Questions We Should Ask Tim Russert

From a correspondent of Alterman:

When I'm not fantasizing about the Guardians of the Universe bestowing me with my own Green Lantern Power Ring, I fantasize about stupid questions like Russert's being answered along these lines: "Tim, I assume you are a voter and a citizen, and therefore have a stake in this election beyond playing "gotcha" with the candidates. So let me ask you a question: What are YOU willing to give up to keep Iran from developing a nuclear bomb? Will you support a sizable increase in your taxes to pay for the war necessary to prevent it? If not, then how many generations of Russerts are you willing to saddle with debt to pay for such a war? Are you willing to have your children drafted to keep Iran in line? If not, why do you expect other Americans to fill that gap? How many dead Iranian civilians do you personally consider an acceptable price? How many of our allies are you, Tim Russert, willing to alienate? How much are you prepared to pay for a gallon of gas? Do you even realize or acknowledge that you, Tim Russert, as a citizen of this nation will have obligations and burdens imposed on you if we go to war with Iran? And if not, why do you consider yourself exempt?"

Tim Russert (also known to Glenn Greenwald, wonderfully, as the Head Raccoon) is a detriment to American political life. When he's not parroting the Republican talking point of the day he's playing "Gotcha" with Democrats, especially Hillary. In 2000 George W. Bush got a ludicrously softball interview from Russert while Al Gore was attacked mercilessly. Timmy Boy is the ultimate insider and part of the reason the political media in this country are generally so god-awful.

Oh, and by the way, there's one more question I'd like to ask Old Pumpkin Head: Did Jack Welch order you to call the 2000 election for Bush on NBC on that fateful November night?

Just asking.

Utah--Yes, UTAH--Rejects School Vouchers

Anti-public school zealots go down to defeat in America's most conservative state.

Yes! Now to dismantle the fraudulent, anti-public education No Child Left Behind law, which has inflicted a disastrous rise in senseless test mania on America's schools. NCLB has one purpose above all--to set a standard so high that no school can reach it, thus allowing the right wingers to declare public education a failure and push for replacing it with private schools that teach that Adam and Eve were real people.

Good to see good sense prevailing in the Mountain West.

Still Think the Right Can Be Talked To?

Then read this piece here. Make sure you read the story in the large blue box that comprises the bulk of the post.

I'm a peaceful person, but right now I'd like to cave in the heads of the fucking bastards that pulled this bullshit.

REPEAT: The radical right/Bush worshipping/Free Republic scum CANNOT be negotiated with. They can only be utterly defeated and politically destroyed.

Period.

The American People Are Finally Getting the Idea

They've figured out that SEVENTY PER CENT of the entire national debt accumulated since 1789 was piled up under just THREE REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTS--two of them named BUSH.

They've figured out that under the two oilmen who seized power in 2000, the price of a barrel of oil has gone up FIVE HUNDRED PER CENT.

They've figured out that no real reform of the broken health care system will happen with the Republicans.

They've figured out that our "prosperity" is built on the sand of cheap credit, debt, and excessive borrowing--and that now the bills are coming due.

Democrats, SEIZE THE MOMENT. Restore our country's faith in itself and build our well-being on solid ground. Do that and you will govern for most of the rest of this century.

Yes! The Last Bastion of Majority Bush Support Falls!

Utah finally comes around.

And look at New England. Ha!

What Digby Said, Part 67

Read it right here. Excerpt:

The Village [The National Media], in other words, is comprised of the same people who are giving money and time and support to the lunatic Rudy Giuliani. They think being simultaneously stupid and madly aggressive is normal. After all, they pretty much gave George W. Bush a nonstop blowjob for years until he had been below 40% national popularity for so long they couldn't ignore it.

Heh heh.

Yes! Justice is Served

The Westboro Baptist "Church" has been hit with a $10.9 million judgment for its despicable and atrocious behavior at a Marine funeral. The details can be found here.

I hope these assholes lose on appeal and have to pay every g-d damned dime. Couldn't happen to a nicer group of scum.

Don't Kid Yourself: Giuliani is a Right Winger

This article in The Washington Post lays it out clearly: the idea that Rudolph Giuliani is a liberal is a fundamental misconception based on a handful of issues. In most respects, Giuliani combines all the worst aspects of Bush and Cheney within himself. Excerpt:

You wouldn't know it from reading the papers, but the favorite to win the Republican presidential nomination is a confirmed right-winger. On issues such as free speech and religion, secrecy and due process, civil rights and civil liberties, pornography and democracy, this moralist and self-styled lawman has exhibited all the key hallmarks of Bush-era conservatism.

That candidate is Rudolph W. Giuliani.

As any New Yorker can tell you, the last word anyone in the 1990s would have attached to the brash, furniture- breaking mayor was "liberal" -- and the second-to-last was "moderate." With his take-many-prisoners approach to crime and his unerring pro-police instincts, the prosecutor-turned-proconsul made his mark on the city not by embracing its social liberalism but by trying to crush it.

To a New Yorker, the idea of Rudy as a liberal or even a moderate is unreal, topsy-turvy -- like describing George McGovern as a hawk or Pat Buchanan as a Zionist. The case for Giuliani's moderation rests mainly on three overblown issues -- guns, gay rights and abortion -- and even in those cases, his deviation from conservative orthodoxy is far milder than is usually suggested.

The "social" and "cultural" issues that divide Americans encompass much more than guns, gay rights and abortion. They include state support of religion; the legitimacy of dissenting speech; the president's right to keep information secret; the place of fair procedures in dispensing justice. The Bush administration's hard-line stands on these matters have polarized the nation as much as the Iraq war has. And on these issues, Giuliani is just as hard-line as the man he'd like to succeed.

Face it, folks--he's Rudolph W. Mussolini. He has nothing but contempt for this country's democratic institutions. He has a disturbing streak of megalomania. And he is willing to say or do anything to win, however dishonest or unethical. Stopping Giuliani from acquiring the presidency is fundamental to the survival of our nation. Don't let him get away with trying to sell himself as a moderate. He's about as "moderate" as Dubya--and even more ruthless.

Giuliani Lying Through His Teeth About His Terrorism "Expertise"

If there is a more dangerous, more dishonest fraud than Rudolph Giuliani running for president, I don't know of him or her. Yes, Romney is a flip-flopping, lying hack, but even he doesn't have the instinct for authoritarianism and double-talk that "Rudy" has. Testimony that Giuliani gave to the 9/11 Commission (You remember that one, don't you? The one Bush tried to kill?) reveals a far different picture than the false one that Giuliani and his toads have been trying to sell the American people. Giuliani has tried to push the fiction that he was aware of the threat long before it materialized. The record says otherwise. Details can be found here:

A 15-page "memorandum for the record," prepared by a commission counsel and dated April 20, 2004, quotes Giuliani conceding that it wasn't until "after 9/11" that "we brought in people to brief us on al Qaeda." According to the memorandum, Giuliani told two commission members and five staffers: "But we had nothing like this pre 9/11, which was a mistake, because if experts share a lot of info," there would be a "better chance of someone making heads and tails" of the "situation." (Such memoranda are not verbatim transcripts of the confidential commission interviews, but are described on the cover page as "100 percent accurate" notes taken by staffers, stamped "commission sensitive/unclassified" on the top of each page.)

