WILL CONGRESSIONAL REPUBLICANS ABANDON BUSH TO BREAK THE IRAQ DEADLOCK?

Bush said he's ready to sit down and "work with" Democrats to come up with a bill to fund the continued occupation of Iraq. The Democrats would like to fund a safe, orderly end to that occupation and Bush, if we can judge from his history, is thinking in terms of them joining him, Cheney, Lieberman and other Regime dead-enders in pushing for a blank check to wage endless war. Those two twains ain't meetin' and tomorrow's Washington Post makes it clear that a good many Republican members of Congress are unwilling to commit political hara-kiri to bolster Bush's fragile ego in defense of his failed strategies and indefensible policies.

Yesterday George Will told George Stephanopoulos on ABC's This Week, when asked if Petraeus' September deadline for reasonable political goals in Iraq remain unmet-- as it nearly certain-- that congressional Republicans "do not want to have, as they had in 2006,another election on Iraq. ...It took 30, 40 years for the Republican Party to get out from under Herbert Hoover. People would say, 'Are you going to vote for Nixon in '60?' 'No, I don't like Hoover.' The Depression haunted the Republican Party. This could be a foreign policy equivalent of the Depression, forfeiting the Republican advantage they've had since the '68 convention of the Democratic Party and the nomination of [George] McGovern. The advantage Republicans have had on national security matters may be forfeited."

The rubber stamp Republican leadership, according to the Post "is brushing aside White House opposition" to agree with Democrats that "a second war spending bill should begin with benchmarks of success for the Iraqi government, and possible consequences if those benchmarks are not met." Bush has vowed to promptly veto the bill he gets tomorrow, on the anniversary of his idiotic "Mission Accomplished" photo op.

But GOP leaders did not take the benchmark issue off the table. House Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) suggested last week that although Republicans could not accept linking benchmarks to troop withdrawals, they could tie them to $5.7 billion in nonmilitary assistance for the Iraqi government.

Blunt spokeswoman Burson Snyder said yesterday that it would be "premature" to rule out such a proposal, in spite of Rice's comments. "We haven't even begun substantive conversations with the Democratic leadership, so how can we start ruling in or out certain provisions?" she said.

House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) took a similar tack. Boehner "believes members and the administration can and will discuss benchmarks as a way of measuring progress and holding the Iraqi government accountable, and that's where members need to start," said his spokesman Kevin Smith. He added that "tying benchmarks to withdrawal dates or deadlines are a non-starter," but he did not rule out consequences for Iraqi government inaction.

Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.) has suggested that benchmarks be tied to U.S. troop positions within Iraq. If the benchmarks are not met, troops would remain in the country but would be removed from combat zones.

Appearing on several Sunday talk shows, Rice said any compromise on benchmarks would not give the Iraqi government and U.S. troops the flexibility they need. Her comments left Democratic leaders convinced that the White House is not ready to negotiate on a war funding bill that includes policy changes for Iraq. Instead, Democrats will have to negotiate with congressional Republicans, hoping a measure with broad, bipartisan support would force Bush to the table.

How much longer will it be before no one is left defending Bush's catastrophic Middle east agenda but Holy Joe Lieberman?

JOHN MELLENCAMP-- SUPPORTING THE TROOPS, NOT THE BUSH REGIME WARMONGERS AND NOT THE WAR

John Mellencamp didn't play "Texas Bandido" or "Rodeo Clown," two songs he wrote about George Bush, a few nights ago at a concert he did for 200 wounded veterans and their families at Walter Reed Hospital. He did a sweaty 14 song set featuring bipartisan crowd pleasers like "Jack & Diane," "Hurts So Good," "Small Town," and "Little Pink Houses." According to the Washington Post "one can apparently appreciate Mellencamp's music even while disagreeing with his personal politics-- just as it's possible for the singer to support the soldiers while opposing the war they're fighting." The Post writer doesn't mention how he ascertained that the wounded men disagree with Mellencamp's "personal politics." But it's the Post, where an Establishment hack like David Broder is honored and esteemed as though he were a real journalist.

Mellencamp has been an outspoken populist-oriented opponent of Bush's worst excesses. He talks about and he writes songs about it. I doubt any of the tunes from Freedom's Road are on Bush's iPod with "My Sharona." It would have been great, however, if whoever loads the iPod would have stuck the whole album on it since the hidden last track, "Rodeo Clown," pans Bush mercilessly. "I didn't want to write about blame," Mellencamp explained to a journalist asking him about it. "With freedom comes certain responsibilities. You can't put Lady Liberty in a position by herself. To be above reproach she has to live up to certain ideals or the rest of us are screwed. I said it in 'Rodeo Clown.' It's always the same. It's rich guys making young kids fight their battles."

His concert at Walter Reed shows how very straight-forward it can be to support the young men and women fighting on behalf of the U.S.-- our troops-- while not supporting the war or the warmongers like Cheney and Bush. In fact, Mellencamp said it himself: "You can support the troops and not support the wa. If I can entertain these kids and get the people watching to think about who's making sacrifices for their country, well, mission accomplished."

If you missed Mellencamp on MSNBC's countdown, here's a 5 minute piece during which he explains what he did and why.

If you haven't heard John lately, here's a video always worth watching:

DOLCHSTOßLEGENDE vs IMPEACHMENT-- HOW ROVE AND THE GOP PLAN TO TURN THE CATASTROPHE IN IRAQ INTO ELECTORAL SUCCESS FOR FUTURE WINGNUTS

For a special look at the right wing mentality today-- especially the penchant for self-entitelment and psychotic paranoia regarding victimization-- I want to take you back a few decades to the ideological and spiritual antecedents of George Bush's Republican base. The time: just after World War I. The place: Germany. The literal translation of "Dolchstoßlegende" is "Dagger stab legend," what we might call the "stab-in-the-back myth." After Germany's defeat, right wing propaganda carefully-- and hysterically-- encouraged and nurtured an ethos of persecution among the German people and successfully brainwashed a substantial part of the population so thoroughly that they blamed the war not on failed militarism and their tragically flawed political leadership but on the enemies of militarism and those very leaders. Germans bought it and instead of turning decisively against the right, many Germans turned towards it.

Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith have written an important essay on how the American right is already planning the same type of propaganda campaign to turn the question, Who lost Iraq? into a club with which to attack Democrats.

Republicans are preparing to dominate future decades of American politics by blaming the failure of the Iraq war on those who "sent a signal" that the US would not "stay the course" whatever the cost. President Bush and Vice President Cheney have already begun to project such a "stab in the back" myth. At a recent Republican luncheon, Cheney told senators that "What's most troubling" about Sen. Harry Reid's recent comment that the war is lost "is his defeatism."

Their propagandists-- as well as media hacks embedded in the mainstream press, like David Broder-- can always be counted on to lend a hand when it comes to smearing the respresentatives of working and middle class Americans they so detest.

Once the Bush Regime has decisively lost the ill-conceived war and given up the occupation of Iraq, Rovian swiftboating "will go into high gear to blame each new outrage on those in the US who didn't give 100 percent support to the war." That's a key reason why so many Democrats who know better are so tepid about supporting a frontal attack on Bush, Cheney and the neocons and on ending the war at once and denouncing it for what it is: a contemptible failure from Day One on the part of an illegitimate political clique outside of the mainstream of American politics. "The crucial problem is that most Democrats seem to be calling for withdrawal or 'redeployment' not because the war is wrong, but merely because it is failing. By framing the war as lost because of mismanagement, poor planning or being bogged down in a civil war, Democrats cede the argument that the war itself was a 'noble cause.' But if the war is right-- if, as Bush maintains, it is necessary to prevent horrendous consequences-- then the public will predictably blame those consequences on the 'defeatists' who made America 'cut and run.'"

What's necessary to evade this trap is to define the war itself-- rather than just the fact that America is losing it-- as wrong. It is wrong because we were lied into it by a rogue executive intent on launching an illegal war and occupation, in violation of national and international law, the US Constitution and the UN Charter. And it is wrong because it has imposed an illegal occupation that has systematically violated the Geneva Conventions and the US War Crimes Act.

The means to define Bush's war for the American people are at hand in the power of Congress to investigate executive branch actions. We are seeing that power being flexed in the use of subpoenas for documents and testimony by committees investigating the firings of US attorneys. But, so far, investigation of illegal war, occupation, torture and rendition has been pusillanimous at best...

In the aftermath of the Vietnam war, Democrats and the peace movement were smeared for "losing Vietnam." This campaign was largely successful because the public was never given a full picture of the real purposes of the war and the full machinations of those who fomented it. As a result, their anger could be turned against those blamed for losing it, rather than those responsible for starting and perpetuating it. That's why the lessons of Vietnam were never learned - and why simply blaming Bush for defeat in Iraq, rather than educating the public about the real meaning of the war, will lay the groundwork for more Iraq-type wars in the future.

There's plenty of evidence for the criminal violation of national and international law and the US Constitution by the architects of the Iraq war. But so far this evidence is not being presented to the American people by their representatives. As long as the American people hear that the only thing wrong with the war is that we're losing it, Democrats and the peace movement will be vulnerable to the Rovian trap.

Yesterday I took a look at an alternative scenario: the demise of the Republican Party. Today William F. Buckley writes a similar piece in the National Review, The Waning of The GOP. He sites opposition by the vast majority of the American people, by the Democrats and by Congress. He refers to accounts coming out from Bush Regime insiders that "demonstrate that there was one part ignorance, one part bullheadedness, in the high-level discussions before war became policy. Mr. Tenet at least appears to demonstrate that there was nothing in the nature of a genuine debate on the question." And he admits what Regime dead enders like Cheney, Bush and Lieberman refuse to do: "It is simply untrue that we are making decisive progress in Iraq."

This is at the root of my disagreement with Speaker Pelosi's assertion that impeachment is off the table. Bush and his illegitimate rogue regime must be exposed and everyone, even toothless rednecks in rural Texas and delusional religionist zombies in Utah and South Carolina must be made to look-- the way Germans were forced to walk through concentration camps after World War II-- at exactly what the war in Iraq was.


The best poster at the California Democratic convention was of Nancy Pelosi as Rosie the Riveter and she was received as a hero. Her opposition to impeachment was, however, washed away in the tide of history. Yesterday the convention delegates demanded that Congress use its subpoena power to investigate the misdeeds of Bush and Cheney-- and to hold the Regime accountable "with appropriate remedies and punishment, including impeachment." It wasn't close. For millions of Americans impeachment is very much on the table.

Bush and Cheney, according to the resolution subverted the Constitution by

* using false information to justify the invasion of Iraq
* authorizing "the torture of prisoners of war"
* "authorizing wiretaps on U.S. citizens without obtaining a warrant"
* "disclosing the name of an undercover CIA operative"
* suspending "the historic Writ of Habeas Corpus by ordering the indefinite detention of so-called enemy combatants"
* "signing statements used to ignore or circumvent portions of over 750 Congressional statutes"

Sounds a lot more convincing than consensual sex with an adult stalker.


UPDATE: THE REAL BETRAYAL OF AMERICA'S FIGHTING MEN AND WOMEN CAME FROM BUSH AND CHENEY

A few weeks ago I spoke with a young Army vet from upstate New York, Jon Powers, and was impressed by the work he is doing with Iraqi orphans. Yesterday he penned an article at the Huffington Post to commemorate the anniversary of "Mission Accomplished." He explains, from the point of view of an American soldier, how the Bush Regime betrayed our soldiers and the Iraqi people. Jon makes a heartfelt plea to Bush, on behalf of Americans and Iraqis, to sign the bill the U.S. Congress is delivering to him today.

When my soldiers and I took over our section of Baghdad from the battled hardened 3rd Infantry Division we were preparing to execute the plan for "securing and reconstructing" that our leader talked about. Driving around the streets of Baghdad it became quickly evident that the Iraqi people were desperate for some basic social and economic needs. Sewage, waste, jobs and other basic needs were not being met.

As a commander on the ground, I expected those leading me to provide me the guidance and systems for my soldiers to implement. I expected there to be a Phase IV for us to execute so we could become "engaged in securing and reconstructing" that our leader talked about in front of the Mission Accomplished banner.

I was a believer, but I was betrayed.

Thomas Ricks, in his book Fiasco, and many others have now proved that there was NO plan for reconstruction. Lieutenant Colonel Alan King recalls, in What Was Asked of Us, as he rolled into Baghdad Airport "they told me I had twenty-four hours to come up with a reconstruction plan for Baghdad."

My platoon and I were not the only ones to feel this betrayal. The Iraqi people began to notice that their simple needs were not being met. Ahmed, an Iraqi friend, asked me, "America has been to the moon, why can't you pick up our trash?" I wondered the same thing as Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority quickly rejected any efforts the ground troops made in preference to the American contractors who did not show up for months. These stories have all been told.

It was because of this betrayal that Baghdad began to slowly deteriorate into the situation we now see today.

Mr. Bush, my soldiers and I secured Baghdad in the summer of 2003. We drove the streets without doors on our Humvees and ate dinner in the homes of the Iraqis people. We needed a plan to address our basic responsibility of social and economic solutions for the nation's needs.

Four years later you now send more troops into Baghdad who are beginning to build walls around neighborhoods such as Adhamiya, where I was stationed, against the wishes of the Iraq people. Your goal is to secure Baghdad, but you again fail to address the social, economic and now more importantly the political issues.

Even General Petraeus, the current commander in Iraq, admits that the solution to this fiasco is not a military one.

Jon Powers thinks Bush has an opportunity to redeem himself as a leader by taking up Congress' well thought out plan to disengage from occupation and war of the anniversary of his infamous speech and bumbling miscalculation. "The American people have spoken, Congress has spoken, and now Mr. Bush it is your turn."

LIFE IN THE GREED ZONE: LET THEM DRINK... PERRIER?

I hope you've been following the adventures of DWT Baghdad correspondent, Fred, doing his best to avoid mercenaries and Bush Regime screw-ups in the Greed Zone. (Earlier reports are here, and here, and here) I just got another e-mail from Fred this weekend that I'd like to share:

Benjamin Franklin noted [as did, more recently, Craig David] that we know the worth of water when the well runs dry. He might also have pointed out the value of anticipating such an event. I did not, and now I must pay. I am busier here than ever expected and thus let laundry needs go unanswered.
 
Too bad, I must now go to the PX to purchase socks and such with the hope that they have same in stock in my size. The PX is pathetic-- it has lots of stock available in CDs, televisions and the like, but essentials seem to be spasmodically stocked.
 
Water here at the Palace and the Hootches (the home away from home for expat Green Zone types) is delivered to holding tanks by truck, around 5,000 gallons at a time it appears. Given the hundreds (or is it thousands?) of people here, transporting water must be a big operation.
 
I wonder if the bowing up of a bridge across the Tigris has anything to do with the shortage. Baghdad was without electricity for some days because they couldn’t get fuel to the generators. Apparently after the bombing, a second bridge was made off limits to tanker trucks, and the tanker truck drivers refused to cross the alternative bridge because it was serving as a live target gallery for certain malcontents.

Damned those malcontents! There followed an e-mail from Halliburton's KBR division, an "All Hands Notice," declaring that as of April 28 the water status is amber. Amber is the third of 4 stages, just before red. Here's the KB definitions:

a.      Green: Water supply is adequate, no additional conservation efforts are necessary

b.     Yellow: Will usually be initiated when water services have been disrupted for 2 hours or more and the ETR is more than 12 hours

                                               i.      KBR will monitor and report water level every four hours.
                                                             ii.      KBR Fire Department:
                                                           1.      Maintain full water tank levels in emergency                     response vehicles
                                                           2.      Coordinate with city services for emergency water support if needed
                                                            iii.      DCMA will inform KBR to execute a Letter of Technical Direction allowing Task Order 130 to draw water from Task Order 139 supplies at FOB Prosperity ROWPU intermediate storage bladder
                                                           iv.      Stop watering grass and all landscaping
                                                             v.      Cease operation of the KBR car wash station
                                                           vi.      Discontinue Full Service Laundry washing, remain open for drop off and pick up only
                                                          vii.      Shut down self-service laundries
                                                        viii.      Cease water replenishment for palace swimming pool
 
c.     Amber: Will usually be initiated when water services have been disrupted for 6 hours or more and the ETR is more than 24 hours; execute the steps for phase Yellow, additionally;

                                               i.      Limit cleaning to sanitary purposes only; as long as we are using latrines they need to be cleaned.
                                                             ii.      KBR will draw water from the fire station storage tanks if necessary; discontinue water draw when storage tanks level falls to 50% (DO NOT DRAW DOWN BELOW 50%)
 
d.     Red: Will usually be initiated when water services have been disrupted for 6 hours or more and there is no reliable ETR

                                               i.      Implement LSA water hours from 0500-0900 and 1700-2100 daily

The implementation of the Amber alert includes shutting down the KBR car wash station, self-service laundries, full service laundry service and water replenishment for swimming pools. I just noticed that there's something worse than red: black. I guess that's when even Cheney realizes the jig is up-- though when Lieberman will pull his head out of his ass and smell the roses is anyone's guess.


UPDATE: HAZARDOUS DUTY PAY?

"State Department employees in Iraq seldom leave the capital's heavily fortified Green Zone. Even there, rocket and mortar attacks are frequent, and the sound of gunfire is constant. Suicide bombers have penetrated the zone on rare occasions, most recently on April 12." And today's USAToday is reporting that American diplomats are returning from Iraq with post-traumatic stress disorder, "the same debilitating, stress-related symptoms that have afflicted many U.S. troops, prompting the State Department to order a mental health survey of 1,400 employees who have completed assignments there."
 

MICHAEL WRAY IS READY TO RUMBLE IN CA-50

I ran into an old friend at the California state Democratic convention yesterday. He had just been talking with Charlie Brown. "Don't give me any 'I told you so's' but I'm coming around on Charlie Brown, he said sheepishly." He and I had been arguing for months about Charlie's electibility. When he looked at Charlie it was all numbers and theory. CA-04 has an R +11 Cook Partisan Voting Index rank. Bush beat Kerry 61% to 37%. The district is almost 84% white. Since 1994 the incumbent Republican, John Doolittle, had always won by better than 60%, culminating at 65% in 2004. I looked at it differently.

Charlie Brown and his family are the very best of CA-04, people every descent man and woman could easily relate to and identify with. The incumbent and his wife are mired in outrageous and horrifying scandals, from bribes, influence peddling and money laundering to direct complicity in a Marianas Islands scheme cooked up by Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff and involving sexual slavery, forced abortions, and inhumanity incomparable to anywhere else in territory ruled by the United States-- and all in the name of the Republican Party's vision for a future union-free America. I look at that race and I see one that in 2006 was incredibly close, with even Republicans sickened by Doolittle's excesses, a race where the incumbent tumbled from 65% to 49% and where an incumbent who had just spent barely $900,000 on re-election in 2004 had been forced to spend nearly two-and-a-half million dollars in 2006.

And, if you've been reading DWT in the last few weeks, you've seen the steady drip, drip, drip of scandal drowning Doolittle and his corrupt wife, Julie, and their circle of crooked business associates.

My friend, after meeting Charlie and Jan Brown, has come around. Irwing had never met him before either. Down in San Diego he got to meet plenty of elected officials and candidates. Afterwards, I asked him who impressed him most. He didn't hesitate for a moment: "Charlie Brown and Michael Wray." That's the other guy I wanted to mention today. Michael wants to run for congress in another "hopelessly"-- albeit far less hopelessly-- red district: CA-50. This was the northern San Diego district that was formerly home to Randy "Duke" Cunningham, currently a resident of the federal penal system. The voters replaced Cunningham with his crony, Brian Bilbray, another corrupt, right-wing extremist, an ex-lobbyist, no less!

CA-50 is only half as red as CA-04. Bush beat Kerry 55% to 44% and Cunningham hadn't been able to muster 60% in 2004. His opponent, moderate ex-Republican Francine Busby, took 36% of the vote that year. Two years later-- after Cunningham's guilty plea and incarceration-- she won 43% of the vote against the Cunningham clone, Bilbray. She wasn't able to close the deal with the voters. Michael Wray, a former Busby campaign worker, feels he can do better. For one thing, he isn't an ex-Republican; and his perspective is never apologetic or tentative. He's a thoughtful and proud progressive Democrat with a vision for how to win in CA-50 and how to keep winning.

Michael is a rocket scientist-- a real one. When we were chatting before the formal interview I did with him on film, he mentioned a different perspective on the Iraq war I hadn't thought about. He had been working with other scientists on a fusion project funded by the U.S. Navy. Like hundreds of other important scientific projects, it was scrapped by the Bush Regime so more resources could be poured into the futile occupation of Iraq. In the world of science, you're either moving forward or you're falling behind. This is another legacy of George Bush, his venal Regime and Rove's desperate tactic of making this dunce a "war president."

So anyway, the same new believer in Charlie Brown was also skeptical about a Democrat running in CA-50. "Only someone who's already been elected to a local office would have a chance," he said. Do I ever disagree with that! What about someone who's never even run for anything but who conducts a grassroots, common sense campaign? My friend snorted in disdain-- like he used to do when we'd talk about Charlie. DWT is going to follow Michael Wray as he makes his choices and as his campaign unfolds. I hope you'll stick around and watch it with us. Meanwhile, I'll leave you with one thought: this is his uncle:

A NONPARTISAN LOOK AT TENET'S ROLE FROM ANOTHER KEY PLAYER-- AND A COUPLE WHO LOOK AT BUSH'S IRAQ CATASTROPHE TOO

I feel like I know ex-CIA agent Michael Scheuer because of his extraordinary book, Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror. That isn't to say I swallow every single opinion he spouts. But what he's spouting about the so-called "War" on Terror, is a lot better than what Bush and Cheney-- or anyone else for that matter-- have been farting out. His OpEd in today's Washington Post is a crucial companion piece for anyone who hasn't read his books but who plans to read George Tenet's (or even just watch Tenet tonight on 60 Minutes.

He says he likes Tenet but that he let the CIA and the country down, primarily by buying into the ideological spin coming out of the White House. "At a time when clear direction and moral courage were needed, Tenet shifted course to follow the prevailing winds, under President Bill Clinton and then President Bush-- and he provided distraught officers at Langley a shoulder to cry on when his politically expedient tacking sailed the United States into disaster."

Scheuer claims that At the Center of the Storm, many of whose premises were debuted earlier by Ron Suskind and Bob Woodward (courtesy, obviously-- if not directly, of Tenet), is "disingenuous about Tenet's record on al-Qaeda." He points out how Woodward showed Tenet in a very heroic light, "warning national security adviser Condoleezza Rice of pending al-Qaeda strikes during the summer of 2001, only to have his warnings ignored. Tenet was indeed worried during the so-called summer of threat, but one wonders why he did not summon the political courage earlier to accuse Rice of negligence, most notably during his testimony under oath before the 9/11 commission."

Then there's the Iraq war. Tenet is now protesting the use that Rice, Vice President Cheney and other administration officials have made of his notorious pre-war comment that the evidence of Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction programs amounted to a "slam dunk" case. But the only real, knowable pre-war slam dunk was that Iraq was going to turn out to be a nightmare.

Tenet now paints himself as a scapegoat for an administration in which there never was "a serious consideration of the implications of a U.S. invasion," insisting that he warned Bush, Cheney and their Cabinet about the risks of occupying Iraq. Well, fine; the CIA repeatedly warned Tenet of the inevitable disaster an Iraq war would cause-- spreading bin Ladenism, spurring a bloody Sunni-Shiite war and lethally destabilizing the region.


But as with Rice and the warnings in the summer of 2001: Now he tells us. At this late date, the Bush-bashing that Tenet's book will inevitably stir up seems designed to rehabilitate Tenet in his first home, the Democratic Party. He seems to blame the war on everyone but Bush (who gave Tenet the Medal of Freedom) and former secretary of state Colin L. Powell (who remains the Democrats' ideal Republican). Tenet's attacks focus instead on the walking dead, politically speaking: the glowering and unpopular Cheney; the hapless Rice; the band of irretrievably discredited bumblers who used to run the Pentagon, Donald H. Rumsfeld, Paul D. Wolfowitz and Douglas J. Feith; their neoconservative acolytes such as Richard Perle; and the die-hard geopolitical fantasists at the Weekly Standard and National Review.

They're all culpable, of course. But Tenet's attempts to shift the blame won't wash. At day's end, his exercise in finger-pointing is designed to disguise the central, tragic fact of his book. Tenet in effect is saying that he knew all too well why the United States should not invade Iraq, that he told his political masters and that he was ignored. But above all, he's saying that he lacked the moral courage to resign and speak out publicly to try to stop our country from striding into what he knew would be an abyss.

This morning I drove back from the California Democratic state convention and I was listening to the radio when General William Odom's voice came over the airwaves. Recall that Odom was Director of the National Security Agency and Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, the Army's senior intelligence officer. He is neither a Democrat nor a Republican, just a dyed-in-the-wool patriot who no one-- except of course Cheney and Rove-- could ever accuse of being soft on terror or on any enemy of this country. "To put this in a simple army metaphor," he explained, "the Commander-in-Chief seems to have gone AWOL, that is 'absent without leave.' He neither acts nor talks as though he is in charge. Rather, he engages in tit-for-tat games… I hope the President seizes this moment for a basic change in course and signs the bill the Congress has sent him. I will respect him greatly for such a rare act of courage, and so too, I suspect, will most Americans." General Odom makes it clear to anyone who hasn't been paying attention-- or who lacks the analytic facilities to understand-- that the Bush Regime has been "squandering U.S. lives and helping Iran and al-Qaeda" in his badly bungled war in Iraq.

"The challenge we face today is not how to win in Iraq; it is how to recover from a strategic mistake: invading Iraq in the first place," he said. "The president has let (the Iraq war) proceed on automatic pilot, making no corrections in the face of accumulating evidence that his strategy is failing and cannot be rescued. He lets the United States fly further and further into trouble, squandering its influence, money and blood, facilitating the gains of our enemies."

And Odom isn't alone among highly decorated and well-respected former military officers urging Bush to sign Congress' plan for winding down the war. Almost unheard of, even an active-duty Army officer, Lt. Colonel Paul Yingling, published a scathing attack on how the war has been run and botched. Like Scheuer, he feels that military officers should be held accountable and that those who see the mendacity in U.S. policies should resign and speak out. Ironically, even Bush's own handpicked pet general, David Petraeus admitted to Congress last week that the occupation in Iraq "would get harder before it gets easier" and warned of the enormous commitment and sacrifice facing the U.S. in Iraq.


PARTISAN CIA OPERATIVES ARE, OF COURSE, SLAMMING TENET AND DEFENDING THE REGIME

Six former CIA officers wrote Tenet a letter describing him as "the Alberto Gonzales of the intelligence community," and called his book "an admission of failed leadership." They also said he has "a moral obligation" to return the Medal of Freedom he received from President Bush and to donate most of his book royalties to U.S. soldiers wounded in Iraq and families of the dead. One of the agents behind this, Larry Johnson, is a right wing hack but others are normal Americans.

The writers said they agree that Bush administration officials took the nation to war "for flimsy reasons," and that it has proved "ill-advised and wrong-headed."

But, they added, "your lament that you are a victim in a process you helped direct is self-serving, misleading and, as head of the intelligence community, an admission of failed leadership.

"You were not a victim. You were a willing participant in a poorly considered policy to start an unnecessary war and you share culpability with Dick Cheney and George Bush for the debacle in Iraq."

And Christopher Hitchens apparently crawled out of his bottle to call Tenet's new book a sniveling, self-justifying disgrace.

