HAVE YOU BEEN WONDERING WHAT'S UP WITH JERRY LEWIS AND SOME OF THE OTHER CALIFORNIA CONGRESSIONAL REPUBLICROOKS?

left to right: Jerry Lewis, Ken Calvert, John Doolittle

If you're a regular DWT reader you already know we think the single most corrupt member of Congress is Jerry Lewis (R-CA). Between Ken and I, we've done dozens of stories on his criminality over the past couple of years but if you need to catch up, let me suggest this and this for starters.

Done? OK, now that you know who this character is, let me point out that Republican propagandist Robert Novak does a weekly right wing politics column for Human Events every week and this week he's reporting on the potential for upsets in California House races. Discounting the absurd wishful thinking of Republicans who are dreaming they can touch one of the most admired congressmen in the state, Jerry McNerney, Novak has figured out most of the GOP soft spots.

The most obvious one, of course, is Doolittle (CA-04) who has been written off by all observers, regardless of political affiliation as someone unlikely to ever win another election for anything, unless he moved to Utah. He barely kept his seat against political new-comer Charlie Brown last time and if there were another election today between the two, Doolittle would be lucky to break 40%. Novak points out that he's "being scrutinized by the Justice Department. Despite his firm protestations of innocence, there is no question that Republicans view him as a liability and do not want to lose his heavily GOP seat because of accusations of impropriety." Novak, however, doesn't mention that Republicans are already jumping in to challenge Doolittle in a primary if he does what no one at all thinks he will and runs again (IF he's not in prison by then). Today another Republican challenger, wingnut Eric Egland, said he will run against Doolittle.

Among those backing his entry into the race is Steve Schmidt, a former White House adviser to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney who ran Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's 2006 re-election campaign, and Cindy Sherrod, who chaired the Bush-Cheney re-election drive in Placer County in 2004.

"The Republican Party will lose that seat if John Doolittle is nominated," Schmidt said.

"That was the lesson of the 2006 election. Ethically tarred Republican congressmen will go down to defeat. And the situation for Doolittle has only deteriorated since the last election."

And speaking of ethically-tarred Republicans, Novak-- as well as the DCCC-- is looking at several in southern California as well. I'll get to Lewis in a moment. Novak has something to say about Republicrooks Ken Calvert and Gary Miller which is ridiculously optimistic and doesn't synch up with the blood in the water most observers in California clearly see. "Representatives Ken Calvert (R) and Gary Miller (R) are also facing ethical questions-- respectively over earmarks and a federal tax dispute-- but they are perceived to be in better shape than Lewis or Doolittle. Still, as the 2006 election cycle demonstrated, this can always change with little notice."

It doesn't take much to be in better shape than Doolittle and Lewis. Doolittle's papers have already been seized by the FBI and Lewis has already paid a high-powered Republican law firm over a million dollars to keep him from being indicted, efforts which are connected to not one, but two cases of U.S. Attorneys leaving office! But being not as bad off as Doolittle and Lewis is hardly a guarantee of political survival and the DCCC is eagerly looking for viable candidates for take on both Calvert and Miller.

But, of course, Lewis is the prime target. Novak broke some news today: Both on Capitol Hill and in California, Republicans say that Rep. Jerry Lewis (R) is unlikely to seek re-election.
Democrat Tim Prince says he will jump into the race if Lewis retires and far right extremist Bill Postmus, the San Bernardino County Assessor, is salivating at the idea of jumping into the race in the heavily Republican, extremely low-information district.

IT GETS MORE DIRE FOR THE REPUBLICANS BY THE HOUR-- EVERYWHERE

Earlier today we reported on the dire response Republican candidates are getting in New Hampshire-- no volunteers, no contributions, no one to come to their boring events-- while Democratic candidates are generating lots of enthusiasm, excitement, donations, etc. Today's right-wing Moonie Times reports that New Hampshire isn't the only trouble spot for the thoroughly discredited Republican Party.

While a clearly psychotic Bush pounds on his chest and screeches embarrassingly that he's the boss, the Republican National Committee, hit by a grass-roots donors' rebellion over his immigration policy, has fired all 65 of its telephone solicitors last week.

Faced with an estimated 40 percent fall-off in small-donor contributions and aging phone-bank equipment that the RNC said would cost too much to update, Anne Hathaway, the committee's chief of staff, summoned the solicitations staff last week and told them they were out of work, effective immediately, the fired staffers told the [Moonie] Times...

There has been a sharp decline in contributions from RNC phone solicitations, another fired staffer said, reporting that many former donors flatly refuse to give more money to the national party if Mr. Bush and the Senate Republicans insist on supporting what these angry contributors call "amnesty" for illegal aliens.

"Everyone donor in 50 states we reached has been angry, especially in the last month and a half, and for 99 percent of them immigration is the No. 1 issue," said the former employee.

And one of the craziest of the wingnut bloggers, a kook who appropriately named himself or herself Hot Air paints a none-too-rosy picture for wingnuttia in Arizona, their ancestral home. "The illegal immigration fight is tearing the Arizona Republican Party apart, to the point that its members and staff wonder if it can even compete." GOP activists had already written off McCain as part of the problem and now they've added Jon Kyle to that garbage heap of disdain. With crooked Republican congressman Rick Renzi negotiating with the Feds for favorable plea bargaining terms, and with Democrats and independent moderates uniting around progressive Winslow Mayor Allan Affeldt, it looks like Republicans are about to lose a third House seat.

PRIMARY BREWING FOR FLORIDA RIGHT WING LOON VERN BUCHANAN

Republican transsexual to take on far right nutcase in Florida?

Earlier today Sarasota, Florida city commissioners passed over the former Largo city manager in their search for a chief executive for their city. Steve Stanton-- now, after a successful operation, Susan Stanton-- came in third and was praised as "very committed, very attuned to the community" and "very qualified in regard to budget issues," according to Mayor Lou Ann Palmer. A Republican, Susan says she may run for Congress against Vern Buchanan, the far right extremist who was declared the winner after a highly irregular-- well, not highly irregular for Florida-- vote count.

In his few months in Congress, Buchanan-- another ethically challenged Republicrook looking to turn public office into a personal gold mine-- has managed to amass one of the most radical right voting records in the entire House-- even worse than the garden variety rubber stamp he promised to be.

DEMOCRATS HAVE MORE FUN? WELL IF NEW HAMPSHIRE IS ANY INDICATION, THE REPUBLICANS MIGHT AS WELL JUST SAVE THEMSELVES THE MONEY AND TROUBLE

OK, the New Hampshire GOP has suffered some setbacks recently. Lots of them were caught stealing elections (for Sununu especially) and are rotting in prison now. Their corrupt and anti-democratic shrinking little party lost both chambers of the state legislature, both the state's congressional seats, and the Democrat got 72% of the vote in the gubernatorial race. Since then, the state has gotten even bluer. But even with that said, things are not looking well for the 10 (or 11 now?) little white dwarves running for president.

According to today's Boston Globe "Democratic presidential candidates are drawing bigger crowds, more donors, and more energy from the New Hampshire electorate than Republican hopefuls are, a sign to officials in both parties of a lack of enthusiasm for the current GOP field and a tired state Republican Party still reeling from a historic defeat in November." No one is going to their stultifyingly dull events and no one much cares what any of the Bush rubber stamps have to say. It seems all but over for the GOP and their Iraq psychosis.

But Democratic campaigns are reporting unprecedented turnouts at events at this stage of the campaign, as party activists seek to build on the gains they made last year.

Obama drew a crowd of more than 5,000 for a rally at Dartmouth College on Monday, a day after 1,200 people attended a standing-room-only meeting in a high school gym in Littleton, according to local news accounts.

"I could feel in '06 a tremendous momentum building," said US Representative Paul Hodes, Democrat of New Hampshire. "Now, there's a sense of historic opportunity" that is bringing hordes of people to Democratic events, he said.

Instead of struggling to attract voters to their events, both Clinton and Obama have had to actively limit attendance for certain meet-and-greet sessions, spokesmen for the two campaigns said.

The Democratic supporters appear to be more motivated than their GOP counterparts, judging from crowd turnouts and polling.

Even a Republican hack like defeated Congressman Charlie Bass admits that "the enthusiasm is definitely on the Democrats' side, still."

McCain, who wanted to razzle dazzle the whole world by making his campaign announcement in New Hampshire, where he's the most popular of the 11 unpopular Bush rubber stamps, instead of his home state, managed to draw only 350 people, most of whom were staffers and people passing by who were curious about the small crowd.

Maybe Sam Brownback's absurd explanation of why religionist superstition trumps science in his backward world view will make a difference-- at least in the bowels of the Old Confederacy. But, like Bownback's questioning of evolution and McCain agreeing with O'Reilly that old white men need to control things, the Republican Party-- and its pathetic lineup of would-be presidents-- is utterly out of step with the American people. Right-wing extremist judicial activists on the Supreme Court narrowly reiterated the Republican position that corporations' rights supersede Justice for individuals, a view shared by about even less Americans than the 15% who admire Dick Cheney.

It remains to be seen if Democrats understand who to make the public understand that there is a positive alternative to everything they distrust and dislike about Republicans. Of course with leaders like Rahm Emanuel, Steny Hoyer and the K Street Democrats barking like Republicans, voters can't be blamed for getting confused and throwing up (their hands).


OH, AND SPEAKING OF NEW HAMPSHIRE... THEY'RE OFFICIALLY FOR EQUALITY THERE NOW

Pam over at Pam's House Blend pointed out that that Democrat who won the 72% of his state's gubernatorial vote last year, John Lynch, just signed a civil unions bill. That means New Hampshire now legally recognizes marriage-like relationships between same-sex couples. The other states that recognize the humanity of gay men and women are California, Vermont, Maine, Washington, Connecticut and New Jersey. Next up, I believe: New York and Massachusetts. Funny how it's always the states who opposed slavery who are out front on this while the slave states are the ones pushing the hardest to discriminate against gays and lesbians (not to mention anyone else who doesn't adhere to their narrow stereotypes of acceptability).

And while forward-thinking Americans-- which, fortunately, means most Americans-- are trying to handle this evolution in a reasonable manner, the backward and mentally ill prefer... closets like Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Larry Craig (R-ID), lives lived in shame, molesting children like Mark Foley (R-FL). Today Cara DeGette did a really funny and insightful story about the upcoming book by Mike Jones, the gay prostitute who outed Republican religionist operative "Rev." Ted Haggard. Progressives deal with our gay and lesbian fellow citizens the way John Lynch did today, with compassion and brotherhood. Reactionaries turn out mentally ill people like Haggard, McConnell and Foley.

IRAQ= KOREA? BUSH= IMPEACHED?

The Big Question: did he get any shopping tips from Miss Lindsey?

Today's Chicago Tribune shows an unmistakable trend in Gallup polling this year: outside of a few dead-enders, Americans want the occupation of Iraq to be over.

If Americans had a direct say in the Oval Office, most would tell President Bush to focus on an exit strategy that removes U.S. forces from Iraq. Just one in four would suggest staying the course.

These are among the findings of a Gallup Poll that asked, ''If you could talk with President Bush for 15 minutes about the situation in Iraq, what would you, personally, advise him to do?''

"Bottom line,'' reports Gallup editor-in-chief Frank Newport: "The majority of Americans, as measured in a number of Gallup Poll surveys this year, believe the initial decision for the United States to become involved in Iraq was a mistake. Research also shows a majority of Americans favor a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that Americans-- if given the chance to talk with President Bush about Iraq-- would be most likely to tell him to figure out a way to get U.S. troops withdrawn from that country.''

Weird to look at this in light of Bush's babbling nonsense yesterday comparing the American occupation of Iraq and their civil war with the U.S. presence in South Korea. It's a shame there are no achievement tests-- you know, like they have in No Child Left Behind-- for people who want to run for president.


Someone who's given up on running for president, Joe Lieberman, but who is still working diligently to wreck any prospects for peace in the Middle East, is on a propaganda tour of Iraq now babbling incoherently about progress while American soldiers he meets there are telling him point blank that there is no progress. Lieberman, of course, didn't come to learn or to listen. He came for the backdrop so he could spout his ideological nonsense and then come back and run to Fox News with his on the ground experience.

And although no one rational thinks Iraq and Korea have much of anything in common, Bush's puppet Prime Minister of the Greed Zone seems to think he may be overthrown in a military coup. I guess he's hoping for Petraeus' stillborn surge to save his ass.

When the Bush administration decided to send tens of thousands of additional troops to Iraq, the strategy rested on an unspoken trade-off: U.S. troops would risk greater casualties to tamp down violence and buy the Baghdad government time to make the political compromises needed to reconcile the country's warring factions.

But a resurgence of sectarian violence and attacks on U.S. troops, coupled with little to no progress on crucial Iraqi political goals, is already spurring discussion about whether the current strategy can succeed.

In the near term, senior American military officials in Baghdad are wrestling with how to increase the effectiveness of the "surge" strategy between now and September, when Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, is supposed to give Washington a progress report. U.S. officials here and in Baghdad are also waging a parallel debate over how long the "surge" should last-- and whether the U.S. needs to begin planning for an alternative approach that would scale back both U.S. troop levels and American ambitions in Iraq...

In Washington, meanwhile, administration officials have begun to debate how much longer the surge should last and what comes after it. Senior military officials in Iraq have said they would like to see the higher troop levels sustained through early 2008.

But senior Bush administration officials worry that extending the buildup into next year could further turn the American public against the war. Pentagon officials and the White House are developing rough proposals to begin withdrawing tens of thousands of soldiers sometime next year as a way of defusing some of the public fury over the war and making it less of an issue in next year's presidential and congressional elections. White House officials caution that the efforts are preliminary and that President Bush has yet to sign off on them. One aide acknowledged that the White House has developed similar withdrawal plans in the past, only to abandon them when violence in Iraq continued to climb.

White House spokesman Tony Snow yesterday said Mr. Bush envisions an indefinite American military presence in Iraq that would resemble the one in South Korea, with the U.S. in a support role able to "react quickly to major challenges or crises." That presumes, though, that an Iraqi government would request or at least tolerate such a deployment, as the South Koreans have.

Hence the coup reports.

CORRUPTION RUNS WILD IN THE GREAT WHITE NORTH-- TED STEVENS MAY NEED A GERIATRIC PRISON CELL

Ben and Ted, Alaskans with crooked genes

I was in DC last week and some bloggers had a little get together. Turns out half the bloggers in DC live in this one giant building. It was cool. I was worried when people who were too drunk to walk straight said they were going home but then just got off the elevator at another floor instead of going to a car. But one guy who apparently didn't have too much to drink-- he sounded Australian but he's from Alaska-- told me this incredible story about corruption in Alaska. I wasn't sure what to make out of it. I mean, everbody knows that Don Young is one of the most corrupt sacks of sleaze in the whole Congress and that ex-Governor Frank Murkowski practically made Ernie Fletcher look almost honest, but this Australian Alaskan told me that virtually the whole GOP up there is drowning in bribery scams and graft. (He also turned me on to a wonderful book about Alaska... sort of, that I'm reading now: Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union.

So it shouldn't have surprised me one bit when today's Anchorage Daily News announced that the FBI is investigating that crazy old Senator Ted Stevens. And just like I was told, it runs in the family. The FBI is in the middle of a gigantic Alaska political corruption investigation that is believed could have almost half the elected Republicans in the state in prison! And in the center of the sleaze has been Senator Steven's son and once political heir, Ben, who accepted a quarter million dollar bribe from a GOP-connected oil industry company.

The wide-ranging federal inquiry surfaced in August when agents raided six legislative offices, including those of then-Senate President Ben Stevens, one of Ted Stevens' sons. The FBI said at the time that it also had executed a search warrant in Girdwood [Ted Steven's shady home extensively remodeled in return for political favors worth millions], among other places, although the location of that search has never been officially disclosed.

Veco, an oil-field service company that has long been a strong lobbying presence in Juneau, was one of the early targets of the agents, according to some of the search warrants that became public. On May 7, the company's longtime chief executive, Bill Allen, and a vice president, Rick Smith, pleaded guilty to federal conspiracy, bribery and tax charges. They are now cooperating with authorities.

The investigation spread to the commercial fishing industry, including Ben Stevens' consulting clients and associates. Federal subpoenas served on fishing companies in Seattle last year sought records concerning both Ben and Ted Stevens.