Asked about the “flow of information about al Qaeda threats from 1998-2001,” Giuliani said: “At the time, I wasn’t told it was al Qaeda, but now that I look back at it, I think it was al Qaeda.” He also said that as part of one of his post-9/11 briefings, “we had in Bodansky, who had written a book on bin Laden.” Giuliani was referring to Yossef Bodanksy, the author of Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America, which was published in 1999 and predicted “spectacular terrorist strikes in Washington and/or New York.” Giuliani wrote in his own book, Leadership, that Judi Nathan got him a copy of Bodansky’s prophetic work “shortly after 9/11,” and that he covered it in “highlighter and notes,” citing his study of it as an example of how he “mastered a subject.” Apparently, he also invited Bodansky to address key members of his staff.

Giuliani attributed his pre-9/11 shortcomings in part to the FBI, which was run by his close friend (and current endorser) Louis Freeh, and to the Joint Terrorism Task Force, an FBI-directed partnership with the NYPD. "We already had JTTF, and got flow information no one else got," he explained. "But did we get the flow of information we wanted? No. We would be told about a threat, but not about the underlying nature of the threat. I wanted all the same information the FBI had, and we didn't get that until after 9/11. Immediately after 9/11, we were made a complete partner." He added: "Without 9/11, I never would have been able to send an adviser to FBI briefings."

Hmmm. An FBI run by close friend and endorser Louis Freeh, who was wasting FBI resources on investigating the Clintons instead of devoting his manpower to fighting terrorism. Here, from Salon in 2002, is an interesting portrait of Freeh, from which I will quote at length:

Freeh was expert in political survival, some say, forging an alliance with top Republicans after he'd turned against the president who appointed him. And though he still wins strong grades from some lawmakers and analysts, the critics say his eight years on the job may have left the agency -- and the nation -- vulnerable.

"If people are looking for a scapegoat, I'd nominate Louis Freeh," says Ronald Kessler, author of "The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI."

It's no secret the FBI suffered a series of embarrassments during Freeh's tenure, some of them deadly. They include the botched handling of the investigations into Waco and Ruby Ridge; the bombing at the Atlanta Olympic Village and the heavy-handed tactics used against Richard Jewell; the breakdown of the FBI crime labs; the inept pursuit of suspected atomic spy Wen Ho Lee; the belated discovery of turncoat agent Richard Hanssen; and the failure to deliver thousands of documents to defense attorneys during the trial of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

The FBI fiascoes seemed to come like clockwork under Freeh, and they continue to roll out to this day. A recently uncovered March 2000 memo reveals that agents mistakenly destroyed evidence gathered in an investigation involving Osama bin Laden.

Yet Freeh has remained largely unscathed.

An episode just last summer showed the continuing esteem he enjoyed on Capitol Hill. During confirmation hearings for Mueller, Sen. Orin Hatch, R-Utah, continued to heap praise upon Freeh, "an extraordinary public servant" who, he said, "accomplished a great deal during his tenure to modernize and restructure the FBI so it can handle the challenges of the future."

And while Mueller took over as director only a week before Sept. 11, critics and press accounts have focused on his role. Freeh has managed to avoid the spotlight. Currently a senior vice chairman for credit card giant MBNA Bank, he has stayed away from the press since September, and he did not return calls seeking comment. Nor did three of his former deputies.

"Freeh is being smart by keeping a low profile. He doesn't want to get involved," says Kessler. "But people who follow the bureau know Mueller is trying to rectify his [Freeh's] problems."

*********

"He should be asked to testify as well as the rest of the ranking officers," adds I.C. Smith, a retired FBI special agent in charge and 25-year veteran of the bureau. "I'm not a Mueller and Ashcroft fan, but this didn't happen on their watch. It was Louis Freeh's team in place when the [9/11] terrorists were setting up their infrastructure and exploiting the system. He can't avoid that."

Detractors blame Freeh for a leadership style that featured arrogance, cronyism and micromanagement. Since 1994, all new FBI agents have to take a polygraph test, but Smith says Freeh left office without ever submitting to one. He tried to promote to deputy a friend implicated in the Ruby Ridge killing. And he personally approved the use of photographic suspect lineups during the Oklahoma City bombing investigation, a decision usually left to field agents.

Yet thanks in part to his high-profile fights with Clinton, Freeh managed to skate by as director and was never held accountable by the Republican Congress or the Beltway press, two influential groups that today seem indifferent to revisiting Freeh's troubled reign in search for clues to what's gone wrong at the FBI.

Former Clinton administration officials say they recognized the problem. But Clinton, crippled by the self-inflicted wounds of a sex scandal, refused to take action against the FBI director.

"We viewed Freeh as a guy who was wholly incompetent but who held on to power by making himself useful to the press and Republicans on the Hill," says one Clinton White House aide. "He was a political opportunist who played Clinton, and he's managed to escape the judgment of history for his mismanagement of the FBI."

Freeh: an incompetent, arrogant liar. It figures that he and Giuliani would form an alliance. Like attracts like, after all.

Yes, these are the people who will "keep America safe", the people who "understand terrorism", the people who are the only hope for our country. I've said it repeatedly and I'll say it again: Giuliani and his henchmen are downright dangerous to the survival of this country as a democratic republic. Giuliani is a liar and a bungler of the first order. He has consistently run on the mangled and burned corpses of the 9/11 dead, using their deaths in a disgusting, self-serving manner to advance his personal ambitions. He MUST BE STOPPED. We cannot allow four more years of Republican executive branch dictatorship in this country. I will continue to pepper away at this "Little man in search of a balcony" to use Jimmy Breslin's wonderful phrase. How about you?

The Giuliani Video You Need to Help Go Viral

It's a damning expose of the fraudulent "hero" of 9/11, Rudolph Giuliani. You can find it here.

I hope if Giuliani is the Republican nominee in 2008 that every American 18 and older sees this.

Help it spread!!

The Absurdity of Thinking Iran is a "Threat to the World"

Fareed Zakaria is the voice of reason in this insightful Newsweek article on the ludicrous notion that Iran represents a more dangerous threat to the world than did Stalin and Mao (!). Excerpts:

The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality. Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative ideologist whom Bush has consulted on this topic, has written that Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is "like Hitler … a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism." For this staggering proposition Podhoretz provides not a scintilla of evidence.

Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland's and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?...

In a speech last week, Rudy Giuliani said that while the Soviet Union and China could be deterred during the cold war, Iran can't be. The Soviet and Chinese regimes had a "residual rationality," he explained. Hmm. Stalin and Mao—who casually ordered the deaths of millions of their own people, fomented insurgencies and revolutions, and starved whole regions that opposed them—were rational folk. But not Ahmadinejad, who has done what that compares? One of the bizarre twists of the current Iran hysteria is that conservatives have become surprisingly charitable about two of history's greatest mass murderers.

Naturally, Giuliani is cheerleading the loudest for an unprovoked attack on Iran. It appeals to his recklessness, his violence, and his megalomania. I've been pleading with anyone who reads my tiny little blog to do what they can to help stop this madness from happening, but at this point Bush and Cheney may be completely beyond reason.

And that scares the hell out of me.

The Most Dangerous Candidate: Giuliani

He lies in debates constantly, simply pulling "facts" from the air. He has grossly distorted his role in 9/11 to make himself look like a hero, when in fact his bungling cost the lives of countless rescuers. And he has an appetite for power and an intolerance of dissent. Kevin Drum notes this authoritarian streak here:

Choosing the best presidential candidate among the 2008 contenders is a tough job. Picking the worst is easy. Rudy Giuliani is the guy you'd get if you put George Bush and Dick Cheney into a wine press and squeezed out their pure combined essence: unbounded arrogance and self-righteousness, a chip on his shoulder the size of a redwood, a studied contempt for anybody's opinion but his own, a vindictive streak a mile wide, and a devotion to secrecy and executive power unmatched in presidential history. He is a disaster waiting to happen.

