The Staton Jones Report

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October 30, 2004

"Still the One" --- NOT!

John Hall, of the band Orleans, has requested that the Bush Team stop playing his 70's hit Still the One at rallies.

John Hall, a former Democratic county legislator in upstate New York, co-wrote the song and recorded it with his band Orleans in 1976. He complained Friday morning about the campaign's use of the song at the president's events.

The cheery pop tune opened and ended a Bush campaign rally in New Hampshire Friday, then was to have vanished from the political playlist.

"Out of deference to Mr. Hall's views, the song will no longer be played," Bush campaign spokeswoman Nicolle Devenish said. She said the song had been included in a catalog of music that the campaign's licensing company used to provide music for events.

Hours after she spoke, however, the song popped up again on the sound system in Columbus, Ohio, as Bush rally organizers tried to warm up a crowd of thousands. A campaign spokesman said the song was piped inadvertently into the arena as part of a video montage.

Out of "deference"? How about, in lieu of a lawsuit we're dropping it. I was appalled when I heard it on the CNN report on TV last night. I couldn't believe Hall would allow it. Turns out, he doesn't.

Posted by Steven at 02:39 PM | Comments (0)

Osama: Still At Large

One thing is certain about the new Osama tape: he's still alive and still making trouble for the U.S. The New York Times evaulates the impact of Osama's video in today's edition. I think it makes Kerry's case: he's still out there and Bush didn't get him. Mission still not Accomplished.

Posted by Steven at 12:22 AM | Comments (0)

October 29, 2004

Letter to the Editor

A co-worker of mine wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times that was published today:

To the Editor:

A high regard for logic impels me to point out that if the United States had not invaded Iraq, the explosives at Al Qaqaa would have continued to be inspected and secured by the International Atomic Energy Agency ("Bush Hits Back at Kerry Charge Over Explosives," front page, Oct. 28).

We may never know for sure whether the explosives went missing just before or shortly after the invasion, but we do know that the invasion was a critical factor in their disappearance.

I fault John Kerry for voting to give the president the authority to go to war in Iraq, but I accuse George W. Bush of the far more serious misdeeds of listening only to the people around him who wanted the war, of conducting the war with too few troops and of failing to plan adequately for the postwar period.

Constance Lewis
Lincoln, Mass., Oct. 28, 2004

Posted by Steven at 12:28 PM | Comments (0)

Is Bush an R/C Toy?

Salon has a great article about Bush's bulge.

We report, you can see the frigging obvious. Either Bush was wired, or he's a radio-controlled toy.

Posted by Steven at 09:07 AM | Comments (0)

Nixonian Tactics Used Against NAACP

Nixon was exposed for using the IRS to intimidate his "enemies". Now the Bush Administration is doing the same. The New York Times is reporting that the IRS is examining the NAACP's tax-exempt status because of a speech given by it's current president Julian Bonds.

The Internal Revenue Service has begun reviewing the tax-exempt status of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, citing concerns over a speech given by its chairman, Julian Bond, at its annual convention last July in Philadelphia. In a letter dated Oct. 8 and released Thursday, the I.R.S. told the association it had received information that Mr. Bond conveyed "statements in opposition of George W. Bush for the office of presidency" and specifically that he had "condemned the administration policies of George W. Bush in education, the economy and the war in Iraq."

The letter reminded the association that tax-exempt organizations are legally barred from supporting or opposing any candidate for elective office.

Mr. Bond's speech on July 11 included a long section that sharply criticized the Republican Party, Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for their positions on an array of issues important to black Americans.

In an interview Thursday, Mr. Bond defended his remarks, saying they focused on policy, not politics.

"This is an attempt to silence the N.A.A.C.P. on the very eve of a presidential election," he said. "We are best known for registering and turning out large numbers of African-American voters. Clearly, someone in the I.R.S. doesn't want that to happen."

He added, "It's Orwellian to believe that criticism of the president is not allowed or that the president is somehow immune from criticism."

The irony of this is that I expect this to further increase black American's anger at the Bush Administration, and to come out in even larger numbers to vote against him. So (hopefully) the tactic will blowback on Rove, and a Kerry Administration will end the probe.

Meanwhile, why hasn't the IRS announced probes into all the Evangelical organizations that are telling their followers how to vote?

Posted by Steven at 08:47 AM | Comments (0)

Krugman: Bush's Mistakes Review

Today's Krugman column reviews Bush's tremendous screwups in his administration. They include:

• Al Qaqaa (the explosives dump that dissappeared)
• Letting Osama get away
• Letting Zarqawi get away
• The situation in Iraq is Chaos
• $70 billion more for the War in Iraq

After all, Al Qaqaa illustrates in a particularly graphic way the failures of Mr. Bush's national security leadership. U.S. soldiers passed through Al Qaqaa, a crucial munitions dump, but were never told that it was important to secure the site. If administration officials object that they couldn't have spared enough troops to guard the site, they're admitting that they went in without enough troops. And the fact that these explosives fell into unknown hands is a perfect example of how the Iraq war has worsened the terrorist threat.

The story of Al Qaqaa has brought out the worst in a campaign dedicated to the proposition that the president is infallible - and that it's always someone else's fault when things go wrong. Here's what Rudy Giuliani said yesterday: "No matter how you try to blame it on the president, the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough?" Support the troops!

But worst of all from the right's point of view, Al Qaqaa has disrupted the campaign's media strategy. Karl Rove clearly planned to turn the final days of the campaign into a series of "global test" moments - taking something Mr. Kerry said and distorting its meaning, then generating pseudo-controversies that dominate the airwaves. Instead, the news media have spent the last few days discussing substance. And that's very bad news for Mr. Bush.

Holy shit, the news media decided to do their job and report reality instead of Rovality. It's a miracle!

Posted by Steven at 08:37 AM | Comments (0)

Zogby on The Daily Show

John Zogby (the pollster) announced on The Daily Show that John Kerry will win the election next Tuesday. He pointed out the fact that all political junkies already know, namely that undecides break 2 for 1 to the challenger. This is just simple human nature -- if they were in favor of the incumbent, they wouldn't be undecided.

The audience roared, and even Stewart was a bit surprised.

VOTE KERRY on TUESDAY !!!

Posted by Steven at 08:29 AM | Comments (0)

October 28, 2004

Finally, it IS Next Year

Congratulations to the 2004 World Series Champion Boston Red Sox.

Oooooh -- just gotta type that again.

2004 World Series Champion Boston Red Sox.

I've got champagne drying in my hair (but will shower before hitting the sack). My cheek muscles are sore from the smiling. I've had more post-midnight calls than ever before, friends and family wanting to share the moment.

The Red Sox have won the World Series.

So this is what it feels like.

God Almighty, this is sweetness. The frustrations and agony of much of my forty years, not to mention the 86 full that weighed upon all New England, are gone -- gone! -- with a little comebacker to the pitcher Foulke.

And such a storyline to it: sweeping the Angels with the extra-inning home run clinch; coming oh so close to falling to the (Hated) Yankees before battling all the way back in historic fashion, and then sweeping (sweeping! did anyone predict that?) the mighty Cardinals, wrapping it up on a lunar eclipse night. The heroic hits by Ortiz, the grand slam breakthrough of Damon, the pure-guts efforts by surgically rebuilt Schilling.

Mission accomplished, gentlemen and Idiots. We cannot thank you enough. One in our lifetime is what we asked, and you, at long last, delivered.

And thanks to you, Kid Theo, and Mssrs. Henry and Lucchino.

A Red Sox championship in our lifetime.

I love and loathe the World Series. It's the biggest show in baseball, where the entire season is boiled down to two tall-standing teams dueling it out for the trophy, the right to brag and strut, to be champions. The Series is also, alas, the last baseball of the season, the closure to the lingering scraps of glorious high summer and the annual days of the nation's pastime, that tonic that keeps us feeling young and alive and full of hope. And then it leaves us to face the winter alone.

Every year it has left Red Sox Nation, the throaty and burdened collective of Sox fans, with a bittersweet taste in the mouth. We're used to it, the Sox's failing, whenever it happened (April, July, September, October). We've seen them lose; we don't like it, but we can take it.

But this year -- this year -- we face the winter with a different point of view. This year, our guys are champions.

Champions.

Winter won't be so bad this year.

It's a sweet feeling.

No more "1918", no more "Curse of the Bambino", done in by the 2004 World Series Champion Boston Red Sox.

Step up, Cubs. Step up, White Sox. It's your turn next. If the Red Sox can win the World Series (did you hear? The Red Sox won the World Series!), then any team can. We got our one. We got our one.

There is joy in Mudville.

Posted by at 01:03 AM | Comments (0)

"One-Fingered Victory Salute"

President Bush has an important message for those remaining Kerry voters:

Read the Salon story here.

Posted by Steven at 12:02 AM | Comments (0)

October 27, 2004

Massachusetts Miracle 2/3rds Here!

Boston Wins World Series -- Ends "Curse" of 86 Years!

They beat the Yankees, and won the Series.

John Kerry Will Win on Tuesday!

We believe!!!

Posted by Steven at 10:51 PM | Comments (0)

Bush Losing the Hummer Vote

This from our friend in Dallas:

You know Bush's [reelection] is in the poo ...

When you see a fully tricked-out Hummer in Dallas with a Kerry/Edwards sticker. And I'm seeing more and more of the stickers all over the place here. Hee.

Thanks to Melanie Fletcher

Posted by Steven at 12:04 PM | Comments (0)

Check Your Email Addresses, GOP!

Over at GeorgeBush.org they've been getting some interesting e-mail from the GOP insiders. The infamous Palast memos are there (where GOP planners scheme ways to block voters in Dem. districts).

Joe Bob sez check it out.

Thanks to Dennis Parslow for the link

Posted by Steven at 08:38 AM | Comments (0)

Dallas: Reunion Opportunity for Bush

CBS is producing a Dallas reunion episode that will air in November. If I was Shrub, I'd be angling for a spot as "J.R."'s evil son. God knows he's got the chops (the hideously mangled accent, the record of corporate asslicking, etc.) and would fit right in. Hell, the entire White House could do a good version of the "Ewings".

Read about the reunion here.

Posted by Steven at 08:33 AM | Comments (0)

October 26, 2004

The French Gnome Behind Bush's Bulge

Here is the French tailor who claims that Bush's suit bulge is normal:

Read about this character in The Hill.