Four current or former Alaska state lawmakers have been indicted and are awaiting trial on corruption charges, and an Anchorage lobbyist has pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges.

And just for the record it isn't just Stevens and his family that are taking massive bribes from VECO executives. Needless to say, Don Young has his snout in the pot, as does Lisa Murkowski (another scion, like Ben Stevens, where the Republicrookery runs in the family). And outside of Alaska it turns out VECO has been spreading around the lard to corrupt senators like John Ensign (R-NV), Arlen Specter (R-PA), Tom Coburn (R-OK), Richard Burr (R-NC), David Vitter (R-LA), Norm Coleman (R-MN), Jim DeMint (R-SC), John Sununu (R-NH), John Thune (R-SD) and ex-Senator and major criminal still at large, Conrad Burns (R-MT). Oh, and Republican hopeful Mike McGavick.

It is widely thought that Stevens, the longest serving Republican in US Senate history, and suffering from an advanced stage of dimentia is unlikely to spend any time in prison no matter if he's found guilty or not. Or has he just been making believe he's more senile than John McCain and Pete Domenici combined? But even the Bush Regime-- sure to turn out to have been the most corrupt in American history-- claims that Stevens is so filthy that they can't allow him to get involved with picking the next U.S. Attorney for Alaska. He'll never notice-- as long as they let him build some more bridges.

Tim Griffin, the grossest joke to surface so far in the still-unfolding Purge-Gate scandal, decides it's time for him to pursue other opportunities

"Griffin became the poster boy for the politicization of the U.S. attorney process. Former Justice official Kyle Sampson noted that getting Griffin into office 'was important to Harriet [Miers], Karl, et cetera.'”
--from ThinkProgress's report of the resignation of Rove-style campaign hatcheteer Tim Griffin as a U.S. attorney

The grossest embarrassment in the Purge-Gate U.S. attorney scandal is moving on. Friday will be the last day as U.S. attorney for the Eastern district of Arkansas for Tim Griffin, the Karl Rove protege who scammed his way into the job with absolutely no qualifications except a master's degree--the master in question being his mentor, Master Rove--in campaign slimery and election thievery. That and his apparent feeling that it would be just a swell job for him, and never mind that there was a widely admired and respected incumbent, Bud Cummins, occupying the office.

It's important to recall that Cummins wasn't fired as part of the famous Virgin List (of insufficiently Bush-sucky U.S. attorney appointees). In fact, beyond the Bush regime's general and enduring hatred for competence, nobody seems to know why Cummins was given the old heave-ho, except that the punk Griffin wanted his job. (At any rate, Deputy AG Paul McNulty testified that he didn't know of any reason apart from the wish of people in high places to install Master Karl's puppet in the job. There is plausible speculation that Master Rove wanted to install his Timmy in Arkansas to position him for a reelection challenge to Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor.) Thanks to the stealth insertion in the Patriot Act that gave the attorney general the power to replace a U.S. attorney indefinitely without Senate confirmation, Idiot Al "The Torture Guy" Gonzales could have slotted the Prince of Darkness himself into the job. Hell, he would have had better credentials for it.

Here's ThinkProgress's report of Timmy's departure:

Rove-Protege Tim Griffin Resigns As U.S. Attorney

The Arkansas Times reports that the controversial U.S. attorney in Arkansas, Tim Griffin, has resigned:

The U.S. Justice Department has notified Arkansas’s congressional delegation that Interim Eastern District U.S. Attorney Tim Griffin is resigning effective Friday, June 1.

Griffin, a former protege of Karl Rove, was formerly research director of the Republican National Committee. In 2004, BBC News published a report showing that Griffin led a “caging” scheme to suppress the votes of African-American servicemembers in Florida.

Griffin became the poster boy for the politicization of the U.S. attorney process. Former Justice official Kyle Sampson noted that getting Griffin into office “was important to Harriet [Miers], Karl, et cetera.” The traditional 120-day term for “interim” U.S. attorneys had expired for Griffin on April 20, yet the Justice Department continued to allow him to serve.

ThinkProgress earlier spoke with Rep. John Boozman’s (R-AR) office, which said that the congressman submitted names of replacements for Griffin to the White House on March 30. So far, no word from the Justice Department on the name of the new U.S. attorney.

In the meantime, assistant U.S. attorney Jane Duke will take over. The Justice Department had previously passed her over to install Griffin, using sexual discrimination as an excuse because Duke had been on maternity leave at the time.

Meanwhile Raw Story reports this comment from a spokesman for Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Arkansas), Michael Teague:

[Griffin's] departure from the U.S. Attorney Office for the Eastern District of Arkansas is a positive development, and the senator is looking forward to having credible leadership restored there.

Reports floated by the Wall Street Journal have the odious Griffin taking a top position in Fred Thompson's impending Republican presidential campaign. However, tonight on Countdown Alison Stewart asked political commentator Dana Milbank why Thompson would want to take on Griffin's weighty baggage, and Dana couldn't think of a good reason.

Safeguard the American food supply? Support free-market-style competition? Who, the Bush regime? What are you, some kinda stinkin' Commie?

"The U.S. Department of Agriculture tests less than 1 percent of slaughtered cows for [mad cow] disease, which can be fatal to humans who eat tainted beef. But Arkansas City-based Creekstone Farms Premium Beef wants to test all of its cows.

"Larger meat companies feared that move because, if Creekstone tested its meat and advertised it as safe, they might have to perform the expensive test, too."

Oops, I seem to have left out the opening paragraph of this news dispatch. That's right, comedy fans, it so happens that in this case the punch line comes first:

"The Bush administration said Tuesday it will fight to keep meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease."

That's right, ladies and germs, the administration is going back to court to prevent a company that wants to bear the cost of testing all its cows from doing so, even after a U.S. district judge has ruled that the government has no authority to stop the company from using the very same test the Agriculture Dept. uses for that one percent of beef it tests.

I'm delighted to own up that I first heard about this delicious story via columnist Rick Perlstein, who seems to have been kind of dumbfounded by it. It falls right on his turf, since he's now devoting his major columnizing attention to food-supply issues.

It takes a lot to render our Rick speechless, and in the end this story didn't quite, but it came close:

E. coli conservatism (19): the ne plus ultra

By Rick Perlstein on May 30, 2007 - 2:33pm.

Offered without comment. What is there possibly to say?

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration said Tuesday it will fight to keep meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture tests less than 1 percent of slaughtered cows for the disease, which can be fatal to humans who eat tainted beef. But Arkansas City-based Creekstone Farms Premium Beef wants to test all of its cows.

Larger meat companies feared that move because, if Creekstone tested its meat and advertised it as safe, they might have to perform the expensive test, too.

A federal judge ruled in March that such tests must be allowed. The ruling was to take effect Friday, but the Agriculture Department said Tuesday it would appeal -- effectively delaying the testing until the court challenge plays out.

Mad cow disease is linked to more than 150 human deaths worldwide, mostly in Britain.

There have been three cases of mad cow disease identified in cattle in the U.S. The first, in December 2003 in Washington state, was in a cow that had been imported from Canada. The second, in 2005, was in a Texas-born cow. The third was confirmed last year in an Alabama cow.

The Agriculture Department argued that widespread testing could lead to a false positive that would harm the meat industry. U.S. District Judge James Robertson noted that Creekstone sought to use the same test the government relies on and said the government didn't have the authority to restrict it.

Oh, all right. One small comment. First, observe the contempt for liberty. When E. coli conservatives say self-regulation is preferable to government, they're even lying about that. Second, observe the contempt for small business. When a small company want to - voluntarily! - hold its product to a higher standard, the government blocks it, in part because bigger companies have to be protected from the competition, in part because a theoretical threat to the bottom line (false positives) trumps protection against a deadly disease.

There's your conservatism, America: not extremism in defense of liberty. State socialism in defense of Mad Cow.

As a number of online commenters have already pointed out, so much for the mystical conservative faith in the omniscient guiding hand of the free market, not to mention the miraculous power of competition. If you have the kind of bucks to get the attention of the Bush regime ("Our Motto: Your Government for Sale, or Maybe Rent"), you don't have to worry about no stinkin' competition.

As for guarding the safety of the American food supply . . . uh, well, you're welcome to leave your name and number, and maybe your gov't will get back to you. And while you're waiting, would you like to make a modestly whopping contribution in support of the Republican agenda?


UPDATE, COURTESY OF HOWIE: IT'S NOT JUST THE EATS... THE DRUGS PART OF "F.D.A." IS SCREWED UP TOO

Either the Bush Regime wants to prove government is incapable of doing anything right, which is what Republicans always say, or they really and truly are the most incompetent bunch that have ever gotten their paws on the levers of power. It doesn't matter which is true; the case has been made to separate the GOP and the U.S. government for a good long time. Tomorrow's NY Times calls the F.D.A. "still unsettled"-- and they're not even going near anything to do with beef.

When Dr. Andrew C. von Eschenbach took over the Food and Drug Administration in 2005, the agency had a crisis over drug approvals that had missed or ignored dangerous side effects in Vioxx, antidepressants and other prominent medications.

Dr. von Eschenbach promised improvements, and agency officials said they would no longer be caught flatfooted on drug safety.

But this month, The New England Journal of Medicine published a study suggesting that a major diabetes pill, Avandia, might increase the risk of heart attacks.

Again, incompetent or... something worse? Congress will start investigating June 6. I hope they talk to Dr. Curt Furberg, a professor of public health sciences at Wake Forest and a co-author of the New England Journal of Medicine’s editorial on Avandia. He says the F.D.A. is broken and that "safety is just not a high priority for them."

GOD MUST LOVE JOHN YARMUTH-- HE JUST GOT THE MOST ABSURD CHALLENGER ANY INCUMBENT COULD HOPE FOR

You'd be smiling just like John Yarmuth if you just found out your opponent was Erwin Roberts

This morning's Louisville Courier-Journal reported that Erwin Roberts announced that he'll be challenging freshman Congressman John Yarmuth. Every Democrat should be so lucky. (They should also be so conscientious and progressive as Yarmuth, by the way; he has the one of the half dozen best voting records of any of the newly elected members of the House.) This is one race I won't have to stress out about.

Is Roberts a serial pet rapist or an illegal gay alien or something? No, he's really bad news-- and on two counts. Peculiar to Kentucky, here's someone who has just announced he's running for high office after having been not just a member-- but a lynch pin in the heart of darkness of the single most corrupt state administration anywhere in America, that of indicted Governor and Republicrook Ernie Fletcher.

Roberts was Fletcher's personnel secretary when a whistleblower's complaint triggered an investigation into allegations that the administration had illegally awarded civil service jobs on the basis of politics rather than qualifications.

That investigation produced indictments of Fletcher and 14 known defendants, as well as 14 sealed indictments. Fletcher pardoned others, and the misdemeanor charges against him were dropped when he admitted to strong evidence of wrongdoing in his administration's hiring practices.

Roberts was identified by prosecutors as an un-indicted co-conspirator in one court filing. And he asserted his Fifth Amendment right in declining to testify before the grand jury.

What could be worse? Well... Roberts was one of the U.S. attorney types who did not get canned for refusing to politicize the Justice Department. In fact, looking at who was let go and who carried out Karl Rove's diktats that perverted justice, it's very clear which side of the line the Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Kentucky is likely to have been on-- the same side as the crooked U.S. Attorney from Arkansas, Tim Griffin. The Arkansas Times announced that trash was finally thrown out "resigned" today. "Griffin, a former protege of Karl Rove, was formerly research director of the Republican National Committee. In 2004, BBC News published a report showing that Griffin led a "caging" scheme to suppress the votes of African-American servicemembers in Florida. He was the poster boy for the politicization of the U.S. attorney process.

Nothing to do with Kentucky or the crook who's running against Yarmuth-- at least not directly... so far-- but the Justice Department formally notified the Senate Judiciary Committee that it is expanding its probe of the firing of U.S. attorneys last year to include allegations of improper politicizing of hiring at the agency, including the actions of former senior official Monica Goodling. I guess they've had enough time to make sure all the incriminating evidence was disposed of. And, as I've said all along, investigating the circumstances of those-- like David Iglesias-- who were fired is important, but so is investigating the low-life criminals who were rated satisfactory by Rove to stay... like the fellow in Kentucky.

WILL THE BUSH REGIME HAVE A JOB FOR GLENN BECK?

In the time of chimpanzees I was a monkey

My financial advisor was over today and we were going through my portfolio, especially focusing in on the "garbage that needs to be cleaned up," as she always so insensitively puts it. One big stack of "garbage" are the shares of TimeWarner I was forced to take in lieu of salary. When I was taking them they were rated at around $90/share. Today they closed higher than they've been in years-- $21.55/share. My losses on TimeWarner are greater than my overall net worth. I'm not looking for sympathy; I'm as happy as a clam. I did ask her how a big name company with so many big name assets could suck so bad. "Howie, you know the answer to that one better than most people do." And I do.

And one example-- one of many, many, many-- surfaced today: Glenn Beck's ratings on CNN. As TimeWarner-owned CNN attempts to follow Fox News down the toilet, there doesn't seem to be any bottom to Beck's ratings.

These are the numbers are for the 7pm hour. The first number is the 25-54 demographic, the second number is the total number of viewers.

Monday - 44,000 / 211,000
Tuesday - 141,000 / 302,000
Wednesday - 73,000 / 172,000
Thursday - 62,000 / 192,000
Friday - 43,000 / 123,000

Beck is a loser-- every other show beats his-- and it's not like he's on there for prestige like a tour of a museum or an orchestra performance. "A year ago, Glenn Beck was heralded as some sort of new talk show host that would revolutionize cable news. Instead, he is another in a long line of right wing radio talk show hosts who has failed in television. In fact, Glenn Beck's numbers for this week were LOWER then a year ago when he was just starting. A year's worth of programming, advertising, and everything else that CNN and Headline News has done to push Glenn Beck has not made a bit of difference. Beck's numbers are the lowest in cable news, and he shows no signs of improving any time soon. My question is how long will Headline News, CNN, and Time Warner continue to put up with Beck's low numbers?"

I begged my financial advisor not to make me sell my TimeWarner shares; it's the masochist in me. I like to revel in my bad decisions. But looking at Beck's numbers just now and thinking about the kind of management-- including one of the highest paid CEOs in America-- that makes these kinds of decisions, is making me reconsider.

BUSH AS DETERMINED AS EVER TO APPOINT A KKK-APPROVED APPEALS COURT JUDGE TO THE FIFTH CIRCUIT-- MEET LESLIE SOUTHWICK

Bush has gotten some of the worst judges ever nominated for anything confimed and we'll be suffering the consequences for years to come, not just on the Supreme Court but throughout the judicial system. In terms of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, though, Bush's nominees have been so gratuitously unqualified and extremist that they have been unable to win confirmation. Even Republicans were choking on a radical right ideologue like Charles Pickering and when the Bush Regime moved to replace that dismal nomination with the even more bigoted Michael Wallace that flopped too. And it isn't getting any better. The latest nightrider nightmare that Bush is trying to foist on us is former Mississippi Court of Appeals Judge Leslie Southwick, a racist amd bigoted asshole every bit as unacceptable to normal Americans as Pickering and Wallace.

A couple weeks ago Judith Schaeffer sent up a warning flare at Huff Po, alerting the public to Southwick's homophobia and racism-- and the fact that he seems proud of both traits. Next week the Senate Judiciary Committee-- rushed into this by Miss McConnell's threats to tie up the Senate if some Bush appointees don't get confirmed fast-- takes up the case of Leslie Southwick and will decide whether or not to send this controversial nomination on to the full Senate, where he will be able to count on a handful of reactionary Democrats (and a reactionary ex-Democrat) to support Bush's goal of stuffing the courts full of pro-corporate, anti-civil rights judicial activists.

We can't let Democrats, now ostensibly in the majority, cave in and let us down on this one, the way they did on Alito and Roberts. As Ralph Neas of People For the American Way said today "regrettably, Southwick also has a troubling record and appears to be cut from the same cloth as [Pickering and Wallace]... Just like Pickering and Wallace before him, Southwick appears ready and willing to turn back the clock on fifty years of social justice progress in our nation. Southwick had an opportunity at his recent hearing to demonstrate a commitment to Americans’ individual rights and freedoms, but he proved that he still doesn’t get it. The Senate Judiciary Committee must reject Southwick’s confirmation.”