Amen to that! Giuliani must be stopped before he causes irreversible damage to our country. I'll do my part. How about you?

Why is the Repulsive Idiot Glenn Beck Still on CNN??

If this doesn't piss you, I'm not sure what would.

Beck has this disgusting habit of attacking and smearing the victims of disasters, as if their suffering were their own fault. He's also the lowest rated of all the cable ranters. And yet, CNN and ABC still keep him on. Why?

"Liberal media" my ass.

The Most Recent Republican Debate

Wonderfully summarized here. Thank God, 'cause I can't look at these idiots.

What a bunch of wankers. There's only one group worse. And that's the hardcore right wing fanatics and haters that make up the Republican "base". Talk about scary...

Random Thoughts on a Saturday

--Al Gore deserves to be re-elected as president of the United States. Although I will support ANY Democratic presidential candidate against ANY Republican candidate in 2008, Gore stands head and shoulders above all of them. His qualifications are immense. He would be one of the great presidents, in my view. Additionally, no man in recent American history has been lied about and smeared more relentlessly. (Read Bob Somerby's obsessively comprehensive archives in The Daily Howler if you doubt me.) His elevation to the presidency would be an act, therefore, of cosmic justice and a repudiation of every lying bastard in the press corps who helped make the 2000 election close enough for Bush's mafia to steal. I hope that if Gore does not actively pursue the presidency that caucus goers and voters in Iowa, Nevada, and New Hampshire write him in in overwhelming numbers.

--Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid should be removed as Democratic leaders in Congress. They continue to buckle under to the least popular, most widely loathed president in modern history. They continue to let the Radical Right frame the agenda. They have failed miserably. They have allowed the dishonest Republican crooks to make mountains out of molehills (MoveOn) and have failed to take any meaningful action to slow down Bush's slide toward the Apocalypse. The last straw for me was Pelosi saying that Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA) who uttered the following words in the debate on the SCHIP override, needs to apologize:

You [the Republicans] don’t have money to fund the war or children, but you’re going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the President’s amusement.

I'd just like to point out, under the Republican's plan, by 2017, we probably will have killed 20,000 soldiers in Iraq, spending $200 billion a year --

Apologize?? For what?!? Telling the G-d damned truth?? Nancy, you and Harry need to both hit the bricks. NOW. I want someone who knows how to FIGHT BACK in the congressional leadership.

--Rudolph Giuliani would be a terrifyingly dangerous president, and must be stopped at all costs. He has recruited ALL of the most insanely radical of the neoconservative war advocates as his foreign policy advisers. (Check it out here.) He has to be stopped before he blunders the world in a third world war.

--Is there ANYTHING Mitt Romney won't say to win support? Check out his amazing duplicity here.

--How is a president with a 24% approval rating dragging us toward war with Iran? And why can't anyone stop him?

I think I'll take a shower now.

Heh! Chris Kelly Destroys the Phony Mitt Romney

Of course, by saying "Phony Mitt Romney" I'm being redundant. See the column here.

And never forget what a two-faced con artist Romney really is. He'll say anything, twist any fact, tell any lie, change any position, to get elected. I'd say he was a whore, but I don't want to insult prostitutes everywhere.

The Anti-Semitic Filth of Ann Coulter

Having taught European history for many, many years, I am broadly familiar with the terrible story of European anti-Semitism, which came to its horrible culmination in the last century. In order to lay the foundations that make mass murder of the kind we saw in the 1940s possible, people's minds have to be infected with false, vicious ideas. One of the worst of these ideas is that Jews are "imperfect" people who will only be "perfected" by converting to Christianity. In other words, if Jews reject Christianity they are, in a sense, responsible for whatever disasters befall them. Well, this past week, my least favorite right wing scum, Ann Coulter, again revealed her true colors, telling a Jewish talk show host that Jews need to be "perfected". Here are some of the relevant details:

Earlier this week, Coulter went on "The Big Idea," a talk show aired on CNBC, the cable channel devoted to business news. Its host, Donny Deutsch, is a preternaturally affable businessman who invites successful people on to talk about how they turn their ideas into money. Coulter was there to describe how she had -- in our vulgar commercial argot --"branded" herself. At one point, Deutsch asked her what an ideal country would be like, and she replied that it would be one in which everyone was "a Christian." Deutsch, who happens to be Jewish, protested that Coulter was advocating his people's elimination. She responded that she simply hoped to see Jews "perfected" through conversion to Christianity.

Deutsch, to his everlasting credit, wasn't having any of it, and the full transcript of their extended and -- on Coulter's side -- vilely offensive exchange on the matter is widely available online. Reaction over the last couple of days has been swift...

Perhaps the best response came from the Anti-Defamation League, which called Coulter's comments "outrageous, offensive and a throwback to the centuries-old teaching of contempt for Jews and Judaism. The notion that Jews are religiously inferior or imperfect because they do not accept Christian beliefs was the basis for 2,000 years of church-based anti-Semitism. While she is entitled to her beliefs, using mainstream media to espouse the idea that Judaism needs to be replaced with Christianity and that each individual Jew is somehow deficient and needs to be "perfected" is rank Christian supersessionism and has been rejected by the Catholic Church and the vast majority of mainstream Christian denominations. Clearly, Ann Coulter needs a wake-up call about the power of words to injure others and fuel hatred. She needs an education, too, about the roots of anti-Semitism."

That she does. As the league points out, "supersessionism," the theological notion that Christianity "completes" or "perfects" Judaism is, along with the deicide libel, anti-Semitism's major theological underpinning. Indeed, in Central and Western Europe between the world wars, there was a substantial body of purportedly "respectable" intellectual opinion that held "supersessionism" made possible a "reasonable" theological anti-Semitism that was entirely licit, as opposed to the Nazis' and fascists' illicit, "racially based" anti-Semitism. It is fair to say that the rails leading to Auschwitz were greased by precisely the opinion Coulter expressed on American television this week.

Yes, the road to Auschwitz. Some people, I guess, still don't understand how it got built.

By the way, NBC affiliates have had Coulter on more than 195 times.

The Rejects

The new Harris poll out today paints a stark picture: Bush and Cheney have now been utterly repudiated by the vast majority of the American people:

After a small rise in September, President George W. Bush’s job performance numbers have dropped to right above his lowest ever. Currently, just over one-quarter (27%) of U.S. adults view his job performance positively. The lowest recorded in The Harris Poll® was 26 percent in July of this year. Almost three-quarter of adults (72%) view the president’s job performance in a negative light. In September 2007, three in ten (31%) viewed his job performance positively and two-thirds (67%) negatively.

Vice President Dick Cheney also continues to see near record low job approval – just less than one quarter (23%) of adults view him in a positive light. Like the president, almost three-quarters (72%) view his job performance negatively.

The Republican Party tied itself like a leech to Bush and Cheney when the two Immortal Leaders were reasonably popular. Now they're stuck with them. Democrats, tie these two rejects around the throat of every Republican candidate in America in 2008. Make it clear that EVERY REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE IS PROMISING, IN EFFECT, A THIRD BUSH ADMINISTRATION.

And then watch the damned Republican Party crash and burn like never before.

For Anonymous, Re Climate Change

I hope you will check this out.

Peace out.

Down to One State Net Approval

And even that ain't by much. Gee, that's too bad, isn't it?

"Have You Forgotten?"

Check it out here.

