC article also notes rather suspicious activity by shady characters at the early polling places:

In Jacksonville, to determine if Republicans were using the lists or other means of intimidating voters, we filmed a private detective filming every "early voter" - the majority of whom are black - from behind a vehicle with blacked-out windows.

The private detective claimed not to know who was paying for his all-day services.

Note: The BBC so far is the only news organization reporting this. None of the US services are mentioning anything about this, 8 hours and more after the story broke.

If Kerry Becomes President, Aliens Will Eat Our Brains, Cheney Announces

Not really, but you get the feeling that that is where he's headed. First, as his campaign decried "scare tactics" on the part of the Kerry campaign, Cheney claimed that a Kerry presidency would lead to a terrorist attack. then he claimed that the U.S. would be nuked if Kerry won. Now he's saying that if Kerry had been president in the 80's, the Soviet Union would still be in power. In addition, Saddam Hussein would probably control the Persian Gulf today. So, essentially, a vote for Kerry will lead to Soviet terrorists in league with a Super-Giant-Mega-Saddam Hussein, nuking us right and left.

What's precious about Cheney's Soviets-in-power claim is that he bases it on Kerry's votes against certain weapons systems. Except that it was Cheney himself who made the decision to cut those precise weapons systems in the first place!!

More About the Republican Voter Intimidation Drive in Ohio

From The Columbus Dispatch:

"Any political party supporting candidates on the ballot ... may appoint one person to each polling location as a challenger during the casting of ballots.... Any person voting may be challenged.... Voters' eligibility may be challenged on four grounds: they are not U.S. citizens, they haven't lived in Ohio for at least 30 days before the election, they do not live in the county where they are voting, they are not at least 18 years old. Voters who are challenged must sign an affidavit responding to the reasons challenged."

The affidavit, it turns out, is even more intimidating than it at first sounds:

Voters who are challenged will be asked to fill out a two-page form stating their name, if they are a U.S. citizen, where they were born, if they have resided in the state 30 days, the names of two persons who know where they live, the county and precinct in which they live, and if they are of legal voting age.

The bottom of the form contains the following warning in bold type: "Whoever commits election falsification is guilty of a felony of the fifth degree."

All of this begs the question: how the heck will they be able to spot people to challenge? What does a person who has not lived in Ohio for 30 days look like? Could you spot someone from a different county? It is not hard to predict that the Republican challengers will be well-trained to spot the most vulnerable voters and force them to go through all of this in order to vote. Voters who appear to be in a hurry will doubtless be targeted as well. And it is without doubt that the GOP challengers will spot the Democrats chiefly by their color.

Additionally, the GOP is challenging 35,000 newly registered voters in Ohio--Democrats, of course, mostly minorities--before they even get to the polling places. The GOP is claiming that a mass mailing they did to new registrants generated a large number of returned mail, suggesting incorrect addresses, in turn suggesting bogus registration. However, there is grave doubt as to the legitimacy of these claims; the GOP has most likely simply found a new way of keeping Democrats from voting. Those Democratic areas being challenged are now being thrown into turmoil, with tens of thousands of Democrats being forced to appear at hearings to prove that they are truly eligible to vote. In short, the GOP found a new way to legally intimidate voters, making them jump through hoops before they can be allowed to vote.

Not that they'll admit to it, of course; in order to make their intimidation appear legitimate, they have been claiming to the press that this is all about voter fraud on the part of the Democrats; for example, they claim that many false registrations were made by a man who "was paid in crack cocaine for his registration efforts by a representative of the NAACP." There are truly no depths that they will not lower themselves to.

The Sweet Frustration of Hypocrites

Well, it seems that the protest against the Sinclair broadcast intended to smear Kerry was successful; at least from the far-right perspective of Freepers, judging from their strangled, frustrated whining, the show was relatively balanced. Their bald ambition to have it be a savage attack on Kerry is undisguised:

Seriously though, I'm mad. This is stupid, and it's not making Kerry look bad. Then they showed a little hit piece on President Bush. Did Sinclair cave or what??------------------This thing sucks. Anything postive for the POWs and vets is "BALANCED" by whack jobs for kerry. Now they're doing the Bush AWOL thing - I am blocking SINclair on my box - what a setup! - It's on tape but I think I'll burn it. ARRRRRRRRRRRGH!------------------Sinclair is apparently a bunch of linguini-spined cowards who decided to chop up the documentary and insert so much cognitive dissonance as to make it useless. Shame on them! SHAME!

Hee hee, that's fun to read. Serves 'em right. This is the same crowd that howled bloody murder when the Reagan miniseries was to show--getting it bumped to cable--and that wasn't about a candidate and it wasn't two weeks before an election. With that miniseries, as you'll recall, Republicans demanded to screen the miniseries beforehand, and if they didn't like it, then they would demand a scrolling subtitle be constantly shown to emphasize that the series was fiction. Not so it would be balanced, but so it would be either sympathetic to their views or fully discredited as untrue. If they can justify that but then rail against this, they are quite clearly raving hypocrites.

Clearly the pressure put on Sinclair was effective. After their stock fell and their advertisers scattered, they announced that they were planning a "balanced" show after all--but no one doubts that if not for the protest, they would have shown only the smear documentary, possibly followed by a panel show, as they had originally announced. But even then there would have been the question of legality; it might have been more than fear of losing sponsors, if Sinclair had aired the anti-Kerry doc as originally planned, they could have been hit with lawsuits and possibly even lost their license.

It should also be noted that maybe the show wasn't quite son easy on Kerry as the Freepers feared; after all, their wing-nut view may just make them feel that the show wasn't an anti-Kerry screed; one of them points out, "It doesn't suck; it's just not slash and burn. Try to remember that the rest of the world isn't quite as strident about John Kerry as we are." To say the least.

It'll be interesting to see what the non-far-right-loony reaction is. But reading through the hundreds of posts by screaming, outraged Freepers is fun.

Large-Scale GOP Voter-Intimidation Drive Planned in Ohio

No, I'm not kidding:

Republican Party officials in Ohio took formal steps yesterday to place thousands of recruits inside polling places on Election Day to challenge the qualifications of voters they suspect are not eligible to cast ballots.

In the meantime, Democrats recruited 3,600 people to protect those same voters from Republican intimidation. The Republican intimidation drive and the Democratic defense against it are taking place primarily in "heavily Democratic urban neighborhoods of Cleveland, Dayton and other cities." This is not a two-sided attempt by both parties to intimidate voters on the other side--this is purely offensive on the part of the GOP, hoping to scare off as many Democratic voters as possible.

This is reprehensible. But not unexpected. The GOP is now running scared, and is evidently willing to stop at nothing to win this one by hook or crook.

Scare Tactics

From Reuters, October 19:

"Instead of articulating a vision or a positive agenda for the future, the senator is relying on a litany of complaints and old style scare tactics," Bush told a rally in New Port Richey.

From ABC News, October 22:

Bush suggested his Democratic rival "does not understand the enemy we face and has no idea how to keep America secure." His campaign reinforced that theme with a new television ad with chilling imagery of prowling wolves in a dense forest. "Weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm," an announcer says.

This Is Why We Need International Observers--And Lots More of Them

"If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we're going to have a tough time in this election."

--Michigan State Representative John Pappageorge (R), July 16, 2004
   (Detroit is 88 percent black in a predominantly white state)

It's almost as open as Pappageorge let slip back in July. Election fraud has already been found well under way in a dozen or more states, and by sheer coincidence, it is 100% Republican. And as in Michigan, much of the GOP fraud is aimed at keeping African-Americans from voting. This coming from a party that lauds itself as "The Party of Lincoln."

It's more visible in Philadelphia than anywhere else as of tonight, where the Bush campaign staff attempted a last-minute drive to shuffle around polling places in Philadelphia--again, a predominantly black city in a predominantly white state. The Bush team argued that they wanted to relocate 63 polling places because they allegedly lack sufficient handicapped access, and because of "intimidation." Said Matt Robb, the Republican leader of the 48th ward in South Philadelphia, "It's predominantly, 100 percent black. I'm just not going in there to get a knife in my back." Another gem of a Republican said they were trying to change polling places in black neighborhoods because "The black neighborhoods are the ones that do the funny stuff. What are you supposed to do?"

This request comes at the last minute, after 1.1 million Philadelphians have already been mailed directions to the polling places. A switch at this point would be strategically timed to confuse and disenfranchise the greatest number of minority and Democratic voters. The white population in 53 of the 63 affected districts is only 10%.

In case you've lost track of the numerous early-bird election fraud events by the GOP (a tidal wave of others will come fast and thick election day, you can bet on it), here's a quick list to remind you:

• Wisconsin: In Milwaukee, another city with a densely Democratic African-American population, more ballots were needed else the central-city districts run out, leaving thousands unable to vote. Guess who tried to block extra ballots from getting delivered? Yep. Republicans again.
• Florida: Jeb Bush, acting against the advice of Florida officials who informed him that the felon list was flawed, pushed for the list to be put into action secretly, actively denying public access to the information. Only after a court order released the list did we find that thousands of Democratic-leaning African-Americans entitled to vote would have been purged, while Republican-leaning Cuban felons had been removed from the no-vote list. Bush called it a "mistake."
• Florida Again: Republicans caught immigrants who had just been naturalized and urged them to register to vote. The forms they gave the brand-new citizens had already been filled out as Republican.
• Florida Yet Again: U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler had to file a lawsuit in order to get a paper trail of votes in Florida. The GOP vigorously opposed him. The electronic machines that the GOP wanted to be without a means of vote verification are made by a company run by a Bush campaign manager.
• Ohio: Here's where that Bush campaign manager is. He's Walden O'Dell, CEO of Diebold, the company that makes voting machines that will be used nationwide. One would think that, in his position as the guy who makes the voting machines without paper trails, O'Dell would be careful to at least sound somewhat fair. Well, guess what. Aside from being a huge Bush supporter and state campaign manager, he also stated publicly that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
• Nevada: Former state Republican Party Chair Dan Burdish attempted to wipe 17,000 Democrats off the voter rolls. He was prevented from doing so, but tried anyway.
• Also Nevada: The first reports of the Nathan Sproul (former head of the Republican Party and Christian Coalition in Arizona) organization, Voters Outreach of America (VOA), a self-purported "non-partisan voter registration company" which is, by sheer chance, funded by the Republican National Committee. In Nevada, workers from within the VOA charged that the company was hiding their affiliation, and working outside shops and malls, was getting hundreds and probably thousands of Democrats to register to vote through them, and then destroying the applications so the Democrats would be deprived of their votes.
• Oregon: VOA was also found to be doing exactly the same thing in Oregon, where a worker reported that he was told that he "might" destroy Democratic applications.
• Pennsylvania and West Virginia: Here VOA did not destroy Democratic applications, they just denied Democrats the forms to register, sometimes falsely posing as pollsters asking who people were voting for, they would press Republicans to register while Democrats were thanked and the conversation ended. Not exactly kosher if you're "non-partisan" and advertise yourself as such.
• Virginia: Even Nader is getting into the act, albeit via Republicans. In an attempt to get Nader on the ballot, Nader state campaign coordinator James P. Polk made 10 false statements in an official capacity, and has been indicted by a special grand jury . Polk is a former Republican activist.

Many of these and more are listed here.

What about Democrats? In Colorado, Republicans are making allegations of Democratic voter fraud. Only one problem: there is no evidence that any fraud is being perpetrated by Democrats. Some people are registering multiple times (though only being counted once); in other cases, false applications are being filled out by people registering others and getting paid by the registration. None suggest any organized fraud, nor does any evidence in the state suggest that Democrats or Republicans are guilty of transgressions more than the other.

This is a Republican game we're playing, folks. And we're not even two weeks away from the election yet. And you can bet your bottom dollar that we haven't found half the election fraud that's happened so far--most times people are smart enough to do it clandestinely. And as election day approaches, the amount of GOP fraud will steamroll until there will be just too damned much to stop.

Hopefully, Kerry will win despite this--and his poll numbers, as well as electoral vote counts, are suggesting he is headed that way--and so the fraud will matter slightly less. But if Bush gets a crucial state by a few hundred votes again--or even several thousand, this time, due to the scale of this year's fraud--then we will have an historic second theft of the presidency on our hands.

Update: Here's a site which keeps track of all the election fraud.

The Fraud Keeps on Coming

This time its in Milwaukee, WI, a city with a lot of Democrats in a battleground state. A Republican politician is blocking a request for sufficient ballots in the city. The city asked for the ballots because of record registration, noting that districts in the city have run out of ballots in the past. Better to have too many than too few.

But the Milwaukee County Executive, Republican Scott Walker--who just coincidentally happens to be co-chair of the Bush campaign in Wisconsin--is refusing to provide the extra 260,000 ballots requested, on the grounds that he thinks that they could possibly be used for multiple voting. This is absurd, and the explosion of new voter registration is very real and strongly documented nationwide. The real reason for the refusal is more likely the fact that the area he is depriving of ballots just happens to be a Democratic stronghold in the state.

The mayor of Milwaukee said "I'm going to lay this at the footsteps of the county if there aren't enough ballots in the city." In my opinion, that's not nearly good enough; if there aren't enough ballots, then it will be too late, and those Democrats will be denied their constitutional right to vote. As for Walker's claim of potential abuse, it is a pitiful excuse--you cannot deprive whole segments of the state population of their right to vote on the potential and unproven suspicion that some may break the law. This is little more than yet another case of Republicans going to any and every extreme to steal another election. They're absolutely shameless this year, and have to be checked at every single turn.

Technical Expert: Bush Was Wired

Photos from Salon.com

Salon is carrying this story, along with a photo of Bush on his ranch with an identical bulge in the back of his T-shirt. It is a device which works with an earpiece lodged in Bush's ear canal, receiving and sending via a transceiver unit worn on his back:

"There's no question about it. It's a pretty obvious one -- larger than most because it probably has descrambling capability," said Alex Darbut, technical and business development vice president for Resistance Technology in Arden Hills, Minn. Darbut examined photographs of the president's back taken from the Fox News video feed at the first presidential debate in Coral Gables, Fla., as well as 2002 photos of the president driving and working in a T-shirt on his Crawford ranch, which were posted on the White House Web site.

Darbut speculates that the device the president wears is provided by the Secret Service, noting, "They're not going to have him driving around the countryside on his ranch without being in instant contact with him."

The relevance is that if Bush were wired, it would be in direct violation of debate rules, and considered a rather severe case of dishonesty and cheating in such an important public event. The problem is, the Bush people can just keep denying it, and unless someone can bring up more proof, few enough people will accept it as certain, no matter what experts say.

It is not even certain that Bush stopped using one, or could conceal it better for the third debate. Ideally, the candidates would have their ears checked, but you know that Bush would never agree to that, even privately; he would just bull his way through. Scrambling transmissions would interfere with the TV broadcast, so those would probably be out as well.

Yet More Republican Election Fraud

Also from DailyKos: a private voter registration company has been registering people in Nevada--but they destroy the registration forms filled out by Democrats, making them think they've registered when they're not. According to the report, "The company has been largely, if not entirely funded, by the Republican National Committee."

Just when you think you've seen the slimiest dirty tricks, the GOP finds new ways to utterly disgust you.

In 500 Words or More...

DailyKos just printed an email from someone about going to events for Edwards and Bush. You'd think Bush was the bigger draw, but:

Bush is coming to Medford, Oregon Thursday. John Edwards is here Wednesday morning.

Edwards' visit is already sold out. There are tickets available for Bush, even though his visit was planned in advance. This is in republican-leaning rural southern Oregon.

I tried to get tickets to both events. Edwards was sold out, but I could still get them for Bush, provided I:

1. was a registered republican
2. wrote an essay about why he should be president
3. promise to support him

Write an essay? Sheesh. No wonder he's not sold out. Who reads the essays? Do they seat you according to writing style? And I bet you still have to sign a loyalty oath at the door in addition to all that, pledging your vote in advance. Bush could probably be way ahead by now if he gave free admittance like Kerry and Edwards. He'd get more hecklers, but he'd reach more undecideds.

Sinclair Plans to Abuse the Airwaves

In yet another demonstration of the right-wing nature of the media, Sinclair Broadcasting is planning to cancel regular prime-time programming two weeks before the election and instead give up their air time for free to broadcast a film that would smear John Kerry. Sinclair, along with Fox and Clear Channel, is well-known as a bastion of conservatism and has been known to take similar types of action before, such as when they refused to air Ted Koppel's "Nightline" when they spent the entire broadcast honoring the fallen American soldiers in Iraq. Sinclair called the memorial "contrary to the public interest." In a pathetic attempt to give the appearance of fair play, Sinclair plans to follow the 90-minute smear ad with a "panel discussion" to which Kerry is invited. The invitation, which they knew Kerry would have to be insane to accept, is their way of weaseling out of giving Kerry "equal time."