Posted by Steven at 11:02 PM | Comments (0)

What's Your High Score?

Looking forward to e-voting for John Kerry?

Kudos to Brett Brooks in Markham for this link!

"Blame Canada!"

Posted by Steven at 10:17 AM | Comments (0)

October 24, 2004

Eminem Dooms Bush

Wow, Eminem says, "Bush is not my homie."

Damning words.

The infamous 18 to 24 year voter will now move, herdlike, to the polls and remove Bush from office. Right.

At least the blonde rapper's heart is in the right place.

Posted by Steven at 11:00 PM | Comments (0)

Massachusetts Miracle Pretzel

Posted by Steven at 10:39 PM | Comments (0)

Blindfolds for Bush

Posted by Steven at 10:36 PM | Comments (0)

Where's Waldo's Explosives?

A huge cache of explosives dissappeared in Iraq during the early days of the war effort.

The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, produce missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons - are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations.

The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no-man's land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished after the American invasion last year.

The White House said President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was informed within the past month that the explosives were missing. It is unclear whether President Bush was informed. American officials have never publicly announced the disappearance, but beginning last week they answered questions about it posed by The New York Times and the CBS News program "60 Minutes."

Administration officials said yesterday that the Iraq Survey Group, the C.I.A. task force that searched for unconventional weapons, has been ordered to investigate the disappearance of the explosives.

American weapons experts say their immediate concern is that the explosives could be used in major bombing attacks against American or Iraqi forces: the explosives, mainly HMX and RDX, could be used to produce bombs strong enough to shatter airplanes or tear apart buildings. The bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 used less than a pound of the material of the type stolen from Al Qaqaa, and somewhat larger amounts were apparently used in the bombing of a housing complex in November 2003 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and the blasts in a Moscow apartment complex in September 1999 that killed nearly 300 people.

The explosives could also be used to trigger a nuclear weapon, which was why international nuclear inspectors had kept a watch on the material, and even sealed and locked some of it. But the other components of an atom bomb - the design and the radioactive fuel - are more difficult to obtain. "This is a high explosives risk, but not necessarily a proliferation risk," one senior Bush administration official said.

The International Atomic Energy Agency publicly warned about the danger of these explosives before the war, and after the invasion it specifically told United States officials about the need to keep the explosives secured, European diplomats said in interviews last week. Administration officials say they cannot explain why the explosives were not safeguarded, beyond the fact that the occupation force was overwhelmed by the amount of munitions they found throughout the country.

The Qaqaa facility, about 30 miles south of Baghdad, was well known to American intelligence officials: Saddam Hussein made conventional warheads at the site, and the I.A.E.A. dismantled parts of his nuclear program there in the early 1990's after the Persian Gulf war in 1991. In the prelude to the 2003 invasion, Mr. Bush cited a number of other "dual use" items - including tubes that the administration contended could be converted to use for the nuclear program - as a justification for invading Iraq.

After the invasion, when widespread looting began in Iraq, the international weapons experts grew concerned that the Qaqaa stockpile could fall into unfriendly hands. In May, an internal I.A.E.A. memorandum warned that terrorists might be helping "themselves to the greatest explosives bonanza in history."

The U.S. pressured the Iraqi government to cover up the losses to the I.A.E.A. In other words, our government has lied about yet another critical fuckup in Iraq, one that could very well lead to American lives lost both in Iraq (a virtual certainty) and even here.

Posted by Steven at 10:28 PM | Comments (2)

Poland Will Leave Coalition After Elections

Remember Bush's asinine comments about "not forgetting Poland" during the debate was a complete ruse. Poland is pulling out of Iraq as soon as the elections are finished here. That tells me that the only reason they're there is to bolster Bush's re-election chances.

Q: Poland's defense minister, Jerzy Szmajdzinski, just announced plans to withdraw all 2,500 of your troops from Iraq next year.

It is not true. Our minister of defense mentioned that we would like to end our mission at the end of 2005, but that is not the official position of the government.

Posted by Steven at 10:08 PM | Comments (0)

Good Summary of GOP "Wolves" Ad

Check out Scott Rosenberg's summary of the Bush "Wolves" ad running on TV. This piece of crap is written and delivered in a way, much like the drumbeat to push the Iraq War, that suggests one thing while actually saying something else.

Posted by Steven at 10:02 PM | Comments (1)

October 21, 2004

Massachusetts Miracle

Jonathan Alter tells us why the Yankees' loss to the Red Sox could be bad news for George W. Bush:

The underlying idea was to create a bandwagon effect. Karl Rove believes that voters like a winner, in the same way that some fans like going with proven success. If the candidate or team looks unstoppable, the theory says, a bunch of other fair-weather fans jump aboard in October.

The Red Sox victory makes the Bush-is-inevitable line harder to pursue. A last-minute come-from-behind win by Kerry suddenly seems more plausible, which in turn will rally Democrats to work harder on Election Day. If Kerry goes in to the final weekend down by five points, well, the Red Sox won, for the first time ever, when they were down by three games.

Bush’s basic argument is that electing Kerry would upset the natural order of things, where grownups like Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld—no matter how incompetent at the plate—keep us safe at home. Now the natural order of baseball—where the Yankees beat the Red Sox every year—has been upended, making it suddenly more plausible to throw out the incumbent in Washington, too. In the showdown series, change beat the status quo.

The only thing Americans like more than a winner is an underdog who upsets a winner, especially a scraggly bunch sticking it to the uptown trust-fund crowd. When the Sox were losing and he wasn’t hitting, Johnny Damon looked like one of those longhaired Vietnam War protesters that Kerry used to hang out with. (While the Yankees’ Kevin Brown appeared like a well-scrubbed spokesmen for the Republican National Committee). But after he drove in six runs in Game 7, Damon’s hippie look is cool again—and Bush’s attack on Kerry as a dangerous Northeastern liberal is sounding a bit tinny.

The whole subtext of the Bush campaign is to make “Massachusetts” into a code word for un-American values. That’s harder now, in Red Sox Nation.

Posted by at 07:26 PM | Comments (0)

Tom Toles: The Bubble

Now this really does explain Bush's "World View".

Posted by Steven at 06:08 PM | Comments (0)

DeLay Subpoenaed

Tom DeLay is subpoenaed today.

First Boston wins, now this miracle.

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R) was subpoenaed in Houston to an October 25, 2004 deposition concerning his role in the controversial dispute between Democratic Legislators and the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) during last year's redistricting struggle. Texas State Representative Lon Burnam (D--Fort Worth) subpoenaed DeLay in his ongoing lawsuit challenging DPS's use of public funds to achieve political ends and for its destruction of documents following the exodus of Democratic Legislators from the State to prevent a quorum in a redistricting effort that Democrats claim was illegal.

Burnam's subpoena of DeLay comes just days after the Republican House Majority Leader was officially rebuked by the House Ethics Committee for his inappropriate use of government resources in an effort to track down and arrest House Democrats--including Burnam--who went to Ardmore to block redistricting efforts of the Texas Republicans.

Burnam's lawsuit alleges that the DPS destroyed documents regarding their efforts to apprehend the Legislators and that DPS had no lawful authority to arrest Democratic members who went to Ardmore. A number of high ranking DPS officials have given their depositions, as has Burnam in the case. An Austin Appeals Court recently held that Burnam's case on the open records issue could go forward.

Update: Go here and pitch some money towards getting DeLay recalled. This is seriously within reach now!

Posted by Steven at 06:01 PM | Comments (0)

October 20, 2004

Diesel Hits $2.50

I dropped $2.50 a gallon to fuel up my Golf TDI tonite. I'm still getting 45 MPG, but it's now over $30 to fillup. Gasoline is creeping up, too, with hi-test at $2.35 and the "cheap stuff" at $2.03 to $2.10. We're still waiting for $58/bbl. oil, but maybe that's Rove's October Surprise.

Posted by Steven at 11:40 PM | Comments (0)

Snapshot: Electoral Vote Predictions (Oct 20)

The guy who runs Electoral Vote Predictor has put up a final prediction page that is based on four simple rules:

- Voters who already have made a choice will stick to it

- The undecideds will break 2:1 for the challenger (Kerry)

- In states where Nader is on the ballot, he will get 1%; otherwise 0% (was 2.74% nationally in 2000)

- The minor candidates such as Badnarik, Cobb, etc. will get 1% of the vote (was 1.01% in 2000)

The actual breakdown of votes is (Kerry states are blue, Bush states are red):

Oct. 20th Electoral Vote Prediction (Kerry: 311 Bush:227)

Posted by Steven at 11:29 PM | Comments (0)

Bush Relatives For Kerry

This link from the The 18½ Minute Gap:

"Bush Relatives for Kerry" grew out of a series of conversations that took place between a group of people that have two things in common: they are all related to George Walker Bush, and they are all voting for John Kerry. As the election approaches, we feel it is our responsibility to speak out about why we are voting for John Kerry, and to do our small part to help America heal from the sickness it has suffered since George Bush was appointed President in 2000. We invite you to read our stories, and please, don't vote for our cousin!

Posted by Steven at 11:19 PM | Comments (0)

Pat Robertson Cautioned Bush About Casualties

CNN is reporting that Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson warned him about casualties from the Iraq war, and Bush brushed him off.

Robertson, an ardent Bush supporter, told CNN in an interview Tuesday night that he urged the president to prepare the American people for the prospect of casualties before launching the war in March 2003.

Robertson said Bush told him, " 'Oh, no, we're not going to have any casualties.' "

More than 1,100 American troops have been killed in Iraq since the invasion, most of them battling an insurgency that followed the overthrow of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

Several bloggers have suggested that Bush was talking about civilian casualties, but I don't agree. Does anyone think Bush was thinking about anything other than the rosy scenarios that Wolfowitz and Pearle were spinning about Iraq?

Posted by Steven at 01:34 PM | Comments (1)

October 19, 2004

Greenspan Has Alzheimer's Too

Alan Greenspan is throwing blankets on the fire. He's saying that the enormous homeowner debt that has accumulated under his watch is not the looming disaster that most economists (if not deluding themselves) say it is.

Alan Greenspan on Tuesday defended one of the most tangible results of his tenure as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board: the big increase in homeowner debt.