Useless slime weasels, all of them.

OUTRAGE: White House and Fox "News" Destroy Anti-Al Qaeda Operation

Unbelievable. Simply unbelievable. If this isn't treason, then tell me what the hell is:

A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.

Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company's Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news [It was Fox "News"--read the whole article--JM] and broadcast worldwide

The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group's communications network.

"Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless," said Rita Katz, the firm's 44-year-old founder, who has garnered wide attention by publicizing statements and videos from extremist chat rooms and Web sites, while attracting controversy over the secrecy of SITE's methodology. Her firm provides intelligence about terrorist groups to a wide range of paying clients, including private firms and military and intelligence agencies from the United States and several other countries.

Incredible. This is a SCANDAL. Why in the hell isn't anyone DOING anything about this G-d damned Republican INCOMPETENCE AND TREASON??

The Bush Tax Cuts: Welfare for the Richest

[Click on the image to enlarge.]

Hey, That Romney, He's All Heart

He basically blows off and disregards a muscular dystrophy victim on the issue of medical marijuana.

Don't you love the "moral compassion" of these right wing bastards?

Anti-Semitism, Hatred of Gays: Different Groups, Same Rhetoric

I offer, without much comment, this comparison between Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda and far right anti-gay diatribes. The comparisons are disturbing, to say the least.

Try not to get physically ill when reading this stuff.

Why the Republican Party is Dying

John Cole is right on the money, right here:

Seriously- what does the current Republican party stand for? Permanent war, fear, the nanny state, big spending, torture, execution on demand, complete paranoia regarding the media, control over your body, denial of evolution and outright rejection of science, AND ZOMG THEY ARE GONNA MAKE US WEAR BURKHAS, all the while demanding that in order to be a good American I have to spend most of every damned day condemning half my fellow Americans as terrorist appeasers.And that isn’t even getting into the COMPLETE and TOTAL corruption of our political processes at every level. The shit is really going to hit the fan after we vote these jackasses out of power in 2008.

Read the whole thing, including the comments, many of which are priceless. Yeah, this isn't the Republican Party of Ike. It's the Republican Party of Limbaugh, Robertson, Coulter, and Rove, and no political party in American history has ever deserved the electoral destruction that is roaring down the mountain toward it with unstoppable ferocity.

(Hat tip: Glenn Greenwald, and if you're not reading Glenn every day, why not?)

"Chicken Hawk Chutzpah"

Great video from Keith Olbermann, right here, in which you can see a REAL soldier fight back against the pseudo patriot who lies through his teeth every day on national radio.

BTW, take notice of the kind of letters the mouth breathing Neanderthals who listen to the pseudo patriot send to the real soldiers.

Ha Ha! Charles Pierce DESTROYS Pigboy Limbaugh

It's an absolute thing of beauty:

I've always thought that one of the most underrated elements of the public pox that is Rush Limbaugh is the man's unalloyed, abject personal cowardice. There are the screened phone calls. There was that time when Nightline wanted him to appear on a panel and he insisted on appearing from his studio, surrounded by his books, rather than sit next to James Carville, who undoubtedly would have stared at him as though Rush were made of etouffee. There was the night in 1990 on which he (literally) nearly was booed off the stage while guest-hosting Pat Sajak's doomed talk venture. (Reports of the evening had Rush sweating like Victoria Falls when some people started yelling at him from the audience.) There was the cheap shot at then-teenaged Chelsea Clinton, which he sniggered at and then blamed on his tech staff. There was the part about Vince Foster's dying in a D.C. love nest rented by Hillary Clinton, which he subsequently sniveled around by claiming he was just passing on a rumor, rendering unto his broadcast empire the approximate credibility of an open sewer in Bangladesh. There was the endless mewling when ESPN canned him. There was sending the maid out to score his dope. There was his leaping into the embrace of the ACLU and the criminal-defense bar when he got busted. In fact, his entire career has been an unremitting drone about what people are doing what nasty things to poor widdle him, the most recent big bully being David Brock, who is committing the unpardonable crime of attempting to hold Limbaugh responsible for the gutless, unmanly way he does his business. We are hearing all the usual alibis -- "Out of context!" -- rather than a stalwart defense of what he actually said. We are fed doctored tapes and expurgated transcripts through his pals salted throughout the media.

Oh HELL yes! And Pierce didn't even mention the anal cyst! BOO-YAH!

Suck on It, Fox "News"

From the new Washington Post poll:

At this point, however, the former president [Bill Clinton] is seen in favorable terms. Two-thirds of Americans said they approve of the job he did while he was in office -- virtually the reverse of President Bush's current approval rating, which stands at 33 percent. Clinton remains overwhelmingly popular among Democrats, and 63 percent of independents and even a third of Republicans also gave him positive marks.

You hear that, you Fox schmucks? You hear that Limbaugh and Coulter the Psychotic? The American People prefer BILL CLINTON to your little tinpot hero by 2-1! THEY'D TAKE HIM BACK IN A HEARTBEAT!

Bwahahahahahahahaha!!

Obama Isn't My First Choice, But This is Impressive

Check it out here.

Bush Vetoes Health Care for Poor KIds

Eric Alterman explains why he did it here. Yes, Bush can ask for an additional $190,000,000,000 for his Iraq disaster for one year, but ask him for $35 billion for children's health care, financed and paid for by a new cigarette tax over five years and he considers that "socialized medicine". My favorite section:

As the apostate conservative, Kevin Phillips observes, "The Bush Administration is not against big government." What it opposes is merely that "portion of it that regulates business and requires tax increases, against a welfare system. When it's the latter, they're against big government, but when it's big government that takes care of the oil industry or bails out financial institutions or pumps money into the Pentagon, then they tend to be in favor of that."

My God, this son of a bitch is like something out of a Dickens novel.

The worst president, aided and abetted by the worst political faction in modern American history, the conservative Republicans.

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You can start by watching their GREAT new commercial here. Be patient; it's getting a lot of hits.

Then, give money to Vote Vets by logging on to their website here.

Go for it! And strike a blow against every right wing liar and coward in America.

By the way, make sure you read the post below this one. It fits Limbaugh to a T.

A Brutally Accurate Definition of (Many) Conservatives

It's from a poster named David Essex on Glenn Greenwald's site. I found it to be astonishingly on the money for a great many conservatives, especially male ones:

Conservatism: 1. a neurosis characterized by hypercompensating preoccupation with the trappings, postures and measures of masculinity, manliness or machismo and strongly linked with projective transference, fervid adulation of (“strong man”) figures irrationally or delusionally invested with the “masculine” qualities seized upon in the preoccupation; marked strongly with tendencies to confuse: aggression with effectiveness; cruelty with toughness; fixation with resolve or perseverance; contrarianism with originality or independence; and, above all, punitive zeal with rectitude; marked also by distrust of or hostility towards ambivalence, ambiguity, and qualities associated with the feminine such as: subtlety, sensitivity, empathy, refinement, self-consciousness, circumspection, forbearance, tolerance and forgiveness. The neurosis seems often to be based in gender-insecurity and/or failure to fully individuate as adults, resulting in a tacit, perhaps subconscious self-condemnation for lack of the very qualities, accomplishments and experiences valorized by the overarching code of “manliness.”