Two of the cases that best illustrate the danger of confirming a character like Southwick are these examples from the Mississippi Court of Appeals:

• In 1998, while on the Mississippi Court of Appeals, Southwick joined a ruling in an employment case that upheld the reinstatement, without any punishment whatsoever, of a white state employee who was fired for calling an African American co-worker a "good ole nigger." The court's decision effectively ratified a hearing officer's opinion that the slur was only "somewhat derogatory" and "was in effect calling the individual a 'teacher's pet.'" The Mississippi Supreme Court unanimously reversed the decision.

• In 2001, Southwick joined a ruling that upheld a chancellor's decision to take an eight-year-old girl away from her mother and award custody to the father, who had never married the mother, largely because the mother was living with another woman in a "lesbian home." Southwick went even further by joining a gratuitously anti-gay concurrence which extolled Mississippi's right under "the principles of Federalism" to treat "homosexual persons" as second-class citizens. The concurrence suggested that sexual orientation is a choice and stated that an adult is not "relieved of the consequences of his or her choice" -- e.g., losing custody of one's child.

The Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee are all partisan hacks and can all be depended on to support Southwick even if he shows up at the hearings in a white sheet and pillowcase over his head. No need to waste any time contacting the likes of Tom Coburn, Sam Brownback, Jon Kyl, Charles Grassley, Orrin Hatch, Arlen Specter-- or any of the guys who use the same sheet and pillow case tailor as Southwick, John Cornyn, Lindsey Graham, and Jeff Sessions. On the Democratic side, however, it is crucial that the squishy members be told in no uncertain terms that they must stop this bigot from getting onto the Appeals Court. The Democrats on the committee are Patrick Leahy (VT), Ted Kennedy MA), Russ Feingold (WI), Dick Durbin (IL), Sheldon Whitehouse (RI), Chuck Schumer (NY), and Ben Cardin (MD) who can all probably be counted on to oppose the nomination. And then there are the possible problems: Joe Biden (DE), Herb Kohl (WI), and Dianne Feinstein (CA).

IMMIGRATION-- THE GREED & SELFISHNESS WING OF THE GOP vs THE HATRED & BIGOTRY WING-- BUSH & GOODE

Graham and Chambliss were booed at GOP conventions. They still love Goode though

Having just come back from at least 3 days in Washington I can report that there are definitely people Inside the Beltway who are convinced that Virgil Goode, Jr (R-VA) isn't as much of a racist, xenophobic and Know Nothing bigot as he portrays himself. Some say he's just trying to take the spotlight off the egregious corruption that is likely to land him in prison eventually. Others say, that, yes, he's one of the half dozen most corrupt members of Congress but that he actually is every bit as racist, xenophobic and bigoted as he comes off-- and is the very definition of a classic Know Nothing.

I'll come back to Rep. Goode in a moment. First let me address the leader of his party, someone who gets a lot more sophisticated advice-- both about how to steal money and how to play to the basest nature of the base. George "I believe in cheap labor" Bush "lashed out at critics within his own party Tuesday, accusing Republican opponents of distorting the immigration deal he negotiated with leading congressional Democrats and playing on the politics of fear to undermine public support. In stern tones normally reserved for the liberal opposition, Bush said conservatives fighting the immigration proposal 'haven't read the bill' and oppose it in some cases because 'it might make somebody else look good.' Their 'empty political rhetoric,' he said, threatens to thwart what he called the last, best chance to fix an immigration system that all sides agree is broken."

Bush spoke in Georgia, a state renowned for racism and xenophobia, a hotbed of the resurgence of a Know Nothing movement that has taken over CNN and the GOP. Last week Georgia's extreme right wing senator, Saxby Chamberpot, was booed at the state GOP convention when he tried defending Bush's immigration bill. According to the NY Times, "Bush's trip to Georgia opened a campaign intended to undercut the criticism that has consumed conservative talk shows and Web sites and to educate the public about a complicated bill."

It would be awesome to see Bush on with Lou Dobbs some time; like that will ever happen. Meanwhile right-wingers are pissed that the Greed and Selfishness wing of the GOP is calling out the Hatred and Bigotry wing.

"I don't think name-calling does any good at this point," said David A. Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union. "What they've done from the very beginning is say, 'This is the way we want it done, and anyone who disagrees with us is outside the mainstream.' . . . It's been badly handled. They'll be lucky, given the attitudes in the country, to come up with anything."

Brian Darling, an analyst at the Heritage Foundation, said he and his colleagues not only have read the bill but also have posted it on the think tank's Web site. "Most conservatives have very strong feelings that this bill contains amnesty . . . and no yelling and screaming by the administration is going to change our minds," he said.

As for the charge of scare tactics, Darling said: "Honestly, I really think people should be frightened. This bill would be the most dramatic change to immigration law in 40 years, and no one seems to understand what's in the bill. . . . The American people should be frightened by the closed-door process that was used and by the ramifications."

Now, back to Virgil Goode, Jr. Let's forget, for a moment all the bribes and corruption and his connections to all the worst elements of the GOP Culture of Corruption. Let's, for a moment, even forget the spectacle he made of his anti-Moslem bigotry when he challenged Congressman Keith Ellison's right to be sworn into Congress on a Koran instead of a Christian Bible. Goode has stopped, momentarily, bashing American Moslems so he could concentrate on those little flags in Mexican restaurants.

One of the local papers in his district, the Charlottesville Daily Progress did a piece yesterday about Goode's opposition to the Bush immigration bill. "'I'm opposed to it. It provides amnesty,'" Goode said on the same day that Bush declared the opposite... [And] he's riled by restaurants in his region that display a Mexican flag."

And in little towns in his district and across the line in North Carolina, "They've got a Mexican flag in these restaurants... They've got one on Main Street in Rocky Mount! They've got one on Tanyard Road in Rocky Mount!

"That riles me," he acknowledged. "If you want to be part of America, fly the American flag!"

God only knows what happens if he ever wanders into New York or L.A. and sees Americans proudly displaying Irish, Italian, Brazilian, Israeli, Armenian, and South Korean flags (not to mention the Mexican ones that so offend his delicate sensitivities)-- often alongside American flags-- to celebrate a heritage they are proud of. It's always been the American way, except for the descendants of convicts, like Goode, who were dumped on American shores and have nothing to be proud of. Meanwhile, Taco Bells in southern Virginia-- beware

Poor House Republicans! They thought they were just making it easier for donors to be extorted, but found they were contributing to open government!

Just yesterday we caught up with Paul Kane's washingtonpost.com chronicle of John "Chipmunk Cheeks" McCain's historic return visit last week to the Senate. Now, in his latest "Capitol Briefing" post, Kane tells the hilarious story of how the Republicans' House campaign committee lit up a big smelly cigar that exploded right in its big fat collective face.

The kids thought they'd merely found a way to make life easier for the big-money donors they ritually extort: by regularly publishing lists of fund-raising events to which the donors are expected to haul those hefty bags o' cash. This way donors could always have enough bags ready, and know exactly where and when to haul them.

Talk about bad luck! It was embarrassing enough that they discovered they'd accidentally stumbled into a practice that--utterly unintentionally, surely--resembled open government! Then they discovered that these very lists could be used (gasp!) to interfere with House Republicans' perpetual quest for cash.

And if this isn't all funny enough, how can you not love a story that concludes with the ritual Republicrook disclaimer: "Both Republicans have denied any wrongdoing, saying they adhered to the law and internal House rules." The "both Republicans" in question are, first, the king of the Republicrooks, DWT fave Rep. Jerry Lewis, and, second, his intended recruit to the House Appropriations Trough, er, Committee, fellow California Rep. Ken Calvert.

House GOP Cuts Off the $un$hine

As the House was voting to spread a little sunshine to its K Street connections, a GOP campaign committee pulled down the shades to hide the fund-raising events hosted by House Republicans.

The National Republican Congressional Committee abruptly stopped publishing lists of money events last week, as noted today by my alma mater, Roll Call. (Subscription required.)

Here at Capitol Briefing the NRCC had won kudos for its openness toward raising money, as the only such campaign committee to ever freely publish its list of events that House Republicans were hosting. The list used to include the fairly standard breakfast, lunch and dinner money events, hosted by lobbying firms and trade associations, as well as the out-of-the-ordinary events like golf fund-raisers in the Carribbean or ski junkets in the Rocky Mountains.

While done ostensibly to alert lobbyists and other special interests to pending events, it also served as a sunshine maneuver that not even the Democrats ever contemplated doing - even as they swore up and down the Capitol about the GOP's shady dealings with K Street.

Alas, the NRCC's web site is being remodeled, and Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) had always planned as "part of the process" of revamping the site to take down the link to upcoming events, according to Ken Spain, NRCC spokesman. "This was planned from day one."

The web site re-launch is still a few weeks away, meaning the elimination of the link to House GOP events happened in advance of the new web site rollout. Ironically, this decision came as the House overwhelmingly voted for further financial disclosure of lobbyists. The new lobbying bill approved last week would require lobbyists for the first time to reveal not just how much money they give to lawmakers but how much they bundle together from their clients and others for politicians.

Also, the money event link happened to disappear the same week that conservative blogger Erick Erickson, who has launched a campaign against the appointment of Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.) to the Appropriations Committee, used the GOP events list to encourage conservative activists to protest a Calvert event.

Calvert's event had Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.) as his special guest. Calvert has come under scrutiny for earmarks for projects located near property he owns, while Lewis is under federal investigation for steering tens of millions of dollars in earmarks to clients, such as defense contractor General Atomics, of a lobbying firm closely connected to the lawmaker.

Both Republicans have denied any wrongdoing, saying they adhered to the law and internal House rules.

CAN RON PAUL WIN THE REPUBLICAN NOMINATION... FOR HIS CONGRESSIONAL SEAT?

One of the takeaways from the Republican "debate" in South Carolina and its aftermath is that Establishment Republicans don't consider Ron Paul or his ideas any more "Republican" than they do Ru Paul and his ideas. And that doesn't come as any surprise to Dr. Paul, more a Libertarian (on whose ticket he ran for president in 1988) than what the GOP has morphed into in recent decades.

When he gently questioned Bush Regime dogma about the origins of 9/11, the entire GOP Power Elite, led by Rudy McRomney, went ape-shit. A libertarian blogger explains what happened (in case you were on Mars):

Fox New’s Wendell Goler addressed Paul and asked, “I believe you are the only man on the stage who opposes the war in Iraq, who would bring the troops home as quickly as-- almost immediately, sir. Are you out of step with your Party? Is your Party out of step with the rest of the world? If either of those is the case, why are you seeking its nomination?”

Ron Paul articulated, “Well, I think the Party has lost its way, because the conservative wing of the Republican Party always advocated a non-interventionist foreign policy. Senator Robert Taft didn’t even want to be in NATO. George Bush won the election in the year 2000 campaigning on a humble foreign policy-- no nation-building, no policing of the world. Republicans were elected to end the Korean War. The Republicans were elected to end the Vietnam War. There’s a strong tradition of being anti-war in the Republican Party. It is the Constitutional position. It is the advice of the Founders to follow a non-interventionist foreign policy, stay out of entangling alliances, be friends with countries, negotiate and talk with them and trade with them…. [T]here’s a lot of merit to the advice of the Founders and following the Constitution. And my argument is that we shouldn’t go to war so carelessly.”

Goler followed up with, “Congressman, you don’t think that changed with the 9/11 attacks, sir?”

His response: our foreign policy was a “major contributing factor. Have you ever read the reasons they attacked us? They attack us because we’ve been over there; we’ve been bombing Iraq for 10 years. We’ve been in the Middle East-- I think Reagan was right. We don’t understand the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics. So right now we’re building an embassy in Iraq that’s bigger than the Vatican. We’ve building 14 permanent bases. What would we say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico? We would be objecting. We need to look at what we do from the perspective of what would happen if somebody else did it to us.”

Goler: “Are you suggested we invited the 9/11 attacks, sir?”

“I’m suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it, and they are delighted that we’re over there because Osama bin Laden has said, ‘I am glad you’re over on our sand because we can target you so much easier.’ They have already now since that time have killed 3,400 of our men, and I don’t think it was necessary.”

That was when Rudy Giuliani blew his top-- giving this writer the best reason I’ve seen not to vote for him and to urge others not to support him.

The Bush Wing of the Republican Party-- which accounts for roughly 99.99% of the GOP Establishment but a somewhat shriveling percentage of the grassroots these days-- started demanding Rep. Paul not be invited to future debates and even be written out of Die Partei.

We saw, dramatized on national television and in ensuing media discussion, the two worldviews that may battle it out over the next year or so for control of the Republican Party-- and possibly the country itself-- with ramifications well beyond Election 2008. The one Rudy Giuliani represents (which is that of the Bush clan, the neocons, and the corporatist elite generally): the U.S. is an empire obliged or destined to rule the world, capable of building “democracies” in the Middle East and perhaps elsewhere, relying on a value system based on money and power. Power does not necessarily corrupt. We peons should fall in line behind our leaders.

The second, which Ron Paul represents, sees the U.S. as a Constitutional republic with a limited government, believes that sound economics requires sound money (not our present fiat dollar), would distinguish genuine free enterprise from corporatism, and advocate a foreign policy of trade with all but entangling alliances with none-- i.e., a foreign policy rooted in respect for other nations’ sovereignty and their right to self-determination. Other nations’ internal affairs are not our business unless we are explicitly invited in.

This is not simply a clash between “left” and “right,” or between “liberal” and “conservative.” We may be approaching a major dust-up between those who want freedom and those who want power, between those who believe society must be aggressively centralized and those who wish to see power dispersed. We may see a struggle between those who want policies that allow the common man to live as he sees fit if he isn’t bothering anyone else, and a cadre of oligarchs who view the world as theirs, and who see themselves as unaccountable.

The Republican National Committee and its talk-show fellow travelers are all on the side of power. The latter immediately went into attack-dog mode. After the debate, Paul appeared on Fox News’ Hannity & Colmes show. Sean Hannity spluttered incoherently against Paul to the point where Paul had difficulty getting a word in edgewise; to his credit, he did not get flustered and refused to back down. He stood his ground the next day when Wolf Blitzer on CNN asked if he wanted to apologize for his statements. He retorted that Rudy Giuliani ought to apologize to him. He told Blitzer that Americans have the right to disagree with bad policy. Interventionism is bad foreign policy, he said, and ought to be challenged. Fox News anchor John Gibson tried to associate Paul with the 9/11 Truth movement by crediting Paul with saying “the U.S. actually had a hand in the terrorist attacks.” Paul, of course, had said nothing of the sort. Glenn Beck, yet another neocon talk-show host and Rush Limbaugh wannabe, has repeatedly smeared Paul on his show, calling him “crazy” after the first debate and a “dope” after this one.

Regular DWT readers are aware that we'd take Ru Paul over Ron Paul any day (although we all like Ron's openess to the idea of impeaching Bush).

I doubt the Republicans will officially excommunicate Paul and through him out of the party. They're certainly never giving him a committee chair and they're not going to discourage any wingnuts from running against him in a primary. In fact... have I mentioned the Mayor Pro-Tem of Friendswood, Texas, Chris Peden? He's running against Paul for the seat. So is an ex-aide of Paul's, ultra-loonitarian Eric Dondero (who has called his ex-boss a "complete nutcase" and his views on foreign policy "near treasonous").

Much of Texas' 14th CD was represented by Tom DeLay. It runs along of Gulf of Mexico from Corpus Christi to Galveston and includes many of Houston's southern and eastern suburbs as well as Victoria.
Like much of Texas, this is one of those areas LBJ warned us about when he signed the Civil Rights Act. It went from solidly Democrat to solidly Republican.

Ron Paul was first elected to Congress in 1976, serving 4 terms before running for Senate-- and being crushed by Phil Gramm in the GOP primary, 73-16% in 1984. (That's when DeLay, an exterminator, ran for the House seat.) In 1988 Paul ran for president as a Libertarian and ran for congress again in 1996 after Rep. Greg Laughlin, a moderate Democrat, switched parties after the GOP promised him a seat on the House Ways and Means Committee. Paul beat him in the primary and then eked out a narrow victory against a Democrat in the general. His percentage of victory has been steadily climbing since then and he was unopposed in 2004. Last year he was opposed by a young right-wing Democrat, Shane Sklar, who held him down to 60%.