THE END OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY?

Unfortunately, not the end forever-- greed, selfishness, bigotry, self-righteous feelings of entitlement and victimization, as well as religionist psychosis, will always strive for political representation on the far right of the political spectrum-- but perhaps a much-needed reprieve from the cataclysmic damages the Republican Party has wrought over the past several decades.

It isn't just the cascading Republican scandals-- the endless bribery cases, the sexual perversion, the lying, the shredding of the Constitution-- it's the gestalt of what Republican rule under the Bush Regime has come to represent in the American psyche.

This morning the L.A. Times published a story by Michael Finnegan, GOP Has Uphill Climb For Cash and Candidates, that deals with the internal ramifications of 7 years of George Bush on the GOP itself. The breathtaking drop in Bush's job performance approval rating-- currently 28%, about double that of his thoroughly detested vice president-- only tells part of the story in what Finnegan refers to as "a toxic climate for the Republican Party" and what Republican Congressman Tom Davis (VA) called "a poisonous environment."

The immediate impact is disarray in the party-- most Democrats will tell you that they like all their party's potential nominees for president while most Republicans will tell you they hate all their nominees and that they would rather sit out the race or even vote for Hillary than for Rudy McRomney. And just as ominous for the GOP is a precipitous decline in fundraising success and an increase among first tier candidates to decline requests to run for office next year. The Republican brand itself is severely damaged-- and the damage is getting worse by the day.

The problems can be seen in such places as Florida's 22nd Congressional District, which hugs the coast north of Fort Lauderdale. Republicans held that House seat for a quarter-century. But since losing it last year, the party has had trouble finding a top-tier candidate for it.

Two of the GOP's choices, both state legislators, declined to run. A third, Boca Raton's mayor, said he was weighing whether a Republican had any hope of retaking the district.

... Damaged by ethics scandals in 2006, the GOP in recent weeks has seen FBI raids at businesses or homes connected to two of its congressmen. A federal agency last week began an investigation into Bush advisor Karl Rove's political operation, and congressional panels authorized a flurry of subpoenas related to White House political activities and the run-up to the Iraq war.

Three-term Rep. Rob Simmons of Connecticut, who lost his seat last year by 83 votes, said he turned down an appeal from the GOP to run again in 2008, partly because of the dismal political climate. In a district dominated by Democrats, he said, it has become impossible for even a moderate Republican like himself to win — especially since he voted to authorize the war in Iraq. Republicans in recent days said they had found a solid candidate to run in Simmons' place: the former commander of the area's naval base.

In Colorado, Republican Sen. Wayne Allard's decision not to seek reelection set the stage for one of the nation's most competitive 2008 races. But the top choice of party leaders, former Rep. Scott McInnis, has taken a pass, citing family reasons. McInnis had nearly $1 million stockpiled for the race.

Between the scandals, the lying, the Iraq occupation, and gas prices which mysteriously sunk just before the election and have now soared to the highest levels in history, people are abandoning the GOP in droves. Fully half of all Americans identify themselves as Democrats while only slightly over a third will admit to being Republicans. The GOP had an advantage not that long ago but 5 years of Bush and his rubber stamp Congress with their wrongheaded and unpopular policies have obliterated that entirely.

Yesterday DWT live vlog viewers were treated to the first interview with Michael Wray, a thoughtful, progressive, young Democrat who will be taking on corrupt and reactionary ex-lobbyist Brian Bilbray in CA-50. Wray is bursting with energy, enthusiasm, innovative ideas and solid optimism. A downcast Bilbray described Bush to the Times as "a millstone" around his neck. Yet Bilbray has been a complete and utter rubber stamp for every single horrendous policy Bush and Cheney have put forward-- except on immigration, where Bilbray feels Bush is too moderate. Bilbray seems to favor rounding up every undocumented immigrant and expelling all 12 million of them, an unrealistic non-solution meant to appeal to the lowest instincts of xenophobes and racists.

Normally Republicans make up for their unpopular policies by spending two or three times in advertising what Democrats can afford to spend. They manage to brainwash low information voters into supporting Republican candidates whose agendas are harmful to the very voters who put them in office. This year, however, a great deal of GOP money has dried up-- or even gone to Democrats!

The GOP's relatively weak fundraising totals for the first quarter could also complicate the party's reelection effort, wrote Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report in a recent assessment. Though it can be dangerous to read too much into these early signals, she wrote, "a weak bank account doesn't just make a bad headline, it also makes an incumbent more attractive to a potential challenger."

At the same time, she wrote, the recent totals "tell us that Republicans aren't going to be able to count on their traditional money advantage over Democrats," which will limit the number of Democratic-held House seats they can target.

Even the Republican charged with re-electing GOP House members, right-wing extremist Tom Cole (R-OK) likened his party to "a beaten-down stock." With at least two Republican congressmen-- John Doolittle (CA) and Rick Renzi (AZ)-- probably headed for messy trials and prison between now and the elections that beaten-down stock is more likely to get delisted than turn around.


UPDATE: OH, AND THERE'S ANOTHER, MORE OBVIOUS REASON, THE GOP'S GOING DOWN HARD

Republican journalist Andrew Sullivan points out that "the 20 percent or so of Americans who still think we're winning in Iraq happen to be the Republican base. And so the GOP in Congress has to pick between surviving their own primaries, maintaining civility with their own faithful, and potentially getting wiped out in the next election. The game of chicken is getting very intense. I guess we'll know how strong the kool-aid is by September." I think we have a pretty good idea already.

SEXUAL DEPRAVITY AMONG ITS LEADERS DESTROYING THE CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT

Chances are you've read how GOP leaders like, Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Senator Larry Craig (R-ID), Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC), Republican religionist shill Ted Haggard, Congressman David Dreier (R-CA), ex-Congressman Mark Foley-- currently using hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to keep his sorry ass out of prison-- have consistently voted against the interests of gay men and women and supported a viciously homophobic Republican agenda while living wild gay lifestyles in their closets. But right wing sexual hypocrisy hardly begins or ends with the Republican gay mafia.

Big news in DC this weekend is about a prostitution ring-- oddly, for Republicans, involving women-- and heads in the Bush Regime inner circle are beginning to roll.

The demise of a call-girl ring and pending trial of an alleged madam claiming thousands of clients has the US capital riveted by the chance powerful men may now be caught with their trousers down, with a senior state department official apparently first to fall.

Deborah Jeane Palfrey, 50, dubbed the DC Madam in local media, has been arraigned in federal court on charges of operating a Washington prostitution service for 13 years until her retirement in 2006.

Palfrey has denied she ran a prostitution ring. Her company, Pamela Martin and Associates, was simply a "high-end adult fantasy firm which offered legal sexual and erotic services across the spectrum of adult sexual behavior and did so without incident during its 13 year tenure," she said.

Palfrey contends her escort service provided university educated women to engage in legal game-playing of a sexual nature at 275 dollars an hour for a 90 minute session, the Washington Post reported.

...Friday, the US State Department announced that Randall Tobias, the embattled head of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), was resigning for unspecified personal reasons.

...Tobias since 2003 also was President George W. Bush's first global AIDS coordinator, a job which drew criticism for his emphasis on faithfulness to partners and abstinence over condom use in trying to prevent the spread of the AIDS virus.

ABC News is reporting tonight that her clients go beyond Tobias and that plenty of Bush White House officials, Pentagon officials and well-connected Republicrook lobbyists and lawyers have been breaking the laws they demand the rest of us follow. Keep in mind that Tobias also insisted that his employees sign anti-prostitution loyalty oaths advocated by right wing religionist loons. Think Progress has a funny video of Brian Ross explaining how these Republicans are claiming they may have hired the hookers but that they didn't... inhale.

So at the same time you have the Republican transvestite running for president (of the United States... of America) flip flopping on his career-long support for gay civil unions turning around for the sake of redneck votes in a South Carolina GOP straw poll, you also get yet another right wing leader being arrested for child porn.

In the latest disaster to hit the American radical right, Kevin Alfred Strom, the founder of National Vanguard and a major neo-Nazi leader for nearly 20 years, has been arrested and charged with child pornography and witness tampering.

Federal agents arrested Strom near his home in Stanardsville, Va., on Jan. 4, after he was indicted for allegedly having pornographic images of children on his computer between Oct. 17, 2005, and last Aug. 4.

Unlike most of the people involved in the latest round of sex scandals, Strom wasn't working directly for the Bush Regime but he was a deputy to right-wing hero William Pierce, author of The Turner Diaries, the blueprint for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. "Strom's arrest set off a firestorm on the radical right, which has seen a number of its key activists arrested recently for embarrassing crimes, some of them sexual in nature. "If Kevin's genuinely guilty," one extremist wrote on the racist Stormfront web forum shortly after the arrest, "then the credibility of his work-- indeed the credibility of all intelligent White nationalist work-- will be severely crippled, and we shall be reduced to apologetics for years to come."


Another wingnut, Bill White, a rival rightist, cut to the chase: "The fact is that the white nationalist movement has been littered with sexual deviants. The entire reactionary wing of the white nationalist movement is corrupt and must be destroyed." This probably has closeted Republican perverts cringing and hoping that don't get burned in these new scandals. Another Republican exposed-- this one far closer to the Bush Regime than either White or Strom was US naval commander Harlan Ullman, the man credited with developing Bush's "shock and awe" strategy.

MEET MICHAEL WRAY, THE NEXT CONGRESSMAN FROM CA-50?

Last night Irwing and I did live vlog sessions with Congressman Jerry McNerney, Charlie Brown, Assemblyman Mark Leno from the fundraiser at the state Democratic Convention in San Diego. I also got to meet Senator Gravel. I was eager to ask him about what he thought the prospects are for a Democrat taking Alaska's sole house seat now that Don Young has been exposed as a bribe-taking bucket of slime. Gravel told me he lives in Virginia and pays closer attention to California politics than to his old state's.

This morning's speakers are Hillary Clinton, Debra Bowen, Jerry Brown, a slew of California congressmembers and local legislators. And then this afternoon we get Nancy Pelosi, Chris Dodd, Barack Obama, Kucinich Barbara Lee and others. We might go hear Obama. But our big event today is a meeting Agnes Pennington set up for us with Michael Wray, a rocket scientist. Mike showed up at the fundraiser last night and we got to meet him briefly. He's going to run for Congress down here in CA-50, the district where Francine Busby made tremendous strides but was unable to close the deal with voters. (This is Duke Cunningham's old district-- which replaced him with a corrupt Republican lobbyist, sort of cutting out the middleman!) Today Irwing and I are having lunch-- at a great raw restaurant, Cilantro Live, in Chula Vista-- with Agnes and Mike and we'll be live vlogging it at around 1:30 or 1:40 at the DWT Headquarters icon on the right of your screen. Just go down to the second image (Blue House in the Brew House and click there for today's chat with Mike.)

JOHN HALL'S RETURN TO BLUE AMERICA

Last September, on the day after he beat Rahm Emanuel's shill candidate in the Democratic primary, John Hall joined Blue America for a free ranging discussion at Firedoglake. He went on to beat a far worse shill in November, a George Bush/Tom DeLay rubber stamp named Sue Kelly. He now represents the 19th congressional district north of New York City. John campaigned on a solidly progressive platform that was strong on confronting and solving environmental issues and strong on bringing a speedy end to Bush's occupation of Iraq. He's been in office for 4 months and he's been living up to his campaign promises-- scrupulously. In fact, in a Republican-leaning district, he thinks the way to be re-elected isn't to compromise on basic principles but to work closely with his constituents the way real leaders do.

And John Hall is already showing signs of being one of the next generation of progressive leaders in Congress. Only 3 freshmen were asked to chair congressional subcommittees. One of them was John-- the Subcommitte on Disability Assistance. The work he's doing there is one of his passions, although, I have to say, that John seems to throw himself into what he believes in-- be it alternative energy, protecting women's health choices, ending the war, or ameliorating the plight of our wounded vets-- with unbounded passion.

"It's a scandal and a travesty to so quickly-- and so frequently-- send our servicemen and women to fight on the far side of the world and yet not support them with medical assistance, housing aid or economic opportunities when they come home."

One of his priorities is to reduce the unbelievable backlog of veteran disability claims. There are over 646,000 initial claims waiting from six months to a year to be acted on and then there's an appeals process that takes 2 more years! "There's an aging Vietnam era population experiencing the aftereffects of Agent Orange and infirmities that come with age plus we're at the front edge of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans coming home now." He gave me a mind-boggling statistic that I'm still trying to comprehend. During the Vietnam War the ratio of wounded to killed was two to one. Now the ratio is sixteen to one. In many ways that is very, very good news. Keep in mind though that many of these vets coming back, who might have died in past decades, are coming back with far more serious injuries, especially when you consider how many have traumatic brain injuries or are missing multiple limbs.

When Congressman Hall and I spoke on the phone a couple weeks ago he had just walked out of the first meeting of the first meeting of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. His enthusiasm was brimming over, palpable. Chairman Markey had decided to focus on the geopolitical implications of rising oil dependence and global warming and John could barely stop talking about it, especially about the national security implications of climate change. Witnesses had included ex-CIA Director James Woolsey, Ambassador Richard Haass (President of the Council on Foreign Relations), Carl Pope of the Sierra Club, and Admiral Dennis McGinn.

Much of John's public career, long before he got involved in politics, has centered on environmental sanity. Sure, he drives a hybrid-- a Mercury Mariner-- but the level of excitement he had when he tried explaining how in the future owners of plug-in hybrids would be able to sell excess electricity back into the power grid the way solar power generators do today was tremendous. He even thinks some of the Republicans on the committee may have been convinced, although, interestingly, Minority Leader Boehner, a dyed-in-the-wool obstructionist, only appointed Republicans to the committee who had voted against its creation.

Last year in just over 2 months 735 Blue America donors contributed over $12,000 to John's campaign and he beat Kelly by just over 4,000 votes, 51% to 49%. She spent over two and a half million dollars and John spent a little less than $1.6 million. Approximately 85% of his money came from grassroots and netroots contributors. Her money came overwhelmingly from Big Business PACs, desperate for a Republican majority to keep up the rubber stamping of Bush's excruciating agenda. If you watched the congressional testimony about Rove's politicization of the GSA, you know that he has targeted John and that Republicans are pouring resources-- perhaps illegally-- into the race already. They have persuaded a fashion industry multimillionaire, Andrew Saul, chairman of Caché Inc, to run against John. (There are also several fringe far right loons who are interested in tossing their hats into the ring.)

I hope you'll join me today in helping John defend a GOP-leaning seat, and one of Blue America's most compelling victories in 2006, a man who beat both Inside the Beltway establishments and is proving himself to be every bit as good as we hoped. Blue America has a box of Neil Young CDs, Live At Massey Hall, 1971 as thank you gifts for contributions of $25 or more ('til they run out).

What the f**k? After all the f**king hullabaloo, it turns out that that's what Harry Reid actually said?

I was just reading Howie's post below about poor sad old David Broder's mindless attack on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, with Howie's added note about Senate Democrats' letter expressing unanimous support for Reid (including even one Republican, Holy Joe Lieberman), and then John Kerry's HuffPost post "Standing With Harry Reid."

I confess I haven't been paying close attention to this nonsense. I usually meet my Daily Nonsense Quotient (DNQ) by about 8:45 in the morning; after all, the human body can tolerate only so much. So my eyes popped out when I came to this paragraph from Kerry:

And the worst part is, the whole attack is based on a completely out-of-context quote. This is what Harry Reid really said, "And as long as we follow the President's path in Iraq, the war is lost. But there is still a chance to change course - and we must change course." Any questions? The President's own generals say there is no military solution to the civil war in Iraq, that it requires the political solution the Iraqis have resisted. By the Vice President's standard, are they "uninformed and misleading"?

WHAT? YOU MEAN THAT'S WHAT HARRY REID ACTUALLY SAID???

Let me get this straight. He actually said, "As long as we follow the President's path in Iraq, the war is lost," and he was taken to have said, "The war is lost"?

Huh???

I assume that every media person who simply passed on the lie (because quoting Reid as having said, "The war is lost," is just that--a lie) has been fired for either gross distortion or gross incompetence. And the partisans who have propagated the lie are being excoriated 24/7 by every patriotic believer in fair and balanced coverage.

We can argue whether it would have been true to say, "The war is lost." (OK, I don't know what the counter-argument is. But there must be one. For the sake of argument, let's just assume.)

We can argue whether it would have been smart to say, "The war is lost."

But since nobody seems to have said, "The war is lost," what the f**k would be the point?

[File under: How the f**k do the Righties and their paper-trained media lapdogs keep getting away with it?]

DWT HEADS OFF TO THE CALFORNIA DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION IN SAN DIEGO

I'm late already and I just cut out the first stop on my excursion, a private listening session for the highly embargoed Linkin Park album, Minutes To Midnight. You probably are already in love with "What I've Done," right? But some of my old buds are Warner Bros tell me there are even better songs on the album, including a couple of anti-Bush Regime anthems. It comes out May 15 and one pal told me that "Hands Held High" isn't what Team Bush wants to hear on the radio. So that's why I had scheduled a stop in Burbank on the drive from L.A. to San Diego. But I'm late so later for Linkin Park. (I'll just listen to "What I've Done" a thousand times on the drive and have something to look forward to Monday.)


Like I explained a few days ago, I'm not into conventions, especially not political conventions but I'm schlepping down to this so I can support Jerry McNerney and Charlie Brown. Tonight at 8:30 or 9 we're having a Blue House At the Brew House Benefit for them. Irwing and I will be live vlogging it. Just hit the DWT World Headquarters icon on the right (the lifeguard station) and it will bring you to a live vlog page at 8:30 or so. This is an experiment. If it works, we'll do lots of them. In fact, if it works, tomorrow, we'll do some more, including one with the next Democratic candidate for the 50th CD. And if we run into anyone interesting, we'll live vlog them too-- so click the station every now and then and see if anything's cooking. Oh, and the direct link to the vlog page is VlogNetwork.TV

Tomorrow I'll be over at Firedoglake for a session with Congressman John Hall (D-NY) at 2pm, EST (11am here in California)... oh the wonders of all this modern stuff!

That picture up top is an example of what you can expect, except moving and talking. Irwing took it at a fundraiser at Lucy's El Adobe a few days ago. It's me, Governor Richardson and the legendary Lucy. I wasn't explaining to the Governor what he needed to do with the Koreans; I was explaining the reasons Pete "Sneaky Pete" Domenici (R-NM) should spend the rest of his miserable days in prison. Richardson didn't agree.

Well, wasn't our Condi supposed to be one of the world's A-1 Sovietologists? OK, probably not, but can you blame her for trying to hold onto the gig?

In case you missed this news, Al Kamen's got it in his Washington Post "In the Loop" column today:

Remember the Soviets?

The Russians are most unhappy with the proposed U.S. missile shield in Europe to protect the United States from Iranian missiles. The Russians somehow think this poses a threat to their nuclear deterrent. Of course, since the Iranians don't have nukes yet, it's probably predictable the Russians would wonder. Remember: We never wait for a mushroom cloud.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in Oslo yesterday for a NATO meeting, told reporters that "the idea that somehow 10 interceptors and a few radars in eastern Europe are going to threaten the Soviet strategic deterrent is purely ludicrous."

She said the administration wants to talk to Moscow based on a "realistic" view, rather than "one that is grounded somehow in the 1980s."

The "Soviet strategic deterrent"? Who's grounded in the 1980s?

REPUBLICAN GREED, AVARICE AND IDEOLOGY WILL MAKE YOU SICK

Did you watch the Democratic presidential debate last night? I had just gotten in from the airport and someone called me and said it was on. I had missed half of it but I got to see a question-- and Hillary answer-- I liked. The question was about WalMart-- is it good for America or bad for America? Hillary answered well enough ("It's a mixed blessing"), but it was the articulation of her underlying philosophy of government-- and how it contrasts with the Bush Regime's-- that I liked. She explained that when WalMart started-- in Arkansas, where her husband was governor-- it was really good, bringing jobs and otherwise unavailable products, and at good prices, to small towns. And then the important underlying "but." This isn't a Jeffersonian Arcadian society made up of lots of small freeholders-- and this sprawling, urbanized, complex, post-industrial society of 300 million ain't going to be that again. The problems with WalMart is that the society isn't setting rules under which it should be operating, rules that protect the legitimate interests of society. She reminded us that that's what Democrats do. Republicans leave it to the imaginary "free market"-- and we get dead pets or, dead grandparents.

Yesterday Congress attempted to deal with quite a few health care concerns, the kinds of concerns that individual members of a mass society are ill-equipped to cope with on their own. I'll get to those in a moment. First though, I want to recommend a piece my friend Cliff Schecter wrote for the AFL-CIO that shows what ordinary Americans are up against when dealing with the big Health Care Husters.

You may know Big Pharma as the quality folks responsible for driving up the price of prescriptions throughout the 50 states by successfully lobbying Congress for a ban on allowing the government to negotiate lower prices for Medicare recipients. Or perhaps for the longtime U.S. ban on allowing Americans to import their prescription drugs from Canada, where they often are half the price of what they cost here.

Today, one of the representatives of Big Pharma, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, got a visit from some of its Working America friends at the company's annual meeting in Morristown, N.J. The guests included a “Canadian moose,” which the executives may have glimpsed on their way from the seaweed rap to the deep-tissue massage. But, hey, they can run to the Jacuzzi, but they can’t hide.

Wyeth has implemented a policy of reducing supplies of its drugs to Canadian wholesalers and pharmacies that sell life-saving medicines to Americans who make the cross-border trip because “they are left with no other choice.”

Who said Big Business doesn't have a heart?

The Health Care Hustle campaign reminded those at the Wyeth stockholder meeting, as well as others across the nation, that our health care system does not have to be this way. It can serve the interests of the American people instead of the American aristocracy.

Let the Wyeths be warned. American workers demand that we fix this broken system and replace it with one that serves all of us.

On a personal level, I'm more into homeopathic and holistic health care. So why should I care about the screwed up health care system? Well, aside for the natural empathy I feel for my fellow human beings who still eat sugar and flour and cancer causing processed foods, the Corporate America is constantly trying to destroy the holistic approach to healthcare. This is from a letter I got yesterday:

There is a crisis in health freedom. On April 30, 2007 the FDA will close the public comment period on a "Guidance" which will classify every alternative practice as medicine so that only licensed physicians can carry out the procedure AND vitamins, minerals, herbs, etc., will suddenly become "untested drugs" which will be forbidden.

Bad? Real Bad! But public outcry can stop this assault on your health and your freedom.

Spread the word! Tell everyone in your Circle of Influence, professionals, alternative practitioners, nutrient and herb companies, everyone! Let them know how important their participation is to make sure the FDA backs off from this repressive course.

I would think the FDA has some real work to do now that their lapdog posture towards Corporate Health has led to the deaths of hundreds (thousands?) of pets and possibly to the introduction of poison into our food system.

Congress is overwhelmed keeping up with their perfidy. Yesterday global health activists and Big Pharma were duking it out over Thailand's decision to override patents for three drugs, including Abbott Laboratories' HIV/AIDS treatment Kaletra. USA for Innovation, an intellectual property rights group funded by Big Pharma for whom it shills, this week asked the Bush Regime's Trade Representative to label Thailand a violator in its annual report of intellectual property concerns abroad. Activists representing Thai NGOs met with lawmakers in Washington seeking to counter Big Pharma's moves. "We want the U.S. government to show it cares about access to life-saving drugs in the developing world," said Jon Ungphakorn, a former member of Thailand's Senate. Thailand needs to break patents on Kaletra and other drugs to deliver needed treatments under its universal healthcare system, which its health budget cannot afford. Abbott Labs provoked anger and despair in Thailand and from health activists when it announced in March that it would take seven other drugs off the market in Thailand in retaliation for the Thai compulsory license. (Nor do you have to go all the way to Thailand to see how Corporate Health and their Republican allies treat healthcare as a profitable commodity with little regard for people's lives-- other than their own.)

At the same time, the House Energy and Commerce Committee announced it is seeking information from the FDA on antibiotic use in animals and the potential for humans to contract antibiotic-resistant bacteria infections as part of its inquiry into how well the agency addresses drug safety. FDA has allowed antibiotic use in healthy animals, as well as sick, for 40 years. "At a minimum, great caution should be exercised in the approval of new veterinary applications for antibiotics," wrote Energy and Commerce Chairman Dingell, ranking member Joe Barton (R-TX), Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Chairman Bart Stupak (D-MI), and ranking member Edward Whitfield, (R-KY).

And yesterday, over on the Senate side of Capitol Hill, Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME) unveiled legislation to reauthorize and expand the State Children's Health Insurance Program to 6 million kids within 10 years. The controversy comes because both Rockefeller and Snowe indicated a willingness to tap extra payments to Medicare Advantage as one option to pay for their SCHIP proposal. We'll see how Snowe's GOP colleagues, more prone to repay corporate bribes with complete obeisance to the BIg Pharma/Corporate Medicine agenda.

Mstislav Rostropovich (1927-2007): He was the greatest cellist ever, one of the leading musical presences of his time, and a crusader for good

Mstislav Rostropovich (1927-2007) was 80 and in poor health, so this morning's news of his death in Moscow isn't a total shock. (The shock was seeing that Wikipedia already had his death incorporated!) Nor is the gap left by his passing news, since he had of course been retreating for some time from his once-central position in international musical life. Still, the size of the gap is enormous--as cellist, conductor, genial spirit, and humanitarian.

I heard him described on the radio this morning as the greatest cellist since Casals. With all respect to Casals--a great musician, conductor, and humanitarian--Rostropovich was in another league as a cellist, able to produce any kind of sound on the instrument from a whisper to a bronze roar, with a vast range of colors and shading. The only cellist I'm aware of who might have been in his class is the tragically short-lived Emanuel Feuermann (1902-1942).

I'm listening now to one of Rostropovich's numerous recordings of the greatest piece written for his instrument, Dvorak's B minor Cello Concerto. It's the only version of his I have on CD--the 1985 Erato one with Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony, coupled with Tchaikovsky's Rococo Variations--but I like it a lot.

Earlier, on the subway, I listened to EMI's CD coupling of the famous 1969 recordings of the Beethoven Triple Concerto (with Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic) and the Brahms Double Concerto (with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra) with Rostropovich and his great colleagues violinist David Oistrakh and (in the Beethoven) pianist Sviatoslav Richter.

Because we in the West knew Oistrakh, Rostropovich, and Richter as their country's foremost violinist, cellist, and pianist, we tended to assume they must be great pals and play together all the time. They weren't and didn't, of course. Although as far as I knew they all not only respected but liked one another, they were very different sorts of musicians and led very different sorts of musical lives. Still, it's fascinating to hear them scale their playing styles and personalities down to a common idiom for the eerily yet hauntingly self-effacing Beethoven concerto. In this titanic performance of the Brahms, Oistrakh and Rostropovich (who both recorded the piece with various other partners) sound more like their full-blooded selves and still manage to partner each other beautifully.

There's actually a fair amount of Rostropovich on video, but probably tonight I'll pop out the precious video documentation of a collaboration with Richter. At the 1964 Edinburgh Festival, at a single concert that started at midnight (don't ask me!) and was televised live by the BBC, they played all five Beethoven cello sonatas, and the concert is now available as an EMI DVD. It's black and white and mono, but something special, even though again this was in many respects an odd pairing. In fact, the audio recording of the Beethoven sonatas they made for Philips, presumably around this same time, which I happen to love, has always been controversial. Basically Richter seems to have decided to make himself a "Rostropovich-compatible accompanist."