In his most detailed discussion yet on the subject, Mr. Greenspan disputed analysts who worry that home buyers have become swept up in a speculative housing bubble that the Fed is partly responsible for creating. While he acknowledged that consumer debt has risen "especially steeply" in the last five years, he said family finances were still in "reasonably good shape."

What shape does the economy have to be in to be "reasonably bad shape"?

Goldman Sachs, in a report entitled "Trouble Brews in the Housing Market," estimated last week that nationwide housing prices are now about 10 percent higher than the level justified by current interest rates and household incomes.

The report also warned that the supply of new housing is growing much more rapidly than demand in many areas. Home buyers, meanwhile, "appear to have developed a speculative mind-set" with wildly inflated expectations about future price increases.

Kathleen Bostjancic, a senior economist at Merrill Lynch in New York, said Mr. Greenspan was glossing over the risks of a housing bubble, particularly one focused in high-price areas on the East and West Coasts, similar to the stock market bubble that collapsed four years ago.

"He talks about how housing doesn't lend itself to being a bubble because it's harder to trade houses and you have to live in a home," Ms. Bostjancic said. "But on the other hand, it's happening in the U.K. and it has happened in Japan. It also happened here in the Northeastern United States in the early 90's. There is a precedent for housing bubbles in the U.S. on a regional basis."

Uh oh!

Posted by Steven at 11:37 PM | Comments (0)

Corporate Welfare Does Not Pay

The New York Times is running a piece on towns that were burned by companies taking tax cuts who then shut down factories.

People in this big-shouldered town, birthplace of the poet Carl Sandburg, say Maytag broke their hearts. After a decade of tax breaks and union concessions to keep the company in a place that has been making refrigerators for more than 50 years, Maytag closed its factory last month, terminating 1,600 jobs.

Maytag may be done with Galesburg, but Galesburg is not done with Maytag.

District Attorney Paul L. Mangieri wants to sue Maytag to recoup what he says were excess tax breaks in a broad package of incentives to keep the company here. Much of the money, he said, came from a purse that would have gone to schools in this economically fragile community.

"We gave Maytag these incentives, and they accepted them," said Mr. Mangieri, a Navy veteran who grew up in a small town not far from here in western Illinois. "We did it based on faith and trust. If we don't do anything now, it sends a message that we lack the resolve to treat the rich and privileged the same as everybody else."

I'm sick and tired of corporate welfare coming on the backs of tax payers. If "tax and spend" is a bad thing, then "untax and ripoff" is worse. Why do businesses, who tout their magical ability to create wealth, need frigging handouts? Are they all George Bushes?

The good news is that the GOP's "tort reform" movement will probably prevent dying cities from suing these bastards.

Posted by Steven at 11:33 PM | Comments (0)

October 18, 2004

Grand Ole Sith

Posted by Steven at 11:47 PM | Comments (1)

Krugman: Bush Lied To You About The Deficit, And Now He's Lying About the Draft

Paul Krugman points out that Bush's disingenious talk about the Draft sounds alarmingly like his talk about the deficit and his tax cuts (from when he was running for office).

Those who are worrying about a revived draft are in the same position as those who worried about a return to budget deficits four years ago, when President Bush began pushing through his program of tax cuts. Back then he insisted that he wouldn't drive the budget into deficit - but those who looked at the facts strongly suspected otherwise. Now he insists that he won't revive the draft. But the facts suggest that he will.

There were two reasons some of us never believed Mr. Bush's budget promises. First, his claims that his tax cuts were affordable rested on patently unrealistic budget projections. Second, his broader policy goals, including the partial privatization of Social Security - which is clearly on his agenda for a second term - would involve large costs that were not included even in those unrealistic projections. This led to the justified suspicion that his election-year promises notwithstanding, Mr. Bush would preside over a return to budget deficits.

It's exactly the same when it comes to the draft. Mr. Bush's claim that we don't need any expansion in our military is patently unrealistic; it ignores the severe stress our Army is already under. And the experience in Iraq shows that pursuing his broader foreign policy doctrine - the "Bush doctrine" of pre-emptive war - would require much larger military forces than we now have.

This leads to the justified suspicion that after the election, Mr. Bush will seek a large expansion in our military, quite possibly through a return of the draft.

I just marvel at the fact that this draft dodging deserter has sent over 1000 men and women of the Armed Forces to DEATH for a lie, and he's going to ratchet up the pain and suffering tremendously when he retains the throne. If I was 18 - 30, I'd be voting against this war criminal.

Posted by Steven at 11:33 PM | Comments (1)

Gore: Bush is a Liar

CNN and the Washington Post (among others) are running stories about Al Gore's final major policy speech today (sponsored by MoveOn.

Former vice president Al Gore finished a two-year series of policy addresses yesterday by accusing President Bush of deliberately suppressing information about Iraq that would have undermined his case for war.

Gore said that he had previously resisted saying Bush intentionally deceived the public in the run-up to the invasion but that the evidence now shows "that in virtually every case the president chose to ignore -- and indeed often to suppress -- studies, reports, information, facts, that were directly contrary to the false impressions he was in the process of giving to the American people."

Echoing a campaign theme of Democratic nominee John F. Kerry, Gore told about 700 students and activists at Georgetown University that Bush is "arrogantly out of touch with reality."

"He refuses to ever admit mistakes, which means that so long as he is our president we are doomed to repeat his mistakes," Gore said, to applause. "It is beyond incompetence. It is recklessness that risks the safety and security of the American people."

No doubt soon you will only be able to talk to Al Gore through a chicken-wire fence in Cuba, but until that time, Go Al, GO!

Posted by Steven at 11:15 PM | Comments (0)

Guess Who's Having Computer Problems?

Well, my daughter, to tell the truth.

But also Florida, the state that "solved" the hanging chad problem with a piece of shit solution known as touch-screen voting.

In Palm Beach County, the center of the madness during the recount four years ago, a Democratic state legislator said she wasn't given a complete absentee ballot when she asked to opt for paper instead of the electronic touch-screen machines. Several voting sites in Broward County had problems with laptops connected to elections headquarters. And a brief computer system crash in Orange County paralyzing voting in Orlando and its immediate suburbs.

Get. A. Paper. Ballot. People.

Posted by Steven at 11:11 PM | Comments (0)

How Many Bush Administration Officials Does It Take To Change A Light Bulb?

From William Gibson's weblog:

How many Bush administration officials does it take to change a light bulb?

None. There’s nothing wrong with that light bulb. There is no need to change anything. We made the right decision and nothing has happened to change our minds. People who criticize this light bulb now, just because it doesn’t work anymore, supported us when we first screwed it in, and when these flip-floppers insist on saying that it is burned out, they are merely giving aid and encouragement to the Forces of Darkness.

-- John Cleese

Posted by Steven at 10:42 PM | Comments (1)

Kerry's War on Terrorism

How will John Kerry address global terrorism? Kevin Drum gives us a comprehensive answer that is light-years ahead of Bush's.

Unlike Bush, Kerry appears to have a firm understanding of all three components of a successful war on global terror: (1) the military effort to kill the terrorists themselves, (2) the cultural and ideological effort to undermine radical Islam, and (3) the diplomatic effort to address ground-level grievances that weaken our ability to pursue #1 and #2.

Bush is doing none of this and only throwing oil on the fire.

Posted by Steven at 10:38 PM | Comments (0)

Supreme Court Orders Texas Redistricting Back to Lower Court

The Supreme Court ruled against Tom "The Hammer" DeLay, ordering the lower court that ruled the GOP led redistricting coup not illegal to reconsider the case. The good news is that the redistricting may not stand. The bad news is that it won't change the district lines currently in contention, which grossly favors the GOP.

The Supreme Court kept alive a Democratic constitutional challenge to a Republican redistricting plan in Texas today, ordering a three-judge district court to reexamine its January decision upholding the plan.

The court's action will not affect the 2004 elections in Texas. Voting for the state's 32 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives will go forward under the contested plan, which was approved in 2003.

But the Supreme Court told the district court to take account of the justices' split decision in April in a similar case in Pennsylvania. In that case, Veith v. Jubelirer, the court upheld a pro-Republican plan but refused to rule out the possibility that extreme partisan gerrymandering could violate the Constitution.

This means that Texas's lines, which were redrawn with the aid of U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R.-Tex.) to boost the GOP's share of a congressional delegation that is now evenly divided, could still be struck down and redrawn at some later date. Republican hopes for control of the House hinge on the new Texas lines.

The GOP contends that since they have a plurality of voters in Texas, they deserve to have a plurality in the GOP representation in the House. This sounds as ridiculous as President Bush saying he's earned the right to another term.

There is no "right" to rule in a democracy. There is a "right" to rule in a monarchy or theocracy. Perhaps that is what they are thinking?

Posted by Steven at 09:57 PM | Comments (0)

Sum Total Bush Administration Post War Planning: Zero

Knight-Ridder is running this article which states that the Bush Administration had no post-war plan whatsoever.

In March 2003, days before the start of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, American war planners and intelligence officials met at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina to review the Bush administration's plans to oust Saddam Hussein and implant democracy in Iraq.

Near the end of his presentation, an Army lieutenant colonel who was giving a briefing showed a slide describing the Pentagon's plans for rebuilding Iraq after the war, known in the planners' parlance as Phase 4-C. He was uncomfortable with his material - and for good reason.

The slide said: "To Be Provided."

A Knight Ridder review of the administration's Iraq policy and decisions has found that it invaded Iraq without a comprehensive plan in place to secure and rebuild the country. The administration also failed to provide some 100,000 additional U.S. troops that American military commanders originally wanted to help restore order and reconstruct a country shattered by war, a brutal dictatorship and economic sanctions.

In fact, some senior Pentagon officials had thought they could bring most American soldiers home from Iraq by September 2003. Instead, more than a year later, 138,000 U.S. troops are still fighting terrorists who slip easily across Iraq's long borders, diehards from the old regime and Iraqis angered by their country's widespread crime and unemployment and America's sometimes heavy boots.

"We didn't go in with a plan. We went in with a theory," said a veteran State Department officer who was directly involved in Iraq policy.

How can Bush be said to have any credibility, whatsoever at this point? Lying liars. Lying goddamned liars. War criminals, war profiteers and amoral monsters. That's the GOP ticket, folks.

Posted by Steven at 09:51 PM | Comments (0)

Oil Breaks $55

From Salon:

Crude oil prices surged past an unprecedented $55 per barrel Monday as uncertainty swirls over production, high demand and tight global supplies.