You might want to watch this video. Paul tries taking the pathetically ignorant Giuliani to school and he also explains how deceptive and disingenuous the Republican Party is. He claims a pro-war Republican-- Rudy McRomney and the rest of the herd-- can't win the presidency.



Clearly, Paul isn't going to be the Republican presidential nominee. Will he back out of the race and go the 3rd party route again? Or, will he back out of that race soon enough to fend off Republicans on his right in what promises to be an extremely bruising primary, a primary that is bound to lead to a contentious battle with a Democrat riding a wave of anti-GOP sentiment?

SO IS CHENEY GOING TO PRISON NOW? HOW ABOUT BOB NOVAK? SOMEBODY?

Both Joel Seidman at MSNBC and Dan Froomkin at today's Washington Post are reporting what has been widely known by everyone with a 3-digit IQ who's been paying attention to the Valerie Plame case: she was a covert CIA agent when Cheney's shop decided to out her to Bob Novak and other right-wing media tools. But like John Amato says, Now it's official. And now it looks like Pat Fitzgerald may well wind up indicting Cheney after all!

Special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald has made it clearer than ever that he was hot on the trail of a coordinated campaign to out CIA agent Valerie Plame until that line of investigation was cut off by the repeated lies from Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Libby was convicted in February of perjury and obstruction of justice. Fitzgerald filed a memo on Friday asking U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, who will sentence Libby next week, to put him in prison for at least two and a half years.

That's all you get for treason these days? Two and a half lousy years? What happened to firing squads and gallows? I thought these wingnuts loved capital punishment. Oh... not for themselves?

Despite all the public interest in the case, Fitzgerald has repeatedly asserted that grand-jury secrecy rules prohibit him from being more forthcoming about either the course of his investigation or any findings beyond those he disclosed to make the case against Libby. But when his motives have been attacked during court proceedings, Fitzgerald has occasionally shown flashes of anger -- and has hinted that he and his investigative team suspected more malfeasance at higher levels of government than they were able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.

In Friday's eminently readable court filing, Fitzgerald quotes the Libby defense calling his prosecution "unwarranted, unjust, and motivated by politics." In responding to that charge, the special counsel evidently felt obliged to put Libby's crime in context. And that context is Dick Cheney.

And it always has been. Cheney told Libby that Plame was a secret CIA agent and Cheney told Libby to disclose that information to hack reporters and was Cheney part of-- actually directed-- the cover-up that followed the White House's outing of her.

Fitz: "To accept the argument that Mr. Libby's prosecution is the inappropriate product of an investigation that should have been closed at an early stage, one must accept the proposition that the investigation should have been closed after at least three high-ranking government officials were identified as having disclosed to reporters classified information about covert agent Valerie Wilson, where the account of one of them was directly contradicted by other witnesses, where there was reason to believe that some of the relevant activity may have been coordinated, and where there was an indication from Mr. Libby himself that his disclosures to the press may have been personally sanctioned by the Vice President."

Libby gets sentenced June 5, a week from today. Will the judge allow him to remain out of prison while he appeals. Umm... is he a rich, well-connected white Republican male? And even if he gets thrown in the pokey, anyone wanna take bets that Bush pardons him within hours?

BUSH SUPREME COURT REAFFIRMS UNFETTERED CORPORATE DOMINANCE OVER AMERICAN CITIZENS

President Clinton makes a great move-- and we owe him

I always tell all the DWT writers that we can't advocate violence-- not even against monstrosities who are destroying our nation. I've heard all the arguments and I always say, "no, we cannot advocate violence at DWT." Nor do I even support the 180 days concept which says if you do something violent to a high up fascist and you can avoid the consequences for 180 days you get a prize and can't be prosecuted. On the other hand, the five high up fascists on the U.S. Supreme Court-- Alito, Scalia, Kennedy, Roberts and that one who never says anything but passes a note to the clerk saying "What Scalia says"-- are in favor of the 180 days concept.

Many of us knew it was a big mistake for Democrats not to block the nominations of Roberts and, even worse, Alito. It wasn't just because of Roe v Wade either. Sure, these two creeps are wrong about everything but the Bush inner circle was primarily looking for judges who could always be counted on to support corporate interests over the rights of consumers and workers, judges who will favor the wealthy and powerful over the rest of us. Today's 5-4 decision can be laid right at the feet of Democrats like Reid and Schumer who sabotaged progressive and grassroots efforts to organize against a filibuster. The decision today upholds a right wing appeals court decision voiding a worker's right to collect damages from a corporation discriminating against her illegally, based on the 180 loophole.

The court ruled 5-4 that Lilly Ledbetter, a supervisor at a tire plant in Gadsden, Ala., did not file her lawsuit against Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. in the timely manner specified by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

A jury had originally awarded her more than $3.5 million because it found it "more likely than not" that sex discrimination during her 19-year career led to her being paid substantially less than her male counterparts.

An appeals court reversed, saying the law requires the suit be filed within 180 days "after the alleged unlawful employment practice occurred," and Ledbetter couldn't prove discrimination within that time period. She had argued that she was discriminated against throughout her career and each paycheck that was less because of discrimination was a new violation.

The conservative majority of the court disagreed, and upheld the appeals court.

Once again it was Ruth Bader Ginsburg who made the most sense even going so far as to urge Congress to amend the law to correct her extremist colleagues' "parsimonious reading" of it (something Hillary Clinton has already said she will do). "In our view," said Ginsburg for the 4 non-fascist members, "this court does not comprehend, or is indifferent to, the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination."

Today's NY Times called Ginsburg's decision vigorous. With the Bush Regime entering the case on behalf of Goodyear and against ordinary Americans, Justice Ginsburg's oral dissent was "an unmistakable sign of anger and the tone of her opinion showed how bitterly she differed with the majority. She asserted that the effects of pay discrimination can be relatively small at first, then become far more serious as subsequent raises are based on the original low pay, and that instances of pay inequities ought to be treated differently from other acts of discrimination. For one thing, she said, pay discrimination is often not uncovered until long after the fact." She pointed out that the court's 5 fascist judges' "opinion 'overlooks common characteristics of pay discrimination.' She said that given the secrecy in most workplaces about salaries, many employees would have no idea within 180 days that they had received a lower raise than others."

Ralph Neas of People For the American Way, which led the fight to persuade Schumer, Reid and other tepid Democrats to really try to stop the Alito nomination, summed up today's ruling and put it into perspective.

Today's ruling is just the latest sign of the Court’s rightward lurch following the replacement of moderate conservative Justice Sandra Day O’Connor with ultraconservative Justice Samuel Alito and the confirmation of John Roberts as Chief Justice.
 
The Court, in an opinion authored by Justice Alito, ruled against a female former employee of Goodyear who claimed she had been subjected to gender-based salary discrimination over many years. Justice Anthony Kennedy joined with the right-wing bloc (as he did in Gonzales v. Carhart) to severely limit the relief available to many workers who fall victim to wage discrimination.
 
It is often exceptionally difficult for employees to learn about salary disparities and to sue for wage discrimination while continuing to work for a company. By making it more difficult for Americans to recover wages unfairly denied them, and less costly for companies to engage in discrimination against employees, the Court majority displayed its hostility to individual rights and to the laws passed by Congress to protect them.
 
In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg accused the majority of straying far ‘from interpretation of Title VII with fidelity to the Act's core purpose.’ Having successfully argued so many important sex discrimination cases when she was an attorney, Justice Ginsburg must feel as though she is going back in time with each passing day. And she would be right.
 
The fulcrum of the Court has shifted rightward from Justice O’Connor to Justice Kennedy. It has become increasingly clear that whenever he aligns with his four ultraconservative peers, the outcome will be destructive. In decision after decision, Alito and Roberts are demonstrating the hostility to crucial rights and protections that the opponents to their confirmation warned about.

I am still standing by DWT practice of not advocating violence-- even against fascists-- and not supporting this 180 days loophole thing. I would like to urge you to remember what I said a few days ago when we asked if you are ready to elect the next Supreme Court (non-violently).


UPDATE: AND IT ISN'T ONLY HILLARY WHO IS SICKENED BY BUSH REGIME DISREGARD FOR WOMEN'S EQUALITY IN THE WORKPLACE

George Miller, Chair of the Education and Labor Committee responded to Justice Ginsburg's called for Congress to address the Bush Court's idiotic decision.

"The Supreme Court’s ruling makes it more difficult for workers to stand up for their basic civil rights in the workplace. A worker undergoing sex, race, or other discrimination in pay is discriminated against with each and every discriminatory paycheck, not just when the company set the worker’s pay. Yet, according to the Supreme Court, if a worker does not file within 180 days of the employer’s decision to set her pay unlawfully, she has to live with that discrimination paycheck after paycheck. This ruling will force Congress to clarify the law’s intention that the ongoing effects of discriminatory decisions are just as unacceptable as the decisions themselves."

RUDY WANTS TO BE THE FATHER OF THE NATION. FATHER OF THE FAMILY HASN'T WORKED OUT SO WELL SO FAR

How could anyone not be proud to have Rudy (left) for a dad? mom?

Today's NY Times has some fluffy nonsense about Giuliani trading in his growl for a smile-- and even shows a picture of him braying like a jackass, which, I suppose, is supposed to represent the smile-- but they are very much out of step with the rest of the papers in New York City this week. The other papers decided not to opt to lend themselves to the Giuliani campaign but to highlight the man's real character, probably the single most important "issue," a potential voter has to figure out before casting a ballot (not counting his authoritarian nature).

And if that's the case, no matter how many Arab invaders Rudy tries to make people in South Carolina think he gunned down on the streets of New York on 9/11, he has no chance to win, at least not in a general election. The Daily News emphasized the dysfunctional nature of Giuliani's personal life and how screwed up his relationships are with his children and wives. The News pointed out that he was "the odd man out" at his daughter's high school graduation Friday.

The Republican presidential hopeful slid in a balcony door with his third wife, Judith, and security guards as the commencement began, then slipped out just as quietly when it ended, without speaking to his daughter and declining to speak with reporters.

Afterwards, a resplendent Caroline, 17, beamed with joy-- but noticeably skipped over her father when asked how she felt about graduating.

"This is a great day," she told the Daily News. "I am celebrating with my mom, my stepfather [Ed Oster], my brother and other family friends."

Earlier, when her name was called and Caroline stood to accept her diploma before a crowd of 2,000, she waved and smiled at her mother and brother and Oster - who were seated a far distance from the former mayor.

Giuliani operatives claim he's trying to repair his relations with his two children. although neither is mentioned on his campaign web site's biography. (Both had been prominently featured in previous campaigns and each appeared in TV ads with him.)

The NY Post was on the same beat, emphasizing the big chill between Giuliani and his former family.

When the commencement speaker, Sen. Charles Schumer, noted Giuliani's presence and the audience broke into applause, Hanover and her son, Andrew Giuliani, sat stone-faced and didn't clap.

But Hanover and Andrew jumped up and cheered when the Harvard-bound 17-year-old Caroline received her diploma from the tony Trinity School, while Giuliani and his wife, Judith, didn't even crack a smile.

Why have we heard so little of the voices of reason among American Christians? It turns out they've been talking, but couldn't make themselves heard

"As this study documents, coverage of religion not only overrepresents some voices and underrepresents others, it does so in a way that is consistently advantageous to conservatives. . . .

"Despite the fact most religious Americans are moderate or progressive, in the news media it is overwhelmingly conservative leaders who are presented as the voice of religion. This represents a particularly meaningful distortion since progressive religious leaders tend to focus on different issues and offer an entirely different perspective than their conservative counterparts."

--from the Executive Summary of Media Matters' new report, "Left Behind: The Skewed Representation of Religion in Major News Media"


Whether it's a symptom or a result, one all but inevitable component of the gradual (oh-so-gradual) loosening of the ultra-loony Far Right's six-year-long death grip on the country has been a weakening of the tyranny of the so-called Christian Right--the far-flung network of demagogic megalomaniacs and racketeers who took large segments of the country hostage with what can most charitably be called "junk" religion.

I'm sure it would be a mistake to over-estimate the weakening of this grip, but even some of its hostages seem to have begun to notice the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the right-wing Christigoons. As the surprisingly muted response to the passing of the unspeakable Rev. Jerry Falwell showed, more moderate evangelical leaders are already showing concern to distance themselves from the looniest of the Christigoon patriarchs.

And more and more we're finally hearing voices of honorable religion speaking up in counterpoint to the debased version that dominates the American "religious revival."

In these wars there hasn't been much that those of us on the sidelines--non-observant Jews, for example--could do except wait. I certainly understood that persons of sanity in the ranks of American Christianity felt under siege, especially as the ranks of their followers shrank while the deluded hosts of the junk religionists swelled. Here and there you occasionally heard a lonely voice, but the loneliness of those voices only underscored their isolation.

What I never stopped to consider was that all through this nightmare there have been sensible religionists trying to be heard, but having to fight their way through the same media blackout that voices of reason in all spheres have had to contend with. Of course, once the idea is introduced, the logic is immediately evident.

Now Media Matters has undertaken a study of the subject, and issued a report with the title LEFT BEHIND: The Skewed Representation of Religion in Major News Media, which you can either read online or download in PDF form.

I confess that I haven't read the report itself, and it may take me a while to get it. But the Executive Summary provides a pretty good idea. I would encourage you to read it while asking yourself, "Is any of this really a surprise?"

It would surprise few people, conservative or progressive, to learn that coverage of the intersection of religion and politics tends to oversimplify both. If this oversimplification occurred to the benefit or detriment of neither side of the political divide, then the weaknesses in coverage of religion would be of only academic interest. But as this study documents, coverage of religion not only overrepresents some voices and underrepresents others, it does so in a way that is consistently advantageous to conservatives.

As in many areas, the decisions journalists make when deciding which voices to include in their stories have serious consequences. What is the picture of religious opinion? Who is a religious leader? Whose views represent important groups of believers? Every time a journalist writes a story, he or she answers these questions by deciding whom to quote and how to characterize their views.

Religion is often depicted in the news media as a politically divisive force, with two sides roughly paralleling the broader political divide: On one side are cultural conservatives who ground their political values in religious beliefs; and on the other side are secular liberals, who have opted out of debates that center on religion-based values. The truth, however is far different: close to 90 percent of Americans today self-identify as religious, while only 22 percent belong to traditionalist sects. Yet in the cultural war depicted by news media as existing across religious lines, centrist and progressive voices are marginalized or absent altogether.

In order to begin to assess how the news media paint the picture of religion in America today, this study measured the extent to which religious leaders, both conservative and progressive, are quoted, mentioned, and interviewed in the news media.

Among the study's key findings:

* Combining newspapers and television, conservative religious leaders were quoted, mentioned, or interviewed in news stories 2.8 times as often as were progressive religious leaders.

* On television news -- the three major television networks, the three major cable new channels, and PBS -- conservative religious leaders were quoted, mentioned, or interviewed almost 3.8 times as often as progressive leaders.

* In major newspapers, conservative religious leaders were quoted, mentioned, or interviewed 2.7 times as often as progressive leaders.

Despite the fact most religious Americans are moderate or progressive, in the news media it is overwhelmingly conservative leaders who are presented as the voice of religion. This represents a particularly meaningful distortion since progressive religious leaders tend to focus on different issues and offer an entirely different perspective than their conservative counterparts.

Oh, to have been in the Senate Thursday afternoon, to witness the tearful reunion of the prodigal senator and his comrades-in-arms

Hey, did you hear the big news from before the Memorial Day Weekend? I just caught up with it via a Thursday 3:44pm entry in Paul Kane's "Capitol Briefing" blog on washingtonpost.com. You'll never guess who paid a whirlwind visit to the Senate that day! Yes, ladies and germs, the head on the item reads:

McCain Returns to Senate

What's more, the Sultan of Baghdad actually cast a vote, for the first time in six weeks.