Rostropovich only recorded the Beethoven sonatas once (and did the two sonatas of Brahms in 1984 with another unlikely partner, Rudolf Serkin, in what turned out to be a splendid collaboration), and waited till 1991 to record in full the cello's greatest legacy: Bach's set of six suites for unaccompanied cello. In the invaluable video commentary that accompanies the video edition of the Bach suites, which is part commentary on the music and part musical autobiography (including, for example, a wonderful recounting of his first meeting with his idol, Casals), he acknowledges his extreme uneasiness about finally tackling this project, which he had delayed as long as he could. He'd been playing the Bach suites all his musical life, of course, but committing them to record was something else again.

He secluded himself for several weeks in rural France, at the Basilique Sainte-Madeleine in Vezelay, and went to work. I'm sorry it was a church he picked for the recording site, because the acoustics seem to me less than ideal for the music. Nevertheless, the locale clearly stimulated him, and the absorbing and often riveting performances are what he intended to leave us, and the commentaries--with R often illustrating at the piano (which he plays quite well)--are wide-ranging and consistently absorbing. The performances are also available on CD, but be warned that they contravene his strict stricture about the importance of maintaining Bach's order of the suites (for the obvious reason that in most performances, these included, you just can't get Suites Nos. 4-6 on one CD).

Since the cello repertory is too limited to contain the interests of so vast a spirit, Rostropovich (like Casals) drifted into conducting, and had a long and successful run at it, including his long stint (1977-94) as music director of Washington's National Symphony Orchestra, which made him a larger presence in this country than he might otherwise have been. In that time, and until the fall of the Soviet Union, Rostropovich and his wife, the distinguished soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, were exiles, having been stripped of their citizenship.

Their problems with the Soviet regime came to a head in the '70s. As Wikipedia explains it:

Rostropovich fought for art without borders, freedom of speech and democratic values, resulting in a reprimand from the Soviet regime. His friendship with Alexander Solzhenitsyn and his support for dissidents led to official disgrace in the early 1970s. He was banned from several musical ensembles and his Soviet citizenship was revoked in 1978 because of his public opposition to the Soviet Union 's restriction of cultural freedom. Rostropovich left the Soviet Union in 1974 with his wife and children and settled in the United States.

When Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya became nonpersons in the Soviet Union, Slava was quoted as saying that what perhaps distressed him most was the official purging of the Bolshoi Opera history and roster to exclude his wife, who had been one of the company's leading soloists for two decades.

One of the first things the Rostropoviches did when they were able to return to their homeland was to establish the Vishnevskaya-Rostropovich Foundation (VRF) for the Health and Future of Children [above], whose mission was announced as "to improve the health care of children in the Russian Federation and other Newly Independent States (NIS) of the former Soviet Union."


PS: ROSTROPOVICH AND BRITTEN, AND A NICE ANECDOTE

I couldn't think of a way of working in a reference to a Rostropovich recording for which I have a special fondness: the Schubert Arpeggione Sonata with Benjamin Britten accompanying on the piano. (It was actually written for the arpeggione, an odd and short-lived six-stringed instrument, with frets like a guitar but played with a bow like a cello.) It's not all that consequential a piece, and yet in the hands of two musicians of this caliber it takes wing.

Now, having stumbled across the blog "The Overgrown Path," I feel especially remiss in omitting mention of Rostropovich's relationship with Britten (1913-1976), who was not just among the handful of the greatest composers of the 20th century, and a singularly fine pianist and conductor, but one of the century's most inspired and inspiring humanists. It's one of the signature qualities of Britten and his partner, tenor Peter Pears, that the better musicians and human beings seemed to find their way to their Aldeburgh Festival. It was for Rostropovich that Britten composed his Cello Symphony, Cello Sonata, and three solo cello suites.

"Pliable," the blogger of "The Overgrown Path" (who notes that in the 1970s he was EMI’s international marketing manager, under division director Peter Andry--who, by the way, was responsible for bringing the Soviet superstars together for those recordings of the Beethoven Triple Concerto and Brahms Double Concerto), also shares this anecdote about Rostropovich:

For me, an incident away from the recording studio showed the difference between Rostropovich and other superstar musicians. We decided to celebrate the release of the Haydn record [of the two cello concertos] by inviting Slava to the EMI offices in 1977 to present him with the lavish EMI-Pathé gatefold edition of the concertos. The visit summed up Slava’s approach to life - energy, enthusiasm, passion, but above all a love for music and a love for the human race. He made sure he spent time talking to all the background staff who rarely came into contact with the artists, yet alone superstars. We were working with many other great musicians at the time, but the prospect of Herbert von Karajan visiting our offices, yet alone hugging a secretary was unthinkable.

McCAIN HAS A NEW OLD CAMPAIGN SONG

I woke up in San Francisco yesterday. I turned on the TV and the first thing I heard was "Barbara Ann" by the Beach Boys. Huh? Was he doing it again? Crazy old John McCain apparently hadn't had enough and he was back for more. Is this guy nuts? I saw him on the Daily Show a couple nights ago and he was really dreadful, joking about giving Stewart an IED-- you know the things that have killed most of our soldiers in Iraq-- that he and Miss Lindsey (R-SC) bought on their shopping trip in Baghdad a few weeks ago. The guy is losing whatever marbles he has left-- fast. No wonder Republicans are so desperate to find an alternative candidate.

Anyway, you probably read how last week crazy old McCain sang "Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran" to an audience of bucktoothed toothless rednecks in South Carolina. Now he's skipping around the country-- announcing for the 4 billionth time he's running for president (while skipping votes, like the one to end the occupation of Iraq, not to mention General Petraeus' congressional briefing in DC). This morning he made a speech in a South Carolina flour factory in South Carolina and after he was finished pandering he played "Barbara Ann," signaling fellow warmongers what kind of a foreign policy he has in mind.

Instead of listening to McCain arthritically croaking out his turgid and sick version of the Beach Boys' classic again, how about if we watch a little video and contemplate crazy old McCain replacing the steaming heap of excrement we have in the White House now:

BUSH REGIME'S ABOUT TO GET SLAMMED BY TENET FOR THE MISUSE OF HIS "SLAM DUNK" COMMENT

I read Ron Suskind's book The One Percent Doctrine earlier this year, so it's no surprise to me that George Tenet wasn't likely to go to his grave without speaking his mind about these unspeakable and treacherous criminals who infest the entire Bush Regime. I have a feeling Bush isn't going to want to be sitting in front of the teevee on Sunday evening. Scott Pelley will be interviewing Mr. Tenet on 60 Minutes.

The mass media is all over his anger about the misuse of his "slam dunk" comment, but Tenet's analysis of the Bush Regime is certainly not about one incident. He thinks the Regime is disingenuous and dishonorable but it's not only because they scapegoated him and ruined his reputation in order to deflect the blame for Bush's longed for and long planned for attack on Iraq onto him.

"So a whole decision to go to war, when all of these other things have happened in the run-up to war? You make mobilization decisions, you've looked at war plans," says Tenet. "I'll never believe that what happened that day informed the president's view or belief of the legitimacy or the timing of this war. Never!"

Tenet says what bothers him most is that senior administration officials like Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice continue using "slam dunk" as a talking point.

"And the hardest part of all this has been just listening to this for almost three years, listening to the vice president go on 'Meet the Press' on the fifth year [anniversary] of 9/11 and say, 'Well, George Tenet said slam dunk' as if he needed me to say 'slam dunk' to go to war with Iraq," he tells Pelley. "And you listen to that and they never let it go. I mean, I became campaign talk. I was a talking point. 'Look at the idiot [who] told us and we decided to go to war.' Well, let's not be so disingenuous … Let's everybody just get up and tell the truth. Tell the American people what really happened."

The media? The corporate media? ... what really happened? Does Tenet expect them to tell the unadulterated truth? Odd. Instead of Truth, what we get from the mainstream media is the lunatic ravings of a demented old pusbag and hack like David Broder. Today he did a little hatchet job for Karl Rove, whose employ he's been in more and more frequently lately, drawing attention to himself by likening Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to Abu Gonzales.

Broder has been foaming at the mouth these days. A man generally given to soporific prose, Broder has been downright venomous lately. And what has put the Benzedrine in Mr. Broder's Ovaltine? Not the fact that President Bush continues to lie about "progress" in the war in Iraq. Or that Dick Cheney continues to lie about pre-invasion links between al Qaeda and Iraq. Or that the Bush Administration has neglected our wounded warriors, ignored the victims of Katrina, potentially obstructed justice by firing US Attorneys who were pursuing GOP wrongdoing. Not even that the Bush Administration lied to the families of Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch, cynically using their blood to distract from their own incompetence and dishonesty.

No, none of this raises Dean Broder's hackles.

He reserves his vitriol for Harry Reid.

Why Reid? Because Reid has been one of the few politicians with the courage to speak the plain, unvarnished truth to power, and the hallmark of Mr. Broder's career has been to suck up to power. Reid calls Bush a liar. Broder can't handle the truth.

In a radio interview Monday, Broder blasted Reid, calling him "bumbling," saying he's an embarrassment, and breaking the news that, "at some point down the road the Democrats are gonna have to have a little caucus and decide how much further they want to carry Harry Reid."

Really? And on what did the self-styled dean of the Washington press corps, base this bombshell? Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Broder just made it up. That's not journalism, it's bloviating - aka Broderizing. In fact, real reporters on Capitol Hill chased down the Broder charge, actually interviewing Democratic senators and their staffs. They found universal support for Reid.

... Perhaps Broder's bed-wetting tantrum against Reid was spurred by the certain knowledge that while Harry Reid has been telling hard truths, Mr. Broder has been falling hard for transparent lies.

Whereas Reid called for Donald Rumsfeld's dismissal long ago, Broder vouched for Rummy, writing, "Overall, Rumsfeld left me with the impression that he is aware of the risks of war with Iraq, but confident they can be handled."

While Reid has called for investigations into allegations Karl Rove broke the law, Broder vouches for Rove: "Let me disclose my own bias in this matter. I like Karl Rove.... I have eaten quail at his table and admired the splendid Hill Country landscape from the porch of [Rove's] historic cabin...." Mighty cozy in Karl's cabin, isn't it, Mr. Broder?

I doubt very seriously that Harry Reid is bothered by Broder's comments. Reid has faced down Vegas mobsters who planted a bomb in his family car. He's unlikely to be intimidated by George W. Bush's housebroken lap-dog.

My guess is that Give 'Em Hell Harry is going to keep telling them the truth, and Mr. Broder is going to keep thinking it's hell. As George Orwell said, "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

The Inside the Beltway press corps seems to have gone out of their collective mind. As David Sirota pointed out today, the Bill Moyers tv piece last night is freaking them all out. It exposes them as the collaborators and enablers they have been on the entire disgraceful Bush agenda. (If you missed Moyers' show, watch it here and you'll see why all the press hacks are in melt down mode.)


SENATE DEMOCRATS DON'T AGREE WITH BRODER'S ASSESSMENT-- NOT EVEN ONE OF THEM

Broder may be trumpeting Rove's propaganda crap for WaPo readers but there sure weren't any buyers in the Democratic Caucus. Every member signed a letter to the Post explaining how Broder had it all wrong. Even one non-Democrat, Bush henchman Joe Lieberman, signed the letter. They were polite enough not to mention exactly where Broder got his (talking) points from.

We, the members of the Senate Democratic Caucus, contest the attack on Sen. Harry Reid's leadership by David S. Broder in his April 26 column, "The Democrats' Gonzales."

In contrast to Mr. Broder's insinuations, we believe Mr. Reid is an extra
ordinary leader who has effectively guided the new Democratic majority through these first few months with skill and aplomb.

The Democratic caucus is diverse, and Mr. Reid has worked tirelessly to make sure that the views of each member are heard and represented. No one ideology dominates the caucus, so that a consensus can be reached and unity achieved. It is hard to imagine a better model for leadership.

Because Mr. Reid has the support of members of the caucus, is a good listener and has an amazing ability to synthesize views and bring people together, the Senate has accomplished a great deal during his time as majority leader. Armed with his years of service in the Senate and with a mastery of procedure, Mr. Reid has led the chamber with a slim majority and a minority that is, at times, determined to stop legislation with which it disagrees.

In the first 100 days alone, we made great strides under his leadership on long-neglected legislation concerning stem cell research, the Sept. 11 commission's recommendations and the minimum wage, to name three. In addition, under Mr. Reid's leadership, we have fulfilled our obligation, left uncompleted by last year's Republican-led Senate, to fund the federal government. He has accomplished all of this in the face of stiff opposition and with a commitment to giving ideas full opportunity for debate.

Finally, in this age of scripted politicians speaking only to their base or claiming that they "don't recall" anything, the fact that Mr. Reid speaks his mind should be applauded, not derided. His brand of straight talk is honest, comes from the heart and speaks directly to the people.

THE MEMBERS
OF THE SENATE
DEMOCRATIC CAUCUS

John Kerry, who is more experienced with the right-wing smear machine than most, went even further.

You all know what's happening-- and once again, you need to let the media gatekeepers know it. Harry Reid is a tough guy and a good fighter, but he can't change the media narrative all by himself. We all need to speak up and protect our leaders when they speak their mind. Minutes after he let loose with a steady stream of pejoratives about Harry Reid, I hit back at Dick Cheney. And I will continue to do so. It's important ... because if we don't stand up for our leaders no one will. This isn't about policy intricacies or a Democrat's syntax, it's about character-- the character of a good man, Harry Reid, and the character of our Party which needs to stand up when one of our own is unfairly attacked.

And the worst part is, the whole attack is based on a completely out-of-context quote. This is what Harry Reid really said, "And as long as we follow the President's path in Iraq, the war is lost. But there is still a chance to change course-- and we must change course." Any questions? The President's own generals say there is no military solution to the civil war in Iraq, that it requires the political solution the Iraqis have resisted. By the Vice President's standard, are they "uninformed and misleading"?

If you missed seeing how far House will go to invade Wilson's privacy--and Foreman's personal and professional crisis--here's when you can see it

"House Training," the House episode I wrote about last night, the one that was first shown Tuesday night, is scheduled to be shown on USA Network a week from Friday night, May 4, at 11pm EDT. (Don't ask me about other time zones. I don't know from other time zones. Don't you have a therapist or clergyman you can talk to about these things?)

This is the episode in which Dr. Foreman (Omar Epps) undergoes his worst professional crisis, at the same time that he's receiving an unexpected--and not especially welcome--visit from his parents. It's also the episode in which House's obsession with Wilson's private life reaches such preposterous lengths as to make one wonder more than ever what the whole concept of "friendship" means to him. At the same time we wind up learning some mighty interesting things about Wilson.

USA's system, the website explains, is that the Saturday 11pm House slot is devoted to "classic" episodes (i.e., from previous seasons), while current-season episodes are shown in the Friday slot. Except the week after they appear on Fox.

In the interest of fairness, we contemplate the possibility that Idiot Al "The Torture Guy" Gonzales isn't the blithering idiot he seems to be

Of course Harvard may have been happy to have a little of the "diversity" that an itty-bitty Latino from Texas would bring their student body, and the state Supreme Court on which he served as a justice was Texas's, for which I'm not sure you can claim more than partial brain-cell credit. To this day, the principal witness to The Torture Guy's brilliance is his pal George--who, come to think of it, is the one who put our Al on the Texas Supreme Court, and who, come to think of it, has diplomas of his own from Yale and Harvard.

Probably the most persuasive argument that Idiot Al isn't as dumb as he appears to be is that, well, who could be? The answer to that, it appears, is: an eerily large number of the people who've been appointed to positions in the Bush regime.

Is it just the Justice Department or the entire federal government that the Bush regime has turned into "the political arm of the White House"?

"Charges are being made that the Department of Justice was the political arm of the White House."
--Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, this past week on Fox News Sunday

Say what you like about Senator Specter (and I've had some choice things to say about him here), one thing he's not is a dummy. Although the most-quoted comment from his recent Fox News Sunday appearance was, "The attorney general's testimony was very, very damaging to his own credibility," he did make clear that at least in some manner he gets what's being alleged when he noted that "charges are being made that the Department of Justice was the political arm of the White House."

Senator Specter seems to have been referring specifically to the "Purge-Gate" firings of the eight U.S. attorneys, but in fact, the more we learn about the way the Department of Justice has functioned in the Bush regime, the clearer it becomes that "the political arm of the White House" is an exact description of what it has become.

Now that we have a pretty good idea that Paul Charlton, the ousted U.S. attorney in Phoenix, was shitcanned to protect Republicrook Rep. Rick Renzi, then locked in a deadly struggle to hold onto his House seat, from a richly deserved trip to the slammer (see Howie's recap below), we need: (a) a more complete accounting of the investigations that Purge-Gate was designed to derail and, perhaps more important, (b) some accounting of the investigations that have been launched or suppressed for partisan political reasons by all the U.S. attorneys who weren't fired.

As Paul Krugman asked so pointedly, what did those "left behind" U.S. attorneys do to hold onto their jobs? Remember, the best estimate we have is that 80 percent of all prosecutions launched by Bush-regime federal prosecutors have been against Democrats. I'm no probabilities expert, but the chance that this falls anywhere remotely near the bounds of probability for impartial administration of justice seems to me zilch.

While the punditocracy obsesses over the question of whether "Idiot Al" Gonzales should be fired, it's clear that the real problem goes way beyond the cuddly li'l "Torture Guy." When "Idiot Al" tells the world that, rather like Manuel in Fawlty Towers, he knows nothing about what was going on inside the department he was ostensibly running, he is telling us that he was installed as attorney general expressly to serve as a caretaker-stooge presiding over an apparatus that is quite aptly described as "the political arm of the White House."

And not just the DoJ. Already we know about the famous "Let's Go, GOP" pep rally at the General Services Administration in January, presided over by Karl Rove henchman J. Scott Jennings, which has drawn the attention of the Office of Special Counsel for possible Hatch Act violations in attempting to coerce political activity from government employees.

Now it appears that "other shoes" are dropping all over the damned place. In today's Washington Post, R. Jeffrey Smith reports:

White House officials conducted 20 private briefings on Republican electoral prospects in the last midterm election for senior officials in at least 15 government agencies covered by federal restrictions on partisan political activity, a White House spokesman and other administration officials said yesterday.

The previously undisclosed briefings were part of what now appears to be a regular effort in which the White House sent senior political officials to brief top appointees in government agencies on which seats Republican candidates might win or lose, and how the election outcomes could affect the success of administration policies, the officials said.

The White House defense seems to be that the briefings were for the benefit of the various agencies' political appointees, who presumably don't need any stinkin' Hatch Act protections.

Once again as we dig into the muck of the Bush regime, Rep. Henry A. Waxman, in his capacity as chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, appears to be on the job. In connection with the GSA briefing he said: "Politicization of departments and agencies is a serious issue. We need to know more about these and other briefings."

We do indeed. What's being charged now is that, as Senator Specter might put it, the entire federal government has been made to function as the political arm of the White House.

Back in the days of Watergate, when John Dean, then Richard Nixon's White House counsel, was young and still a true-blue Nixonite, as evidence solidified of White House involvement in the break-in and especially the ensuing cover-up, he famously warned his boss--who was famously unfriendly to unfriendly news--that there was "a cancer on the presidency." If there's anyone in the White House today who's in contact with reality, that person might warn, well, anyone who would listen that this presidency is a cancer.


UPDATE FROM HOWIE: WILL YOU BE SURPRISED TO KNOW THAT ROVE & GONZO TRIED TO SAVE RENZI BY FIRING A (REPUBLICAN) U.S. ATTORNEY INVESTIGATING HIS RAMPANT CRIMINAL ACTIVITIES?

It may surprise Washington Post readers, but DWT readers can't possibly be surprised to find out that there was a "questionable" connection between Renzi and the firing of U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton.

The top aide to Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.) called the office of Arizona's U.S. attorney about six weeks before the prosecutor was fired, inquiring about a federal probe into the congressman's role in a land deal that benefited a former business partner and political patron.
The former U.S. attorney, Paul K. Charlton, told House investigators this week that his office alerted the Justice Department's headquarters about the call from Renzi's chief of staff, Brian Murray, because he considered it potentially improper, according to congressional sources who spoke about the probe on the condition of anonymity. Justice rules require prosecutors to report contacts from members of Congress seeking information about investigations.

Doesn't this sound very much like a pattern? Pete "Sneaky Pete" Domenici and his protege stooge, Heather Wilson in New Mexico; "Doc Hastings in Washington; Jerry Lewis in California...

Anyone who thought the Republican Culture of Corruption would disappear with the indictments of key criminal leaders like Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff and Bob Ney, underestimated the influence of political inertia... and of Karl Rove and the degree to which the Bush Regime has politicized the entire machinary of government.


MINI-UPDATE: BYE-BYE RENZI

Rumors of Renzi's resignation from Congress-- now that he's been kicked off all his committees and from the GOP re-election mechanism-- are sweeping the Arizona blogosphere-- and the mainstream media. Tomorrow may be the day. What about Doolittle? Sneaky Pete? Feeney? Jerry Lewis? Abu Gonzo? Heather Wilson?

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY! BUSH'S AND CHENEY'S MISSION HAS INDEED BEEN ACCOMPLISHED: UTTER DISASTER & PLENTY OF WAR PROFITS

Next week is the 4th Anniversary of Chimpy the Prez declaring "Mission Accomplished" in an elaborately staged photo op that was part of his similarly staged re-election bid. Yesterday some of us went to visit Robert Greenwald and his Brave New Films team and they showed us the rough cut of this incredible video clip featuring Steven Connell that looks at "Mission Accomplished," 2007. Click that first link to get to the Brave New Waved contest and petition.

Is Denny Crane a racist? Hard to say, but shouldn't someone tell Chimpy the Prez that Denny's against the war now? (And tell McCain he "can't win"?)

Alan (James Spader) and Denny (William Shatner) digest the day on Boston Legal.

"Anybody in America can grow up to be president, that's what I say. Except Hillary. She wins, I puke."
--Denny Crane, explaining that he might vote for Barack Obama

Since the rain gods don't seem to give any consideration at all to what I'm supposed to watch when they choose to wipe out a given evening's home-team baseball activity, I got to look at my Tuesday Night DVR Twosome, House and Boston Legal, a mere day late this week.

The House episode was just plain spectacular; we really ought to talk about it sometime. It took us ever deeper into the strangely fascinating friendship between Drs. Wilson and House (Robert Sean Leonard and Hugh Laurie, right), and gave Foreman (Omar Epps) an episode of his own, a gripping exploration of fuck-ups, and death, and medical fuck-ups that result in death, and the question of where we come from and who we are--with the great Charles S. Dutton returning as Foreman's father and Beverly Todd appearing memorably as his Alzheimer's-afflicted mother. Wow!

The Boston Legal episode had its moments. It was only to be expected that by the time I started writing about the show, it was about to begin its plunge into the personal crapper to which writer-producer David E. Kelley seems to consign all his creations. It's hard to break the habit, though, and this week's traditional episode-closing scene of best friends Alan Shore and Denny "I'm Denny Crane" Crane nursing their cigars and drinks on Denny's terrace was a corker, ranging through questions of racism, the presidential candidates, the war in Iraq (and, Denny hoped, newer and fresher wars to come), and the fact that America is hated in the rest of the world.

Alan lost his case this week, failing in his attempt, on behalf of a former girlfriend with a six-year-old daughter, to prevent a chain department store from marketing "prosti-tot" dolls to children--and failing honorably to his old friend Jerry "Hands" Espenson.

Denny, meanwhile, who was probably a number of cards short of a full deck even before his affliction with "the mad cow," planted his foot even deeper in his mouth by telling a hotshot young African-American litigator the firm was eager to hire that he doesn't "sound black." But Crane Poole Schmidt's other remaining on-premises name partner, Shirley Schmidt (Candace Bergen, above), managed to rescue Denny by explaining at a press conference that he was speaking in the context of a mostly white law firm that has to cater to the preferences (prejudices?) of a mostly white clientele.

We pick up shortly after the start of the Alan-Denny scene, as Denny--who reminds us regularly that he's never lost a case--muses on Alan's having lost his.

DENNY: What's that like, to lose?

ALAN: You almost lost in a very big way today, my friend.

DENNY: Oh, you should have seen Shirley. If anyone wonders how she got to be Shirley Schmidt, the evidence was on full display today. She was as strong and as powerful and as dignified as any woman I've ever seen. Made me want to flip her on her back and have sex with her.

ALAN [after a pause]: Do you think you're a racist, Denny?

DENNY: Oh . . . no, I . . . I don't know. Do you think it's racist to say a man "sounds black"?

ALAN: I think it's more offensive to say "street" or "urban" when the inference is you mean "black."

DENNY: So what do you say?

ALAN: Well, Barack Obama referred to the "black sound" as a black "idiom," more like jazz and less like a set score.

DENNY: They let him get away with that?

ALAN [laughing]: Evidently.

DENNY: I might vote for him, you know.

ALAN [astonished]: Obama?

DENNY: Anybody in America can grow up to be president, that's what I say. Except Hillary. She wins, I puke.

ALAN [contemplating]: Barack Obama.

DENNY: Yeah. Handsome, great photo op. I don't know what he stands for. [Sudden realization.] Be a perfect president. He speaks perfect white, as well as black--you never heard me say that.

ALAN: What about McCain?

DENNY: He speaks Bu-u-ush now, can't win.

ALAN: Obama is against the war now, you know.

DENNY: So am I. [Alan is startled.] It's boring. I'm ready for a new war. Time to blow up Iran. We got Saddam. Now we've got to get, uh, Aminadouchebag. And that nutjob in North Korea. They've both got to go, and not . . . because . . . they're not white.

ALAN: Okay. Denny, does it bother you at all that America is so hated by the rest of the world?

DENNY: Well, of course it does, Alan. You just can't please everybody. Better to just . . .

ALAN: Blow them up!

DENNY: Exactly. And not . . . because they're not white.

ALAN: No.

As the Bush regime makes a show of fake respect for "Army Families," how much do you figure the Pentagon'll be paying Halliburton for all those "F"s?

Longtime DWT readers are aware that we don't take kindly to the Bush regime's shockingly shameful, not to mention viciously hypocritical, history of abuse of our armed services.

It was bad enough that those vermin, puffed up with their megalomania and war-profiteering greed, put American military lives at risk for the sake of their delusional and bone-headed policies of unilateral aggression. But then to do so without making even a minimal effort to equip and supply those forces adequately, and to subject them to such grotesque overuse (in order to spare themselves having to confront the American people with the reality of their warmongering), in the process pulling apart the lives of all those reservists and National Guardsmen, and going farther than any American government might ever dare to render the country all but defenseless militarily, and finally--the crowning indignity--to treat our wounded and maimed servicepeople with such imperious disdain and ineffective care.

That alone should guarantee that every last scumbag who has participated in the formulation and/or execution of Bush regime foreign policy roasts in hell for eternity.

But then factor in the deliberate and vile hypocrisy, in the form of the monumental campaign of slimification waged by Dick Cheney and his America-loathing Right against authentically patriotic Americans who had the sense--and, it turns out, courage--to ask basic and obvious questions about those hateful and insane policies. For all these years in which the regime bullyboys have played on what they knew, at least in their lucid moments, to be a vicious and vile fabrication, that the questioners "don't support our troops"--well, can we consign them to roast in hell for two eternities?

Now finally, it appears, the Bush regime has recognized some obligation to the families who have been called on to make sacrifices that the Bushbullies would never consider making themselves. Or at least some obligation to Army families--or rather, now, "Army Families."