Crude for November delivery on the New York Mercantile Exchange hit $55.33 per barrel around noon in Asia, up 40 cents from its Friday settlement price.

The prices are the highest in a generation and while oil is more than 70 percent higher than a year ago, they are still around $25 below the peak inflation-adjusted price reached in 1981.

Crude prices have skyrocketed more than $10 in the past month, primarily over production delays in the Gulf of Mexico, where Hurricane Ivan hit mid-September.

Now that the $55 barrier has been surpassed, analysts are looking toward $60 a barrel, with some saying it may reach that mark by the end of the year -- smack in the middle of the Northern Hemisphere winter.

"We hit the new milestone and we're looking at $60," said Victor Shum, oil analyst at Texas-headquartered energy consultants Purvin & Gertz. "$60 is certainly feasible."

We're sticking by our $58/bbl. on 11-2 prediction. It's looking less and less like a guess.

Posted by Steven at 09:08 AM | Comments (0)

This is your Newspaper on Drugs

It is not a big surprise that the Dallas Morning News is endorsing Bush for President. It is rather amazing, however, that they didn't even bother trying to come up with a plausible rationale for doing so, instead echoing cliches that sound like they came from a Bush campaign commercial.

Americans want and need a president with a backbone steeled by courage and a heart tendered by compassion...

I just want somebody who can dance.

Having been tempered by the most eventful and consequential four years served by any U.S. president since Franklin D. Roosevelt's third term (1941-1945), Mr. Bush has earned the right to hold firm to his charge for another term...

Earned the right? Did he earn this right by launching a pre-emptive war for reasons that turned out to be utterly false? Or did he earn this right by completely botching the occupation of this country that was no threat to us? Or, perhaps, by running up the largest deficits in history by giving tax cuts to the wealthy?

Though he has stumbled and fallen at times, Mr. Bush has always risen to fight the next round. It's called conviction. It's called sticking. It's called guts. The challenges of these dramatic days demand an American president with guts...

Aren't you guys supposed to be journalists? Why don't we just dispense with this reality thing altogether and nominate a cartoon character for President?

Mr. Bush inherited an economy slip-sliding into recession. Then came 9-11, followed by bruising blows from the cost of the Iraq war and occupation. Yet the economy has started to revive, thanks in part to his leadership on taxes...

The economy is reviving? Have you tried to get a job in the Dallas area recently?

That said, we have been disappointed by the president's refusal to rein in domestic spending. True, Mr. Kerry has no real plan to eliminate the deficit either, but that's cold comfort. In a second term, Mr. Bush would have to turn into a budget hawk. We trust that that would be easier for a Texas Republican than for a Massachusetts Democrat.

So, you're saying that Bush has a four year track record of utter irresponsibility on fiscal matters, but at least he's not a liberal from Massachusetts? Is that something right off the RNC feed?

Posted by at 06:36 AM | Comments (0)

October 17, 2004

It's The Same People Who ...

Check out this clip from C-SPAN of Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) during the Draft Bill debate in the House.

Now do you have any doubts that Bush will re-instate the Draft?

Posted by Steven at 04:26 PM | Comments (0)

October 16, 2004

NY Times Endorses Kerry

Senator John Kerry goes toward the election with a base that is built more on opposition to George W. Bush than loyalty to his own candidacy. But over the last year we have come to know Mr. Kerry as more than just an alternative to the status quo. We like what we've seen. He has qualities that could be the basis for a great chief executive, not just a modest improvement on the incumbent.

We have been impressed with Mr. Kerry's wide knowledge and clear thinking - something that became more apparent once he was reined in by that two-minute debate light. He is blessedly willing to re-evaluate decisions when conditions change. And while Mr. Kerry's service in Vietnam was first over-promoted and then over-pilloried, his entire life has been devoted to public service, from the war to a series of elected offices. He strikes us, above all, as a man with a strong moral core.

•

There is no denying that this race is mainly about Mr. Bush's disastrous tenure. Nearly four years ago, after the Supreme Court awarded him the presidency, Mr. Bush came into office amid popular expectation that he would acknowledge his lack of a mandate by sticking close to the center. Instead, he turned the government over to the radical right.

Mr. Bush installed John Ashcroft, a favorite of the far right with a history of insensitivity to civil liberties, as attorney general. He sent the Senate one ideological, activist judicial nominee after another. He moved quickly to implement a far-reaching anti-choice agenda including censorship of government Web sites and a clampdown on embryonic stem cell research. He threw the government's weight against efforts by the University of Michigan to give minority students an edge in admission, as it did for students from rural areas or the offspring of alumni.

When the nation fell into recession, the president remained fixated not on generating jobs but rather on fighting the right wing's war against taxing the wealthy. As a result, money that could have been used to strengthen Social Security evaporated, as did the chance to provide adequate funding for programs the president himself had backed. No Child Left Behind, his signature domestic program, imposed higher standards on local school systems without providing enough money to meet them.

If Mr. Bush had wanted to make a mark on an issue on which Republicans and Democrats have long made common cause, he could have picked the environment. Christie Whitman, the former New Jersey governor chosen to run the Environmental Protection Agency, came from that bipartisan tradition. Yet she left after three years of futile struggle against the ideologues and industry lobbyists Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had installed in every other important environmental post. The result has been a systematic weakening of regulatory safeguards across the entire spectrum of environmental issues, from clean air to wilderness protection.

•

The president who lost the popular vote got a real mandate on Sept. 11, 2001. With the grieving country united behind him, Mr. Bush had an unparalleled opportunity to ask for almost any shared sacrifice. The only limit was his imagination.

He asked for another tax cut and the war against Iraq.

The president's refusal to drop his tax-cutting agenda when the nation was gearing up for war is perhaps the most shocking example of his inability to change his priorities in the face of drastically altered circumstances. Mr. Bush did not just starve the government of the money it needed for his own education initiative or the Medicare drug bill. He also made tax cuts a higher priority than doing what was needed for America's security; 90 percent of the cargo unloaded every day in the nation's ports still goes uninspected.

Along with the invasion of Afghanistan, which had near unanimous international and domestic support, Mr. Bush and his attorney general put in place a strategy for a domestic antiterror war that had all the hallmarks of the administration's normal method of doing business: a Nixonian obsession with secrecy, disrespect for civil liberties and inept management.

American citizens were detained for long periods without access to lawyers or family members. Immigrants were rounded up and forced to languish in what the Justice Department's own inspector general found were often "unduly harsh" conditions. Men captured in the Afghan war were held incommunicado with no right to challenge their confinement. The Justice Department became a cheerleader for skirting decades-old international laws and treaties forbidding the brutal treatment of prisoners taken during wartime.

Mr. Ashcroft appeared on TV time and again to announce sensational arrests of people who turned out to be either innocent, harmless braggarts or extremely low-level sympathizers of Osama bin Laden who, while perhaps wishing to do something terrible, lacked the means. The Justice Department cannot claim one major successful terrorism prosecution, and has squandered much of the trust and patience the American people freely gave in 2001. Other nations, perceiving that the vast bulk of the prisoners held for so long at Guantánamo Bay came from the same line of ineffectual incompetents or unlucky innocents, and seeing the awful photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, were shocked that the nation that was supposed to be setting the world standard for human rights could behave that way.

•

Like the tax cuts, Mr. Bush's obsession with Saddam Hussein seemed closer to zealotry than mere policy. He sold the war to the American people, and to Congress, as an antiterrorist campaign even though Iraq had no known working relationship with Al Qaeda. His most frightening allegation was that Saddam Hussein was close to getting nuclear weapons. It was based on two pieces of evidence. One was a story about attempts to purchase critical materials from Niger, and it was the product of rumor and forgery. The other evidence, the purchase of aluminum tubes that the administration said were meant for a nuclear centrifuge, was concocted by one low-level analyst and had been thoroughly debunked by administration investigators and international vetting. Top members of the administration knew this, but the selling went on anyway. None of the president's chief advisers have ever been held accountable for their misrepresentations to the American people or for their mismanagement of the war that followed.

The international outrage over the American invasion is now joined by a sense of disdain for the incompetence of the effort. Moderate Arab leaders who have attempted to introduce a modicum of democracy are tainted by their connection to an administration that is now radioactive in the Muslim world. Heads of rogue states, including Iran and North Korea, have been taught decisively that the best protection against a pre-emptive American strike is to acquire nuclear weapons themselves.

•

We have specific fears about what would happen in a second Bush term, particularly regarding the Supreme Court. The record so far gives us plenty of cause for worry. Thanks to Mr. Bush, Jay Bybee, the author of an infamous Justice Department memo justifying the use of torture as an interrogation technique, is now a federal appeals court judge. Another Bush selection, J. Leon Holmes, a federal judge in Arkansas, has written that wives must be subordinate to their husbands and compared abortion rights activists to Nazis.

Mr. Bush remains enamored of tax cuts but he has never stopped Republican lawmakers from passing massive spending, even for projects he dislikes, like increased farm aid.

If he wins re-election, domestic and foreign financial markets will know the fiscal recklessness will continue. Along with record trade imbalances, that increases the chances of a financial crisis, like an uncontrolled decline of the dollar, and higher long-term interest rates.

The Bush White House has always given us the worst aspects of the American right without any of the advantages. We get the radical goals but not the efficient management. The Department of Education's handling of the No Child Left Behind Act has been heavily politicized and inept. The Department of Homeland Security is famous for its useless alerts and its inability to distribute antiterrorism aid according to actual threats. Without providing enough troops to properly secure Iraq, the administration has managed to so strain the resources of our armed forces that the nation is unprepared to respond to a crisis anywhere else in the world.

•

Mr. Kerry has the capacity to do far, far better. He has a willingness - sorely missing in Washington these days - to reach across the aisle. We are relieved that he is a strong defender of civil rights, that he would remove unnecessary restrictions on stem cell research and that he understands the concept of separation of church and state. We appreciate his sensible plan to provide health coverage for most of the people who currently do without.

Mr. Kerry has an aggressive and in some cases innovative package of ideas about energy, aimed at addressing global warming and oil dependency. He is a longtime advocate of deficit reduction. In the Senate, he worked with John McCain in restoring relations between the United States and Vietnam, and led investigations of the way the international financial system has been gamed to permit the laundering of drug and terror money. He has always understood that America's appropriate role in world affairs is as leader of a willing community of nations, not in my-way-or-the-highway domination.