In case Sinclair forgot, the airwaves are owned by the public; Sinclair's action is nothing less than the use of public resources to air political propaganda, timed just before an election.

Remember how, just a few months ago, conservatives tried to ban any TV commercials for "Fahrenheit 9/11" because it could be construed as a political ad? Then what the hell is this? The complaint against commercials for F-9/11 might have been legitimate had they referred to any actual planned airing of commercials mentioning Bush 60 days before an election, but there were no commercials for the film planned during that time period, so the FCC concluded there was nothing to act on. This documentary, which very noticeably mentions Kerry and would be broadcast within the 60-day restriction, should be illegal itself under the same law used by conservative groups to try to silence Moore.

Don't think this qualifies as a campaign ad? The filmmaker is Carlton Sherwood, a former journalist for the right-wing Washington Times (owned by Rev. Sun Myung Moon), who later worked for Tom Ridge and finally was hired by the Bush administration to handle PR for Homeland Security. Carlton was arrested in 1983 for illegally taping a conversation, and in 1984 falsely accused Vietnam vets of misspending money for the Vietnam memorial.

If the broadcast is, in the end, allowed, then a panel discussion won't be enough; Kerry should be given the exact same time slot one week later to run any damned thing he pleases.

Send email to the FCC expressing your outrage at this plan. The addresses are:

michael.powell@fcc.gov
kathleen.abernathy@fcc.gov
michael.copps@fcc.gov
kjmweb@fcc.gov
jonathan.adelstein@fcc.gov

Postscript: in case you thought that perhaps the guy running Sinclair is a paragon of virtue, check this out. He's still President and C.E.O., by the way.

Update: The DNC has decided to file formal charges against Sinclair with the FEC on Tuesday, calling the infraction "Sinclair Broadcasting's illegal in-kind contribution to the Bush-Cheney campaign." The FEC is closed until Tuesday because of Columbus Day.

Meanwhile, people against Sinclair's plans have wasted no time, and a variety of sites are now up and running, including this site to boycott Sinclair, with a list of their advertisers; give as many as you can a call. Also sign this petition. DailyKos is all over this one, and will likely continue to be.

Update 2: Morons.org has a pretty good rundown on how the Sinclair move violates Federal Election Law. It seems pretty clear that Sinclair's action is completely illegal.

The U.S. and the Third-World Election

The GOP is gradually turning us into a country with third-world elections. We have to have international inspectors now, and despite that, it is almost a dead certainty that election fraud will still be rampant. And isn't it interesting that it always just happens to favor the GOP, performed by them or on their behalf?

The Florida situation is an excellent example of this. In 2000, just one of the many GOP frauds committed there was the issuance of a "felons" list that illegally disenfranchised tens of thousands of voters, most of them Democrats. That in and of itself should have been punished with a jail sentence for the partisan administrator who ordered it--but instead, then-Florida state attorney general Katherine Harris, who swore an oath to protect the law she violated, was awarded with a safely Republican congressional district, like a loyal vassal receiving a fief for services rendered.

Still, even with the crime exposed, if not punished, one would think that (a) no one would dare try to do it again, and (b) if they did, the repercussions would be severe. And yet (a) they did it again, and (b) again nothing is being done. Jeb Bush and his people put together another "felons" list--and tried to keep it secret, too. It took a court order to have it made public, and when that happened, again it was found to have illegally disenfranchised thousands of voters and additionally omitted a strongly Republican demographic.

The brazen fashion which Jeb Bush is acting is simply one of the more blatant examples of voter fraud being committed nationwide, as we speak. The Guardian provides this article detailing many of the problems in Florida. But then there is also the active suppression of minority voters by Republicans, as that group usually votes strongly Democratic. This was widespread in Florida in 2000, but not by any means limited to there. A Michigan state senator, Republican John Pappageorge even said publicly, “If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we’re going to have a tough time in this election.” More than 80% of Detroit residents are African-American. Other violations and cases of voter fraud have occurred across the country.

But that doesn't stop the right-wing rags from claiming that Democrats are planning "massive vote fraud." Their evidence? Democrats in Iowa are registering and requesting absentee ballots in record numbers. Those bastards! How villainous! They aren't supposed to do that!

Sorry. It would be more funny if it weren't so damned despicable. This is what they're turning our country into. Well, I say prosecute the hell out of the bastards. With extreme prejudice. If the laws don't exist, then make 'em. After all, if we don't have a fair vote, then our very own "democracy" is nothing but a very sad, pathetic joke. Don't let them do this to us. Let the election results wait too long so that the fraud can be investigated and force a constitutional crisis, if absolutely necessary, but don't let them get away with it like they did in 2000.

A Look at Two Convention Speeches: Part Two

And finally, on to Bush's convention speech.

Naturally, he opens with references to the bravery of others, on 9/11 and in the invasion of Iraq; in essence, he is saying, if you honor them, then you honor me. An easy sell, but dishonest as well; their honor is not his, their actions are divorced from his, not representative.

But then, he lapses into a strange metaphor of hills and valleys. 9/11 was a hill? And how is now a valley? Not exactly "morning in America" or even "the shining city on the hill." Anyway, he goes on to praise Dick Cheney, his wife, his father, and then name-drops Ronald Reagan. But he quickly ventured into policy; according to some observers, the idea was that if anyone happened to flip through and momentarily watch the speech, they'd hear at least a few policy point.

In education, he claims progress--but there is no evidence that progress is being made. Bush continues to massively underfund NCLB, and those students who do attend Bush's "magic bullet" charter schools have scored worse than students at public schools (probably exactly because Bush has failed to fund them). And instead of trying to fix the system, Bush is simply getting his Department of Education to stop collecting information on charter schools so no one will be the wiser, and instead hopes people will simply buy his unsupported line about how education is "improving."

He then spoke of strengthening Medicare, but he has only done a spectacular job of destroying it. He lied to Congress and the people about the costs of the program he pushed through Congress. He illegally used government funds to create a Bush campaign commercial under the guise of "educating the public" about his plan. He cornered seniors into committing to a single plan for buying drugs, which the pharmaceutical companies can renegotiate whenever they like; he blocked the government from negotiating better prices for drugs, like many countries do to great affect; and now, we find out that Bush's medicare prices are jumping by 17%, the greatest rise in premiums ever for medicare. In short, he's done an abysmal job, and yet crows about how he's some kind of Medicare Savior.

He goes on about his tax cuts, claiming that it benefitted "America's workers, entrepreneurs, farmers, and ranchers." Bull. He only shifted the tax burden onto the middle class while dangling a plastic carrot "tax cut" for the middle class that was nothing more than a tax hike in disguise, while slashing taxes for the rich. "Farmers and ranchers" are a suggestion that his plan to eliminate the estate tax saves farms, when nothing of the sort is true--the individual farmer and rancher already have protections; the Bush changes only benefit the wealthy. And after three years, his magic solution to the weak economy is still ineffectual; the economy is still anemic, and the job market is destitute.

He recycles "compassionate conservatism," with the term being just as ambiguous and without real meaning as it was four years ago. He claims that "government should help people improve their lives, not try to run their lives," while at the same time spending money like a madman, tearing down our civil liberties, forcing fundamentalist religious policy into national laws, while refusing to be accountable to the people, veiling his administration in secrecy, thus giving Americans less power over government and our lives than ever before. He lied about Iraq to get Americans to agree to go to war, and now we find we've been suckered, and our young men are killed every day. That's putting us in control of what happens to us? And yet he has the gall to speak of "expanding liberty," whilst giving no clue as to what that supposedly means.

He even spoke of today's economic woes of having multiple jobs and being laid off frequently as "a time of great opportunity for all Americans." Incredible. He uses this as a prelude about how he wants to change government systems to "take the side" of the American people, when he has shown every intention of doing the opposite. Is stiffing seniors while giving huge benefits to pharmaceutical corporations "taking your side"? Is stiffing you at the gas pump while letting Big Oil write the nation's energy policy "taking your side"? I don't think so.

After four years of horrifically bad performance in jobs--the worst since Hoover and the Great Depression--he claims that his policies will get you more and better jobs. His performance so far, with the freedom to do practically anything he wants with minimal opposition, has resulted not only in massive losses of jobs, but also has resulted in what jobs we do have being worse than ever before, with salaries low, workload high, and very little job security--except for those at the top of the ladder, Bush protects them. But for you? Remember, this is the administration that wanted to redefine "manufacturing jobs" to include burger-flipping.

But Bush claims that his plan will "encourage investment and expansion by restraining federal spending, reducing regulation, and making tax relief permanent." Good lord. "Restraining federal spending"? Bush has been on an unprecedented four-year spending spree. "Reducing regulation"? Where has he done that, except to allow for oil drilling in national parks or to remove roadblocks to corporate corruption? And making "tax relief" permanent? We've had this "relief" for close to four years now, and it's only driven us deeper into the hole.

He goes on to say that he "will make our country less dependent on foreign sources of energy." Really? How? What's he done so far? He's given good lip service, but the only way he's tried to act to accomplish this goal is to drill in ANWAR, which, even if successful, will hardly solve any energy dependency problems--it would be 10 years before the oil would really start running, and would hardly be enough to make us oil-independent. Hey, maybe if he told Dick Cheney to let the public see how the Gas, Oil and Coal lobbies wrote our nation's energy policies, maybe we'd get a better idea then!

Oy vey. That's enough for tonight. And I'm not even halfway through the speech yet. In short, practically everything in the speech was either an outright lie, or had major elements of untruth, exaggeration, misdirection and other shades of dishonesty.

But Bush knows the drill: claim something is true long enough, strongly enough, and the American people will believe it to be true, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. 70% believed that Saddam was in on 9/11. How many believe Bush's current load of bull?

A Look at Two Convention Speeches: Part One

Not Zell Miller and Dick Cheney, or even the Twins, but rather the two speeches considered most popular and important by Republicans: Bush and Schwarzenegger. Now, Zell Miller's speech is fun, and even the Republicans shoved him out on the street after all was said and done, but it is important to note that even the best of the rather pathetic convention was lukewarm at best.

First, Governor Schwarzenegger, who is picking up just where his predecessor actor/California Governor Ronald Reagan left off: fictionalizing history. During his speech, Schwarzenegger said:

"When I was a boy, the Soviets occupied part of Austria. I saw their tanks in the streets. I saw communism with my own eyes."

Well, not exactly. Soviet tanks had left Schwarzenegger's home province of Styria two years before he was born.

"As a kid I saw the socialist country that Austria became after the Soviets left."

Again, not quite. Between 1945 and 1970 (Schwarzenegger was born in 1947 and left Austria in 1968) Austria had conservative leaders, not Socialists:

What's more, when Schwarzenegger left in 1968, Austria was run by a conservative-only government headed by People's Party Chancellor Josef Klaus, a staunch Roman Catholic and a sharp critic of both the Socialists as well as the Communists ruling in countries across the Iron Curtain.

Schwarzenegger "confuses a free country with a Socialist one," said Polaschek, referring to East European Communist officials' routine descriptions of their countries as Socialist.

Polaschek saw the moderate Republican governor's recollections at the convention as a tactical move. Schwarzenegger, he said, was "using the old Communist enemy image for Bush's election campaign."

"He did not speak as a historian, after all, but as a politician," Polaschek said.

Norbert Darabos, a ranking official of Austria's opposition Social Democratic Party, sharply criticized Schwarzenegger's "disdain for his former homeland."

"The Terminator is constructing a rather bizarre Austria image," he said. (source)

And that's just to start. It really wasn't hard to see that Schwarzenegger was using hype instead of facts. The whole Communist-infested-Austria move was completely irrelevant to his thesis; instead, it was intended purely for effect, trying to revive Cold-War mentality and fears.

Schwarzenegger then posed Richard Nixon as his political hero, mentioning only what Nixon talked about, and nothing of what he actually did; he then attempted to do the same thing, to tell people by talk--not by action--why they should regard themselves as Republicans. According to Schwarzenegger, you're a Republican if:

• you believe government should be accountable to the people, and not the other way around (which begs the question why Schwarzenegger supports the least accountable administration in living history);
• you believe a person should be treated as an individual, not as a member of an interest group (like the rich? or oil companies? or the NRA? or pro-life groups? or fundamentalists?);
• you believe your family knows how to spend your money better than the government does (after spending under Bush has skyrocketed, and the table-scrap tax cut has been eaten up by hidden Bush taxes and costs?);
• you believe our educational system should be held accountable for the progress of our children (like the were in Texas, where Bush policies inspired massive fraud and broke that system down?);
• you believe this country, not the United Nations, is the best hope of democracy in the world (yeah, because look how well Bush is doing in Afghanistan and Iraq);
• you believe we must be fierce and relentless and terminate terrorism (with al Qaeda's numbers swelling, Osama still at large, and terrorist activity soaring? Yeah, good job, George).

Schwarzenegger then tried to claim that "the other party says there are two Americas." Excuse me? Wasn't he listening to Barak Obama and just about every other Democrat? Schwarzenegger tried to claim that Bush's decision to go into Iraq was an unpopular one--ha! Bush surged in the polls upon that action, and he even used it to win midterm elections--remember Andrew Card's "from a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August"? It only hurt him in the polls when all of his claims about Iraq turned out to be massive lies. Bush knew Saddam didn't have "massive stockpiles" or nuclear weapons, but he thought there would be enough sarin gas left over from a decade before that he could claim that he'd found WMD--and if he had, he would have been golden.

And then Schwarzenegger started making it sound like Bush, or possibly the Republican Party, was responsible for things that they weren't: the Peace Corps (Kennedy), fighting AIDS in Africa (Bush has weaseled out of his promise to send $15 billion), the Berlin Wall (sorry, I forgot Reagan did that single-handedly), Tiananmen Square (Bush Sr. wimped out and did nothing except grant China favored nation trade status), and even Nelson Mandela, who gained his election victory only after sanctions, fought against tooth and nail by Republicans, succeeded in bringing down Apartheid.

In short, Schwarzenegger's speech was little more than a corny recitation of feel-good fiction, with mangled history and hypocritical claims of Republican accomplishments that were nothing of the sort. Schwarzenegger wants you, like himself, to believe in the hype, not the facts.

Next up: Bush.

Recent Political News, September 2, 2004

Boy let me tell you, CNN is making me sick. Remember when, in the Democratic convention, they let Republican bigwigs have a huge amount of airtime after Democratic speeches? CNN is not doing the reverse now in the RNC. They did, technically, give air time after Cheney's speech to a Democrat--but it was to turncoat Democrat Zell Miller, who gave the Republican keynote address, and is as much a Democrat as Bush is. After a long Zell Miller interview, and after more of their in-house coverage, finally they gave "a few moments" to a Kerry adviser, but that was it. Wolf Blitzer, on air, actually tried to excuse their paltry make-up interview with the Kerry advisor by directly mentioning that they had given ultraconservative Ralph Reed air time after Edwards' address at the DNC--but as I recall, Reed was given the slot immediately after the speech, and it was a hell of a lot longer than they gave the Democrat tonight.

---

One thing is for certain, though: if people don't like stark, over-the-top attacks, then Zell Miller did not help Bush at all. Many are comparing his speech to the "frightening" address by Pat Buchanan in 1992 that helped get Bill Clinton elected. Miller claimed that Kerry opposed a host of weapons systems, a claim long since proved to be false, but Miller used it as a way to beat Kerry about the head (ignoring the fact that it was Dick Cheney, then defense secretary under the first President Bush, who actually cut most of those systems). He made outrageous accusations, such as:

Kerry would let Paris decide when America needs defending. I want Bush to decide. John Kerry, who says he doesn't like outsourcing, wants to outsource our national security. That's the most dangerous outsourcing of all. This politician wants to be leader of the free world. Free for how long?

Pundits are already noting that the Republicans are all but giving up on winning the undecided voters, and are starkly appealing to their base while going for an all-out, balls-to-the-wall attack on John Kerry. And many believe that this is chiefly because they'll have little else to run on: the 1,000th U.S. soldier will die in Iraq in mid-September (the casualty rate has been climbing steadily since the "handover"), and the economic report coming out in a few days is reported to be one that follows the recent trends--in other words, it will probably be bad news. With Iraq and the economy being the top key issues in this election, and with a majority of Americans seeing the country going in the wrong direction, the only hope of the Bush campaign is to smear, smear and smear some more, hoping to both galvanize their base and, they hope, turn off some of those undecideds from voting for anyone.

