More on Karl Rove's Despicable Lies

Watch Keith Olbermann and Arianna Huffington calmly strip the bark off the lying criminal asshole Rove here. [There is a 30 second commercial at the start.]

"Obscene chutzpah" is the term Arianna uses to describe Rove's Orwellian attempt to rewrite history by asserting that Congress pushed Bush into the Iraq War and not the other way around. I'd say Ms. H is understating the case.

And most of the MSM Villagers like Rove. So what if he's a traitor (Plame) and a congenital, reflexive liar? Why, I'm sure he's very nice at Washington, D.C. dinner parties.

BTW, thought you'd be interested in this. It's a list of psychopathic traits as determined by psychiatrists. See how many apply to Rove or Rove's old boss, the Boy King himself:

glibness/superficial charm
grandiose sense of self worth
need for stimulation/prone to boredom
pathological lying
conning/manipulative
lack of remorse or guilt
shallow emotional response
callous/lack of empathy
parasitic lifestyle
poor behavioral controls
promiscuous sexual behavior
early behavioral problems
lack of realistic long term goals
impulsivity
irresponsibility
failure to accept responsibility for their own actions
many short term relationships
juvenile delinquency
revocation of conditional release
criminal versatility

It's kind of eerie, isn't it? I can apply at least 17 of these to Bush. No wonder he and Rove are so close. They're soul mates, after all.

The Most Astonishing Lie Yet from Rove: CONGRESS Forced BUSH Into War

You wonder sometimes if there's anything this son of a bitch WON'T say, and then you see something like this. You then realize that the answer is no, Karl Rove will utter absolutely any lie to further the cause of the Radical Right.

Amazing. Absolutely amazing. Will these people ever take responsibility for anything? Don't be a fool. They're far-right conservatives. They blather on about "personal responsibility" but they don't actually believe in any of that crap. Everything has to be blamed on everybody else.

Will Rove be allowed to get away with this horseshit? Of course. He just got a regular column in Newsweek to "balance" Kos and he's got tons of friends in the Beltway Media Whorehouse, so yeah, he'll get away with it.

And our country moves another step closer to its death.

Giuliani: My Financial Affairs Are None of Your Damn Business

Remember when the Radical Right was obsessed with investigating Bill and Hillary Clinton's business affairs? The Wall Street Journal's editorial goons were so insanely obsessed with the so-called "Whitewater Scandal" that they published the equivalent of several VOLUMES about it, even though, as Right Wing Henchman Kenneth Starr later admitted, there was absolutely NOTHING to it. How much you want to bet the Journal devotes similar attention to this?

Every time reporters press Giuliani on his work with Giuliani Partners, his booming consultancy (Guiliani took home $4.1 million last year and his stake is worth anywhere from $5 million to $25 million), he's got the same answer: I'm not telling, but you should ask the firm. Then the reporter diligently calls over to Giuliani Partners to get the brush-off from its spokeswoman. That's what happened to The Wall Street Journal when the paper had questions about the firm's contract with Qatar. The Chicago Tribune got the same treatment when it asked about the firm's work for a developer's casino resort in Singapore.

When the AP asked him in an interview earlier this month if he'd disclose his client list, he responded that the business was "totally legal, totally ethical," "very ethical and law-abiding" and that there's "nothing for me to explain about it. We've acted honorably, decently." It was unfair to even ask, he said, employing the deft logic that since no one has found anything wrong, people shouldn't even ask the question...

Translation: Buzz off with your questions. You can trust me because I say so. The Journal was brushed off, as you saw. Will they press the matter Whitewater Style? Gee, I wonder.

The sad thing is that most of the MSM will simple let Benito Jr. get away with this crap. Don't want to make him mad, after all.

(BTW, make sure you click the link above to the Chicago Tribune article. It's very strong--and troubling.)