We look back on the past four years with hearts nearly breaking, both for the lives unnecessarily lost and for the opportunities so casually wasted. Time and again, history invited George W. Bush to play a heroic role, and time and again he chose the wrong course. We believe that with John Kerry as president, the nation will do better.

Voting for president is a leap of faith. A candidate can explain his positions in minute detail and wind up governing with a hostile Congress that refuses to let him deliver. A disaster can upend the best-laid plans. All citizens can do is mix guesswork and hope, examining what the candidates have done in the past, their apparent priorities and their general character. It's on those three grounds that we enthusiastically endorse John Kerry for president.

Posted by Steven at 09:29 PM | Comments (0)

October 15, 2004

Rove Gets Ready for his Frog March

The Rovester paid a visit to the Grand Jury on Friday. About frigging time ...

Rove spent more than two hours testifying before the panel, which White House spokesman Scott McClellan said showed that Rove was "doing his part to cooperate" in the probe, as ordered by Bush.

Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, said prosecutors have assured Rove he is not a target of the criminal investigation.

"He appeared voluntarily today. He answered every question that was put to him," said Luskin, who added that he would provide no further details because prosecutors "have advised us that public disclosure would interfere with the investigation."

Rove's good. He's probably not going to get burned with this, even if it was almost certainly his idea. Others always take the hit for Bush, that's his magical ability. But it'd be great to see them made to pay for this treasonous act.

Posted by Steven at 11:58 PM | Comments (0)

Did Bush Have a Stroke?

This from Salon's War Room:

After watching the third presidential debate Wednesday night, Dr. W. Kendall Tongier, M.D. of Dallas, Texas posted on the Dallas Morning News Web site about his concerns that the President may have had a stroke. The anesthesiologist, who has been in practice for 15 years, wrote: "Having watched the first two debates from start to finish, I was looking forward to listening to a spirited debate between Bush and Kerry. Unfortunately, I barely heard a word that was said. Instead, I found myself staring at and concentrating on the President's drooping mouth.

"As a physician and a professor, I tend to pick up on signs and symptoms of physical problems better than most other people. I am highly concerned with what I saw. The drooping left side of the President's face, his mouth and nasolabial fold (the crease in the face running from the nostril to the side of mouth) may be indicative of a recent stroke, TIA (transient ischemic attack)) or, possibly botox injections. I sincerely hope this was nothing more than botox injections. The other options are truly scary given an upcoming election for President in three weeks." In a phone interview, Dr. Tongier stressed that he's not a neurologist, and no doctor can make a diagnosis from a 90-minute debate. But he did explain why he found Bush's face so distracting Wednesday night: "It struck me across the face to the point where I wasn't really listening to the debate. It looked like the left side of his mouth was downturned. You know how he sneers at times. At first I thought that's what it was, but it didn't change when his face was at rest. It changed when he talked, but you'd expect that. It's the loss of muscle tone there that's really kind of concerning. And it was pretty much persistent throughout the entire debate."

Dr. Tongier isn't the only one wondering if the President's had a stroke. And the fact that President Bush skipped his annual check-up this year, right before the election is only fanning the speculation.

And I was so hoping it was just because he's going senile.

Posted by Steven at 11:48 PM | Comments (0)

Note To Sinclair Broadcasting

The infamous documentary that Sinclair Broadcasting is airing is a pack of lies. ABC's Nightline did some actual journalism (horrors!) visiting the village that Kerry fought in and asked the actual witnesses what happened.

According to the after-action report, after beaching the Swift boat, Kerry "chased VC inland, behind hooch, and shot him while he fled, capturing one B-40 rocket launcher, with round in chamber."

None of the villagers seems to be able to say for a fact that they saw an American chase the man who fired the B-40 into the woods and shoot him. Nobody seems to remember that. But they have no problem remembering Ba Thanh, the man who has been dismissed by Kerry's detractors as "a lone, wounded, fleeing, young Vietcong in a loincloth." (The description comes from "Unfit for Command," by Swift boat veteran John O'Neill.)

"No, this is not correct," Nguyen Thi Tuoi, 77, told ABC News. "He wore a black pajama. He was strong. He was big and strong. He was about 26 or 27."

Tuoi said she didn't see Ba Thanh get shot either, but she and her husband say they were the first to find his body. They say they found him a good distance from his bunker, though she could not confirm that Kerry -- or anyone else -- had pursued him into the bush.

Her husband, Nguyen Van Ty, in his 80s, had a slightly different account of how Ba Thanh died.

"I didn't see anything because I was hiding from the bullets and the bombs," he said. "It was very fierce and there was shooting everywhere and the leaves were being shredded to pieces. I was afraid to stay up there. I had to hide. And then, when it was over, I saw Ba Thanh was dead. He may have been shot in the chest when he stood up."

He also said the Swift boats were coming under attack from the Viet Cong fighters on shore. "We tried to shoot at the boat," he said, "but we didn't hit anything."

Kerry's citation says he "uncovered an enemy rest and supply area, which was destroyed," but according to the villagers, the Americans missed the military supplies. In fact, Vo Ti Vi said, just a few weeks after the attack, the Viet Cong raided a U.S. base stealing weapons and ammunition. The weapons remain in Nha Vi all these years later, she says, buried under her garden.

Back in Tran Thoi, villager Nguyen Van Khoai said that about six months ago he was visited by an American who described himself as a Swift boat veteran and told him another American from the Swift boats was running for president of the United States. Nguyen said the man was accompanied by a cameraman.

"They say he didn't do anything to deserve the medal," Nguyen said. "The other day, they came and asked me the questions and I said that the recognition for the medal is up to the U.S.A."

He said that, after they met, the Swift Boat veteran and the cameraman turned around and went back down the river. "Nightline" has not been able to identify the men.

These Rove tactics are going to backfire this time because of efforts like ABC's.

Posted by Steven at 11:42 PM | Comments (0)

Gentlemen, Start Your Lawyers

Ok folks. Vote early. Vote early, or be prepared to take a lawyer with you to the polls. And you lawyers reading this, remember the old adage and bring someone else to be your lawyer.

Salon covers the Lawyer Smackdown coming on Nov. 2nd.

At the eye of the storm is Glenda Hood, Florida's secretary of state and the chief official responsible for running elections. Hood, a Republican who was mayor of Orlando in the 1990s and whom Gov. Jeb Bush appointed in 2003, has been criticized not only by Democrats but also by independent observers for her exceedingly partisan approach to managing elections. Her critics note that politically, Hood is firmly in George W. Bush's camp; she was a Bush-Cheney elector in 2000. Jimmy Carter has urged Jeb Bush to replace her. The New York Times has called her Katherine Harris II. Hood's critics point to a string of decisions that favor Republicans or, at the very least, undermine voters' confidence in the fairness of Florida elections. Even though Florida law requires a manual recount of ballots in close elections, Hood has issued election rules barring such a count for electronic machines. After a judge ruled in early September that Ralph Nader's name should not appear on the Florida ballot, Hood ordered local officials to add him to absentee ballots anyway (the courts later reinstated Nader).

In matters small and large, on questions over registration procedures or voter identification or interpretations of Florida's abstruse election code, Hood has ruled according to a consistent pattern, her opponents charge -- she's attempted at every turn to keeps voters off the rolls and away from the polls, a gambit that clearly benefits Republicans. Nowhere was this more clear than in her design, this spring, of a list of ex-felons to be "purged" from Florida's voting rolls. Hood, whose office did not respond to numerous inquiries from Salon, initially tried to keep the felon list secret; only after media organizations sued for access to the list and discovered that it was riddled with errors and included a large number of African-Americans and only a handful of Hispanic (read: Republican) felons was she forced to scrap the list.

The GOP is bending/breaking every rule they can in Ohio and Florida, because they're not locked up for Bush, and they play to win, not to be fair.

Posted by Steven at 11:29 PM | Comments (0)

GOP Spending Federal Pension Funds to Avoid Raising Debt Ceiling

Well, it's three weeks ahead of the election, and the U.S.'s credit card bill came in ... and we're over the limit again. What does the GOP do? Steal the funds from the Federal Pension Fund rather than take the politically unattractive step of raising the debt ceiling again.

Brad Delong offers this observation:

How is the U.S. government under Bush different from the management of United Airlines? United Airlines' management is no longer making its payments to the employee pension fund. Bush is not only not making payments to the employee pension fund, they are snarfing back money from the pension fund to cover current operations.

Posted by Steven at 11:01 PM | Comments (0)

GOP New England Campaign Chief Resigns

New England campaign chairman stepped down Friday after the Democrats accused him of taking part in the jamming of their telephone lines on Election Day 2002. This resignation occurs months after the top GOP honchos knew that he had conducted illegal activities.

Get-out-the-vote phones run by Democrats and the nonpartisan Manchester firefighters union were jammed on Election Day two years ago by more than 800 computer-generated hang-up calls. The calls tied up the phones for about 1 1/2 hours.

Last summer, Chuck McGee, former executive director of the state GOP, pleaded guilty to conspiracy and admitted paying $15,600 to a Virginia telemarketing company that hired another business to make the calls. GOP consultant Allen Raymond, former president of GOP Marketplace in Alexandria, Va., also pleaded guilty.

At their plea hearings in federal court, McGee and Raymond acknowledged speaking to an unidentified official with a national political organization about the jamming. Democrats have said they believe that Tobin was the official and that he might have put McGee and Raymond together.

In 2002, Tobin was Northeast political director for the Republican Senatorial Committee.

Among the races affected by the phone-jamming was the Senate contest between Democratic Gov. Jeanne Shaheen and Republican Rep. John E. Sununu. The race had been considered a cliff-hanger, but Sununu wound up winning by about 20,000 votes.

The more interesting question comes from Joshua Micah Marshall:

What now seems clear from the offers of proof of the two men who've pled guilty in the case is that the scheme was not a local affair but arranged through the NRSC or at a minimum through its regional political director, Tobin. This is, again, what the first man to plead guilty in the case, Allen Raymond, told prosecutor Todd Hinnen during his plea negotiations.

Which raises the question, is Tobin the only person at the NRSC who was aware of the scheme? And was this the only such scheme Tobin was involved in during his tenure at the NRSC, given that he had responsibility for several other hotly contested senate races that year?

