Green USA

Conservatives Hero Worship a Murderer

2008-09-23T11:14:00.000-07:00

Conservative Bloggers' Hero a Murderer

John McCain's Dirt on the Cross Lies

2008-08-20T17:48:00.000-07:00

The exposure of another likely plagiarism, this time originally pegged to plagiarizing Solzhenitsyn, by the McCain Campaign has them and their surrogates hypocritically attacking the patriotism of a Navy Veteran:

First of all, I would like to thank the people who have sent their encouragement and kind messages to me. I have been complimented on my "good citizen journalism" and have seen people take my idea and raise it to the level such that it is being talked about in the mainstream media.
Of course, along with the good comes the bad, and I have been called a traitor, a terrorist, un-American, and someone who wants to destroy Christianity. I have been called a "pro-Obama Dungeons & Dragons" player who loves to "disparage a fellow countryman's memory of war from the comfort of mom's basement" by the McCain people. Because of these attacks, I feel that it is necessary to tell a bit about myself, and to highlight what it is that we are really up against in the candidate that is John McCain.

I served in the Navy as a Nuclear Plant Operator for over 14 years. I served onboard the USS Texas (CGN-39) in Operation Desert Storm. I served onboard the USS Arkansas (CGN-41) in support of Operation Desert Fox. I was a crewmember of the USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70) when airplanes struck the Twin Towers on 9/11, and our ship was the first ship that was flying attack missions into Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. I am a father, a husband, an active member of VoteVets, and I take personally any attack on my character or on my morality.
...snip...

They have used McCain's POW history to create a firewall to shield from all criticism, and as a universal qualifier for all things that pertain to foreign policy or to the military.
Here are some examples:

- Any question of McCain's integrity is instantly an insult to all military personnel and all veterans who have ever served.

- Any opposition to McCain's ideas must be prefaced with a disclaimer honoring his military service.

- Any McCain misstep or gaffe is instantly forgiven because he was once a Prisoner of War, and must be honored as such.

- John McCain's war hero status overrides the Ten Commandments, because according to Sean Hannity, his adultery is erased by the fact that he was imprisoned in Vietnam.

The Legend of John McCain^TM has been perpetuated by the Republican party and the Corporate Media to crush all dissent and create a teflon candidate that is beyond reproach.

Previously Brewed in New Milford:

Alexander Solzhenitsyn Or John McCain?

Who are you going to believe?

You read. You watch. You Decide:

Here is a story about Alexander Solzhenitsyn from his times in the Soviet Gulags.

Along with other prisoners, he worked in the fields day after day, in rain and sun, during summer and winter. His life appeared to be nothing more than backbreaking labor and slow starvation. The intense suffering reduced him to a state of despair.

On one particular day, the hopelessness of his situation became too much for him. He saw no reason to continue his struggle, no reason to keep on living. His life made no difference in the world. So he gave up.

Leaving his shovel on the ground, he slowly walked to a crude bench and sat down. He knew that at any moment a guard would order him to stand up, and when he failed to respond, the guard would beat him to death, probably with his own shovel. He had seen it happen to other prisoners.

As he waited, head down, he felt a presence. Slowly he looked up and saw a skinny old prisoner squat down beside him. The man said nothing. Instead, he used a stick to trace in the dirt the sign of the Cross. The man then got back up and returned to his work.

As Solzhenitsyn stared at the Cross drawn in the dirt his entire perspective changed. He knew he was only one man against the all-powerful Soviet empire. Yet he knew there was something greater than the evil he saw in the prison camp, something greater than the Soviet Union. He knew that hope for all people was represented by that simple Cross. Through the power of the Cross, anything was possible.

Solzhenitsyn slowly rose to his feet, picked up his shovel, and went back to work. Outwardly, nothing had changed. Inside, he had received hope.

[From Luke Veronis, "The Sign of the Cross"; Communion, issue 8, Pascha 1997.]

Now watch this John McCain ad:

Does anyone else get the feeling that McCain's old war stories that he rattled on about during the Forum on Faith, and during this campaign, are nothing more than a heaping, steaming pile of BS? Hey! it wouldn't be the only lies John McCain told in that church last night...

Further reading for your homework pleasure:
TomP: Cross in the Dirt, a recap of what we know
Calouste: No "cross in the sand" for McCain in 1973
Throwing Stones: McCain lies, contradicts himself on Cross story

[update] It appears that even the Freepers have known McCain's story was all a lie since way back in 2005:
And McCain had just published his latest book of embellished tales. A Freeper posted the reference to the Cross-in-the-Dirt story, and Freepers accepted it with, lets say, something less than enthusiasm.

http://www.freerepublic.com/...

Among some of the responses are:

Do I sense a run for president coming up? Sorry if I'm too cynical.

Perhaps McCain is making obvious Christian statements to gain support for 2008.
----
Perhaps??? :-)

and of course:

This guy is so full of $hit his eyes are brown. He is a sellout RINO. I would not believe a word he says.

But my jaw hit the floor when I read this:

Hmmmm. Looks like McCain has been reading Solzhenitsyn.
From The Mayor's daily posts at FR's Finest and The Canteen from the devotional "Our Daily Bread" comes Sunday's reading...

World-famous Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was sent to a Siberian prison because he criticized communism. Languishing there under intolerable conditions year after year, he decided to end his life. But suicide, he firmly believed, would be against God's will. He thought it would be better for a guard to shoot him.

So at a public assembly of the prisoners, he sat in a front row, planning to get up and walk toward an exit, compelling a guard to kill him. But to his surprise, another prisoner sat down, blocking his exit. That unknown man leaned over and, to Solzhenitsyn's astonishment, drew a cross on the dirt floor.

Here's a direct link to that response:
http://www.freerepublic.com/...
So... Both the left and the right seem to be in agreement that McCain is full of, ummm? Let's just say McCain has brown eyes, OK?

So far we have established that McCain has had different versions of the story to recount in more recent years - since about the year 2000 - for campaign purposes, a pretty clear indication that McCain can't keep the lies straight:

It's worth noting that pursuing the cross-in-the-dirt evangelical parable as it might have happened to McCain is in no way impugning anyone's war record. No one is disputing in any way what McCain did in Vietnam, his heroism, his sacrifice or any jot and tittle of his combat in arms and time in captivity. What we're curious about is how an urban legend in Christianist circles (attributed to Solzhenitsen but originating, so far as one can tell, in Chuck Colson) reshaped and altered an actual, utterly believable story of rare humanity in a prison camp. And how a campaign not only adopted the improved story but then wielded it in a campaign ad and as a critical message to evangelicals. If that ad is not actually true - and its depiction of the cross in the dirt we know is false (according to McCain, it was done with a sandal; in the ad it is done, as in Colson's account, with a stick) - it's a question of challenging a campaign's veracity, and what can only be called a cynical use of religion. Could the campaign confirm that the ad itself is visually incompatible with the Salter story? Or were they unconcerned with such detail, assuming no one would be foolish enough to question a war hero's unconfirmable anecdote - and eager merely to show the deeper (and true) point that McCain relied on God to survive the unimaginable?

And, clearly, many of the witnesses the right wing have trotted out to provide cover for the plagiarism charges in the last week claiming McCain told them before have been so contradictory in their stories it is laughable.

From May of this year:
“I don’t recall us talking specifically about our faith,” says Orson Swindle, one of McCain’s closest friends and a fellow POW. “We talked about our friends, families, our resistance posture, and that our country didn’t seem to have the will to win.”

Belief in a higher power helped them survive the routine torture and daily indignities, Swindle says. “It would help us endure what we had to endure. But we knew God wasn’t going to come down and wave a magic wand.”
Swindle's recollection today is here.

Spin reactionary right wing thugs. What a joke... His life and faith altering moment was so important that there is no recount in his earlier recounts of Christmas stories:

I just want to point out that there's a chapter specifically devoted to three Christmases of McCain's captivity in The Nightingale's Song, Robert Timberg's critically acclaimed 1995 book, which helped put McCain on the map as a political celebrity -- and the cross story does not appear. Nor does it appear anywhere else in the book.

The chapter is titled "'Tis the Season to Be Jolly." It says that on Christmas Eve 1968, a guard tried to compel McCain to attend a church service that was being staged for the benefit of visiting photographers. McCain decided "to ruin the picture," letting out a series of curses ("'Fu-u-u-u-ck you, you son of a bitch!' shouted McCain, hoisting a one-finger salute whenever a camera pointed in his direction"). There's certainly no mention of a cross in the sand in this account.

On Christmas Eve 1969, we're then told, McCain had a civil conversation with ~~the Cat, the one guard he's said in other accounts was considerate to him~~ a guard called the Cat (see Calouste's correction in comments) -- but again there's no mention of a cross in the sand. (Timberg tells us that McCain and the Cat discussed the Cat's tie clip and cigarette lighter, as well as McCain's decision not to accept early release.)

On Christmas 1970, Timberg writes, McCain was transferred to a cell with his friend Bud Day -- "the perfect Christmas present" because he'd just spent two and a half years in solitary. Again, no cross.

(The chapter also includes an account of the car accident in which McCain's first wife, whom he later divorced, was seriously injured. The accident took place on Christmas Eve 1969.)

Never mind that his rock solid faith was so affirmed by all of his experiences as a POW that as soon as he got home he cheated on his first wife repeatedly... Before divorcing her.

Do you really think anybody is believing a word that comes out of McCain or his campaign anymore?

If McCain's lips are moving... He is lying:

The problem is that in an era where things can easily be verified, “I don’t remember” is sometimes passable and “I never said that” or “I never did that” is unacceptable and easily verifiable.

We know that he lied about not writing letters to the FCC to benefit one of his campaign contributors;
We know that he lied when he said that he never asked for nor received a single earmark;
We know that he lied about privatizing Social Security;
During the primaries, he lied about his potential running mate, Romney on more than one occasion;
Over the past week, he lied about Obama and visiting the troops. In fact, his new ad on this is also a lie.
He lied this week (again) about not using the word “timetable”;
He lied about his admission that he is the damn fool when it comes to the economy;
His campaign lied about oil spills after Hurricane Katrina;
He lied about his voting record when questioned by a veteran about it;
He recently lied to either a child or to conservative bloggers about immigration;
He lied about his POW experience (i.e., Pittsburgh Steelers vs. Green Bay Packers), and while this isn’t as big a deal to me, it should be raised if stupid petty nonsense about Obama gets raised.
Of course his wife Cindy lied about her recipes for cookies when she stole them from Family Circle magazine. Of course, stealing is something that she knows well, as she also stole painkillers from a veteran’s charity that she was in charge of.
He lied recently to FoxNews about a Town Hall event they were working together on;
He lied about decreasing oil prices being because Bush lifted the offshore drilling ban;
He has lied about Obama’s and Clinton’s health care proposals;
He lied about his position on Bosnia and Kosovo in trying to prove his credentials;
He lied about Clinton and Obama’s comments regarding renegotiating NAFTA;
He lied about his opting into public financing when it was convenient for him to opt back out;
He lied a few months back about Iran-Contra.
He lied about his involvement (not sexual but political) with Iseman and her firm.
And that is just off the top of my head and a quick search.
So let’s start calling him what he is. A full on liar. Not only “forgetful”, not only “misinterpreted”, not only “misquoted”, not only mean-spirited and stretching the truth.

And, please remember you insane right wing nuts... That if you really want to address who started all of these plagiarism accusations in the first place: Right wingnut Freepers at the Free Republic. Yeah, that's right... YOUR OWN RIGHT WINGNUT SMEAR CAMPAIGN BUDDIES.

Can we help it if it is pretty darn clear that it is true?

[update] The long trail of this mythology/story on the conservative side of the aisle makes it pretty darned clear that any right wingnut could have cobbled this campaign lie together for McCain:

But it turns out that this episode probably never happened to Solzhenitsyn at all, and according to a Solzhenitsyn biographer it appears nowhere in his published writing. Columbia University professor Michael Scammell, the author of Solzhenitsyn: A Biography, says the episode "never happened," and didn't appear in Solzhenitsyn's book, Gulag Archipelago, either.

This only solves a piece of the mystery, but it's a key piece. It doesn't necessarily rule out the possibility that McCain or his biographer, Mark Salter, picked up the tale that this happened to Solzhenitsyn elsewhere and embellished it for their own purposes.

But it takes one well-trafficked theory off the table: That McCain, a fan of Solzhenitsyn, picked it up straight from his works. More broadly, it also skewers once and for all the cherished right-wing falsehood that this happened to Solzhenitsyn at all.

Of course, it's still possible that McCain or Salter picked this up from the sort of right-wing circles that it first originated in. After all, this tale was bandied about by Chuck Colson and many other wingnuts for years; McCain or Salter could have picked it up from such circles, as the notes from Colson's 1983 book, Loving God, explain:

"The story about Alexander Solzhenitsen and the old man who made the sign of the cross was first told by Solzhenitsyn to a group of Christian leaders and later recounted by Billy Graham in his New Year's telecast, 1977. It has been retold subsequently, most publicly by Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC)."

Those investigating this story have also pointed out that no one can find evidence that McCain referenced this episode until his 1999 book -- it didn't appear anywhere in a lengthy 1973 article McCain wrote about his captivity. It does seem odd that McCain would not have discussed such a pivotal moment until twenty-five years later.

What is becoming clear is that this is just more of the typical GOP and conservative crap that is made up and inserted into the mythology of any campaign or far right wingnut cause that wants to abuse the truth.

Thanks to the Dictators

2007-11-07T12:42:00.000-08:00

It's not as if these Wackos of Mass Distractions at every level of the failing bush government could get any more stupid and incompetent:

Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s decision to suspend the constitution, seize emergency power, and round up leading opposition figures is bringing quiet joy to the State Department. “Thank heavens for small favors,” an aide to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, referring to Musharraf’s actions. Compared to Pakistan, “Iraq looks pretty good.”

I am sure that these guys are not thanking heavens for this distraction from the republican warmongers' failures in Iraq:

Year	US Deaths	US Wounded
2003	486	2,411
2004	849	8,003
2005	846	5,948
2006	822	6,398
2007	846	5,411
Total	3849	28171

You can bet these guys aren't praying for distractions from the GOP's failures:

"U.S. soldiers comfort each other at their base after a roadside bomb exploded as a U.S. convoy was driving by in Saddam Hussein's hometown Tikrit, Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2003. Three soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division were wounded." (AP Photo/Karel Prinsloo)

Get out of here!

2007-07-20T21:49:00.000-07:00

Via Think Progress:

War supporters responded yesterday to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-NV) call for an up-or-down vote on Iraq withdrawal legislation by threatening a permanent Iraq filibuster. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell proposed “an automatic 60-vote threshold for all key Iraq amendments.”

Meanwhile, as the GOP gets set for this little overnight filibuster what is Joe neocon Lieberman doing? He is out here using soldiers as PROPS on the very day he plans to stab them in the back... The video and more is here.

Republican + Terrorist = No MSM

2007-06-17T19:04:00.000-07:00

If these scumbucket republicans aren't annoying enough:

Brian David Anderson was arrested in Spain in March, but you don't hear a thing as his ties to the card carrying Republican Al Qaeda terrorist Abdul Tawala Ibn Ali Alishtari are going unreported in the American MSM. Hundreds of people defrauded, MILLIONS in fraud, terrorism ties, BUT nothing from the MSM.

Brian David Anderson was arrested in Spain in March. This guy was supposedly running a ponzi scheme and was picked up after defrauding hundreds of people out of millions of dollars.
A Canadian under investigation in British Columbia and Ontario for allegedly scamming millions from investors was arrested in Spain yesterday for his suspected role in financing terrorist training camps.

Spanish police said they had arrested businessman Brian David Anderson at a Madrid hotel for his alleged involvement in financing terrorist camps in Afghanistan.

The arrest followed a joint investigation led by the FBI, which arrested Mr. Anderson's business partner, Abdul Tawala Ibn Ali Alishtari of New York, on terror financing charges last month.

Remember the Republican terrorist, Abdul Tawala Ibn Ali Alishtari? (AKA Michael Mixon)

Ok... So the terrorism part first:
Terrorism charges brought Friday against the administrator of a loan investment program claimed that he secretly tried to send $152,000 to the Middle East to buy equipment such as night vision goggles for a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan.

Abdul Tawala Ibn Ali Alishtari, 53, of Ardsley, N.Y., pleaded not guilty in U.S. District Court in Manhattan to an indictment accusing him of terrorism financing, material support of terrorism and other charges. The charges carried a potential penalty of 95 years in prison.
But would you really believe me if I told you he was a Republican?
CBS News has confirmed that Alishtari is a donor to the Republican Party, as he claims on his curriculum vitae. Alishtari gave $15,500 to the National Republican Campaign Committee between 2002 and 2004, according to Federal Election Commission records. That amount includes $13,000 in 2003, a year when he claims to have been named NRCC New York State Businessman of the Year.