How the Republicans Became the Party of Racial Hatred

When I was a kid, it was the (conservative) Southern Democrats who stood in ferocious opposition to justice for our country's African-American minority. Northern Republicans (such as Everett Dirksen of Illinois) were foursquare for civil rights legislation and used their legislative influence to help make it law. Among the most hateful of the Southern Democrats who opposed equal rights for blacks was the despicable Strom Thurmond, whose opposition to such measures bordered on the pathological. (He wore a diaper so he could conduct a 24 hour filibuster in the Senate against the 1957 Civil Rights Act!) Yes, the deal with the devil the national Democratic Party had made was truly shameful: tolerate the Southern racists as long as those same racists delivered states for Roosevelt or Stevenson on election day.

But in 1963-64 all of this began to change drastically. After John F. Kennedy's shocking assassination 44 years ago Thursday, a new president, a Southern Democrat named Lyndon Johnson, took over. And, fully aware of the political consequences of such a move, Johnson became the greatest civil rights president in American history. (The fascinating story of LBJ's courageous stand in favor of justice--and the price the Democratic Party paid in the South--can be found here.) Johnson was simply magnificent on these issues. His tragic legacy in Vietnam has taken attention away from his leadership on human rights, but it does not change the record. LBJ not only talked the talk, he walked the walk, more than any other president has.

In the same period, far-right conservatives began to take over the local machinery of the Republican Party. They found a hero in Arizona Senator Barry M. Goldwater. Goldwater, I am convinced, was not personally a racist, but he was willing to look the other way in regard to those who were. Goldwater's opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act made him a magnet to racists all over the country, especially in the former "Solid South". While the rest of America was shifting heavily Democratic in '64, there was a strong undercurrent of what used to be called "white backlash" in the country. It was already propelling George Wallace to national prominence, and it caused many southerners who had never voted Republican in their lives to support Goldwater. In the general disaster the Republicans suffered in 1964, this support stood out in startling contrast. From the article linked to above:

The one region in which Republicans gained was in the previously solid South. The five states that Goldwater won outside Arizona (Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, and Louisiana) were the top five states in terms of black population levels. Goldwater's message of racial conservatism carried the day with the white electorate of those states, sometimes by landslide numbers (87 percent in Mississippi). Of the 507 Southern counties that Goldwater carried, 233 had never voted Republican before. [My emphasis.] The Goldwater effect was present even in parts of the urban ethnic North, if more muted...Moreover, while Goldwater was a disaster for most Republicans, of the twenty new Republican members of Congress, nine were from the South, and five were from Alabama alone. Eisenhower and Nixon had won border Southern states like Virginia and Tennessee. Goldwater lost those states while winning the heart of Dixie, the black belt.

And among the Southern Democrats who switched to being Republican was the aforementioned loathsome Strom Thurmond. The national Republican Party took a clear message from all this: opposing equal rights for black Americans (or at least slowing down the pace of such progress) was a political winner in the South (and in parts of Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, or in any white suburb where voters felt threatened by black "incursions".) Naturally, this racism had to be subtle, lest more moderate or liberal voters be put off. The turmoil of the 1960s, the urban riots in such places as Detroit and Watts (which were tragically self-destructive and harmful to racial relations in America), the anti-war agitation, and the rise of violent crime handed the Republicans the perfect vehicle--"Law and Order" as a codeword for "Let's stop the blacks from threatening White America." Now those who hated blacks could hide behind a convenient label.

It is here that the Democrats dropped the ball. Fear of crime was a legitimate issue; a public opinion poll at the time indicated that half the women in America were afraid to go out at night. Foolishly, short-sightedly, Democrats in the late 60s did not work hard enough to address the legitimate concerns of Americans about crime, but simply let the Republicans, in effect, "have" the law and order issue. For fear of seeming to support the racists who were using "law and order" as a cloak, the Democrats didn't take a strong enough stand. We should have said, "Crime is not a racial issue". We should have said "We are for law and order AND justice." We should have pointed out that blacks were among the worst victims of crime. But instead of de-linking race and crime, the Democrats conceded the field to the Republicans. Those who were worried about crime were drawn into an alliance with those who opposed civil rights. Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy", drawn up by advisors such as Patrick Buchanan, worked to create such alliances. The results were disastrous. The Democratic share of the vote dropped from 61% in 1964 to 43% in 1968. In the Old Confederacy, the Democratic share of the vote fell to 31%! Hubert Humphrey actually finished third in Arkansas, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Tennessee, running behind Nixon and Wallace.