The conservative is strongly (if inauthentically) drawn to the role of “protector” of others from enemies or corruptive influences, for this places premium value on the martial qualities he espouses. But the strongest appeal of this role probably lies in the moral immunity it affords; defense of the (usually abstract and ill-defined) Good, or the defenseless, necessitates whatever evil the protector employs. This rationalizes, pardons, retroactively legitimizes the conservative’s arrested ethical development – always evidenced by a pronounced, even self-congratulatory lack of empathy, and the correlative predisposition towards self-pity, or feelings of persecution. Other indicators of this stunting are failure to embrace an ethic of reciprocity (usually substituting an atavistic sin-based code), and the utter devaluation of consistency and moral authority (that is, leadership by example) as components of ethical deportment. Indeed, with respect to moral authority the ethical debility is often strongly associated with pronounced self-blindness, leading often to floridly self-disclosing projections: condemnations, preoccupations, excoriations and paranoias about putative threats, ills or failings, which are rooted in the neurotic’s guilty or devalued sense of self since he or she craves, embodies or enacts that which is condemned.

2. a mutual reassurance society of said neurotics

Oh baby! I think that's CLASSIC. Maybe not all conservatives should be classified in this way, but it sure as hell applies to all the people running our government and the right wing idiots on Fox and talk radio running their mouths. Heh heh.

The Enablers

Few people have polluted our nation's political discourse more than the hateful, vicious Ann Coulter, as ugly and malicious a human being in spirit as any I have ever seen in my life. You would think someone who spews that many lies and utters that many "joking" death threats against her opponents would not be given a prominent national platform from which to do so. You'd be wrong. MediaMatters, one of the most invaluable resources we have, has the story:

According to the Nexis search, since April 28, 1997, Coulter has appeared 117 times on CNBC, seven times on NBC News, and 70 times on MSNBC for a total of 194 interviews. Nexis does not transcribe every show on every network, so these figures represent only those interviews that Media Matters could verify. For example, Nexis does not transcribe CNBC's The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch, where, on July 26, 2006, as Media Matters documented, Coulter asserted that former President Bill Clinton exhibits "some level of latent homosexuality." Coulter has also been interviewed on The Tonight Show, which is not transcribed in Nexis.

According to the review, Coulter has been interviewed on at least 13 different NBC and NBC-affiliate programs -- including MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews, MSNBC's Scarborough Country, MSNBC's Tucker (formerly The Situation with Tucker Carlson), MSNBC's The Abrams Report, MSNBC's Deborah Norville Tonight, MSNBC's Buchanan & Press, MSNBC's Saturday Final with Lawrence O'Donnell, MSNBC's Phil Donahue, NBC's Today, CNBC's Kudlow & Company (formerly Kudlow & Cramer), CNBC's Rivera Live, CNBC's Equal Time, and CNBC's Upfront Tonight. Additionally, since April 29, 2003, Coulter has been interviewed 36 times by MSNBC host Joe Scarborough. Since June 26, 2002, Coulter has been interviewed 21 times by MSNBC host Chris Matthews. Further, from December 16, 1997, to August 14, 2001, Coulter was interviewed 69 times on CNBC's Rivera Live hosted by Geraldo Rivera.

Coulter, of course, can say anything she wants. But she damn well doesn't have the automatic right to a national television audience. Coulter hurls phony, slanderous, bullshit allegations every time she appears on TV. NBC has been letting this hideous person do this again and again. It's far past time they pulled the plug.

My God, I hate that woman. As the old saying goes, I wouldn't piss down her throat if her heart was on fire.

Cheney and Romney Both Tied to Iran

"Dick" Cheney through his Halliburton connections, as documented here:

As investigators from 60 Minutes discovered, Halliburton has used an offshore subsidiary incorporated in the Cayman Islands (where the company has no oil and gas construction or engineering operations) to trade with Iran, a country that the Bush administration has described as part of an "axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world." Federal law disallows American companies from transacting business with nations that sponsor terrorism, but foreign subsidiaries of such companies are not banned from such transactions.

In May 2004, the U.S. Senate voted against legislation that would have stopped companies like Halliburton from using offshore subsidiaries to invest in Iran. The legislation was defeated in a 50-49 vote, mostly along party lines. As CEO of Halliburton, Mr. Cheney lobbied the Clinton administration to ease sanctions on Libya and Iran, according to various news reports. "I think we'd be better off if we, in fact, backed off those sanctions [on Iran], didn't try to impose secondary boycotts on companies .. trying to do business there," Cheney told an Australian television interviewer in April 1998.

Mitt Romney through his investments, as nicely summarized in this You Tube video here. (Seems like Ol' Mitt has been rakin' in Iranian oil money through his investments in Russian oil firms doing HUGE business with Iran, such as Gazprom.)

Ahh, the Republicans. Moral and ethical consistency of the highest order. Iran may be a terrorist-supporting state, and its government may be controlled by whack jobs, but hey, a guy can still do business with 'em can't he?

A REAL Soldier Takes on Phony "Patriot" Draft Dodger Limbaugh

It's a thing of beauty and you can see it here.

Again I ask: what right do these right-wing assholes like Limbaugh, Coulter, Hannity, O'Reilly, Beck, Savage, O'Beirne, Malkin, et al, have to judge the patriotism of ANYONE?? Who in the hell decided that they get to decide who a "real American" is?

BTW, the military's identification with the Republican Party has dropped sharply. And donations to Democrats by members of the military now account for 40% of the total of all donations.

I guess those soldiers just hate America. Just ask Rush "Anal Cyst" Limbaugh, the toughest talking draft dodger in America.

I'm Discouraged; I'm Taking a Break for a While

I was hoping after the 2006 elections that the Democrats would actually fight back against the most unpopular president in modern American history and his corrupt, despicable gang of enablers in both Congress and the media.

I was wrong. The Democratic Party continues to cave in to the little son of a bitch every damn time.

This Petraeus bullshit was the last fucking straw. No, we can't defund the g-d damned war, but we can pass a resolution condemning an ad, thus making the Democrats look like utter fools and cowards, and, by the way, diverting attention away from actual issues. (Ooooh, we have to condemn a newspaper ad or Limbaugh and Fox "News" will call us unpatriotic. WTF is that??)

So right now, I'm utterly discouraged. The country is sliding into economic crisis, the Rightwing bastards are screaming for a war with Iran that will plunge the world into disaster, the little son of a bitch just asked for $200 BILLION more for his g-d damned war (and he'll get it), Blackwater mercenaries simply kill people in Iraq with impunity, our international standing has never been lower, and the corporate media spits on the Democrats, lies about them constantly, and holds them to an outrageous double standard. And what does the leadership of my party do? Surrender. Cave in. Ignore its strongest supporters. Cower in fear before Mr. 29% approval. Meanwhile, the progressive agenda that the American people actually favor (see my post, The Myth of a "Conservative America" right here) is ignored as conservative special interests continue to ride roughshod over the vast majority of the American people.

So screw it. I'm so sick and tired of politics right now I could puke. This country is DYING and my party's leadership doesn't have the nerve or the vision to stop it.

So I've got to think things over. I'll try to be back by 1 October. In the meantime, can I urge my few loyal readers and the occasional new reader to do me a favor? Look into the archives you see listed on the right side of this blog. Dive into them and see for yourself. I have fought my heart out in this little tiny blog. There are more than 1,300 posts over the last two years. Virtually every one of them has been in support of the Democratic cause. I'm wondering why the hell I'm doing it any more.

I have been a Democratic activist since 1992, when I converted from the Dark Side. I have poured time, energy, and money into building a Democratic majority that would fix the sicknesses and lies that are killing America. I've fought for the Democrats with all my heart.

I just wish they'd fight for me once in a while.

Go Alan, Go!