Alishtari also claims to be a lifetime member of the National Republican Senate Committee's Inner Circle, which the NRCC describes as "an impressive cross-section of American society – community leaders, business executives, entrepreneurs, retirees, and sports and entertainment celebrities – all of whom hold a deep interest in our nation's prosperity and security."
The Republican party needs to be placed on "The List" of terrorist related organizations and watched very carefully.

It is pretty apparent that the FBI and Homeland Security are wasting their time watching us liberal/peacenik/Quaker/progressive/etc. types.

Go read the rest...

Feeling Lucky?

Murtha: Ixney on the funding, eh?

2007-01-11T05:14:00.000-08:00

Arianna Huffington over at HuffPo has the scoop:

Murtha Again Taking the Lead on Iraq:
"When we asked about the likelihood of the president sending additional troops to Iraq, Murtha was adamant. 'The only way you can have a troop surge,' he told us, 'is to extend the tours of people whose tours have already been extended, or to send back people who have just gotten back home.' He explained at length how our military forces are already stretched to the breaking point, with our strategic reserve so depleted we are unprepared to face any additional threats to the country. So does that mean there will be no surge? Murtha offered us a 'with Bush anything is possible' look, then said: 'Money is the only way we can stop it for sure.'

To this end, Murtha, the incoming Chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, is planning to hold wide-ranging hearings, starting January 17th, that will focus on the depleted state of our military readiness , as well as contractor corruption in Iraq and Afghanistan. The goal is to turn the spotlight on how drained the military has become, and on how any talk of a troop surge is utterly irresponsible (as well as strategically misguided). 'The public,' he said repeatedly, 'is already ahead of us on all this.

He says he wants to 'fence the funding,' denying the president the resources to escalate the war, instead using the money to take care of the soldiers as we bring them home from Iraq 'as soon as we can.'"

Murtha will deny the stupid politicians the McCain/Lieberman option of sending more targets to Iraq.

Olbermann: Mr. Bush Might Be Stupid

2006-11-03T20:26:00.000-08:00

No further comment neccessary...

Desperate Republican Vote Theft?

2006-11-03T07:50:00.000-08:00

If you have electronic voting machines in your district check your votes carefully before you leave that voting booth:

CHECK YOUR VOTES VERY CAREFULLY!

Buying Votes The Lieberman Way

2006-11-02T17:34:00.000-08:00

Connecticut Bob has a clip from an interview with Conservative Alan Schlesinger saying that he thinks that it has to be "STREET MONEY":

For those of you unfamiliar with the term...
It means money used to BUY votes.

And Schlesinger says "It makes no other sense."

So Joe... What are you really trying to hide by not disclosing who all of that $387,000 in "Petty Cash" went to? This scandal ain't going away just becsause you chose to hide your campaign finance ledgers from the public.

Feeling Lucky?

Lieberman = The Definition Of Insanity

2006-11-02T17:21:00.000-08:00

Ned Lamont drives the point home in a new add:

Vote for Ned Lamont!

Connecticut For Lieberman? Yeah right...

Why Nutmeggers Are Against Lieberman, Johnson, Shays & Simmons

2006-10-31T16:51:00.000-08:00

"Are you with us or against us?"

Last night on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, columnist Mark Shields dropped this little bombshell:

MARK SHIELDS: The highest ranking or certainly one of the highest ranking men in the United States military today has recommended that we remove all troops from Baghdad

...snip...

JIM LEHRER: So who did he make this recommendation to?

MARK SHIELDS: He made it to the civilian leadership of the United States.

Of course there is no doubt that the Bush administration will follow the soldiers suggestion since Bush claims that he always takes their advice... So that there is no question concerning the Bush's intentions for winning the hearts and minds of Iraqis the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Karen Hughes headed off to the Middle East, to deliver "news" of the newest Bush plan:

Substantially expand…[the] “Micro scholarship” program…targeted at youth in key disadvantaged areas in Iraq, such as Sadr City or Anbar Governorate.”

Create a fund to support media projects by Iraqis, such as documentaries, short films, animation, audio-visual productions and other material that would show Iraq’s reality to pan-Arab and pan-Islamic audiences.

Revive book publishing in Iraq to fill the intellectual vacuum…and support…Iraq’s hard-pressed intellectuals.

Hey wait a second? That sounds suspiciously more like "RE-EDUCATION" AND PROPAGANDA PROGRAMS, like the previous propaganda programs run by the Lincoln Group in Iraq, than it does like pulling out of Baghdad.

“Donald Rumsfeld is backing off his claim last week that the Pentagon had stopped paying to plant stories in the Iraqi news media,” the AP reports.

On Sunday’s ABC This Week, Stephen Hadley acknowledged that President Bush has not yet ordered the shut-down of the Pentagon’s propaganda campaign in Iraq.

The UK Independent presents examples of the Lincoln Group’s propaganda work in Iraq, which one military specialist described as “comical.” One exaggerated headline: ‘IRAQI ARMY DEFEATS TERRORISM.’

We all know how successful those PROPAGANDA PROGRAMS were. Just look at where we are now, eh?

In a freaking vicious cycle of "Stay the course!", even while this BOZO administration and their supporters like Lieberman, Johnson, Shays, and Simmons, are denying that fact. And all because of the Bush administrations refusal to do what everyone in America knows they should do.

Listen to the military that is telling you that we need to get out of this mess. Listen to the American people, that obviously know better than you OR any of your supposed "Foreign Policy Experts". Propaganda will not win anything in Iraq.

"Change the Course!"

Those of you that support the failed Bush administration's policies - Lieberman, Simmons, Shays and Johnson - are going to get a rude awakening on November 7th.

Because "We, the outraged people", are changing the course whether you like it or not! For all of you propaganda spouting turds on the failed GOP side, I have only one question for you:

"Are you with us or against us?"

Lamont Has Grassroots Support

2006-10-31T16:39:00.000-08:00

The Democratic establishment in Washington isn't doing much for Ned Lamont:

Ned Lamont got little financial support from congressional Democrats - and none from Connecticut Sen. Christopher J. Dodd and key Senate veterans - in the crucial weeks after he won the party's Senate nomination Aug. 8, according to new campaign finance data.

Lamont has alot of money, money that he has ponied up on his own, and money from the grassroots. Lamont doesn't get much from the entrenched establishment because they are afraid of him. But having the largest base of grassroot support in Connecticut is a good thing if you are looking to fix what is broken on Capitol Hill. Lamont hasn't taken anything from corporate lobbyists, and nothing from any PACs.

Ned Lamont's support is people powered.

Joe Lieberman has alot of money. He had a HUGE war che$t. But where does all of that money come from? Lobbyists and PACs and from republican supporters that want to see the Connecticut-bush-clone "Stay the course!"

Joe Lieberman's support is the problem that needs to be fixed.

Face the facts... Influence for votes on Capitol Hill is a bought and sold commodity to the entrenched establishment. Lobbyists for special interests, PACs, and corporations are buying the old guard establishment on a daily basis, and we are the ones that are losing out.

Voting for Ned Lamont is one little step that can help stem the tide of corruption. It can help take back one of those votes in the Senate and make it ours. It can help make that one vote beholden to us Nutmeggers and NOT to the entrenched establishment that is afraid of what the Lamont campaign means to them.

Can we afford to miss this opportunity to take back that one Seanate vote for ourselves? Not if we truely want to fix what is wrong with our government.

Change the course!
Vote for Ned Lamont

Lamont Rocks!

2006-10-30T09:21:00.000-08:00

There is no doubt that
JOE HAS GOT TO GO!

Democratic candidate Ned Lamont will
"CHANGE THE COURSE!"

Lieberman info

Hastert Lies AGAIN...

2006-10-29T11:57:00.000-08:00

Hastert Just can't seem to stop getting caught lying. Tuesday the man behind the Foley cover-up released a statement that was... Well? An outright lie. To put it mildly.

Democrat Leader Pelosi’s plan is to leave our borders open, grant blanket amnesty and provide Social Security benefits to illegal immigrants. Is THAT their plan? Democrat Leader Nancy Pelosi has NEVER visited the border. She claims to understand the needs of those on the front lines but has never visited those agents and offers no solutions.

How do we know it was another Hastert lie?

Here is a snippet from the Pelosi response:

“I visited the southern border in March with Congressman Silvestre Reyes, who had a distinguished career of leadership in the Border Patrol. I was able to see firsthand the Republicans’ record of failure on border security.

“This morning, the President plans to sign legislation authorizing a 700-mile border fence that his own Administration does not plan to build and for which the Republican Congress has not provided construction money.

“This fence that will not actually be built is a perfect symbol of the Republicans’ unwillingness to make controlling our borders a priority."

The Texas Congressman Reyes, after confirming Pelosi's visit to the border, had this to say about it all:

Perhaps that is why after six years of controlling the White House, the Senate, and the House, their ‘signature achievement’ on border security is a 700 mile fence along a 2,000 mile border. This fence doesn’t come close to solving our problem.

Unfortunately, no amount of photo-ops or signing ceremonies is going to take the place of real leadership on this vitally important issue.

I am certain the planned 12 foot high fence will increase the sales in Mexico of 13 foot ladders to get over it and shovels to dig under it, but I doubt it will stop many illegal border crossings. I also think that Hastert doesn't understand the real needs concerning securing our borders and hasn't offered any real solution at all.

Now that Hasterts latest lie has been exposed, I wonder how long it will be before he addresses his earlier lies about the Foley cover-up? Brian Ross at ABC news' The Blotter has an update on another Republican being investigated:

A source close to former House Clerk Jeff Trandahl told ABC News that Arizona Congressman Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.) was one of a small number of "problem members"

...snip...

Kolbe was also asked by reporters to respond to reports that the U.S. Attorney in Phoenix has opened a preliminary inquiry into a 1996 camping trip Kolbe took with two high school boys, both former pages, following a report by MSNBC that one adult member of the trip was "creeped out" by "fawning, petting and touching" on the arms, shoulders and back of one of the teenagers by Kolbe.

"I know there are a number of inquiries underway, and we're cooperating fully with all those inquiries, and I'm sure at the end of the time it will show that we acted appropriately and did exactly the right thing," Kolbe said.

"A small number of "problem members""?
"A number of inquiries"?
"All those inquiries"?

IS ANYONE ELSE SEEING A LOT BIGGER PROBLEM HERE?

Just how many Republicans are being investigated? I am starting to think that I will have to keep my kids locked inside my home, at least until the elections are over, just in case a Republican comes to the neighborhood campaigning... Because you never know if they are one of the ones being investigated... Because Hastert and the rest of the GOP leadership covers up for all of them.

Is Nancy Johnson Wrong AGAIN? CT- 05

2006-10-29T11:48:00.000-08:00

Fuzzy Turtle pointed me to an online paper called The Corner Report:

Tuesday was a bad day for Republican Congresswoman Nancy Johnson.

First, the AFL-CIO issued a “report card” on the congresswoman’s record on working family issues during her 24 years as the Republican representative in the state’s Fifth Congressional District – a report card with a failing grade.

Next, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee distributed a list of Johnson’s record on health care, including the $739,000 she’s taken from pharmaceutical companies.

Then, signs began sprouting on trees on Rt. 7 and elsewhere in the Northwest Corner that say “Nancy Johnson is WRONG.” But the word “is” is written in such small letters that drivers passing by see only the words “Nancy Johnson WRONG.”

--- Read the rest at The Corner Report

Apparently there are alot of people that think NANCY JOHNSON is WRONG. Welcome to the club that seems to grow exponentially as the campaign season progresses towards

"NATIONAL KICK THE CORRUPT REPUBLICAN BUMS OUT DAY"

The Corner Report is a pretty good read. It has the look and feel of a typical Blog, but the writing style of a hometown paper. I couldn't help but stop and check out a few of the articles while I was there. Definately worth repeat visits.

The article also reminded me of a little sign problem we have in our town:

There is an empty house for sale a couple of streets over from where I live. I noticed a "Vote Johnson" sign up there a few times but it kept disappearing. There one day, gone the next. A couple of weeks ago I saw the people that used to live there and as I watched they removed the sign and tossed it in the garbage. The sign still keeps popping up on that empty for sale house.

And it keeps *POOF* vanishing.

It is obvious that someone keeps putting the sign there against the owners will in the hopes of "creating" a view of alot more local support for Johnson than there really is.

It's like Joe Lieberman's $387,000 illegal slush fund that was apparently used to pay for out of state people, from NJ and elsewheres, to campaign for him here because he doesn't have that sort of volunteer base in Connecticut like Ned Lamont does. Joe's support is strictly lobbyists' and other Republican money sources funneled through back-channels that pays for campign muscle. Some call them the "Liebergoons". lol

I guess Lieberman and Johnson are both pretty darn pathetic! That is what happens to career politicians when they sell their souls to corporate lobbyists and continue to cling to the failed policies of the Bush administration...

They lose touch with the people, and they lose all of their local support.

Certainly there are still some hardcore right-wing-nuts that will support any republican candidate regardless of their corruption and incompetence. But, thankfully, their numbers are obviously dwindling.

How Does The Incompetent Bush Admin. Confirm Intel Reports on WMDs?

2006-10-26T18:26:00.000-07:00

They wait for things to BLOW UP!

Buried in the bowels of a Washington Post story by Glenn Kessler, while travelling with Condi Rice on a "Junk It" in Moscow, reveals the incompetent Bush administration's strategy for assesing North Korea's advances in developing their nuclear technology:

Before North Korea announced it had detonated a nuclear device, some senior officials even said they were quietly rooting for a test, believing that would finally clarify the debate within the administration.

Yep... Just sit back and wait for the explosions.

Isn't that the same tactic they used to assess the threat when reports that "Al Quaeda determined to attack within US" hit the administrations' desks before 9-11? The same tactic that resulted in a "Goat" eyed president frozen from fear and staring at the bright lights of jets crashing into buildings.

The GOP and their pet neocons still sit and wait for the explosions...

While the rest of America has to watch the American death toll get higher and higher in the biggest military blunder ever in American history. You know? The "Civil War in Iraq". The one that everyone lays much of the blame at the feet of Donald Rumsfeld for his gross incompetence, bordering on negligence when it comes to equiping our soldiers with the needed equipment to do the job. A situation that to this day has yet to be rectified.

And just in case you weren't already worried enough about the Bush administrations' innumerable past failures, whom do they put on the job to protect us from the next attacks?

After 9/11, the United States launched an extensive effort to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction. The Special Operations Command, which has been directed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to take the lead in planning and leading U.S. counter-terror campaigns, is playing a major role.

SOCOM’s commander, Army Gen. Bryan D. Brown, told the conference that he has given Rumsfeld a 600-page plan to fight a global war, including a strategy to prevent terrorists from using mass-casualty weapons against the U.S. The plan went through six revisions before Rumsfeld accepted it, Brown said.

He revealed few details of the plan. A key concept, however, is in the slogan, “no borders, no boundaries,” he said. “We don’t have geographical boundaries in special operations,” he said. “We have a global defense.”

That slogan also is meant to be taken intellectually, he said. “The borders and boundaries in our minds are those of our own making,” he said. “In fighting this war, we have to think outside the box.”

National Defense Magazine - February 2005

Donald
"The Most Incompetent Neocon Of Them All!"
Rumsfeld...

Apparently, given their actual track record, their idea of "thinking outside the box" is to wait for the "mushroom cloud" here in the USA... Then, and only then, will the Bush administration be able to confirm reports that terrorists wanted to attack us again.

But Bush won't mind if that happens.

In an all-out PR assault, co-ordinated by Rove with the "embeded MSM", Bush will just declare that:

"They are blowing us up over here because we are winning over there!"

And some Americans, the kind that blindly cheered when a similar meek-minded battlecry eminated from the Cheerleader in Chief's office, the kind that blindly follow the incompetent bush and support lying GOP candidates without question as to where the GOPs' real loyalties lay, will hail this as a combination of both foreign & domestic policy genius.

Genius MY ASS!

Those kind of GOP supporters should do themselves a favor. Go and buy themselves a new campaign T-shirt with this self-evident GOP campaign slogan boldly emblazoned upon it:

"I'M WITH STUPID...
VOTE GOP"

Just add a few "Faux-Patriotic" stars and stripes and the picture will be complete. And then those GOP supporters can sit and wait with all of the patience of the ranting and raving lunatics that they are (much like their idiot leader Bush) for the next explosion coming to a city near them if they get their way in the November 7th elections.

Bush and Lieberman in Hot Water

2006-10-26T18:09:00.000-07:00

"Stay the course!"
That is all you will get from both Bush and Lieberman.

Despite President Bush's recent denials that "We've never been stay the course" and the NY Times' FALSE assertions to counter Ned Lamont's caqmpaign charges that Joe Lieberman has been a consistent cheerleader for Bush's failed "Stay the course!" policy, the fact remains that this is a bold face lie that exposes BOTH Bush and Lieberman's penchant for polticizing this war by telling people whatever they have to in order to cover their political asses and get more votes. It also doesn't say much about the researchers and writers at the "Post Judy Miller" NY Times.