Posted by Steven at 10:40 PM | Comments (0)

Polled Troops Prefer Bush

Servicemen polled about who they feel is a better commander-in-chief chose Bush over Kerry in a poll.

Well guys, if you want to spend the rest of your adult lives in Iraq then by all means, vote your stupid fucking asses into endless war and choose the chose of all "War! Good God! What is it really good for?" morons, George W. Bush.

Posted by Steven at 10:29 PM | Comments (0)

GOP: Don't Mention Our Gay Daughter

So John Kerry brings up Dick "Fuck You" Cheney's gay daugther during the third debate.

BULLETIN:

Dick Cheney's GAY daugther is part of his CAMPAIGN STAFF.

The GOP pitches a fit. How dare Kerry bring up the gay daughter? I mean, so what if the CBS News Anchor moderating the debate asks the idiotic question "Is homosexuality a choice?", and John Kerry used the example of Mary Cheney to answer his question. If the GOP is having a fit over this, it's plain and clear that they hate and fear gays, including Cheney's DAUGHTER.

Posted by Steven at 10:25 PM | Comments (1)

GOP Blocks "Christopher Reeve" Bill

Well, perhaps it's just as well that Christopher Reeve passed away last weekend. He missed seeing the Senate Bill 1010 (named in his honor) blocked, anonymously and cowardly, by a GOP Senator.

L.A. Weekly has learned that, just a day after the actor’s death, one or more Republican senators put a surprise hold on the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Act. The uncontroversial legislation had been expected to sail through committee and then the Senate as easily as it had the House of Representatives where it passed 418 to zero last week. Monday’s action was beyond cruel; it was like opposing Mom and apple pie.

Congressional sources confirmed to L.A. Weekly Tuesday that the hold was placed on the legislation from the Republican side of the aisle. Democratic committee members led by Senator Edward Kennedy are trying to find out which Republican senator or senators sandbagged S. 1010. The way the Senate system works, any senator can delay a bill without accountability because anonymity is assured.

“We’re shocked,” a source inside the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation told L.A. Weekly on Tuesday. “We had been told the bill was going to pass the Senate, but then the Republicans put a hold on the legislation. We heard it was because Chris has been too outspoken on the stem-cell issue. That was the trigger.

“So it would have passed if Chris hadn’t died.”

While the rest of the world was mourning Reeve’s tragic death and celebrating his heroic life, on Monday the Republicans cravenly played politics with the actor’s legislation by holding up the bill inside the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions — whose GOP members include chairman Judd Gregg (R–New Hampshire), who is running for re-election, and Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tennessee), a heart surgeon. Last July, Reeve’s wife, Dana, made a point of traveling to Senator Gregg’s backyard and meeting with the local media in an apparent attempt to keep the pressure on Gregg to move Reeve’s bill through his committee. She told the Portsmouth Herald, “There are no dollars attached to it, and it is just a real ‘feel good’ piece of legislation. How could you not support it?”

Yet Senate Republicans found a way.

Reeve’s S. 1010 is identical to the already passed HR 1998, aimed at enhancing and furthering research into paralysis and improving rehabilitation and quality of life for those with spinal-cord injuries. Even so, one or more Senate GOPers made it a casualty of George W. Bush’s mission to confine stem-cell research to a paltry few and inadequate lines despite the fact that Reeve’s legislation had nothing to do with that issue. That’s worth repeating: The thespian’s bill had nothing to do with stem-cell research. Not only did the legislation have bipartisan co-sponsorship, Reeve’s foundation cited the support of Bush cabinet member Tommy Thompson, the Health and Human Services secretary.

But one or more Republican senators decided to piss on Reeve’s grave because the dead actor had dared speak out in support of opening up stem-cell research, which Dubya opposes in lockstep with his conservative Christian masters. As someone else with a conscience said to a cruel and reckless U.S. senator half a century ago, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”

If you're wondering why we find the GOP to be a bunch of craven religious nuts, this is why.

Posted by Steven at 10:12 PM | Comments (0)

Bush in the Bubble

Ever since going to the theater became an on-the-job hazard for Presidents, the "bubble" has evolved, expanded and become increasingly opaque. President Bush is clearly in a "warp bubble", a peculiar phenomena caused by living in a Universe 750m across.

None of this comes as a surprise. For the last decade (before entering the Rove Bubble) Bush lived in Dallas' exclusive "bubble", akaHighland Park, TX with his good neighbor (and bubble-meister) Dick Cheney. This man was bred to exist in the "Bubble".

Kevin Drum summarizes it succinctly:

I suspect the answer lies in the cocoon Bush lives in. Not only has he convinced himself that he never really said that he wasn't concerned about Osama, but he has no idea that the outside world believes otherwise. He doesn't realize that not only is his Osama statement well known, it's actually quite a popular target of mockery. What's more, nobody on his staff has ever clued him in.

It's a pretty good metaphor for Bush's biggest problem: his staff spoon feeds him a rosy view of the outside world and he honestly believes that this rosy world is the real world — and that's why he makes so many disastrous decisions. After all, you can't solve real world problems if you refuse to understand the real world in the first place.

Posted by Steven at 10:01 PM | Comments (0)

CNN: The "C" is for Irony!

With its talking heads, subtitles, and text crawl, CNN uses a single television screen to deliver three times as much news as a screen with one third the news! It's impressive.

As an incomprehensible jumble of animated headlines has steadily consumed screen real estate like a blanket of video kudzu, some critics have opined that the "crawl" is actually a step backward in the delivery of news. Maybe it is, but that's obviously not the point.

I've long believed that its a Zen meditation tool, and I've finally found my smoking one-hand-clapping:

"PUBLIC SPLIT ON WHETHER BUSH IS A DIVIDER"

And I was enlightened.

Posted by at 01:26 PM | Comments (0)

October 13, 2004

Ew

Bill O'Reilly has been charged with sexual harrassment by one of his producers. He allegedly "forced" her to have phone sex with him. I guess the accuser hadn't picked up on O'Reilly's signature "Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!" or "Turn off his mic!" technique.

Bill claims that someone is just trying to embarrass him before the election. I assume that would be the election in which in he's not running for anything.

"Alleged" excerpts:

If I took you down there, I'd want to take a shower with you right away. ... You would basically be in the shower and I'd come in and get behind you ... rub your boobs, get your nipples really hard ...

I'm going to puke.

Posted by at 06:07 PM | Comments (0)

3rd Debate Prediction

Tonight, Bush will have to discuss the domestic situation — i.e. the U.S. domestic situation — which is harder (but not impossible) to lie about. He's going to pretend that the recession started with Clinton, that September 11th started with Clinton, that the tax cuts didn't create jobs because of Clinton. And on the heels of the largest unfunded expansion of government in human history, Bush will attempt to spook the voters with the specter of Kerry raising taxes.

This moron doesn't even know he owns a timber company; Kerry should clean his clock.

Posted by at 05:18 PM | Comments (0)

Mission Accomplished

I guess it's just "cheezy visual humor" on my beat today:

This entry brought to you by the Prime-Numbered Blog Entry Association (PNBEA)

Posted by at 01:58 PM | Comments (0)

Another General Endorses Bush

John Kerry isn't the only candidate endorsed by generals!

General Thade Says: Vote Chimpy!

OK, so an endorsement from the chimp faction was a given...

Posted by at 10:53 AM | Comments (0)

Economists Against Bush

It looks like Bush's economic policies are not all that popular with people that actually understand what is going on. From The Economist:

In an informal poll of 100 academics, conducted by The Economist, Mr Bush's policies win low marks. More than 70% of the 56 professors who responded to our survey rate Mr Bush's first-term economic policies as bad or very bad. Fewer than 20% give positive marks to Mr Bush's second-term economic agenda, and almost six out of ten disapproved...

Despite their diverse assessments of today's economy, the professors are overwhelmingly critical of the central plank of Mr Bush's economic policy—tax cuts. More than seven out of ten respondents say the Bush administration's tax cuts were either a bad or a very bad idea, and a similar proportion disapproves of Mr Bush's plans to make his tax cuts permanent. By contrast, Mr Kerry's plan to roll back the tax cuts for people with incomes over $200,000 wins the support of seven in ten of them...

The broad condemnation of tax cuts seems to be linked to the professors' worries about America's fiscal health and the looming retirement of the baby-boom generation. Although Americans overall seem relatively unconcerned about the budget deficit, a large majority of the economists rate it as a serious problem for the economy, with almost one in five describing it as a crisis. And they back Mr Kerry by a large margin (79% to 18%) to do more to promote fiscal discipline than Mr Bush.

Posted by at 12:15 AM | Comments (0)

October 12, 2004

GOP Destroys Democrat Voter Registration Forms

I haven't got words for how much this angers me. I marched in Dallas when Bush was stealing the election. They don't want an election. They want to rule in a junta.

If you registered in Reno, Nevada, PLEASE call the Clark County elections office and make SURE you're registered to vote.

This may be your last chance.

Employees of a private voter registration company allege that hundreds, perhaps thousands of voters who may think they are registered will be rudely surprised on election day. The company claims hundreds of registration forms were thrown in the trash.

Anyone who has recently registered or re-registered to vote outside a mall or grocery store or even government building may be affected.

The I-Team has obtained information about an alleged widespread pattern of potential registration fraud aimed at democrats. Thee focus of the story is a private registration company called Voters Outreach of America, AKA America Votes.

The out-of-state firm has been in Las Vegas for the past few months, registering voters. It employed up to 300 part-time workers and collected hundreds of registrations per day, but former employees of the company say that Voters Outreach of America only wanted Republican registrations.

Two former workers say they personally witnessed company supervisors rip up and trash registration forms signed by Democrats.

"We caught her taking Democrats out of my pile, handed them to her assistant and he ripped them up right in front of us. I grabbed some of them out of the garbage and she tells her assisatnt to get those from me," said Eric Russell, former Voters Outreach employee.

Eric Russell managed to retrieve a pile of shredded paperwork including signed voter registration forms, all from Democrats. We took them to the Clark County Election Department and confirmed that they had not, in fact, been filed with the county as required by law.

So the people on those forms who think they will be able to vote on Election Day are sadly mistaken. We attempted to speak to Voters Outreach but found that its office has been rented out to someone else.

The landlord says Voters Outreach was evicted for non-payment of rent. Another source said the company has now moved on to Oregon where it is once again registering voters. It's unknown how many registrations may have been tossed out, but another ex-employee told Eyewitness News she had the same suspicions when she worked there.