Perenniel nutjob loser Alan Keyes, that is. He's made it official--he's in the Republican presidential race! Way cool, Alan! Force the Republican Party even farther toward the lunatic Right! Yes, Keyes doesn't think that people like Sam Brownback are conservative enough, so it's Alan to the rescue of the Sodom and Gomorrah that is modern America. Keyes perfectly represents the views of the hardest core right wing fanatics who make up the Republican base. Most Republican candidates are leery of appearing too much in bed with such voters. My DD has some thoughts here:

The fact that the front-runners are putting this crowd at arm's length reveals that they have at least an inkling of what we've known for a while: that the so-called "moral conservatives" as they like to call themselves are a fringe element in the country and are largely responsible for the losses among independents that the party has suffered. Contrary to what they like to believe, they do not have a monopoly on morality or on values. Sadly for Republicans who seek to win nationally, they are also an extremely active and vocal portion of the Republican base (McCain's HQ phone lines have reportedly been tied up with callers demanding that he appear at the debate tomorrow) and I think it's quite telling that while the Democratic candidates flock to their base, the mainstream Republican candidates are fleeing from theirs.

Well said. Yes, contrary to their fairy tales of moral superiority, too many so-called "Values Voters" are perfectly OK with the U.S. using torture. They're fine with bombing and killing nasty brown people. Many of them call people who look like Alan Keyes "nigger" in private. Many hate immigrants not because they're illegal but because they're dark skinned. They don't mind that 20% of U.S. children live in poverty. They are mostly indifferent to the 47,000,000 without health insurance. They fully support a president who has conducted a tragically unnecessary war that has killed, maimed, or traumatized tens of thousands of brave young Americans. They are the spiritual representatives of all that is worst in us--our hatreds, our prejudices, our indifference to the suffering of other people, our raging intolerance. They want America to be a theocracy. They despise science. They hate our Constitution and would be delighted to live in a right wing religious dictatorship. Many would gladly see their opponents censored or killed. They would imprison or exterminate gays as well. Yes, these are "Alan's People", all right. And I say he's welcome to them. The more the Democrats can wrap these wretched, lunatic right wingers around the throats of the major Republican candidates, the more crushing the victory the Democrats will win in 2008.

Digby Hands the Social Conservatives Their Collective Asses

and in the process rips Rudy Giuliani a new rectum right here:

Many social conservatives are phonies, and the rest are willing dupes. I'm not sure why people are still surprised by this. How many diaper wearing wingnut senators and teenage boy-chasing conservative congressmen does it take to prove that the whole family values campaign was just another market tested bludgeon with which to hit liberals over the head?

(J. Miller: Whoo-hoo!)

I used to argue endlessly about this, citing things like porno viewing numbers and divorce and abortion statistics in the heartland which proved that the supposed "real Americans" were just as loose in their personal lives as everyone else. Many readers argued with me and said that I was projecting --- the social conservatives may be rigid and small minded, they said, but they are sincere. And when I pointed out that the brouhahas about Janet Jackson's nipple and that blond desperate housewife jumping into a black football players arms had more than a tinge of racial rather than moral outrage, I was told that I was wrong: people really were stunned at such overt sexuality on television, despite the fact that there is a ton of explicit sexuality on television that barely raises an eyebrow...

[Citing right wing apologists for Giuliani]: And now we have GOP it-boy Rudy Giuliani, a man whose history makes Bill and Hillary Clinton look like Ma and Pa Kettle, being offered all kinds of excuses for his positions on the issues and his own sewer of a personal life...

The truth is that "family values" for the most part is just a phrase certain tribal conservatives use to assert their moral superiority over the rest of us, probably in an attempt to deflect the fact that they are, at heart, cruel bigoted small-minded jerks. And there is no more cruel, bigoted, small-minded jerk than Rudy Giuliani, the poster boy for the newly pragmatic Republican Party. (You remember the Republicans, don't you? The party that lived by its principles and talked straight, unlike the terrorist loving hippies?)

Oh yeah, baby! Many of these right wing Republican clowns would rather die 10,000 deaths than have their own personal lives examined in public. And the assertion that "Red States" are morally superior to "Blue States" is pure out and out bullshit. Some examples, as presented by the gloriously rampant J. Miller:

States With the Highest Divorce Rate by Political Affiliation


[By the way, liberal Commie-Hippie Massachusetts has the LOWEST divorce rate in the United States.]

Red states are also by far the worst in terms of infant mortality, receiving more money from the Federal government than they pay in taxes (that good 'ol conservative self-reliance), and any number of other indicators.

Face it: SOCIAL CONSERVATISM IS A CROCK OF HYPOCRISY AND LIES, and it has never--and will never--be anything else.

Very Cool

Check this out. It's a series of views going from 10 million light years from earth to the subatomic level, moving in (or out) by a factor of 10 each time. Absolutely mind boggling. Try putting it on manual so you can control the speed of the presentation.

It Was the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Him

George W. Bush's presidency was already stalled and stagnating on 10 September 2001. Nine months after having stolen the presidency and eight months after having been sworn in, Bush was hovering at 50% approval and his program was languishing. Then came the horrible events of the next day. Bush performed wretchedly on 9/11, sitting like a helpless idiot for long minutes after America had come under attack, fleeing across the country afterward and keeping his head down (contrary to the right wing mythology propagated later) like the pathetic, incompetent coward he is. But he recovered his equilibrium and the nation overwhelmingly rallied to him. Americans of all political persuasions supported him, and the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan received near unanimous support. So what did Bush do with our national unity and resolve? He turned 9/11 into a cudgel to attack the Democrats and smear the patriotism of anyone who dared to question him and his vicious, snarling vice president. By early 2002, Karl Rove, Bush's top political advisor, was already urging Republicans to use 9/11 to their electoral advantage.

Aided and abetted by Fox "News" and the rest of the right wing slime machine, all dissent was mercilessly attacked. War veterans were called traitors for criticizing Bush, aka Dear Leader, in the tradition of North Korea's Kim Jong-il. The Republicans shamelessly campaigned on the corpses of the 9/11 dead, using their charred and mangled bodies as GOP campaign fodder. The lunatic right shouted that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11--on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. The attacks were used to help justify the tragically wrong decision to invade Iraq, an invasion which was also brutally politicized by the radical right. And above all, the constant fear mongering by the Bush Administration, supported by a compliant, groveling press corps, allowed Bush to win the narrowest reelection of any incumbent since 1916. In other words, the Al Qaeda attacks on America of 11 September 2001 were a godsend to Bush. They rescued his miserable, failing presidency and gave him an enormous weapon with which to ram through the program of far-right extremism which threatens this country's very survival as a free nation. They were, in short, the best thing that ever happened to him. They allowed this utter loser to present himself as a great statesman, when in fact he has failed at everything he has ever done in his life.

So remember, when you hear the right wing screaming for blood in Iran and using the Iraq war as a way to attack the Democrats, where it all began. It began when Bush and Cheney started thanking their lucky stars for Osama Bin Laden, the greatest gift the Republican Party has ever received--and vice versa.

(By the way, be sure to check out Eschaton's thoughts on all of this right here. It's a list of things we must do to help stop the madness the right wing Republicans have unleashed on us. And by God, don't let that lying SOB Giuliani keep using 9/11 to gain the White House. We're not going to allow another Republican fraud to fail his way upward.)

If You Care About the Things I Care About, Read This

It's a post you need to see, and it's right here.

I wouldn't ask if I didn't think it was of the highest importance.

Those Bad Little Republican Boys

Right here.

Har!