In Bush's and Lieberman's own words:

BUSH: We will stay the course. [8/30/06]

LIEBERMAN: We have to stay the course in Iraq now and continue to build a stable, modernizing, democratizing country there. [01/04/04]

BUSH: We will stay the course, we will complete the job in Iraq. [8/4/05]

LIEBERMAN: We can do better. I will do better. I will make it international. I will stay the course, and I'll create a stable, democratizing, modernizing Iraq, which would be a tremendous step forward in the Middle East and the Islamic world and in our war against terrorism. [01/11/2004]

BUSH: We will stay the course until the job is done, Steve. And the temptation is to try to get the President or somebody to put a timetable on the definition of getting the job done. We’re just going to stay the course. [12/15/03

LIEBERMAN: Well, let's put it this way. What I'm most happy about is that he said that he will stay the course in Iraq until we finish the job, and the Iraqis are in control of their own destiny. [07/28/04]

BUSH: And my message today to those in Iraq is: We’ll stay the course. [4/13/04]

LIEBERMAN: We want to not only stay the course: we want to achieve victory. [04/26/04]

BUSH: And that’s why we’re going to stay the course in Iraq. And that’s why when we say something in Iraq, we’re going to do it. [4/16/04]

LIEBERMAN: "I thought the president gave the strongest case that I can remember him giving about why we went in and why we have to stay the course," Lieberman said, adding, "We've got to adopt a strategy of success. A defeat will create chaos in Iraq, chaos in the Middle East, and will embolden the terrorists in a way that will endanger our future and our children's future." [04/15/04]

Here is over 30 examples of Bush saying we must "Stay the course!" in some form or another. Media Matters has the goods on more of Lieberman's "Bush enabling" statements that mirror Bush administration talking points as perfectly as if they had come straight out of Karl Rove's mouth, even emulating the GOP talking point that defeat will create chaos "and will embolden the terrorists" that we have heard so often from every mouthpiece for the Bush administration.

If defeat will create chaos then we must be losing pretty badly since those terrorists are getting pretty emboldened according to defeatist Republican Senator Lindsey Graham:

"We're on the verge of chaos, and the current plan is not working," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said in an Associated Press interview. U.S. and Iraqi officials should be held accountable for the lack of progress, said Graham, a Republican who is a frequent critic of the administration's policies.

Asked who in particular should be held accountable Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, perhaps, or the generals leading the war Graham said: "All of them. It's their job to come up with a game plan" to end the violence

Bush and Liberman clearly say stay the course over and over. Because you never know who you might embolden in defeat. Now BOTH Bush and Lieberman are trying to hide from their mutual love of staying the course. It's almost like they are freaking flip-flopping clones.

This is why Ned Lamont is correct in attacking Lieberman's support of the failed Bush policy of staying the course. And Lieberman hates that.

And Senator Graham is right in laying alot of blame on Donald Rumsfeld. Here is what Rumsfeld has to say about Bush cutting and running from his "Stay the course!" policy:

Rumsfeld called media reports about Bush’s reversal “nonsense,” and said “of course” Bush is “not backing away from staying the course.”
---CLICK HERE TO LISTEN

The ever-incompetent Rumsfeld says that "Stay the course!" is still the Bush plan, regardless of the Bush "cut and run" posturing.

Lieberman and Bush are both in some hot water over their attempts to hide from their "Stay the course!" whitewash. If you vote for Joe Lieberman you are clearly voting for more of the same CHAOS. And all of the Bush backpeddling and NY Times' lies can't hide Lieberman from his own public record of support for the failed "Stay the course" Bush policy.

Vote For the Democratic candidate Ned Lamont, because he will work to "CHANGE THE COURSE!" of Lieberman's and the Bush administration's failed policies.

Don't look at this!

2006-10-26T17:05:00.000-07:00

So you can be an informed voter:

Info on Ned Lamont:

Ned Lamont and Joe Lieberman - Official Campaign Website

Ned Lamont and Joe Lieberman - Ned Lamont, the Political Entrepreneur

Ned Lamont and Joe Lieberman - "Democrats Back Lamont; Lieberman Files Independent Run" (F0x)

Ned Lamont and Joe Lieberman - Unofficial Ned Lamont Resource

Ned Lamont and Joe Lieberman - Unofficial Lamont Blog

Ned Lamont and Joe Lieberman - "The Democrats Mean Business" (WSJ)

Ned Lamont and Joe Lieberman - "Ned Lamont vs. Joe Lieberman" (The Nation)

Ned Lamont and Joe Lieberman - "Lieberman Loses Debate With Challenger Ned Lamont"

Ned Lamont and Joe Lieberman - "Lamont: Lieberman Sounded Like Cheney"

Ned Lamont and Joe Lieberman - "Lamont Fires Up Naples" (New Haven Independent)

Info on Joe Lieberman:

Joe Lieberman - "Seasonal Memory Lapses" by Paul Bass (Hartford Courant)

Joe Lieberman - "Truth About Joe"

Joe Lieberman - "Lieberman Wins Republican Friends, Democratic Enemies..." (WaPo)

Joe Lieberman - "Joe Lieberman is a Big Oil Republican" (LamontBlog)

Joe Lieberman - "Kerry Calls Lieberman the New Cheney" (ABC)

Joe Lieberman - "Joe Lieberman Doesn't Care About Handicapped People" (Wonkette)

Joe Lieberman - "Joe Lieberman is Running With a Bad Crowd" (Firedoglake)

Joe Lieberman - "116 Reasons Not to Vote for Joe Lieberman"

Joe Lieberman - "How Joe Lieberman Tried to Kill Rock 'N Roll" (Huffington Post)

Info on Alan Schlesinger:

Alan Schlesinger and Joe Lieberman

Info on races across the nation:

--AZ-Sen: Jon Kyl

--AZ-01: Rick Renzi

--AZ-05: J.D. Hayworth

--CA-04: John Doolittle

--CA-11: Richard Pombo

--CA-50: Brian Bilbray

--CO-04: Marilyn Musgrave

--CO-05: Doug Lamborn

--CO-07: Rick O'Donnell

--CT-04: Christopher Shays

--FL-13: Vernon Buchanan

--FL-16: Joe Negron

--FL-22: Clay Shaw

--ID-01: Bill Sali

--IL-06: Peter Roskam

--IL-10: Mark Kirk

--IL-14: Dennis Hastert

--IN-02: Chris Chocola

--IN-08: John Hostettler

--IA-01: Mike Whalen

--KS-02: Jim Ryun

--KY-03: Anne Northup

--KY-04: Geoff Davis

--MD-Sen: Michael Steele

--MN-01: Gil Gutknecht

--MN-06: Michele Bachmann

--MO-Sen: Jim Talent

--MT-Sen: Conrad Burns

--NV-03: Jon Porter

--NH-02: Charlie Bass

--NJ-07: Mike Ferguson

--NM-01: Heather Wilson

--NY-03: Peter King

--NY-20: John Sweeney

--NY-26: Tom Reynolds

--NY-29: Randy Kuhl

--NC-08: Robin Hayes

--NC-11: Charles Taylor

--OH-01: Steve Chabot

--OH-02: Jean Schmidt

--OH-15: Deborah Pryce

--OH-18: Joy Padgett

--PA-04: Melissa Hart

--PA-07: Curt Weldon

--PA-08: Mike Fitzpatrick

--PA-10: Don Sherwood

--RI-Sen: Lincoln Chafee

--TN-Sen: Bob Corker

--VA-Sen: George Allen

--VA-10: Frank Wolf

--WA-Sen: Mike McGavick

--WA-08: Dave Reichert

CT Blogs-

Bye Bye Rob [Simmons]-

Caffeinated Geek Girl-

Drinking Liberally, New Milford-

Hat City Blog- Joe Lieberman's Blog-

Joementum-

Lamont Campaign Blog (official)-

LamontBlog (unofficial)-

Liebermania-

NH Independent-

No More Nancy (CT-05)-

CT Campaigns-

Chris Murphy (CT-05)-

Joe Courtney (CT-02)-

Diane Farrell (CT-04)-

John DeStefano (Gov)-

Dan Malloy (Gov)

CT Sites-

Caucus of CT Dems-

Clean Up CT-

CT Citizen Action Group-

CT For Lieberman-

DeStefano for Gov-

Dump Joe-

Judith Blei Government Relations-

Lamont Resource (unofficial)

Ned Lamont Joe Lieberman Nancy Johnson Chris Shays Rob Simmons Connecticut post Dianne Farell Chris Murphy Joe Courtney CT Races Elections CT-04 CT-05 CT-02 CT-Gov Governor Jodi Rell CT Campaigns Ned Lamont (Sen) Chris Murphy (CT-05) Joe Courtney (CT-02) Diane Farrell (CT-04) John DeStefano (Gov) George W Bush Dick Cheney Mark Foley Denis Hastert GOP republican democrat independent polls local hartord courant danbury new milford town news-times spectrum my left nutmeg stamford advocate washington times WaPo NY Times Greenwhich times

Information on campaigns across Connecticut and the nation

2006-10-24T16:34:00.000-07:00

So you can be an informed voter:

Info on Ned Lamont:

Ned Lamont and Joe Lieberman - Official Campaign Website

Ned Lamont and Joe Lieberman - Ned Lamont, the Political Entrepreneur

Ned Lamont and Joe Lieberman - "Democrats Back Lamont; Lieberman Files Independent Run" (F0x)

Ned Lamont and Joe Lieberman - Unofficial Ned Lamont Resource

Ned Lamont and Joe Lieberman - Unofficial Lamont Blog

Ned Lamont and Joe Lieberman - "The Democrats Mean Business" (WSJ)

Ned Lamont and Joe Lieberman - "Ned Lamont vs. Joe Lieberman" (The Nation)

Ned Lamont and Joe Lieberman - "Lieberman Loses Debate With Challenger Ned Lamont"

Ned Lamont and Joe Lieberman - "Lamont: Lieberman Sounded Like Cheney"

Ned Lamont and Joe Lieberman - "Lamont Fires Up Naples" (New Haven Independent)

Info on Joe Lieberman:

Joe Lieberman - "Seasonal Memory Lapses" by Paul Bass (Hartford Courant)

Joe Lieberman - "Truth About Joe"

Joe Lieberman - "Lieberman Wins Republican Friends, Democratic Enemies..." (WaPo)

Joe Lieberman - "Joe Lieberman is a Big Oil Republican" (LamontBlog)

Joe Lieberman - "Kerry Calls Lieberman the New Cheney" (ABC)

Joe Lieberman - "Joe Lieberman Doesn't Care About Handicapped People" (Wonkette)

Joe Lieberman - "Joe Lieberman is Running With a Bad Crowd" (Firedoglake)

Joe Lieberman - "116 Reasons Not to Vote for Joe Lieberman"

Joe Lieberman - "How Joe Lieberman Tried to Kill Rock 'N Roll" (Huffington Post)

Info on Alan Schlesinger:

Alan Schlesinger and Joe Lieberman

CT Blogs-

Bye Bye Rob [Simmons]-

Caffeinated Geek Girl-

Drinking Liberally, New Milford-

Hat City Blog- Joe Lieberman's Blog-

Joementum-

Lamont Campaign Blog (official)-

LamontBlog (unofficial)-

Liebermania-

NH Independent-

No More Nancy (CT-05)-

CT Campaigns-

Chris Murphy (CT-05)-

Joe Courtney (CT-02)-

Diane Farrell (CT-04)-

John DeStefano (Gov)-

Dan Malloy (Gov)

CT Sites-

Caucus of CT Dems-

Clean Up CT-

CT Citizen Action Group-

CT For Lieberman-

DeStefano for Gov-

Dump Joe-

Judith Blei Government Relations-

The GOP Legacy

2006-10-23T17:19:00.000-07:00

If a picture is worth a thousand words...

THAN THIS ONE SPEAKS VOLUMES!

CLICK ON THE PIC!

If you vote for the GOP or for Lieberman
EXPECT MORE OF THE SAME.

That is exactly what "Stay the course!" means...

Lieberman and his 3 GOP Torture Loving Buddies in Connecticut

2006-10-21T11:30:00.000-07:00

Not your typical "Freeway Bloggers"... Think big!

Think BILLBOARD BIG!

Lifted from a dKos diary by DelicateMonster

"A group of religious activists has purchased a giant billboard on the interstate for a massive ad accusing four Connecticut incumbents of voting for torture. The Associated Press reports that the group, Reclaiming the Prophetic Voice, bought the space to target Senator Joe Lieberman and and GOP Reps. Chris Shays, Nancy Johnson and Rob Simmons. According to the AP piece all four voted for the controversial Military Commissions Act of 2006, which allows the President to "authorize aggressive interrogation methods that might otherwise be seen as illegal by international courts." In other words, torture, as well as the suspension of habeas corpus, of course."

They have a picture of the actual billboard up at the I Wage Peace website, a group that is working with Reclaiming the Prophetic Voice to get this message out, if you want to see it.

Rell: Selling Out CT to Big Apple Buyers

2006-10-15T18:53:00.000-07:00

It is bad enough when you see the list of companies that have contracts with the State of Connecticut that are also MAJOR donors to the Rell campaign, something Rell claims she has never done... But today we see that Rell was selling out Connecticut to Big Apple buyers intent on gaining more influence on our States business than she will ever give to regular Nutmeggers.

About 75 people attended the $1,000-per-person reception Thursday evening, said Rell's campaign spokesman, Rich Harris.

Like many of Rell's other fundraising breakfasts, luncheons and receptions, the event was closed to the press. The reception was also not mentioned on Rell's campaign website.

Republican Rell influence peddling? Oh no! Never!

What do you have to hide, Jodi, that you can't let the press into these buyouts of our State?

For a full understanding of influence peddling see Republican criminal/super-lobbyist Jack Abrahmoff, criminal Republican Randy "Duke" Cunningham, criminal Republican Bob Ney, or likely criminal Republican Curt Weldon.

OR, of course, you could just look at Rell's mentor, disgraced Republican and former Governor Rowland to know how that scam works:

Her showing at the Garde Arts Center in New London won't hurt her with voters relieved that this steady-as-she-goes matron is not John G. Rowland, her glib predecessor and former political teammate whose greediness landed him in jail.

But a few gaffes in an otherwise OK performance are what viewers are talking about.

Late in the debate, Mrs. Rell pulled a George W. Bush when considering whether she made any mistakes in office. She didn't name any - though surely she could have wished, for just one thing, that the state Department of Transportation had kept an eye on the contractor who installed hundreds of faulty drains on I-84.

"I'm Jodi Rell, and I am perfect BUT please ignore the skeletons in my closet!"

Good lord!

Rell = GOP + Bush + Rowland + $$$ wasted + incompetent

That is basic math for republican politics...

Info on the CT Senate Race:

2006-10-04T22:50:00.000-07:00

So you can be an informed voter:

Info on Ned Lamont:

Ned Lamont - Official Campaign Website

Ned Lamont - Ned Lamont, the Political Entrepreneur

Ned Lamont - "Democrats Back Lamont; Lieberman Files Independent Run" (F0x)

Ned Lamont - Unofficial Ned Lamont Resource

Ned Lamont - Unofficial Lamont Blog

Ned Lamont - "The Democrats Mean Business" (WSJ)

Ned Lamont - "Ned Lamont vs. Joe Lieberman" (The Nation)

Ned Lamont - "Lieberman Loses Debate With Challenger Ned Lamont"

Ned Lamont - "Lamont: Lieberman Sounded Like Cheney"

Ned Lamont - "Lamont Fires Up Naples" (New Haven Independent)

Info on Joe Lieberman:

Joe Lieberman - "Seasonal Memory Lapses" by Paul Bass (Hartford Courant)

Joe Lieberman - "Truth About Joe"

Joe Lieberman - "Lieberman Wins Republican Friends, Democratic Enemies..." (WaPo)

Joe Lieberman - "Joe Lieberman is a Big Oil Republican" (LamontBlog)

Joe Lieberman - "Kerry Calls Lieberman the New Cheney" (ABC)

Joe Lieberman - "Joe Lieberman Doesn't Care About Handicapped People" (Wonkette)

Joe Lieberman - "Joe Lieberman is Running With a Bad Crowd" (Firedoglake)

Joe Lieberman - "116 Reasons Not to Vote for Joe Lieberman"

Joe Lieberman - "How Joe Lieberman Tried to Kill Rock 'N Roll" (Huffington Post)

Info on Alan who?
Nevermind... heh

12 Days of Justice - Day 5

2005-12-21T07:04:00.000-08:00

So far in the 12 Days of Justice daily series you have learned that:

Judge Samuel Alito does not respect the primary role of the Legislative branch of our government.
By Tampopo

Judge Alito will threaten the fundamental rights and basic legal protections for working Americans of all ages.
By AP

Judge Alito has violated the laws and ethical codes that govern the conduct of federal judges and was a member of the radical and discriminatory group CAP.
By Steven D

Judge Alito's view of discrimination against persons with disability is so restrictive that "few if any...cases would survive summary judgment."
By susanhu

Todays diary for Day 5 will be a short and to the point explanation of Judge Alito's views concerning women and abortion rights. It will deal with his radical and demeaning views from the perspective of his positions revealed in certain abortion cases, memos, applications, and discussions of Roe v Wade.