It's going to take a while to sort all of this out, but the immediate concern for voters is to make sure you really are registered.

Call the Clark County Election Department at 455-VOTE orclick here to see if you are registered.

The company has been largely, if not entirely funded, by the Republican National Committee. Similar complaints have been received in Reno where the registrar has asked the FBI to investigate.

Posted by Steven at 09:49 PM | Comments (1)

Catholic Church Politicizes Itself

The New York Times is reporting that conservative Catholic leaders are conspiring to politicize their faith and help elect George Bush.

Galvanized by battles against same-sex marriage and stem cell research and alarmed at the prospect of a President Kerry - who is Catholic but supports abortion rights - these bishops and like-minded Catholic groups are blanketing churches with guides identifying abortion, gay marriage and the stem cell debate as among a handful of "non-negotiable issues."

To the dismay of liberal Catholics and some other bishops, traditional church concerns about the death penalty or war are often not mentioned.

Archbishop Chaput has discussed Catholic priorities in the election in 14 of his 28 columns in the free diocesan newspaper this year. His archdiocese has organized voter registration drives in more than 40 of the largest parishes in the state and sent voter guides to churches around the state. Many have committees to help turn out voters and are distributing applications for absentee ballots.

These men are, of course, fucking hypocrites. They back a man who has signed over one hundred death sentences, and who has started an illegal war that has killed tens of thousands of humans. How dare they say those people are worth less than unborn cells. Humanists would never make that choice, but Catholic leaders have their heads so far up women's cervixes they cannot see the horror they bring to the world.

If church leaders are doing the same exact things that the political action committees are doing (voter drives, telling people who to vote for) than I say they've forfeited their tax exempt status.

Posted by Steven at 08:27 AM | Comments (0)

October 11, 2004

We Have The Boss

Well, if you missed the Sundance channel's broadcast of the "Vote for Change" concert in Washington D.C. then I hope it was because you were there. Hours long, the show was crammed with so many pop stars, they frequently ended up sharing the stage. Such was the case with the legendary Bruce Springsteen, who joined R.E.M. for their final number, "Man on the Moon."

Eddie Vedder also joined R.E.M. for a number, but later returned with his band, Pearl Jam, for a full set that included a crowd-pleasing cover of "The New World" by the celebrated L.A. folk-punk band, X:

X: The New World(Yes, this is the preferred formatting)

"honest to goodness the bars werent open this morning they must have been voting for a new president of something do you have a quarter?" i said yes because i did honest to goodness the tears have been falling all over the country's face it was better before before they voted for what's-his-name this is s'posed to be the new world flint ford auto mobil alabama windshield wiper buffalo new york gary indiana don't forget the motor city baltimore and d.c. now all we need is don't forget the motor city this was s'posed to be the new world all we need is money just give us what you can spare twenty or thirty pounds of potatoes or twenty of thirty beers a turkey on thanks giving like alms for the poor all we need are the necessities and more it was better before they voted for what's-his-name this is s'posed to be the new world don't forget the motor city this was s'posed to be the new world!

The song was performed with actor Tim Robbins singing high harmony.

The concert openned with a surprisingly crisp and rousing short set by John "Don't Call Me Cougar" Mellencamp who culminating in "Ain't That America." This was followed by a cameo by Kenny "Baby-Face" Edmonds, the legendary singer/songwriter/producer who performed the song he wrote for Eric Clapton that helped Clapton secure "Album of the Year." Following Edmonds was a combo fronted by Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt and Keb Mo' who sang a classic folk-rolk set including a blues-rock rendition of "Stop, Children!" The show departed from a rather white-bread lineup when, Jurrassic 5 took to the stage with a politically-slanted hip-hop set.

Following Pearl Jam's turn, James Taylor took the stage playing a couple of numbers solo before bringing on his "backup band," the Dixie Chicks, who filled out quite a soulful rendition of "Sweet Baby James". Taylor's flawless, Chick-backed reprises of his old standards were interspersed with the best banter of the night:

I'm tired of people who say, "You shouldn't change horses in mid-stream." Look, if your horse can't swim... and he's in over his head... and there's a perfectly good Democratic mule available...

This is what I tell undecided voters: look at both candidates, learn as much as you can, and then pick the smart one.

After a few more of his own pieces, Taylor left the stage and the Dixie Chicks did a short set of their own material.

Drawing in the barely-old-enough-to-vote crowd was The Dave Matthews Band. In fact, during the intermission, Sundance played some interviews with a foursome of drunk college girls, two of whom insisted that they were Republicans, attending only to see Matthews:

We're not here to support John Kerry. We just want to see Dave Matthews. Yeah, we're here to support the Republicans... well, I guess we're not supporting the Republicans...

Morons.

Anyway, after Dave Matthews and crew belted out a half-dozen earnest guitar-rock anthems, they were effectively wiped from stoner memory by the next act: Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band (you didn't think Bruce was going to show up just to sing backup for R.E.M., did you?), or "Bruce Springstreet...een and the E Street Band," as they were introduced by an obviously intimidated Matthews.

The Boss kicked off his set with a jangly power-chorded Star Spangled Banner wrenched with signature Springsteen sincerity out of an accoustic 12-string guitar. Bruce then restored relevance into his anthem, Born in the U.S.A. that it lost years ago, when it became a jingle for pickup trucks. On their fourth number, the E Street Band was joined by one of the greatest songwriters in American popular music history, John Fogerty, who sang his new anti-war piece, "Deja Vu." Of course, they couldn't let Fogerty off the stage without a reprise of "Fortunate Son." Then, completing his boyhood Springsteen fantasy, Michael Stipe came on stage to sing Because the Night with The Boss. I have to say, this is the first time I've ever seen Stipe look like he actually wanted to be on stage.

Springsteen closed the evening with one of his characteristic half-sung voice-overs urging vote for change, etc. etc.

The bottom line is that while the Rabid Republicans may have all the Bread, we have all the Circuses — fuck — we have The Boss.

Posted by at 11:18 PM | Comments (0)

The R/C President

You cannot tell me, with a straight face, that President Bush is not a remote control robot.

See the WIRE running down Bush's back?

Al Franken said (on his radio show today) that the debate rules have been amended such that both me will be "wanded" live, on TV before the debates begin. It's come down to this: we cannot trust Bush not to break his own rules.

But wait... there's more:

Posted by Steven at 02:00 PM | Comments (1)

U.S. Ups Internet Censorship

The BBC and others are reporting that Rackspace, an Internet provider, has shutdown Indymedia's servers in London and handed over the hard drives to the FBI.

A FBI spokesperson told the AFP news agency that it was not an FBI operation, saying the order had been issued at the request of Italian and Swiss authorities.

The seizure has sparked off protests from journalist groups.

"We have witnessed an intolerable and intrusive international police operation against a network specialising in independent journalism," said Aidan White, general secretary of the International Federation of Journalists.

"The way this has been done smacks more of intimidation of legitimate journalistic inquiry than crime-busting."

The UK site of Indymedia is back up and running but several of the other 20 sites affected are still offline.

In the US, the civil liberties group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said it was working with Indymedia over how to react to the seizures.

"The constitution does not permit the government unilaterally to cut off the speech of an independent media outlet, especially without providing a reason or even allowing Indymedia the information necessary to contest the seizure," said EFF Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl.

More pre-election, post PATRIOT shenanigans ... in another country?

Posted by Steven at 11:27 AM | Comments (0)

Oil Still Rising

Just a quick reminder -- oil still rising in price, hitting $53.56 today.

$58/bbl. oil is still a safe prediction on or by Nov. 2.

Posted by Steven at 08:39 AM | Comments (0)

Carbon Dioxide Levels Accelerating

Global Warming, George Bush (noted scientist) declares, is "bad science". The Earth has responded in kind by refusing to store any more of his CO2 emissions, according to the Guardian.

An unexplained and unprecedented rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere two years running has raised fears that the world may be on the brink of runaway global warming.

Scientists are baffled why the quantity of the main greenhouse gas has leapt in a two-year period and are concerned that the Earth's natural systems are no longer able to absorb as much as in the past.

Again, we are forced to remind our good readers living near ocean borders to rethink their 30 year mortgages.

Posted by Steven at 08:34 AM | Comments (0)

Contracts on America

Remember Newt's Kontract for Amerika? Well, some ten years after the fact, it's nearly completely invalidated by the GOP. The Boston Globe is running a three part series detailing the corruption in the Congress conducted by the GOP. While they were excoricating the Democrats for cheap haircuts, sloppy checkbook accounting and the occasional book deal (before that meant million dollar fees), they've ransacked the national treasury and looked askance at nearly all major companies' tax dodging behavior (provided they put the appropriate "donations" into the GOP coffiers).

Interviews with scores of lawmakers, lobbyists, and citizen activists reflect a growing frustration with what has become a closed shop in Washington. Among the Globe's findings:

# The House Rules Committee, which is meant to tweak the language in bills that come out of committee, sometimes rewrites key passages of legislation approved by other committees, then forbids members from changing the bills on the floor. Only five times this year were House members allowed to amend policy bills on the floor, and only 15 percent of bills this year were open to amendment. For the entire 108th Congress, just 28 percent of total bills have been open to amendment -- barely more than half of what Democrats allowed in their last session in power in 1993-94. Further, the Rules Committee has blocked floor votes on legislation opposed by the Bush administration but supported by a majority of the House. For example, a bill to extend benefits to the long-term unemployed has been kept off the House floor despite what backers say is the support of a bipartisan majority.

# The Rules Committee commonly holds sessions late at night or in the wee hours of the morning, earning the nickname "the Dracula Congress" by critical Democrats and keeping some lawmakers quite literally in the dark about the legislation put before them. On the Patient's Bill of Rights legislation in 2001, for example, the Rules Committee made a one-word change in the middle of the night that drastically limited the liability of HMOs that deny coverage to their patients. The measure was hustled through the House hours later, with few lawmakers aware of the change.

# Congressional conference committees, charged with reconciling differences between House- and Senate-passed versions of the same legislation, have become dramatically more powerful in shaping bills. The panels, made up of a small group of lawmakers appointed by leaders in both parties, added a record 3,407 "pork barrel" projects to appropriations bills for this year's federal budget, items that were never debated or voted on beforehand by the House and Senate and whose congressional patrons are kept secret. This compares to just 47 projects added in conference committee in 1994, the last year of Democratic control.