By 1972, the Nixon-Wallace voter alliance led to an enormous victory for Nixon in the South, who carried every state in the region, the first time ANY Republican had ever done so. Many of these states provided Nixon with astonishing shares of the vote--71% in South Carolina, 75% in Georgia, 72% in Florida, 72% in Alabama, 78% in Mississippi, 73% in Oklahoma, 66% in Texas. Jimmy Carter's regional strength in 1976 seemed a promising reversal of fortune for the Democrats, but by 1980, Ronald Reagan was again able to use subtle (and not so subtle) appeals to racism to win, edging out Carter in many Southern states. In 1984 Mondale was wiped out in the South, losing most states in the region by margins of 20, 25, or 30 percentage points. In the rest of the country. "Reagan Democrats", drawn by the social conservatism of Reagan (and the subtly anti-black undertone of it) helped cement Reagan's national landslide. The "Willie Horton" message of the Bush campaign in 1988 was simply a logical extension of the now classic Republican strategy: stirring up fear of those Awful Negroes was a winner.

Now, for myriad reasons, many of them unrelated to race, many southern voters are now firmly Republican, providing Bush with his narrow margin of victory in 2004 (and making 2000 close enough to steal). The appeals to hatred are no longer overt. But the roots of Republican dominance in the South are clear: Starting in 1964, when the Democratic Party took a stand for human rights, our base in the South began deserting us in droves. The rise of the Republican Party in the South was based, more than any other factor, on race hatred and prejudice, and the Republicans have never repudiated, or even admitted, this shameful history.

To sum up, let me quote the summary to the superb article I have linked to:

In 1960 the Republicans made a serious effort for the black vote, and failed. In 1964 they accepted black hostility and tried to win without minorities. The pendulum that had swung quite far toward civil rights in 1960 now had swung far closer to George Wallace, although it never reached his pure anti-black malice. Neither strategy was successful in the short term, but in the ashes of the Goldwater defeat, Richard Nixon and others saw hopes for a Republican renewal, based on peeling off white voters from their Democratic allegiance. One lesson of 1964 for Republicans was that the open racism practiced by Goldwater's Southern supporters must be decried, denied, and denounced. Yet the second lesson of 1964 for the GOP was central to later Republican victories. If racial politics could draw white voters into the camp of a candidate as extreme and unelectable as Barry Goldwater, then it was indeed among the most powerful forces in American politics. What might it do in the hands of a more appealing messenger? By 1968 the political alchemists of the Republican Party had refined a heady mixture of codeworded backlash appeals and surface adherence to racial egalitarianism. Nixon's 1968 and 1972 "Southern Strategy" campaigns were designed to bring in the backlash votes without alarming the rest of the electorate. More recently, the 1988 Bush campaign used the rape of a white woman by a convicted black murderer to encourage white Democrats to vote Republican, an odious campaign that Barry Goldwater would have refused to run on. While 1964 was a tremendous victory for the Democratic Party and for Lyndon Johnson, it was also the election that taught Republicans how to use racial politics to help pave the road to the White House for the next three decades.

Our country is still dealing with the fateful consequences of the decisions made in 1964, the year that in many ways was the decisive one in modern American political history.

The Giuliani Video You Won't See on NBC

And why won't you see it? Because NBC (Olbermann excepted) is too busy trying to shove Giuliani down our throats, even though he'd be a bloody disaster. But Channel 4 in the UK is actually engaged in journalism, and they have the goods on this lying, two-faced "hero" right here.