The customarily vigilant Al Kamen has the story in his Washington Post "In the Loop" column today:

Army Puts an Emphasis on Families

This e-mail from the Army brass was circulating last week:

"The Acting Secretary of the Army and the Chief of Staff, Army have emphasized that Army Families are a key component of our readiness. Army Families shoulder a great burden of sacrifice, supporting their Soldier and often enduring long periods of separation from their loved ones.

"Top notch care and support of Army Families demonstrate our sincere appreciation and gratitude for their many contributions, and allow our Soldiers to fully concentrate on the fight and focus on their duties.

"Effective immediately, the word 'Families' will be capitalized in all Army correspondence. Please ensure wide dissemination of this change. Thanks for your continued efforts to do all you can to provide steadfast support to our Army Families."

Also, Extended Tours, Multiple Deployments, Shortened Home Leave and Other Words Will Be Capitalized From Time To Time, As Deemed Necessary.

No word as of yet from responsible officials about the possibility of "steadfast support" for Navy, Air Force, and Marine families. (And Coast Guard? Merchant Marine?)


IRONIC POSTSCRIPT

I'm not sure "irony" covers dereliction of responsibility on this scale, but did you pause, while reading the above, to reflect: Why exactly is it, again, that we have an "acting" secretary of the Army?

Poor old Francis Harvey was just one of the (now rapidly) growing number of Bush regime hacks being forced to fall on their swords in the regime's increasingly desperate attempt to deflect attention--and of course blame--from its pervasive misdirection, corruption, and incompetence. Former Secretary Harvey retains the distinction of being the highest-ranking regime apparatchik to take a fall for the Walter Reed disgrace, a scandal that should by now have consumed the highest ranks of the Pentagon and then laid siege to the Oval Office.

WHY ARE RABID RIGHT WINGERS BEHAVING MORE LIKE LEMMINGS THESE DAYS THAN USUAL?

Giuliani seemed desperate. Along with the standard Republican election year pablum about raising gasoline prices and lowering taxes for the rich-- except they never mention the gas or who exactly taxes get lowered for-- he was running around screaching that unless he's elected president, the U.S. would be attacked by al-Qaeda. After all, it was Rudy who met the Arab armies on the Hudson and defeated them, right. Yeah, sure-- if you're a Republican primary voters in South Carolina.

Today's issue of the American Conservative leads with an article by Associate Editor, old line reactionary W, James Antle III decrying how this year's conservatism is tied-- with an anchor-- to the Bush-Cheney failed policies in Iraq. "Wartime, the argument goes, is no time for conservatives to demand ideological purity. Or, as Noemie Emery put it in an emblematic essay for The Weekly Standard, 'in a time of national peril, the test is a luxury [conservatives] cannot afford.'"

He cites both pro-choice/pro-gay/pro-immigrant/pro-gun control Giuliani and anti-tax cuts/pro-amnesty/campaign finance reformer crazy old man from Arizona McCain ("between the two of them, they make virtually the entire conservative domestic agenda-- lower taxes, limited government, gun rights, the pro-life cause, and the defense of traditional marriage-- negotiable"). But they're supporting the Bush Regime on Iraq, so for the 28% of Americans who agree with that policy... they're the GOP frontrunners.

In fact, it would be difficult to find a Republican who hews closer to the party line on Iraq than the two frontrunners. McCain is adamant that if U.S. forces were to withdraw, “the consequences would be chaos, genocide, and, sooner or later, we go back.” Or we end up with terrorism on our own soil: “If we come home, bin Laden and [deceased al-Qaeda leader] Zarqawi, they are going to follow us.”

Giuliani agrees. “When you listen to these debates in Congress, and you listen to the politicians debating, you sort of get the impression that they think we’re in control of whether we’re at war or not,” America’s Mayor explained to pundit Sean Hannity. “It doesn’t matter what we think. They’re at war with us. They want to come here and kill us.” ... In many respects, they are more fervent believers in the Bush Doctrine than the current president.

Conservatives hate McCain for many reasons, the most cutting being on the character issue: he's an undependable asshole and egomaniac. But they have specific ideologically-based problems with him too, even though his voting record is excruciatingly right-wing and couldn't be called anything other than extremist by anyone with 2 brain cells to rub together. But what the greed and selfishness wing of the party will never forgive him is his opposition to endless tax cuts for millionaires and his refusal to toe the party line, if just on that one vote. "McCain’s rationale for opposing the second President Bush’s tax cuts sounded much like Ted Kennedy’s. The Arizona senator said, 'I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us at the expense of middle-class Americans who need tax relief.'" This and other tax stands by McCain, writes Antle III should disqualify him from being considered for the presidency by the wingnuts but instead even some of the most rabid greed-and-selfishness caucus spokesmen, like Lawrence Kudlow, support him. And Antle III makes the obvious case that Giuliani is even worse, from a far right perspective, mostly because he's pro-choice.

Nevertheless, Giuliani now leads in every national poll. A plurality of Republicans seem ready to nominate a man who, as mayor of New York City, issued proclamations celebrating Planned Parenthood Day, donated money to the hard-line pro-choice group NARAL, and spoke glowingly about the “distinguished tradition” begun by Margaret Sanger. In some surveys, he leads his nearest rival by double-digit margins.

Many wingnuts however will never support either McCain or Giuliani. "The anti-tax Club for Growth has pilloried McCain’s economic record, and the Arizona senator has been equally hostile to them. James Dobson, a leading religious conservative, has said flatly that he would not vote for either Giuliani or McCain in the general election. A high percentage of Republicans don’t know the full extent of Giuliani’s social liberalism. A Wall Street Journal poll found that a majority of the former mayor’s own supporters would have reservations about backing a pro-choice, pro-gay unions candidate."

Six in ten Republicans are dissatisfied with what they're being offered. Many would rather lose with Newt. Otherwise the entire GOP strategy comes down to one thing: "It's the War, stupid." According to one far-right loon writer for the GOP propaganda sheet Weekly Standard, "Iraq 'overwhelms everything as the major issue in the eyes of the base.' While Giuliani is pro-choice, he should be preferable to conservatives because '[t]hey see him as a more ruthless George W. Bush.' Giuliani 'would have taken Falluja the first time,' for example, or 'would not have been fazed by whining over Abu Ghraib and Club Gitmo, and would have treated critics of the armed forces and of the mission with the same impatience he showed critics of the police in New York.'" The same kook said she would rather vote for Joe Lieberman than Brownback or Hagel, who don't support Bush as strongly as the ex-Democrat. Even across-the-board far-right nutcase and Cheney shill Hugh Hewitt says, "For a majority of the GOP primary electorate, it is the war, the war, the war."

And somehow these imbeciles having watched-- and enabled-- George Bush and the Republican Party, grievously damage the national security of our country, somehow think that either ex-prisoner of war McCain or the mayor of the city that got bombed who didn't hide under a desk the way Bush did would somehow be the best leader. Because they're both Bush mini-Me's? Neocon con artist William Kristol of the Weekly Standard has been campaigning for Lieberman to be the GOP vice presidential nominee based almost solely on his rabid support for Bush's Iraq agenda-- and at the same time he's screaming that the 17 Repugs in the House who voted against Bush's escalation should all get primary challengers.

Antle III is less sure than his extremist fellow-travellers that nothing matters but continuing Bush's unpopular endless occupation of Iraq. "The conservative domestic agenda is already stalled under a president who supposedly agrees with most of it. Territory ceded to leaders who don’t may be impossible to reclaim... To say that conservatives can compromise on first principles but cannot disagree about how best to wage the war on terror is to urge the abandonment of the issues that built the Republican majority in favor of the issue that tore it down. Conservatives who surrender on every other fight in exchange for the single-issue hawks’ promises of victory are accepting a fool’s bargain.


Ken says: YOU KNOW WHAT'S TRULY BIZARRE ABOUT THIS?

So, we're told, the war in Iraq is now overwhelmingly "the" issue of the right-wing base? To the extent that for many of them it obliterates all other issues?

But this isn't even a "conservative" issue. There's nothing about conservatism that makes the invasion and occupation of Iraq part of its packet of issues. What seems to have happened is that the Moron Conservative Movement adopted the grossest moron of them all, Chimpy the Prez, as its figurehead and then--ever eager to shut those delicate brains off--revamped its approach to ideology such that what's "conservative" is now defined as "What Chimpy Sez." It's true that Chimpy throws hard-core movement conservatives ideological bones with religious-type stuff like opposition to stem-cell research and, well, whatever "position" was being advanced in the disgraceful Terry Schiavo episode. But mostly that provides cover for doing the bidding of the high-capitalist "greed and selfishness" conservatives.

How on earth did this become the bottom-line conservative issue when the Bush regime still hasn't told us why we were invading Iraq? (Of course we have been told why we have to stay the course . . . er, why we have to stay now that we're there: to win!)

Remember, when the Bush regime neocons first signaled the intention to invade Iraq, the loudest opposition came from conservatives, who pointed out, among other things, that this had nothing to do with the conservative agenda. Of course once the invasion became official Bush doctrine, and therefore by extension official moron-conservative doctrine (see above), the conservatives who opposed it seem to have vanished from the face of the earth.

MORE REPUBLICANS CALL FOR GONZALES TO STEP DOWN-- LOTS MORE

After Congressman Doody (R-FL) jumped on the Dump Abu Gonzo bandwagon last week, I started to lose track of all the Republicans with their fingers to the wind calling on Bush's hideous Attorney General to resign or be fired. So while Bush reiterated his complete confidence in Abu G-- going so far as to say that his confidence in the man no one else has any confidence in at all "had grown after the attorney general's performance at the Judiciary Committee hearing Thursday"-- although Bush later admitted he hadn't even watched "the performance"-- all the vulnerable GOP senators who have to face voters next year urged Gonzales to take a powder.

Senator Leahy liked Bush's endorsement of Gonzo to his "Heckuva job, Brownie" statement in the wake of the botched FEMA disaster after Katrina. Ron Brownstein, in today's L.A. Times was even less circumspect-- about Bush.

GEORGE W. BUSH'S presidency is devolving into an extended holding action. On too many fronts, his top priority now appears to be delaying the inevitable.

Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former Defense secretary, once described the Iraqi resistance as a few "dead-enders" who refused to acknowledge that the world around them had changed. Increasingly that phrase applies as a self-portrait for the administration that Rumsfeld served. Forget "the decider." Bush has become the dead-ender.

Today's batch of Republican cowards included Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Susan Collins (Lieberman Party-ME), and Norm Coleman (R-MN), while Kentucky's Little Miss Popularity (with an approval rating of 38%-- just 30% higher than Cheney's) is urging fellow Republicans to bury their heads in the sand-- something, as a longtime denizen of dark closets-- he's very comfortable with. As with all things-- and perhaps the reason we're in such a mess now, McConnell "deferred to Bush, who said this week that Gonzales’ April 19 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee had reaffirmed his support for Gonzales. 'The attorney general works for the president,' said Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. That's why they call him Bush's "bitch," that good old rubber stampin' attitude in the face of... well, everything.


UPDATE: EVEN CRAZY OLD McCAIN SAYS ABU GONZO SHOULD RESIGN

With his head having been firmly up Bush's aqss for the last 2 years, McCain has been loathe to say anything that would make Chimpy the Prez twitch. Last night on CNN's Larry King Show, however, McCain finally came around and agreed that Gonzales has to go. “Out of loyalty to the president, he should obviously step down,” McCain said. “He’s not serving the president well. I reached that conclusion a long time ago but no one asked me."

DICK CHENEY-- THE DARK FORCE FOR PURE EVIL ON THE AMERICAN POLITICAL LANDSCAPE

Indicted money launderer and Jack Abramoff conspirator, Tom DeLay is screaming that the Democrats are "close to treason" and the GOP hate machine is making an all-out push to smear Harry Reid as a "defeatist" for saying what between 60 and 70% of Americans say-- that the Iraq war is lost if we just keep following Bush's disastrous agenda. And, between running from doctor to doctor today, Cheney popped into Congress to spray his own personal vitriol all over the American political dialogue and slime the Senate Democratic leader.

Is it time to take a garden hoe or rake and chop off the head of the snake? Dennis Kucinich thinks there's a constitutional way to do so. He's introduced H. Res 333 articles of impeachment against Cheney, a great start. He's seeking to charge Cheney on 3 big counts:

* Manipulating intelligence to fabricate a threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction
* Manipulating intelligence to fabricate a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda
* Openly threatening aggression against Iran absent any real threat to the United States

I spoke with Nancy Pelosi on the phone for a long time today and she went on a bit about why it would be a waste of time and energy to impeach Bush. I know she's right in many ways. But I don't agree with her. Leaving Bush in office-- not even trying to remove him, is a stain on the soul of our nation. It's time. We're well beyond a Senate no confidence vote in Gonzales. The time for symbolic gestures is past.

This morning's NY Times covered Kucinich's news conference. "
The event was originally planned for noon, but Kucinich initially postponed it based on news reports Cheney was undergoing emergency medical treatment for a chronic blood clot condition in his leg. When subsequent news reports indicated the tests were more routine, Kucinich rescheduled the event... Speaking at the news conference, Kucinich said he was pursuing impeachment of Cheney, and not Bush, for practical reasons. 'It’s significant and responsible to start in this way, because if the same charges would relate to the president as relate to the vice president, you would then have to go through the constitutional agony of impeaching two presidents consecutively,' he said."

The resolution concludes like this:

In all this, Vice President Richard B. Cheney has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as vice president, and subversive to constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and justice and the manifest injury of the people of the United States . . . [and] by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office.

RENZI UNLIKELY TO RUN FOR RE-ELECTION-- EVEN IF HE DOESN'T WIND UP BEHIND BARS

Today was a bad day for crooked Republican congressman Rick Renzi. The world is caving in on this schnook. He's been a greedy little piggy and he deserves what he gets. The right-wing Arizona Republic alerted low-info constituents about what he's been up to, so flying under the radar and avoiding controversy is no longer an option. The jig is up.

The Republican House caucus had already kicked him off the House Intelligence Committee and today they really made him feel like a pariah by telling him to leave all his other committee positions and by throwing him out of ROMP, the committee that tries to save the most endangered and vulnerable GOP congressmen. They don't allow convicted felons or even indicted or, apparently, about-to-be-indicted felons on the list. Like with the Intelligence Committee, the spin is that Renzi voluntarily resigned from ROMP (Regain Our Majority Program). It really is the kiss of death for any chance to retain the seat, which he won with a scant 51% of the vote last November. He spent $2,246,790 last year, most of it from Big Business legal bribes. That has all dried up now.


UPDATE: GONZALES AND RENZI SITTIN' IN A TREE?

Today's Wall Street Journal is on the warpath protecting free market capitalism by attacking corruption. They're wondering if Gonzales protected Renzi from federal investigators before last year's congressional elections, where the local prosecutor's office "faced unexpected obstacles in getting needed Justice Department approvals to advance a corruption investigation of Republican Rep. Rick Renzi, people close to the case said. The delays, which postponed key approvals in the case until after the election, raise new questions about whether Attorney General Alberto Gonzales or other officials may have weighed political issues in some investigations. The Arizona U.S. attorney then overseeing the case, Paul Charlton, was told he was being fired in December, one of eight federal prosecutors dismissed in the past year. The dismissals have triggered a wave of criticism and calls from Congress for Mr. Gonzales to resign. Investigators pursuing the Renzi case had been seeking clearance from senior Justice Department officials on search warrants, subpoenas and other legal tools for a year before the election, people close to the case said."

SPECIAL ELECTION TO FILL THE SEAT IN CA-37

My bud Roland teaches elementary school in Compton. I am certain that "Mr. C's Life Lessons" will have a greater impact on his kids than anything he has to force on them under "No Child Left Behind." I rarely ever have a conversation with him when his enthusiasm for his young charges doesn't come bursting forth. A lot of his kids are poor and most of them are the children of immigrants; many are immigrants themselves. In a society that does not value teachers-- just look at what a school teacher makes compared to... well almost anyone-- Roland feels that the parents of his students value him tremendously. They respect him and love him for the effort he puts in with their kids. These parents put tremendous value on the power of education.

The native born kids' parents, in his experience, are another case altogether. Roland worries every day that the homelife of his many of his young African-American students-- he teaches third grade-- aren't nearly as conducive to learning and valueing education as are the values being taught in the homes of the immigrant students.

Compton used to be an overwhelmingly African-American city. It's overwhelmingly Latino now. But the mayoralty and most of the high level appointed positions are held by African-Americans. And Compton-- along with much of Long Beach-- are the heart of the 37th congressional district. This is the district that was so well-represented by Juanita Millender-McDonald for the last decade and a half.

Congresswoman Millender-McDonald succumbed to cancer Sunday. (Roland claims the air in the district is so polluted from industry that he expects that everyone there will die from cancer, including himself. There's some kind of chemical plant right near the school that belches pollutants into the air and has caused him and his students to get sick and throw up.)

Carson Mayor Jim Dear said Millender-McDonald had colon cancer that had metastasized to her liver. "She was very active and working hard for the people of the 37th Congressional District all the way up until the end," he said. "She was always there to help people in need." ... Under state law, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has 14 days to set a date for a special election to fill her seat. Overwhelmingly Democratic, communities in the 37th District have reflected the demographic shifts across much of Los Angeles County-- in recent decades, largely African American areas have become increasingly Latino. Millender-McDonald's death is likely to set off "a major scramble" for her seat, said Dymally, who was California's lieutenant governor in the mid-1970s.

The Sacramento Bee also envisions the same major scramble. "With few blacks in Congress, African American leaders often put an emphasis on replacing one black politician with another." But the district has changed and many of the local African-American officeholders in the area are very old, like Assemblymen Mel Dymally (80) and State Senator Ed Vincent (72). More likely is another state senator, Jenny Oropeza, a progressive who represents the area south of Compton. Freshman Assemblywoman Laura Richardson, whose 55th Assembly District covers Carson and dips down into Long Beach, is another potential candidate and African American. Unfortunately she isn't very progressive and she has a reputation for being no friend of the gay community's. The congressional district is 43% Latino, compared to about 25 percent for African-Americans and 17 percent for whites.

Our pal Joshua Grossman from Progressive Punch shared an analysis of the potential race with the California Progress Report this morning.

Approximately 369,000 of the district's residents are in Long Beach, 93,000 from Compton, 90,000 from Carson, and only about 33,000 are in the Los Angeles portion of the district.

...State Senator Jenny Oropeza has been listed in the print media as one potential entrant. Although her current Senate seat has only 15% of the Congressional District, she is from Long Beach and would be a strong contender, according to Grossman.

Senators Alan Lowenthal and Edward Vincent represent about 40% of the Congressional District in their respective Senate Districts.

Three Assemblymembers, represent portions of the 37th Congressional District: newly elected Laura Richardson (approximately 38%), Betty Karnette (30%), and Mervyn Dymally (30%). In fact much of what is in the Congressional District was represented by Dymally when he was in Congress and he is an icon, having been Lieutenant Governor of the state and in office for virtually all of the last 4 decades.

Although Richardson has served on the Long Beach City Council, being newly elected to the Assembly, Grossman wondered if she would run for Congress. He also looked at the ages of others and wondered if they would want to be commuting to Washington, D.C. Oropeza, to his mind, approaching age 50 might be the best shot, although he handicapped Lowenthal as another strong competitor.

A PORTRAIT IN REPUBLICAN HYPOCRISY-- C.W. BILL YOUNG, UNDERMINING U.S. TROOPS IN IRAQ, JUST LIKE HE DID AT WALTER REED

Like many Americans, it's physically difficult for me to listen to George Bush's defensive, whiny, passive-aggressive yowling these days. It's a really ugly sound-- like fingernails on a chalkboard-- regardless of the topic. I don't think "Bush fatigue" even begins to describe it. And nothing I do hear from him pisses me off more than his twisted Rovian talking points about how the Democratic Congressional leadership is trying to micromanage the war instead of letting "the men in uniform" do it. The hypocrisy drips from this creature's every pore. Every single time a professional military officer tried warning Bush or Cheney or Rumsfeld that their incompetent harebrained schemes were nonstarters, they were fired and their careers destroyed.

Today one of the worst Bush Regime asslickers, a worthless, honorless rubber stamp who should be driven from office by patriots in his Florida district, repeated the same line of garbage. We've come across right wing loon C.W. Bill Young before-- when it turned out that he made the conscious decision to let wounded American soldiers lay in vermin infested rooms at Walter Reed rather than do his job and embarrass the Regime. Today this sleazy apologist for Bush and Cheney is using more twisted logic to put forward the right-wing meme in favor of endless war.

The Army Times is reporting that Young is whining that Congress shouldn't manage the conduct of war.

Rep. C.W. “Bill” Young, R-Fla., said catastrophe always follows when civilians turn a deaf ear to their military officers.

In the 2003 run-up to the war, Young said in an interview, administration officials dismissed a top Army officer’s estimate that securing Iraq would probably require several hundred thousand troops.

“I just don’t think that it’s a good idea for us here in the Congress to try to manage the conduct of the war,” Young, a military appropriations expert, told his colleagues during a meeting Monday.

So Young thinks Congress should just abdicate it's responsibility and let Bush's failed policies spin further out of control, the same way he abdicated his own responsibilities to wounded soldiers at Water Reed? Bush and Cheney-- two of the least competent elected officials to ever get control of a military force-- haven't a clue how to handle the war they started in Iraq. It is Congress' job to get us out of the mess these maniacs have dragged us into. Young should be tossed onto history's trash heap at the first opportunity for being a shameful partisan enabler for these two criminals while Bush's puppet regime in Iraq falls apart and the increasingly anti-American insurgency goes, violently, from bad to worse.


UPDATE: DOES THIS SOUND LIKE A BUCKLE TO YOU?

In about an hour I'll be on a conference call with the House Leadership and maybe I should wait before I write about this. So just let me quote the CongressDaily:

House and Senate negotiators approved a $124.2 billion war supplemental spending bill Monday that includes a "goal" of withdrawing combat troops from Iraq by April 1, 2008, and troop readiness standards that could be waived by the president.

No comment... for now.

DCCC ROCKS THE HOUSE-- TOTALLY

Watch this devastatingly kewl video and I'll tell you how you'll know DWT hasn't moved inside the Beltway to work for the DCCC. It might be difficult to figure out just by the content of the video. But I'll give you the telling clues: no pictures of Emanuel or Hoyer. Other than that... it is so completely awesome: best political video of the year so far. Don't you think?



Hey! Where's Gary Miller? And what about Jerry Lewis? Renzi? Young? Feeney? This song rocks so hard. And there are certainly enough Republicrooks so that there's no need for an edited version.

A REAL INVESTIGATION OF ROVE? OR A WELL-PLANNED WHITEWASH?

One of the primary reasons-- after Bush's imperious, despotic attitude and petulance-- for the Regime holding onto the corpse of Alberto Gonzales and calling it the Attorney General, is because they fear that he's just the appetizer and that the main course is Karl Rove. Since Karl Rove is generally considered the brains behind the whole crime mob that has infested the Executive Branch, this isn't an unreasonable theory.

This morning's L.A. Times has a story by Tom Hamburger about a low-key office launching a high-profile inquiry into the arch-villain of American politics.

Most of the time, an obscure federal investigative unit known as the Office of Special Counsel confines itself to monitoring the activities of relatively low-level government employees, stepping in with reprimands and other routine administrative actions for such offenses as discriminating against military personnel or engaging in prohibited political activities.

But the Office of Special Counsel is preparing to jump into one of the most sensitive and potentially explosive issues in Washington, launching a broad investigation into key elements of the White House political operations that for more than six years have been headed by chief strategist Karl Rove.

The new investigation, which will examine the firing of at least one U.S. attorney, missing White House e-mails, and White House efforts to keep presidential appointees attuned to Republican political priorities, could create a substantial new problem for the Bush White House.

First, the inquiry comes from inside the administration, not from Democrats in Congress. Second, unlike the splintered inquiries being pressed on Capitol Hill, it is expected to be a unified investigation covering many facets of the political operation in which Rove played a leading part.

Hamburger writes that the decision to investigate Rove "is the latest evidence that Rove's once-vaunted operations inside the government, which helped the GOP hold the White House and Congress for six years, now threaten to mire the administration in investigations. The question of improper political influence over government decision-making is at the heart of the controversy over the firing of U.S. attorneys and the ongoing congressional investigation of the special e-mail system installed in the White House and other government offices by the Republican National Committee. All administrations are political, but this White House has systematically brought electoral concerns to Cabinet agencies in a way unseen previously."

The Office of Special Counsel has never bitten off a mouthful like this before. It stems from Rove's obvious violations of the Hatch Act and  from his interference into the office of David Iglesias on behalf of crooked Republican rubber stamps Pete "Sneaky Pete" Domenici and Heather Wilson.

Hamburger writes that the L.A. Times has learned that there were other presentation, to other government agencies like the one illegally given at GSA-- and that some were given by Rove himself. "During such presentations, employees said they got a not-so-subtle message about helping endangered Republicans."

Some officials have said they understood that they were expected to seek opportunities to help Republicans in these races, through federal grants, policy decisions or in other ways.

A former Interior Department official, Wayne R. Smith, who sat through briefings from Rove and his then-deputy Ken Mehlman, said that during President Bush's first term, he and other appointees were frequently briefed on political priorities.

"We were constantly being reminded about how our decisions could affect electoral results," Smith said.

Or is this merely a ploy to preempt Waxman? As my friend Buzz pointed out, "How can someone appointed by Bush be independent?"


UPDATE: PERPARE FOR THE WHITEWASH

So my instincts were correct; the head of the Office of the Special Counsel, Scott Bloch, is a corrupt toady, a complete lackey of the Bush Regime and under investigation himself! This is strictly a whitewash and an attempt to derail a serious investigation of Rove. The L.A. Times story cited above "failed to inform its readers that Bloch had been accused of retaliating against employees who disagreed with his policies, and intimidating them before they were questioned about a whistle-blower investigation inside the Office of the Special Counsel. The whistle-blower probe was launched by the White House's Office of Personnel Management inspector general nearly two years ago, according to a February 16, 2007 story in the Washington Post." In fact Discourse.net asks a crucial question about the investigation:

I wonder if the purpose of this move isn’t to insulate Rove and others. Now, they have an excuse not to answer any questions. If Congress calls, they all take the 5th — “Would love to talk but I’m being investigated by the OSC.” Ditto for the White House press office — “we never comment on pending investigations” (afterwards they say, “we already dealt with that,” but I’m getting ahead of myself).
Is it too paranoid to expect a memo saying that they failed to prove anything beyond reasonable doubt — in Dec 2008? Or maybe just before the Nov 2008 election? After all, the OSC has a record of just closing cases without review in order to be able to report a lower number of backlogged cases.
So far, everything about this administration has been worse than anyone might reasonably have expected. Why should this be any different?
I can see Rove chuckling now, ‘Please OSC, don’t throw me in that briar patch!’

NEXT CROOKED REPUBLICAN CONGRESSMEN TO BE CHARGED? HINT: WHAT DO ALASKA AND FLORIDA HAVE IN COMMON?

So you know all about the FBI raids on crooked Republican congressmen Rick Renzi (R-AZ) and John Doolittle. And you've already figured that they're both probably going to resign and go to prison, just like Bob Ney and Duke Cunningham. And now you want to know who's next. I know you want it to be Jerry Lewis and Duncan Hunter. I do too. But it looks like two other GOP congressmen have been clamoring for legal attention even louder: Alaskan pork king Don Young and the bribe-taking Orlando crook Tom Feeney.