In the meantime, news events threaten to take away some steam from Bush's moment in the sun: charges have been dropped against Kobe Bryant today, and Hurricane Frances is scheduled to slam into an already weather-beaten Florida this weekend, not to mention the hostage crisis in Russia.

---

In addition to all that, Bush may have his own Vietnam woes rekindled soon. As the SBV lies against Kerry continue to be discredited as political smear-campaign attacks, new information about Bush and his national guard days are coming to light.

One of them is Ben Barnes, the former lieutenant governor of Texas, who has admitted in the past to using his political influence to get Bush into the Texas Air National Guard, at the request of the Bush family. Barnes will appear on 60 Minutes and reportedly will give details about how he got Bush into a champagne unit, filled with the sons of the rich and powerful, which was slated never to go to Vietnam.

Another breaking story is that of Linda Allison, widow of James Allison, former close confidant of the Bush family. According to Linda Allison, W. Bush was becoming such an embarrassment to the Bush family that they asked her late husband to take Dubya under their wing and have him assigned to the Blount campaign in Alabama, which Allison managed.

"The impression I had was that Georgie was raising a lot of hell in Houston, getting in trouble and embarrassing the family, and they just really wanted to get him out of Houston and under Jimmy's wing," Allison's widow, Linda, told me. "And Jimmy said, 'Sure.' He was so loyal."

...

Allison's account corroborates a Washington Post investigation in February that found no credible witnesses to the service in the Alabama National Guard that Bush maintains he performed, despite a lack of documentary evidence. Asked if she'd ever seen Bush in a uniform, Allison said: "Good lord, no. I had no idea that the National Guard was involved in his life in any way." Allison also confirmed previously published accounts that Bush often showed up in the Blount campaign offices around noon, boasting about how much alcohol he had consumed the night before. (Bush has admitted that he was a heavy drinker in those years, but he has refused to say whether he also used drugs).

"After about a month I asked Jimmy what was Georgie's job, because I couldn't figure it out. I never saw him do anything. He told me it basically consisted of him contacting people who were impressed by his name and asking for contributions and support," Allison said.

The Salon article goes on to lay out the relationship between the Allisons and the Bushes, and describes some of Dubya's behavior at the time.

At the very least, this will be an embarrassment to Bush, a distraction from his message, and will bring into sharp contrast the records of Bush and Kerry--even if you believe the Swift Boat Vet lies, you still have to admit that Kerry was in combat in Vietnam, and that Dubya was using family ties to stay safe in Texas while boozing it up.

---

Alan Keyes, meanwhile, has managed to stay in the spotlight, by calling Vice President Cheney's daughter a "selfish hedonist." In a recent interview, he stated that "If we embrace homosexuality as a proper basis for marriage, we are saying that it's possible to have a marriage state that in principle excludes procreation and is based simply on the premise of selfish hedonism."

When asked if that applied to Linda Cheney, Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter, he replied, "Of course she is. That goes by definition. Of course she is." He later backed up his remarks by saying, "Dick Cheney may or many not like to hear the truth, but it can be spoken." And later, "I have said that if you are actively engaging in homosexual relations, those relations are about selfish hedonism. If my daughter were a lesbian, I'd look at her and say, `That is a relationship that is based on selfish hedonism.' I would also tell my daughter that it's a sin, and she needs to pray to the Lord God to help her to deal with that sin."

In the "Oh Really?" department, John McCain already concedes losing Illinois. But Keyes is only helping Democrats by having a national platform to show his unadulterated right-wing views. Keep on talking, Alan.

---

And finally, no one, not even staunch conservatives, felt that the Bush twins did any favors for their daddy when they addressed the convention yesterday. Bill Kristol, Morton Kondracke, and Fred Barnes all felt that the twins did not belong on the podium. Many have described the twins as looking like "ditzes."

So far, the Republican lineup has not been all that impressive.

Well, That Didn't Take Long

Keyes is already suffering from foot-in-mouth disease, and unabashedly so. He said of his opponent Barak Obama:

"I would still be picking cotton if the country's moral principles had not been shaped by the Declaration of Independence... [Obama] has broken and rejected those principles he has taken the slaveholder's position."

We're already beginning to see why Keyes has badly lost every race he's gotten into. It'll be very interesting to see the polling data for Illinois next week. And because of the very high-profile nature of this race, it may have an effect on many other races as well. If there were ever a race that better showcased the true principles of each party, this would have to be it--and the Democrats could not ask for a better representative than Obama.

The Bush/GOP Smear Campaign Hits Full Stride

You have probably heard the Swift Boat Veterans for "Truth" advertisement, in which they go around saying, I served with John Kerry!" and then denounce him in a variety of ways. The group claims to be non-partisan. Their ad, however, is so full of lies, that if the truth were told, the ad would sound very different--imagine "Swift Boat Veterans Under Truth Serum":

"I didn't serve with Kerry, but I was in Vietnam at the same time as he was, and now I'm a partisan Republican who is really pissed at him. So I'm here to smear him any way I can, and use the fact that I was in Vietnam to do so."

"Me too. I never served a day with him, but I was over there at about the same time. I don't like the fact that he spoke out against the war, so I'm trying to keep him from being elected now. But if I just say that I don't like him for his anti-war protests, that wouldn't be so convincing, so I'm pretending that I knew the guy and that I have the right to criticize him."

"I didn't serve with Kerry in action either, and I initially claimed Kerry lied about what happened in Vietnam. But it was my statement that was a lie. I don't know how anyone would have taken the risks he took in combat just for the glory of running for office. It was a terrible mistake probably for me to sign the affidavit with those words. I'm the one in trouble here. . . . I knew it was wrong. I really don't know anything first-hand."

"I didn't serve with Kerry, but I met him at an officer's club once. As I recall, he complained that we didn't get enough air support, and that's about it. But I'm willing to make him sound like a coward and a traitor because of my political leanings."

"I kind of served with John Kerry in Vietnam, in that I worked for someone on a different swift boat, and I heard somewhere that Kerry needed a lot of supervision. I'm willing to make that sound as bad as I can."

"I served on a different boat than Kerry, and I saw from just a few yards away when he was supposedly wounded, and he was lying--he wasn't wounded and there was no enemy fire, and he ran away. Well, actually, he wasn't a few yards away, he was a few hundred yards away. And actually, I'm claiming he ran away and there was no enemy fire, which doesn't make any sense. And the guy whose life he saved and was right there with Kerry completely contradicts me. Hmm. Maybe I'm lying."

"I treated Kerry for one of his wounds in Vietnam, and I'm here to testify that he clumsily shot himself and then demanded a purple heart. Of course, I'm kind of lying, because I never treated Kerry, and I actually have no idea what really happened, I just claim that I heard something from these two guys, though they both completely deny telling me anything."

The above, of course, is a mixture of actual quotes, and fictional quotes based upon actual observations (see factcheck.org). And here's a real veteran:

"My name is John McCain. I think the ad is dishonest and dishonorable. As it is none of these individuals served on the boat Kerry commanded. Many of his crewmates have testified to his courage under fire. I think John Kerry served honorably in Vietnam."

Furthermore, the group is hardly "partisan." The initial funding came from a Texas Republican who has given millions of dollars to the GOP; other funds come from another Texas Republican, and leading all of this is John O'Neill, who was hand-picked by the Nixon administration to try to smear and renounce Kerry, and has been gunning for him ever since.

This is the biggest salvo yet in the now months-long campaign to try to smear Kerry, a campaign which started with fake claims of Botox injections, ginned-up photos of Kerry and Jane Fonda, completely fabricated claims that Kerry had an affair with an intern reporter, and a phony claim that Kerry tried to dodge the draft. Now there are shadows of the Nixon dirty-tricks teams; just like the Nixon con men who rode up and down in elevators all day talking loudly about completely fake smear stories about Democrats so people would overhear them and repeat the stories, their modern counterparts are using the Internet, spreading emails that Teresa Heinz Kerry gave money to terrorists and paid for Saddam Hussein's attorney--and God alone knows what other venomous crap is out there.

This is more than just anti-Kerry advertising, we're now in the middle of what we all fully expected: an all-out, pedal-to-the-metal dirty-tricks smear campaign against Kerry, orchestrated by the GOP for Bush's benefit. So far, there hasn't been much public reaction against Kerry, who has been doing extremely well in battleground state polling, and if we're lucky, the smear campaign will backfire. But we have to remember, the GOP is extremely good at doing this kind of thing. So we watch (while suspending belief in the commercials and anything coming from the right wing about Kerry), and wait.

Barak Obama vs. The Instant Hypocrite

As reported earlier, the Illinois GOP has badly mishandled the Senate race there. They faced a popular, well-respected contender in Barak Obama. When candidate Jack "Family Values" Ryan left the race due to a sex scandal, they tried to engage a string of celebrities, millionaires and party faithful to take on the campaign, but they all failed; then they turned to the race card, paring the list of hopefuls down to two African-Americans, hoping that would counter the fact that Obama is black. They claimed it was mere coincidence that their finalists were both black, but in a party which is overwhelmingly white, it's like saying that you just "happened" to deal yourself two straight-flushes in a row and that no, the deck is not stacked, why do you ask? The GOP clearly hopes that by making their conservative candidate black, that African-Americans in Illinois will somehow feel that Keyes is just as appealing as Obama.

Alan Keyes, however, carries the burden of instant hypocrisy: in 2000, he forcefully criticized Hillary Clinton for carpetbagging, or running for a seat in a state she had no relation to, saying that it represented the destruction of his beloved federalism, that she would "go into a state she doesn't even live in and pretend to represent people there, so I certainly wouldn't imitate it." And of course, that is exactly what he is doing now. Is he destroying federalism? Of course not! You see, he felt that he should leave Maryland and go to Illinois in order to "defend the land of my spirit and my conscience and my heart. If indeed that land is the state of Illinois, then I have lived in the Land of Lincoln all my life."

Ooooohhh, I see! He's been a spiritual resident of Illinois since birth! What an amazing revelation! I should do that! After all, I can't vote for California state Senators or Representatives because I live overseas and don't pay state taxes--so I instead will claim residence in Texas, which has no state taxes. Actual physical residency? Posh! It's been my spiritual home since birth! Yes, that's the ticket!

What an outrageous hypocrite.

In addition to the hypocrisy, Keyes also brings with him a record of being the perennial loser. Even in his home state, he lost two Senate races by landslides (in 1988, getting only 38.2% of the votes, and in 1992, getting 29%--they love him there!), and was a Republican presidential contender in 1996 and 2000, again finishing way, way last. So now he's gearing up for embarrassing loss #5, right on time for his every-four-years failure. And this time, he's promising not to pay himself a "salary" from campaign contributions (read: stuffing donations into his own pocket) like he did in 1992.

This should be fun.

The GOP and Illinois

You know, the GOP usually has its act together. So what's up with the race for the GOP-held Senate seat in Illinois?

The Democratic contender, Barak Obama, used to be pit against Jack "Family Values" Ryan, the ex of actress Jeri Ryan, whose divorce testimony turned up accusing Jack of trying to get her to perform explicit sex acts in public. After withering for a while, Ryan quit. After Obama made a fantastic keynote speech at the DNC, he skyrocketed.

So the GOP scrambled for a replacement. They tried celebrity Mike Ditka, but (forgive the football imagery) they fumbled it rather badly, and Ditka declined. So they fished around some more, with contenders yanking themselves out of contention almost as fast as the GOP can consider them, and then they stumbled upon the brilliant idea: Obama is black, that must be why he's winning, so let's find a black Republican candidate! In standard Republican fashion, they set about trying to find the rather unusual combination of black and GOP-brand conservative, and they came up with two names: former presidential candidate Alan Keyes, and former Bush deputy drug czar Andrea Grubb Barthwell.

Of course, the GOP had to look like color wasn't a factor; a Republican representative said, "These two were selected because of their strengths, not because of their color. Voters are smarter than that. That clearly wasn't the intent." Yeah. Right. Barthwell also said, "I don't think that this committee is playing any kind of race card here. I think they have looked at the candidates and the strengths they can bring to it and how they position themselves on the issues." But Barthwell is pretty much an unknown on the issues. And since (a) the GOP is looking at two prominent black candidates to fill the spot, and (b) prominent black Republicans are extremely rare, it's pretty clear exactly what's going on.

And there are more problems: Barthwell, it turns out, stands accused of Clarence-Thomas-like sexual harassment, a staffer saying that she made statements which were "lewd, derogatory and called into question his heterosexuality." Read Marshall's column for the unsavory details.

Well, that leaves Keyes, right? And despite being radical, not to mention having willfully thrown himself into Michael Moore's mosh pit in 1996, there is one other problem: he's from Maryland. Why is that a problem, when he can become eligible for Illinois citizenship well in time for the election? Because in 2000, on Fox News, when it was suggested that he run for Senate in New York, he responded sharply: "I deeply resent the destruction of federalism represented by Hillary Clinton’s willingness go into a state she doesn't even live in and pretend to represent people there, so I certainly wouldn't imitate it."

Oops.

So the GOP is going with someone up on sexual harassment charges, or someone who would become an instant hypocrite.

Don't you just love it when a plan comes together?

For even more GOP ineptitude, read this DailyKos article about how a GOPster got slapped upside the head by Donna Brazille when he suggested that Kerry wasn't distinguished as a senator.

Using Fear as a Political Tool

A few days ago, as you are almost certainly aware, the terror alert was raised to "orange" the the D.C. and NYC areas because the Bush Administration told the public that from a raid in Pakistan it had just uncovered a plot to attack the stock exchange and The Citigroup Center in Manhattan, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank buildings in Washington and Prudential Financial Inc.'s headquarters in Newark, N.J. Police shut down streets, banned trucks from driving anywhere near those buildings, started searching vehicles and asking people for documentation. A police presence can strongly be felt around these areas, and it is clear that very large amounts of money and other resources are being spent on this alert. Bush told the country that "What we're talking about here is a very serious matter based on solid intelligence."

Well, now it turns out that although the information was just uncovered this week in Pakistan, the information itself was three to four years old--pre-9/11.

So why did we immediately jump to high alert and put massive resources into protecting these buildings as if the attack were coming tomorrow? There's no good reason. You act suddenly if you find information that is current--but not just because you currently found information which is old. The dated evidence would indeed explain why the Bush people said that they knew "where" the attacks would be, but "not when." And Bush & Co. claim that their sudden panic response is justified because they are hearing chatter that an attack will take place sometime before the election--despite the fact that there is absolutely no connection between the aged Pakistan data and the current chatter data.

It's like you find an old newspaper from a few years ago that carried a warning that a tornado could strike somewhere in the U.S.--and so you panic and immediately hide in the southwest corner of your basement. Everyone else would think you to be a fool, and after a few hours, even you begin to wonder exactly how long you should stay down there. The Bush reaction to this data is similar: the information is years out of date, and in that time any number of factors could have changed. There's no reason to believe that these plans are the current ones by al Qaeda, or anywhere close to being the only plans--there could be far more targets easily switched to, or any number of other terrorist plans that we know nothing about. And how long will millions of dollars and countless man-hours of resources be spent? After three weeks and no action, will we still but shutting down the traffic around our financial centers and stopping everyone who goes there? And even assuming that the terrorists were, after 3 or 4 years, just now on the verge of carrying out such an attack, what would keep them from simply changing their target?

It comes as no surprise to me that CNN is downplaying this point to the extreme. Watching their coverage, they only obliquely refer to the aged data, and otherwise paint this as a strong, smart and effective response to critical data. This is simply one more reason why I am, in disgust, abandoning CNN as much as I can--even to the point of trying to get satellite TV instead of cable, since on my current cable plan CNN is all there is for news.

Many sectors of the media, especially television, are turning sharply against Kerry now, portraying him in a "losing" light, while showing Bush in a "strong president" light. The news agencies are covering Kerry only in the context of "where's the bounce?" even as they carry, in the immediate wake of the Democratic convention, nothing but stories on the hyped-up terror threat and how Bush is reacting to it, cheerleading the president all the way.

The fundamental point I'm leading up to on these events is the fact that the Bush administration is rather blatantly using fear as a political weapon, and the media is lapping it up. But how can the administration so easily wag the dog, so flagrantly play on people's fears, and not have people recognize it?

A lot of it has to do with the fact that people do not want to admit that they are afraid, and even more, do not want to admit that they allow their fears to dictate their actions. I suggested as much to one person I was debating with on the Internet, suggesting that fear was being used as a tool--and that person completely rejected the possibility, as if it were ludicrous to even suggest that it could be done.

But it is a classic political weapon, used down the ages. Make the people afraid, and then tell them you are the one who can save them.