Kane doesn't get into it, but you have to figure there was all manner of hugging and kissing and crying as our John reunited with all his old Senate buddies (though poor old Sen. Jim Bunning is probably still asking anyone who'll listen, "Who is it? Is it Santa Claus?")--not to mention the inevitable cries of "Didja bring me anything?" I wouldn't be surprised if the senator hurriedly sent his old pal Sen. Lindsey "Gotta Shop Till I Drop" Graham out into the bazaars of D.C., and I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if America's hagglemeister came back with rugs for everyone! (Leastwise the Republicans. You know them damn Dems don't Support Our Troops. 'Ceptin' that nice man-o-Gawd Holy Joe Lieberman.)

Kane does tack on this note:

[Full disclosure: McCain returned to Washington yesterday afternoon for a meeting with his national finance committee for his presidential campaign, followed by a rooftop fundraiser last night hosted by a lobbying firm. That was followed up today by a breakfast fundraiser here in Washington and then an evening money event, leaving time for senatorial duties.]

I just think it's nice--heart-warming, even--when the senator manages to work a bit of the people's business into the jam-packed schedule for his real business: the business of fund-raising.

MR. DWT GOES TO WASHINGTON

Last week I was in DC for a few days and my meetings-- nonstop, back-to-back before I had to take off for Chicago-- afforded me a little time to sleep and one free morning. I figured I'd go visit some of our pals on The Hill during that one free slot. I jump in a taxi and a block later we're at a red light and this guy in a suit and tie walks over to the open window and says, "I don't suppose you're on your way over to the Hill, are you?" I said, "Sure, jump in." He does and then I remember to ask, "Are you a Democrat or a Republican?"

Well, at one time, long ago, the man in the suit and tie who jumped in the taxi was just a kid who found himself in DC working for a Democratic senator from back home. Eventually he wound up as the president of the Capitol Hill Democrats. He didn't say what party is was a member of, just that he's a patriot who loves the country. I relaxed; anyone who loves the country has to hate Bush and the Republicans. Then it came out that the senator who he used to work for was not exactly what we would call a Democrat today: John Sparkman, who served from 1946 until 1979 and-- much like Joe Lieberman in 2000, was the Democratic Party's nominee for vice president in 1952. I well remember as a very young Democrat in Brooklyn, NY thinking what a disgrace it was for the Democratic Party to have people like Sparkman, a virulent and aggressive racist and, as it turned out, a forebearer of the modern GOP. "Hmmm..." I said; "if Sparkman were alive today he wouldn't be a Democrat. You're not a Democrat any longer either, are you?"

He came clean. He's spilled his guts. He seemed like a nice normal guy. Name's Rick Sellers and he's back living in Montgomery, Alabama. Sitting in a taxi talking with him, you'd never guess what he's been up to. He didn't tell me exactly why he joined the GOP, only that in 1992 he ran against then Democratic Senator Richard Shelby. Although he only managed to swing about a third of the vote, the half million people who did vote for him were more than had ever voted for a Republican for U.S. Senator in Alabama going way back to the days of the reviled Abe Lincoln, when being a "Republican" meant something entirely different from what being a Republican means today.

His race against Sellers, the obvious way the wind was blowing in the post-Nixon "Southern Strategy" states of the Old Confederacy, and then the Republican victory in both Houses in the 1994 elections caused Shelby to switch parties. (A vicious reactionary, he had been voting with the GOP for years.) Meanwhile, Sellers ran the NRA's anti-Democratic Party smear campaign which he confidently told me in the back of the cab was the "real" reason the Republicans managed to win so many seats from the Democrats in 1994. "It was what we did at the NRA," he boasted to me, "much more than Newt and the Contract With America."

If you're a regular DWT reader, I'm sure you can imagine what was coursing through my brain at this moment-- as I was making my way to the DCCC building. But Rick didn't have horns coming out of his head and if he has cloven hooves, they were well hidden. He had a perfectly friendly and positive demeanor and even offered to pay the taxi fare. When I told him I was in Washington to attend meetings of a progressive political action committee he got all excited that some personal friends of his were on the same committee and made me promise to give them his regards and his cards.

One of them was former Republican-- very former-- Congressman John Buchanan from Alabama. John is neither my idea of a Republican nor of an Alabama congressman. But he once told me a story about a county in Alabama, Winston County up north near Tennessee, that seceded from Alabama when Alabama seceded from the U.S. and declared itself the Republic of Winston (often called the Free State of Winston even today). It has been a Republican bastion since the 1860s-- but a Lincoln Republican bastion-- and that's the kind of Republican-- and congressman-- John Buchanan was. He was also, in 1980, the first victim of the so-called Christian Coalition (ironic since he was a graduate of the Southern Theological Seminary; less ironic when you think about what an extremist and partisan bunch of maniacs the Christian Coalition was). John was defeated by the religious right in the Republican primary who backed a neo-fascist, Albert Smith. Smith served one term and was so insane and extreme that he was defeated by a Democrat, Ben Erdreich, who represented the district for a decade afterwards. John didn't say anything when I handed him Sellers' card.

WE TOLD YOU SO-- AH... SWEET KENTUCKY

The hope in Kentucky was to pray the Republicans picked their most corrupt candidate, incumbent crook Ernie Fletcher, and that the Democrats rejected their own crook, reactionary Republican-backer Bruce Lunsford. The problem with that is that how could anyone be stupid enough to vote for Fletcher and how could another candidate resist Lunsford's tidal wave of cash and Establishment support. Last Tuesday both happened-- Republicans idiotically picked Fletcher and Democrats wisely rejected Lunsford and nominated Beshear. And the first polls for the general election are in: no contest. Miss McConnell's worst nightmare is happening back home. But what's an old nag gonna do? She embraced Fletcher, sleaze and all.

A WHAS11/SurveyUSA poll shows Democrat Steve Beshear would crush Fletcher by nearly a 2-1 margin if the general election were held today...

With Beshear polling 62% to Fletcher's 34%, look for the Republican gutter campaign to kick off immediately with Fletcher and his whacko running mate, Robbie Rudolph, screaming that Beshear will tax school prayers and guns and force abortions and homosexuality on Christians. The sad thing is that even after 6 years of Bush-rule, a third of Americans still buy that load of manure.

The WHAS poll shows Beshear leading in every area of the state, including the most red areas, and among all age groups. Even "among Republicans who said they voted for Anne Northup on Tuesday, 51 percent say they'd vote for Beshear today, 36 percent for Fletcher, 13 percent undecided."




COST PER VOTE

Yesterday Joe Gerth's column in the Louisville Courier-Journal tabulated what each of the candidates spent per vote in the primary. Among the also-rans "Republican Billy Harper spent $5.1 million-- most of it his own money-- to receive 27,086 votes. That's a whopping $188.28 per vote. Democrat Bruce Lunsford spent $4.7 million-- largely his own money-- on 74,537 votes. That's $63.06 per vote... Republican Anne Northup coughed up $16.85 for each vote she got." And the two winners? Fletcher outspent Northup at $26.39 for each vote he received, and Beshear was the most economical, paying just $8.54 per vote to win the Democratic nod.

END OF THE MUSIC BUSINESS-- WELL DEATH COMES BEFORE RE-BIRTH

An old pal of mine got laid off last week. He won a Grammy a year, more or less, for decades. My old company is down by more than half and they laid off-- that means fired-- another 400 people. The record business-- or, more accurately, the corporate record business-- isn't a promising place. I kind of tried explaining why I thought so about 3 months ago when I explained the concept of industry suicide. Today's NY Times got into it too. Music, of course, is as integral-- if not more integral-- in the lives of people. The middleman, the music biz, on the other hand seems to have outlived its usefulness and is widely viewed as an obstacle to the enjoyment and proliferation of music. They have no useful purpose-- not to consumers, not to new and developing artists, not to successful artists, not to shareholders, not even to the vast majority of the employees that are left. Upper level management is still suck all they can get out of the corporate tit, of course, but so much has been sucked out, its nearly dry.

Despite costly efforts to build buzz around new talent and thwart piracy, CD sales have plunged more than 20 percent this year, far outweighing any gains made by digital sales at iTunes and similar services. Aram Sinnreich, a media industry consultant at Radar Research in Los Angeles, said the CD format, introduced in the United States 24 years ago, is in its death throes. “Everyone in the industry thinks of this Christmas as the last big holiday season for CD sales,” Mr. Sinnreich said, “and then everything goes kaput.”

Everyone left behind who I know thinks it already all went kaput. The business has gone from one run by savvy music fans to one run by leveraged buy out operators looking to monetize whatever assets they can. No one's buildin' nothin'. Hostility to, and studied ignorance of, technological innovation-- inevitable technological innovation-- has killed the record business. Even now, with industry dinosaurs clinging to the hated DMR "protections" and trying to force their own outmoded vision on consumers instead of serving consumers what they are clamoring for, the executives with the biggest paychecks are digging their companies deeper and deeper into holes that lead their owners into financial oblivion.


The smartest artists are running away from the major label death spiral as fast as they can. The Times article talks about Paul McCartney's escape from EMI. Lou Reed is another perfect example. His art has aged gracefully and his music is as relevant today as it ever was-- and it always was-- albeit to a different age group. Why make incredible and relevant music and feed it into a ridiculously irrelevant machine that is clueless about how to cope with it? No reason at all.

Check out what Nightmare of You is up to-- which is all about music and nothing to do with the corporate music biz and overpaid corporate music executives.

IS THE BUSH REGIME BLATANTLY WORKING TO SUBVERT THE U.S. CONSTITUTION? DOESN'T THAT RISE TO THE LEVEL OF IMPEACHABILITY?

If Nancy Pelosi-- however kind her heart is-- insists on keeping impeachment off the table, does that make her an accomplice? I don't think that on this Memorial Day Cindy Sheehan would dispute that. The polar opposite of Cindy Sheehan-- in every way-- however would. And he had something to say today too. He, meaning Dick Cheney, the most hated Vice President of the United States certainly since Spiro Agnew, perhaps since Richard Mentor Johnson or even Aaron Burr. Cheney was let out of his cage cave this Memorial Day weekend to turn graduating cadets at West Point against both the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Constitution. A Republican blogger, Andrew Sullivan, analyzed what Cheney, a notorious draft-dodger, had to say.

He portrays the Geneva Conventions and the Constitution as devices by which al Qaeda can defeat the United States. The effect can only be to undermine respect for both Geneva and the Constitution among West Point cadets and the military in general. In the current debate, Cheney is using a West Point graduation to urge the military to support his disavowal of Geneva and his interpretation of a unitary executive in which the president has indefinite dictatorial powers with respect to "enemy combatants" in the war on terror. Invoking Geneva and the Constitution in a time of war, Cheney implies, is only something terrorists or terrorist-supporters would do. Sticking by Geneva and the Constitution is a function of "delicate sensibilities," which, in Cheney's faux-macho worldview, is about as contemptuous an expression as can be imagined.

Cheney represents the GOP establishment consensus, as expressed in the recent South Carolina debate, and across the Bush-blogosphere. He views both the Geneva Conventions and the Constitution of the United States as obstacles to be overcome in fighting the war on terror, the kind of obstacles only wimps defer to. After all, the Constitution might be read as forbidding the executive branch from detaining a U.S. citizen on American soil, bringing no charges for years, and torturing that citizen in solitary confinement until he is a quivering wreck of a human being. But in the battle between Cheney, Padilla and the constitution, Cheney won-- and Padilla and the Constitution lost.


Cheney seems to believe that the military and the president have taken oaths to defend American lives and American territory and American interests. But of course, presidents and vice-presidents and U.S. servicemembers take no such oath. Servicemembers take the following oath:

"I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God."

Does Cheney understand this oath? Do the Republicans? The Constitution-- not the territory, not the people-- is what the U.S. government is constructed to defend. And yet the current administration clearly views that Constitution as very September 10. We have a year and a half to go under a president and vice-president with this view of the Constitution. If you are not worried, you should be.

Republican Sullivan and ex-Democrat Sheehan are certainly not be the only Americans this Memorial Day who disagree with Speaker Pelosi's decision to not pursue impeachment. In his heartbreaking story about a dead colleague Private Donald Hudson, Jr. of the 86th Airborne Division stationed in Iraq, doesn't mention impeachment. But do read what he has to say and try to guess where he'd stand on the issue.

BAGHDAD, May 12 -- My name is Donald Hudson Jr. I have been serving our country’s military actively for the last three years. I am currently deployed to Baghdad on Forward Operating Base Loyalty, where I have been for the last four and a half months.

I came here as part of the first wave of this so called "troop surge", but so far it has effectively done nothing to quell insurgent violence. I have seen the rise in violence between the Sunni and Shiite. This country is in the middle of a civil war that has been on going since the seventh century.

Why are we here when this country still to date does not want us here? Why does our president’s personal agenda consume him so much, that he can not pay attention to what is really going on here?


Let me tell you a story. On May 10, I was out on a convoy mission to move barriers from a market to a joint security station. It was no different from any other night, except the improvised explosive device that hit our convoy this time, actually pierced through the armor of one of our trucks. The truck was immediately engulfed in flames, the driver lost control and wrecked the truck into one of the buildings lining the street. I was the driver of the lead truck in our convoy; the fifth out of six was the one that got hit. All I could hear over the radio was a friend from the sixth truck screaming that the fifth truck was burning up real bad, and that they needed fire extinguishers real bad. So I turned my truck around and drove through concrete barriers to get to the burning truck as quickly as I could. I stopped 30 meters short of the burning truck, got out and ripped my fire extinguisher out of its holder, and ran to the truck. I ran past another friend of mine on the way to the burning truck, he was screaming something but I could not make it out. I opened the driver’s door to the truck and was immediately overcome by the flames. I sprayed the extinguisher into the door, and then I saw my roommate’s leg. He was the gunner of that truck. His leg was across the driver’s seat that was on fire and the rest of his body was further in the truck. My fire extinguisher died and I climbed into the truck to attempt to save him. I got to where his head was, in the back passenger-side seat. I grabbed his shoulders and attempted to pull him from the truck out the driver’s door. I finally got him out of the truck head first. His face had been badly burned. His leg was horribly wounded. We placed him on a spine board and did our best to attempt "Buddy Aid". We heard him trying to gasp for air. He had a pulse and was breathing, but was not responsive. He was placed into a truck and rushed to the "Green Zone", where he died within the hour. His name was Michael K. Frank. He was 36 years old. He was a great friend of mine and a mentor to most of us younger soldiers here.

Now I am still here in this country wondering why, and having to pick up the pieces of what is left of my friend in our room. I would just like to know what is the true reason we are here? This country poses no threat to our own. So why must we waste the lives of good men on a country that does not give a damn about itself? Most of my friends here share my views, but do not have the courage to say anything.

Happy Memorial Day.

WILL A CHANGE OF ETHICS LAWS PROMPT RESIGNATIONS FROM CORRUPT CONGRESSMEN LIKE JERRY LEWIS, KEN CALVERT, GARY MILLER, ETC?

Virtually all the significant growth in California is hours away from the big cities, most of it in Southern California's Inland Empire. There phenomenal rates of growth are registered year after year in Riverside and San Bernardino counties. There is virtually no Democratic Party infrastructure in these counties and, politically, these areas have been left to rot in a red, red hell. San Bernardino and Riverside counties are divided between Buck McKeon (CA-25), David Dreier (CA-26), Jerry Lewis (CA-41), Gary Miller (CA-42), Joe Baca (CA-43), Ken Calvert (CA-44), and Mary Bono (CA-45). Baca, a Latino, is the only Democrat rep in the area. He is also the only moderate and one of the only members of the congressional delegation from the area who didn't wind up on CREW's list of the 20 Most Corrupt Members of Congress in the U.S.. Of the 20 most corrupt, San Bernardino and Riverside have the biggest concentration of ethical sleaze in the entire country, boasting advanced corruption investigations for Jerry Lewis, Ken Calvert, and Gary Miller.

This is especially interesting in light of the prediction by CBS correspondent Gloria Borger (on yesterday's Chris Matthews show) that there will be "mass resignations from House members who are now saying they can’t afford to live here unless they’re bought and paid for by lobbyists; they're going to leave." Friday the House overwhelmingly passed a bill that will make it more difficult for members of Congress to trade favors for financial support from lobbyists employed by wealthy companies.