Feeney, like Ney, Doolittle and DeLay, was in cahoots with Abramoff. Like them, he was on the receiving end of plenty of goodies. It's up to the feds to figure out and prove what he did in return. He claims he's "cooperating" but, of course, that's a complete lie and he'll never admit anything until he's presented with the irrefutable evidence of his own criminality. Then he'll say he was an alcoholic or high on pain killers or something. CREW pegs him as one of the 20 most unethical and corrupt members of Congress. Brad at the BradBlog has been building an even more disturbing case against Feeney for a couple of years.

We've been covering the corrupt Congressman in great detail for years in relation to claims by Florida computer programmer, Clint Curtis, that he'd asked him to create a vote-rigging software prototype when they worked together at a software firm in 2000 while Feeney was serving as a registered lobbyist for the company even while he was Speaker of the Florida House. We originally broke that story in December 2004. A summary version is here.

Let's hope Curtis saved those "Clint Curtis for Congress" signs. He may need them again sooner than he might have thought.

Now the case against Don Young is more garden variety and he's going down by the tried and true FBI method of catching a little piggie and making him squeal, the same way they did with Ney, Cunningham and Doolittle. In Young's case, the little piggy-- Abramoff-connected, of course, is Mark Zachares. His plea bargain comes today.

According to the document, Zachares and Abramoff had what they called their "two year plan": Zacheres would work for Abramoff on the inside, taking advantage of his congressional position to throw business Abramoff's way, and eventually, when Zachares left Congress, Abramoff would reward him. As the information reads: Abramoff "would 'credit' Zachares with the 'business' Zachares... referred or developed for Abramoff's firm, and would ultimately employ Zachares as a lobbyist credited 'with business,' warranting a high annual salary."

In addition to the usual stream of junkets, meals, and sports tickets, Abramoff also funneled $10,000 to Zachares through one of his phony charities. In return, Zachares referred clients and provided a number of favors for Abramoff's various clients.

The document does not implicate Rep. Young, but it does mention that in 2002, Abramoff "assisted Zachares in obtaining his position as a staffer on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee," which Young chaired. And Young has come up often in the course of the Abramoff scandal.

DO YOU THINK THE ONLY KIND AND GENEROUS PEOPLE WITH LOVE IN THEIR HEARTS ARE DEMOCRATS? WRONG!

"This is for your own good; candy is bad for you"

That's right. There are certain types of kindness practiced by Republicans. You don't believe me? Watch this video.

YOU MAY THINK REPUBLICANS IN NEBRASKA ARE JUST A BUNCH OF NARROW-MINDED HICKS BUT DID YOU EVER CONSIDER THEY ARE ACTUALLY WARMONGERS TO BOOT?

Nebraska is one screwed up place politically. You want to talk about backward? The Republicans there are almost on a Utah level. The 3 congressmen are all extremist right wing loons, the governor is a kook and of the two "moderate" US Senators, one is a Democrat-- Ben Nelson-- who votes with the Republicans more than with the Democrats (and almost makes Lieberman look moderate!) and the other-- Chuck Hagel-- has a voting record that is so extreme right wing that it boggles the mind ... but he's in trouble back home because he isn't perceived as extreme enough!

Trouble? Oh yes. But not in trouble for that godawful voting record. He's in trouble because it isn't godawful enough and because he hasn't been supportive enough of Bush and Cheney for the tastes of Nebraska Republicans. Another extremist, Nebraska's lunatic Attorney General. Jon Bruning, is promising to be an even bigger right-wing rubber stamp than Hagel has been. One could hardly be a worse rubber stamp voting wise, but I guess you could just send the Democrats bad vibes and say nice things about Cheney on TV.

Bruning is challenging Hagel in the upcoming GOP primary. "Tying Hagel to Democratic opponents of the Iraq war and peace activist Cindy Sheehan, Bruning said he’s preparing to challenge the two-term senator in next year’s Republican primary election." If Bruning is elected he'll feel right at home in the GOP caucus and on the Republican propaganda outlets like Hannity and Limbaugh:

“Hagel has voted with Democrats on every major issue dealing with Iraq” during the past month, the attorney general said in a telephone interview after returning to Nebraska from a fundraising trip to Washington.

“When he suggested impeachment as a remedy, that crossed the line,” Bruning said.  “Impeachment smacks of vengeance and anger.

“The only other person I’ve heard talking about that is Cindy Sheehan.”

He echoes all the Rove talks points, especially about how the war in Iraq is being won. On top of that, he's a vicious xenophobe and racist and wants to take on Hagel as not being anti-Latino enough. "The Hagel plan," he says, "rewards those who came here illegally. We need to be very careful about a plan that encourages people to break the law. We cannot have amnesty as part of the plan."

Today Bruning released a survey claiming he'd beat Hagel by 9 points among likely Republican primary voters. There's not usually much drama in Nebraska politics; that may change this year. There's even a little tiny chance that ex-Senator Bob Kerrey, currently president of the New School in NYC, might run. That doesn't sound likely to me.

ANOTHER SAGA COMING TO AN END: JOHN DOOLITTLE, REPUBLICAN CRIMINAL FROM ROSEVILLE, CALIFORNIA

Earlier today, I mentioned in an update to a story on another crooked Republican congressman, extortionist Rick Renzi (R-AZ), that it's hard to blame the "librul media" when the charges against you are on page one of the Wall Street Journal. There's an even more damaging place for charges against a rightist than that-- the WSJ's editorial page, the most ideologically far right spot anywhere short of the Rush Limbaugh show. And today, the editors of the Journal took a closer look at John Doolittle... and threw up. John Fund wielded the scalpel and his first words are absolutely devastating: "It's sad when someone you've known for decades gets in trouble and you're not surprised."

No one who's been reading DWT for the last couple of years could be surprised either. John Doolittle, who plays the part of an upright Mormon, has been one of the 3 or 4 most unethical and corrupt members of Congress. He-- and his wife-- are destined for prison.

After the FBI raided the home of California's Rep. John Doolittle this month in search of records from the fundraising company run by his wife, Julie, Republican House leaders didn't wait even a day before they pressured him to step down from his seat on the powerful Appropriations Committee. Everyone knows that such a raid only occurs after a judge has issued a search warrant in response to government claims that there is probable cause a crime has been committed.

In Mr. Doolittle's case, it appears the FBI is exploring allegations that Mrs. Doolittle received thousands of dollars from lobbyist turned felon Jack Abramoff for phantom work in exchange for favors Mr. Doolittle might have performed for Abramoff clients.

Fund recites kaddish over the corpse of Doolittle's reprehensible political career. "...his congressional career is over. Last year, publicity about his ties to Mr. Abramoff caused his popularity to plummet. He won re-election by only 3% in a district President Bush carried by 24% in 2004. Now he is almost certain to face a primary challenge from a local GOP state legislator, as Republicans scramble to make sure the seat stays in their hands."

As many bloggers have been doing for weeks now, Fund drew the glaring comparisons between ex-congressman Bob Ney, another DeLay/Abramoff crook who is now in prison, and his pal Doolittle.

Mr. Ney was brought down in large part because Neil Volz, his former chief of staff who later went to work for Mr. Abramoff, cooperated with prosecutors in building their case. The Sacramento Bee reports that Kevin Ring, a former Doolittle aide who also later worked in Mr. Abramoff's office, also "sought help from the congressman on behalf of [Abramoff] clients and now is believed to be talking to federal prosecutors." Mr. Ring resigned from his position at a Washington law firm on the very day Mr. Doolittle's home was raided by the FBI.

The funniest part of Fund's piece though is how he's trying to distance the Right from one of their mot stalwart members. Doolittle has been a complete Bush rubber stamp with one of the most reactionary and extremist voting records in the entire Congress-- to the right of Atilla the Hun. Yet Fund wants to talk about him cooperating with Maxine Waters and make out like "shoveling pork" wasn't an integral part of the GOP Culture of Corruption. 

At least Fund acknowledges that "Mr. Doolittle's fall from grace will no doubt be used as evidence for how the Republican Congress lost its way during its 12 years in power. And it's true that the onetime reformer has morphed into a symbol of much of what he used to fight against... A couple of his House colleagues think so too. One said that the former term-limits opponent had himself 'become a walking advertisement for them.' Another remarked on the changes he had seen in the man. 'John isn't the ideological conservative he used to be. He talks more and more like a lawyer making the best case for whatever he's doing right now.' Sadly, regarding Mr. Doolittle's efforts to remain in Congress I fear he has a weak case and a bad client."

Whether Doolittle manages to hand on 'til November '08-- unlikely-- or if there's a Special Election to fill his seat between now and then, Charlie Brown is going to need all the help he can get against the Forces of Darkness and Repression. If you oppose Darkness and Oppression, try this. Thanks.

ABU GONZALES-- THE NEVER ENDING SOON TO END SAGA

One more time, Karl; who stays and who goes?

The Bush Regime doesn't count Republican Senator Arlen Specter among its most reliable stooges, although he has been a fairly dependable rubber stamp (even more so than Lieberman) for most of their hideous agenda. At one point they threatened to disregard his seniority and not allow him to become Chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Apparently they got him to agree to a certain amount of toein' the line and he was chairman, until the Democrats swept half a dozen Republicans out of the Senate in November-- and Specter and the rest of the Republicans out of their committee chairs. It looks like support for Alberto Gonzales wasn't part of the toein' the line extracted from Snarlin' Arlen. Yesterday he suggested it's time for Gonzales to say goodbye. A failure to do so, he said on Fox News Sunday, would be "no doubt, bad for the Justice Department."

Republicans made their anger at him clear in a blistering hearing over the dismissals on Thursday. In his testimony, Mr. Gonzales cited a faulty memory at least 50 times in responding to questions about the dismissals.

After the hearing, aides to Mr. Gonzales reportedly called the absence of a demand for his resignation from Mr. Specter a “positive barometer.” But Mr. Specter said Sunday that they were misreading him.

“I don’t think they should be celebrating that, because the attorney general’s testimony was very, very damaging to his own credibility,” he said. “Charges are being made that the Department of Justice was the political arm of the White House.”

Mr. Specter said that it was up to President Bush to demand a resignation, but that Mr. Gonzales’s presence “is bad for the Department of Justice.”

“It is harmful,” he said. “There has been a very substantial decrease in morale. There’s no doubt about that.”

In today's Newsweek Michael Isikoff writes that "GOP senators-- hoping for a strong performance-- were visibly pained when Gonzales couldn't remember a crucial Nov. 27, 2006, meeting (noted on his calendar), when he was briefed by his chief of staff about the firing plan. "Senator, I have searched my memory. I have no recollection of the meeting," Gonzales told GOP Sen. Jeff Sessions. The A.G. was even unable to recall a meeting where President Bush passed along complaints about the three U.S. attorneys-- a talk that Bush himself has publicly recalled. (Gonzales said he now "understands" he had such a conversation.) With that performance, Gonzales lost the Hill."

Congressman Doody (R-FL), the third-ranking Republican in the House leadership is just a little twit but when he called for Gonzo to step down Friday he was speaking for the entire GOP House leadership-- the "position that a group of top House GOPers privately delivered to Bush earlier in the month. 'He's done something I didn't think possible. He's lost the confidence of almost all the Republicans in Congress,' said one top GOP strategist who is close to the White House, anonymous when talking about sensitive personnel matters. A big GOP concern: Gonzales's continued presence will make it hard to move measures important to the party's base, like immigration reform, through the judiciary committees, said the strategist."

At this point, though, the entire affair is about petulant Bush's childish sense of ego. "One White House adviser (who asked not to be ID'ed talking about sensitive issues) said the support reflected Bush's own view that a Gonzales resignation would embolden the Dems to go after other targets-- like Karl Rove. 'This is about Bush saying, "Screw you",' said the adviser, conceding that a Gonzales resignation might still be inevitable. The trick, said the adviser, would be to find a graceful exit strategy for Bush's old friend."

One of the fired prosecutors, David Iglesias, said that if this was his case he'd be putting Gonzales aside for now-- since he said he doesn't know anything about anything-- and start some serious investigations into Karl Rove and his White House operation.


UPDATE: EVEN A RIGHTIST HACK LIKE GINGRICH TELLS BUSH TO PULL HIS HEAD OUT OF HIS ASS AND GET RID OF ABU GONZO

Newt Gingrich, a Republican who wants to be president, "chastised Bush on ABC's This Week for letting 'personal loyalty transcend service to the nation' by not forcing Gonzales to step down." Like all but the most narrowly partisan DC gameplayers, he told Bush to get rid of him for the good of America.

GAY MARRIAGE IN NEW YORK-- SPITZER MOVES IT UP A NOTCH

In the last couple of days DWT had two posts about gays people moving towards equality, on involving New Hampshire and one involving Washington. Today's New York Times says New York's governor, Eliot Spitzer, wants to go further than either.

Gov. Eliot Spitzer will introduce a bill in the coming weeks to legalize same-sex marriage in New York, his spokeswoman said Friday, a move that would propel New York to the forefront of one of the most contentious issues in politics.

New York would join Massachusetts in marriage equality if the bill passes. Connecticut is considering similar legislation. But that's a big "if." Both the Assembly and the Senate in New York are run by corrupt, entrenched reactionaries, one old line Democrat, Sheldon Silver, and one Republican, Joey Bruno. The chances of a gay marriage bill passing this year are next to nothing. But gay activists are relieved that there is real opportunity to move forward with the kind of social discussion that will lead to progress.

Having always considered the gay lifestyle kind of an outlaw thing-- I can't help it; the first I ever heard from "gay" was by Rechy and Genet-- two of the lowest things on my list of personal priorities were marriage and joining a military. But, having recovered from Rechy and Genet, I fully support anyone who wants to get in either of those battles to be able to do so. In fact, I thought today it might be appropriate to mention that since "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was enacted in 1993, 10,870 gay men and lesbians have been discharged from the military under its provisions. On a less bleak note, Out Magazine reports that 73% of military men claim to be comfortable with gays.

WHERE'S MOO?

Someone sent me this nice video today. I was really touched. I hope you enjoy watching it:



The band is Where's Moo and they live right in my neighborhood! Darren Vierday did the video.

NEWT GINGRICH: STILL THE DIVISIVE PARTISAN HE ALWAYS WAS. HE WAS UNFIT TO BE SPEAKER AND HE'S LESS FIT TO BE PRESIDENT

It's probably close to incomprehensible to imagine a president worse than George Bush. But if GOP extremist ayatollah James Dobson has his way you might get to live the nightmare. Dobson has all but endorsed Newt Gingrich and has been working hard to rehabilitate his imagine as a philandering and perverted bomb-thrower. Working against Dobson, of course, is Gingrich himself.

There's a reason why so many Americans say they would not vote for Gingrich under any circumstances. And there's a reason why the latest Rasmussen poll shows Gingrich has the highest negativity ratings of any Republican being considered for the GOP nomination. And today Gingrich was on ABC-TV strutting his stuff, attempting to use the Virginia Tech tragedy to bolster his narrow partisan goal of running in the GOP primaries to the right of everyone else. In the past he's tried blaming liberals and Democrats for everything from the tragedy in New Orleans (claiming African Americans were so "so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn't get out of the way of a hurricane") to Republican child predator Mark Foley (who he says wasn't removed by conservatives who knew he was preying on young pages because they were afraid they "would have been accused of gay bashing" by liberals. The jaw drops.

Today he fed an incredulous George Stephanopoulos a bucket of horseshit. He stood by his bizarre and divisive claims that liberals were to blame for the tragedy at Columbine.

GINGRICH: Yes, I think the fact is, if you look at the amount of violence we have in games that young people play at 7, 8, 10, 12, 15 years of age, if you look at the dehumanization, if you look at the fact that we refuse to say that we are, in fact, endowed by our creator, that our rights come from God, that if you kill somebody, you're committing an act of evil.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But what does that have to do with liberalism?

GINGRICH: Well, who has created a situation ethics, essentially, zone of not being willing to talk about any of these things. Let me carry another example. I strongly supported Imus being dismissed, but I also think the very thing he was dismissed for, which is the use of language which is stunningly degrading of women — the fact, for example, that one of the Halloween costumes this last year was being able to be either a prostitute or a pimp at 10, 11, 12 years of age, buying a costume, and we don't have any discussion about what's happened to our culture because while we're restricting political free speech under McCain-Feingold, we say it’s impossible to restrict vulgar and vicious and anti-human speech. And I would argue that that's a major component of what's happened to our culture in the last 40 years.

See what I mean about "worse than Bush? After all, as John points out, Gingrich had a lot more to do with Timothy McVeigh blowing up the Oklahoma City Federal Building than liberals or Democrats had with Virginia Tech or Columbine.

And why would Gingrich make all this noise today? He's busy winning hearts and minds... and pocketbooks over in NRA-ville, where they're starting to panic about a growing clamor for reasonable gun control or even a discussion of rethinking or even repealing the Second Amendment.

IS THERE A REAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN REPUBLICANS AND DEMOCRATS? I MEAN IN PEOPLE'S LIVES... DOES IT REALLY MATTER?

For anyone who has ever said that it doesn't make any difference who gets elected and that all politicians suck, regardless of party, just look at the bill signed into law by Governor Christine Gregoire (D-WA) yesterday. The civil union bill will give gay and lesbian couples the same rights as married couples. " It gives gays, lesbians and unmarried seniors rights to visit a partner in the hospital, inherit property when there's no will, and make decisions on matters like emergency health care, funeral arrangements and disposition of remains. Domestic partners are to register with the secretary of state's office to qualify for the rights."

Gregoire was in one of the closest races in the country in 2004, beating a viciously homophobic far right fanatic, Dino Rossi (R), to become Washington's first woman governor. Rossi would never have signed this bill. Wingnuts were so incensed that he lost the race-- by a mere 129 votes-- that it lead to the firing of U.S. Attorney John McKay, who Rove thought should have done more to steal the election for Rossi. Last month the Washington Post reported that McKay was under pressure from GOP opertatives to interfere in the vote count. "Former Washington state Republican Party Chairman Chris Vance acknowledged Tuesday that he contacted then-U.S. Attorney John McKay to inquire about the status of federal investigations into the 2004 governor's race while the outcome was still in dispute. Vance also spoke regularly with presidential adviser Karl Rove's aides about the election, which Democrat Christine Gregoire ultimately won by 129 votes over Republican Dino Rossi... In testimony before Congress last week, McKay said that he received a call in late 2004 or early 2005 from Ed Cassidy, then chief of staff for Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Pasco, inquiring about the status of ongoing investigations into possible voter fraud. McKay said he cut off Cassidy before he could ask inappropriate questions."

On Aug. 22, three weeks before Sampson recommended that Miers oust McKay, Miers and White House deputy counsel William Kelley met with McKay in Washington, D.C. McKay had requested the meeting after he discovered that a merit-selection panel had not named him one of three finalists to become a federal judge in Western Washington.

McKay said Miers and Kelley quickly asked him about Republican unhappiness in Washington state about his handling of the 2004 election.

McKay's office and the FBI conducted a preliminary investigation of voter-fraud allegations, but filed no charges and did not convene a grand jury because McKay and the Justice Department felt there was not sufficient evidence of federal crimes.

Democrats believe McKay was fired because he did not pursue the investigation, a claim denied by the Justice Department.

The Justice Department initially said McKay was fired for "performance-related" issues, then cited policy differences over sentencing and a communications system that McKay championed.

As for the domestic partnership bill, the Republican Party fought it tooth and nail.

The long-time posterboy for Republican right-wing opposition to gay equality, Jim West, former Republican State Senate leader and then Mayor of Spokane, died last year. Before he died he had been recalled as mayor after being caught molesting young boys.

For 25 years West has used his positions of authority-- as a sheriff's deputy, Boy Scout leader and powerful politician – to lure young boys into his web. It looks like West was one of the typical Republican closet cases who desperately tried to show the world how aggressively homophobic he was to try to prove he wasn't gay. West wasn't just another two-bit Republican pol; he was the Washington State Senate leader and one of the most powerful GOP leaders in the Northwest. So how homophobic was West (while he was molesting underage boys)? Early in 1986, West introduced a bill to bar gays and lesbians from working in schools, daycare centers and some state agencies. The bill called for firing state workers whose sexual identities became known. That same year he voted to bar the state from distributing pamphlets telling people how to protect themselves from AIDS during sex. Needless to say he vigorously opposed every gay rights bill that ever came up and, of course voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman. In 2003, as Senate majority leader, he bottled up a gay rights bill in committee, where it died. Once he became Mayor of Spokane he opposed giving benefits to domestic partners of City Hall workers but was beaten with a veto-proof majority on the City Council. Jim West is a sick cookie, a sick Republican cookie.

Yesterday the FBI raided his home and confiscated his computer and other records as part of an ongoing Federal Investigation into corruption allegations. West has been using his office to offer City Hall jobs to young men he met in gay online chat rooms. The FBI obtained the federal warrant to search West's home after convincing a federal judge there was probable cause to believe a federal crime had been committed. The warrant said there was sufficient evidence to believe that West "knowingly and willingly engaged in a scheme to entice others to engage in sexual activity with him through offers and grants of city of Spokane jobs, internships or appointments." West's secret life started unraveling in May when a local newspaper, The Spokesman-Review, started publishing the details of a thorough investigation into the Republican politician's double-life. His well-documented crimes against young boys go back into the 1970's when he was a deputy sheriff and a Boy Scout leader. West, who is clearly delusional, refuses to resign and is fighting a recall drive, does acknowledge using "poor judgment," but denies doing anything illegal. Nothing illegal? Does this sound legal to you? West and the members of the Pac NW Pedophile clan have been accused of using an at risk boys camp, Morning Star Boys Ranch, of which West is on the Board of Directors, as a kind of library to check out young boys for camping trips and hiking. It is alleged that during these trips the clan molested the young men. West, who resigned last week from the boys ranch Board of Directors, admits he "vaguely remembers" that he "maybe took one kid on a hike or camping trip once."

West, typical of the kind of cornered-rat-Republican on getting caught, is playing as if HE is the victim. After strenuously denying everything, he's now starting to crack and this horribly vicious, hate-filled homophobe who has used a career in public office to try to destroy the lives of innocent gay men and women, now tries to say he is being attacked because he is gay! "I'm being destroyed because I am a gay man, which is fine," this vicious right-wing child-molester/blowhard whined. Recently West lashed out against "sex Nazis" who try to regulate private sexual behavior, so deluded that he fails to recognize that he built his whole career on exactly that! "Because I am a gay man, because of this double life, it has been hell." My heart is not breaking for Jim West as more and more of his victims are coming forth to testify against his deprecations. By the time Bush and the Republicans are swept out of government we're going to have to build a new super-prison just to house the Republican politicians caught up in a culture of arrogant corruption and abuse of power beyond anything ever seen in this country before.

I don't know if Republican Rep. Bill Hinkle or right wing religionist loon Joe Fuiten molest young boys or not, but, like their role-model West, they have been shrill and partisan in their hysteria about gay equality. Hinkle ominously warned that the legislature is "chipping away at the very foundations of this institution and of society." And Fuiten's Republican hate group, an operation he calls the Positive Christian Agenda worked to kill the legislation. The GOP front group "sent an email to its supporters two weeks ago saying the measure would likely pass the House in the dark of night so Democrats could mask their 'dirty deeds' from the public. The group sent another email Tuesday conceding House leaders didn't wait until nighttime. 'Rather, they lead their Democratic caucus in voting, unashamedly, in broad daylight, to undermine marriage,' said the group's email message."

DWT would like to send this musical interlude out today to Karl Rove, Joe Fuiten, Jim West and Bill Hinkle for their narrow-minded bigotry and their cheapening of American society:

WILL SOMEONE GO TO JAIL FOR KILLING FIDO? MAYBE BUT IT WON'T BE BUSH, NORQUIST, ROVE OR THE SOLONS OF THE GOP, THE REAL GUILTY PARTIES

One of the fundamental tenets of the disastrous Bush Regime-- and of the far right ideology that underpins it-- is the destruction of the regulatory agencies meant to protect consumers from unscrupulous businessmen out to make a quick buck at the expense of public safety. The predatory businessmen-- be it Ken Lay and Jefffrey Skilling of Enron, Bernie Ebbers and Scott Sullivan of WorldCom, the John Rigas family of Adelphia, Jack Abramoff of BushCo, Dennis Kozlowski and Mark Swartz of Tyco, Adam Kidan of SunCruz Casinos, Richard Scrushy of HealthSouth, Frank Quattrone of Credit Suisse First Boston [UPDATE: DWT has been informed by Quattrone's attorneys that he is not in prison and that his conviction was overturned by the Court of Appeals], Joseph Nacchio of Qwest, Sanjay Kumar of Computer Associates, Walter Forbes of Cendent, and hundreds of other convicted and unconvicted (those listed are all convicted and serving prison time) crooked Republicans-- who have financed the Bush Regime ascendancy have demanded-- and received-- a hand in reining in the ability of the government to protect workers and consumers.

And, speaking of Tyco, our pets.

Today's Washington Post reports that the purposely enfeebled Bush Regime FDA has finally opened a criminal investigation into what their headline writer calls a pet food scare." As usual, the Regime dragged its feet on this-- giving the guilty parties plenty of time to destroy evidence-- and only acted when forced to do so by revelations that the lax regulations have led directly to tainted meat entering the human food chain.

More than 100 hogs that ate contaminated food at a custom slaughterhouse in California's Central Valley were sold to private individuals and to an unnamed licensed facility in Northern California during the past 2 1/2 weeks. The hogs consumed feed that contained rice protein tainted with melamine, the industrial chemical that has sickened and killed dogs and cats around the world.

I wish I could say that only Republicans eat pork and that they deserve everything they get for inflicting this tragedy on us all. Unfortunately, plenty of normal people eat pork as well and are now victims of Republican greed, avarice, treachery and ideological mania.

Stephen Sundlof, director of the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine, said criminal charges are a possibility, but he declined to say whether there is reason to believe any individual or organization intentionally adulterated pet food...

Five companies received the contaminated Chinese rice protein concentrate. Three firms have identified themselves by announcing recalls; the other two are not publicly known because the FDA will not name them until the companies say they used contaminants in their products.

More than six other companies, some of which make pet food under a variety of labels, have announced recalls because melamine-contaminated wheat gluten was used in their products, starting with a March 16 recall. Wheat gluten is by far the larger ingredient in American pet food, the FDA said.

So as the FDA decides to protect criminal businesses' reputations at the expense of consumers and pets, and is already making the excuse that "they didn't do it on purpose," hundreds of dogs and cats are dying at the hand of what Rick Perlstein has so brilliantly dubbed, the e. coli conservatives. Nice going... Bushie.


CAN'T PROTECT US... OR WON'T?

Tomorrow's WAPO continues the discussion about how the Bush Regime has wrecked the regulatory agencies we pay for to protect us. Elizabeth Williamson writes that "The Food and Drug Administration has known for years about contamination problems at a Georgia peanut butter plant and on California spinach farms that led to disease outbreaks that killed three people, sickened hundreds, and forced one of the biggest product recalls in U.S. history, documents and interviews show. Overwhelmed by huge growth in the number of food processors and imports, however, the agency took only limited steps to address the problems and relied on producers to police themselves, according to agency documents."

Allowing Business to police itself is the Republican way. It doesn't work, not in 2007 in a mass-based society. "Congressional critics and consumer advocates said both episodes show that the agency is incapable of adequately protecting the safety of the food supply... Tomorrow, a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee will hold a hearing on the unprecedented spate of recalls."