If you care about our country, spread this to everyone you know.

One More Time: Al Gore and the Internet

From a poster on DKos:

Vinton Gray Cerf (born June 23, 1943) is an American computer scientist who is commonly referred to as one of the "founding fathers of the Internet" for his key technical and managerial role, together with Bob Kahn, in the creation of the Internet and the TCP/IP protocols which it uses.


And what did Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf have to say on the subject?

Al Gore and the Internet

By Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf

Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development.
...
Last year the Vice President made a straightforward statement on his role. He said: "During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet." We don’t think, as some people have argued, that Gore intended to claim he "invented" the Internet. Moreover, there is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore’s initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet. The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people were listening. We feel it is timely to offer our perspective.

As far back as the 1970s Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship. Though easily forgotten, now, at the time this was an unproven and controversial concept.

When the Internet was still in the early stages of its deployment, Congressman Gore provided intellectual leadership by helping create the vision of the potential benefits of high speed computing and communication. As an example, he sponsored hearings on how advanced technologies might be put to use in areas like coordinating the response of government agencies to natural disasters and other crises.

As a Senator in the 1980s Gore urged government agencies to consolidate what at the time were several dozen different and unconnected networks into an "Interagency Network." Working in a bi-partisan manner with officials in Ronald Reagan and George Bush’s administrations, Gore secured the passage of the High Performance Computing and Communications Act in 1991. This "Gore Act" supported the National Research and Education Network (NREN) initiative that became one of the major vehicles for the spread of the Internet beyond the field of computer science.

As Vice President Gore promoted building the Internet both up and out, as well as releasing the Internet from the control of the government agencies that spawned it. He served as the major administration proponent for continued investment in advanced computing and networking and private sector initiatives such as Net Day. He was and is a strong proponent of extending access to the network to schools and libraries. Today, approximately 95% of our nation’s schools are on the Internet. Gore provided much-needed political support for the speedy privatization of the Internet when the time arrived for it to become a commercially-driven operation.

No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the Vice President. Gore has been a clear champion of this effort, both in the councils of government and with the public at large.

The Vice President deserves credit for his early recognition of the value of high speed computing and communication and for his long-term and consistent articulation of the potential value of the Internet to American citizens and industry and, indeed, to the rest of the world.

Now--is everybody clear?

My Letter to Chris Matthews

[This is what I actually just sent.]

Dear Mr. Matthews--So how long do you intend to keep telling the same lies about Al Gore, e.g., that he claimed he "invented the Internet", when in fact he said no such thing? (By the way, which member of Congress do you think the major internet players credit with doing the most to boost and promote the development of the Web? Hmmm? Can you guess?)

I'm sick and tired of your pathetic, discredited lies about Al Gore. You're one of the most dishonest people on television, and as long as you're on Hardball, that show can count me OUT as a viewer.

Sincerely,

Joseph A. Miller

P.S. In light of your borderline-insane obsession with things like Hillary Clinton's clapping, do you intend to seek out psychiatric help?

There's Just No Excuse for This!

Damn kids.

Giuliani and the Kerik Indictment

Bernard Kerik, as you may recall, was a corrupt individual with ties to organized crime recommended by Rudolph Giuliani to the Little King for the post of Homeland Security chief. When Kerik's shady past was revealed, the nomination fell through. Now Kerik is under indictment. The whole matter isn't just a question of Giuliani's (severely flawed) judgment, it's a matter of the credibility of his candidacy itself:

The Kerik indictment isn't merely news because it calls into question Rudy's judgment or vetting skills on one appointment or even on his recommending him for DHS. Rather, its real importance lies in the fact that it undercuts the core rationale of his entire candidacy. It perfectly captures the fraudulent nature of Rudy's entire Presidential quest.