Zack Space, who replaced Republicrook Bob Ney, convicted last year of corruption and currently residing in a federal penitentiary in West Virginia, ostensibly spoke for 396 members who voted for the legislation, when he said "It is absolutely imperative that we break this circle of deceit that exists, that has existed, between lobbyists, their wealthy clients and this legislature." I say "ostensibly" because many of the most corrupt members of Congress felt compelled to support the bill, not just the aforementioned Gary Miller, Jerry Lewis and Ken Calvert and 2 crooks whose papers were recently seized by the FBI [Rick Renzi (R-AZ) and John Doolittle (R-CA)] but also K Street darlings from both sides of the aisle like Rahm Emanuel (D-IL), Steny Hoyer (D-MD), Roy Blunt (R-MO), Denny Hastert (R-IL), Brian Bilbray (R-CA), John Boehner (R-OH), Virgil Goode (R-VA), and other ethically challenged members like Tom Feeney (R-FL), Doc Hastings (R-WA), William Jefferson (D-LA), Heather Wilson (R-NM). Patrick McHenry (R-NC) and Paul Gillmor (R-OH).

At least Don Young (R-AK), one of the most corrupt members of the House-- on a level with Jerry Lewis and John Doolittlee-- was honest enough to vote against the bill. H R 2316, Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007, now moves on to the Senate, where it is viewed as being weak and unthreatening enough to pass.

Friday's Washington Post refers to the weeks of yeoman's work it took to convince some of the more corrupt Democrats-- particularly Emanuel and Hoyer-- to go along with the bill. The Post conveniently glosses over the success the K Streeters had in weakening the final bill.

Party leaders and new lawmakers worked until the day before the vote to sway some longtime members who had balked at the proposals. It took weeks of persuasion by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other key lawmakers to convince recalcitrant Democrats -- among them some members of the speaker's inner circle.

The new proposals, which in the end passed overwhelmingly, would expand the information available about how business is done on Capitol Hill and make it available online. They would provide expanded, more frequent and Internet-accessible reporting of lobbyist-paid contributions and sponsorships, and would for the first time impose prison terms for criminal rule-breakers. They would also require strict new disclosure of "bundled" campaign contributions that lobbyists collect and pass on to lawmakers' campaigns. Yesterday's legislation passed 396 to 22...

The House in January passed rules banning gifts, meals and travel from lobbyists. The rules also require sponsors of pet spending projects, known as earmarks, to identify themselves and certify that they have no financial interest in them.

Many of the most corrupt members deeply resented DCCC Chair Chris Van Hollen's anti-bundling measure and there were rumors on Capitol Hill that his insistence on the inclusion-- with backing from Pelosi-- came close to rupturing his relations with his DCCC predecessor, Rahm Emanuel and with the House Majority Leader, who is every bit as corrupt and unscrupulous as Emanuel (and GOP leaders past and present), Steny Hoyer. "The bundling reports, filed quarterly and posted online, would mean 'much more visibility of conduct that has typically occurred undetected because current law doesn't cover it or the FEC has been spotty in its enforcement,' said Kenneth A. Gross, an ethics attorney at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. On the floor yesterday, the bundling provision survived a Republican vote to send it back to committee when lawmakers passed an amendment making the bundling rule apply to political action committees."

Good government types see it as a tiny step in the right direction although it just tinkers with a thoroughly corrupt system around the edges. While the Republican leadership and slimy Democrats like Emanuel and Hoyer were fighting against even these modest infringements on their "right" to plunder, good government types like Mike Capuano (D-MA) were furious that the legislation didn't go nearly far enough. The bill doesn't even start to address the real problems undermining American democracy-- "the millions I have to raise to run for office."

"They've started to drain the swamp, and we commend the Democratic leadership and the freshmen members of Congress who pushed hardest for this," said Bob Edgar, president of Common Cause. "But there's still a lot of work to do to prove that this Congress is serious about cleaning up Washington."

A story in today's NY Times, about where the pols of both parties get their dough, goes a long way towards proving that it isn't that serious.

Have you been falling behind on coverage of the 2008 presidential campaigns? Happily, here's Tom Tomorrow to get you all caught up on both races

[As usual with these things, you can click on either strip to enlarge.]


I've been conceptualizing and hacking my way through a piece that will bring together all the current strands of discussion: why we can't stop the war, why we can't have a serious discussion of immigration, why in fact it's so hard in our system to talk about issues that really matter.

It will come, eventually, and the best part is, it's guaranteed not to make the tiniest dribble of a difference. Because, as we can see from these recent offerings from the great Tom Tomorrow, the new presidential election cycle is already humming.

It occurs to me that most everything I'm trying to verbalize is in fact expressed in these lovely strips. Plus, somehow our Tom makes it all funny. This, surely, has to be chalked up to genius.

IS VOTING FOR DEMOCRATS POINTLESS?

Bill left a comment on the John Laesch post yesterday that voices what more than a few people, including Cindy Sheehan, have been thinking:

I supported some "Blue America" people in 2006 and where did it get me/us ..... all those freshmen blue guys deserted us in the Iraq supplemental voting ... so why this guy?

First of all, almost every one of the Blue America-endorsed freshmen voted against the supplemental. The exceptions were Chris Carney, who we have asked to return all 722 contributions he got from Blue America members (not just because of this one vote, of course, but because of a pattern of voting that has shown us he deceived us with false promises and that instead of the progressive he portrayed himself as, he is a reactionary Democrat, voting frequently with Republicans for the Bush Cheney agenda), Kirstin Gillibrand, Ciro Rodriguez and Joe Sestak. Congressman Sestak is coming on for a live blog session next Saturday, June 2, and we'll get to ask him about why he voted the way he did. Meanwhile please keep in mind that all the other House members we helped elect voted no: Mike Arcuri (NY), Bruce Braley (IA), Steve Cohen (TN), John Hall (NY), Paul Hodes (NH), Jerry McNerney (CA), Patrick Murphy (PA), and Carol Shea-Porter (NH). Meanwhile, Republicans are still in a state of denial, lying their asses off and even trying to tell the American public that Iraq was involved with 9/11, something no one except Dick Cheney still parrots.

Check out the live session we did with Eric Massa Saturday. He's running again and he categorically declared he would have voted against the bill and that. Here's part of an answer he gave to a question about ending the occupation of Iraq:

We, as Democrats must stop being afraid of standing up to the lying liars and the lies that they tell. Tomorrow I will post on several blogs the following: “Why I (would have) Voted against the funding Bill." The bottom line is accountability. I am not ready to say “let bygones be bygones." We need to hold the leaders who took us to war without reason accountable. No more blank checks, and if the President Vetoes the bill then so be it-- we have him and each and every supporting member of Congress on record -- that’s how we win elections. Taking that accountability back to the people and in clear, no nonsense language state our case.

I can state that case because when they tell me that I am not supporting the troops I can look at them and state that “I am a troop.” I join MG John Batiste, a personal friend, who has stood with me in opposing this President. We have both given up one heck of a lot and will continue to do so in our quest to create a Veto proof majority.

I am not and will not criticize any fellow democrat. But I will be clear about what I will, would have, and have done.

Later the same day, we spoke with John Laesch, another Fighting Dem who is also going to make a second attempt to oust an entrenched Republican warmonger. John thinks we need to end the occupation NOW, not in a year or 6 months... NOW.

This morning another Blue America candidate, Dr. Steven Porter, who is also trying again against a Bush rubber stamp. Phil English, sent us a statement expressing disgust with congressional Democrats' failure to lead on the Iraq issue.

They not only caved in to Bush on the spending bill, they do not have the fortitude to do what is necessary to save our troops and innocent Iraqis from further harm. Biden wants to ‘wear down’ 17 Republican Senators until they demand benchmarks from the President. Edwards wants to cut off Iraq war funds. Hillary Clinton and Obama voted against the funding bill knowing it was going to pass so that they could play to the anti-war voters. All of it is a horse that won’t run. All of it perpetuates the slaughter.
 
Bush and the neo-cons aren’t going to change.  This war is and always has been about oil, greed, power, and control for them. Hoping for any kind of epiphany is silliness. Cutting off funding only hurts our troops because Bush is just cruel and stubborn enough to leave them in the field unprotected. Wearing down 17 Senators will take time-- time which will cost more lives.
 
The answer is to get rid of Cheney and Bush via impeachment, and to do it quickly. They have trashed the Constitution over and over again, and the counts against them have been documented in the double digits by some of the best legal minds of the nation. Once rid of them, the next step would be to set up a three- or four-region political settlement in Iraq where Kurds, Shia, and Sunni have autonomous control and where oil revenues are equitably shared.
 
Then invite the international community to share in the rebuilding of Iraq and in securing the regions against Al Qaeda as our troops reduce their burden and are brought home. I am sure that once the warring factions in Iraq are guaranteed autonomy, they themselves will take the initiative to keep the terrorists from destroying the country further. Giving the international community some partnership in the rebuilding of Iraq would provide an economic justification for an international peacekeeping force.
 
Beyond this, moving quickly through international agencies (NATO, the UN, etc.) both to create a two-state solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and to reduce the poverty and despair which fosters terrorism would be the next important steps in the process of a lasting Middle East peace.
 
Finally, a concerted effort on the part of the Democratically-controlled Congress to have all federal elections publicly funded would end the special interest games which lie at the heart of so many of our problems.
 
All this would be possible for representatives who are caring statesmen and women instead of the usual run of politician. All this would be possible if a brain-dead, heartless media would begin to educate the American people instead of titillate them. All of this would be possible if the American people would put down their sports pages long enough to think.

LIFE IN THE GREED ZONE-- YEP, THERE'S SOMETHING WORSE THAN CODE RED

Nothing about this story has anything to do with Republican Party hacks Patraeus and Pence-- except the blame part

When we last heard from Fred, the DWT Baghdad correspondent, he gave us a very clear explanation of the various-- and color-coded-- degrees of water problems in the Greed Zone. He gave us all the ramifications, courtesy of Dick Cheney's company Halliburton, between green and red. He didn't explain "black." This morning, when Halliburton subsidiary KBR implemented it, he did: "MISSION CRITICAL WATER NEEDS ONLY: LSA water hours from 0500 - 0900 and 1700 - 2100 daily; Emergency response vehicles maintained at 50% water capacity." I guess the step after that goes way beyond the pathetic benchmarks Bush and corporate Dems passed this week.

Water for showers, toilets, ordinary use is brought into the Embassy Compound (in the Green Zone) by truck. When trucks cannot move, problems quickly become apparent. Drinking water is brought in from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia by 18-wheelers with pallet loads of liter (for the kitchen) and half liter bottles for drinking.

I'm just guessin' here, but maybe the trucks with the water are having problems getting into Baghdad because Iraqis-- if not Cheney Democrats in the U.S. Congress-- are eager for Americans to decamp asap. In fact, Moqtada al-Sadr is saying the U.S. must remove their troops from his country. Bush and his cronies claim the U.S. will withdraw when Iraq wants us to but he's waiting until God calls him and tells him that that's the case.

Meanwhile, water isn't the only thing having a hard time getting into Baghdad. Fred explains the process of a person getting into Baghdad. He flew in from Amman, Jordan. His trip doesn't have anything to do with the photo-op McCain staged to falsely paint Baghdad as a safe place to take a leisurely stroll with your gay friend from South Carolina.

Traveling to Baghdad under US Government auspices is a dilly of an experience. It was so fascinating that I took notes along the way. After arriving, everything seemed so surreal that I continued taking notes. I was here in mid-2004 but somehow I either was not exposed to the more weird aspects of life in the Green Zone or did not notice it. Anyway, here is the first part of my story for your amusement.

It took 20 hours to get to Baghdad by plane from Amman, Jordan. Prewar, one could drive it in about ten hours. The trip was bizarre to say the least. I even had written instructions and tried to follow them to the letter but alas, a few things were left out.

The delays started even before travel begins. Someone in Baghdad must first verify that you have a CAC or Common Access Card, country clearance, a Letter of Authorization (LOA, at the airport they referred to them as Travel Orders) and that there is room for you in the inn, i.e. is there an empty bunk in one of the several thousand trailers or other billets in the International Zone (better known as the Green Zone)? None of this happens in parallel, all must be done in a specific sequence. When all is gathered, a seat is reserved for you on a C-130.

Two days a week, a C-130 flies from Kuwait to Baghdad, then Baghdad to Amman, then Amman back to Baghdad and finally from Baghdad back to Kuwait; all very orderly, but intentionally (for security reasons) not on any discernable time schedule.

On the afternoon before the flight, specifically between the hours of 4 and 8 pm, you are obliged to telephone (or inquire via the Internet) the transportation people and ask for the Amman to BIAP (Baghdad International AirPort) ‘show time’. I telephoned at the appointed time and was told that show time at Marka airport-– an old airport now mostly devoted to general aviation-– was “oh-nine-thirty.”

At 8:15 the following morning, a colleague drove me to the airport. On the drive, I mused that the usually brown hills had turned green as the result of a tiny bit of rain a few days earlier and thought of it as a good sign. Such is life in a desert environment.

Marka airport dates from an earlier era. The terminal looks as though it had just slipped into a hole in the ground. It is small, nearly empty, dimly lit and dreary. Other than the employees, everyone in the terminal appeared to be headed for the same flight to Baghdad.

After standing in line for an hour, I paid the departure tax, gave someone at the ticket counter (no tickets were actually issued) my luggage bag and a copy of my LOA and was checked in. One carry-on is permitted – as long as you can carry it on your lap.

After checking in, we passengers gathered in a small open area overlooking part of the runway and waited some more. A forlorn looking Duty Free shop was open as was a stand that sold cookies, sodas and such but otherwise the joint was empty.

After a rather long wait, Jordan Immigration opened a departure counter and someone called out that the immigration line was open. So, I had the dubious pleasure of yet another line in which to stand. Having completed that task, everyone re-gathered into a glassed-off waiting area and, of course, waited some more.

At 12:45 pm, a bus pulled up and after more waiting, a group of us crowded onto the bus and were taken to the plane. This being a C-130 we boarded by walking up a ramp at the back of the plane. The seats are web mesh on aluminum frames. Down each side of the plane a row of seats faces inward; down the center of the plane two rows of seats separated by web mesh faces outward. I’ve attached pictures for your amusement.


The web mesh is the seat back. For those sitting in the middle rows of seats only the mesh separates each persons back from the back of the person on the other side. The plane narrows in the middle to accommodate the wheel wells. Passengers seated in that section find themselves sharing knee space as well. Amazingly enough, several passengers seemed to sleep or toil away (play?) on laptops that were truly on their laps, despite the rather uncomfortable arrangement. When one of the air force types (shall I call him the flight attendant?) went from the front of the plane to the back, he did so by stepping carefully between the knees of the passengers from one seat edge to the next.

Some 70 of us crowded onto the plane. The toilet on the plane is a bucket behind a curtain, if anyone is desperate for relief.

Our baggage, collected on a pallet and wrapped in plastic wrap like a piece of meat at the supermarket, was fork-lifted onto the plane, the ramp raised, the door latched and off we went. The plane jerked forward from a standing position but climbed into the sky quite nicely. The flight was noisy and uncomfortable but not overly long.

At 1:54 pm, the pilot landed the plane in a spiral motion-– rather reminiscent of the time I did my pilot’s biennial with a stunt pilot as my check pilot. In this case however, the reason for landing in such an unusual way was to avoid flying over areas where the troublemakers like to shoot at low flying planes. Touchdown was rather sudden and abrupt.

Even leaving the plane is an experience. First the luggage pallet is removed – we probably could not get off the plane otherwise – then a hippy-looking chap yelled “skull caps off” and “follow me." We stumbled off the plane, in two remarkably straight lines, for some distance behind the plane. The reason was immediately obvious. The engines were still running, the noise was deafening and the wind the engines generated was incredible. We next pushed off to a tent/building where our arrival was registered.

I was instructed to call upon arrival at BIAP but told not to give any flight times, etc. over the phone (seemed strange as the flight was over) but I followed the instructions. I had to borrow a phone as my Jordanian phone did not work despite receiving a SMS message welcoming me to Iraq from Fastlink Jordan.

It is not obvious where the luggage is placed upon arrival, and given the impression I had that the bags continued to the Green Zone with the passengers, I did not go fetch my bag-- a bit of a mistake-- but that’s another story.