"This administration does not like regulation, this administration does not like spending money, and it has a hostility toward government. The poisonous result is that a program like the FDA is going to suffer at every turn of the road," said Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), chairman of the full House committee. Dingell is considering introducing legislation to boost the agency's accountability, regulatory authority and budget.

EVERYBODY'S FLIPPIN'; EVERYBODY'S FLOPPIN'-- ESPECIALLY GIULIANI. I GUESS NOW HE HATES HISPANICS TOO? OR IS HE JUST MAKING BELIEVE? DOES IT MATTER?

Rudy's taken a ratings beating lately because he's stuck to his long-standing pro-abortion/pro-gay policies. He has a record that is hard to hide and hard to run away from-- although it's taking low-information Republican voters quite some time to get beyond the fantasy heroism that's been drilled into their skulls about how he single-handedly met the Arab hordes when they invaded NYC on 9/11 and turned them away at Ellis Island.

But he's starting to get the idea that he'd better start putting some distance between himself and his record. George Marlin ran for mayor of NYC in 1993 as the nominee of the  Conservative Party. He says he's observed Giuliani for many years and "I can say categorically that he is not now, nor has he ever been, a conservative. In my judgment, his record leaves no doubt that he's a lifelong liberal." Giuliani, "like Hillary, is campaigning" for the presidency "in order to implement lifelong leftist beliefs." Sounds like a kook, right? Guess who votes in Republican primaries... especially in South Carolina and Iowa.

Today's NY Times has a story datelined Des Moines, "a long way from Ellis Island."

A decade ago, as mayor of New York, Mr. Giuliani used that historic backdrop to champion the cause of immigrants, calling attacks on people who came here legally a blow to “the heart and soul of America.” And from City Hall he often defended illegal immigrants, ordering city workers not to deny them benefits and advocating measures to ease their path to citizenship.

But now he is running for president, and the politics of immigration in the post-9/11 world is vastly different, with the issue splitting the Republican Party and voters peppering Mr. Giuliani on the campaign trail with questions about his current thinking. Perhaps more than any other candidate, Mr. Giuliani has a record on immigration with the potential to complicate his bid for the nomination.

His spin is tailor-made for the nativist haters and xenophobes who dominate the Republican Party's nomination process. He's not Tancredo-- but he's not the old Rudy Giuliani either. These days he talking about "penalties for people here illegally and requirements for them to wait at the back of the line. And while he once pushed policies like providing schooling for the children of illegal immigrants by saying, 'The reality is that they are here, and they’re going to remain here,' now he emphasizes denying amnesty."

He's doing his best to hide behind Bush's skirts. But hard corp xenophobes know Bush wants to fill the country with cheap labor for his corporate pals and Giuliani is getting the old fisheye when he addresses the subject. He's been changing his emphasis and swerving further and further to the right-- and further and further from the role he once cherished of "becoming a national leader for the cause of welcoming immigrants." Once he wanted to spend millions of dollars to help immigrants seek citizenship and it was known that "he vigorously defended the city’s policy of forbidding city employees, including police and hospital workers, from asking a person’s immigration status." In the 90's he called the Republican hicks whose votes he is soliciting these days "Know Nothings."

He's dancing around the issue and trying to weave it into his fantasy meme about being the big bad terrorist fighter. But his fighter image has been taking some hits-- first from the fire fighters who claim he's full of hooey and last week from an interesting article in New York Magazine that asks the uncomfortable question if he was as much a draft dodger as Cheney.

After receiving several deferments as a student, Giuliani applied for an occupational deferment as a law clerk, but his application was rejected. Giuliani appealed their decision, and asked the federal judge he was clerking for to petition the draft board for him. Which the judge did. When his deferment expired in 1970, Giuliani became susceptible to the draft. He received a high number and was never called. Giuliani “has made it clear that if he had been called up, he would have served,” says Katie Levinson, Giuliani’s spokesperson. He was opposed to the war in Vietnam on “strategic and tactical” grounds, she says. Asked to clarify what tactics Giuliani opposed, Levinson declined to offer specifics. “Voters will choose the next commander-in-chief based on their whole record, and we believe the mayor’s record speaks for itself.”

That's what John McCain is counting on too-- as is Hillary. (Oh-- and that picture up top? Not photoshopped; it's the real thing-- just like all the pictures of him in drag.)


UPDATE: GIULIANI BESTS McCAIN IN SOUTH CAROLINA STRAW POLL-- BUT COMES IN FOURTH

Straw poll season among the South Carolina GOP base-- and base well describes this crew. Anyway, CNN is reporting a big upset on the lunatic fringe. "Romney finished first with 132 votes, followed closely by Huckabee with 111. California Rep. Duncan Hunter got 87, Giuliani had 35 and Brownback received 19. McCain received 17 votes. Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo had five votes, former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson got three, and Texas Rep. Ron Paul and former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore each got one."

IS IMPEACHMENT FEASIBLE? CAN ANY AMERICAN WITH A SHRED OF DIGNITY OR HONOR NOT WORK TO BRING IT ABOUT? AND DON'T FORGET: IMPEACH CHENEY FIRST

Friday I'm going to the California State Democratic Convention. I haven't been to a political convention since I was in my early teens. I've always seen them as a big old gaggle of geese encouraging each other's elitist behavior, imaginary self-importance and a degree of incompetence that would be tolerated in private industry for about 15 seconds. And politicians in general... I mean do you really want to get anywhere near one? I got talked into this one so I could help with a fundraiser for two guys who aren't really politicians, Jerry McNerney and Charlie Brown. But it turns out the gaggle will be there too. Inside the Beltway will be inside San Diego next weekend: Hillary, Obama, Edwards, Richardson, Pelosi, DiFi, Boxer...

Irwing wants to go find a donkey show in TJ after the fundraiser; he's as impressed with the self importance thing as I am. There is one thing I want to see at the convention though-- Pelosi's face when the convention passes a resolution calling for impeachment hearings for Bush and Cheney. We'll go see the donkey show in TJ after the donkey show in SD.

I hope you've detected a theme that runs through DWT that emphasizes, like the Constitution, that power resides at a grassroots level. Politicians may be a necessary evil but they do tend to be an evil. Pelosi's one of the very best of the lot. But how compromised is that person? How tied to Rahm Emanuel and Steny Hoyer? I have no doubt that when Speaker Pelosi took impeachment off the table she felt the realpolitik calculus made it necessary. (I wouldn't be surprsied if she'd like to see Bush impeached as much as I would.) It's up to The People to change the calculus.

Legislatures all over the non-Confederate states are doing that. A few days ago Vermont's Senate became the first to pass a resolution asking Congress to initiate impeachment proceedings against Bush and Cheney. The resolution was initially blocked by Insiders triangulating the political calculus. The People of Vermont changed that calculus with months of town hall meetings. When the resolution came to a vote it passed in less than 15 minutes, 16-9. They were too close, physically, to The People to avoid it.


It isn't for Nancy Pelosi and other compromised/compromising politicians to tell us whether or not impeachment is on or off the table. It's for us to tell them. This isn't about political calculation; it's about the soul of our nation and of us as a People. Friday, I'll watch us do that. And then I'll let Irwing take me to the donkey show.

IS BUSH WAITING FOR GOP LEADERS TO INVITE THE MOODY BLUES TO PERFORM ON THE SOUTH LAWN BEFORE HE TELLS ABU G THAT IT'S TIME TO MOVE BACK TO TEXAS?

Kiss bye-bye, boys

In 1968 Walter Cronkite went to Vietnam and reported that he had seen the lies, corruption, and stalemate in that war and that it was time for us to go. President Johnson listened to Cronkite's verdict with dismay and real sadness and told an aide, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost America." Although Walter Cronkite and The Howdy Doody Show were popular in the same era, there is no newscaster with the moral heft of a Walter Cronkite today and the 2007 version of Howdy Doody... well, he doesn't quite measure up. But Rove, Cheney and Bush must have felt something like what Johnson felt in '68 on Friday when Adam Putnam (R-FL) joined a growing chorus of Republicans clamoring for a quick exit for Bush's incompetent and corrupt Attorney General, Abu Gonzales. If they've lost Adam Putnam, they've lost the brain-dead fringe of right-wing nutcases who always support them on everything, no matter how outrageous and unconstitutional.

It isn't like there is someone in Washington that has just learned that Abu G is incompetent or never knew that his shallow understanding of the U.S. Constitution made him unfit to be a court stenographer or that his supine posture towards power and natural predeliction towards corruption guaranteed that he would be among the worst Attorneys General in American history. No, that was all clear from day one. What happened this week is that it was on teevee and impossible for anyone-- including voters-- to miss.

Little Doody has known for some time that Abu Gonzo needed to be shoved out the door. As Chairman of the House Republican Conference, he's supposed to help build Repugs to get elected, not watch as they are swept out of Congress in disgust. By March he was already seeing the writing on the wall and started gently prodding the White House to kick Gonzales overboard. At a Florida press conference he told reporters "I have been very critical of his actions (in the firing of the U.S. attorneys) and stopped short of calling for his resignation because that is the prerogative of the president. But it is clear he is not as effective as the result of this tornado he is in the middle of."

Yesterday Little Doody, exasperated that gentle prodding wasn't getting him anywhere, conferred with his more cowardly-- but no less concerned-- fellow leaders of the GOP House caucus, and he announced that, basically, Democrats had it right all along: Abu G is unfit to remain Attorney General. Rep. Doody of Florida, "chairman of the Republican conference in the House of Representatives, said it was important for the head of the U.S. Justice Department to have 'unwavering' credibility. 'For the good of the nation, I think it is time for fresh leadership at the Department of Justice,' Putnam said in a brief telephone interview. He said a lack of credibility by the Justice Department chief puts in jeopardy the president's legislative agenda."

Putnam isn't alone among Bush Regime rubber stampers in begging the White House to get Gonzales off the front pages and off the TV screens immediately. "My House colleagues are concerned about the management of the Department of Justice and how this most recent scandal has been handled," Little Doody said-- although he would not say how many of his GOP colleagues are screaming for Gonzales to get the boot. "They recognize the sensitive issues that we all face that involve the Justice Department and know that we do deserve to have the best possible, most open, candid and effective leadership possible at the head of that department."

Republican legislators who abdicated all sense of duty and decency when Bush assumed the presidency and never once questioned any part of his horrific and outrageous agenda-- even the worst right wing ideologues like Jeff Sessions (R-AL) and Tom Coburn (R-OK)-- have now found something to posture about that seperates them from the increasingly disdained and distrusted Bush Regime. Clueless as ever, Bush, hasn't felt enough heat yet to cut the ties that bind. It's still, "Gonzo, you're doin' a great job."

Asked Friday whether Bush was interviewing candidates to succeed Gonzales, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino told reporters, "Not that I'm aware of, no."

She said that Bush had spoken to Gonzales after he testified and that the president was "pleased that the hearing had finally been held."

Perino said Gonzales "continues to have the president's full confidence."

"I can understand there are some people who still don't want to support the attorney general; that is their right. But he has done a fantastic job at the Department of Justice. He is our No. 1 crime fighter," Perino said.

CNN reports that tipsters, anonymous White House insiders, are dismayed over Gonzales' pathetic performance yesterday. Unlike Perino, the public face of the Regime, who is paid to lie and dissimulate, CNN's sources, "involved in administration discussions about Gonzales, said two senior level White House aides who heard the testimony described Gonzales as 'going down in flames,' 'not doing himself any favors,' and 'predictable... 'Everyone's putting their best public face on,' one source said, 'but everyone is discouraged. Everyone is disappointed.'"

After one official-- Rove-- likened watching Abu G's Judiciary Committee hearing to watching someone club a baby seal, most White House movers and shakers moved on to the next topic: finding a successor for the DoJ. Although Utah's conniving and unscupulous Orrin Hatch has been angling for the job, many inside the Regime say the last thing they need is an egomaniac to follow Abu. "One name that consistently comes up is Ted Olson, former solicitor general. Olson is seen as having the experience, reputation and credibility needed to steer the department for the next year and a half, through the end of Bush's term." The fact that he's a vicious far right partisan deters no one at all.

Now, as promised, ladies and gentlemen, the fabulous Moody Blues:



And if the Moody Blues don't work? It's unlikely Renzi or Domenici would do it but maybe Rosa De Lauro, Pete DeFazio and Frank Pallone could invite Sarah Brightman and Andrea Bocelli?


UPDATE: BUSH AIN'T GIVIN' UP HIS ABU NO MATTER WHAT SOME HOWDY DOODY-LOOKIN' LITTLE NIMROD™ SAYS

Today's WAPO has a funny story by Dan Eggan and Peter Baker about the disarray in the White House over the Abu Gonzo disaster. Rove and all the other snakes are telling Bush to kick his ass out but Bush takes it as a personal affront to his authority, sort of like Eric Cartman, and has dug in his heels. Rove is putting it out there that Bush wants Abu to just resign quietly on his own and take the onus off his poor commander-in-chief shoulders. Apparently, though, Gonzales is living in Never-Never Land and thinks everything's coming up roses.

But in this case, according to Republican strategists, Bush faces the choice of leaving in place a law enforcement chief who has undermined his effectiveness in his department and on Capitol Hill, or reversing gears in the coming days and weeks if the political situation continues to deteriorate.

"Everybody at the White House... all think he needs to go, but the president doesn't," said a Republican who consulted the Bush team yesterday. Another White House ally said Bush and Gonzales are ignoring reality: "They're the only two people on the planet Earth who don't see it." A third Republican intimately familiar with sentiment inside the White House said the hope is that Gonzales will leave on his own. "At some point, he'll figure out that it's not a sustainable situation," the Republican said.

UPDATE: CAN ABU G DO TO THE BUSH REGIME WHAT HE DID TO THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT?

Former federal prosecuter Elizabeth de la Vega (with over 20 years at the DoJ) has a question, one that will be answered before May flowers bloom. She wants to know if Gonzo will "be pushed over the side, take a dive off the plank or simply hang onto the railing of the wreck the Bush administration has made of the Department of Justice." No one can rationally dispute his unfitness for public service. "Certainly, Gonzales is unfit to be the nation's chief law enforcement officer. We knew that before he testified on April 19. We knew that before he was even confirmed. No one who signs off on tortured legal memos authorizing torture, kidnapping and illegal detentions is fit to be the attorney general of the United States."

After his catastrophic televised non-testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee-- likened to watching a baby seal being clubbed by "someone" in Rove's office-- Abu G is trying to keep a low profile. He wasn't on any of the Sunday talking heads shows to defend... the indefensible. And at last night's White House Correspondant's Association Dinner-- while Sheryl Crow and Laurie David tried explaining to Karl Rove works for us, not the other way round-- Gonzo sat quietly, still stunned from his clubbing, at the USA Today table, refusing to talk with anyone beyond, "I am enjoying my meal, it is great to be here. I am enjoying myself.”

BLUE AMERICA-- THIS YEAR WE WILL PUT A DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE: VICTORIA WULSIN

This afternoon we welcome Doctor Victoria Wulsin back for her second Blue America live blog session at Firedoglake, 2pm, EST. Her first one is archived here and you will get a great idea of just what an incredible candidate-- and person-- she is. Last year, of the 30 men and women our community supported in House races, we donated more money to Vic than to anyone else running, over $27,000 plus hundreds of radio spots our PAC placed independently.

Vic came very close to winning the election-- in an area renowned for crooked Republican vote counting overseen by the most egregiously corrupt Secretary of State in the nation, now departed. Within days of the election I was urging her to consider running again. I was overjoyed last week when she announced she would do it. We spent some time on the phone Thursday and Friday and I'm firmly convinced that as good a candidate as she was last year, she's supercharged this year! This is a very smart woman who knows how to learn from experiences.


Another big factor her supporters can feel optimistic about is how the fast-learners are now being joined by more and more Americans in their disdain for the Bush Regime and the rubber stampers like Mean Jean Schmidt who enable it and prop it up. Last year Vic got to 49% with virtually no assistance from Inside the Beltway. It was all grassroots and netroots. This year the grassroots and netroots are as fired up as ever-- more so-- and a more enlightened Van Hollen-led DCCC is already interested in Vic's campaign. Paul Hackett has told people he isn't interested in running for the seat and there doesn't appear to be any viable competition for a seat Vic needs only a couple thousand more votes to win.

Of course she is far better known throughout the district too and she's starting from a powerful base of volunteers. Emily's List has already jumped into the campaign and when Rove was illegally urging the GSA to disregard the Hatch Act and come to the aid of vulnerable Republican incumbents, Schmidt was right on the top of his list. Interestingly, she may be as endangered from disgruntled Republicans as she is from Democrats and independents. A primary challenge is almost a foregone conclusion, although she's likely to win that.


Even the Republican-leaning local media has been more evenhanded in their coverage of Schmidt lately. The Cincinnati Enquirer covered Schmidt's incomprehensible viewpoint on the treatment of wounded American vets at Walter Reed, as did the local TV stations.

Of course, the best case for the election of Vic-- other than Vic herself-- is Mean Jean. Many people in the area are still concerned that she's relentlessly promoting the importation of nuclear waste into the district, just upriver from Louisville and Cincinnati. "Radioactive exposure is permanent," Dr. Wulsin reminds me. "She thinks it's a jobs program." But it's nutty attitudes like this that discourage real jobs from coming to OH-02. The Batavia Ford factory is closing; that's real jobs. Will employers want to locate somewhere that has a national laughing stock as a representative who is trying to import nuclear waste that could be a threat to their own families and employees?

Almost every answer I got to the questions I asked Vic was informed by her public health background. We talked about the tragedy at Virginia Tech and last week's tragedy at the Supreme Court and in both cases she was approaching the subjects as health and healing issues. "There's no such thing as a 'partial birth abortion.' ...Abortion isn't a good method of family planning. They should be legal, safe and rare. Education for women and for men is very important as are the accessibility of birth control pills, contraceptives, clinics where the patients aren't stigmatized."

When I asked her about Virginia Tech her immediate response was to talk about the warning signs that were so clear in the shooter and how society refused to deal with them. There was no support system that could have prevented this tragedy. Gun control is a very tough issue in her district but she isn't ducking it. She feels that society has to distinguish between guns people are entitled to for recreation and self-defense-- especially in rural areas where there isn't ready access to law enforcement-- and guns for mass destruction. On the campaign trail she gets the feeling that half the NRA members she talks to agree with her. "People with untreated mental illnesses and with impaired judgment should not have guns; that's a challenge but not impossible."

And speaking of not ducking a tough issue, Vic, who campaigned against the war and occupation of Iraq in 2006, says she plans to hit on that issue even harder this year. "We can't solve their civil war. We should bring our troops home and as soon as possible." Similarly she feels she needs to talk to people in the district about the Constitution and how it has been under threat. "The level of miseducation, much of it from outlets like Fox, is unbelievable." She feels a need to talk with people in southwest Ohio about habeas corpus and why that's important to every single one of us.

I know these issues are important to every reader of this blog. And I know from the outpouring of dedication and generosity last year that lots of us understand why it's important to help a woman like Victoria Wulsin get into Congress where she will be a force that is a part of creative and fresh solutions, instead of a festering sore on the ass of every problem that we face like... well, you know who. I'd like to urge you to join me in donating to Vic's campaign and moving her from the bottom of our list towards the top. 24 hours from when this story was posted I'm going to put all the names of the people who have contributed into a bag and pull 12 out. Each of the 12 will get a copy of the new book by Jeffrey Feldman, Framing the Debate, a book about the power of communication in contemporary progressive politics. Jeffrey has autographed each book in an effort to help us raise some funds for Vic's campaign. If you already have a copy, just add .01 to your donation as a sign you don't want us to send you another.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS, THE MEDIA, & A WOMAN’S RIGHT TO CHOOSE

This past week was a week of major news stories; the awful events at Virginia Tech, Gonzo’s excellent adventure in the Senate, and, a ruling by our "Supreme" Court that upheld the so-called Partial Birth Abortion Ban voted into law by our recent Republican dominated Congress. For clarification purposes, let’s point out that “Partial Birth Abortion” is a perversely ingenious example of buzz-word marketing. During the rest of history, the procedure was know as “Dilation And Extraction” or a D & E. The Republikooks changed the terminology and the media eagerly followed suit. Let’s take a look at recent events and take a look at how we got to this point where D & E is now banned, even a case where the woman’s health and even life is at risk. If a pregnant woman now gets in a car accident and a D & E will save her life, "too bad." say the compassionate conservatives who slither among us. Let’s begin with the "Supreme" Court’s appointment of the smirking chimp as unacceptable and unaccepted leader of the free world. To those who felt there was no difference between Al Gore and chimpy, guess again. I feel confident that at least Al Gore, among other things, would not have nominated the likes of John Roberts and then Samuel Alito for the court. I’ll concentrate on Roberts. He was the first and he was anointed as Chief Justice.

Before being nominated, Roberts served as Deputy Solicitor General in Daddy Bush’s administration, once arguing, in 1990, before the Supreme Court that the court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling which struck down state laws that criminalized abortion "was wrongly decided and should be overturned." Thirteen years later, during his confirmation to the District Of Columbia Appeals Court, he, very disingenuously, stated that he was merely acting on behalf of a client, not presenting his own position. He then went on to embellish, his transparency visible to all but senators and media hacks, that Roe v. Wade is "the settled law of the land" and that "nothing in my personal views would prevent me from fully and faithfully applying that precedent." Hey, he wasn’t lying. Lying under oath in the Senate would be a crime. He was just spinning up masterful lawyerspeak to a bunch of overly martinied Senators that, for the most part, just sat back and enjoyed the hypnotic haze spun by a forked tongued devil. In another century, Roberts would have been charming the Indians into signing worthless treaties. In a few years, he was to be named Chief, Chief Justice. In an ultimate irony, some even address him as "your honor." To be fair to Roberts, there’s a little more to the story. Roberts is a smart guy. He was doing what one would expect him to do. Unfortunately, the media, our “fourth estate” (a term that implies being a “fourth branch” of government, another check in a series of checks and balances, something made even more crucial when the three branches of government, the executive, congress, and the court are controlled by one party), abdicated their responsibility to inform the country.

In declining to point out that, as an appellate court judge, Roberts was beholden to the laws of the land as directed by the Supreme Court, but, as a member of the Supreme Court could actually indulge in judicial activism and reverse existing law, our corporate Orwellian media painted a picture of Robert’s as someone far less threatening to a woman’s right to choose. They did it by presenting his 2003 statements as his approach on the matter of abortion law. That’s right, the media sold John Roberts to the American public just like they sold a war, just like they sold GWB as a regular guy, and just like they now sell John McCain as a moderate. CNN’s Brian Todd, NBC’s justice correspondent Pete Williams, FOX’s Major Garrett and Megyn Kendall, CBS’s Julie Chen and Gloria Borger, ABC’s Kate Snow ALL suggested that Robert’s 2003 testimony at his Appeals Court confirmation somehow applied to his Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Either they are part of a rightist agenda or the education standards for reporters are extremely low. How much effort does it take to do a little research? Either way, a weapon of mass deception was deployed. NBC, who the right like to smear as liberal, had one of the worst offenders in Pete Williams. Not only did his July 19, 2005 report distort the picture, but, he later did almost exactly the same thing on January 9, 2006, during the Alito hearings. Ask yourselves why.

The failing of the media was so bad that even the pathetic current Attorney General Alberto Gonzales showed more honesty, candor, and grasp of the facts when he said (in a July 26, 2005 interview with the AP) “If you’re asking a circuit court judge, like Judge Roberts was asked, yes, it is settled law because you’re bound by the precedent. If you’re a Supreme Court justice, that’s a different question because a Supreme Court justices is not obliged to follow precedent if you believe it’s wrong.” Yes, folks, the sleazeball who just said he “couldn’t recall” 74 times in one hearing session was more forthright than our news bozos. After that, it becomes unnecessary to even discuss the media’s coverage of Bush’s nomination of Samuel Alito. I’ll just offer one more example to couple with Pete Williams’ "storytime." Here it is, a beyond incredulous headline from the nation’s carp wrapper, USA Today (USA Toadie) on November 26, 2005: "Alito’s Abortion Stance Tough To Decipher." Yeah. Right. Real tough one. Sadly, people not only buy the paper, they buy what’s in it. Makes a great wee-wee pad, if you ask me. The most galling thing is how little respect and how much contempt for the public a news organization has to have to even come up with such a headline.


There’s a sad flaw in most of us that leads us to trust that anything on the TeeVee or believe that anything that comes from an authority figure must be true. The media’s role in the deception on the Robert’s confirmation is a good example of how these Goebbels worshippers work. It’s not unlike how, more recently, they have neglected to mention that the eight U.S. attorneys, fired by the current administration are REPUBLICAN attorneys, appointed by the same administration. By not making that clear, they have given most of the country the impression that the whole Gonzales scandal is just partisan politics as usual when, in fact, these REPUBLICAN attorneys were fired for following the law of the land and doing an honest, professional job, even if the trail led back to the White House, as appears to be the case in the Carol Lam firing. We have to watch the media like an eagle. They can be very subtle. Recently, on March 1st, the New York Times ran an article that stated that ABC News had edged out NBC News in the latest ratings book. ABC is perceived, rightly or wrongly, as being more rightwing than NBC. Personally, I just think ABC is more OVERT (that little Clinton bashing show on 9/11 comes to mind) about it, but, the report failed to mention the statistical margin of error. That margin could have just as easily placed NBC in the lead, but the so-called liberal (yeah, right) New York Times slanted the article in ABC’s favor. Why? I’ll put it in context and then it’s "you decide." Think of the paper’s lack of questioning on the matter of the 2000 "election." Think of their lies about WMDs and their promotion of the war in Iraq. It goes on and on. The media in this country is engaged in pushing this country ever rightward. They bash Pelosi for taking the same trip Republicans did. They also bash her for wearing the same head scarf that Laura Bush did. No criticism of them, though. It doesn’t fit the agenda. They parrot Senator Hatch’s lies about U.S. Attorney Carol Lam (a Republican) being a Democrat and working as a campaign chair for Bill Clinton’s campaign as the truth. There’s no end to media mass deception. The big lie.

So, this is one of the ways we got to the “Supreme” Court’s decision on D & E. The media has traditionally been a source of vital information. Thomas Jefferson, himself said given the choice between a government without the press or a press without a government, he would choose in favor of the press. Things have obviously changed. Will this be a wake up call? If the Democrats are smart (I know, a BIG leap, there) they can use the decision to really increase their margins in both houses of Congress in 2008. With everything else that happened this week, how much of the public even knows of the decision and comprehends its ramifications? I have to think that there are a lot of women out there, of ALL creeds and parties, who are fed up and disgusted and would vote against the Repugs, maybe for the first time. Then again, maybe they’ll continue to vote against their best interests, supporting candidates who don’t care if you live or die. Maybe, it’ll take a horrible incident of a high profile politician’s wife or judge’s wife or daughter being in that car accident having to die when a D & E could have saved her. This aspect of the Bush culture of death will cause more deaths than the despicable actions of a well-armed lunatic.

NOAH

STEVEN GRILES AND SUE WOOLDRIDGE: WHO IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WOULD MARRY EITHER ONE OF THEM?