Rudy's argument to voters is simple: He's the candidate best equipped to protect us from what he likes to call the "terrorists' war on us." To justify this he likes to say that as Mayor he shouldered the burden of maintaining the "safety and security of 8 million people," and that as Mayor of New York on 9/11 he alone understands just how frightful the terrorist menace really is and hence would be most effective in countering it. This is Rudy's central message: I alone am the best equipped to keep the country safe from Islamofascisterror.

It hardly needs to be pointed out that the post of Homeland Security chief is kind of important when it comes to doing this. Despite this, Rudy is the primary reason that a cartoonish joke like Kerik was ever considered for the all-important post of defending the nation in the first place. Remember, Rudy privately vouched for Kerik to Bush. If somehow Kerik's various shenanigans and misdeeds hadn't come to light in time, it's not inconceivable that he could have ended up as DHS chief, with potentially catastrophic results that would have been primarily Rudy's fault. Now Rudy is telling us he's the guy to keep us safe?

I keep telling everybody that Giuliani is a fraud and danger to the Republic. I hope enough people wake up in time and figure it out for themselves.

New Poll: Clinton Leads Giuliani in New York City by FORTY POINTS

You know, New York, the city where Giuliani showed us all his "heroism" and his great management style, the city he personally saved from disaster, according to him? Read 'em and weep, Rudolph:

In New York City, Senator Clinton beats the former mayor by a whopping 41% (62% to 21%).

On the issue seen widely as Giuliani’s greatest strength nationally, New York State voters are divided on which one would do a better job keeping the country safe (Clinton 40 % vs. Giuliani 39%). In New York City, where the tragic events of 9/11 occurred and where then Mayor Rudy Giuliani became a symbol to the country, Hillary Clinton is seen as better able to keep the US safe by a resounding 20 points (Clinton 50% to Giuliani 30%).

The city’s former mayor is viewed favorably by only a third of the city’s voters (34%) and less than half of the state’s voters (41%).

Oooooh, that's GOTTA sting!

Wise up, America. The people of NYC know him best, and he's getting trounced there. Maybe you should ask why.

Fox "News" Porn!!

Check out every steamy second of it right here!!

From your family values network.

Support the Writers Strike!

Here's why.

A Poem for Veterans Day

Since Veterans Day was originally Armistice Day, the end of the First World War, I thought a piece from that era would be appropriate.

Dreamers

SOLDIERS are citizens of death's gray land,

Drawing no dividend from time's to-morrows.

In the great hour of destiny they stand,

Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.

Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win

Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives.

Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin

They think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives.


I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,

And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,

Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,

And mocked by hopeless longing to regain

Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,

And going to the office in the train.

--Siegfried Sassoon

Giuliani, Robertson, and the Depths of Moral Degeneracy

Few things in the current presidential campaign have been as instructive and appalling as the utterly cynical and perverse alliance between Rudolph Giuliani and America's favorite psychotic right wing "holy man" Pat Robertson. Giuliani wants to sell you the fiction that he's a "moderate". Robertson wants you to believe he's morally consistent. Both narratives are utter bullshit.

You know my position on Giuliani. Read my blog archives if you're not sure. He's a closet fascist, an authoritarian who hates our Constitution and who dreams of dictatorship. He's also damn near a pathological liar. He combines all of Bush and Cheney's worst traits, and that's terrifying.

And just to remind you, here are some "highlights" of Robertson's sick, vicious career.

Robertson the Anti-Semite

From The Christian Century:

IN HIS PUBLISHED WRITINGS, especially his 1991 book The New World Order, Pat Robertson has propagated theories about a worldwide Jewish conspiracy. Michael Lind raised the issue in February in the New York Times Book Review, and in April Jacob Heilbrun, writing in the New York Review of Books, cited chapter and verse of Robertson's borrowings from well-known anti-Semitic works. After the New York Times and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith called attention to the matter, Robertson issued a statement denying any anti-Semitic intent, affirming his alliance with the Jews and his support for Israel, and saying he "regretted" any offense his writings may have caused...