[Updated]: to reflect many edits! Please check the bottom to cross-post easily.

Join me in the back alley to get a clear view of Alito.

In 1985 Alito made crystal clear his position concerning Roe v Wade.

Alito's name does not appear on any briefs the Reagan Solicitor General's office filed in abortion-related cases. However, just a few months before Alito wrote his DOJ application letter touting his contribution to cases in which the government argued that "the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion," the Solicitor General's office had filed a brief in Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists on that very subject. The brief urged that "this Court should overrule" Roe v. Wade. The Court rejected the Solicitor General's arguments, with only two justices agreeing that Roe should be overturned.

T. R. Goldman at law.com Offers this opinion of the upcoming battle:

If Alito's jurisprudential views match those on the Thornburgh brief -- and at least in 1985, Alito indicated that they do -- then the job application provides the Judiciary Committee with the type of window into a future justice's thinking that, since the failed nomination of Robert Bork, has become almost nonexistent.

This is a nomination demanding to be "Borked" into nonexistence. But this still does not give a clear picture of his views on women's rights. Please consider taking and using any or all parts of the following letter and using it to contact your Senators concerning this nomination. Feel free to adapt and edit this letter, or you can just say how you feel about this in your own words. All we ask is that you take action before it is too late.

What does Samuel Alito think about women and abortion rights?

In Judge Alito's 1992 dissent in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, Alito argued that a law requiring a woman in certain circumstances to notify her spouse before seeking an abortion did not pose an undue burden on a woman's right to choose. Alito asserted that if parental notification requirements were constitutional, as the Supreme Court had previously held, then spousal notification requirements must be permissible as well. (Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 947 F.2d 682 (3d Cir. 1991), aff'd in part, rev'd in part, 505 U.S. 833 (1992).)

Alito's colleagues on the Third Circuit and a 5-4 Supreme Court majority disagreed. Writing for that Supreme Court majority, Sandra Day O'Connor firmly rejected Alito's troubling logic:

"A State may not give to a man the kind of dominion over his wife that parents exercise over their children."

(Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992) at 898.)

Sandra Day O'Connor was correct in rejecting Alito's view of women as subservient to men and less than equal in the eyes of the law.

In a 1985 memo Alito had advised the Reagan Administration that it should attempt to undermine Roe v. Wade. Alito urged the administration to file a friend-of-the-court brief in Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and argued that this brief could promote "the goals of bringing about the eventual overturning of Roe v. Wade, and in the meantime, of mitigating its effects."

Alito wanted the administration to "make clear" that it "disagree[d] with Roe v. Wade," but argued that the most effective long-term strategy of persuading the Supreme Court to overturn this groundbreaking precedent was to chip away at it slowly through extremely restrictive state laws. Overturning Roe v Wade would most certainly result in a return to the days of dangerous "illegal" abortions.

Is this the kind of nomination that sounds like a moderate? This candidate is not representative of my views, nor of mainstream America.

Alito clearly has no problem with forcing his radical ideals on women.

I strongly urge you to vote against this horrible nomination because no woman should be forced by anyone to have to resort to using a coat hanger to perform a back alley abortion. When you consider that Alito's warped views would be replacing the moderate voice of Sandra Day O'Connor there should be no doubt that Alito's nomination must be stopped.

Signed,

Some suggested contacts and petitions:

Your senators

The Judiciary Committee

Your representatives

Congress.org

Campus Progress "Stop Alito's America"

PFAW "Save the Court"

Planned Parenthood Anti-Alito Petition

Naral Anti-Alito Petition

Rolling Justice

Plan B Petition

Sending a FAX via the Web (For those of us that don't have a fax machine at home.)

Again, feel free to copy and paste any and all of the information or images you will see put up over the next couple of weeks by the Anti-Alito Brigade into Blogs and letters as we hold Alito's feet to the fire. Even if you only participate on a few of the days it can help make a difference. There are so many issues where Samuel Alito's views and allegiances are just flat out wrong for a SCOTUS nomination.

Watch for Alice's diaries on the "separation of church and state/religious freedom" for days 6 and 7... On two different days because we want to keep them twice as separated!

Actions for: Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4

12 Days of Justice

2005-12-14T11:46:00.000-08:00

There are many reasons to be wary of the nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court.

Over the next 12 days the Anti-Alito Brigade will be bringing you many of those reasons, and also some actions that you might consider to help stop this horrible nomination.

The main intention of this nomination is to try and tip the balance of power away from the legislative branch and towards the President.

Alito is an activist judge that will legislate from the bench on many of the issues that all progressives hold dear to their heart.

Our intention is that everyone across the Left Blogosphere participates in this any way that they can. Write a few letters, send Emails, send Faxes, and make some phonecalls to your Senators and Reps. (I know Reps don't vote on this, BUT they can provide more pressure on this issue to those that do vote on Alito! Besides, it is fun to piss them off... lol)

Taken from Tampopo's BooTrib diary:

December 12, 2005

You should be very wary of Judge Samuel Alito. Perhaps afraid is more accurate.

Judge Samuel Alito does not respect the primary role of the Legislative branch of our government. Therefore, he should not be considered acceptable to any member of Congress, particularly true Conservatives, regardless of his opinions on other matters held dear.

Judge Alito is a threat to your role in the structure of our government. You practice the art of politicking, balancing constituents' concerns and needs with those of our society as a whole. Legislation is challenged in court, as it should be when the interpretation of a law is in question. Judge Alito's record suggests he is not a "strict constructionist" of the Constitution.

Norm Ornstein, of the prestigious American Enterprise Institute, has recognized the danger Judge Alito represents. In his article, "Judge Alito Doesn't Show Congress Enough Deference," Ornstein states:
[Supreme Court Justice John] Roberts respects Congress and its constitutional primacy; Alito shows serious signs that he does not...
...Roberts is a very conservative guy, and a strict constructionist -- one who means it. He understands that Congress is the branch the framers set up in Article I, Section 1 of the Constitution. It is not coincidence that Article 1 is twice as long as Article II, which created the executive branch, and almost four times as long as Article III, which established the judiciary. Judges should bend over doubly and triply backward before overturning a Congressional statute, especially if it is clear that Congress acted carefully and deliberatively...

The court case that has Mr. Ornstein turning such a critical eye on Judge Alito is from 1996, "United States v Rybar." This case involved a challenge to Congress's right to regulate the possession or transfer of machine guns.

From Mr. Ornstein,
Congress had passed the law in a reasonable and deliberate fashion. A genuine practitioner of judicial restraint would have allowed them a wide enough berth to do so. Alito's colleagues did just that. But Alito used his own logic to call for its overturn, arguing that the possession of machine guns by private individuals had no economic activity associated with it, and that no real evidence existed that private possession of guns increased crime in a way that affected commerce -- and thus Congress had no right to regulate it. That kind of judicial reasoning often is referred to as reflecting the "Constitution in Exile."
Whatever it is, it's not judicial restraint.

In response to Alito's opinion, the majority said, "Nothing in Lopez (an earlier Supreme Court case) requires either Congress or the Executive to play Show and Tell with the federal courts at the peril of invalidation of a Congressional statute."

Mr. Ornstein's final sentence is a caution to you,
Whatever else it does with Judge Alito at the confirmation hearings, the Senate needs to hold his feet to the fire on this larger issue of deference to the legislative branch.

Don't let Judge Alito's opinions on single issues distract you from the danger he presents to our nation's Constitutional foundation. Reject his nomination and encourage your colleagues to do the same.

Three groups to contact:

Your senators

The Judiciary Committee

And your representatives

Feel free to lift the image here or any of the others over at Booman Tribune, and feel free to copy and paste any and all of the information you will see put up over the next couple of weeks into Blogs and letters as we hold Alito's feet to the fire.

Even if you only participate on a few of the days it can help make a difference. There are so many issues where Samuel Alito's views and allegiances are just flat out wrong for a SCOTUS nomination.

Note: Tommorrow's actions and reason's are still being worked on today. Feel free to check it out at Booman Tribune (Just look for the "Justice" diaries) and any help or participation of any kind you can provide will be greatly appreciated. This is another action brought to you by the group that brought you "Operation Yellow Feather" which was a very successful cross blog protest. These actions are designed to help bring the "Left Blogosphere Think Tank" together on our many shared issues.

X-posted at My Left Wing, Booman Tribune , My Left Nutmeg, Political Cortex

And also Front Paged or posted by Cedwyn at: Dembloggers, ePluribus Media, MyDD, and TPM Cafe reader Blogs as well as by shermanesqe at Street Prophets and C&J

Operation Flying Monkees

2005-11-15T14:12:00.000-08:00

Crooks and Liars has the latest on the presidents speech to rally the flying monkees:

TDS on the Speech

Stewart started Monday off with a look back at President Bush's speech to our troops on V-Day.

Click to see video at C&L...

You knew there had to be a talking head montage thrown in for good measure. Jon offers President Bush a simpler name to call the radicals since he gets so tongue tied. The end clip that TDS uses highlights the fact that Bush really makes about as much sense as Bert Lahr.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

2005-11-10T13:18:00.000-08:00

If a picture is worth a thousand words...

THAN THIS ONE SPEAKS VOLUMES!

CLICK ON THE PIC!

Cutting Military Benefits to Pay for Katrina?

2005-09-28T22:38:00.000-07:00

It seems that this is exactly what the bush admin. and the republicans in congress would like to do.

Who do the bush admin. and republicans that love them want to screw more than anyone else on this earth? (Well, other than the people living in the lands with the oil neocons think they should own...)

Who else but the military that they send off to die in a war for oil.

Sirotablog:

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, President Bush and Republicans in Congress have refused to consider rolling back the $336 billion in new tax cuts that the richest 1 percent are slated to get over the next five years. They say we need to pay for reconstruction not by asking the wealthiest to sacrifice just a little bit, but by massive cuts to spending. And now we see what that means: The Navy Times today reports that those cuts "include trimming military quality-of-life programs, including health care." This, while troops are in battle.

The Republicans have put their cutting efforts in military terms, calling it "Operation Offset" - a further insult to the men and women in uniform they are now trying to screw over. The specifics are ugly. They are, for instance, asking troops to "accept reduced health care benefits for their families." Additionally, "the stateside system of elementary and secondary schools for military family members could be closed." In the past, this idea "has faced strong opposition from parents of children attending the schools because public schools [in and around bases] are seen as offering lower-quality education."

How can an honest republican that has any sense of morality look at what bush does everyday without gagging from what they see?

Pseudoconservative? Neocon? Same Idiots, Different "Phantom Enemy"

2005-08-23T21:47:00.000-07:00

As you can see here, there is some doubt about bush's honesty amongst the Vets...

National Post:
"Bill Moyer, 73, wears a 'Bullshit Protector' flap over his ear while President George W. Bush addresses the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
(AP Photo/Douglas C. Pizac)"

Then again... You could have just asked me. As a Vet myself, well, I think that the few soldiers that make it home alive will be lucky if there any benefits left for them the way bush is messing with VA benefits, nevermind the fact that we should never have been in Iraq in the first place, or the fact that since we have been in Iraq bush and his pseudoconservative policy makers have messed it up almost every single way possible.

I know... You said pseudocon what???? If you don't remember McCarthyism and their insisting "there is a commie hiding behind every tree!" well, there is the tie in to the kind of administration we have in the White House right now. The modern day pseudoconservative's (neocon's) "Fear, fear, fear!" campaign is no different than the pseudoconservative driven McCarthy witch hunts...

As an independent, I feel pretty safe saying "Better dead than red!" If you are talking about GOP red that is.

Thank God I live in a blue state where the Dems are moderate liberals, and the GOP are flaming liberals, or at least pretend to be with the way they tax and spend. Needless to say, the budgeting skills of the GOP do show a preference for red ink...

Sad but true...

Does it surprise anyone that polls show bush support has dropped to %36? Talk about an unpopular idiot in the White House...

A nod to the realities of the soldiers plight.

2005-08-16T13:44:00.000-07:00

Drinking Liberally in New Milford:
"A nod to the realities of the soldiers plight."

THE BRAD BLOG:

"In a departure from the norm in Kentucky -- one of the reddest of red states -- some of Comley's relatives, including a few sitting in the front pews, have spoken out strongly against the Bush administration and the war that took the 21-year-old Marine's life.
...
On Friday, Comley's grandmother, 80-year-old Geraldine Comley of Versailles, described herself in an interview as a former Republican stalwart who is "on a rampage" against the president and the war.

She said she would like nothing better than to join Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a fallen soldier who has been holding a peace vigil outside President Bush's ranch in Texas.

"When someone gets up and says 'My son died for our freedom,' or I get a sympathy card that says that, I can hardly bear it," Geraldine Comley said.

She said her view, developed before her grandson's death, is that Bush pushed for war because Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had tried to assassinate the first President Bush, and to get control of Mideast oil.

"And it irritates me no small amount that Dick Cheney, in the Vietnam War, said he had 'other priorities,'" Geraldine Comley said. "He didn't mind sending my grandson over there" to Iraq.""
Written by: Winter Patriot

My deepest and sincerest condolences to the Comley family in the loss of their son, and my thanks to Cindy Sheehan for faithfully representing the many who demand better leadership in this country.

A nod to the realities of the soldiers plight.

2005-08-16T13:43:00.000-07:00

Drinking Liberally in New Milford:
"A nod to the realities of the soldiers plight."

THE BRAD BLOG:

"In a departure from the norm in Kentucky -- one of the reddest of red states -- some of Comley's relatives, including a few sitting in the front pews, have spoken out strongly against the Bush administration and the war that took the 21-year-old Marine's life.
...
On Friday, Comley's grandmother, 80-year-old Geraldine Comley of Versailles, described herself in an interview as a former Republican stalwart who is "on a rampage" against the president and the war.

She said she would like nothing better than to join Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a fallen soldier who has been holding a peace vigil outside President Bush's ranch in Texas.

"When someone gets up and says 'My son died for our freedom,' or I get a sympathy card that says that, I can hardly bear it," Geraldine Comley said.

She said her view, developed before her grandson's death, is that Bush pushed for war because Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had tried to assassinate the first President Bush, and to get control of Mideast oil.

"And it irritates me no small amount that Dick Cheney, in the Vietnam War, said he had 'other priorities,'" Geraldine Comley said. "He didn't mind sending my grandson over there" to Iraq.""
Written by: Winter Patriot

My deepest and sincerest condolences to the Comley family in the loss of their son, and my thanks to Cindy Sheehan for faithfully representing the many who demand better leadership in this country.

Too late you stupid bushies...

2005-08-14T15:27:00.000-07:00

Is there even one idiot on this earth that will believe this BS line coming from the pentagon and the White House?

Fearing backlash, Pentagon moves to block new Abu Ghraib photos - Yahoo! News:
Sat Aug 13, 3:50 PM ET

"WASHINGTON (AFP) - The
Pentagon has moved forcefully to block the release of new video evidence of prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, arguing it would help recruit new Islamist insurgents and endanger American lives."

Too late morons... The insurgents already know the truth about the torture the corrupt bush administration and the incompetent Petagon officials sanctioned.

THEY HAD TO SUFFER THROUGH IT!

Just who is it you are trying to protect there?

He further states that should the pictures become public, they will "endanger the lives and physical safety of the soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines in the United States Armed Forces presently serving in Iraq and
Afghanistan."

Americans aren't that stupid. We already know that the insurgents are quite aware of the torture.

WHEN IDIOTS LIKE BUSH, GONZALES, AND RUMSFELD, ETC., GAVE THE GREEN LIGHT ON TORTURE THEY ENDANGERED EVERY SOLDIER IN THE MILITARY AS WELL AS EVERY AMERICAN CITIZEN AND ANY OTHER COUNTRY THAT IS IN IRAQ HELPING THE US.

We already know who you are trying to protect and who is really to blame.

Meanwhile, ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero insists the real reason the Pentagon is fighting the release of the new evidence is because it demonstrates "the failure of American leaders who placed our young men and women in compromising situations and are now seeking to blame them for it."

Rep. Nancy Johnson's Scandal Plagued Legislation

2005-08-11T10:20:00.000-07:00

It seems that Nancy Johnson's political career has a lot of junk in the trunk...