For most folks who arrive on a C-130, getting to the Green Zone from BIAP is via steel-plated buses called Rhinos. The color, size and hulking shape of these beasts suggest that they are well-named. Unfortunately the Rhinos do not run until the wee hours of the morning (to avoid being shot at during the daytime, when folks can be along the road without appearing suspicious). So for those of us who arrived via C-130, it’s a 6 to 10 hour additional wait.

Having time to kill, I went exploring. I found a Dining Facility (in Green Zone-speak, a DFAC) but they would not let me enter with my laptop (security has its own peculiar logic) and there was no place to store it safely. I found a PX (Post eXchange) and cluster of trailers housing a Burger King, a Subway sandwich shop, a Green Beans (a Starbucks-like coffee shop found on military bases), a jewelry shop, a barber shop, a beauty salon and a gift shop. All seemed in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by churned up and hardened mud with large river stones in place of paving. The whole business was surrounded by concrete T-walls (blast protection).

Later I took a bus to Camp Striker (where the Rhinos pick up their passengers). The bus was accompanied by a van onto which they place any luggage that passengers are carrying (again, all in the name of security). At Striker, the waiting area is housed in a large temporary building with coffee, tea, television, and wireless internet (for a fee), etc. For those who can tolerate endless propaganda there are some couches and chairs around a couple of televisions with identical smatterings of Fox News and military pep talk pieces. There are also a few books and magazines to read.

At about 11:00 pm, the Rhino passengers queued up, identified themselves and had their names placed on a manifest and were told the number of the bus that they are to take to the Green Zone. Rhino passengers are required to have a flak jacket and helmet. Of course I did not have these items (and did not get any for several days). But I did receive a lengthy lecture on the subject. Just where, how or when I could have acquired this equipment was left out of the lecture.

The Rhinos finally arrived, an announcement was made and we we went out to meet them. The luggage was lined up in a row and sniffer dogs examined them after which the baggage and other boxes were tossed into a shipping container that sat on a flat bed trailer.

Five or six Rhinos (one purposefully empty) took us to the Green Zone. We were escorted by humvees with a pair of helicopters watching overhead. At the Green Zone, the luggage truck was unloaded, and again inspected by other sniffer dogs.

I was not told beforehand that I would be going into the Palace that morning, and thus did not get the necessary temporary badge. By the time someone came to get me, the badge person had left and my escort and I had to wait until someone of higher rank arranged for a temporary badge. The badge was needed simply to let me pass through the Palace on my way to a “Transient Hootch”, Hootch being the name given to the sleeping quarters that are trailers or modified shipping containers. It is a Vietnamese word for huts that serve as living quarters. The US military borrowed the name from the Vietnamese during the Vietnam war and have used it ever since. Once a temporary badge was issued, my escort took me to Billeting, picked up a room key and finally, at 4:00 am I crawled into bed.

So, you see the waiting is unbelievable, especially when you realize that everyone who enters or leaves the airport via this process loses a day in entering and a day in leaving. The drag on individuals and the cost to the USG must be enormous. I think the C-130 holds about 70 people. My guess is that the people cost alone easily exceeds $500,000 each trip. My logic: each trip 65 to 75 people travel to Amman and 65 to 75 from Amman plus similar numbers going through Kuwait – each person loses 16 to 24 hours in traveling this short distance-- the average fee expended for the services of these people likely exceeds $1,000 per person per day (my estimate may even be low)-- add in the cost of the C-130s, the security personnel, the Rhinos, the escorts and the number soon staggers the imagination-- all this in the name of security.

The costs go on. You cannot just change planes in Amman or Kuwait and fly on to Baghdad. Thus folks other than the military who are traveling to Iraq for the US Government must of necessity be lodged in a hotel for a day or more until such time as they can continue their journey.

While Fred tells us how difficult and uncomfortable it is for Americans to get in to the Greed Zone, Frank Rich has a gloomy column on the plight of Iraqis-- many, the very ones who bought into the Bush Regime "freedom and democracy" bullshit-- who now need to get out. As Iraq descends more and more into bloody and hopeless chaos, over 15% of it's population has become refugees-- but only a few hundred (all translators) have been given asylum in the U.S. And if you wonder why those men and women have targets on their backs, it shouldn't be too difficult to figure out. Instinctively, everyone knows what a quisling is. American soldiers stationed in Iraq are starting to realize that only one things seems to unite all Iraqis: a desire to take their country back from American occupier.

BLUE AMERICAN LIVE VLOGGING IN CHICAGO WITH JOHN LAESCH

In last year's congressional races there was no candidate who Blue America contributors were more excited about than Illinois Fighting Dem John Laesch. Over a thousand of our donors contributed over $20,000 to his longshot campaign against the powerful and entrenched Republican Speaker of the House, Denny Hastert. Hastert is no longer Speaker; no longer quite so entrenched or powerful and IL-14 isn't quite as red as it was in 2006. To a great extent, we have a savvy, tenatious and energetic carpenter, the son of missionaries, to thank for that. I'd like to urge you to read the transcript of the July, 2006 first visit John paid to Firedoglake in preparation to today's session. (In fact, if you have the time, please also take a look at John's post-election visit at FDL too.)

We're going to try something different today. Christina Siun and myself are in Chicago with a robust group of Illinois bloggers and activists in order to sit down face to face and talk with John. Christina will be live blogging it and I'll be trying to lead a vlogging session. Here at DWT just hit the lifeguard station on the right (our world headquarters) and you'll see the portal to the vlogging session. That'll allow you to watch a real time video and audio broadcast from the Chicago Laesch event. And, of course, you can participate by typing your questions in to Christina at Firedoglake. She'll pass the questions on to John and I and you'll experience everything short of our visit to the Art Institute.

We'll ask Johh how he would have been more effective than other Democratic congressmen in opposing Bush's war agenda and how he would have voted on other issues that came before Congress. And if you like what you hear, I want to ask you to join me in helping John mount another vigorous campaign in IL-14, where his success in showing that Democrats can make inroads in the area has drawn the attention of the corporate, anti-grassroots political machine of Rahm Emanuel who will be surreptitiously backing another candidate the way he disastrously ruined progressives' attempts to win an Illinois seat for Christine Cegelis last year by spending millions and millions of dollars on his own puppet candidate who sabotaged Cegelis and then, at huge cost, failed to win the general election. Emanuel, who helped engineer enough Democratic support in Congress so the Republicans could pass Bush's occupation budget, might be hard to defeat in his ward-politics district in Daley's Chicago. But in grassroots-oriented IL-14, Emanuel can be stopped from accruing more power. You can contribute to John's campaign here on our Blue America page.

Last year we placed hundreds of radio spots in IL-14 and our creative team-- hey Tommy!!!-- is working on something even better for 2008. So after you donate to John's campaign directly, also consider a dollar or two for our Blue America PAC on the same page. Enjoy the clip-- and join us for our vlog session (3pm Chicago time, 4pm EST and 1pm PT).

ERIC MASSA: BLUE AMERICA WELCOMES BACK AN AMERICAN HERO FROM NEW YORK STATE

New York's Southern Tier, the 29th congressional district, is the most conservative in the state. Our Blue America candidate last year was Eric Massa and he came within 6,000 votes (out of nearly 200,000 cast) of beating right-wing extremist and Bush rubber stamp Randy Kuhl. NY-29 shares a long border with one of the reddest of Pennsylvania's congressional districts, the 10th. PA-10 is currently represented by Chris Carney, the Democratic congressman who promised to support hate crimes legislation and then voted against it (one of only 14 super reactionary Democrats who did) and promised to help extricate us from Iraq and then voted to stay the course. I was one of the 722 Blue America contributors who fell for Carney's lies and donated to his campaign last year.

Carney's perfidy has had a demoralizing effect on many of us. He has refused to give back the donations or to even offer a reasonable explanation for his actions. (Instead he regurgitated some tired GOP talking points.) I've decided to talk to perspective endorsees about our bad experience with Carney. Like Carney, Eric Massa was a military man running as a Fighting Dem. I could see his jaw drop through the phone line when I told him how Carney had voted on these two bills.

Eric was very impressive when he joined us at Firedoglake last July. Look it over so I don't have to repeat his illustrious history or explain why so many of us were so powerfully attracted to his character and his candidacy. We asked him to come on again to tell us why he's decided to run again and to explain how he plans to beat Kuhl next year. And to ask him how we can help.

"The war of occupation and attrition in Iraq-- and 18th century war that we're fighting-- is the issue of my generation. It is unethical, immoral, financially bankrupting and the largest strategic military blunder in the history of this country. It is based on a lie, twisted into propaganda and sustained by falsehood. We have turned so many corners in Iraq that we are, literally, running in circles. And so any candidate," he continued, referring to my question about fellow former Fighting Dem Chris Carney, "must be clear and put down an unequivocal marker about where they stand on Iraq. Right now the president won't even talk about leaving; he won't use that word. We need to stand up as a nation, tell the world we are leaving, and start immediately." Carney may not have voted for the McGovern bill to end the war. Eric certainly would have.

As for the Hate Crimes legislation Carney voted against, not only would Eric have voted for it, even his reactionary Republican opponent, Shotgun Randy Kuhl, voted against it! "He's been super-glued to George Bush and he became a minority whip. For two years I campaigned on very consistent statements of policy and fact and I ran in the most Republican district in New York and lost by just a couple of percent. Whether it's people in rural areas or in metropolitan areas, there is a widespread realization that discrimination and violence based on that discrimination can no longer be tolerated. My position is very simple: I support the legislation as it was passed. I don't intend to change any of my beliefs, my statements, or my policies. And the way we know we're going to win is that the people of this district-- like people all over the United States-- have changed. They now know they cannot trust anything Dick Cheney says. Underline 'anything.'"

Eric is getting started very early. That's a lesson he learned from 2006. He's already up on the air with 2 minute radio spots talking substantively about serious issues facing voters. "You have to hold these people accountable early." Last time he had to spend a huge amount of money to create name recognition. He raised over a million and a half dollars-- without taking one cent from a corporate PAC, something he will never do. He's as serious about real campaign finance as any candidate I've ever spoken to. He doesn't wait for me to bring it up, either. "I believe if you're going to talk about campaign finance reform, you have to be willing to do it to prove your point. And I did and I would not be able to look myself in the mirror if I took money from ExxonMobil. My opponent gets over 70% of his money from PACs... Of all the issues we face, the core issue has to be campaign finance reform because nothing will change til we get the Board Room out of the voting booth."

The Southern Tier is an economically depressed area and Eric has no doubt in his mind that what the voters there want their representative to do more than anything is to work on economic expansion that brings jobs-- the kind with living wages attached-- to the area. Like many people in the district who aren't asleep at the wheel, he's watched Bush's and Kuhl's policies sending jobs and opportunities to China. "I'm a violent FAIR trader," he explains, "not a free trader." That might have something to do with why 180 local unions endorsed him. "To join the European Union, your whole country gets inspected to insure that there exists the rule of law, standards of human rights, enforcable environmental policies, and adequate labor protections. We have failed to do any of that with respect to WTO and China." And it isn't just Republicans like Kuhl pushing these disastrous trade policies. There are more Democrats than there should be going right along for the ride. Eric won't be on that bandwagon.

Take a look at the video Eric's friend, neighbor and colleague, Major General John Batiste, cut for the district. They served together in Kosovo and the general is hosting a fuindraiser for him in a few weeks. Take it to heart; it's our future at stake. Then please join me in helping arm Eric for the coming battle with Shotgun Randy.



Live discussion at FDL now (2pm, EST).

It was worth trying to shut down the war by congressional action, but it's time to recognize that it can't happen now and move on with Plan B

"It's fine to urge opposition to the Iraq spending bill, but it's juvenile to toss around threats or make it seem as if voting wrong on this bill means you aren't sincerely against the war. In fact, what's going on inside the Democratic Party now is a family argument about tactics, not principle."
--Jonathan Alter of Newsweek, in a "web-exclusive commentary," "The Case for Gamesmanship"

I've been reading a lot of commentary, and have written some of it myself, denouncing Democrats who failed to oppose to the death the supplemental spending bills allowing Chimpy the Prez to continue his war in Iraq. I've also grown increasingly uncomfortable with the hysterical, absolutist, and all-knowing--even though it's not really all that smart--hectoring.

So when Howie mentioned Jonathan Alter's contrary argument, I went ahead and read it.

Alter makes clear that he has lots of disagreements with aspects of the Democratic congressional leadership's handling of the issue but insists that doesn't change "the elemental fact" "that Democrats may have won the midterms but they lack the votes to end the war in Iraq." They "didn't have anywhere near the votes to override [Bush's] veto [of their bill with a timetable for withdrawal]. Bush and his war might be terribly unpopular, but under our system, he's still holding the high cards."

So why not keep passing bills and letting Chimpy veto them ("the 'Chinese water torture' option backed by John Edwards, among others")? Two reasons, says Alter.

First, the country won't buy it. With a fanciful but persuasive "the kids are hungry" analogy, Alter points out that Republican strategists have been all primed to wage a Memorial Day jihad against Democrats who don't support the troops. "This is not a figment of some spineless Democrat's imagination but the reality of what he or she will face back in the district over Memorial Day."

However unpopular the war may be, anyone who thinks it's possible to survive the charge of not supporting our troops in the country at large is, I would say, completely out of contact with reality. That would be a bloodbath.

Second, Democrats don't even have the votes for the "Chinese water torture" strategy in the Senate--where, remember, they couldn't even pass their own bill without Republican votes.

I think it was worth trying to stop the war this way. It's not theoretically impossible to do so. But I think the people who are now screaming that this is the only acceptable approach have ever been honest, either with themselves or with their screamees, about just how hard this is to do. As we've discovered, real-world conditions simply don't exist at present for this solution.

What about the argument that Democrats have now made this their war?

Sen. Russ Feingold argues that by not voting to cut off funding, Democrats are becoming complicit, and taking co-ownership of the war. Feingold's far-sightedness on the war (he was much more prescient about its folly than I was) deserves great respect. But on this narrow political point, he is mistaken. Democrats who vote to cut off funding can be more easily blamed for the war's failures, especially in swing districts. That's why the leadership is letting members vote their consciences, rather than try to enforce a party line vote that would not prevail in the end, anyway.

So what do we do? What, then, is Alter arguing?

For Democrats, the world of Washington as it is requires a strategy of slowly ratcheting up pressure. They won an important tactical victory by forcing Bush to accept benchmarks for performance by the Iraqi government. Those benchmarks will prove useful when the Iraq war is revisited--first in July, when the big Defense Department funding bill comes up, and again in September, when Gen. David Petraeus reports on progress on meeting the benchmarks, or lack thereof, in Baghdad.

I encourage you not to settle for my mini-paraphrase. Here's the full Alter column:

Column/Between the Lines
Jonathan Alter  

 The Case for Gamesmanship

The Democrats' internecine squabbling over the war is a family argument about tactics, not a showdown over principle. The left should remember that.

Web-exclusive commentary
By Jonathan Alter
Newsweek
Updated: 4:16 p.m. ET May 24, 2007

May 24, 2007--It isn't easy to make the case for capitulation and gamesmanship when human lives are at stake, but I'm going to try. That's because many Americans--especially on the left--don't understand why Democrats in Congress had no choice but to proceed the way they have this week on the war in Iraq.

I undertake this unpleasant task as someone who has been arguing for a while that Democrats need to stiffen their spines. Last summer, for instance, after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others then in the minority outlined their 2006 election agenda without focusing on Iraq, I wrote a tough column asserting that ending the war must be the primary issue for Democrats in the midterms.

But it's one thing to be tough; it's another altogether to criticize any member of the party who doesn't vote with MoveOn.org and others on the antiwar left as "Dick Cheney Democrats" cruising for a primary challenge, or at least a flaming from the liberal blogosphere. It's fine to urge opposition to the Iraq spending bill, but it's juvenile to toss around threats or make it seem as if voting wrong on this bill means you aren't sincerely against the war. In fact, what's going on inside the Democratic Party now is a family argument about tactics, not principle.

The first thing to understand is that Democrats may have won the midterms but they lack the votes to end the war in Iraq. Some liberals don't seem to get this elemental fact. A bill with a timetable for withdrawal was passed and sent to President Bush's desk. He vetoed it. Democrats didn't have anywhere near the votes to override the veto. Bush and his war might be terribly unpopular, but under our system, he's still holding the high cards.