The New World Order was written principally to condemn the United Nations' command authority during the gulf war. Robertson presents a sweeping warning about an age-old conspiracy designed to control world politics and economics. In Robertson's view, the conspirators belong to a secret "society" led by satanic atheists and financial "money barons." [He means JEWS--J. Miller] According to the evidence he marshals, these conspirators have taken over international banking and American academic and cultural institutions, and have carefully planned to use the UN and Federal Reserve Bank to impose upon the globe a "one-world" government. The real purpose of the conspiracy, however, is the destruction of American Christian culture and of Christianity itself.

ROBERTSON TRACES the historical progress of this conspiracy, back to Lucifer and his machinations in antiquity. In the modem era the conspiracy has been promoted through a small secret society founded in late 18th-century, Bavaria called the Illuminati, whose members purportedly infiltrated Freemasonry, organized the French Revolution, recruited Friedrick Engels and other communists to their cause and orchestrated the Bolshevik takeover of Russia. Through their control of international banking, the Illuminati-dominated servants of Satan, [He means JEWS--J. Miller] according to Robertson, have imposed a system of national and private credit and interest that has saddled the nation with debilitating and enslaving debt, robbing the American people at once of their independence and their control over their religious life.

A 2004 Robertson attack on Jews is here. Excerpt:

A misleading article prominent on Robertson's CBN.com makes the stunning claim that the Jews manipulate their Sabbath services so that synagogue worshipers reject Jesus. The article, "The Passion According to Isaiah", claims that the weekly recitation of verses from the Prophets (haftara) in synagogues worldwide were specifically designed to avoid a passage in Isaiah that Christians interpret as a reference to Jesus.

"This is a serious charge against Judaism for which there is not a single shred of evidence…. The absurdity of this claim lies in the fact that the selections for the weekly reading of verses from the Prophets, including those from Isaiah, predate Christianity by two centuries. What motive did Jews have for preventing worshipers from converting to Christianity, when at the time the custom to read from the Prophets was created, Christianity and Jesus didn't even exist?" asks [Rabbi Toviah] Singer.

Robertson, btw, was, at the time, defending Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic religious pornography, known as The Passion of the Christ.

From The Virginian Pilot:

Sometimes, however, words speak louder than actions. If Mr. Robertson is surprised to find himself regarded as anti-Semitic, perhaps he should look to his own house: In the April 1992 issue of ``The Paper,'' a newsletter published by the School of Journalism of Regent University (one of the organizations Mr. Robertson controls), an editorial appeared titled ``Anti-Judaism is not anti-Semitism.''

While the editorial claims that "anti-Semitism goes against the very heart of Christianity,'' it states in the same sentence that "it is understandable that the world would hate Jews, the people called by God to be His chosen nation.'' It goes on to say, ``Even if the Jews were enemies of the church, Christians are commanded to love their enemies.'' Well, once you have called me your enemy, it hardly matters whether you label that epithet anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic. It is clearly anti-me.

The editorial says that ``Jews, as nice as they may be, if they do not believe in Jesus Christ as their savior, are eternally condemned by God.'' It states that God will punish Jews in hell forever. It calls Judaism a cult.

The editorial condemns the selection of Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein (whom it calls a pagan) to give the opening prayer in the U.S. Senate because ``anyone who does not accept Christ as savior, does not acknowledge Jesus as the King of Kings, is therefore an enemy of God.''

The editorial ends by stating that Jews (and all non-Christians) are under God's wrath and should be pitied by Christians. The editorial concludes, ``We cannot allow them to lead us in worship until we have led them in the sinner's prayer.'' These words do not, to me, sound like "respect for the beliefs and traditions of the Jewish community.''