Deroy Murdock on Medicare on National Review Online:
"This fiscal malpractice has not bought the White House even political dividends. An August 25-26, 2003 Gallup poll found 40 percent of adults approved of the president's handling of Medicare while 48 percent disapproved. After the benefit's adoption, a March 26-28, 2004 Gallup survey saw 35 percent approve of Bush on Medicare, while disapproval climbed to 55 percent. What a bargain: Each one-point drop in Bush's Medicare approval rating cost Americans $44.5 billion.

The GOP Congress should dump the drug benefit. They should spare taxpayers this absurdly expensive new project whose true costs were concealed by an administration that sacrificed integrity and fiscal responsibility on an altar of blind ambition.

Instead, Republicans should develop a modest plan for poor seniors who lack coverage, rather than any American over 65, including multimillionaires and those who already have drug insurance.

The Medicare drug benefit has metastasized from bad policy to bad politics and now to scandal and possible criminality. This law begs to be euthanized. The GOP should pulls its plug. As for the perpetrators of this colossal public fraud, the Justice Department should fit them for orange jumpsuits."

And this is the legislation she was was so proud of and pinning her re-election hopes on? Well now, If that ain't an elephant passing some serious gas on to the voters?

Careful now!
Never stand behind an elephant that is full of it...
You never know when it is going to take its next dump on YOU!

Pigs on the Wing

2005-08-08T20:37:00.000-07:00

While Juan Cole sets the record staright on the real issue of what is at the heart of the terror unleashed on London last week there is one very minor point he may have missed.

Salon.com News | "The time of revenge has come":

Blowback from Bush and Blair's incompetently pursued war on terror has hit London. When will the U.S. figure out how to fight smart?

By Juan Cole

July 8, 2005 | Credit for the horrific bombings of the London Underground and a double-decker bus on Thursday morning was immediately taken on a radical Muslim Web site by a 'secret group' of Qaida al-Jihad in Europe. By Thursday afternoon, as the casualty toll rose above 40 dead and 700 wounded, British Foreign Minister Jack Straw was saying, 'It has the hallmarks of an al-Qaida-related attack.' Although U.S. President George W. Bush maintains that al-Qaida strikes out at the industrialized democracies because of hatred for Western values, the statement said nothing of the sort. The attack, the terrorists proclaimed, was an act of sacred revenge for British 'massacres' in 'Afghanistan and Iraq,' and a punishment of the United Kingdom for its 'Zionism' (i.e., support of Israel). If they really are responsible, who is this group and what do they want?"

Don't you ever wonder where all of these web sites are coming from?

UK-based dissident denies link to website that carried al-Qaida claim

David Pallister - The Guardian
Saturday July 9, 2005

The claim of responsibility for the London attacks was first posted on one of the dozens of Islamic websites that are routinely monitored by western intelligence services.
The statement, under the name of the Secret Organisation of the al-Qaida Jihad in Europe, said: "The heroic mujahideen have carried out a blessed raid in London. Britain is now burning with fear, terror and panic in its northern, southern, eastern and western quarters."

...snip...

...two Israeli groups devoted to exposing the network of jihadist sites claim that it is connected to the London-based Saudi dissident Saad al-Faqih. Mr Faqih, who is based in Willesden, north-west London, and runs the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia (Mira), was designated by the US treasury last December as a supporter of al-Qaida. The UK Treasury followed suit by freezing Mr Faqih's assets.

Speaking in December 2004 before the assets were frozen, Mr Faqih ridiculed any idea that "millions of dollars" would be frozen. "I have no assets in the US and all I have in the UK is a current account with a few hundred pounds."

Well? At least someone out there is doing something about all of this by trying to freeze the assets of people that are involved...

But could we do more? Maybe...

It was posted on an Arabic website, al-qal3ah.com, which is registered by Qalaah Qalaah in Abu Dhabi and hosted by a server in Houston, Texas.

One would hope that they will deal with this Houston companies involvement in promoting terror? Maybe freezing all of their assets too...

Maybe?

When pigs can fly!

The server in Houston has intriguing connections. Everyone's Internet was founded by brothers Robert and Roy Marsh in 1998 and by 2002 had an income of more than $30m (now about £17m).

...snip...
Roy Marsh counts among his friends President George Bush's former sister-in-law, Sharon Bush, and the president's navy secretary.

Everyone's Internet, which also hosts a number of pornographic sites, states: "We support the uncensored flow of information and ideas over the internet and do not actively monitor subscriber activity under normal circumstances."

I am sure that investigators will clear Roy of any wrongdoing AFTER they have completely gone through all of the porn on those houston servers owned by another bush family porn pal.

If you didn't care what happened to me,
And I didn't care for you
We would zig zag our way
Through the boredom and pain
Occasionally glancing up through the rain
Wondering which of the buggers to blame
And watching for pigs on the wing

Pink Floyd, Animals

Frist's Torturous Decision

2005-08-08T20:34:00.000-07:00

If there was ever any question about who is supporting the soldiers, well, the Army Times had no problems figuring this out. They point out how alarmed Dems are that republicans would rather pander to special interest groups like the NRA instead of making the important decisions while we are supposed to be a nation at war.

Army Times - News - More News: "By Rick Maze
Times staff writer

Senate Republican leaders decided Tuesday that a gun manufacturers’ liability bill is more important than next year’s $441.6 billion defense authorization bill.

With Democrats expressing amazement that there could be any higher legislative priority in a time of war than the annual defense bill that includes money for pay and benefits, operations and maintenance, and weapons’ purchases and research, Sen. Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Senate Republican leader, decided Tuesday that a bill protecting gun manufacturers from lawsuits over the illegal use of firearms was a higher priority.

The decision came after Republican leaders failed to muster the 60 votes needed to prevent amendments not strictly related to the defense budget from being offered to the defense bill.

In a count of 50-48, seven Republicans joined Democrats in voting not to restrict debate, a move that Democratic leaders said would have prevented consideration of amendments to help veterans and survivors of deceased service members, along with other issues."

It is really important to understand that this effort to push back the bill is less about the funding for the war and more about getting more important rich elitist agendas to the floor quickly:

With Congress planning to leave town Friday for one-month break, debate on S 397, Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, is expected to last two or three days, and then Senate leaders plan to take up an energy bill, an estate tax reform bill and an Interior Department funding bill

A hat tip to QWQ, who had this note about Frist's torturous decision to sidetrack this:

Also, several folks have noted in the comments that pandering to the NRA is not the only reason the Republicans wanted to delay the Defense Authorization bill -- the White House also wanted to avoid showdowns on detainee treatment and military base closings. The new AP story has that angle, as does this CBS edited version of the original AP story.

Oh, yeah... The bushies don't want to give up their right to torture innocent Iraqis that are held along with the few terrorists in captivity... Go figure, huh? Apparently the republican controlled Senate doesn't work any better in making us safer than torture does at getting useful intel.

Ronald Reagan on Outing Spies

2005-07-26T14:19:00.000-07:00

It appears that Ronnie Raygun's words have come back to haunt the traitors that hero worship him:

Remarks on Signing the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982

Excerpt from the speech delivered by Ronald Reagan:

Whether you work in Langley or a faraway nation, whether your tasks are in operations or analysis sections, it is upon your intellect and integrity, your wit and intuition that the fate of freedom rests for millions of your countrymen and for many millions more all around the globe.…

Like those who are part of any silent service, your sacrifices are sometimes unappreciated; your work is sometimes misunderstood. Because you’re professionals, you understand and accept this. But because you’re human and because you deal daily in the dangers that confront this nation, you must sometimes question whether some of your countrymen appreciate the value of your accomplishments, the sacrifices you make, the dangers you confront, the importance of the warnings that you issue.

And that’s why I have come here today; first, to sign an important piece of legislation that bears directly on your work, an act of Congress whose overwhelming passage by the representatives of the American people is a symbol of their support for the job that you do every day. But even more than this, I’ve come here today to say to you what the vast majority of Americans would say if they had this opportunity to stand here before you. We’re grateful to you. We thank you. We’re proud of you.

If you support the treachery of rove and libby than I hold nothing but contempt for you. The potential dangers that these leakers have exposed networks of agents to, and the security risks they have caused for our nation is nothing less than an act of treason.

Yep! Treason...
Reagan is calling y'all on it from his grave there bushies.

But is there more?
Well, yes there is... Here ya go:

The Congress has carefully drafted this bill so that it focuses only on those who would transgress the bounds of decency; not those who would exercise their legitimate right of dissent. This carefully drawn act recognizes that the revelation of the names of secret agents adds nothing to legitimate public debate over intelligence policy. It is also a signal to the world that while we in this democratic nation remain tolerant and flexible, we also retain our good sense and our resolve to protect our own security and that of the brave men and women who serve us in difficult and dangerous intelligence assignments.

During the debate over this bill, some have suggested that our focus should be not on protecting our own intelligence agencies, but on the real or imagined abuses of the past. Well, I'm glad that counsel was rejected, for the days of such abuses are behind us. The Congress now shares the responsibility of guarding against any transgression, and I have named a new Intelligence Oversight Board and Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board to assist me in ensuring that the rule of law is maintained in areas which must remain secret and out of the normal realm of public scrutiny.

Beyond this, I have full confidence that you'll do your job vigorously and imaginatively while making sure that your activity is lawful, constitutional, and in keeping with the traditions of our way of life. And while you're at your job and while I'm President and while these Congressmen stand at watch, we'll work together to see to it that this powerful tool of government is used to advance, not abuse, the rights of free people.

"The Great Accumulator" (you know? All of that debt Reagan ran up, silly!) must have had his astrologer working overtime that day...

A Must Read From BuzzFlash!

2005-07-18T06:26:00.000-07:00

I am putting the begining of this Buzzlash interview on without any further comment EXCEPT that I suggest you read the article and check out IWT News.

Paul Jay, Creator of Independent World Television, Intends To Challenge Corporate Broadcasters at Their Own Game

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

What we think is, if you don't do it on TV, it doesn't break through. But if we break through with it on television, then it makes it much more difficult for the rest of the television media to simply ignore these stories.

What television is doing, and to some extent the big-media print press -- is they're treating propaganda as news. They're allowing political forces and corporate forces to create a façade of how the world looks. And they're reporting on the façade as if it's real. I liken it to professional wrestling, about which I made a film. Wrestling press can talk about wrestling theater as if it's something real, even though everybody knows it's theater. Well, the same thing's happening here. If you try to step outside that as a journalist, they call you partisan.

* * *

When we heard of Paul Jay's project to start an international television news network supported by viewer donations, we said to ourselves, "Now here is a guy who is truly BuzzFlashian!" After all, BuzzFlash was started in May of 2000 with sweat equity, and it has been supported ever since by its readers -- 5 million monthly, these days, although in the first month of our online existence, we only had 34 readers a day. When we met Paul Jay, we became convinced he's got the professional expertise and righteous indignation to maybe pull this idea off. After all, we did, on the Internet. So, we have joined his advisory committee, and BuzzFlash is fully supporting his efforts. After all, he's a kindred spirit who cherishes democracy, the free flow of ideas, and social justice. You can find out more about his vision and unfolding plans at the Independent World Television web site: http://www.iwtnews.com/

Fork You Rove!

2005-07-15T22:39:00.000-07:00

Here is the text... Read it all... There is no exception for disclosing classified info even if you only confirm a previous source. It is illegal. And they are "trained" to know this before they to get any security clearance.

They are so detailed in this training that even confirming classified info to a news source is a part of that training, and it is definately a no-no.

REP. HENRY A. WAXMAN

RANKING MINORITY MEMBER

COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM

U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
JULY 15, 2005

Fact Sheet

Karl Rove’s Nondisclosure Agreement

Today, news reports revealed that Karl Rove, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff and the President’s top political advisor, confirmed the identity of covert CIA official Valerie Plame Wilson with Robert Novak on July 8, 2003, six days before Mr. Novak published the information in a nationally syndicated column. These new disclosures have obvious relevance to the criminal investigation of Patrick Fitzgerald, the Special Counsel who is investigating whether Mr. Rove violated a criminal statute by revealing Ms. Wilson’s identity as a covert CIA official.

Independent of the relevance these new disclosures have to Mr. Fitzgerald’s investigation, they also have significant implications for: (1) whether Mr. Rove violated his obligations under his "Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreement" and (2) whether the White House violated its obligations under Executive Order 12958. Under the nondisclosure agreement and the executive order, Mr. Rove would be subject to the loss of his security clearance or dismissal even for "negligently" disclosing Ms. Wilson’s identity.

KARL ROVE’S NONDISCLOSURE AGREEMENT

Executive Order 12958 governs how federal employees are awarded security clearances in order to obtain access to classified information. It was last updated by President George W. Bush on March 25, 2003, although it has existed in some form since the Truman era. The executive order applies to any entity within the executive branch that comes into possession of classified information, including the White House. It requires employees to undergo a criminal background check, obtain training on how to protect classified information, and sign a "Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreement," also known as a SF-312, promising not to reveal classified information.1

The nondisclosure agreement signed by White House officials such as Mr. Rove states: "I will never divulge classified information to anyone" who is not authorized to receive it.2

THE PROHIBITION AGAINST "CONFIRMING" CLASSIFIED INFORMATION

Mr. Rove, through his attorney, has raised the implication that there is a distinction between classified information to someone not authorized to receive it and confirming classified information from someone not authorized to have it. In fact, there is no such distinction under the nondisclosure agreement Mr. Rove signed.

One of the most basic rules of safeguarding classified information is that an official who has signed a nondisclosure agreement cannot confirm classified information obtained by a reporter.

In fact, this obligation is highlighted in the "briefing booklet" that new security clearance recipients receive when they sign their nondisclosure agreements: Before … confirming the accuracy of what appears in the public source, the signer of the SF 312 must confirm through an authorized official that the information has, in fact, been declassified. If it has not, … confirmation of its accuracy is also an unauthorized disclosure.3

THE INDEPENDENT DUTY TO VERIFY THE CLASSIFIED STATUS OF INFORMATION

Mr. Rove’s attorney has implied that if Mr. Rove learned Ms. Wilson’s identity and occupation from a reporter, this somehow makes a difference in what he can say about the information. This is inaccurate.

The executive order states: "Classified information shall not be declassified automatically as a result of any unauthorized disclosure of identical or similar information."4

Mr. Rove was not at liberty to repeat classified information he may have learned from a reporter Instead, he had an affirmative obligation to determine whether the information had been declassified before repeating it. The briefing booklet is explicit on this point: "before disseminating the information elsewhere … the signer of the SF 312 must confirm through an authorized official that the information has, in fact, been declassified."5

"NEGLIGENT" DISCLOSURE OF CLASSIFIED INFORMATION

Mr. Rove’s attorney has also implied that Mr. Rove’s conduct should be at issue only if he intentionally or knowingly disclosed Ms. Wilson’s covert status. In fact, the nondisclosure agreement and the executive order require sanctions against security clearance holders who "knowingly, willfully, or negligently" disclose classified information.6 The sanctions for such a breach include "reprimand, suspension without pay, removal, termination of classification authority, loss or denial of access to classified information, or other sanctions."7

THE WHITE HOUSE OBLIGATIONS UNDER EXECUTIVE ORDER 12958

Under the executive order, the White House has an affirmative obligation to investigate and take remedial action separate and apart from any ongoing criminal investigation. The executive order specifically provides that when a breach occurs, each agency must "take appropriate and prompt corrective action."8

This includes a determination of whether individual employees improperly disseminated or obtained access to classified information The executive order further provides that sanctions for violations are not optional.

The executive order expressly provides: "Officers and employees of the United States Government … shall be subject to appropriate sanctions if they knowingly, willfully, or negligently … disclose to unauthorized persons information properly classified."9

There is no evidence that the White House complied with these requirements.

ENDNOTES

1 Executive Order No. 12958, Classified National Security Information (as amended), sec. 4.1(a) (Mar. 28, 2003) (online at Web Reference ).

2 Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreement, Standard Form 312 (Prescribed by NARA/ISOO) (32 C.F.R. 2003, E.O. 12958) (online at Web Reference).

3 Information Security Oversight Office, National Archives and Records Administration, Briefing Booklet: Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreement (Standard Form 312), at 73 (emphasis added) (online at Web Reference ).

4 Executive Order No. 12958, sec. 1.1(b).

5 Briefing Booklet, supra note 3, at 73.

6 Executive Order No. 12958, sec. 5.5(b) (emphasis added).

7 Id. at 5.5(c).

8 Id. at 5.5(e)(1).

9 Id. at 5.5(b).

Stick a fork in rove...
YEP,...
He is done.

Now what we need to know from cheney and bush?

What did you know? AND when did you know it?
And while I am at it...
How friendly were you with Jeff Gannon? Wink Wink
(Hey, Gannon had to be screwing some guy in the White House?)

ROVE'S TREASON?

2005-07-12T23:06:00.000-07:00

This recent report shows a complete lack of uderstanding (or a lack of guts to report it honestly) for what is LIKELY really going on in Pfitz investigation of the Plame leaks...