Think about how it has affected you. I mean, really, seriously consider it. If you are on an airplane and you see a group of Arab-looking men, would you be at least nervous? After getting off the plane hours later, would you not be even a little more willing to support racial profiling in screening passengers for security threats? What if you worked at one of the buildings being watched in the current alert? Wouldn't this whole scare make you think twice about going to work, and would it not make you more eager to support actions to thwart the terrorists? If the answer to those questions, and others like them, is "yes," then congratulations: you have just had your political views adjusted by fear.

Fear is not only a weapon, it is perhaps the most powerful weapon that can be used in politics. And Bush is brandishing this weapon like no other, using it without concern of the consequences. He knows that people will respond to it; every terror alert he issues, no matter how flagrantly false, buys him votes. It's a win-win strategy: if there is an attack, he looks justified in warning us, no matter how misdirected that warning would be; if there is no attack, it looks like he prevented it. And as few who are fooled want to think they've been fooled, he can herd great portions of the public in his direction in the knowledge they will continue to flock toward the voting block.

Don't allow fear to influence your political decisions. Don't accept simply what you see and hear from the television media--the print and web media tends to have more information, better grounded--use Google News to help find your sources, not Fox or their wannabe-twin CNN. And vote based on the facts, not the hype.

I myself have a fear: that Bush and the GOP are just too damned good at lying, cheating, and stealing elections. But that's not what is driving my vote. It is, however, driving my determination to stop what I regard as the greatest threat to America since Joe McCarthy: Bush and Cheney.

The Great Divider

George W. Bush has claimed to be a uniter, not a divider, trying to follow the "big tent" concept that the Republican party has tried to engender for so long. Inclusiveness, bipartisanship, and unity. The problem is, as with so much that Bush has promised, he says one thing but does another.

But Bush has managed to split the nation more deeply than before. He made withering claims of bipartisanship, but soon after taking office with control of both houses of Congress, he dismissed not only the Democrats, but even the moderate wing of his own party. His policies and practices were so divisive that he even repelled one of his own Senators, Jim Jeffords, into leaving the party and temporarily placing the Democrats in control. After the contested 2000 election, the Democrats called for, and practiced, bipartisan unity; after 9/11, the Democrats again called for, and again practiced bipartisan unity. And both times Bush took advantage of that Democratic spirit of unity, ramrodded his highly partisan and often extreme agenda through Congress, and just as he squandered the sympathy and unity of the world, he drove most of half the nation far against him in anger and disgust.

Bush claimed that the Democrats have practiced "class warfare," but under Democrats everyone prospered--the rich got richer, and so did the poor. All boats rose with the Democratic tide. But under Bush and the Republicans, the rich are given the deepest tax cuts while the middle class has their modest cut negated by poorer wages, higher fuel costs, slashed services and benefits, higher local taxes, and a plethora of other hidden costs that cost them more than Bush bribed them with. Bush has been against a decent minimum wage and social welfare, yet for corporate welfare and letting the wealthy avoid paying their fair share. And to counter the outrage, he accuses anyone who points these truths out to be waging "class warfare."

Bush and the GOP have been trying to appeal to minorities to vote for their party, and put on a good show at their convention--but when you look carefully, you'll see the color on the stage, but almost no color at all in the audience. Bush went before the National Urban League (after shunning the NAACP), and lectured, "I know plenty of politicians assume they have your vote. But did they earn it, and, do they deserve it? ... Have the traditional solutions of the Democratic Party truly served the African-American people?" As if he has done anything for African Americans, as if he has even come close to earning their vote. The fact is, under Clinton, minorities did far better, with rising pay, falling crime, and better opportunities, while under Bush, the exact reverse has been true.

Even under Clinton, when the country divided, it was not because Clinton drove them there but because the Republicans knew they could gain power through divisiveness and so sought to turn as many in the nation against him. And even then, Clinton remained more popular than even Reagan had been, gaining more bipartisan support from the people, if not the Republican core.

We need to bring the country back together, and it has been made incredibly clear over the past four and twelve years that the GOP is not interested, whatever their claim might be. There is still the peril that, if John Kerry wins, even if the Democrats gain control of one or both houses in Congress, even with no more independent prosecutor law, the Republicans will fall back on their most effective way to gain power: to do everything within their abilities to divide, falsely accuse, and smear.

The Democrats gave Bush not one, but two major chances to embrace bipartisanship, offering cooperation and unity to the point where they angered their base, and remained cooperative until Bush threw it back in their face and abused their trust, later even using it as a weapon against them. When Kerry takes office, let's see if the Republicans can offer true bipartisanship and unity, even once, even for a small while. I doubt that will happen to the point of utter disbelief, but I can only hope it will happen nevertheless.

When Republicans Let Slip the Truth

A Michigan Republican, John Pappageorge, stated recently in a print article that "If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we're going to have a tough time in this election." Detroit is 83% African-American. It is doubtless that in Florida, Jeb Bush is calling him and saying, "Shh! You're not supposed to tell anyone!"

Pappageorge later confirmed that it was crucial to get "the vote down in Detroit," but that it would be done by delivering a "good message." Right. I'd love to see how a "good message" can "suppress" and "get down" a city's vote. Not a very good job of covering up there.

GOP asked Enron for $$ to Redistrict Texas

That headline almost seems like it was written for a sensationalist rag, but that's the story coming from the Washington Post. It seems that Tom DeLay, then the House Majority Whip, asked Enron to contribute $100,000 to:

...come from "a combination of corporate and personal money from Enron's executives," with the understanding that it would be partly spent on "the redistricting effort in Texas," said the e-mail to Kenneth L. Lay from lobbyists Rick Shapiro and Linda Robertson.

The e-mail, which surfaced in a subsequent federal probe of Houston-based Enron, is one of at least a dozen documents obtained by The Washington Post that show DeLay and his associates directed money from corporations and Washington lobbyists to Republican campaign coffers in Texas in 2001 and 2002 as part of a plan to redraw the state's congressional districts.

Yikes.

A GOP leader asked Enron to supply funds to allow them to take over the Texas legislature for the express purpose of redistricting the state in a non-census year for partisan political purposes.

Man, I hope the media doesn't gloss over this one like they have so often before. This is a substantial pile of stinking muck that badly needs to be raked.

Ron Reagan Jr. to Speak at Democratic Convention

Yes, it is well-known that he is a liberal, and yes, he will speak about stem-cell research, and will not be nominating Kerry for the presidency.

Still, it is quite a substantial coup for the Democrats. The GOP will dare not try to besmirch Reagan, and yet the Democrats will in a very real way become the bearers of the Reagan family legacy, if not the Reagan political legacy. And that will be worth quite a bit, I think. Perhaps even extra TV coverage of the convention, and broader recognition of the true values of the liberal side.

Florida Felon List Yanked

We already covered the fact that the new Florida Felon List had thousands of eligible voters on it, and had far more Democrats than Republicans (28,000 to 9,500) being taken off the voter rolls.

The new development is that the list almost completely omitted Hispanic voters, including only 61 on the list of 48,000--about 0.1% of the total, while about 17% of the Florida population is Hispanic. And Hispanics in Florida are predominantly Cuban in origin, and predominantly vote Republican.

Apparently, that straw broke the camel's back. The outrageous election fraud in 2000, the fact that the new list was already disenfranchising thousands of legal voters, mostly Democratic--these facts were pressure enough, but to find that a predominantly Republican felon population had been omitted was apparently enough to shame Jeb Bush into pulling the list.

"It was an oversight and a mistake," Jeb Bush said; "We accept responsibility, and that's why we're pulling it back." So it seems that if there's a large amount of election fraud, it's OK, but if there's an egregious amount, then it's an "oversight" and they'll stop doing it.

GOP At It Again: 2004 Election fraud

Remember in the last election, when a variety of criminal and near-criminal actions broke out in Florida near election time, each one giving Bush hundreds or even thousands of votes? Remember the one pulled off by Katherine Harris, then Florida Secretary of State? During the post-election brawl, she jumped at every chance to announce Bush the winner, only to be stopped by the state courts each time. But it was before the elections that she pulled her coup (perhaps literally), by using the felon rolls in Florida as a political weapon.

She took control of the list away from a Florida firm and gave it to a Texas firm, then told that firm to compile the list based upon ridiculously biased rules that would ensure that 90%--more than 50,000 legal voters--would be added to the list, and since most were minorities, that means most were Democrats. Despite having thus deprived so many thousands of their legal right to vote (never notifying them, they found out by going to the polls to be told they were criminals), Harris and the GOP then mocked these people and the Democratic party for (a) being stupid, and (b) being criminals. The net loss of more than 20,000 votes lost for Gore were one of many over-the-top actions that, each one individually, handed Bush enough votes to win the election. Fitting, I suppose, for the first president with a criminal record to win by crook, but that's old news.

Or is it?

Past is prologue in Florida, it seems. Jeb Bush and the GOP are at it again. They've got a whole new list of "felons" and have been fighting like hell to keep it secret--the specific names, at least. They claimed that they were taking every precaution and notifying everyone on the list so they can challenge their status, but we all know what a load of horse manure that is. Their actions in 2000 were so crooked as to be unbelievable, and yet Bush was handed the election, and no one on Jeb Bush's staff was arrested or even charged--they know full well that if they do the same thing this time, they won't be touched, again. All they have to do is keep it under wraps until after the election, and then they're home free.

A small hitch developed for them, however, as several news organizations sued the state and finally got the list published. And guess what? It's full of names of people who should not be on it. After the state said the list of 47,000 was valid, having had months to check it out, the news services, with the list in hand less than 24 hours, identified at least 2,119 people who should not have been on the list. And that's just so far--it is likely that a vast majority of the people on the list are legal voters, minorities, and Democrats, just like in 2000. Just among the 2,100-plus names identified so far as being legal, eligible voters, 62% were registered Democrats and 20% Republicans, and more than half are black. Again, numbers almost the same as in 2000. Surprise, surprise.

A look at the list (alphabetical, in PDF format) will also reveal that a great many names are nearly identical, suggesting that again, as they did in 2000, many were added to the list just for having names similar to alleged felons.

The Florida GOP are complete, unabashed scum--sorry, but they are. And that's just one ploy in Florida. Another GOP game is the no-paper-trail electronic voting fiasco, machines supplied by a company run by a Bush campaign manager. God knows how many other frauds they're up to without anyone knowing about it.

No wonder why Democrats are calling for the U.N. to come to America to observe and verify the 2004 elections. The GOP has made our country into a Banana Republic, where elections are openly rigged and the world has to observe in order to have even a small hope that some of the fraud can be stalled.

By the way, Katherine Harris got her payoff--in the 2002 elections, the GOP gratefully gave her the seat in the GOP stronghold of Sarasota in Florida, which she now occupies--instead of the jail cell she so richly deserves.

Cheney Weasels on Fox

Cheney was interviewed on Fox News (where else?) and gave the same mealy-mouthed weaseling we're used to from him. When asked if he had really used the F-word, he replied, "That's not the kind of language that I usually use," delivered not in a sheepish, apologetic tone, but in a tone that clearly expected the listener to believe he hadn't said it at all, as in "I don't know why they said that, I don't speak that way."

Fox's Neil Cavuto, though handling him with kid gloves, did pin him down: "Did you curse at him?" Cavuto asked. "Probably," Cheney replied. What a hypocrite. Remember how the entire weight of the GOP fell on Bill Clinton whenever he tried to twist language to his purposes? Here's Cheney twisting the hell out of the language, weaseling like mad--and let's not forget the GOP's condemnation of "John Effing Kerry" for such a long time after he used the word in a Rolling Stone interview late last year.

Bush Foreign Policy to be Condemned by 26 Respected Former Officials

And mostly not Democrats, either; most were appointed during Republican administrations. They are coming out tomorrow to speak out and make Americans aware that despite the non-stop PR campaign to make Bush sound like a foreign policy genius, he is, in fact, the worst and most dangerous president in terms of foreign policy, perhaps the worst in American history. They will enunciate to the American people, whom they formed careers serving, that Bush's foreign policy has been an abysmal, miserable failure. "What has caused us to speak out in what could be seen as a partisan or political way is simply our deep, deep concern about the future security of the United States," one of the group already announced.

While most are not endorsing Kerry outright, the group, "Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change" are certainly telling people that they should absolutely not vote for someone with a record like Bush's. One member said:

"Ever since Franklin Roosevelt, the U.S. has built up alliances in order to amplify its own power. But now we have alienated many of our closest allies, we have alienated their populations. We've all been increasingly appalled at how the relationships that we worked so hard to build up have simply been shattered by the current administration in the method it has gone about things."

And this is coming from Reagan's appointee to the ambassadorship to the Soviet Union, Jack F. Matlock, Jr. Finally, hopefully, there will be serious recognition of the massive blunders and trashing of foreign policy and America's standing in the world committed by the Bush 43 administration.

This is not the first time for something like this--52 former British diplomats and government officials criticized Blair for supporting Bush, saying his policies in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were "doomed to failure."

The list of American officials making their announcement tomorrow includes former ambassadors to the Soviet Union (two of them, both Reagan's), Israel (again, two), Britain, France, Greece, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Mexico, Nigeria (two), Bangladesh, Zaire, Zimbabwe, Senegal, Republic of Congo, Czechoslovakia, Burundi, Pakistan, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Nations.

Former political, military or intelligence officials include those holding the rank of: director of the CIA, secretary of state, chairman of the joint chiefs, commander in chief of U.S. Central Command, deputy commander in chief of the U.S. European Command, chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force, two former assistant secretaries of Defense, and the chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Committee. There are also 5 assistant secretaries of State, 2 deputy assistant secretaries of State, and an undersecretary-general of the United Nations.

Bush's people are apparently waiting to see exactly what they say before the inevitable trashing of these guys, though some Republicans are already trying to dismiss this impressive arsenal of foreign policy expertise as not "sufficiently well-known." Let's see how well that plays.

Here is the list of signatories as provided by the L.A. Times:

Avis T. Bohlen — assistant secretary of State for arms control, 1999-2002; deputy assistant secretary of State for European affairs 1989-1991.

Retired Adm. William J. Crowe Jr. — chairman, President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Committee, 1993-94; ambassador to Britain, 1993-97; chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1985-89.

Jeffrey S. Davidow — ambassador to Mexico, 1998-2002; assistant secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, 1996

William A. DePree — ambassador to Bangladesh, 1987-1990.

Donald B. Easum — ambassador to Nigeria, 1975-79.

Charles W. Freeman Jr. — assistant secretary of Defense, International Security Affairs, 1993-94; ambassador to Saudi Arabia, 1989-1992.

William C. Harrop — ambassador to Israel, 1991-93; ambassador to Zaire, 1987-1991.

Arthur A. Hartman — ambassador to the Soviet Union, 1981-87; ambassador to France, 1977-1981.

Retired Marine Gen. Joseph P. Hoar — commander in chief of U.S. Central Command, overseeing forces in the Middle East, 1991-94; deputy chief of staff, Marine Corps, 1990-94.

H. Allen Holmes — assistant secretary of Defense for special operations, 1993-99; assistant secretary of State for politico-military affairs, 1986-89.

Robert V. Keeley — ambassador to Greece, 1985-89; ambassador to Zimbabwe, 1980-84.

Samuel W. Lewis — director of State Department policy and planning, 1993-94; ambassador to Israel, 1977-1985.

Princeton N. Lyman — assistant secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, 1995-98; ambassador to South Africa, 1992-95.

Jack F. Matlock Jr. — ambassador to the Soviet Union, 1987-1991; director for European and Soviet Affairs, National Security Council, 1983-86; ambassador to Czechoslovakia, 1981-83.

Donald F. McHenry — ambassador to the United Nations, 1979-1981.

Retired Air Force Gen. Merrill A. McPeak — chief of staff, U.S. Air Force, 1990-94.

George E. Moose — assistant secretary of State for African affairs, 1993-97; ambassador to Senegal, 1988-91.

David D. Newsom — acting secretary of State, 1980; undersecretary of State for political affairs, 1978-1981; ambassador to Indonesia, 1973-77

Phyllis E. Oakley — assistant secretary of State for intelligence and research, 1997-99.

James Daniel Phillips — ambassador to the Republic of Congo, 1990-93; ambassador to Burundi, 1986-1990.

John E. Reinhardt — professor of political science, University of Vermont, 1987-91; ambassador to Nigeria, 1971-75.

Retired Air Force Gen. William Y. Smith — deputy commander in chief, U.S. European Command, 1981-83.

Ronald I. Spiers — undersecretary-general of the United Nations for Political Affairs, 1989-1992; ambassador to Pakistan, 1981-83.