"The Complete Failure of Republican Economic Policy"

The inimitable bonddad strikes again right here, calmly and systematically destroying right-wing claims of superior economic policy. The evidence he marshals is impressive and his conclusions are devastating: so-called "Supply Side Economics" as practiced by the last three Republican presidents was and is simply a shell game, where economic growth was financed by the accumulation of enormous debt. (In fact, 70% of America's national debt, from 1789 to the present, has been accumulated under Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II.) This debt has put us in a horrendous hole. bonddad supplies the numbers and facts:

Let’s look at tax revenues to see how they have responded. First, remember that Bush first cut taxes in 2001 and again in 2003. So let’s go back to the first tax cut to see what happened from that point forward. According to the Congressional Budget Office’s Historical Budget Data, total revenue from individual taxpayers was $994 billion in 2001 and $1.043 trillion in 2006. Since the fourth quarter of 2001, the GDP price deflator has increased from 103.1221 to 117.003 (this was the price deflator in the third quarter of 2006 when the federal government’s fiscal year ends). This is an overall increase of 13.46%. In short, after adjusting for inflation, the overall increase in tax revenues from 2001 when the first tax cutting began is nothing to write home about.

And how was the mediocre economic performance of Bush purchased? bonddad again:

Total Federal Debt

09/30/2000 5,674,178,209,886.86
09/30/2001 5,807,463,412,200.06
09/30/2002 6,228,235,965,597.16
09/30/2003 6,783,231,062,743.62
09/30/2004 7,379,052,696,330.32
09/30/2005 7,932,709,661,723.50
09/30/2006 8,506,973,899,215.23

In other words, Junior put our "prosperity" on the credit card, and our children and grandchildren will have to pay the price. Read the whole thing--and then resolve to throw these profligate, reckless bums out next year.

Delusional, Pathetic Liar Bill O'Reilly Reaching New Depths of Idiocy

Don't believe it's possible? Check it out here.

O'Reilly hates it when anyone dares to speak up against his lunatic, far-right wing thuggery. He's a laughable, thin skinned tool, a little wimp crying about how the Big Mean Liberals have dared to ridicule and criticize Bill-O himself!! Aw, poor Bill-O.

By the way, did you ever notice how Billy Boy avoids any forum where he doesn't control the microphone? I think this can be traced back to when Al Franken publicly humiliated him a few years ago. O'Reilly has since stayed under his rock at Fox "News".

He's too much of a coward to do anything else.

Rudy Giuliani: The Fraudulent "Hero" of 9/11

Watch this video right here and tell me this lying con artist deserves to be president. If you've got a pulse, you'll be outraged and disgusted.

I Think I'm Gonna Love It!

It's this wonderful site here from the Massachusetts Democratic Party detailing the REAL record of the most two faced, phony, dishonest, double talking Republican in the race, Mitt Romney. (Think of the competition he had to beat. Now that's impressive.) Check it out!

How the Bush-Cheney Regime Crushes Iraq Whistle Blowers

Guess what happens to people courageous enough to expose the enormous fraud being perpetrated by Republican-connected firms in Iraq?

For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods.

There were times, huddled on the floor in solitary confinement with that head-banging music blaring dawn to dusk and interrogators yelling the same questions over and over, that Vance began to wish he had just kept his mouth shut.

He had thought he was doing a good and noble thing when he started telling the FBI about the guns and the land mines and the rocket-launchers - all of them being sold for cash, no receipts necessary, he said. He told a federal agent the buyers were Iraqi insurgents, American soldiers, State Department workers, and Iraqi embassy and ministry employees.

The seller, he claimed, was the Iraqi-owned company he worked for, Shield Group Security Co.

"It was a Wal-Mart for guns," he says. "It was all illegal and everyone knew it."

So Vance says he blew the whistle, supplying photos and documents and other intelligence to an FBI agent in his hometown of Chicago because he didn't know whom to trust in Iraq.

For his trouble, he says, he got 97 days in Camp Cropper, an American military prison outside Baghdad that once held Saddam Hussein, and he was classified a security detainee.

Almost $9 BILLION in reconstruction funds unaccounted for? Don't ask if you know what's good for you. More than 190,000 weapons simply vanished into the hands of our enemies? Keep your mouth shut. For above all, the right wing criminals who run our government follow the code of silence unto death, and no one can violate it.

Really, it's as if our government were being run by the Mafia.

Then again, maybe our government IS the Mafia.

Doonesbury Gets It Right

Check it out here.

Heh heh heh.

(Thanks to Paul Claycomb!)

Bush and Cheney Lying Through Their Teeth About the Escalation--er, I Mean the Surge

And more than 500 people were killed just days ago by suicide bombers.

Are you really surprised? They claim violence is down and that U.S. losses are down. Both are simply damned lies.

(Hat tip: Juan Cole, Kevin Drum)

Fighting Back: An Excellent Example

A fighting Democrat, Brent Budowsky, lays the lumber to Fox "News" and all of its lying con artist helpers here. Budowsky is referring to a right winger who was blatantly lying about him:

Strange but true: the distorted vision of media promoted by Fox News lies at the heart of the Republican problem...

Fox will have a segment with an inherently demeaning title implying Democrats are soft on terrorism or unpatriotic. They bring together a partisan and biased right-wing host with the partisan help hired by the Republican right. Then they find the weakest Potemkin Democrat they can, and conduct a pseudo-debate in Putin style that is rigged from the beginning.

For several years, it worked, but it has now become an albatross around their necks...

The more they win their one-sided debates in their unfair and unbalanced echo chamber of delusion, the more they lose touch and the more they lose votes.

Anyone reduced to calling me an über-lefty is out of fighting shape, and I feel her pain. I am glad she enjoys my writing; she would enjoy even more what I privately advise senior Democrats to do, which is consistent with what I write publicly...

We need to fight back EVERY DAY against the Radical Right's Noise Machine. This is a strong example of how you do it.

Can Nothing Be Done to Stop a War With Iran?

The fanatics who control our government and the propagandists who work for the "news" organizations that support them are going to start a massive propaganda push soon after Labor Day for a war with Iran, a war they claim to be already in progress. All the despicable outlets of radical Right propaganda--Fox "News", The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, the neocon "think tanks"--will be baying for blood and demanding that other people's sons be sent off to die. The Democrats in Congress are too ineffectual and timid to offer strong opposition to this madness, and I really am convinced Bush and Cheney no longer care what people think of them. Glenn Greenwald, as usual, has some incisive thoughts about all this, right here:

The groundwork for an attack on Iran is so plainly being laid in the same systematic way as the attack on Iraq was and by the same people. Last week, [Greg] Djerejian read and then dissected the full "trip report" issued by [Kenneth]Pollack and [Michael] O'Hanlon following their return from Iraq. In addition to including even more propaganda-bolstering claims about Iraq than was found in their Op-Ed, Djerejian noted that the report also recites the most mendacious aspects of the administration's case for war against Iran, including the truly idiotic accusation regarding "Iran's ability to supply al-Qa'ida" -- an accusation so absurd that nobody other than Joe Lieberman has been willing to voice it until now. Yet now it issues from our most Serious Democratic, "liberal" foreign policy "scholars": Iran is arming Al Qaeda.

The true danger here is that even if there would be marginally more political opposition to an attack on Iran than there was for an attack on Iraq -- and surely there would be, perhaps considerably more opposition -- those who favor an attack are still politically strong within the administration. And there simply are no factions which would oppose such an attack that are anywhere near strong enough to stop one. Who and where are they? What are the political factions which have sufficient political strength and who are willing to risk political capital to stop such a confrontation?