Robertson the General Lunatic

A collection of Robertson quotes here:

"You say you're supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense. I don't have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist. I can love the people who hold false opinions but I don't have to be nice to them." Pat Robertson, "The 700 Club," January 14, 1991

"I know this is painful for the ladies to hear, but if you get married, you have accepted the headship of a man, your husband. Christ is the head of the household and the husband is the head of the wife, and that's the way it is, period." Pat Robertson, "The 700 Club," January 8, 1992

"(T)he feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians." Pat Robertson, 1992 Fund Raising Letter

(Talking about apartheid South Africa) "I think 'one man, one vote,' just unrestricted democracy, would not be wise. There needs to be some kind of protection for the minority which the white people represent now, a minority, and they need and have a right to demand a protection of their rights." at Robertson, "The 700 Club," March 18, 1992

"There is no such thing as separation of church and state in the Constitution. It is a lie of the Left and we are not going to take it anymore." Pat Robertson, November 1993 during an address to the American Center for Law and Justice

"Many of those people involved with Adolf Hitler were Satanists, many of them were homosexuals--the two things seem to go together." Pat Robertson, "The 700 Club," January 21, 1993

"Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It's no different. It is the same thing. It is happening all over again. It is the Democratic Congress, the liberal-based media and the homosexuals who want to destroy the Christians. Wholesale abuse and discrimination and the worst bigotry directed toward any group in America today. More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history." Pat Robertson, 1993 interview with Molly Ivins

"[Homosexuals] want to come into churches and disrupt church services and throw blood all around and try to give people AIDS and spit in the face of ministers." Pat Robertson, "The 700 Club," January 18, 1995

"[The National Organization for Women] is saying that in order to be a woman, you've got to be a lesbian." Pat Robertson, "The 700 Club," December 3, 1997

"Maybe we need a very small nuke thrown off on Foggy Bottom (home of the State Department) to shake things up." Pat Robertson, "The 700 Club," June 2003

Robertson the Crook and Con Man:

Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign has hungered for some form of blessing from the religious right. Today, the former New York City mayor and supporter of abortion and gay rights got an unexpected endorsement from televangelist Marion G. "Pat" Robertson.

But the world famous Christian conservative's declaration of support left out a few things.It did not, for example, refer to Robertson's approval of abortions for the purposes of population control as expressed in China in a 2001 CNN interview.

Nor did the Giuliani campaign's press release mention Robertson's business partnership in a gold mining venture with former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor. For that matter, what about Robertson's suggestions that it might not be a bad idea to assassinate or "take out" Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and North Korea's Kim Jong-Il?

Robertson's near-legendary status on the Christian right is based on his founding of three institutions, the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN); his television program, The 700 Club; and the formerly extraordinarily influential Christian Coalition.

On matters affecting the bottom line, however, Robertson - who has made himself millions as the proprietor of a Christian empire - has repeatedly demonstrated his willingness to let his belief in free market capitalism override traditional morality.

Yes, this who Giuliani is proud to have teamed up with--an anti-Semite, a misogynist, a vile bigot in almost every possible sense, and someone who is just borderline insane as far I'm concerned. And while Giuliani savaged Ron Paul in a Republican debate for suggesting that U.S. policies may have had something to do with provoking the 9/11 attacks, it was Robertson (and Falwell) who blamed the attacks on America itself, particularly liberals, gays, and the ACLU!! Yes, the two fruitcakes were pressured into apologizing three days later, but you get the feeling Old Pat didn't really mean it.

If I ever needed another reason to fight to the utmost to keep Giuliani out of the White House, this idiot's endorsement would be more than enough. In making an alliance with each other, Robertson and Giuliani have found in each other kindred spirits--people who hate everything good that America stands for. In embracing the nominally pro-choice Giuliani, Robertson has blithely shed what was supposed to be his most sacred issue. In embracing Robertson, Giuliani has told much of his own home city to go to hell.

And if that isn't moral degeneracy, than I don't know what the hell is.

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.

Brothers and Sisters, Support VOTE VETS Now!

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?