Michael Sterner — deputy assistant secretary of State for Near East affairs, 1977-1981; ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, 1974-76.

Retired Adm. Stansfield Turner — director of the Central Intelligence Agency, 1977-1981.

Alexander F. Watson — assistant secretary of State for Inter-American affairs, 1993-96; deputy permanent representative to the U.N., 1989-1993.

Reagan Jr.: Bush "Just Plain Corrupt"

There's an article you really should read, one printed in Salon about a year ago, in which Ron Reagan, Jr. absolutely tore into George Bush, Jr. A must-read for anyone who bought even a little into the fiction Bush and his people have been spinning about Bush Jr. carrying on Reagan's legacy. Some excerpts:

"The Bush people have no right to speak for my father, particularly because of the position he's in now," he said during a recent interview with Salon. "Yes, some of the current policies are an extension of the '80s. But the overall thrust of this administration is not my father's -- these people are overly reaching, overly aggressive, overly secretive, and just plain corrupt. I don't trust these people." ...

Reagan took a swipe at Bush during the 2000 GOP convention in Philadelphia, which featured a tribute to his father, telling the Washington Post's Lloyd Grove, "The big elephant sitting in the corner is that George W. Bush is simply unqualified for the job... What's his accomplishment? That he's no longer an obnoxious drunk?" Since then he's been quiet about the current occupant of the White House -- until now. ...

"Sure, he wasn't a technocrat like Clinton. But my father was a man -- that's the difference between him and Bush. To paraphrase Jack Palance, my father crapped bigger ones than George Bush."

Ouch.

Republican Web Sites Blocked Outside America?

I have never been able to visit the official Republican web sites, specifically www.rnc.org, www.gop.com, and Bush's campaign site, www.georgewbush.com. Every time I try, after about a minute of waiting, I get an error message, "Operation timed out when attempting to contact...." I have tried from work, at home, and using a variety of browsers, but each time, the attempt times out. I have been trying this over a period of many months--always the same result. In contrast, the DNC web site and the Kerry campaign site are both readily accessible.

I would like to ask the assistance of all of you visiting here to test this hypothesis--try to access those three Republican sites, and let me know if you can get through--and which country you reside in. Especially those living outside the U.S.--are the Republicans making a concerted effort to hide their web sites from those outside the United States?

Pentareagan

It is now being reported: "An amendment proposed by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist would change the name of the Pentagon to "The Ronald Reagan Defense Building."

This is the Senate Majority Leader, for crying out loud.

What next? Rename the White House to the Reagan House? Capitol Hill to Reagan Hill? That's not too far off from renaming the Pentagon.

Even Freepers, in their ultraconservative go-crazy discussion forums, are starting to say "Whoa, Nelly!":

"OK, no, I'm sorry. Let's not go nuts here, people."

"I agree- the Republican Party is dangerously close to outdoing the Paul Wellstone crowd."

"this is nuts. and it shows how shallow the 'leaders' of our party in the Senate are. somebody from the white house better call this idiot, fast."

"Why not just rename the whole country. United States is uninspired and characterless for a name of a country. Name it Reagania."

When the far-right-wingers start saying the GOP is going too far, it just might be time for them to call it quits.

Put Reagan's Name/Face on (insert your own noun here)!

There are currently several efforts underway by conservatives to put Reagan on the $10 bill (though they would be just as happy with the $20 or dime), one in Congress and another by appealing to the Bush administration. Already Reagan's name has been plastered over the National Airport in Washington, D.C., and has been put on a mountain (Mount Reagan), a naval vessel (the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan), in addition to "54 highways, schools, post offices and other memorials to Reagan around the country."

Thus begins the completely expected rush to slap Reagan's name on just about everything in sight. Apotheosis indeed. Nancy Reagan, gratefully and gracefully, has opposed such movements, but conservatives, wishing to immortalize their political icon and make sure everyone reveres him, ignore the request (possibly figuring she's just saying such things for the sake of image).

But fortunately there is more than just public opposition, Democrats in Congress are opposing as well. Normally cowed by Republican attempts to pass their agenda under unrelated popular and/or patriotic themes, Democrats have a way around that--by voicing their support for Alexander Hamilton and Franklin Roosevelt. Republicans want to overcome this by compromising as issuing half Reagan dimes and half Roosevelt dimes.

As an alternative, I might suggest putting Reagan's face on infants' bibs (in honor of his "trickle-down" economics), using his name in the title of the next Star Wars film (double purpose, for the 'Star Wars' program and for the use of the "evil empire," which is portrayed as being created in the next Star Wars flick), or on food stamps, in recognition of how many people he forced into poverty and so have to use them--although I am certain he tried to cut the issuance of such 'welfare' to people who needed them. But then, Republicans have never really been bothered by contradictions such as these.

(Update: I just noted something: this is post number 666!!! I didn't notice until after I'd posted, but I find it incredibly appropriate--especially considering that when the Reagans moved back to California after leaving the WHite House, their house number was 666--and Nancy insisted it be changed before they took residence. Funny how that number keeps popping up with him....)

The Political Apotheosis of Reagan and Rash Justification of Bush

Remember how the Republicans were shocked, horrified, and aghast that a few Democrats at the podium of Senator Paul Wellstone's memorial service suggested that his political legacy be fulfilled in the special election to replace him? How the Republicans used their alligator-tear "outrage" to beat the Democrats over the head and win that election?

In the past few days, Republicans have done what the Democrats did, but a hundred times over, not just by glorifying a whitewashed version of Reagan's political legacy and using that to shower warm praise of Bush--not to mention make endless direct comparisons between Reagan and Bush--now Bush's own re-election campaign site (often unavailable) has become a virtual shrine to Reagan. Republicans are draping themselves in the flag of Reagan, and while none are saying explicitly, "Reagan died, so vote for us," the message could not be more loud and clear.

Conservatives have been also taking shots at liberals about how they must be so glad that Reagan is dead--but if the truth be told, the GOP must be filled with glee at the timing of his demise. What better use for Reagan's death than in the midst of a contested campaign season? Their only regret must be that he did not have the decency to hold on and then die a few days before election day.

---

In the meantime, it is gratifying to see that the Bush administration was not able to derail media attention to all their scandals; new attention is being focused on administration documents that justify the use of torture. These documents, which include legal views such as "authority to set aside the laws is 'inherent in the president'" harken back to the good old days of Nixon's "The president is above the law" mindset.

These legal findings make it a bit more difficult for the administration to claim that it was all the fault of the soldiers they have been blaming, a "few bad apples" doing the deeds while the administration is pristine-clean. Ashcroft is trying to defend all of this by saying that Bush never used the legal findings and it's just coincidence that all that torture took place.

The image comes to mind of a child proclaiming in the morning, "I don't care what mommy and daddy say, I can eat as many cookies as I want!"--then an hour later finding the cookie jar empty, and a brazen child with crumbs on his shirt claiming that it was all the dog's fault, he had nothing to do with it.

Plame Flame Rising, Enron Burning

The grand jury investigation into the Valerie Plame affair came into the media spotlight today as we find that Bush is speaking with private counsel about what he should do if they want to 'sit down and talk' with him. This is most interesting in that it means the grand jury might be focusing on more than just Cheney's chief of staff, if only as far as looking into what the president knew and when did he know it.

Meanwhile, another Bush-related scandal has also shifted back into view: Enron, Bush's biggest Texas backers. We are now getting an earful of the traders cheerfully gabbing about screwing California over:

---

"He just f---s California. He steals money from California to the tune of about a million."

---

Shutting down power plants to drive up prices:

"If you took down the steamer, how long would it take to get it back up?"

"Oh, it's not something you want to just be turning on and off every hour. Let's put it that way,"

"Well, why don't you just go ahead and shut her down."

---

"They're f------g taking all the money back from you guys? All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?"

"Yeah, grandma Millie, man"

"Yeah, now she wants her f-----g money back for all the power you've charged right up, jammed right up her a------ for f------g $250 a megawatt hour."

---

Enron traders hoping for Bush to win in 2000:

"It'd be great. I'd love to see Ken Lay Secretary of Energy."

"When this election comes Bush will f------g whack this s--t, man. He won't play this price-cap b------t."

Which is exactly what Bush did. "We will not take any action that makes California's problems worse and that's why I oppose price caps," Bush said during the election. It is commonly believed that Bush fully supported not only Enron and its shady business practices, but also the rifling of California through usurious energy rates, so that Democrats in that particular Blue State would become unpopular, so that Republicans could take over. And guess what happened?

And as a massive fire scorched California, one trader made the quintessential Enron comment about California: "Burn, baby, burn. That's a beautiful thing."

Herseth Wins SD Seat for Dems, But GOP Fights Back Illegally

Stephanie Herseth won a close election to narrow the Republican majority in the House to only 11 seats. DailyKos points out quite rightly that their involvement in the campaign may very well have helped tip the scales, and points out the importance of grass-roots Democratic support, which is swelling enormously in this contentious election year. Herseth replaces Republican Janklow, who killed one of his constituents (which is pretty much how far a Republican has to go nowadays in order to get the police to arrest him).

This is the second big win for Democrats in special elections this year (they picked up a House seat in Kentucky earlier), and signals a likely trend for Democrats to gain seats and take over at least one house if not both in Congress--but there is a possible braking action here, an illegitimate Republican dirty trick in the form of non-census-related redistricting. Usually voting districts are redrawn only when new census figures change the number alloted to a state and require the districts to be re-drawn. If there is one party decisively in power at the beginning of a decade, they often gerrymander, that is, draw up districts to maximize their chance to win more seats in Congress.

Republicans, however, have hit upon a new strategy: instead of waiting a whole ten years for those pesky censuses, just do it now. Any time Republicans gain control of both houses in a state, they pounce on the opportunity to redistrict right then, in order to solidify their hold on power. In 2002, the GOP broke with long-standing political tradition and gerrymandered in Colorado without any legitimate need to do so; they wanted to win more seats in the next election, so they just redrew the lines for that purpose and that purpose only. This year, with Tom DeLay pushing the agenda, Texas followed suit--and Republicans elsewhere are gearing up to follow.

The Supreme Court has ruled "excessive partisanship" in districting as unconstitutional, and the recent Republican efforts in Colorado and Texas are undeniably just that. In fact, the entire redistricting effort by GOP members in control of those states is, without any question or possibility of doubt, strictly designed for the purpose of slanting the playing field so more Republicans can win, and for no other reason whatsoever. The Texas redistricting alone stands to gain Republicans at least four seats in the House. Republicans in Georgia and Ohio say they want to do the same thing next.

A case was rejected by the Supreme Court last month (Vieth vs. Jubelirer) concerning the overtly partisan Republican Pennsylvania gerrymandering (at the time of the census) on the grounds that there are no "workable standards" for courts to follow in determining whether a redistricting is partisan or not. But a new case, Jackson vs. Perry, brings forth the question of non-census gerrymandering in the Texas debacle, and may have the "workable standards" that would bring about a majority of SC justices to agree that the redistricting is unconstitutional.

Unfortunately, Jackson vs. Perry will likely not be decided until after the election--which means the Republicans will get away scot-free with another heaping handful of stolen elections. There is a chance that perhaps the Texas courts will find the reason to throw out the new lines before time runs out, but I am not holding my breath there. If the Dems fail to win a majority in the House by less than five seats, then the Republicans will have won yet another victory for governmental control via the illegal scumbag route. In other words, nothing new to see here.

Polling Trends and Politicizing Terror

After Andrew asked about an updated Bush approval polling chart, I went back to Pollkatz, and sure enough, they have an updated chart available (pictured at right, link here). Looking at this chart answered some concerns that I'd had.

Until just last week, I had been worried by the fact that Bush seemed to be unmovable at around 50%, despite all the crises, not to mention the fact that his numbers have always followed a steady downwards trend. So what was with the long hovering at 50%?

The Pollkatz chart, an amalgam of 14 different polls, shows something that I'd been missing: the telescoping of time, and the disorientation of seeing different polls at unpredictable times. The Pollkatz chart demonstrates that Bush's "hover" was less a hover and more of an early drop and steadiness, and that the three or so months Bush hovered do not really break the trends so clearly demonstrated on the chart. Save a major event between now and November, Bush's trend should take him below 40%--though he might get a fair bump at convention time; question is, how much, and will it do him any good?

The next question is, as Bush and his people are no doubt painfully aware of these numbers and Bush's usual trend, what will they try to do in order to get Bush's numbers up? There are a number of October surprise scenarios, but they seem to be off to an early start with a tried and true strategy: scare the sh*t out of the American people.

Ashcroft--excuse me, "federal officials" have leaked news that al Qaeda is planning some kind of major attack on U.S. soil between now and September. What kind of attack? We don't know, apparently. But there's "chatter" out there again.

Why is this most likely a political move rather than one of national security? First, Ashcroft is not raising the alert level. Why not? This is one of the strongest warnings of terrorist action in the past few years, and we've gone to "Orange" or "Burnt Umber," or whatever it is, over less than this in the past. The lack of alert level change seems to belie the seriousness of the warning.

Second, the time span--between now and the election. Bush's people know full well that Bush's highest numbers are in his dealings with terrorism--though even they are falling. But playing to this strength would be an obvious move for them to make. Which ties into point number three: how they're phrasing this. "They saw that an attack of that nature can have economic and political consequences and have some impact on the electoral process," said a Bush administration official.

The translation: if there is an al Qaeda attack, it is because, like in Spain, they will be trying to make Bush lose. If this impression is successfully implanted into the American psyche, then Bush would automatically benefit from such an attack rather than be blamed for it--after all, if the terrorists are trying to affect the elections to make Bush lose, that would be great publicity for Bush--he could run against al Qaeda rather than John Kerry.

The claim is bogus, of course; if al Qaeda attacks, history seems to show that Bush would be the obvious beneficiary--he has always gotten a boost in popularity in times of crisis (see the above graph for the obvious proof), and the Spain election did not go to the Socialists because the people were shaken by the attack--quite the contrary, they were brought together by it and emboldened--the election was lost by the ruling party because they screwed around with the bombing investigation, lying by saying it was Basque separatists instead of al Qaeda, and they were caught red-handed. They lost the election because the people were ticked off by that improper manipulation of the attack for political purposes.

But by making this terror warning, Bush & Co. are covering their bets: if there is no attack, they benefit by people being afraid and believing that Bush is better at fighting terror; if al Qaeda does strike, then they can say that they tried to warn everyone and did the best they did, and then they can campaign as if the choices are Bush vs. al Qaeda.

Restricted

Doubt the claim that Bush events are carefully screened so that only fervent Bush backers get in, and no one else is allowed to see the president? Check out this article, with a number of eyewitness accounts of organizers tossing out people who want to see the president speak if they even look like they might not support him--even if they have valid tickets to the event.

Do not doubt for a moment why the president is always greeted by cheering, adoring crowds: no one but the most fervent true believers are allowed within miles of the president, even when driving by in a motorcade.

Using the Death of an Innocent

Not that this surprises me, but the Bush administration--very likely enjoying a great deal of relief--has been using the death of civilian Nick Berg in Iraq to its greatest advantage.

In recent days everyone was focused sharply on the administration concerning the growing Abu Ghraib scandal, with harsh criticism hitting them from every direction. But then, yesterday, when the news came out that there was a videotape of the beheading of American Nick Berg at the hands of an apparent al Qaeda group, administration officials likely high-fived each other: they had a possible 'out.'

Everybody had been looking at the U.S. as the bad guy, the aggressor, the barbarian. The story itself was not that damaging, after all it had been out for some time without people noticing, but the damning part was the artwork. The photos of the prisoner abuse, so graphic and shocking, were what made the story move. But then here came al Qaeda to the rescue, with a videotape even more graphic and barbaric. Nick Berg was suddenly the administration's man. All they had to do was say, "this guy is us," and they could absorb his victimhood and make the prisoner abuse (which they had known about for many months but had hidden) seem to be, if not justified, then at least less bad.

Republican Senator Jon Kyl said it succinctly: "As bad as some of the things were that were done to Iraqi prisoners, it didn't involve beheading. ... That doesn't justify it, but it does to some extent put it in context and show you what you're dealing with in terms of the enemy." Translation: we're going to use this murder to take the pressure off of ourselves. Isn't that sweet?

The administration not only enjoyed the distraction of the press from Abu Ghraib and used the story to excuse their own wrongs, but it even tried to use the killing to justify the war in general, trying to use Berg's death to the greatest possible advantage to further their political agenda at home.