MSNBC Analyst Says Cooper Documents Reveal Karl Rove as Source in Plame Case By E&P Staff

NEW YORK Now that Time Inc. has turned over documents to federal court, presumably revealing who its reporter, Matt Cooper, identified as his source in the Valerie Plame/CIA case, speculation runs rampant on the name of that source, and what might happen to him or her. Tonight,

...Snip...

"And I know I'm going to get pulled into the grand jury for saying this but the source of...for Matt Cooper was Karl Rove, and that will be revealed in this document dump that Time magazine's going to do with the grand jury."

Other panelists then joined in discussing whether, if true, this would suggest a perjury rap for Rove, if he told the grand jury he did not leak to Cooper.

A fucking perjury rap for a god-damned traitor to our country? I think not... A man who plays politics with the lives of people in our intelligence community, endangers potentially important covert contacts at a time of war, and they talk about perjury? This ain't no fucking BJ!!! This is treason! With all of the stuff coming from the Judge showing a likelyhood of a very real investigation of an espionage conspiracy AND a conspiracy of those that tried to cover it up.

I was reading a good write on the summary of everything circulating the various Blogs on this by kant and it seems pretty obvious what is going on and why bush, cheney, rove, and numerous members of the bush "all-star-fake-news-and-lies" team are lining up to speak to their lawyers. Of course they are just doing that as a precaution... They certainly wouldn't need these lawyers to cover their asses, would they?

It also explains why the media may be worried. Anyone of the media that received any information about the leaks and did not report it to the authorities as a potential crime could be found just as guilty in this conspiracy. Anyone that knew about the leak prior to it's publishing (Novak outing Plame in his editorial) face a very real prospect of becoming "collateral damage" as Joe Wilson put it when Miller was justly sentenced by the judge to sit in the thinking box to ponder whether or not she wants to considered part of these conspiracies.

If I were the judge I would have sentenced miller based on pretending to be a journalist... But I don't like liars like Judy Miller.

Judy Miller (You know, Chalabi's "mouthpiece" for "anonomous tips" he gave her about all of those fictitious WMDs she wrote about in her "Fear, fear, fear!" campaign leading up to the illegal invasion of Iraq?) is part of the cover-up of the alleged espionage if she refuses to give up the names and therefore may become part of this espionage conspiracy. The cover-up part is a near certainty given Judge Tatels statements, and considering her as part of the original conspiracy to out a covert operative is a definite legal possibility. This no longer about keeping sources confidential to protect whistle-blowers for the good of the public. It is about a national securtiy leak and the sources of it that have hurt our country.

Yes... There is a lot of specualtion about "who may be charged with what?"... But it is becoming very clear that this is more than just a failed political smear by the bush regime... It is more likely about traitors getting charged under the Espionage Act.

Come on Miller, who is the other traitor you are protecting? Is it scooter? cheney? bolton? Powell? Maybe even bush? Perhaps all of them?

My gut instinct says it is cheney and bolton, since they already have shown a willingness to bypass the normal/legal means of getting Intel. It would also explain why the Whithouse refused to confirm or deny what Intel bolton had intercepted that upset the Senators so much in bolton's failed confirmation...

---------------------------

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The News Network bush Will Hate!

2005-06-29T00:15:00.000-07:00

This needs to be blasted into the Blogosphere!

IWT news
I don't really care if you want to miss out on this chance for truely independent news.

NO corporate backing, NO government funding, and NO commercials.

Just independent WORLD news, supported ONLY by the people.

http://www.iwtnews.com/

Watch the VIDEO, do the SURVEY, then you decide if they merit your support!

Now Click on the link and freep this survey! They desperately want everyone's input (and yes, they wouldn't mind your donation...)

http://www.iwtnews.com/survey

Independent World Television is building the world's first global independent news network. Online and on TV, IWTnews will deliver independent news and real debate from professional and citizen journalists -- without funding from governments, corporations or commercial advertising. Using the web to organize and raise funds across borders, IWTnews is building an international movement for democracy.

Sounds pretty fucking noble, huh?

A message from Jeff Cohen:

"Friends,

This is a project I've been working on since the election -- an effort to build the world's first indepedent global news channel...

independent of corporations and government... Sponsored only by its viewers...an alternative to Fox News and CNN.

Check out the new website

http://www.iwtnews.com/ and new video. Spread the word to your lists.

Let me know what you think.

-- jeff cohen, founder of FAIR"

Do yourself a favor... If you do anything today pass this link along on your Blog, in an email, on a message board. Anywhere!

If there is anyone that is sick of Micheal Jackson reports 24/7 doesn't believe in this than everything else they have been doing is a complete fucking waste of time!

You know I am right...

One day (perhaps right here and right now?) a formerly-ignorant person will thank you for this...

I thank you! ;)

Taking the Fight to Karl!

2005-06-27T07:09:00.000-07:00

Take it to Karl

As a Vet, and one that does NOT support the stupidity they call policy coming out of the GOP controlled governments, I have a serious problem with recent statements made by Karl Rove, who is just another notable chickenhawk that refused to back up his dreams of empire with real support for the soldiers in the United States military. Here is a great place for other Vets to voice their opinions about Karl Rove, the chickenhawk elitist:

SOUND OFF, Soldiers!

Email to:
FightingLiberals@yahoo.com

Note: You must include NAME, STREET ADDRESS, RANK and UNIT INFO (OR OTHER VERIFIABLE MILITARY INFO) for verification purposes. I will not publish or disclose that information, but I also will not publish without seeing it. This is to keep this site honest as is possible in the "internets" age. The choice to publish your thoughts is yours.

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The Duke of Hurl

2005-06-26T17:14:00.000-07:00

We have all read the ongoing fish story (it keeps getting bigger and bigger!) of Republican Randy "The Duke" Cunningham getting a nice profit of $700,000 from Mitchell J. Wade, "the defense contractor whose firm, MZM Inc., saw its number of government contracts soar in the months immediately after the home sale."

Cunningham, obviously feeling a little seasick from the accusations, has hurled noxious reasoning at the situation in claiming that he is the most ethical human on the face of the earth:

signonsandiego.com
"My whole life I've lived aboveboard," Cunningham said. "I've never even smoked a marijuana cigarette. I don't cheat. If a contractor buys me lunch and we meet a second time, I buy the lunch. My whole life has been aboveboard and so this doesn't worry me."

Sure you buy them lunch, just like I am buying your story. Now the sharks are circling in a feeding frenzy around a deal that involves the "rental" of a 42 foot yacht, "The Duke-Stir", owned by Wade.

nctimes.com
Cunningham since April 2004 has been living on Wade's yacht in Washington. The congressman said that in lieu of rent, he paid more than $8,000 in dock fees and $5,000 for upkeep on Wade's boat.

We can set aside the dock fees, because Cunningham rented space for his own boat at the Potomac River marina for years before he moved into Wade's boat. According to Cunningham's accounting, that $5,000 over the last 14 months amounts to $357 a month.

Unless we are missing something, this looks like a sweetheart deal, with Cunningham paying far less than market rent, to say nothing of the true maintenance and depreciation costs of a fancy boat.

$357 dollars per month for a luxurious yacht? "Sweetheart deal"? You have got to be kidding right? Why even bother charging at that price? Around here that will get you a cardboard box in a park to live in.

Now, I am in a pretty generous mood today, so I will be nice enough to allow Cunningham the luxury of claiming the docking fees as a "legitimate" part of his rental fee. That would make $13,000 for 14 months of living on the "Duke-Stir". Being in a generous mood I will say that is about $930 per month. ($928.57 per month, to be precise)

Considering my wife and I pay about 2 grand per month on our mortgage that $930 per month seems a little bit skewerd for a luxury yacht charter?

Heck! My friends and I are looking at paying about a grand to charter a fishing boat for a day. It's a nice fishing boat, but it is not a yacht... So my mortgage really seems WAY too generous a comparison.

I found a nice charter service running out of Annapolis, Maryland, to try and do an honest comparison of how much a yacht would typically cost to charter. I chose only the yachts on the list that were within a few feet of the 42 foot Duke-Stir's length.

Name-------------Length---7 Days---14 Days
Llyric--------------------39------2532-----4561
Ray Sea Lady-------39------2745-----4886
Shenandoah----------41------2379-----4235
Engram-----------------43------3111-----5538
Wind Walker---------43------2196-----3909
Carolina----------------43------3111-----5538

To make this comparison as fair as possible I have also chosen the least expensive yacht on this list of comparable yachts, the Wind Walker, to base some (not so) fun calculations on.

At $3909 for a 2 week charter you would have to figure that it would come in at $7818 for 28 days... But continuing to be in a generous mood I will call that the full monthly charter cost. (Man! Am I ever generous today, huh?)

That means that to charter a yacht like the "Duke-Stir" it would cost $109,452 for 14 months, at the minimum by my more-than-generous calculations. Subtract the generous $13,000 that Cunningham claims to have paid in "rent" and you are looking at what is an extremely generous gift to Cunningham from Wade of...

$96,452

Keep in mind that this generously low calculation of Wades "Duke-Stir" gift is just tip of the iceberg when compared to the titanic $700,000 house warming gift that will sink Cunningham.

Kind of makes you want to hurl when Cunningham says, "My whole life I've lived aboveboard," eh? It is time to throw this ethically challenged Republican overboard. Feed him to the circling sharks. I am certainly being more than generous in that thought than he deserves...

Update: This is an excerpt from a signonsandiego.com news story where they do an indepth evaluation of the actual value of Cunningham's home:

Cunningham previously lived in the same slip aboard a 65-foot yacht called the Kelly C. Coast Guard records list Cunningham as the owner of the Kelly C.

In 1998, when Cunningham was living aboard the Kelly C, he used his position on the defense appropriations subcommittee, which oversees the District of Columbia's budget, to earmark $3 million to refurbish the waterfront where the yacht was docked.

Shortly after Congress approved the funding, Cunningham told Copley News Service he was fulfilling his duties as a member of the subcommittee.

It was not, he said then, because the beautification project would benefit an area he calls home when he is working in the nation's capital. It was, he said, because then-Speaker Newt Gingrich "said he wants to make D.C. a shining city, and so I said, 'OK, . . . I want to clean up the waterfront' . . . not for Duke Cunningham," he added. "I haven't got a nickel invested."

As Cunningham's office tries to deal with questions about Wade's yacht, a controversy continues to swirl around the sale of the congressman's Del Mar house. Real estate professionals in San Diego have questioned the sale's circumstances, saying their review of the comparable sales do not support the price that Wade paid Cunningham in November 2003.

Go read the entire story... It has a nice pic of the luxury yacht, Duke-Stir. It also makes a mockery of Cunningham's "aboveboard" life.

Watch the GOP eat their own alive!

2005-06-23T05:59:00.000-07:00

Don't you just love it when the GOP eats it's own children?

If you had any doubts whatsoever about whether or not the GOP is interested in any kind of bi-partisan efforts look no further than the actions of their party when it comes to bi-partisan efforts.

NFRA: Arizona Republican Assembly Votes Unanimously to Censure Senator McCain: "The resolution reads as follows:

WHEREAS, Senator John McCain is presently co-sponsoring, together with his Democrat soul-mate, Senator Teddy Kennedy, a Bill to Reform the Immigration Policy of the United States promoting amnesty for illegal aliens and for their U.S. employers, thus ignoring the opinions of his constituents expressed in numerous polls and personal pleas; and

OMG! The horror! He is doing pretty much what bush has been doing and wanted to do all along... Did you think those little cards bush wanted to give illegal immigrants would have led to anything else?

WHEREAS, Senator McCain deserted the ranks of the Republican Party and the Leadership of the U.S. Senate on the issue of limiting the filibuster of judicial nominations, some of which have been on-hold for several years, thus stalling the President’s agenda for judicial reform; and

OMG! It's unthinkable! Can you believe that he supported a bi-partisan effort to keep the fillibuster in place when most Americans agree with the use of the fillibuster? Maybe most Americans really are not happy with the GOP, huh?

WHEREAS, Senator McCain led the Democrat Party in “reforming” campaign finance, providing for a clear usurpation of 1 st Amendment free speech rights during the last 60 days of an election campaign, and leading to an orgy of spending in the 2004 elections;

OMG! The unspeakable! 60 more days of swift boat lies... Ok, maybe they are right there. lol

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED, that the Arizona Republican Assembly (ARA) officially and publicly censures Senator John McCain for dereliction of his duties and responsibilities as a representative of the citizens of Arizona; and "

Yep! The hypocritical GOP... The party that cries about a lack of bi-partisan effort from everyone else, but CENSURES their own members in a cannibalistic manner when they don't like the results of bi-partisan efforts! You are all a bunch of corrupt, lying, sleazy, pornographic, two-faced pieces of CRAP!

CRAP
(Christian Racist Armed Party)

Blue Note Bloggers: EFF: Homepage

2005-06-20T12:33:00.000-07:00

Not sure if what you are doing is legal? Not sure if you could get harrased for excersizing your right to freedom of speech? Confusled about how all of the new laws may effect you and your Blog?

Have I got a link for you!

EFF: Homepage: "EFF Announces its New Legal Guide for Bloggers
We are pleased to release a document that informs bloggers of their legal rights. EFF's 'Legal Guide for Bloggers' is a collection of frequently asked questions (FAQs) designed to educate bloggers about their legal rights in a number of areas, including libel law, copyright law, and political advocacy.
Full story, Legal Guide for Bloggers, More on Blogging
June 13, 2005"

EFF.org has been nice enough to put together some simple straight forward answers to many questions that you may have concerning most types of Blogs.

Thanks EFF.org!

GOP SaysThey are Sorry for Coingate...

2005-06-14T07:14:00.000-07:00

The sad truth is that they mean they are sorry they got caught. I know their apologies will make it all better. I think this sets a great example for kids everywhere.

The message the Ohio GOP is sending out about morality to kids across America:

It is Okay to take bribes if you return the money when, and only if, you get caught.

toledoblade.com:
Ohio GOP leaders vow to return funds given by coin dealer

Republican Sens. Mike DeWine, George Voinovich, and Gov. Bob Taft plan to refund money given to their campaigns by Tom Noe, who is under investigation.

By STEVE EDER, BLADE STAFF WRITER

COLUMBUS - President Bush's political advisers are 'looking into' what to do with more than $100,000 in campaign money raised by Tom Noe after Ohio's governor and U.S. senators announced yesterday that they would refund thousands of dollars contributed to their campaigns by the Toledo-area coin dealer.

'We are in the process of looking into the situation and we will take the appropriate legal action if the situation dictates that's what we need to do,' Brian Jones, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said last night.

The White House has deferred all Noe fund-raising questions to the RNC.

Gov. Bob Taft, as well as U.S. Sens. George Voinovich and Mike DeWine, and a host of top Ohio Republican leaders, including three GOP gubernatorial candidates, yesterday said they would refund contributions from Mr. Noe, who is facing federal and state investigations.

The contributions likely will be donated to charitable organizations, which have not been announced - but the money will not be returned to Mr. Noe.

In a statement, Mr. Taft and Bob Bennett, chairman of the

Ohio Republican Party, said about $50,000 in contributions by Mr. Noe, mostly given to Republican leaders since the coin dealer started doing business with the state in 1998, would be placed in escrow - and then transferred to an 'appropriate entity.'

'We want to send a message loud and clear to the people of Ohio that Mr. Noe's actions will not be tolerated. Ohioans deserve bold and aggressive leadership in cleaning up this abuse of public trust, and we are committed to providing that leadership,' Mr. Taft and Mr. Bennett said.

Hey Taft, Bennet, and Voinovich:
"YOU ARE THE PROBLEM!"
What a great bunch of role model precedents the GOP is developing for our nation. The GOP is sending a message LOUD AND CLEAR that:

The GOP should never take responsibility for their actions.

Bribes and kickbacks are good, unless you get caught, BUT then returning the money is good enough to be forgiven. (Of course Awnold is still holding on to his $10,000 gift from Noe AND bush still has $100,000 that Noe gave him.)

War against the weak is good if there is oil involved.

Rich elitists need tax cuts, but the poor... What poor?

Torture is fine, but reporting the facts about it is taboo.

Killing a child is a horrible crime, until the child is old enough to have their parents let them enlist.

Soldiers need a pat on the back, not medical benefits and decent wages.

The list could go on and on...

The GOP sickens me. At every single level of government they are corrupt and have no moral values. I know this for a fact becuase I live in Corrupticut, (AKA: Connecticut), so named because it is the state with the second highest number of corrupt GOP members in the USA, as revealed over the last few years... We would be number one with a bullet except for Texans like Delay and, of course, bush and his oil cartel administration are the worst and most corrupt the USA has ever seen.

Perhaps, rather than vowing to return their corrupt fortunes, they would better serve America by quitting politics and taking a vow of chastity? It would mean, at the very least, one less child could be corrupted by their political schemes.