Well, there are several obvious answers there, but the main point is that Bush's crooked ex-Deputy Secretary of the Interior Steven Griles and ex-Department of Justice anti-environmental hack Sue Wooldridge now cannot be forced to testify against each other. As The Hill so elegantly put it this morning, "two Bush administration officials who have been linked in scandal are now linked in wedlock... They were married March 26, three days after Griles pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about his relationship with Abramoff and a previous romantic partner... Legal experts note that people can refuse to testify against their spouses, and that in some cases, people can prevent their spouse from testifying against them. 'There have been plenty of cases where marriage was a good strategy for a criminal defendant,' said Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor. But he added, 'It’s plausible they simply picked an odd time to wed.'”

Adam, the art director, is responsible for the lovely wedding picture and he asked me to include his take on this. He rarely does, so I agreed. His main point is that this typically Republican wedding is yet another demonstration of how these hypocrites preserve the sanctity of marriage-- not unlike Mitch McConnell's marriage of convenience to Elaine Chao.

JOIN JERRY McNERNEY, CHARLIE BROWN, DWT, & THE CALIFORNIA BLOGGING COMMUNITY AT THE STATE DEM CONVENTION NEXT WEEKEND

Our pals over at Calitics are sponsoring a very special event at the California Democratic State Convention next weekend-- the Blue House at the Brew House Blograiser to benefit the campaigns of Representative Jerry McNerney (CA-11) and Lt. Col. Charlie Brown (CA-04). If you're in the neighborhood, stop by and meet Jerry and Charlie and the California blogging community in person. There's going to be great food, delicious San Diego microbrews, and you can help us take a big step towards making California even more Blue! This will be going down at the Karl Strauss Brewing Company downtown at 8:30pm, Friday, April 27. The address is: 1157 Columbia Street, San Diego, CA 92101.


Donate $20 to Jerry McNerney's campaign and $20 to Charlie Brown's campaign ($40 in total) via Blue America's ActBlue Page and your name will be at the door AND you'll be registered for a drawing for the 6 prizes. There are 5 autographed copies of The Bush Diaries by California author (and blogger) Peter Clothier, each paired with a rare, collectible CD, a promo-only copy of the Blue America campaign song from 2006, "Have You Had Enough," sung by Rickie Lee Jones and our two ex-Squirrel Nut Zippers Tom Maxwell and Ken Mosher. The grand prize is even rarer, an official Australian Record Industry Association platinum and gold award for two records by one of Congressman McNerney's best known constituents, Chris Isaak (a born and raised Stockton native). The double platinum award was for the album Forever Blue and the gold single award is for "Somebody's Crying." The unique award was given to the former president of Chris' label and he (errr... me) donated it for this event. Calitics will be picking the winner from a hat on Friday night. The good news is that you don't even have to be there to win. If you donate the $20 + $20 minimum online, your name gets thrown into the hat too and we'll mail you the book and CD or the platinum record award if you win.

DWT regulars already know who Jerry McNerney and Charlie Brown are and what they stand for. If you just stumbled across this post, please check out our most recent conversation with Jerry on March 31 and with Charlie on February 3. Keep in mind that Karl Rove has targeted Jerry for defeat and has helped to recruit a far right loon to campaign against him.

Charlie's best bet will be to face the severely corrupt incumbent, John Doolittle again-- and Doolittle claims to be running for re-election-- but it is very possible that Doolittle will be living out of the district-- in a federal penitentiary by November '08. As you probably know, his office was raided last week by the FBI and the House Republican leader John Boehner forced him to resign from his Appropriations Committee seat (since it was his membership on that committee, after all, facilitated his ability to take in so much money in bribes).

According to today's CongressDaily "Doolittle's northern California 4th District, which President Bush won in 2004 by a 61-37 percent margin, would ordinarily be among the safest seats in the House. But Doolittle barely won a ninth term last year by defeating Democratic nominee Charlie Brown 49-46 percent... National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Tom Cole of Oklahoma said he has not had time to assess the political ramifications of the FBI investigation. 'Too soon to talk about it,' Cole said. 'It's all happening fast.' (But not too soon for some: In fact, there are plenty of right wing loons lining up to grab that Doolittle seat. Hopefully, they'll all be in a special election, 5 or 6 hard right Republican kooks against one upstanding, well-respected Democrat. He'd need 50% + one vote and he'd be the congressman to make CA-04 proud after the recent disgrace.) A Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesman said the district has seen significant growth, including new residents from the generally Democratic San Francisco Bay area. 'A lot of these new people moving into the district don't know anything about John Doolittle other than he is under an ethical black cloud,' the DCCC spokesman said.

One more thing-- you know the little video area that comes up when you click the lifeguard station on the right? Right now all that you can see there is an interview with me. But we hope that this Friday we'll have a LIVE VLOG of the event in San Diego. It's an experimental new technology but we're going to try. So come back Friday and click the lifeguard station at 8:30pm (Pacific Times) and see if we have it together. Or, better yet, come join us in person down in San Diego.

HOUSE DEMOCRATS VOTE FULL REPRESENTATION FOR DC-- BUSH VOWS A VETO

Were Abe Lincoln to suddenly be resurrected and decide to run for office as a Republican-- before someone could warn him that his old party had been completely taken over by a cabal of southern racists, self-styled aristocrats and religionist kooks-- he might win an election in the District of Columbia. Short of that, it's hard to imagine any Republican ever getting a significant number of votes from that high-information, predominantly nonwhite district. (Less than 8% of the voters are registered Republicans and Bush only managed to garner 9% of the vote in each of his bids for the presidency.) So when Democrats have tried to give the District of Columbia equal representation, Republicans have fought it tooth and nail.

Yesterday the House finally circumvented obstructionist Republican tactics to pass the District of Columbia House Voting Rights Act (HR 1905), 241-177.

Don't break out the champagne yet, though. "The bill faces considerable obstacles. Democrats don't appear to have enough votes in the Senate to avoid a filibuster, and the White House has threatened a veto. If the measure becomes law, it probably will be challenged in court.

Twenty-two Republicans broke ranks with the KKK Party and joined the Democrats in passing the bill. Disgracefully, 6 Democrats voted against it:

* Dan Boren (OK)
* Nancy Boyda (KS)
* Chris Carney (PA)
* Tim Holden (PA)
* Paul Kanjorski (PA)
* Gene Taylor (MS)

UPDATE: ELEANOR NORTON HOLMES SMACKS DOWN REPUG CLOSET CASE DREIER

The compromise bill that passed yesterday was introduced jointly by DC's non-voting Rep., Eleanor Norton Holmes and Virginia Republican Tom Davis. During the debate, hypocritical California closet queen, David Dreier, tried interupting Ms. Holmes making the case. Exasperated, she gave him an answer he wasn't looking for:

Dreier:  Will the gentlewoman yield?
 
Holmes Norton:  I will not yield, sir.  The District of Columbia has spent 206 years yielding to people who would deny them the vote.  I yield you no ground.  Not during my time.  You have had your say, and your say has been that you think the people who live in your capital are not entitled to a vote in their House. Shame on you. 

Watch it on YouTube; it's good.
 

PATRICK McHENRY LESS SQUARE THAN EVERYONE WHO EVER MET HIM THINKS?

Is Wonkette getting ready to drop the big bomb on Patrick McNutcase (R-NC)?

He made his reputation-- as an insane person and a far right fanatic-- by dressing up like Abe Lincoln and waving a sign in the vague vicinity of President Clinton saying "Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed?" He then started a deranged website called notHillary.com which led to him winning a Republican primary in a low-info North Carolina congressional district... by 86 votes. When the Republican House leadership couldn't find anyone willing to defend their child predator congressman, Mark Foley, McNutcase was happy to step up... and blame Foley on Clinton and Pelosi. Now he's an unsavory hatchetman for Howdy Doody (R-FL).

Anyway, Wonkette is an Inside the Beltway gossip blog that staffers in offices there read for titillation. Sometimes, though, they point in the direction of a serious story and I sense that that is what Wonkette did today. It's hard to imagine that the nerdy McHenry is a fan of avant garde indie rock-- let alone of anti-racist musicians-- but a Wonketter spotted him at the 930 Club last night seeing a TV On the Radio concert (and dressed like an ex-Young Repug-- which, of course, is what he is: "McHenry is the kind of young person whom other young people can't stand because he comes across as if he's been prepping his whole life to be 40"). Maybe he was a Joy Division fan.

Although most DC observers see McNutcase as a low-level loser with no future whatsoever, his own staffers think he could be a future Dick Cheney (which in their world is a good thing): "You know, I see him as someone who could someday be vice president," McHenry's political consultant Dee Stewart tells me. "Not president, because you've got to be more bipartisan for that, but a vice president, someone who could become a conservative legend."

That may be nipped in the bud very soon. Keep your eyes and ears open.

FBI IS ON A ROLL: FIRST DOOLITTLE AND NOW RENZI-- THE ARIZONA CROOK GETS RAIDED AND THEN RESIGNS FROM HIS COMMITTEE

It's about time, but the FBI has kicked into high gear on two long-pending cases against two of the slimiest of the Republican Culture of Corruption congressmen, John Doolittle (CA) and Rick Renzi (AZ). Doolittle details are at the link. Renzi's wife's business front for some of their dirty dealings was raided by the Feds yesterday. He was forced to resign from his Intelligence Committee seat immediately.

Renzi is well known as one of the slimiest and most corrupt members of Congress and he has been on CREW's "20 Most Corrupt Congressmen" list for many of his ethical lapses. Beyond the ethical lapses there has been some major criminal behavior, like funneling tens of millions of dollars into his father's defense contracting company, ManTech International, in return for contributions bribes.

Renzi has so many criminal activities going that no one has been sure which ones the FBI was honing in on. According to today's Arizona Republic it might not even one of the major ones. The Justice Department has been investigating Renzi for months, but the subject of the inquiry has never been made public. Media reports last fall gave conflicting versions, with authorities said to be looking into either a land swap involving a former business partner of Renzi or a Pentagon contract involving Renzi's father, a retired Army general."

One of the fired U.S. Attorneys, Paul Charlton, was axed by Abu Gonzo and Rove because he was investigating Renzi. An analysis of campaign fundraising in last week's Washington Post seems to indicate that Renzi knows he's unlikely to be running for re-election in '08.

Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.), who is battling allegations about land deals under investigation, raised just $117,724 from Jan. 1 to March 31 -- which is about a third of the amount he raised in the same period two years ago. In addition, Renzi ended the quarter with just $80,561 in his campaign account, a sharp drop from the $441,704 he had in his war chest at this point in 2005.


Moreover, Renzi is still holds debts of more than $144,000, which means he has negative net balance in his campaign account. The bulk of that debt, more than $100,000, is to Patton Boggs, the law firm that is helping defend him from a federal investigation into allegations that he promoted a land deal that benefited a former business partner.

UPDATE: THE INSIDE DOPE ON AZ-01

I got a great primer on Renzi today from Joel Wright, a friend of mine who lives in the district (AZ-01). He says the FBI raid is "huge" news in Flagstaff, Prescott and the rest of Renzi's sprawling, mostly rural district. Last year's candidate was Ellen Simon and she did pretty well-- holding Renzi down to 51% of the vote. She didn't really get much traction with the corruption rumors because many voters considered her... well, Renzi's political opponent with an ax to grind. And the U.S. Attorney for Arizona, Paul Charlton slowed down the investigation-- at the insistence of Abu Gonzo and Rove-- for the duration of the campaign. So this raid yesterday was the first real public indication Renzi's sleaze; 'til yesterday it was just a rumor. "That means," writes Joel, "this is a psychic break for voters in this district, a district that is rural, the voters working class for the most part, honest, regular folk, and for them to see their congressman raided by the FBI, stepping down from the Intelligence Committee, well, there’s only one word to characterize how voters are going to feel about him now:
Embarrassed."
 

Oh my, is that a cardinal sin here. You can be an ass, a jerk, an ego maniac, politically ambitious, even ruthless, but do not ever, ever, ever embarrass the good people of this district. No, no, no, no, no! So, the raid et al is a huge, huge development here.
 
With that said, Ellen had a very tough road to hoe last time and it will be that way, for the most part, again. Even in a special election, which would enhance her chances, I think, because it would mean Renzi would have had to have stepped down. So, the Republican candidate would have to climb the mountain of sleazy association, in addition to making the case to be the new representative. Given the collapse of this Administration, Abu G, Iraq, a shit economy, a housing collapse that is particularly devastating to folks here (because a big part of the district economy is housing construction), global warming (water is the biggest issue for us), and on and on, the door would seem to be wide open for a Democratic pickup.
 
And it is. And it certainly is much wider open today than it was yesterday. No doubt. But, it’s a big but too, the door’s been open most every cycle since ’92. The problem has been, and still is, two-fold:
 
1.      Dem candidates. Mostly they’ve been weak campaigners, ineffective, dominated by Beltway idiot consultants who have no clue how to campaign and win here (the biggest single problem, BTW), uninspiring and, most often, all of the above. I am the first to say Ellen and her campaign were different last year. That is why she came fairly close to Renzi. She’s different; she worked hard. And I supported her in ways I was able and I will support her again and be willing to do whatever I can to help. But even Ellen, an outstanding person and a gutsy campaigner, is still going to be saddled with the dreaded "L word," the ACLU and, as Renzi hit on hard last year, her "association" with NAMBLA (The North American Man-Boy Love Association). A total Swift Boat smear, but it’s there nonetheless. Still, Renzi showed Republicans not be fearful of swift boating her (or anyone else for that matter). He didn’t pay the price for lying nor his other ruthless shit. Republicans noted that, trust me.

2.      This district is plurality Democrat in registration, by a small percentage, and most people identify as moderate, either Dem, Rep or Indy. That’s their initial inclination-- steady as she goes types. That’s what most Beltway polling shows Democratic candidates. Don’t rock the boat, keep it simple, talk about issues, health care, for example. The only problem with that is it’s campaign bullshit. Strategically brain-dead and a proven, proven recipe for disaster. Sheesh! Stuff I’ve done in this district, as recently as last year even, shows clearly voters support progressive ideas and with government help: solutions to the water crisis, wildfire protection, forest health, economic development of this narrowly-based economy, and on and on. In short, no Dem campaign has made the progressive case and voters want it to be made. They’re hungry for it, believe you me.
 
So, bottom line, we get crap campaigns run by Beltway idiots, generally speaking, saying nothing to anyone while Renzi and Republicans (JD Hayworth before him) literally slice and dice weak Democratic candidates to pieces. It’s incredibly sad and frustrating. And totally predictable.
 
Now, I believe Ellen, in a second go ‘round, is the most likely to change that pattern. She’s got experience here now; campaign experience. She’s got higher awareness. The November outcome was respectable. She’s poised, especially given Renzi’s now-public sleaze, to knock it down here. I believe she can do it IF she runs a smart and strong campaign. That means attacking, hard, relentlessly. I’d counsel to run a one-two punch campaign: hit the Republican, talk water, hit the Republican, talk fires, hit the Republican, hit the Republican, hit the Republican, talk honor, talk values, talk honesty, hit the Republican, hit the Republican, hit the Republican. Pretty much a cadence like that.
 
The final thing to note here is that AZ-01 is not a single geographic or cultural entity. It’s the size of Pennsylvania, I believe. One ofhe largest districts (in land mass) in the country. That means you’ve got at least six quite distinct areas of this district. Northern AZ is different from Casa Grande, down south. The Navajo Rezservation. Three/four other rez’s. Northern Gila county, where I live, is different from southern Gila county. Sedona is different from Camp Verde/Clarkdale/Jerome. Et cetera, et cetera. To win, a Dem must take these differences into account and, actually, exploit them. No campaign besides Karan English’s has been smart enough to do that effectively.
 
Tough road to hoe here, but entirely doable and, now, much more so, IMHO. I’m very hopeful today. Not so yesterday.

UPDATE: WHEN WILL RENZI RESIGN?

He can't even claim it's just the "librul media" out to get him. The front page of the Wall Street Journal, a paper even further to the right than Renzi, is carrying an article so damaging to his reputation that he should probably just cut the best deal he can right now and save himself and his constituents all the pain and anguish between now and the sentencing. Renzi tried to scam the world's two largest mining companies trying to mine copper in Arizona. "In exchange for supporting the bill, the local congressman, Rick Renzi, a Republican, insisted on something in return: He wanted Resolution [a joint venture between the two ming companies] to buy, as part of the land swap, a 480-acre alfalfa field near his hometown of Sierra Vista, according to documents and people involved in the deal. Resolution executives refused. For starters, they thought the land was overpriced, people close to the deal say. More troubling, they discovered it was owned by Mr. Renzi's former business partner, these people say. Resolution wasn't the only party troubled by the congressman's demands. His chief of staff resigned and began cooperating secretly with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to witnesses and others close to the case. The FBI began a preliminary inquiry that was first reported in October, just before Mr. Renzi was elected to a third term."


UPDATE: GOP MOUTHPIECE, THE ARIZONA REPUBLIC SLAMS RENZI

Today's Arizona Republic took a big ole bite out of Renzi's hide. They explain the whole sordid investigation for their readers, although in the gentlest of manners, but end on an ominous note: "Renzi clearly has a great deal of explaining to do to his constituents as well as to investigators."
 

EVEN KARL ROVE FINDS THE CLUBBING OF A BABY SEAL DISTURBING-- AND WHEN THAT BABY SEAL IS NAMED ABU GONZO...

Both Christie at Firedoglake and a team from People For the American Way did solid jobs live blogging from the Senate Gonzales hearings today. What a circus! He was preparing for this? For a month?! So he could say he doesn't recall... anything?

Reactions from Republicans was complete dismay. Wingnut bloggers were wringing their hands and gnashing their teeth. One kook, founder of an extremist blog called Redstate, watched C-Span and asked "can we get some recommendations for a new AG?" Byron York, a far right propagandist at the National Review wrote: "It has been a disastrous morning for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. The major problem with his testimony is that Gonzales maintains, in essence, that he doesn't know why he fired at least some of the eight dismissed U.S. attorneys. When, under questioning by Republican Sen. Sam Brownback, Gonzales listed the reasons for each firing, it was clear that in a number of cases, he had reconstructed the reason for the dismissal after the fact. He didn't know why he fired them at the time, other than the action was recommended by senior Justice Department staff."


But Gonzales had an even worse problem with senators on the Judiciary Committee-- and not just Democrats. Ranking Republican Arlen Specter (PA) drew first blood when he felt his authority wasn't being respected. He was very harsh with Gonzales: "We have to evaluate whether you are really being forthright in saying that you, quote, 'should have been more precise,' close quote, when the reality is that your characterization of your participation is just significantly, if not totally, at variance with the facts."

Even more devastating to Gonzales-- and the Bush Regime-- was uber-right-wing Senator Tom Coburn (OK), who told Gonzo to resign: "But to me, there has to be consequences to accepting responsibility. And I would just say, Mr. Attorney General, it's my considered opinion that the exact same standards should be applied to you in how this was handled.  And it was handled incompetently. The communication was atrocious. It was inconsistent. It's generous to say that there were misstatements. That's a generous statement. And I believe you ought to suffer the consequences that these others have suffered. And I believe that the best way to put this behind us is your resignation."

Although I heard some GOP extremist refer to closeted Republican Lindsey Graham (SC) as "the Arlen Specter of The South," he's usually a very dependable Bush Regime rubber stamp. But he too took a couple of big bites out of Abu Gonzo. "Mr. Attorney General, most of this is a stretch. I think it's clear to me that some of these people just had personality conflicts with people in your office or at the White House and, you know, we made up reasons to fire them. Some of it sounds good. Some of it doesn't. And that's the lesson to be learned here... at the end of the day, you said something that struck me, 'That sometimes it just came down to these were not the right people at the right time.' If I applied that standard to you, what would you say?"

Even a kiss-ass like John Cornyn (R-TX) got in a slap "I have to tell you that the way that this investigation has been handled is just been-- been really deplorable." But the Republican senators' posturing was nothing compared to what anonymous White House operative were leaking. TV was abuzz with an assessment, halfway through the testimony, probably from Rove's office, that Gonzales "is going down in flames" and "not doing himself any favors."

Clueless as ever, Bush released a statement saying he was "pleased with the Attorney General's testimony today. After hours of testimony in which he answered all of the Senators' questions and provided thousands of pages of documents, he again showed that nothing improper occurred. He admitted the matter could have been handled much better, and he apologized for the disruption to the lives of the U.S. Attorneys involved, as well as for the lack of clarity in his initial responses." Bush isn't 100% alone on thinking Gonzales shouldn't be fired-- just 99.99%. The .01% belongs to his witless deputy press secretary, Dana Perino, who told reporters that "He has done a fantastic job in the Department of Justice."

So when does Orrin Hatch (R-UT) become Attorney General? And when does the Judiciary Committee get to question Rove. Did anyone else find it odd that Gonzo said he discussed the firings with Rove but that they didn't discuss it from a political perspective. Did they discuss it from a fashion perspective? Does Rove have some other talent aside from politics that they've been hiding from us?


UPDATE: BAD REVIEWS FOR GONZO'S ACT THE DAY AFTER

This morning's NY Times led the way: "If Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had gone to the Senate yesterday to convince the world that he ought to be fired, it’s hard to imagine how he could have done a better job, short of simply admitting the obvious: that the firing of eight United States attorneys was a partisan purge. Mr. Gonzales came across as a dull-witted apparatchik incapable of running one of the most important departments in the executive branch."

We don’t yet know whether Mr. Gonzales is merely so incompetent that he should be fired immediately, or whether he is covering something up.

But if we believe the testimony that neither he nor any other senior Justice Department official was calling the shots on the purge, then the public needs to know who was. That is why the Judiciary Committee must stick to its insistence that Mr. Rove, Ms. Miers and other White House officials testify in public and under oath and that all documents be turned over to Congress, including e-mail messages by Mr. Rove that the Republican Party has yet to produce.

William Rivers Pitt was scathing and very much on target. And Dana Milbank at the Washington Post comes right to the point: "Alberto Gonzales's tenure as attorney general was pronounced dead at 3:02 p.m. yesterday by Tom Coburn, M.D." An editorial in the same paper closes with a soundbyte we've all seen on TV and then an observation: "'The moment I believe I can no longer be effective I will resign as attorney general,' Mr. Gonzales said yesterday. That moment has arrived, whether or not the attorney general and the president are willing to acknowledge it."

And the Speaker of the House wasn't too impressed either.

The Attorney General is the defender of the Constitution and the chief law enforcement officer. The people of the United States must have absolute confidence in the integrity of their Attorney General.

By his actions and with his testimony yesterday, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has lost the trust of the American people. The nation cannot have a chief law enforcement officer whose candor and judgment are in serious question.

The President should restore credibility to the office of the Attorney General. Alberto Gonzales must resign.

THERE ARE A LOT OF REPUBLICANS WHO HATE GAY PEOPLE AND ALWAYS VOTE AGAINST THEIR INTERESTS-- BUT SO DO A HANDFUL OF DEMOCRATS

First a little good news: New Hampshire's wildly popular governor, John Lynch, announced that he's going to sign the bill allowing for civil unions for gay couples in his state. "I believe it is a matter of conscience, fairness and preventing discrimination. "I believe it is a matter of conscience, fairness and preventing discrimination." Although Massachusetts already has gay marriage, New Hampshire will join Connecticut, Vermont and New Jersey as states establishing civil unions. These were also states early to oppose and abolish slavery.

More good news: 66 House members-- all Democrats, of course, have perfect (100%) records on standing for gay equality. Among those 66 are not just openly gay members like Barney Frank (MA) and Tammy Baldwin (WI), but most of the Democratic leaders as well, like Nancy Pelosi (CA), George Miller (CA), Rahm Emanuel (IL), and Charlie Rangel (NY).

And now the bad news: All but 3 Republicans-- Libertarian Ron Paul (TX), Jim Sensenbrenner (WI) and ex-Democrat Rodney Alexander (LA), each with a 25% score-- also have perfect scores: 0%. That means that all but 3 of the Republican congressmembers-- including the half dozen known gay Republican closet queens-- voted against gay equality every single time it came up. That is staggering. I wonder how the Log Cabin loons can look at themselves in the mirror.

And now the worse news: fourteen reactionary Democrats have voted with the Republicans on every roll call seeking to legislate discrimination or block equality in regard to gay men and women. These are the homophobic and disgraceful Democrats with zero scores:

* John Barrow (GA)
* Melissa Bean (IL)
* Dan Boren (OK)
* G.K. Butterfield (NC)
* Russ Carnahan (MO)
* Emanuel Cleaver (MO)
* Jim Costa (CA)
* Henry Cuellar (TX)
* Stephanie Herseth (SD)
* Brian Higgins (NY)
* Daniel Lipinski (IL)
* John Salazar (CO)
* Allyson Schwartz (PA)
* John Tanner (TN)

Are you gay? Or do you have gay family members or friends? Think about those names-- all but 3 Republicans and those 14 homophobic Democrats-- next time the any of the Inside the Beltway PACs asks you for a donation... and next time you go to the polls.

THE NEXT INEVITABLE STEP TOWARDS CONGRESSLOON AND MRS. JOHN DOOLITTLE'S INCARCERATION IN FEDERAL PRISONS

uhh... No good news today, John

Although Northern California's pathetic right-wing nutcase, John Doolittle, is trying to spin the media into believing he resigned from the House Appropriations Committee-- membership on which helped him build valuable and illicit financial relationships with GOP rainmakers like Jack Abramoff, Kevin Ring, Brent Wilkes, etc-- reliable sources tell DWT a very different story. Doolittle actually thought he could prevent news leaking out about the FBI raiding his home Friday. He didn't tell the Republican hierarchy and when someone knocked on Boehner's tanning booth to tell him he flipped out. I mean if someone says "Resign by tomorrow or be fired," does that count as a resignation? Just asking.

Boehner allowed Doolittle to say "I understand how the most recent circumstances may lead some to question my tenure on the Appropriations Committee. Therefore I feel it may be in the best interest of the House that I take a temporary leave with seniority from this committee until this matter can be resolved." Boehner then followed up in a statement that "Doolittle's decision" is "in the best interest of the House and the American people."

So when does he resign from Congress? Help rebuild democracy in CA-04 by making a donation to Charlie Brown's campaign and by voting for him in Democracy for America's "Grassroots All-Star" competition.

LIFE IN THE GREED ZONE: BAGHDAD COUNTRY CLUB OFF LIMITS AFTER 6PM-- UNLESS ACCOMPANIED BY McCAIN'S ARMED CONTINGENT

Yesterday something like 200 civilians going about their day to day lives in George Bush's Iraq were killed. McCain was out sniffing for campaign dollars and not on a Baghdad neighborhood stroll or a bargain hunting shopping trip with silly Lindsey Graham (R-Closet) and crazy Mike Pence (R-Indiana country market).

This morning, Fred, our pal in Baghdad, forwarded us a Security Notice (#06-688) that went out to all U.S. personnel working there from Senior Regional Security Officer Randall Bennett. The subject: Baghdad Country Club Bar and Restaurant Off-Limits after 1800 hours. Oh dear; what will nights in the Greed Zone be like now?

The Regional Security Office (RSO) continues to receive threat reporting of possible attacks planned within the International Zone and works closely with the Joint Area Support Group (JASG), International Zone (IZ) Police, and other military elements to counter these threats.

Our best defense, however, will always be the personal ownership each Mission employee assumes for his/her own safety. Each of you should periodically review your security posture to identify any possible vulnerability such as the RSO does so for the entire Mission. In a critical threat environment, the most fundamental security concepts are to lower your personal profile and to avoid places where Westerners frequently congregate, such as restaurants, bars, and nightclubs.