What's worse, the administration is actually indirectly responsible for Berg's death. Although the administration is now in the process of denying it as forcefully as possible, Berg's family is being inconveniently unquiet in laying some of the blame at their door. Berg was in Iraq voluntarily to do reconstruction work--not as a contractor, nor as a soldier, but on his own. On March 24th, Berg was arrested by the Iraqi police. The U.S. knew he had been arrested from the beginning, of course, and says that the FBI visited him three times. Berg's family say that the FBI informed them that Berg had been turned over to U.S. custody, and tried everything they could to get him released, even to the point of going to court and suing the U.S. government to let him go.

The Bush administration, then and now, feebly argue that they didn't have him, the Iraqis did--but even if it is true and he was never turned over to the U.S., since the Iraqi police are still under U.S. control that is a razor-thin distinction, and even then only in legal terms and most certainly not in fact. Had they wanted him released immediately, they could have done it. Only when his family filed suit did they let him go--the next day--and Berg's attempt to then leave the country on his own is what put him into the hands of the terrorist cell that soon executed him. He had planned to leave the country March 30, but could not when he was jailed; he left Baghdad April 10, and was likely captured soon thereafter. He was killed on Saturday, May 8, and his body found the same day.

Berg's father spells out how he sees the government as responsible: "I think that they caused his death indirectly by detaining him without any rights. Even after detaining him I think they at least had an obligation to get him safely out of the country." The administration is now claiming through an anonymous source that Berg had been told to leave the country--when and by whom, the source "refused to elaborate." Just after he was released, handed his hat, and left to his own devices? Or before he was arrested--which would suggest that maybe his arrest was not a random or coincidental act?

Whatever the case, the administration's handling of this affair is despicable. Despite their shoddy treatment of Berg, their arrest and dismissal of the American, when he was murdered they shamelessly exploited his graphic murder to their best advantage. One can be certain that if it were not for the fact that the family is now grieving, their pointing out the administration's faults would have by now resulted in a now-familiar Bush smear campaign by the administration to besmirch their son's reputation and call the family liars and publicity hounds. You can even see that much happening at a very subdued level, knowing they cannot go too far, but the echoes of it are there--the family is not telling it right, Nick Berg was arrested for "suspicious activities," we told him to get out or Iraq, and even an ominous-sounding "more on him is coming next week" from an unnamed source in the administration.

So chalk one up for the administration's spin team, they've been working overtime lately.

Fool Me Once, Fool Me Again

I have often wondered in amazement as to how Bush, in the light of several months of scandal, lies, lawbreaking and bad news in general, has been able to hold steady in the polls over time. Part of it, of course, is his base constituency, but I also think a great deal of it has to do with the old saying, "you can fool some of the people some of the time"--although, more accurately in this case, that should read, "you can fool some of the people all of the time."

How so? Remember when the poll was taken saying that 69% of the American people believed that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks? Well, even after Bush came out and denied that publicly, he and others in his administration have persisted in tying pre-war Iraq with terrorism, and the lies have worked. Despite there being absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support the concept, fully 57% of Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein gave "substantial support" to al Qaeda. While not the exact same position as the previous poll, it is very close, so much so as to be virtually the same. Bush's campaign of lying to make people see a tie between Hussein and 9/11 has been so effective that Bush can come out and say there was no tie, and yet he can still make more than half of the American people believe it.

Further numbers from the survey: 45% think that there is "clear evidence" Hussein worked with al Qaeda, and 60% believed that Hussein either had WMD or had a "major program for developing them." All of these beliefs fly directly in the face of known fact.

And so Bush remains steady at 50% in the polls. Even if Bush's base is as low as 30%, I guess this is evidence that he can so completely fool at least another 20% into believing things that are so obviously false. The only question remains, what is the reason these 20% of the people believe such clear falsehoods? Fear? Blind patriotism? Stupidity? Possibly a combination of those three, and some others to boot. That people would choose to accept such an openly corrupt president for these reasons is reason for dismay, to say the least.

Bush at 43%: Is Pew Right?

The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press has released the results of their latest survey: Bush's popularity rating has (finally!) fallen to a new low of 43%, the lowest Bush has ever polled at. The bad news is that Pew has always been on the low side, and it is too early yet to tell if this is a blip or a new trend. One encouraging piece of corroborating evidence is that Zogby has had him at 46% and 47% over the past several weeks, though they have often been a low poll too. So I am watchfully hopeful.

The poll adds that public approval of Bush's handling of Iraq has fallen to 40%, which will probably only fall further as the death toll sadly and inevitably mounts. Support for Bush on the economy is down to 39%, and his energy policy gets only 29%, undoubtedly not helped greatly by high gas prices.

At the same time, low poll numbers could be a bit scary, for reasons that I have spoken of for a long time now: we know that Bush and Cheney have no problem with committing extreme acts for their political benefit, and the only thing that has ever brought Bush's poll numbers up were terrorist attacks, starting a war, and capturing an enemy--and if they can't (or haven't) capture(d) Osama bin Laden, then what will they do if things become desperate for them?

In the meantime, I will take these poll numbers as a good sign.

The Outrage List Continues: Part III

It is hard to see just a few days go by without another set of lies and scams perpetrated by the Bush people, and remember, people, these are just the ones we find out about--there are without doubt many more.

The first one is all too public, the failing of the Bush administration to manage postwar Iraq. Their failure to have a coherent postwar strategy, their arrogant posturing and just plain stupidity making a far more respectable U.N. force to keep the peace, and Bush's desperate rush to hand over power so he can pretend that U.S. troops aren't there (while they will really be there for at least another decade), have all led to this carnage we see today.

The number of U.S. soldiers killed now number 15 for the month of April (one other foreign soldier died as well), for an average of 3.2 Coalition troops killed per day--which is a startling number. That's just slightly behind the 3.6 per day killed in November, and that was when helicopters full of soldiers got shot down--this month our people are getting killed one by one, by bombs and in combat. And if you go past last November, this month so far has been bloodier for our troops than any month since the invasion began last March.

And that is before the summer heat starts up, and before a major turnover of troops will make a majority of troops reservists, minimally trained, the first time practically untrained soldiers have outnumbered active-duty troops. That, along with growing resentment of American troops in Iraq by the Iraqis, promises to make this quagmire bloodier and bloodier still.

But at least we have the comfort of knowing that the sacrifice of our young fighting forces will not be allowed to work against the election campaign of George W. Bush. Why? Because he's stacked the Iraq press office with a very large number of GOP staffers whose job it is to spin the Iraq news to benefit Bush's election run. "One-third of the U.S. civilian workers in the press office have GOP ties, running an enterprise that critics see as an outpost of Bush's re-election effort with Iraq a top concern."

And Bush's corruption of public information to help him get elected doesn't stop in Baghdad. Remember the 9/11 commission? Remember how Bush, through Dennis Hastert, did everything possible to stop the 9/11 commission from getting a 2-month extension because they were terrified of the investigation report coming out too close to the November elections? Well, problem solved. You won't get a chance to see the 9/11 commission report before the election, if Bush gets his way. They are saying that they will have to put the report through a "vetting" process, and they may not get finished with it until after the election.

But with luck, we'll get a look at what they've found through leaks, and that is the fact (which I've blogged on recently) that the 9/11 attack "were probably preventable." Any wonder the Bush White House--who before were incredibly anxious to get the report out asap and tried to block a 2-month extension the commission called for--is now saying that it'll take so much time they won't be able to say anything before the election. What a surprise.

And then we have piece of evidence #26 that Bush was planning to invade Iraq from early on: a former British ambassador reported that just nine days after 9/11, Bush told Blair that "when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq." Remember how the Bush people blasted Paul O'Neill, smearing him as some kind of psychotic, greedy liar because he claimed Bush was focused on invading Iraq from long before 9/11? Same for Richard Clarke? What will they say about this former British ambassador? Will they call him a raving loony? How many more ultimately respectable, intelligent and formidable men and women will Bush's people have to smear before people get wise to the lies?

And while we're talking about how Bush's people are smearing those who dare criticize them, look at the list of people who served the Bush administration that they are now attacking: Paul O'Neill, Joseph Smith, Lawrence Lindsay, Anthony Zinni, Eric Shinseki, Richard Foster, John DiIulio, Scott Ritter, and Richard Clarke. That's a lot of people, and that's just the A-list, but my point is this: if so many people who used to work for Bush are all liars, profiteers, child molesters, psychotics and so on--what does this say about the quality of people working for the Bush administration? These are the smart, honorable and dignified people Bush promised to surround himself with? No, the fact is, these are the honorable people about which none of the Bush smears are true, which is why they all had to leave--there's no place for people of such integrity in Bush's White House.

And closing for today before I overload once again (too late!), now we also find out that Bush's people sent out an email to the troops telling them to lie about the environment whenever asked about it, to wit: "global warming has not been proved, air quality is 'getting better', the world's forests are 'spreading, not deadening', oil reserves are 'increasing, not decreasing', and the 'world's water is cleaner and reaching more people.'" The source of these claims? A research institute funded by Mobil Oil. A Republican strategist behind most of this is reported to have said, "There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science." Which is the hallmark of Bush's scientific policy: fight the science. Make sure the ideology wins out. Science proves Bush wrong? Rewrite the report. It's as simple as that!

Oy. Yet more Outrage Overload. How much longer can this go on?

More Overload

Here are some more points of outrage, just part of the massive waves of dirty dealing, scandal and incompetence that has become apparent over recent weeks and months. To punctuate this, I would like to point out that if Clinton had done any of this, Republicans would be calling for his head. It is useful to imagine the name Clinton wherever you see Bush in this post and the last one, and you'll have a slightly better ability to imagine the massive Republican outrage should that have been the case--and the total double standard that now exists, with the right wing claiming that we're tired of scandal (until the next Democrat comes into office), and making weak attempts to rationalize, excuse, or much more often obfuscate Bush's malfeasance.

One of those points is honesty. Remember how Bush was supposed to bring "honor and dignity" back to the White house? How they claimed that Clinton lied so much, and painted Gore as a liar even more so? And then it turns out Bush was lying through his teeth all along. He lied about not wanting to do nation-building, lied about his criminal record (I still can't believe we elected, if you can call it that, a man with a criminal record, with a DUI, and a VP with two DUIs!); they lied about willingness to delve into deficit spending; they lied about the vandalism at the White House, about how the Clinton team ripped out the "W"s on the keyboards. And that was just the beginning. There were the unending lies about Iraq and Saddam Hussein and WMD. Now we have Bush lying to Congress about Medicare, Rice lying to everybody about everything, and even the formerly statesmanlike Colin Powell admitting that is "ironclad" evidence was, in retrospect, not so "solid" after all. Gee whiz, ya think?

Another lie being propagated right now is that Bush did everything possible to catch bin Laden--no, wait, he didn't, but they were going after al Qaeda--no, no, that's not right either, but they were all over the terrorism problem--well, actually not. But at least we can take heart in the reassurance that Bush & Co. couldn't really have done anything to prevent 9/11. After all, the Clinton administration were such slackers, the election thing meant they had to get off to a late start, and by the time it was humanly possible to act, the terrorists were already in place and nothing could be done. Right? BZZZT. Nope. That's wrong too. They were occupying their offices from early on, they were warned from the outset, vividly, about al Qaeda, a plan of action (let's not quibble over words, Clinton's people had a set of actions to take and it was thoroughly transmitted to Bush's people), and Clarke was there trying and trying to push them into action--but they were too caught up in Star Wars missile defense, and terrorism played badly in that scenario, and they just gave it no credence. But most importantly, Clarke painted a very clear picture of how 9/11 could have been prevented, just as the Clinton WHite House prevented massive attacks planned by al Qaeda on American soil for the millennium celebrations:

CLARKE: Well, we'll never know. But let me compare 9/11 and the period immediately before it to the millennium rollover and the period immediately before that. In December, 1999, we received intelligence reports that there were going to be major al Qaeda attacks. President Clinton asked his national security adviser Sandy Berger to hold daily meetings with the attorney general, the FBI director, the CIA director and stop the attacks. And every day they went back from the White House to the FBI, to the Justice Department, to the CIA and they shook the trees to find out if there was any information. You know, when you know the United States is going to be attacked, the top people in the United States government ought to be working hands-on to prevent it and working together.

Now, contrast that with what happened in the summer of 2001, when we even had more clear indications that there was going to be an attack. Did the president ask for daily meetings of his team to try to stop the attack? Did Condi Rice hold meetings of her counterparts to try to stop the attack? No.

And if she had, if the FBI director and the attorney general had gone back day after day to their department to the White House, what would they have shaken loose? We now know from testimony before the Commission that buried in the FBI was the fact that two of the hijackers had entered the United States. Now, if that information had been able to be shaken loose by the FBI director and the attorney general in response to daily meetings with the White House, if we had known that those two -- if the attorney general had known, if the FBI director had known, that those two were in the United States, Larry, I believe we could have caught those two.

Now with Sibel Edmonds coming forward and saying that the information not only existed but was passed up to the administration, this suggestion has even more merit to it. There is an extremely high probability that had Gore been elected, then the information would have gotten through, and 9/11 would never have happened. Under Bush, though, the terrorists walked right in, because Bush & Co. were far too busy looking for missiles in the sky.

Then there is the business side, the money scandals. Has Ken Lay, Bush's biggest contributor since 1994, been charged, let alone punished, for his massive fraud that so damaged the economy and stole the life savings of so many Americans? He never acted when Enron and other oil companies ripped Californians off to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. Cheney included all the oil companies, including Enron, to write the nation's energy policy, and then tried like crazy to keep all of that a secret (it is now before the Supreme Court, where it will be ruled on by Cheney's best bud, Antonin Scalia--gee, I wonder what he'll decide on the matter?). And let's not even get started on Halliburton.

What fewer people know is that Bush has long-time relations with the bin Laden family and the Saudi royal family. Bush Sr. as well as Jr. were getting massive funding and investment out of these people since the late 1970's, the current Bush's involvement beginning with his first business, Arbusto ("Bush" in Spanish), which Bush promptly bankrupted. But the relationship continues to this day, and was most clearly evidenced by Bush's redacting a few dozen pages from an important terrorism report, pages which would have shown the Saudis as being very much behind Islamic terrorist groups; it was demonstrated strongly also in the few days following 9/11, when Bush had the entire bin Laden clan resident in the U.S. airlifted out, even as Americans were not allowed to fly.

On Al Franken's new radio show, Michael Moore was a guest and they discussed a very applicable analogy to this situation. Imagine the following: after the Oklahoma bombing of the Murrah building by Timothy McVeigh, the FBI suspects McVeigh is the bomber and wants to talk to his family members. Clinton, however, gets the entire McVeigh family together, loads them on a plane, refuses to let the FBI question them in full, and instead carts the whole lot off to Paris, outside U.S. jurisdiction. And then we learn later that Clinton had substantial financial relationships with the McVeighs over the past two decades or more.

If that had ever happened, the right wing would have gone nuclear. Impeachment hearings would have started within minutes, and conservatives everywhere would be blasting Clinton from here to doomsday--and the Democrats probably would have been with them. But when the exact same scenario is played out by Bush, airlifting the entire bin Laden family from the U.S. while no U.S. citizen was allowed to fly, not letting the FBI question them thoroughly--and now we know that the bin ladens were financing Bush for many, many years... it defies belief that Bush can get away with this and no one seems to think that it is worthy of much attention.

For further information, I would direct you to buy House of Bush, House of Saud, and wait for Michael Moore's new movie, Farenheit 911, slated for release this summer, before the election. It is absolutely unforgivable how slimy these associations Bush has and how he has unabashedly given massive favors to Halliburton, Enron execs, the bin Laden family and the Saudis in return for their long financial support for Bush and Cheney. You can say this about Bush: he is loyal, and is a politician that, when bought, stay bought.

And how about outright criminal activity? You know that Republicans were systematically stealing Democratic Senators' files for a year and a half, leaking them to Fox News and conservative columnists, in violation of law. And even if you don't consider lying to Congress about Medicare, or spending millions of federal dollars on fake Medicare ads that were thinly disguised campaign commercials, as crimes, then how about the Plame affair? First, Bush lies to Congress, the people and the world about Saddam building nukes, saying the he knew it was true because of British intel that said Hussein tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger--when in fact, his own intel people told him the claim was fake. Then former Ambassador Joseph Wilson had the courage to come forth and tell the truth about that, in response to which, the vicious Bush attack dogs made public the fact that Wilson's wife was an undercover CIA operative, a federal felony punishable with prison time, and a crime that ruined the career of Wilson's wife, and could have placed her and those she'd recruited in danger of being killed. The investigation into that now spans from Karl Rove's office to Dick Cheney's chief of staff and others in his office.