# Bills are increasingly crafted behind closed doors, and on two major pieces of legislation -- the Medicare and energy bills -- few Democrats were allowed into the critical conference committee meetings, sessions that historically have been bipartisan. The energy bill -- a sweeping package meant to lay out a national energy policy -- started in closed-door meetings held by Vice President Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force and was written in private sessions on Capitol Hill that excluded all Democrats. On the Medicare negotiations, only two Democrats -- both already supportive of the bill -- were included.

# The amount of time spent openly debating bills has dropped dramatically, and lawmakers are further hamstrung by an abbreviated schedule that gives them little time to fully examine a bill before voting on it. The House typically holds no votes until Tuesday evenings -- and then usually on noncontroversial items such as the renaming of post offices -- then adjourns for the week by Thursday afternoon. The Iraq war resolution was debated just two days in 2002; the defense authorization bill, which customarily undergoes weeks of floor discussion, was debated and voted on this year in two days.

The representative legislative process is all but dead under the GOP. If you don't pay Tom DeLay through one of his shell corporations, your petition to the government is all but ignored. The corruption is at an all-time high, and may well make the Teapot Dome scandal look amatuerish. If we don't overturn this total control by the GOP in the White House, Congress and Supreme Court, we'll become a rotten Roman Empire -- and you know what happened to that. It "caught" Christianity and died from complications of thereof. Take a look at the GOP and tell me they, too, haven't "caught" it.

Posted by Steven at 08:29 AM | Comments (0)

Waging Political War

The Bush Administration is sacrificing military success for electoral gain.

Brad DeLong and Kevin Drum are both blogging about the Bush Administration's decision to delay military action against the insurgent strongholds in Iraq until after our election on November 2nd. The military wants to move now and the Bush people are preventing them from doing what they think will be most effective, militarily, on the ground, for political gain. Who is the better choice to finish the war in Iraq now, we ask?

Drum summarizes the highlights of an LA Times article:

The Bush administration will delay major assaults on rebel-held cities in Iraq until after U.S. elections in November, say administration officials, mindful that large-scale military offensives could affect the U.S. presidential race.

...."When this election's over, you'll see us move very vigorously," said one senior administration official involved in strategic planning, speaking on condition of anonymity.

....Any delay in pacifying Iraq's most troublesome cities, however, could alter the dynamics of a different election -- the one in January, when Iraqis are to elect members of a national assembly.

With only four months remaining, U.S. commanders are scrambling to enable voting in as many Iraqi cities as possible to shore up the poll's legitimacy.

U.S. officials point out that there have been no direct orders to commanders in the field to pause operations in the weeks before the Nov. 2 election. Top administration officials in Washington are simply reluctant to sign off on a major offensive in Iraq at the height of the political season.

DeLong finishes his blog entry with "Impeach Bush. Impeach Cheney. Impeach ..." We couldn't agree more. These guys make Nixon look like Desmond Tutu.

Posted by Steven at 08:20 AM | Comments (0)

October 08, 2004

Republican Logic

Reported to us by Denis "Live Free or Die" Parslow.

Posted by Steven at 08:05 AM | Comments (0)

October 07, 2004

The Centre Cannot Hold

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
- W. B. Yeats

Bush is starting to drown in Hurricane Iraq. Howard Fineman is running an opinion stating, simply, that Bush and his goons are losing control of the Iraq story.

This is a turning-point in the election cycle, indeed, even in the Bush Administration. Up until now, they've had the ability to tamp down any dissent in the mainstream press (in some cases, by calling and intimidating the editors of renegade reporters) and keep "the Message" on the headlines, regardless of the cognitive dissonance it presented. Now that is failing them, and the press is emboldened.

George Bush's real political enemy now isn't so much John Kerry as it is the flow of the news. Not long ago, Kerry's decision to attack the president as commander-in-chief (remember all those Swift Boat vets in Boston?) was dismissed by analysts (including me) as naive at best, folly at worst. Well, it may turn out to have been the move that wins this race.

When has the reporting of facts on the ground become "the enemy" of this nation? Under Bush, of course.

Posted by Steven at 08:52 PM | Comments (0)

AMERICA (the Book)

Quickie review of The Daily Show's America (THE BOOK).

This book is being touted on Comedy Central (in the U.S.) by none other than the author (John Stewart, et. al.). I found a copy at Newberry Comics tonite.

I expected this to be another loose collection of essays and silly charts/graphics. No, they went much, much farther than that. Imagine The Onion writing a high school American History textbook. Now imagine it just a little bit more serious. That's American (THE BOOK).

The book is hilarious, scathing, scandalous, rude, crude and surprisingly clever and even brilliant at times. Published and printed to look as much as possible like a real textbook (including the "THIS BOOK IS THE PROPERTY OF" printed on the inside cover like the typical school district stamps), it could easily pass for the real deal, until you get to the chapter about the Supreme Court featuring nude cutouts of the current court justices and cutout robes for them on the opposite page.

The book features a huge pull out chart titled "Shadow Government", and yeah, Halliburton is on it.

You'll have to ask for it from behind the counter at Borders or Barnes and Noble, but it's worth a look and definitely worth a read.

Posted by Steven at 07:40 PM | Comments (0)

Oil Watch: $53/bbl. And Rising

Jesus. Oil's going up a dollar a day this week. It (briefly) broke $53 today.

Oil prices scaled new heights at $53 for U.S. crude Thursday on concerns over tight winter heating fuel supplies and an unexpected strike at Nigerian oil terminals.

U.S. light crude set a record at $53 a barrel -- marking a surge of $20, or more than 60 percent, this year -- before settling at $52.67 for a gain of 65 cents. London crude also struck a new peak, at $49.20 a barrel, before ending at $48.90 a barrel, up 91 cents.

"Where it ends, who knows?" said Jan Stuart, an analyst with Fimat USA. "What's going to happen when the winter hits? I'd say we have a better than fifty-fifty chance of hitting $60 by year end."

Posted by Steven at 07:31 PM | Comments (0)

Bush and Hussein: Contrast in Lying

President Bush is now a known liar who has led his subordinates into a disatrous war against his nemesis Saddam Hussein. Hussein is an unsophisticated thug with aspirations of grandier who suffered the exact opposite problem of Bush: his own people lied to him to stay alive.

Tariq Aziz, a former deputy prime minister, is quoted as asserting that before last year's invasion by U.S.-led forces, Iraqi commanders lied to Hussein about Iraq's preparedness, leading Hussein to badly miscalculate his military's ability to deter an attack. Other former Iraqi officials also are cited saying key commanders overstated their combat readiness and willingness to fight.

Bush doesn't give his own people the straight dope to permit an illegal war, and Hussein's own people don't level with him so he thinks he can survive the same war. It's just amazing how much damage can be done when there's no transparency.

Posted by Steven at 03:41 PM | Comments (0)

Saddam's Arsenal

In case you were clinging to the hope that President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfield and National Security Advisor Rice were not lying to you about Iraq's weapons stockpiles and programs, I've got bad news. The report on the Iraq WMD is out and it proves beyond a shadow of doubt that our leaders are a bunch of criminal liars who started a war on a complete and utter fabrication.

Iraq had destroyed its illicit weapons stockpiles within months after the Persian Gulf war of 1991, and its ability to produce such weapons had significantly eroded by the time of the American invasion in 2003, the top American inspector for Iraq said in a report made public Wednesday. The report by the inspector, Charles A. Duelfer, intended to offer a near-final judgment about Iraq and its weapons, said Iraq, while under pressure from the United Nations, had "essentially destroyed'' its illicit weapons ability by the end of 1991, with its last secret factory, a biological weapons plant, eliminated in 1996.

Mr. Duelfer said that even during those years, Saddam Hussein had aimed at "preserving the capability to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction when sanctions were lifted.'' But he said he had found no evidence of any concerted effort by Iraq to restart the programs.

The findings uphold Iraq's prewar insistence that it did not possess chemical or biological weapons. They also show the enormous distance between the Bush administration's own prewar assertions, based on reports by American intelligence agencies, and what a 15-month inquiry by American investigators found since the war.

How can we ever trust these monsters again? They've killed and maimed thousands of American troops and countless Iraqis (at their insistence, the numbers are not tabulated, so why was Cheney so adament in his "percentage of losses" during the debate?). They've ruined the U.S.'s good name in the world, and plunged us into a ruinious war. We won't even get the "prize" -- the oil. It's impossible to reconstitute an oil industry during a civil war.

Posted by Steven at 08:21 AM | Comments (0)

Cheney's Revisionism

Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball wrote a detailed accounting of Dick Cheney's bizzare rewriting of history during the debate on Tuesday.

With virtually all of the administration’s original case for war in Iraq in tatters, Vice President Dick Cheney provided shifting and sometimes misleading arguments in last night’s debate with John Edwards about Saddam Hussein’s ties to terrorists and his access to weapons of mass destruction.

Cheney’s claims about an “established relationship” between Iraq and Al Qaeda were always a principal part of the administration’s case for war, cited by Powell at the United Nations and, most forcefully, by Cheney in numerous speeches and TV interviews before and after the invasion. But it is also a contention that has been seriously undermined by a series of recent U.S. government reports, including the September 11 Commission report, which concluded there was no “collaborative operational relationship” between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Another is a recent CIA analysis, disclosed for the first time this week, raising questions about whether Jordanian terrorist Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, had been harbored by Saddam’s regime before the war.

Cheney tried to shift the reasons for the war from WMD and a fuzzy accusation that Saddam aided Al-Qaeda in 9/11, to his harboring two specific men (one who had died by 2002 and who had nothing to do with 9/11), paying monies to Palestinian bomber families (the Saudis do the same thing), and his favorite warhorse, those lethal aluminium tubes for nukes (which has been debunked several different ways). This article takes apart his new reasons for the war given in the debate, and I think proves that we went there for the oil and the oil alone.

Posted by Steven at 08:12 AM | Comments (0)

October 06, 2004

Congress Admonishes DeLay

Read the memo yourself.

However, we also obtained information indicating that Representative DeLay’s participation in and facilitation of an energy company fundraiser in June 2002 is objectionable in that his actions, at a minimum, created the appearance that donors were being provided with special access to Representative DeLay regarding the then-pendi