By stark and dispositive contrast, those who are pining for an attack on Iran -- from the Weekly Standard to the AEI and various generic warmongers of the Dick Cheney/National Review strain, as well as our most pious evangelical Christian warriors -- are zealous adherents, True Believers. Bringing about a military confrontation with Iran has always been, and continues to be, their paramount priority.

Unless there is a strong and concerted groundswell NOW to stop this insanity, I fear the consequences will be even more horrendous than those which grew out of the deeply ill-advised war in Iraq. The lunatics are running the asylum, folks--and they're dragging us all down to disaster with them.

In the name of what is decent and rational, won't somebody do something?

UPDATE: Check out this sickening video. It compares what Fox "News" was doing to stir up war in Iraq and what they're doing to stir up war with Iran. G-d damn it, they're pulling the same bullshit again, and they need to be CALLED ON IT.

Get a Sense of Perspective

You can find it here.

Or, you can get it in a different way here.

It's Time For One of My Favorite Lists!

It's the big list of Republican sex offenders!

Aw, what the hell, let's look at this one, too! (There is some overlap, of course.)

And don't forget Sen. David Vitter (hookers), Sen. Larry Craig (trolling for gay sex in a public restroom), and Ted Nugent (statutory rape, in all probability).

And what was Rush Limbaugh doing with Viagra on an "all guys" trip to the underage sex capital of the Western Hemisphere, the Dominican Republic? And does Rush like teenage girls or teenage boys? Just asking (Fox "News" style, ya know).

"Fair Tax": Prescription for Disaster

There is renewed talk right now of abolishing the income tax, FICA, the estate tax, and all other federal taxes and replacing them with a 23% national sales tax. The idea is being bandied about by former Governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee, one of the Republican candidates for president. While the idea might seem superficially plausible, it would in fact be an economic catastrophe. An unusual, radically anti-tax organization called Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership has a surprisingly comprehensive and well-argued attack on the Fair Tax proposal here. Among its highlights:

We're likely to end up with both a national sales tax and an income tax. Even if legislation required abolition of the income tax (as HR 25 does), a “national crisis” would soon cause the income tax to be “temporarily re-instated” and the Internal Revenue Service would remain in our lives on an “emergency basis” that never ended.

Likelihood: High probability.

It gets worse. A 1998 analysis by the William Gale of the Brookings Institute calculates that in reality (to pay all current government expenditures while also compensating for such factors as tax evasion), the national sales tax might have to run as high as 67 percent. AFT disputes that high figure. But they do not dispute that their initial “23 percent” tax rate would actually be achieved by adding 30 percent to the purchase price of goods.

Bruce Bartlett a senior fellow for the National Center for Policy Analysis, slams the 23 percent claim, also, saying it's too low even to cover current government spending. He writes in the National Review:

When Congress' s Joint Committee on Taxation scored the Linder proposal [The “Fair Tax Act”] four years ago it estimated that it would actually require a tax-inclusive rate of 36 percent, not 23 percent, to equal current federal revenues. Calculating the rate in a normal, tax-exclusive manner would mean a 57 percent rate.(2)

Likelihood of the tax actually being more than 23 percent: Certainty.

**********

Inflation will kill you. For decades, the income tax gradually crept up as government-caused inflation pushed Americans into higher and higher tax brackets. This outrage caused horrific hardship before Congress was finally forced to index the income tax to the inflation rate (meaning that if your income goes up with the inflation rate, your tax rate doesn't). There is no indexing with the sales tax. As goods become more expensive, you have only two choices: pay more in taxes or do without the things you need.

Consider just one example. You've been saving to buy a new house. That house now costs $260,000 (which is already 10 times what your parents would have paid for an identical house in 1968). Your “FairTax” on that home will already be a whopping $78,000, for a total purchase price of $338,000. Then government printing presses go into high gear. While you're still saving up for your down-payment, double-digit inflation takes over and the price of your house zooms 20 percent in one year. The house now costs $312,000. Your “FairTax” on that house is now $93,600 for a total purchase price of $405,600. And you have to wait another year to buy it. And if inflation continues to go up, your hopes recede even further. (And all this is without mentioning the increased mortgage interest you'll have to pay over the decades to cover both the government-caused inflation and the government-benefiting tax.)

Likelihood of inflation boosting the sales tax: Certainty

**********

The FairTax is monumentally unfair to retiring Baby Boomers. People who have paid 1/4 or 1/3 of their income in taxes for 40 years will now have to pay an equally high tax on all the after tax income they've managed to put aside for their retirement. Every time Boomers buy anything with their lifelong savings, they'll be double taxed.

Likelihood: Certainty

**********

The tax will be used to track your entire financial life. While H.R. 25 does not contain any requirement that every purchase be linked to an individual's ID, the trend toward tracking every purchase is growing. We expect that eventually, your “national ID cash card” will be required when you buy anything. Or giant databases will combine the records of your credit cards, store loyalty cards, radio-frequency ID tags on merchandise, government ID, etc. into one vast set of interlinked records, immediately accessible to – and subject to manipulation by – government agencies.

Therefore, the national sales tax will eventually be used to track – and manipulate – what we purchase. Instead of merely being profiled by Wal-Mart or Safeway, your buying habits will be available in detail to the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health and Human Services, the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives, university researchers – you name it.

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Although the tax is initially only to apply to services and new items, here's another projection: Swap meets, farmers' markets, gun shows, and garage sales will automatically come to be considered prime places for black market activity. Either the tax will eventually be extended to used items, or all such free markets will eventually be heavily regulated and patrolled – or banned outright as havens for the new anti-sales tax criminals and resisters.

Likelihood: Certainty (of black markets); high probability (of regulating used and private sales)

And remember – to whatever extent some people manage to keep more of their own money through black-market purchases, those who buy on the legal (taxed) market will end up paying higher taxes to feed the insatiable federal government.

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The national sales tax will give government another reason to make cash purchases illegal. Because buying with cash will make it easier to evade the sales tax, taxing authorities will quickly conclude that buying with cash is a sure indicator of criminal activity. The federal government has already classed all large cash transactions (in some cases, that means amounts as low as $750) as “suspicious.” Expect cash purchases of all sorts eventually to become criminal under the sales tax regime. After all, as government and the media will soon tell us, “It used to be that big drug dealers and crooked businessmen evaded taxes on large purchases. But now millions of Americans are cheating their countrymen every day by evading tax on billions of small, but cumulatively huge, purchases of milk, coffee, CDs, and tee-shirts!”

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Cash purchases, of course, will also make it more difficult for government social engineers and corporate marketers to make sure your buying habits meet their standards. Cash purchases make it harder to tell whether you're guilty of eating too much butter, consuming too much beer, or owning too many guns. That will be yet another reason to make all purchases trackable. But the excuse given will be to prevent the terrible crime of sales tax evasion.

Likelihood: High probability.

Absurdly, the article concludes by advocating the abolition of ALL taxes. (Now how in the hell do these people propose funding such activities as defense, infrastructure maintenance, national law enforcement, and all other vital services provided at the Federal level, not to mention Social Security, the abolition of which would be a disaster?) Still, the article makes persuasive arguments, and ones that I think need to be heeded.

Even lunkheads can be right sometimes.

Knocking Down Bush's Vietnam "History" Lesson

You can read about it here.

Don't let Bush lecture us about a conflict that he couldn't be bothered to get involved in. He's either lying or ignorant or both. And he's dead flat wrong--as always.