RSO has conducted a security survey of the Baghdad Country Club restaurant/bar. The restaurant/bar presents several vulnerabilities to include zero setback, no reinforced perimeter physical security, and only three Iraqi guards on patrol at night. The wine bar and restaurant will only be open in the evenings beginning at 7:00 p.m.

The RSO has placed this establishment off-limits after 6:00 p.m. If you choose to go to the adjacent beverage and general merchandise store during the day, you should increase your vigilance, look for possible surveillance or suspicious activity, travel in groups, and have someone watch your vehicle while you are in the store. If you have any questions or concerns, do not hesitate to contact ARSO Ricardo Gibert at 914-822-9060 or gibertr@state.gov/

Can someone forward this to Senators McCain and Graham and Congressmen Renzi and Pence?

Thought for the day: Is my friend giving the Big Dickster too much credit? Or might there really be "intelligent design" behind the Veep's madness?

My first response to this e-mail from a friend--who's European-born and now splits his time between there and the U.S.--was that it credits the Dickster with more sophistication than he's ever shown in his vice presidential behavior, either public or (insofar as we are aware) private. However, that behavior has been explicable only as the product of criminal psychosis so extreme that it all but demands locking him up and throwing away the key.

Could there in fact be method to this blatant madness?

What Cheney can't tell the American people

We are living above our means, we owe the world trillions of dollars that we can't pay back....What do you think will happen if they are no longer afraid of us? What will happen if we lose control over the world's oil reserves and they want to be paid in euros and not in dollars?

VERY QUESTIONABLE FINANCIAL SHENANIGANS ON THE STRAIGHT TALK EXPRESS: HAS McCAIN REVERTED TO HIS OLD CROOKED WAYS?

McCain's got his own version of a coalition of the willing down in South Carolina. And, like Bush's in Iraq, they're willing as long as the bribes are flowing their way. McCain's first ever brush with national celebrity was when he was caught stuffing his face at the trough that came to be known as the S&L scandal-- he was one of the Keating 5. A consultant told him the only way to save his tarnished reputation and his political career would be to create an image that looked clean.  So he got involved with a bunch of clean stuff-- like McCain-Feingold and his bogus "Straight-Talk Express, and this whole maverick shtick. But always lurking beneath the surface was the grubby, grasping, cheat, the real John McCain.

And according to yesterday's Columbia State the ugly face of the real McCain was exposed for everyone in South Carolina.

John McCain’s presidential campaign has paid more than $30,000 in 2007 to a South Carolina senator and the sons of two other prominent elected officials, all of whom have endorsed the Arizona Republican’s bid for the White House.

Mr. Forked Tongue Express has state Senator Mike Fair and the sons of Representative Gloria Haskins (Bryan) and Adjunct General Stan Spears (Stan, Jr.) on his payroll. Fair and the two kids' parents all endorsed McCain (of course). "The endorsements and jobs are not related, McCain’s top political consultant in South Carolina told The State Tuesday." Who would ever imagine they would be?


DID YOU KNOW CRAZY OLD McCAIN WAS A BEACH BOYS FAN?

I didn't either. But apparently he likes singin' Beach Boys songs when he's confronted with tough diplomatic questions. Pat over at Nitpicker did a great post this morning called Crazy Talk Express and answers the question on many people's minds: "Good God; John McCain is Nuts." McCain was out trying to harvest wingnuts in South Carolina when one kook Republican primary voter, eager for the bombing of Iran to begin, asked him when America would "send an airmail message to Tehran." Fortunately, a Romney "tracker," looking for a McCain "macaca-moment," was there to capture it all.

McCain began his answer by changing the words to a popular Beach Boys song. “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran,” he sang to the tune of Barbara Ann.

How do you think this sets him up to deal with Iran diplomatically?

Watch the video over at Crooks and Liars.


UPDATE: McCAIN ISN'T CLASSY ENOUGH TO BE A BEACH BOYS FAN-- HE WORSHIPS AT THE ALTER OF VINCE VANCE & THE VALIANTS

Here's what McCain was trying to sing. (And, yeah, that's Vince.) Jon Solz contemplates what most people thought was impossible: a worse presidency than Bush's!

You want more music? OK, try this!

McCain, in Las Vegas yesterday trying to suck up some gambling moolah, said if you don't like his singin' "lighten up and get a life."


UPDATE: MOVEON DOESN'T THINK WE CAN AFFORD ANOTHER RECKLESS PRESIDENT

Take a look at the Bomb Bomb Bomb Iran" ad MoveOn just finished.

MITCH McCONNELL (R-KY): "MALE IMPERSONATOR"

A few weeks ago when DWT exposed Bush's bitch Mitch as a quintessential hypocritical closet case, we were savagely attacked by a bunch of crazed far right websites. I wonder if they'll go after Rolling Stone now that they've outed McConnell too.

Matt Taibbi did a story on the tussle over ending the occupation of Iraq and kind of matter of factly refers to Bush's #1 Senate enabler as "male impersonator Mitch McConnell." The story isn't about McConnell being gay. It just mentions it in passing. I'm not certain how many copies of Rolling Stone get sold in Kentucky but I suspect that in the next week almost as many people in KY will know Kentucky has a closeted gay U.S. Senator as already do in Washington, DC.

FBI RAIDS CHEZ DOOLITTLE. HE HASN'T BEEN ARRESTED YET

I don't think the FBI needed to read our Doolittle story on Monday to figure out they needed to raid John Doolittle's Oakton, Virginia house. They should have done it long ago, in fact, before he and his moll had a chance to destroy evidence. Most people are guessing that Kevin Ring, a Doolittle bagman who worked for Abramoff and with Julie, has turned state's evidence to save his own worthless neck.

The Hill is reporting that the FBI actually searched the Doolittle's lair Friday. It looks like Doolittle was trying to keep it secret, not even telling Boehner.

The search took place on the same day that his former chief of staff, Kevin Ring, abruptly resigned from his lobbying firm. Ring left Doolittle’s office to work for Abramoff at the law firm Greenberg Traurig and may have played a role in Abramoff’s decision to hire Julie Doolittle’s consulting firm. After the Abramoff scandal broke, Ring went to work for the lobbying firm, Barnes and Thornburg.

Doolittle came within three percentage points of losing his election in November after facing months of scrutiny over his relationship with Abramoff, who is in jail for an array of fraud, bribery and money-laundering charges. The lawmaker has denied any wrongdoing.

Throughout his campaign, Doolittle refused to return an estimated $50,000 he received from Abramoff clients, mostly tribes, between 1999 and 2004. Abramoff also personally donated $14,000 between 1999 and 2004 to Doolittle’s congressional campaigns.

Doolittle used Abramoff’s luxury sports box for a fundraiser without initially reporting it to the Federal Election Commission.

Doolittle also has been under fire for paying his wife’s company, Sierra Dominion Financial Solutions, a 15 percent commission on all contributions that the company raised for Doolittle’s campaign committee and leadership PAC. Her only other clients were Abramoff’s former firm, Greenberg Traurig; Abramoff’s former restaurant Signatures; and the Korea-U.S. Exchange Council, which Ed Buckham, a former chief of staff to ex-Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas), created.

The Justice Department previously subpoenaed Julie Doolittle’s files.

Doolittle also received contributions from indicted defense contractor Brent Wilkes and his associates, and investigators are probing whether those contributions are linked to any official action Doolittle took to help Wilkes’ company obtain millions of dollars in government earmarks.

Wilkes recently was indicted in connection with his investigation stemming from former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham’s (R-Calif.) bribery conviction and jailing.

Charlie Brown, who nearly beat Doolittle last year and is well positioned to win the seat next year, issued a statement: "This is a sad day for the people of the 4th District, for our Congress, and our country.  It is my sincere hope that the ongoing investigation will bring the era of corruption and scandal ridden politics to a close, so that we can move forward on addressing the real priorities of the American people:  like ending the war in Iraq, winning the war against Terrorism, securing our borders, keeping faith with our veterans, expanding economic opportunity, and achieving energy independence." Charlie's one of the most upstanding and all-American guys I ever met. Please join me in helping to make sure he has enough money to go into battle against Doolittle-- or whatever Doolittle-clone the GOP finds if the original model is in prison he has to fight-- right here


UPDATE: FBI RAID HITS THE WIRES


The Associated Press newswire is reporting that the search "the search last Friday focused on records of Doolittle's wife's company, Sierra Dominion Financial Solutions." That company was one of the ways Doolittle was laundering bribes into his personal account from crooks like Ring and Abramoff. Doolittle slyly tried to insinuate to the press that the whole thing is about his wife and not about him!

"My wife has been cooperating with the FBI and the Justice Department for almost three years and that cooperation is going to continue in the future," Doolittle said. "I support my wife 100 percent and fully expect that the truth will prevail."

Yeah, me too. But meanwhile... there's John Doolittle, the video homage to corruption and wingnuttery.

DONATING TO NARAL IS NOT GOING TO HELP PROTECT A WOMAN'S RIGHT TO CHOICE. IN FACT, IT COULD UNDERMINE IT!

Today at high noon Jane declared war... on behalf of every progressive in America. And the enemy: NARAL.

And what did they do with all that cash? They sat on it and didn't do a damn thing, didn't lift a finger to fight Samuel Alito. Worse yet, when the Gang of 14 decided to vote in favor of cloture, they said that they did not consider cloture votes "significant" and would not be considering them in their scorecard. They then went on to add insult to injury by asking their membership to thank Lincoln Chafee and Joe Lieberman for the beatings they delivered with their "aye" cloture vote by pretending that their "nay" floor votes were significant. They then poured salt into the wound by endorsing both "short ride" Lieberman and Chafee over their opponents who made it clear that they would not have voted for cloture for Alito, which gave us the 5-4 decision we have today.

Don't reward failure. Tell your friends. Don't give money to NARAL when they come knocking on your door to tell you that choice is going down the crapper unless you give them a lot of money, because what you'll be giving money for is Nancy Keenan's ability to point her little pinky over tea at Washington cocktail parties and tut-tut over the state of choice in this country at the hands of the fundamentalists. She'll take no responsibility for the fact that NARAL will not fight, will not back those that fight, and worse yet, that NARAL sucks up all the pro-choice money so nobody else can mount a meaningful fight, either.

While Jane was contemplating NARAL's response to the Supreme Court travesty-- a travesty that could easily should be laid at NARAL's feet-- I was on the phone with Congressman John Hall, preparing for Saturday's live blog session. He had just come out of the first meeting of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming and he was brimming over with enthusiasm and excitement. He talked for 10 minutes about the committee before I could get in a word. (Come back Saturday at 2pm EST for the global warming stuff.) I asked him what he thought of today's Supreme Court decision upholding the ban on partial birth abortion. He had just walked out of the committee room when he called me so he didn't know it had happened and he said he had to read the ruling but... and he was off on a tear: "That phrase is a complete misnomer deliberately attached to this procedure to make it seem more unpalatable and more abhorrent. I don't know any woman who is excited about having an abortion at any time during her term." He had ideas about the availability of emergency contraception and about eduction, not just for women but for men as well.

John Hall just happened to be on the phone with me today when this came down. But he's the kind of informed and progressive candidate that Blue America supports. We don't support reactionaries who are a threat to women's rights or gay people's rights or who support illegitimate wars. NARAL is an insider political clique that has lost its way. There are state offices, like the one in New York, that are fine and effective organizations. The national Inside the Beltway NARAL is not one of us. It's one of them. Joe Lieberman? Lincoln Chafee ANY Republican? Republicans-- whether an extremist wingnut like Sessions or Cornyn or a supposed moderate like Collins or Chafee votes to organize the Senate in a way that can only be utter disaster for women's rights and tends to vote-- with the connivance of NARAL-- on procedural matters with the GOP.

NARAL, Chafee and Lieberman brought you Sammy Alito-- and made you pay for it-- and today Alito was the fifth vote in the religionist right's effort to chip away further at Roe v Wade. NARAL is either naive or incompetent or both. When they ask you for money-- based on today's Supreme Court ruling, no less-- tell them you're donating to the Blue America PAC instead. The first question we ask a candidate is how they stand on women's right to choice. If they waffle we tell them "good luck" and recommend they go talk to the DCCC or DSCC. And don't just tell them you are, how about $5 today for our PAC. We'll be using it to support candidates like John Hall and the ones you see listed with a grassroots campaign like the one we did for Victoria Wulsin last year in her first-- and nearly successful-- bid to unseat Mean Jean Schmidt. Think about what John Edwards said today when the decision was handed down: "I could not disagree more strongly with today's Supreme Court decision. The ban upheld by the Court is an ill-considered and sweeping prohibition that does not even take account for serious threats to the health of individual women. This hard right turn is a stark reminder of why Democrats cannot afford to lose the 2008 election. Too much is at stake -- starting with, as the Court made all too clear today, a woman's right to choose." And then think about what John McCain-- a variation on the theme of what all the wingnut candidates had to say-- "Today's Supreme Court ruling is a victory for those who cherish the sanctity of life and integrity of the judiciary. The ruling ensures that an unacceptable and unjustifiable practice will not be carried out on our innocent children. It also clearly speaks to the importance of nominating and confirming strict constructionist judges who interpret the law as it is written, and do not usurp the authority of Congress and state legislatures. As we move forward, it is critically important that our party continues to stand on the side of life."




UPDATE: WAS THIS RADICAL SUPREME COURT'S DECISION TODAY A BIG DEAL?

You bet it was! Scott's got the details.

RON PAUL'S VISION OF A SAFER AMERICA: SHOOT-OUTS ON EVERY STREET, IN SCHOOLS, IN CHURCHES, STORES, EVERYWHERE... THAT'LL SHOW 'EM

Every time I mention Loonitarian Rep. Ron Paul, one of the zombies from his campaign jumps online and starts squawking about how he has the most anti-Iraq voting record of anyone in Congress. That's not only patently false, it belies the fact that he has a pretty abysmal Iraq voting record, voting with the rubber stamp team behind the Bush and Cheney agenda 18 times-- and having voted "present" or absenting himself several other times-- out of the 50 roll calls related to Iraq. He may be the "best" of the Republicans but all but 10 Democrats have better Iraq voting records than Ron Paul.

So don't even think about voting for this guy based on Iraq. And as far as the rest-- yecchhh. He's been almost a complete hack and right-wing rubber stamp. Look at this repulsive voting record, far, far worse than even the most reactionary Democrats. The 3 most reactionary Democrats score a 49 (Gene Taylor of Mississippi), 56 (Dan Boren of Oklahoma) and a 57 (Bud Cramer of Alabama). Ron Paul scores a 25. But he's running for president and his cheering squad thinks he's enlightened and progressive.

His vanity campaign isn't in the news much-- but it was today. He has a "simple solution to future shooting massacres": "more guns... People are a little more cautious if somebody might have a gun there. A concealed gun carried by a responsible person-- that might have ended the problem that they had at Virginia Tech with one person being killed or two people being killed."

Like other extremist wingnuts and Loonitarians, Paul sees gun control as "an affront to freedom." Mad as a hatter, the flat earth primitive claims that "It's the lack of access to law-abiding citizens to have guns in many places that increases our crime rate."

And Paul is petrified that the UN is coming to take our guns away too-- no doubt in black helicopters. Yep... that kind of "candidate."


POSTSCRIPT (FROM KEN): HOW SHAMEFULLY
WE'VE DISHONORED THE SACRIFICE OF JIM BRADY

When some well-meaning crackpot posted a comment on DWT the other day saying he didn't see how gun control might have mitigated the horror of the Virginia Tech shootings, I thought of those authentic American heroes Jim and Sarah Brady.

When White House Press Secretary Jim Brady became a "collateral damage" victim of John Hinckley's 1981 assassination attempt on Jim's boss, President Ronald Reagan, the Brady family launched a personal campaign to bring at least a modicum of sense and responsibility to gun sales. Despite the predictably implacable and ruthlessly well-funded opposition of the gun lobby (I believe the National Rifle Association's official policy is that even the tiniest hint that gun ownership involve either sense or responsibility should be dealt with by blowing the Commie sumbitch's head off), the Bradys were on hand when President Bill Clinton signed the Brady Bill into law in November 1993.

That should have been the start of a process of working toward a situation where responsible people could own guns under a system of reasonable controls such as any sane society would apply to potentially lethal objects--the way we require registration of car ownership, for example.

Instead, with the sense-extinguishing rise of the Extreme Right, momentum was not only lost but reversed. And so, instead of honoring Jim and Sarah and Scott and Melissa Brady, we've shamed them, turning our backs on their personal sacrifice and the lesson they worked so hard to teach us.


THE NRA IS SUCH AN EFFECTIVE PROGAPANDA OUTLET THAT THEY'VE BEEN ABLE TO CONVINCE THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA THAT GUN CONTROL POSITIONS SUPPORTED BY 80% OR MORE AMERICANS ARE "EXTREME"

Media Matters shows how Bill Schneider of CNN and Time's Karen Tumulty, as well as media wingnuts, have substituted N.R.A./GOP talking points for real reporting.

I don't know what's happening with the BlackBerry crisis, but it's OK to hold the whipped cream on my blackberry shortcake (I'm cutting back)

Mmm, the ripe ones would make great shortcake, wouldn't they?

In my company e-mail this morning, I found this from our IT guy:

There is a outage with the North America blackberry system. Emails cannot be sent or received. The outage is estimated to last through the morning.

Translating IT talk into English, I gather that this is a problem afflicting BlackBerry users, which doesn't affect blackberry consumers at all. As it happens, personally speaking I have "a outage" of my own, blackberrywise, but it's entirely a function of market economics--the blackberry market and my personal economics.

Shortcake. Blackberries would make great shortcake. You could put just a dollop of whipped cream on top, with maybe a hint of vanilla whipped in, and . . .

Oops, I'm drifting. If blackberries are a subject of great interest to me (if there were just something we could do about the damned price), the BlackBerry is of almost none. Except for this sudden discovery that it's apparently possible to make the entire North American BlackBerry system go kerplooey!

I read just recently here on DWT that His Holiness Joe Lieberman, in his capacity as chairman of the Senate's Homeland Security Committee, is proud to be able to cooperate with the Bush administration and has come increasingly to admire the job being done by Secretary Michael Chertoff.

Now, when Judge Chertoff first entered my consciousness some years back, I had the impression that he was a person of some substance, perhaps even accomplishment. But I know you have to be careful with these D.C.-esque resumes. As no one demonstrated better than Chimpy the Prez's own personal Poppy, George H.W.B., it's possible to build up a history of impressive-sounding jobs without ever doing anything, or even acquiring the know-how to do something if you wanted to. But by the time Chimpy tapped Chertoff to be secretary of homeland security, following the sudden unavailability of Rudy Giuliani's pal Bernie Kerik for the job, it's clear that the Chert had embraced rank chumpdom with open arms. (See: Katrina, Hurricane.)

I wonder how Secretary Chumpoff, I mean Chertoff, greeted the news that the entire North American BlackBerry system can be offed with a single whoosh. I suppose the Republican Noise Machinists' Union is looking at the usual suspects: godless, or rather wrong-godded, terrorists. I'm more inclined to think it's another case of business as usual, corporate-America-style.

The only reason to outsource the job to furriners like Osama bin-Laden is that they can probably do the job cheaper. But not better. No, never better. When it comes to fucking up America, nobody could hope to do a better job than our beloved corporate whoremasters. Is it any wonder we pay our CEOs the supermegabucks?

And you can hold the whipped cream on my blackberry shortcake. Lately I haven't been getting to the gym regularly. Oh, it was just whipped? With some vanilla and sugar? Well, we don't want it to go to waste. Environmentally speaking, we hate waste, don't we?

I'll keep you posted on the BlackBerry mess. Or better still, you just keep an eye on your BlackBerry for updates.

CHARLIE CRIST SEEMS TO HAVE OPENED THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION-- PARDON FOR JIM MORRISON?

Last year, Florida Republicans rejected the hard right posture of Bush's self-indulgent brother Jeb and chose moderate Charlie Crist over right-wing loon Tom Gallagher, even after it was clear that Crist is another GOP closet queen. So far, Crist has been a far better governor than anyone would have imagined. He's been governing from the point of view of trying to help his constituents, the citizens of Florida, rather than the way Jeb was running the state, as an off-shoot of BushCo, the family firm, every move meant to further narrow partisan aims and enrich political supporters at the expense of everyone else.

A couple weeks ago I was knocked out when I read that Crist was going to actually deal with the disgraceful situation whereby Florida has been disenfranchising thousands of ex-felons. Under Crist's compromise plan-- the legislature, after all, is still dominated by far right maniacs and racists-- "cuts down on the time and paperwork that ex-convicts need to get their civil rights restored... Under a draft of the plan, felons would be divided into three categories upon their release: nonviolent offenders, criminals who haven't committed murder or sex crimes, and those who have committed the more heinous acts. The nonviolent offenders, who account for 80 percent of the crimes, would be eligible for the swiftest restoration of their rights to vote, sit on a jury or obtain occupational licenses, according to a draft the Miami Herald obtained under the public records act." It was approved by the Florida Clemency Board last week.

Last week I mentioned in a Crooks and Liars Late Nite Music Club that Crist is also considering a posthumous pardon for native Floridian/Door lead singer Jim Morrison. After a rally with Sheryl Crow at the University of Florida on Monday to stop global warming, "Crist got on a plane for the capital and seemed lost in thought. He then turned and said he is seriously thinking about pardoning Morrison's 1970 indecent exposure and profanity convictions stemming from a Miami concert the year before. 'He died when he was 27. That's really a kid, when you think about it, and obviously he was having some challenges. There's some dispute about how solid the case was,' Crist said."

I wasn't at the show, but Morrison was a friend of mine and I remember the incident well. He was a real superstar and youth hero at the time. And "the time" was very explosive since VietNam was front and center and young people were overall very alienated from the Establishment. Many people felt Morrison was being crucified unjustly. There was no evidence that he had ever exposed himself and he died before the appeal. Some think the conviction led to his death. "Who doesn't do things that maybe they wish they hadn't done when you're that young?" Crist said. VH-1 did a sensationalized report on the story a few years ago:

SO WHO'S STILL AGAINST LETTING OLDER PEOPLE GET CHEAPER PRICES ON THEIR MEDICINES?

McConnell does more than just filibuster ending the occupation of Iraq. The closeted Kentucky senator is also busy making sure that needy older Americans pay top dollar for their medicines. Although the Senate has more than enough votes to guarantee that the government will negotiate with drug companies on behalf of consumers to get the best prices, GOP dead-enders like McConnell are using obstructionist techniques to keep the legislation from moving forward. In order to pass it there is a need for 60 votes. Five Republicans who were thought to be wavering and voting in favor of their constituents instead of Big Pharma-- for a change-- have now indicated that Big Pharma's steady flow of fat bribes will win the day. The 5 Republicans are Trent Lott (MS), Kay Bailey Hutchison (TX), Lindsey Graham (SC-- GOP closet queens stick together), Bob Corker (TN) and Ben Nelson (NE-- technically a Democrat but... let's be real).

With no regard for any semblance of truth Hutchinson said today she is a definite "No" vote on the bill. "I think it would be a mistake to open up negotiations," she said. "It would limit the number of options" for seniors. You decide-- liar or insane? Under current law, written by Big Pharma lobbyists with Bill Frist, McConnell and Santorum-- only one of whom is still in elective office-- the government is prohibited from intervening in private-sector price negotiations between drug makers and providers.

I wrote the above two paragraphs this morning and held it, knowing there would be further developments today. There were; Bush, in repayment for the gigantic sums of money Big Pharma has given to the GOP (over $60 million in legal bribes since Bush took over the White House), said he would veto the bill. And, on the brighter side, Ben Nelson has agreed to abandon his Republican allies and vote with the Democrats-- not on the bill itself, but just to end McConnell's filibuster (cloture).

Bush's Mormon Mafia Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, on behalf of the Regime's Insurance Industry and Big Pharma patrons, ominously warned Republican senators that government authority to negotiate drug prices could lead to government price controls under the next (Democratic) administration and that he would not use negotiating authority even if it passed. Bush, Leavitt and the GOP propaganda machine-- financed by Big Pharma-- are desperately trying to convince senior citizens that the bill will harm them. The Regime issued a nonsensical statement claiming that the legislation would "impede competition and reduce convenience for beneficiaries."


Reid is pessimistic about rounding up a few Republicans to shut down the filibuster. "Based on the power of the insurance industry and its closeness to the Republicans, I don't have a lot of confidence." Minnesota's rubber stamp Bush-league senator, Norm Coleman, among the 2 or 3 most vulnerable Republicans up for re-election next year, is afraid enough of voters in his state to turn on Bush and vow to support the bill and vote against McConnell's filibuster. But with Tim Johnson still in the hospital and with Big Pharma and the insurance lobby having gotten to Kay Bailey Hutchison and persuaded her to change her vote on this from last year when she supported it, the chances that Bush will need to veto in to screw senior citizens is slight. McConnell and his gang of corrupt right-wing pols will do it for him.


UPDATE: McCONNELL SERVES HIS CORPORATE MASTERS WELL-- DRUG PRICES WILL REMAIN SKY HIGH FOR THE ELDERLY

The Democrats failed today to win the 60 votes necessary to shut down McConnell's filibuster and start debating whether or not to allow the government to negotiate Medicare Part D drug pricing. Six Republicans joined all Democrats on the 55-42 vote in favor of cloture. The Republicans who voted for it last year but buckled under to Big Business pressure this year were Lindsey Graham (SC), Kay Bailey Hutchison (TX), Lisa Murkowski (AK), Richard Shelby (AL) and Ted Stevens (AL). McCain, of course, didn't vote, being too busy peddling his ass to the highest bidders in his desperate and pointless quest for the presidency. Funny, about that-- Hillary and Obama both voted.

END OF THE ROAD FOR SAM GRAVES?

Republican rubber stamp Sam Graves was first elected to Congress from northwest Missouri's 6th CD in 2000, succeeding a retiring Democrat, Pat Danner, by beating her son. Graves won that race with a bare 51%. But the district trended red and he's managed to improve on that margin considerably-- up to the 64% in 2004-- although he fell back to 61% last year. Bush beat Gore and Kerry convincingly (with 53% and 57% victories, respectively). Sounds like taking Graves out would be a real longshot, right?

Maybe. Claire McCaskill beat incumbent Jim Talent, whose voting record was almost identical to Graves, in the district. Like Talent, Graves is a rubber stamp imbecile and a bright red reactionary with a voting record way, way too extreme hard right for this moderate district. On Iraq he could just as well have handed Bush or Cheney a proxy on October 10, 2002 saying "Please cast my vote for me."

The traditionally Democratic half of the district, in the metro Kansas City area, is the mass media center for almost the entire district. That's a mighty attractive proposition for popular K.C. Mayor Kay Barnes, who would start out at least as well-known as Graves, who's from a small, backward town, Tarkio, in the remote northwest. The DCCC is courting Barnes, who will leave the mayoralty in May after 2 successful terms, the first woman to have ever held that job. A cousin of Walter Cronkite, she is credited with bringing together a broad coalition of private and public interests to revitalize downtown K.C. She is a quintessentially business-friendly Democrat.

Ron Grunzberger reports something odd about the race. There is a lot of chatter about Barnes challenging Graves. But instead of rallying around him, local Republicans... are rallying around her! "State House Speaker Rod Jetton (R) decided to present Barnes with an "Outstanding Missourian Award" at the State Capitol last week. Jetton even made sure the ceremony was videotaped for possible later use." Jetton is just one of many local Republicans sick and tired of Graves' imperious attitude and of his divide-and-conquer approach to internal Republican politics in Missouri.