Truly, this administration's staff has a vicious, bloodthirsty vindictive streak a mile and a half long. You speak out against them, and they will lie, cheat, steal, and commit federal crimes to dirty your name, ruin your career and drive you into hiding. And yet so many people--Paul O'Neill, Joseph Smith, Lawrence Lindsay, Anthony Zinni, Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, Richard Foster, the Medicare actuary, John DiIulio, and Richard Clarke--all viciously smeared by Bush & Co., and that's just the people who used to work in the Bush administration!

Again, this is just too much, I'm getting overloaded by all of this. And again, there is so much more.

People, we have to talk about this! get these facts down, print these posts, email them to friends, get people talking and aware of all this, because the conservative media is hiding so much of it. I don't know how many times I have spoken about facts like these with family and friends, and have gotten the reaction, "when did that happen?" because the news shows they watch and newspapers they read don't report on them much at all. And yet, these are all documented facts, people. Talk! Let people know! Don't wait, do it now!

DeLay DeMoted?

I can only post on this quickly as I get ready for work, but it appears that a long-overdue comeuppance is on its way: Tom DeLay will likely have to step down as House Majority Leader. Why? Because he will probably be indicted on felony charges of campaign finance abuses in Texas. Now, that sounds kind of like getting Al Capone for tax evasion, but it works for me.

The Union Burma Label

This is actually post #501, but I am backdating it to keep the #500 post alive at the top of the blog for a day.

As the election season draws nearer, I will more and more be commenting on the state of things, providing information as well as I can as to why we should not elect Bush, and why Kerry is far more the right man for the job. There is a new category for the blog, Reasons to Not Vote for Bush, and in the next month I plan to start making categorical entries there outlining why Bush is so terribly, disastrously wrong for the country on a plethora of issues, and how the country and the world will be far better off with Kerry in office.

In the meantime, hardly a day goes by when the Bush administration and their associates do not do something rather notably stupid, offensive, or outright illegal. The latest was actually all three: an official merchandiser for Bush/Cheney campaign apparel, it turns out, was selling sweaters emblazoned with the Bush/Cheney logo, all nice and patriotic-looking--except the pullovers were made in Myanmar, formerly known as the nation of Burma.

This is stupid and offensive because the Bush administration has been trying to fight the (unfortunately quite true) image of being an administration that approves of outsourcing, of sending jobs overseas so they can be done more cheaply--thus exporting valuable American jobs. Bush & Co. have been trying to make people believe that the U.S. economy is booming, but the fact that we are hemorrhaging jobs is kind of putting a damper on that. Just last week, Bush tried to appoint a "jobs czar" who would oversee the protection of American jobs. Unfortunately, the businessman Bush chose, a Mr. Anthony Raimondo, whose company makes pre-fab building materials, had fired 75 of his workers (one-sixth of his employees) in 2002 and sent those jobs to China. Which perfectly represented the Bush administration, but not in a way they were looking for. The Bush team promptly put its collective tail between its legs and withdrew the appointment (already six months late, and still no one occupies the job).

The illegal part comes when you realize that not only did the Bush/Cheney sweaters were made abroad, but they were made in Myanmar. And that's relevant because last July, none other than George W. Bush slapped an embargo, effective September 1st, on all imports from Myanmar, to pressure the country to change from a military dictatorship to a Democracy. So we find out that now Bush merchandise is somehow slipping by his own import ban--which the person who runs the merchandising business admits is clearly illegal.

And the blunders just keep on coming....

Bush Administration Faked News Videos

I don't know how I missed this story until now. It is related to yesterday's post on the Medicare bill, the cost of which Bush's people lied about in order to get it passed.

But now it seems that while one hand of the Bush administration was busy deceiving Congress, the other was busy deceiving the people, in the shape of fake news video segments. In the videos, "reporters" named "Karen Ryan" and "Alberto Garcia" appear as journalists who praise Bush's Medicare plan. Problem is, they're actors. In one video, actors playing a pharmacist and a customer discuss how great Bush's Medicare plan is, saying that it "helps you better afford your medications." Bush is also shown receiving a standing ovation. These videos were then sent to news stations, with scripts for the anchors to use to introduce them. Many TV stations did exactly that, presenting these fictional reporters and stories as the real thing, with no indication that they were produced by the government. The videos aired more than 50 times across the country as of a month ago.

Now, you see press releases all the time which are designed to look like they came from a media outlet when they really came straight from an interested party. But this goes way over the line. Calling actors "reporters," faking videotaped scenes with actors pretending to be pharmacists and patients, failing to identify them as coming from the government, selling them as real--and just as disturbing, making all of them with federal money, when they are little more than thinly disguised political commercials for Bush.

The Bush administration says this is somehow OK because when they pitched it to the TV stations, they didn't hide the fact they they were working for the government. But using federal money for what are effectively campaign commercials ("publicity or propaganda purposes" is the legal term used) is in violation of federal law. Yet another criminal offense on Bush's record, and like so many others, one that he will never be held accountable for.

Using the Image

In a discussion group I frequent, someone posted on a recent Bush campaign commercial that claimed Kerry was weak on National Security. In the ad, they mentioned terrorism as a major threat, and above the terrorist label, showed a picture of an obviously Arab-American male, looking back somewhat insidiously. At least one major Arab-American group is protesting this representation, and is demanding the ad be changed or pulled. Now, usually I would be posting about how it seems that Bush can’t create an ad without offending a great many people in some way or another, or how stupid and fake the ad is for saying that Kerry wants to weaken the fight against terrorism, but this time I’m focusing on the appropriateness of the image. The poster on the forum I mentioned usually provides a liberal view, but this time saw nothing wrong with the image. Just after 9/11, in one of Bush’s rare good deeds, he urged the country not to take out their anger at the terrorist attack on Muslims or Arabs; now two years and a half later, I think it is important for us to remember what Bush said then, as he so clearly has forgotten it himself. It is, in my opinion, not OK to use generic racial images like that one in the ad. You may not feel that is the case, but you may also be white. Let me explain.

This is where having personal experience with racial discrimination is necessary to understand the objections. You may think you can understand how people think and feel because of discrimination, you may even know people who have experienced it and think you understand because of that. But as someone who has been in both places, I can tell you that you have to be the recipient before you can really understand it well--and I believe I don't even have the whole understanding of racism in America because racism in Japan is less serious, though more open.

In the 1980's, Japan and America suffered a great deal of animosity due to adverse trade relations. On top of that, Japan was feeling its oats as a country, feeling on top of the world, and nationalism was enjoying a resurgence. As an American living in Japan at that time, I felt the repercussions of negativity against non-Japanese, and Americans specifically. Americans were all too often portrayed as violent, criminal, and diseased (AIDS-carrying). I got pulled over on my bicycle by police for 'biking while white,' accused every time of stealing it (even when well-groomed and dressed in a business suit, coming back from work). I was told to leave restaurants, denied membership in stores like video rental shops, and in the countryside I was stared at, pointed at and sometimes ridiculed. 95%+ of apartment landlords refused to let me even see an apartment because "gaijin wa dame" ("foreigners are no good"), and some even posted ads reading "no pets, prostitutes or foreigners allowed." On TV, Americans were often portrayed as gun-loving, violent criminals or AIDS carriers; in baseball, American players were intentionally beaned far more often than usual, then labeled as violent when they rushed the mound. The word for "foreigner" in Japanese was even played upon to change the meaning to "harmful person."

And when the cops pulled me over on my bike for the Nth time, surrounded me, checked my bike's serial number and called it in while demanding my ID and grilling me on the street--I would see Japanese people passing by, carefully looking without looking, and I knew that at least some were thinking, "so it's true!"

So if, on TV, someone showed a photo of someone who looked like me and labeled it "Criminal," then hell yes, I would be offended. Worse, if I saw that in a political ad, I would be offended and not just a little scared. Because the ad would (a) play on people's fears, and increase those fears they felt when they saw me on the street, and (b) if the politician won (and fear sells well), there would be yet another person in power who saw political gain in making me out to be a threat to the country.

Now, today, things are different and much better in Japan in these respects. The trade war pretty much forgotten about, the animosities not so prevalent. It’s a different story now. Foreigners are not so often pulled over and accused, apartments are easier to find—I haven’t been at the receiving end of any discrimination I can discern for many years now. But I can still remember, and I can still recognize the same elements of that harmful discrimination back home. Remember, Bush was supposed to be the one who didn’t do this kind of thing; that he approves of that ad, to me, shows that (a) he has changed his beliefs on the issue, (b) he never believed it and told Americans what he did after 9/11 for some other reason, (c) he still believes but is willing to betray those beliefs to get elected, or (d) his understanding of the issue is so weak that he simply can't see the difference. Any way you look at it, it’s not pretty. As James Zogby, head of the Arab American Institute said, "This is the very thing that the president warned against after 9-11. He was so wise to tell the country not to fall prey to the negative stereotypes that exploit fear. Now the president seems to be doing what he warned against."

I have seen the ad, and I do understand how Zogby feels. So because of that, and not just a generic liberal principle, I agree with him wholeheartedly. The ad should be pulled, and Bush should not do that kind of thing again.

From Drudge to the Pros--Second Batter Up in the Smear Game

Watch out, the professional dirty-tricks teams are beginning to show their colors.

Kerry has already withstood three dirty-tricks attacks, all of those coming from Matt Drudge. The first was the Botox scam, where Drudge chose two groups of photos--one where Kerry had his eyebrows raised and was lit from above, accentuating his forehead wrinkles, and another group where Kerry had his eyebrows lowered, had a relaxed expression, and was photographed with straight-on flash lighting, thus de-accentuating the wrinkles. Drudge then called these evidence that Kerry had Botox treatments. The charges were ridiculously false, of course.

Drudge's second attempt was to try to frame Kerry as being diabolically in league with "Hanoi Jane" Fonda. The evidence? A photo of Kerry in an audience standing several rows back and many meters away from Fonda, two years before she went to Hanoi. The fraud was initially taken as serious when another photo of Kerry and Fonda on stage next to each other was discovered, except that photo turned out to be a fake. The frame-up died a silent, withering death.

Drudge's final attempt was his most bold: a claim that Kerry had had an affair with a woman who worked for the Associated Press, labeled an "intern," who "fled to Africa" to escape the scandal; Drudge claimed this was being seriously investigated by several major news agencies, and claimed that three reporters had revealed to him that Wesley Clark, in an off-the-record comment, had claimed that Kerry would "implode over an intern scandal." Well, the intern was not an intern, there was no affair, the woman's parents, who were quoted as saying Kerry was a "scumbag" said nothing of the sort and planned to vote for him, and the woman had gone to Africa to be with her fiance. And the Clark quote was fake as well.

That was strike three for Drudge. I don't know if he's tried to put any more whoppers out there, but if he ever does, it is doubtful that anyone but the GOP faithful will take him as anything other than a sad joke.

Time for the next batter: the real dirty tricks artists. And they've just taken two swings at the plate.

First was an attempt to silence the public opposition with a letter to TV stations "urging" them to yank ads critical of Bush. The letter, fired off by the Republican National Committee (RNC) counsel Jill Holtzman Vogel, claimed that ads produced by the liberal advocacy group "MoveOn.org" violate federal campaign laws. The letter from the RNC chief lawyer name-dropped the FCC in a threatening manner, obviously intended to scare the stations into pulling the ads immediately.

MoveOn.org drew attention a short while ago when it put out the call for Americans to come up with "Bush in 30 Seconds" ads, designed to showcase the damage done by Bush, and reasons why he should not be re-elected. Many ads were submitted, a great many making salient points in both entertaining and sometimes poignant ways. These ads have been running on cable for a while, and MoveOn tried to get one aired during the Super Bowl--but CBS shot it down, claiming that it did not air "advocacy ads." But recently, MoveOn has spent $1.4 million of small-denomination donations to air the ads nationally, with another $1 million coming soon. In steps the RNC, trying their hardest to distort the law and get TV stations to pull opposition ads while at the same time trying to smear the other side, not being able to fight on the actual issues themselves.

The RNC lawyer claims that MoveOn had to have used donations that exceeded the legal limit and pointed out big donations from George Soros and Steven Bing, and hinted that MoveOn could not possibly cover the ads with smaller donations only. But the letter is crafted in such a way that it does not actually name specific figures or provide any actual proof of wrongdoing--the closest it comes in actuality is that vague and unsupported claim that there are not enough small donations, and otherwise quotes a lot of legalese to make it sound like there's an illegality. MoveOn, however, immediately pointed out that they have received $10 million in small donations, and points out that the RNC is distorting the law in order to scare FCC-regulated broadcasters into silencing the president's critics.

So strike one. Next comes the second pitch, a wild throw, this in the form of a bizarre accusation against Kerry himself. The claim is that a Harvard Crimson reporter, some 30 odd years ago, trailed Kerry for a time and learned that Kerry had asked for a student deferment to study in Paris for a year, but was turned down, and that in response to that, Kerry volunteered for the Navy. Reported by the right-wing Telegraph news agency in the U.K., it quotes none other than veteran Republican dirty-tricks master Lucianne Goldberg as saying, "This means that Kerry didn't jump into all that heroic service until he was pushed, and it is a very nice piece of information." Republican strategists tagged this story as somehow canceling out Bush's evading Vietnam by joining the National Guard.

That reaction is not just bizarre, but utterly insane. Those two cases are equal? Bush asked for, and got, student deferments all the way through Yale, and only after he had finished them and no more were forthcoming, did he use privilege to jump over 500 people in line and get the red-carpet welcome into the Texas ANG, his golden ticket out of Vietnam service--and after savoring several luxuries awarded solely for being the son of a politician, he went AWOL and then got out early. And let's not even talk about Cheney's string of deferments, because he had "other priorities" than serving the nation at that time.

Kerry, on the other hand, asked for one deferment to study, did not get it, and volunteered for actual duty in combat. And then he served in combat, saved lives, got shot, performed heroically, was awarded some of the highest decorations there are, and came back a veteran. And that's the same thing?

Fortunately, it looks like this fell so spectacularly flat that Republicans have taken their hands off it like a red-hot potato (excuse me, "potatoe"). After the initial release of the story, few are jumping on it any more.

Strike two.

Anyone want to wager on what the third pitch will be, and how the RNC will strike out with it?

After that, it's either Bush or Cheney left to come up to bat, and they'll have no one on base to clean up with. Pity.

Well, That's Kind of Embarrassing

In his recent batch of new election campaign ads, the more positive ad had George W. Bush talking about how good things are:

"And as the economy grows, the job base grows, and somebody who is looking for work will be more likely to find a job ... I know what we need to do to continue economic growth so people can find work."

And just a few days later, the new job numbers for February are out. With 150,000 jobs needed to just break even, with 200,000 to 300,000 net jobs gained every month seen as needed to truly break out of the recession, and with economists having averaged in their predictions that we would get 130,000 jobs in February... a grand total of 21,000 jobs were created that month. Relative to growth caused just by young people entering the work force, that's a net loss. It is below any economist's projections... and it gets worse: it turns out that January's numbers, among the highest in a long time, weren't as good as we thought. Instead of gaining 112,000 that month, we actually gained about 97,000, or 15,000 fewer than reported.

What's more, factories, construction, and manufacturing industries lost jobs, while the greatest gains were in temp jobs, which have few if any benefits and are far less desirable jobs.

But look at the bright side: it's all Clinton's fault.

Using 9/11

The question that will, without any doubt, be arising in the next eight months is, how far can Bush go to use 9/11 for his own personal political advantage?

The question first arose when Bush and the GOP tried to sell a photo of Bush on Air Force One on 9/11 to raise funds for the party during midterms elections. For $150, you could get a copy. 9/11 was a national tragedy, sacrosanct in a very real way. The key word there is that it was a national tragedy. Not a Republican one. Not a partisan one in any way. That would belittle it, and demean the price the country paid on that day, and what it means to us as a people. And you don't lightly go around using such tragedies to ask people for money so you can win an election. At least you're not supposed to.

Bush & Co., however, have been busy pushing the envelope on that one. It started with the fundraising photo, and escalated when the GOP chose New York for their convention venue this election year. Not that there is anything objectionable about New York, but at this time and with this president it smacks of opportunism. As if to say, "this is where George W. Bush had a good day." And the GOP is playing this to the hilt: they have delayed their convention to the first week of September so that it will land as close as possible to the 9/11 anniversary, and most likely will blend into the memorial ceremonials to follow, tying Bush's campaign in with the remembrance of the victims of that day. Add to that Bush's recent indirect attempt to squash the 9/11 commission from extending their deadline to do the job right because it would come closer to the GOP convention, and what you have is a president crassly using a national tragedy as a showpiece, a PR stunt, a political ad. Three thousand dead to elect a president.