Blue Note Bloggers: Making fun of McClellan!

2005-05-20T13:42:00.000-07:00

Is Newsweek making fun of Scott McClellan and the White House in their latest headline "Consider the Source"? If they aren't, then I am...

MSNBC - Consider the Source
Consider the Source

The State Department says MEK is a terror group. Human Rights Watch says it’s a cult. For the White House, MEK is a source of intelligence on Iran.

By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
Updated: 4:35 p.m. ET May 19, 2005

May 18 - A controversial exile movement cited by President George W. Bush as a source of information on Iran's nuclear ambitions is condemned for psychologically and physically abusing its own members in a new report by Human Rights Watch.

In a document scheduled for public release this week, Human Rights Watch alleges that the Iranian exile group known as Mujahedine Khalq (MEK) has a history of cultlike practices that include forcing members to divorce their spouses and to engage in extended self-criticism sessions.

More dramatically, the report states, former MEK members told Human Rights Watch that when they protested MEK policies or tried to leave the organization, they were arrested, in some cases violently abused and in other instances imprisoned. Two former recruits told the human-rights group that they were held in solitary confinement for years in a camp operated by MEK in Iraq under the protection of Saddam Hussein. MEK representatives in the United States and France, where MEK is headquartered, did not immediately respond to NEWSWEEK phone calls and an e-mail requesting comment.

MEK has long been controversial because of its history of violent attacks in Iran, its relationship with Saddam's regime and its background as a quasi-religious, quasi-Marxist radical resistance group founded in the era of the late Iranian shah. In 1997, the Clinton administration put MEK on the State Department's list of foreign terrorist groups. MEK's U.S. supporters, among whom at one point numbered dozens of members of Congress, charged that the Clinton administration only labeled MEK as a terrorist group as part of an ill-conceived attempt to improve relations with the ayatollahs who currently run Iran. However, the Bush administration added two alleged MEK front organizations to the State Department's terrorist list in 2003.

Despite the group's notoriety, Bush himself cited purported intelligence gathered by MEK as evidence of the Iranian regime's rapidly accelerating nuclear ambitions. At a March 16 press conference, Bush said Iran's hidden nuclear program had been discovered not because of international inspections but "because a dissident group pointed it out to the world." White House aides acknowledged later that the dissident group cited by the president is the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), one of the MEK front groups added to the State Department list two years ago.

In an appearance before a House International Relations Subcommittee a year ago, John Bolton, the controversial State Department undersecretary who Bush has nominated to become US ambassador to the United Nations, was questioned by a Congressman sympathetic to MEK about whether it was appropriate for the U.S. government to pay attention to allegations about Iran supplied by the group. Bolton said he believed that MEK "qualifies as a terrorist organization according to our criteria." But he added that he did not think the official label had "prohibited us from getting information from them. And I certainly don't have any inhibition about getting information about what's going on in Iran from whatever source we can find that we deem reliable."

However, current and former senior U.S. national-security officials, who asked not to be named because they are not supposed to talk about intelligence-gathering activities, say that all the major revelations MEK publicly claims to have made regarding nuclear advances in Iran were reported in classified form—and from other sources—to U.S. policymakers before MEK made them public. A Western diplomat familiar with the work of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations component that has been monitoring Iran's nuclear program, said that while the MEK has occasionally come up with accurate information about Iran's nukes, the group has come up with a similar number of other tips that have not checked out.

According to Human Rights Watch, several members of Congress, including both Republicans and Democrats, only last month attended a Washington meeting of a legal "MKO-backed" group called the National Convention for a Democratic, Secular Republic in Iran. In February, the group says, a think tank co-chaired by retired U.S. military officers called for MEK to be dropped from the State Department terrorist list and recommended that the U.S. government actively support MEK in its campaign to bring down the Iranian theocracy.

According to administration officials, some Pentagon officials want to recruit former MEK members as U.S. secret agents who would infiltrate Iran on intelligence missions. The Pentagon has emphatically insisted that it has no plans to work with the MEK or any of the group's members.

The new Human Rights Watch report offers no insight into the validity or inaccuracy of MEK information about Iranian's nuclear program but it does allege strange and sometimes brutal behavior by the group’s leaders and internal security apparatus. According to the report, MEK, formed in 1965 by three political activists, originally was an "urban guerilla group" which participated in the struggle against the shah that resulted in the 1979 Iranian revolution and produced the current theocratic regime in Tehran.

In an early schism following the revolution, the MEK and Abolhassan Bani Sadr, briefly Iran's president during the 1980 U.S. Embassy hostage crisis, split away from the main revolutionary movement led by Ayatollah Khomeini and went into exile. Later, Bani Sadr in turn split from MEK after a disagreement with Massoud Rajavi, who, with his wife, Maryam, subsequently became the movement's unchallenged leader. During the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam allowed MEK to set up several military camps in Iraq—with a headquarters encampment near Baghdad known as Camp Ashraf—and the group proceeded to conduct paramilitary operations against the Tehran regime, the largest of which was mounted—unsuccessfully—shortly after Iran agreed to a U.N.-brokered ceasefire in the Iran-Iraq War. MEK reportedly lost more than 1,000 fighters in this attack.

According to Human Rights Watch, following this 1988 military defeat, the Rajavi's leadership of MEK became increasingly authoritarian and cultlike. According to an MEK defector's memoir, Rajavi claimed to have a mystical relationship with a prophet known as Imam Zaman, who is Shia Islam's version of the long-awaited Messiah. In order to better cement their relationship with their leader, and hence ultimately their Messiah, Rajavi then instructed his followers to divorce their spouses. The group had already established a practice of "self criticism," under which members were asked to undergo their own personal "ideological revolution" by confessing personal inadequacies in cultlike confession sessions.

Paranoid about defectors and possible infiltrators from the Tehran regime's intelligence apparatus, in the l990s, according to Human Rights Watch, MEK leadership ordered a series of stringent "security clearances" in which "many" members were arrested by group organizers and interrogated and even imprisoned in special buildings inside the boundaries of MEK camps in Saddam-ruled Iraq. Human Rights Watch says the testimony of former MEK prisoners paints "a grim picture of how the organization treated its members, particularly those who held dissenting opinions or expressed an intent to leave the organization."

Witnesses contacted by Human Rights Watch reported two deaths during the course of MEK internal interrogations and other cases of lengthy imprisonment. One MEK detainee interviewed by Human Rights Watch, Mohammad Hussein Sobhani, claimed to have spent eight and a half years in solitary confinement in MEK detention facilities after he started raising questions about the leadership's policies. He said he was beaten on 11 occasions with wooden sticks and leather belts. Another former MEK member interviewed by Human Rights Watch, Farhad Javaheri-Yar, claimed to have been imprisoned in solitary confinement by the group for five years.

Other witnesses told Human Rights Watch claimed it was the practice of MEK interrogators to tie thick ropes around prisoners' necks and drag them along the ground. One witness told investigators: "Sometimes prisoners returned to the cell with extremely swollen necks—their head and neck as big as a pillow." In a statement accompanying its investigative report, Joe Stork, a Human Rights Watch expert on the Middle East, commented: "The Iranian government has a dreadful record on human rights. But it would be a mistake to promote an opposition group that is responsible for serious human rights abuses.”
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

© 2005 MSNBC.com

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7902719/site/newsweek/

"Straight-Speak"

2005-05-17T19:09:00.000-07:00

There are many reasons why I am an Independent and likely will remain un-affiliated to any party all of my life. Jack Dalton sums up one of the most recent reasons that justifies my intelligent choice.

"Straight-Speak": "Monday, May 16, 2005
The 'Illusion' of Two 'Parties'

The “Illusion” of Two “Parties”
By: Jack Dalton

Thanks to the recently released “memos” between the BushCo camp and the Blair “brigade” there is no longer any doubt they “cooked the books” on the intelligence to fit their already in place plans to invade Iraq. For some of us, this is just icing on the cake as there was already a wide body of evidence in the public domain articulating how “intelligence”--and I use that term loosely-- was being deliberately distorted and made to fit pre-determined plans to invade Iraq. Former Secretary of the Treasury, Paul O’Neill, in “The Price of Loyalty” shows as early as February, 2002, a deliberate, concerted effort was being put forth to “justify”—also used loosely—invading Iraq.

On March 20, 2003, as you know, Iraq was invaded and is now occupied. Since then, tens upon tens of thousands of Iraqi’s have been killed, with an untold number wounded; with the number of Americans killed moving toward 1,700; and the actual number of total medical evacuations for all reasons, closer to 30,000 (that number includes the 17,000 that the Pentagon said were evacuated but not “wounded”—a great number of which were for psychological reasons). That is for another discussion, so on to the “illusion.”

The “smoking gun” memos were made public on March 5th, less than two weeks ago. 88 members of the House of Representatives signed a joint letter demanding the White House explain them. After all, everyone around Bush, and Bush included, stated over and over again that there were no plans in place to invade Iraq; and that they would make all decisions based on the “best available intelligence.”

If the members of the House were aware of the memos, it stands to reason the members of the Senate would also have been aware of the memos. I clearly remember, and not in the distant past, many voices of outrage coming from Senate Democrats over the manner in which this nation was lead into this BushCo war of choice.

A few days ago, these Democratic Party voices of opposition had the chance to, in part, show “what they are made of” and take a stand against the $82 billion supplemental earmarked for Iraq, and everything it represents. Not only would passage of the supplemental throw additional huge sums of “good money after bad,” but tucked away inside it is an amendment that will allow the Department of Homeland security the power to waive laws with no oversight what-so-ever.

“A stroke of the pen makes it final: President Bush signed into law the Iraq war supplemental, which includes a controversial provision giving the secretary of homeland security the power to waive all law when securing U.S. borders.” Now here’s the kicker—when the Senate votes were tallied up, the supplemental and all the tucked away provisions like the one above, the vote was unanimous--100 to 0.

If ever there existed a time the mandated a strong, determined and uncompromising voice of reason in our congress, especially the Senate, it is now—but they were nowhere to be found.

At the same time the Senate Democrats, in total, were joining their Republican comrades in passing this piece of “legislation”—again a term used loosely—it was simultaneously announced by the Pentagon they would be back in August for more.

I’ve said it many times and repeat it again, we only have one political party in this nation with two ends of the very same pole—the one that we, the people of this nation keep getting in the back. The silence of broadcast and print media on and about all of this especially the memos makes them, by the failure to bring this to the publics’ attention, guilty of deception by omission. The “media” has failed itself and has betrayed the people of this nation by its silence.

For those that find this unacceptable and would like to join me in letting the people in congress know just exactly how you feel and what you think of what they are doing in your name, here is the link to Congress.org. If you follow the link you will see how easy it is to contact those in congress. They need to hear from us and the more of us the better.

A few letters to editors of local as well as national newspapers wouldn’t hurt either.

posted by Jack Dalton at 9:43 PM

There is a blog that deserves to be cut and pasted... Or better yet! Follow Jack's advice and let your Senators, political parties, and the MSM, know that the government is one big corporate mess that deserves to be flushed.

Senate Fishing Expedition... Galloway leaves them all wet.

2005-05-17T18:03:00.000-07:00

Well, I think I will let Galloway's words stand on their own other than adding that if you have read the senate committees report you would already know that they have nothing on Galloway unless they are hiding it, which would make absolutely no sense. If they could contradict him at all they would have right then and there after that onslaught of truth against the bush farce.

"Senator, I am not now, nor have I ever been, an oil trader. and neither has anyone on my behalf. I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one - and neither has anyone on my behalf.

"Now I know that standards have slipped in the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice. I am here today but last week you already found me guilty. You traduced my name around the world without ever having asked me a single question, without ever having contacted me, without ever written to me or telephoned me, without any attempt to contact me whatsoever. And you call that justice.

I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims did not have weapons of mass destruction.

I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda.

I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001.

I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.

Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.

"Now I want to deal with the pages that relate to me in this dossier and I want to point out areas where there are - let's be charitable and say errors. Then I want to put this in the context where I believe it ought to be. On the very first page of your document about me you assert that I have had 'many meetings' with Saddam Hussein. This is false.

"I have had two meetings with Saddam Hussein, once in 1994 and once in August of 2002. By no stretch of the English language can that be described as "many meetings" with Saddam Hussein.

"As a matter of fact, I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns. I met him to try and bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war, and on the second of the two occasions, I met him to try and persuade him to let Dr Hans Blix and the United Nations weapons inspectors back into the country - a rather better use of two meetings with Saddam Hussein than your own Secretary of State for Defense made of his.

"I was an opponent of Saddam Hussein when British and Americans governments and businessmen were selling him guns and gas. I used to demonstrate outside the Iraqi embassy when British and American officials were going in and doing commerce.

"You will see from the official parliamentary record, Hansard, from the 15th March 1990 onwards, voluminous evidence that I have a rather better record of opposition to Saddam Hussein than you do and than any other member of the British or American governments do.

"Now you say in this document, you quote a source, you have the gall to quote a source, without ever having asked me whether the allegation from the source is true, that I am 'the owner of a company which has made substantial profits from trading in Iraqi oil'.

"Senator, I do not own any companies, beyond a small company whose entire purpose, whose sole purpose, is to receive the income from my journalistic earnings from my employer, Associated Newspapers, in London. I do not own a company that's been trading in Iraqi oil. And you have no business to carry a quotation, utterly unsubstantiated and false, implying otherwise.

"Now you have nothing on me, Senator, except my name on lists of names from Iraq, many of which have been drawn up after the installation of your puppet government in Baghdad. If you had any of the letters against me that you had against Zhirinovsky, and even Pasqua, they would have been up there in your slideshow for the members of your committee today.

"You have my name on lists provided to you by the Duelfer inquiry, provided to him by the convicted bank robber, and fraudster and conman Ahmed Chalabi who many people to their credit in your country now realize played a decisive role in leading your country into the disaster in Iraq.

"There were 270 names on that list originally. That's somehow been filleted down to the names you chose to deal with in this committee. Some of the names on that committee included the former secretary to his Holiness Pope John Paul II, the former head of the African National Congress Presidential office and many others who had one defining characteristic in common: they all stood against the policy of sanctions and war which you vociferously prosecuted and which has led us to this disaster.

"You quote Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Well, you have something on me, I've never met Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Your sub-committee apparently has. But I do know that he's your prisoner, I believe he's in Abu Ghraib prison. I believe he is facing war crimes charges, punishable by death. In these circumstances, knowing what the world knows about how you treat prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, in Bagram Airbase, in Guantanamo Bay, including I may say, British citizens being held in those places.

"I'm not sure how much credibility anyone would put on anything you manage to get from a prisoner in those circumstances. But you quote 13 words from Dahar Yassein Ramadan whom I have never met. If he said what he said, then he is wrong.

"And if you had any evidence that I had ever engaged in any actual oil transaction, if you had any evidence that anybody ever gave me any money, it would be before the public and before this committee today because I agreed with your Mr Greenblatt [Mark Greenblatt, legal counsel on the committee].

"Your Mr Greenblatt was absolutely correct. What counts is not the names on the paper, what counts is where's the money. Senator? Who paid me hundreds of thousands of dollars of money? The answer to that is nobody. And if you had anybody who ever paid me a penny, you would have produced them today.

"Now you refer at length to a company names in these documents as Aredio Petroleum. I say to you under oath here today: I have never heard of this company, I have never met anyone from this company. This company has never paid a penny to me and I'll tell you something else: I can assure you that Aredio Petroleum has never paid a single penny to the Mariam Appeal Campaign. Not a thin dime. I don't know who Aredio Petroleum are, but I daresay if you were to ask them they would confirm that they have never met me or ever paid me a penny.

"Whilst I'm on that subject, who is this senior former regime official that you spoke to yesterday? Don't you think I have a right to know? Don't you think the Committee and the public have a right to know who this senior former regime official you were quoting against me interviewed yesterday actually is?

"Now, one of the most serious of the mistakes you have made in this set of documents is, to be frank, such a schoolboy howler as to make a fool of the efforts that you have made. You assert on page 19, not once but twice, that the documents that you are referring to cover a different period in time from the documents covered by The Daily Telegraph which were a subject of a libel action won by me in the High Court in England late last year.

"You state that The Daily Telegraph article cited documents from 1992 and 1993 whilst you are dealing with documents dating from 2001. Senator, The Daily Telegraph's documents date identically to the documents that you were dealing with in your report here. None of The Daily Telegraph's documents dealt with a period of 1992, 1993. I had never set foot in Iraq until late in 1993 - never in my life. There could possibly be no documents relating to Oil-for-Food matters in 1992, 1993, for the Oil-for-Food scheme did not exist at that time.

"And yet you've allocated a full section of this document to claiming that your documents are from a different era to the Daily Telegraph documents when the opposite is true. Your documents and the Daily Telegraph documents deal with exactly the same period.

"But perhaps you were confusing the Daily Telegraph action with the Christian Science Monitor. The Christian Science Monitor did indeed publish on its front pages a set of allegations against me very similar to the ones that your committee have made. They did indeed rely on documents which started in 1992, 1993. These documents were unmasked by the Christian Science Monitor themselves as forgeries.

"Now, the neo-con websites and newspapers in which you're such a hero, senator, were all absolutely cock-a-hoop at the publication of the Christian Science Monitor documents, they were all absolutely convinced of their authenticity. They were all absolutely convinced that these documents showed me receiving $10 million from the Saddam regime. And they were all lies.

"In the same week as the Daily Telegraph published their documents against me, the Christian Science Monitor published theirs which turned out to be forgeries and the British newspaper, Mail on Sunday, purchased a third set of documents which also upon forensic examination turned out to be forgeries. So there's nothing fanciful about this. Nothing at all fanciful about it.

"The existence of forged documents implicating me in commercial activities with the Iraqi regime is a proven fact. It's a proven fact that these forged documents existed and were being circulated amongst right-wing newspapers in Baghdad and around the world in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Iraqi regime.

"Now, Senator, I gave my heart and soul to oppose the policy that you promoted. I gave my political life's blood to try to stop the mass killing of Iraqis by the sanctions on Iraq which killed one million Iraqis, most of them children, most of them died before they even knew that they were Iraqis, but they died for no other reason other than that they were Iraqis with the misfortune to born at that time. I gave my heart and soul to stop you committing the disaster that you did commit in invading Iraq. And I told the world that your case for the war was a pack of lies.

"I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims did not have weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.

"Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.

If the world had listened to Kofi Annan, whose dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened to President Chirac who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the anti-war movement in Britain, we would not be in the disaster that we are in today. Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq's wealth.

"Have a look at the real Oil-for-Food scandal. Have a look at the 14 months you were in charge of Baghdad, the first 14 months when $8.8 billion of Iraq's wealth went missing on your watch. Have a look at Halliburton and other American corporations that stole not only Iraq's money, but the money of the American taxpayer.

"Have a look at the oil that you didn't even meter, that you were shipping out of the country and selling, the proceeds of which went who knows where? Have a look at the $800 million you gave to American military commanders to hand out around the country without even counting it or weighing it.

"Have a look at the real scandal breaking in the newspapers today, revealed in the earlier testimony in this committee. That the biggest sanctions busters were not me or Russian politicians or French politicians. The real sanctions busters were your own companies with the connivance of your own Government."

Can you say "fishing expedition"? I can't wait to hear the whoppers the GOP will tell tomorrow about "the one that got away!" LMAO

News Shredder: KR Washington Bureau | 05/05/2005 | British memo indicates Bush made intelligence fit Iraq policy

2005-05-16T14:49:00.000-07:00

It really pisses me off that this story has been out there since April and the MSM refuses to give it any serious coverage. If there was any doubt about a conservative biased media this is just another marker on the highway to the truth. The "Liberal-biased media" is a figment of the radical right wing's messed up imagination.

KR Washington Bureau | 05/05/2005 | British memo indicates Bush made intelligence fit Iraq policy: "Posted on Thu, May. 05, 2005

British memo indicates Bush made intelligence fit Iraq policy

By Warren P. Strobel and John Walcott

Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - A highly classified British memo, leaked in the midst of Britain's just-concluded election campaign, indicates that President Bush decided to overthrow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein by summer 2002 and was determined to ensure that U.S. intelligence data supported his policy.

The document, which summarizes a July 23, 2002, meeting of British Prime Minister Tony Blair with his top security advisers, reports on a visit to Washington by the head of Britain's MI-6 intelligence service.

The visit took place while the Bush administration was still declaring to the American public that no decision had been made to go to war.

'There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable,' the MI-6 chief said at the meeting, according to the memo. 'Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD,' weapons of mass destruction.

The memo said 'the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.'

No weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq since the U.S. invasion in March 2003.

The White House has repeatedly denied accusations made by several top foreign officials that it manipulated intelligence estimates to justify an invasion of Iraq.

It has instead pointed to the conclusions of two studies, one by the Senate Intelligence Committee and one by a presidentially appointed panel, that cite serious failures by the CIA and other agencies in judging Saddam's weapons programs.

Click on the headline for the rest of the story...

I was going to skip writing on this. Since it was huge news all around the world I figured eventually it would have to saturate the American MSM... But HELL NO! They have chosen to ignore the incontrivertable evidence that bush lied to congress and is guilty of treason. Does that make the MSM as guilty of treason as the bush admin.? I think it does...

bush's GOP BOBBLE-HEAD DOLLS

2005-05-15T18:19:00.000-07:00

What are Voinovich and the rest of the GOP members of the committee really saying? It is perfectly obvious that they are simply making a scripted and rehearsed statement about the Democrats plan to fillibuster bush's radical activist judges. Nothing more, and nothing less.

Your GOP talking point fillibuster smears just won't jive.

While Americans overwhelmingly support the minority protections provided by the fillibuster, GOP committee members are shirking their responsibilities to the people while sitting there nodding their heads like bobble-head dolls in support of bush's reckless choice of candidates. Why do you think there are committees to look at candidates before they go to the floor for a vote Voinovich? What are you payed to do? By whom were you elected to do your job? The president OR the people?

GOP Senator Breaks Ranks, Attacks Bolton - Yahoo! News:

"'Mr. Chairman,' Voinovich said, 'I am not so arrogant to think that I should impose my judgment and perspective of the U.S. position in the world community on the rest of my colleagues. We owe it to the president to give Mr. Bolton an up-or-down vote on the floor of the U.S. Senate.'

The committee, he said, should move the nomination along — but without a recommendation to approve Bolton. 'Let the Senate work its will,' he said.

At day's end, Voinovich prevailed. By a 10-8 party-line vote, the committee followed his recommendation, and now it will be up to the Senate itself to decide.

Afterward, Voinovich said he would vote against Bolton on the floor, but he declined to predict the outcome in the Senate, where Republicans outnumber Democrats 55 to 44, with one independent.

Voinovich said he plans to lobby fellow senators on the matter, saying he intends to 'share my concerns about him with my colleagues in the Senate, hopefully to convince them to not just rubber-stamp this, but rather give this thoughtful consideration.'"

Sorry there bobble-head Voinovich. What your statement really means to Americans is that you and the GOP failed, yet again, to do your job of representing the people. You shouldn't be on the committee if you are incapable of voting against an incompetent choice, and instead invoke your purposefully scripted, and feigned, discomfort with the choice of Bolton.

You, Voinovich, and the rest of the GOP bobble-head committee members, have failed to do what the people pay you to do by putting one of the worst possible candidates for the job at the UN on to the floor for a vote. Your Job was to stop the Senate from wasting it's time voting on the wrong candidates. It was pretty arrogant of you to assume that you are on the committee just to nod your head like a bobble-head doll. You owe it to Americans to do your job Voinovich. You, and the rest of the GOP bobble-heads, are all complete failures.

Pittsburgh's Proud Propagandist

2005-05-11T08:20:00.000-07:00

If you haven't visited Ariana Huffington's new blog, The Huffington post, you might have missed a great story. Scott Baker, according to his bio at news channel 4, is very accustomed to Pittsburgh viewers referring to him as "that guy who's on with Sally and Michelle." You still don't know who Scott Baker is? Scott Baker is also the man behind the Teresa Heinze "Shove It" story.

The Huffington Post | The News Wire: "Scott Baker, News Anchor, WTAE-Pittsburgh
'I’m the Guy Who Taught Jeff Gannon Everything He Knows About Journalism.' | permalink

I’m the guy who taught Jeff Gannon everything he knows about journalism. Okay maybe not everything. I’m still not clear on (sorry all hyperlinks on this one freak me out) his evident self-description of “Position: Top.” Except that I now gather that it has endangered the nuptial bonds of Julia and Brad. But I suppose I bear some responsibility for having lectured at the two-day journalism seminar Gannon attended.

Just when it seemed like the Gannon/Guckert story was about to fade away for lack of interest (something slightly less than the interest in “Topic A with Tina Brown”), along comes the new Vanity Fair to re-energize the matter when Gannon himself couldn’t even pull an invite to the White House Correspondents Association dinner.

This is what I get for trying to teach a simple little seminar on media career strategies? Jeff Gannon as my star student? I had more modest goals. Most kids trying to dive into media careers fail miserably. So maybe I can nudge them with a few helpful ideas. Hoped for result: entry level job in, say, a small market television station. Not so hoped for: center square of odd journalism scandal.

The Vanity Fair article calls it a seminar for “aspiring right-wing journalists.” My mantra to the students involves getting rid of the “right-wing” and esteeming the value of solid day-to-day journalism. Good old-fashioned storytelling.

TV commercials for weight loss programs often have tiny disclaimers about the thin person in the ad. “Results not typical.” I’m kind of hoping this is like that. But with my luck Corey Clark will soon be claiming I’m the guru of his love life.

Posted May 9, 2005 03:03 PM"

Do you think that News channel 4 will be inserting these little tidbits from Bakers first Blog entry on The huffington post into his bio? I highly doubt it.

It is also interesting to note that in Baker's bio News Channel 4 mentions that "For 10 years, he has taught career philosophy seminars for thousands of students interested in media careers." What Baker refers to as teaching "a simple little seminar on media career strategies" might seem much more inspirational if it were not for the fact that, as reported on by Will Bunch at Attytood, Baker is not simply teaching journalism philosophy seminars, but right wing journalism philosophy seminars.

But Baker has another job -- one that he doesn't list on his resume, although he does (sort of) 'fess up in his Huffington Post post. It turns out he teaches journalism to young conservatives at the Leadership Institute School of Broadcast Journalism, founded by Karl Rove associate and former national Young Republican director Morton Blackwell. And anchorman Baker is not just their star instructor -- he's also a graduate (scroll down).

Bunch also reports on the known fact that Morton Blackwell, a very good friend of Karl Rove, was also behind the "Purple Bandage" protest of John Kerry's Purple Hearts by the GOP before the election. Do you find any of these links disturbing? If you don't you haven't been paying attention to the fake media out there funded by our tax dollars and pushing the GOP agenda.

Scott Baker... Is he just another Jeff Gannon, Armstrong Williams, Maggie Gallagher? It would be too convenient to blow this off as concidence IMHO. I am sure that more will come of this in the Blogosphere, but I won't be holding my breath for this information to come out in the MSM. They won't even report on the biggest news of the last month (BBC proof of bush and Blair conspiring to make us go to war with Iraq). Why would they care about telling us the truth? No profit in that...

Thanks for tanking the economy bush!

2005-05-09T09:45:00.000-07:00

Some more serious news for radical right wing bush supporters to ignore (as per usual...)

BBC NEWS | Business | GM and Ford downgraded to junk
GM and Ford downgraded to junk
Standard & Poor's (S&P) has cut the debt ratings of US carmakers General Motors and Ford to 'junk' status.

The US credit rating agency said its decision reflected tough global competition in the market and slower sales of both firms' leading vehicles.

The downgrades, affecting debt worth about $290bn (£152bn), are the largest cuts to junk in a single day.

A junk status rating suggests that a company is more likely to default on its debt.

Rising costs

With both GM and Ford facing difficult times, analysts had predicted cuts to junk status later this year.

But many were surprised at the speed of S&P's decision.

Last month, GM reported a net loss of $1.1bn in the first three months of 2005, largely due to flagging sales and the rising cost of employee healthcare.

Rival Ford also reported a 40% drop in first-quarter net profits, to $1.21bn, citing falling US sales and rising prices for raw materials.

S&P cut GM and General Motors Acceptance Corp's long-term credit ratings to 'BB', the second-highest junk rating.

S&P's outlook on the new rating is negative, which means another downgrade could be possible in the next 24 months.

Meanwhile, S&P cut Ford and Ford Motor Credit Co's long-term credit ratings to 'BB+', the highest junk rating. The outlook on the new rating is also negative.

GM and Ford, which are the world's number one and three carmakers respectively, said they were disappointed with the downgrades.

Both companies stressed they had ample cash reserves.

The economy is tanking, the market is tanking, inflation is rising, unemployment is sucking unless you want to call flipping burgers a career.

I wonder how happy the soon to be laid off auto workers will be knowing that GM and Ford have plenty of cash on hand? Do you think they are glad that bush is pushing for dismantling social security so they can try and scrape together enough of their oncoming unemployment checks for "investing" in the bush privatization scam?

The only thing worse than Reaganomics? Reaganomics in the incapabable hands of a warmongering fool...

Are you sure you want to read this?

2005-05-04T14:22:00.000-07:00

For the many computer users that never bother to use anti-virus, firewall, or Ad-Aware type softwares to protect their computer from spyware and viruses, here is just another reason for you not to worry.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Bogus blogs snare fresh victims

Cyber criminals are starting to use fake blogs to snare new victims.

The bogus web journals are being used as traps that infect visitor's machines with keylogging software or viruses.

Filtering firm Websense said it had found hundreds of bogus blogs baited with all kinds of malicious software to snare the unwary.

Websense warned that the baited blogs could get past traditional security measures that try to protect people from malicious programs.

Hidden harm

The company said blogs were being used because they inadvertently offered lots of help to computer criminals.

Blogs are free and simple to use, offer users lots of storage space, can be used anonymously and most do not scan stored files for viruses and other malicious programs.

Websense said it had seen examples of some computer criminals creating a legitimate looking weblog, loading it with keylogging software or viral code...

... viruses hosted on weblogs might be a danger because they get round the filtering systems many firms have created to ensure malicious programs do not reach employees.

Users were urged to keep anti-virus and patches up to date, regularly scan machines with anti-spyware products and exercise caution when reading unsolicited messages sent via e-mail or instant messenger.

You have to keep in mind that this is just a phishing scam variation, but instead of hoping you will enter user names and passwords at the site they are looking to take control of your computer. That, of course, can still lead to identity theft once they control your computer. Another important fact to remember is that malicious code has always been hidden everywhere on the web. Hiding it on a blog is no different than websites that hide it in pictures or in links they put on their pages.

There really is not much you can do to avoid "all" spyware and viruses. The best you can do is hope that the people at companies like McAfee, Norton, Spybot destroyer, Ad-Aware, and others that help protect most computers stay on top of these problems as they develop.

If you do not have any of the needed software to protect your computer are you sure you want to read blogs? Of course you do. It is no less safe than any other web page you may visist.

Is DeLay's Policy Director Jumping Ship?

2005-04-25T18:57:00.000-07:00

A senior member of Tom DeLay's team is leaving his side at the same time that DeLay is getting hammered with investigations. Does anyone else see this as a rat scurrying off of a sinking ship?

Yahoo! News - DeLay: She'll Be Missed; Majority Leader's Policy Director Joins K-Street Firm:
"Sullivan had been with DeLay for over six years and was elevated to policy director for the Majority Leader at the beginning of 2003. Prior to that, she served as DeLay's senior appropriations adviser, developing and implementing the House leadership's appropriations and budget strategy as well as coalition strategies with grassroots groups and members of Congress. She was a key member of DeLay's leadership team throughout, as the point of contact between House leadership and Senate leadership while policy director and as the leadership contact for Republican members in the appropriations process during her stint as senior appropriations adviser."

You have to figure that things are not looking too good in the DeLay camp. His supporters deserting him, even the shills in the media that used to love him have a hard time not noticing the illegal and unethical things he has been doing doing, and just as the Department of Justice is stepping into the investigations a senior member of his team jumps ship for a Law firm. Maybe Sullivan thinks she and DeLay will need legal help in the near future?

DROP THE HAMMER ON DELAY!

News Shredder: Power Line represents a backward, primitive way of looking at the world.

2005-04-22T07:40:00.000-07:00

News Shredder: Power Line represents a backward, primitive way of looking at the world.
Given how these radical right Power Line wingnuts claim that Dems are blocking extremist judges based on their faith, I find it interesting to see the typical hate towards religion, and Catholics in particular, that Power Line exhibits in its latest blog on science.

Power Line: Planet of the Apes:
"It's interesting, though, to contemplate the quest for insight into human nature via the apes in the context of news coverage of the selection of Pope Benedict. The conventional view is that religion in general, and Catholicism in particular, represents a backward, primitive way of looking at the world, and especially at human nature, compared to modern, progressive science."

It is plainly apparent that, aside from being the last ones to consult concerning "progressive science", these ridiculously hypocritical charges being tossed out there by Power Line like Maltov cocktails at all of the moderates that oppose the radical bush policies and tactics will eventully result in more self-destruction A LA Tom "the hummer" DeLay (he really sucks!), John "I support those who kill judges" Cronyn, and Condi "Skirts the Constitution" Rice, Jeff "get a BLOW job" Gannon, and John "Nuke the U.N." Bolton...

There is very little that is going right for the extremist bush lovers right now, even in their own little fantasy world, and it is our job to keep this "reality" ball rolling...