Recent reports that the GOP is seriously considering using Ground Zero itself for Bush to give his acceptance speech are hard to believe, but they're there. And considering the fact that 9/11 families are already angry just because Bush has used 9/11 images in his new presidential ads, one can only imagine the firestorm of criticism and protest should Bush choose such sacred ground for what is one of the definitive partisan political events in the country. As if the GOP owns 9/11, and Bush has a right to capitalize on it for his benefit.

So you can expect to see a testing of these boundaries, and if the past is any indication, you can expect that testing to be done in a kind of blundering way, as Bush & Co. seem to be more than a little blind to the sensitivities involved.

It Was Like This When I Found It

Remember that episode of the Simpsons where Homer teaches Bart the most important lesson in life? When you screw something up, just say, "It was like this when I found it!" Bart, over time, has also used the old stand-by, "I didn't do it."

I guess we've got President El-Barto or something, because one of his first new ads (free registration required to access the page, with Real Media videos) essentially blames everything bad on Clinton. Over soft piano music and slow cross-fades between still images, the commercial displays the captions:

January 2001: The Challenge An Economy in Recession A Stock Market in Decline A Dot-com Boom... Gone Bust Then... A Day of Tragedy Today, America is Turning the Corner Rising to the Challenge Safer, Stronger

Essentially, Bush is saying that everything bad going on is not his fault--despite the fact that most of it is wrong and, at best, misleading. The recession did not kick in until much later, and Bush ignored terrorism concerns before 9/11, essentially scrapping the plans and mechanisms built by Clinton (terrorism played against Bush's campaign for missile defense). The economy he did inherit, but the ad is misleading because Bush has failed to pull us out of it. The last recession we pulled out of in three years, but this one Bush has yet to bring us out of, especially as far as jobs are concerned. OK, so he was handed a bad economy (after the biggest economic boom in history, led by Clinton)--it's his job to fix it, and he failed to do so. His fix-all cure was to slash taxes for the rich while giving a modicum to the middle class, and then wait for a recovery so he could claim credit. The promised jobs and overall recovery as well have not come, but Bush is pretending like the dickens like it has.

But the big message here is one of pointing blame: it's Clinton's fault, then 9/11 hit, I got a Trifecta, so don't blame me, I just work here, and if you don't look too hard and squint a little, you can imagine things are fine.

This is leadership? This is accountability? Of course not. But as Kerry has pointed out, Bush doesn't have much to talk about that doesn't reek of failure or scandal. So everything has to be sanitized, whitewashed... or blamed on someone or something else. The thing is, this most likely will not fly. The American people, as a whole, are well-known to blame the sitting president for what problems exist, whether the president is actually to blame or not. And the people are not complete fools, either--the finger-pointing game will only travel so far.

---

In other Bush administration business lately, the independent 9/11 commission, after asking for and getting a two-month extension (which Bush tried to block through Speaker Hastert), is now telling Bush and Cheney that the commission will not put up with Bush and Cheney chintzing out on their duties. The president and VP said they would appear before the commission to answer questions about 9/11 (if they didn't it would have been a public disgrace), but they are trying to do it and avoid doing it at the same time: they say that they will visit only if the meeting is closed and private, and only for one hour each, and only before the chairman and vice-chairman, not the whole commission. In other words, they're trying to blow it off.

Well, the commission is not having any of that. They are now insisting that Bush and Cheney appear in public in front of the full committee, without the strict limitations the administration wants to inflict. (Both Clinton and Gore have agreed to meet with the full commission without time restraints.) They cannot force Bush and Cheney to comply, but if they raise a stink--especially now that the election year is in full gear--it could look pretty bad. Particularly if families of the victims come up again and start criticizing them on TV. Hastert is trying to fix things up and cover for the president again by talking to the Republican head of the commission, but apparently the commission is a bit more independent than the GOP had hoped for.

Their evasions are lame as well--a White House spokesman claimed that executive branch members do not have to appear before "legislative bodies," claiming that the White House-appointed commission (Bush insisted on appointing the commission himself to head off a Congressional investigation) is somehow "considered a legislative body." It's an executive commission! They don't pass laws.

Bush has been dodging a real investigation into 9/11 practically since 9/12--and now, with all of this coming to a head at election time, he has no one to blame but himself. Had he started the commission right away instead of waiting a few years to get it going, this would have all been in the past already.

What Happens If...

What happens if, sometime in October this year, news agencies report that Osama bin Laden has been captured?

The story comes from Iran, where state radio has announced that bin Laden has already been captured; that he was captured in a tribal area of Pakistan, and that Rumsfeld's latest visit to the area was in relation to this. The IRNA news agency claims this all comes from "a very reliable source." So far, it is not being widely reported in the U.S. (except mostly for denials), but international news organizations are reporting on it quite a bit, particularly in the Middle East and India, though the story is spreading (The Telegraph, Daily Times, Haaretz, The Australian, Xinhua, Express India, Bloomberg). This supplements conspiracy-theory rumors in the U.S., where not only are theorists contemplating a bin Laden capture, but there are more than a few doubts about whether Saddam had been captured weeks earlier and released according to political timing. The Pentagon denies bin Laden has been captured, as does Pakistan, but there are fresh rumors that there will be an "October Surprise."

The October Surprise scenario is not unimaginable; in 1980 and '81, Iran withheld the hostage release until Reagan took office, clearly to damage Carter; it is rumored, though of course not confirmed, that Reagan's people made deals with the Iranians (considered to be the first contacts in what later became the arms-for-hostages scandal) to not release the hostages until Reagan could take credit for it.

Now here's the problem with conspiracy theories: they sound like conspiracy theories, and from association with nutball conspiracy theories (the government is practicing mind control, Clinton had JFK Jr. killed), you sound like another nutball. On the other hand, some conspiracy theories are very possible, and some are certainly true. It's certainly a big plus for someone planning a conspiracy--just call anyone who accuses you a "conspiracy theorist," and you're golden, so long as there is no smoking gun. Such theories are also next to impossible to disprove, meaning that believing in them is usually an article of faith.

So what happens if it is announced that bin Laden is captured sometime in October? Or even in August or September? The timing will be suspicious--but there will be so much happiness and relief that most people will not care when he was captured. Many will be wary, but without proof, Bush will be able to laugh off any accusers and bask in the light of "winning" the war on terror.

One problem with that, of course, is that the war on terror is unwinnable; just as capturing Saddam did nothing to stop the resistance in Iraq, capturing bin Laden will not stop the terrorists. And here's where a timing problem comes in: if the conspiracy theories are true and Bush has bin Laden, when should he announce it? If he does so too close to the election, suspicion about an "October Surprise" will be strengthened. But if he releases bin Laden too early, his people may carry out one or more terrorist attacks to demonstrate that they are still in business.

Suffice it to say that if we hear reports of a bin Laden capture before the election, I for one will be extremely suspicious; these current reports would bolster that feeling. Frankly, considering what Bush has already done, it is more than conceivable that he would not hesitate to stoop to something like this. One can only hope that if it is true, then more than just an anonymous report from Iran pops up.

Venue of Glory and Shame

Saw this in Calpundit, from a news story from The Hill (second story down), about what the GOP might do for their convention in New York this year:

The source, a veteran official of past GOP conventions, said the 50,000 delegates, dignitaries and guests would watch off-site events on giant TV screens. “Now, we’ll go to the deck of the USS Intrepid as the U.S. Marine Corps Band plays the National Anthem,” he said, pretending that he was playing the part of the convention chairman.

“Or, and this is a real possibility, we could see President Bush giving his acceptance speech at Ground Zero,” he added. “It’s clearly a venue they’re considering.”

Now, it's already bad enough that Bush has taken advantage of 9/11 for his own political purposes. Bad enough that the only good the attack could have brought would have been to unite the nation and bring the world to our door, asking how they could help--and that Bush divided us and pissed away that sympathy by going with the Neoconservatives in their bid to invade Iraq. Bad enough that the GOP chose New York as their convention center in a crass political move to use the deaths of all those people to engender political popularity.

But, giving the acceptance speech at Ground Zero? That generates disgust beyond imagination. Why not hold the nomination celebrations atop the graves of those who died in Iraq? How about Bush wrapping himself in the flags that covered the coffins of those who came home silenced? Maybe Bush could announce his decision on his vice presidential candidate in Arlington National Cemetery?

And even the alternative merits revulsion--using members of the military on a U.S. warship to provide color for a partisan political event? But then, none of this is new for Bush, is it? He used the entire military in part to win the midterms. He turned around an aircraft carrier full of men and women waiting to meet their families, at a cost of more than a millions dollars, so he could fly in as if he were some top gun (he didn't pilot), and strut around in a flight suit, all for political campaigning and posturing.

Probably neither he nor his people even are aware that using the military in that fashion, or more to the point, using the sacred ground where thousands died to campaign for election, is in some way... well, "distasteful" is not the right word. Maybe, let's see... "so crass as to be virtually unthinkable" might come closer.

On a related note, the GOP, still trying to squirm out of actually having any responsibility for the intelligence failures that caused Ground Zero to exist in the first place, tried vainly to block the 9/11 Commission (which was only approved far too long after the tragedy, and only if Bush got to hand-pick the members) from getting a much-needed extension in order to do their job. House Speaker Dennis Hastert took point in denying the extension, doing the job that Bush obviously wanted done but couldn't dare do himself--deny the extension so that Bush wouldn't be embarrassed too much by having the report released too close to the GOP convention. After all, it would be kind of uncomfortable for Bush to be delivering his acceptance speech at Ground Zero within a few weeks of his own commission talking about his intelligence failures that helped 9/11 become possible.

But the outrage was palpable. Nobody bought into the fiction that Bush wanted it, but Hastert was the bad guy. Everybody saw through the sham, and Hastert had little choice but to do a 180 and allow the commission to do their job they way they felt necessary. This was such a bipartisan necessity that even the Republican-led Commission felt is was of great importance to have more time, whatever the political cost.

One can only hope that the commission finds more than what we already know--that Clinton left Bush with a strategy to fight terrorism, and Bush and his people ignored it, letting security slide in that area because they were focused at the time on the missile shield (remember that?) and the prospect of terrorism was inconvenient to that program. After all, terrorists wouldn't fire ICBMs, they would sneak attacks in like they did on 9/11; if a nuclear bomb were to be delivered, it would by by surface. But that didn't sit well with Bush's plan to pay his contributors billions to create a useless boondoggle.

Notice how the whole missile defense idea kind of disappeared from public view after 9/11? Naturally, it's still there, though. It's just overshadowed by Bush's reckless bent to rack up even more hundreds of billions of dollars more in deficit spending. Your money, being wasted.

Would You Like Fries With Your Chrysler?

The Bush administration has been under attack for the "jobless recovery," and has hardly been doing a skilled job at covering for itself. Recently, there have been three attempts to create the appearance of job recovery without the actual job recovery itself.

First was the claim that we should be including household employment in the job numbers. In January, only 112,000 new jobs were created by the traditional Current Employment Statistics counting method. Because this looked bad, conservatives tried to spin the numbers by suddenly insisting that we look at the household measure of job growth, which gave a more impressive number of 496,000 new jobs. The household measure includes self-employed and home-working jobs; aside from being a completely different counting system, these jobs are typically not as well-paying, and are usually not considered as important to the economy as jobs counted in the traditional method. Also, if we were to switch to the new counting system retroactively, we would still see the same pattern of job loss, just on a different scale.

But that was not what the conservatives were pushing; they wanted the pure smoke-and-mirror effect that would make people think that half a million new jobs had been won instead of a less-than-satisfactory 112,000. That is redefining, however, not actual recovery. Suddenly switching to a different counting system does not mean there was greater job growth, any more than changing from Celsius to Fahrenheit means that it just got a lot hotter.

Second came the claims that what we did get--366,000 jobs since last August--was somehow a very good number, and the administration deserves praise for this. Again, redefinition, not recovery. 750,000 jobs in that time period would have been breaking even; 366,000 is bad.

And now, with the exporting of America's manufacturing job base as a hot campaign issue, we are getting a sneak peek at yet another new attempt at redefinition by Bush economists with Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, actually suggesting that jobs at fast food restaurant's like McDonald's and Burger King be counted as manufacturing jobs.

As a reporter on Lou Dobb's show put it, it would be funny if they weren't actually serious about it.

Isn't the recent bent towards redefining the economy to make things look good when they are not going way too far?

Drudge: Three Strikes, One Out for the Right Wing Sleaze Machine

First it was Botox. Then it was Jane Fonda. Then Drudge seemed to score big when he "broke" the story about Kerry and an "intern." He claimed it started when Wesley Clark told a dozen reporters off the record that Kerry would implode over an intern, and three of those reporters--never named, never confirmed--told Drudge they absolutely confirmed it was true. Then he claimed that several big news outfits were "investigating" it (what, they heard about it and found it was baseless?), and reported it as if it were then well-established fact--and millions of conservatives across the nation accepted it as such.

But the really telling thing was that everything hinged on Drudge. The Clark story, the news outfits reporting on it, the entire story, in fact, every last detail, came directly from Drudge. No evidence, no corroboration. It sounded like maybe there was something when the girl's parents called Kerry a sleazeball, even though they denied the affair in the same breath.

And guess what?

You got it. It's all fake. To the last drop. Kerry denied it. The woman's parents denied it. Now the woman, Alex Polier, denies it.. Drudge's story that she "fled" to Africa seem false as well; she apparently now lives in Africa, with her fiance. Clark endorsed Kerry, making it fairly certain the reports of his statement were false. The woman's parents now even say they'll be voting for Kerry, and when you note the "sleazeball" quote was only sourced by "The Sun," a British tabloid reeking of sleaze itself, you begin to wonder if even that quote wasn't manufactured. And still not a shred of evidence.

And golly if conservatives aren't still running with the story! (That includes nearly all the conservatives on the forums I frequent.) And Drudge himself has moved on to even more bizarre sleaze, now claiming that Polier had an affair with Kerry Finance Director Peter Maroney. Oh, those goofy right-wingers.

But hang in there folks. So Drudge has struck out, and there's one down on the Right-wing line-up. But this is just the first out of the first inning. We got nine more months of this to go. To buckle up, and make sure you're wearing your foulies--the mud and sleaze will be thick and heavy from Right field in this game.

As I Said...

Someone at the web site Professor Pollkatz's Pool of Polls (and Auto Supply, I suppose) has, despite the goofy name, done a great job of taking the polls tracking Bush's approval and disapproval numbers over the past three years. Fourteen different polls were taken to make the chart. Earlier, I posted about Bush's poll numbers and noted that they indicated a natural state of descent, checked only by special events of note. This new chart only confirms that fact. Aside from 9/11, the Iraq War, and the capture of Saddam Hussein, Bush's numbers have fallen consistently; only those events have brought his numbers up over time.

Which has gotten people to start asking, what kind of October Surprise is Bush planning? He has to know what the numbers are doing, and you can imagine Karl Rove is planning something big. At the very least, word must get out: something big happens to hike Bush's ratings within a month or so of election, it is very likely that event was planned. When people expect that, it will have less impact, not to mention less chance of happening.

On other notes, Bush's National Guard woes still keep on building. The White House still refuses to release all of Bush's records, breaking Bush's recent promise and making him a liar. Bill Burkett tells the rather convincing story, which he documented at the time when Bush was governor of Texas, that Bush's records were "cleansed" by the Texas Guard so as not to incriminate him. Several people back him up and/or testify to his credibility. A flying buddy of Bush's from Texas stood up to testify on Bush's behalf, writing a letter to the editor of the Washington Times, but when the letter is dissected, it shows that Campenni has no knowledge of whether Bush went AWOL or not. Additionally, it turns out Campenni might even be lying about where he served. And even if not, his letter does nothing more than say that according to procedure, Bush probably did what he was supposed to--but the problem with that is, Bush didn't follow standard procedure. He got preferential treatment. Like when he enlisted, and told the guard his criminal record (two arrests we knew about, but also two speeding tickets, and, interestingly, two car accidents we never heard of before), he apparently did not have to get a waiver--which anyone else would have had to do. So just because Bush got paid and honorably discharged does not actually mean he fulfilled his duties. And though one person stepped forward to say Bush was serving in Alabama, that person claims positive knowledge of "at least six" drills Bush attended--though his recent records show he did no more than four. And, oh yeah, this guy is a "staunch Republican." Surprise. And this is in contrast to two men from the same Alabama unit who said they were looking for Bush but could never find him there.

Good lord, it is a morass, but there is more, and more and more, every day. Read Calpundit to stay up on the issue.