So why not pass the bill again, have him veto it again, pass it again and have him veto it again--until the votes change? This is the "Chinese water torture" option backed by John Edwards, among others. It sounds gratifying, but there are two big problems with it.

The first is what might be called "the kids are hungry" dilemma. You're in a bad restaurant. Dad sends back the food. The waiter brings the same food back. Dad says it still stinks and sends it back again. He even vows not to pay for the meal. Trouble is, the kids are hungry and dad has promised repeatedly that he will "support the kids" by giving them whatever they need to stay well-nourished.

The whole "support the troops" meme has become a terrible problem for Democrats. Even though, as Glenn Greenwald has argued in Salon, cutting off funding doesn't mean soldiers will have their guns and bullets and armor taken away in the middle of a battle, Americans have been convinced that it does. They want to end the war and support the troops at the same time--i.e., send back the food and still eat.

This is not a figment of some spineless Democrat's imagination but the reality of what he or she will face back in the district over Memorial Day. Democrats who vote to cut funding not only risk getting thrown in the briar patch by Republican hit men in Washington; they also might not be able to satisfy their otherwise antiwar constituents at home.

The second problem is that even if Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid wanted to adopt the Chinese-water-torture approach, they don't have the votes for it in the Senate. Not gonna happen now. Pass-veto, pass-veto sounds good for Edwards on the stump but, sadly, bears no relation to reality on the ground in Washington. And the one thing we've learned from Bush's fiasco in Iraq is that we have to deal with the world as it is, not as we would like it to be.

For Democrats, the world of Washington as it is requires a strategy of slowly ratcheting up pressure. They won an important tactical victory by forcing Bush to accept benchmarks for performance by the Iraqi government. Those benchmarks will prove useful when the Iraq war is revisited--first in July, when the big Defense Department funding bill comes up, and again in September, when Gen. David Petraeus reports on progress on meeting the benchmarks, or lack thereof, in Baghdad.

I wish the Democrats had played tougher by including Rep. John Murtha's provision that any troops sent to Iraq would have to be better equipped. Bush privately promised to veto that, too, and they should have called his bluff. Vetoing a bill with no timelines, only a readiness requirement, might have been hard for the president, even if Murtha's amendment was, at bottom, a sly move to send fewer troops.

But the point is, reasonable people can disagree over tactics. Sen. Russ Feingold argues that by not voting to cut off funding, Democrats are becoming complicit, and taking co-ownership of the war. Feingold's far-sightedness on the war (he was much more prescient about its folly than I was) deserves great respect. But on this narrow political point, he is mistaken. Democrats who vote to cut off funding can be more easily blamed for the war's failures, especially in swing districts. That's why the leadership is letting members vote their consciences, rather than try to enforce a party line vote that would not prevail in the end, anyway. Pelosi's position is the right one--she's voting against the bill but not trying to make others do the same.

Would it be preferable if the Democrats hadn't prevented floor amendments, split the House bill in two and added domestic sweeteners? Sure, but this is politics, not the movies. It's the art of the possible. Elected representatives who recognize that reality deserve better than to be called "Dick Cheney Democrats."ve called his bluff. Vetoing a bill with no timelines, only a readiness requirement, might have been hard for the president, even if Murtha's amendment was, at bottom, a sly move to send fewer troops.

But the point is, reasonable people can disagree over tactics. Sen. Russ Feingold argues that by not voting to cut off funding, Democrats are becoming complicit, and taking co-ownership of the war. Feingold's far-sightedness on the war (he was much more prescient about its folly than I was) deserves great respect. But on this narrow political point, he is mistaken. Democrats who vote to cut off funding can be more easily blamed for the war's failures, especially in swing districts. That's why the leadership is letting members vote their consciences, rather than try to enforce a party line vote that would not prevail in the end, anyway. Pelosi's position is the right one--she's voting against the bill but not trying to make others do the same.

Would it be preferable if the Democrats hadn't prevented floor amendments, split the House bill in two and added domestic sweeteners? Sure, but this is politics, not the movies. It's the art of the possible. Elected representatives who recognize that reality deserve better than to be called "Dick Cheney Democrats."

DEMOCRATS ARE MAKING A BIG MISTAKE AND PLAYING WITH FIRE

Not a few of my friends would like to take the Inside the Beltway version of the Democratic Party apart today-- not just the out-and-out scumbags like Emanuel and Hoyer who have carefully taken part in sabotaging efforts to stop Bush's Iraq madness, but even the majority of House Democrats who voted no (after approving a procedural rule that would make it possible for them cast that no vote on Bush's Iraq occupation budget while insuring that he'd win anyway). I understand where they're coming from. And they-- as well as the majority of Democratic senators who authorized Bush's invasion and again voted to fund the occupation-- will have to be dealt with. I think the Rahm Emanuels and Steny Hoyers should be dealt with first. (Jonathan Alter doesn't see it the same way either camp does and I want to be sure to offer an opportunity to see his point of view too.)

But I want to share two e-mails I got today with you. First was one from Darcy Burner, a progressive grassroots Democrat who came very close to beating far right warmonger Dave Reichert in the Seattle suburbs last year and will take him on again in the coming election cycle. Darcy, like many non-Beltway progressives, is furious that the Democrats didn't stop Bush. She says she wouldn't have bought into the Hoyer/Emanuel crap. Watch her explain it.



The other e-mail came from a longtime DWT reader, John.

Hi Howie,

I'm sorry I ever gave Tester a friggin' nickel.
this is so disappointing and they can't paint a
positive face on it no matter how hard they try
someone wrote a blog on DWT the other day about how
the Dems are worse than the Republipigs because they
support evil when they know it's wrong
that's so true
it makes me sick
John

I'd post this but I can't figure out how to post
blogs anymore after google screwed with the thing

Democratic senators and congressmembers who think they can play games with the Iraq issue will find themselves weeping the same bitter and ignorant tears as John Boehner if they don't wise up. Carl Levin better hope his treachery will persuade many Republicans to vote for him in 2008. He certainly lost a lot of Democratic support, not from the lobbyists and Inside the Beltway parasites he has spent entirely too many years with, but among real grassroots Democrats.

I just finished a fantastic book by Joseph Wheelan, Invading Mexico. Set a mere 160 years ago, the analogy between the unprovoked invasion of Mexico by the duplicitous James Polk-- nicknamed "The Mole"-- and the similarly unprovoked invasion of Iraq (with far less to gain; at least Polk stole California, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and parts of Texas and Oklahoma) by Bush, screams from every page. I read the epilogue as we were starting to land in Chicago. Let me quote a few lines:

Polk's dubious justification for the nation's first offensive war-- "American blood shed on American soil"-- was the first time, but not the last, that an American war had commenced on arguable grounds. Questionable pretexts would later launch the Spanish-American and Vietnam wars and the 2003 Iraq invasion: the mysterious explosion that sank the U.S.S. Maine; the alleged North Vietnamese gunboat attacks on the U.S.S. Maddox in the Golf of Tonkin; and Iraq's purported weapons of mass destruction. Crushing Spain in ten months spared William McKinley a backlash over his war but prolonged fighting spurred challenges to the underlying causes of the wars prosecuted by Polk, Lyndon Johnson, and George W. Bush.

As did other presidents, Polk and his allies coerced support for their war agenda by accusing opponents of providing the enemy with "aid and comfort," the constitutional definition of treason. This gambit forced the opposition to walk a tightrope-- authorizing war funds to demonstrate their support for the troops, while criticizing the policies that necessitated the expenditures.

Several future U.S. presidents participated and I want to quote two of them. "Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion... and you allow him to make war at pleasure. This same future president, then a congressman staunchly opposed to the war had this to say about one of Polk's deceitful and cynical speeches about the war: "The half insane mumbling of a fever dream... His mind, tasked beyond its power, is running hither and thither, like some tortured creature, on a burning surface, finding no position, on which it can settle down and be at ease." Abraham Lincoln's opposition to Polk and his war of aggression didn't prevent him Forman being elected president or from being judged by history as the greatest of all American presidents.

The second quote is by a man who served in the war in Mexico and was written by him after he had left the presidency. "Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times." That was Ulysses S. Grant talking about how the U.S. Civil War was divinely ordained punishment for the U.S. invasion of Mexico.

And if Hillary and Obama could figure it, they all can. Of course, Hillary and Obama are motivated. They want to do what the American people are demanding. Democrats who don't shouldn't be re-elected.


OH, AND ABOUT THOSE BENCHMARKS...

Bush signed the disgraceful supplemental spending bill Congress gave him. Some people think-- or say they think-- Bush was forced to accept benchmarks he didn't want. There's a reason Cheney has a wide smile on his ugly puss.

Thursday, May 24 the US Congress voted to continue the war on Iraq. They called it “supporting the troops.” I call it stealing Iraq’s oil-the second largest oil reserves in the world. The “benchmark” or goal the Bush administration has been working on furiously since the US invaded Iraq is the privatization of Iraqi oil. Now they have the US Congress blackmailing the Iraqi Parliament and Iraqi people: no privatization of Iraqi oil, no reconstruction funds.
This threat could not be clearer. If the Iraqi Parliament refuses to pass the privatization legislation, the US Congress will withhold US reconstruction funds promised to the Iraqis to rebuild what the United States has destroyed in Iraq. The privatization law, written by American oil company consultants hired by the Bush administration, would leave the control of only 17 of 80 known oil fields with the Iraq National Oil Company. The remainder (two-thirds) of known oil fields and all yet undiscovered oil fields would be up for grabs by the private oil companies of the world (but guess how many would go to the United States firms given to them by the compliant Iraqi government.)
No other nation in the Middle East has privatized its oil. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Iran give only limited usage contracts to international oil companies for one or two years. The $12 billion dollar “Support the Troops” legislation US Congress passed requires Iraq, in order to get reconstruction funds from the United States, to privatize its oil resources and put them up for long term (20-30 year) contracts.

Maybe the Bush Regime was even more like the rapacious Polk than I thought! Good thing we have a democracy in our country! Just ask Miss McConnell. Bush's Chief Senator Obstructionist doesn't seem to think the voters will hold their representatives accountable for voting against their interests on even the most crucial issues. Speaking to Al Hunt about the immigration controversy, McConnell, completely misreading the mood of America-- and especially of his own GOP Base-- claimed "I don't think there's a single member of either party next year who is going to fail to be re-elected over this issue." Isn't he going to be in for a surprise?

DWT readers have a right to know: So who the darned heck made up The [friggin'] List anyways?

Was it Idiot Al? Was it Monica? They say, "Nuh-uh!"

Now that we know--from the testimony of such straight shooters as Attorney General Idiot Al "The Torture Guy" Gonzales; his former chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson; former Deputy AG Paul McNulty; and former Department of Justice White House Liaison Monica M. Goodling--that none of them had anything to do with The List, and also nobody in the White House (even though none of the DoJ people, including the White House liaison, seems to recall ever having had any contact with anybody in the White House; don't you think these people need to get out and socialize more?), you would think that that would be the end of the discussion.

And yet some people insist on pressing that pesky question:

So where'd the friggin' list come from anyways? It hadda come from someplace.

Here at DWT, the Public Research Group has narrowed the list of suspects down to the following:

(a) former President Bill Clinton
(b) New York State's junior U.S. senator, Hillary Clinton
(c) former New York State Gov. DeWitt Clinton*
(d) former Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet
(e) former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover
(f) former FBI Associate Director W. Mark Felt
(g) former Ambassador Joe Wilson
(h) former CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson
(i) the Wilsons' twins, Trevor and Samantha
(j) Ambassador Wilson's older twins (with his first wife, Susan), Sabrina and Joseph
(k) Third Reich entrepreneur Oskar Schindler
(l) North Pole philanthropist Santa Claus
(m) former vice presidential buttboy Irving "Lewis" Libby
(n) former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger
(o) former President Richard M. Nixon
(p) Nixon aides John Ehrlichman and/or H. R. "Bob" Haldeman
(q) Nixon secretary Rosemary Woods

- - - - - - - - - -
*You know, the guy who built the Erie Canal--well, no, not with his own personal hands--and thereby opened up the West, or at any rate Buffalo, and thus gave Americans access to the spicy chicken wings.

PRINCE OF DARKNESS THINKS THE IMMIGRATION BED THE REPUBLICANS MADE FOR THEMSELVES ISN'T GOING TO BE TOO COMFY

My meeting started today at 8:30am and ended around 6pm. There were no windows and the recirculated air was dry, ultra-cold and unhealthy. And it was a very tough, contentious meeting. I got back to my hotel and switched on the tube to see if Congress had voted to give Bush a blank check yet. While I was waiting for the shameful vote, Lou Dobbs was on CNN bashing everyone who supports Bush's immigration "Grand Compromise." My favorite part was about how redneck Arizona Republicans are so furious at their two wingnut senators, Jon Kyl and old man McCain, that they're leaving the GOP in droves.

Robert Novak, like me, thinks that Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Saxby Chamberpot (R-GA) being boo-ed at their reactionary, racist, xenophobic party's state conventions, portends ill for Republicans. Both corporatist whores are trying to deliver cheap labor to their Big Business financiers and "behind the catcalls was GOP rage over undocumented foreigners, a sentiment GOP lawmakers must appease or risk dire consequences."

Graham has called his rightist antagonists ignorant Know Nothings-- which they mostly are-- but that has made him even more of a target for their rage and feelings of betrayal. When Novak asked the closeted Republican why his constituents are so angry with him, Graham "quoted from a federal government report on the new arrivals to this country, 'largely unskilled laborers' and heavily illiterate: 'The new immigration has provoked a widespread feeling of apprehension as to its effect on the economic and social welfare of the country.' The report, by the U.S. Immigration Commission, was dated 1911."

Graham and Chambliss, both up for re-election next year, were unprepared for the hostility they encountered at their state party conventions. At Columbia, S.C., delegates erupted in boos when Graham mentioned Kennedy's name. Chambliss' apparent proximity to Kennedy in a photograph evoked booing at Duluth, Ga. Unaccustomed to such treatment, Chambliss expressed his resentment to Senate colleagues back in Washington. Graham was not happy with his junior South Carolina colleague, Sen. Jim DeMint, for playing to the convention crowd with anti-immigration oratory.

Nor was Graham happy with the performance in Columbia by DeMint's candidate for president, Mitt Romney. The former governor of Massachusetts won cheers by claiming the Senate compromise constitutes "amnesty"-- the word guaranteed to rouse Republican audiences. Only two years ago, Romney supported a less restrictive bill passed by the Senate on grounds it did not constitute "amnesty." Sen. John McCain, who supports the Senate compromise and is Graham's choice for president, said Monday: "Maybe I should wait a few weeks and see if [Romney's position] changes."

Many Republicans reach for an anti-immigration lifeline because of the party's plight. Burdened with an unpopular president and an unpopular war, the GOP cannot claim to be the party of limited government and controlled spending. But immigrant-bashing divides rather than unites Republicans. In a recent closed-door meeting of the House's conservative Republican Study Committee, Rep. Bob Inglis of South Carolina raised the danger of resembling South Africa's National Party advocating apartheid.

How long will it take before wingnut Repugs borrow an idea from France offering to pay its 5 million immigrants to go "home?" Remember, the French just elected a xenophobic rightist who was cheered on by the Repugs. "New French President Nicolas Sarkozy made immigration a central issue of his campaign. Now, his new minister for immigration and national identity says its time to start paying immigrants to leave the country." The French are offering immigrants $8,000 per family. The Republicans are probably too cheap to offer that much but expect something idiotic from some of these neo-fascist desperados.

CONGRESS CAPITULATES-- GIVES BUSH A BLANK CHECK DESPITE AMERICANS' OVERWHELMING OPPOSITION TO CONTINUED OCCUPATION OF IRAQ

Although the Democratic-led House voted to include a raise in the minimum wage as a sop to their base, it is a ruse unlikely to work. Americans are angry about Bush's occupation of Iraq and his never-ending escalation. Democrats are even more angry. And now Democrats will be able to focus that anger on Democrats they can make pay, namely the traitors Steny Hoyer and Rahm Emanuel, the leaders of the Democratic-end of the Cheney coalition.

Basically 86 Democrats joined the Republicans to give Bush a blank check in Iraq. 140 Democrats voted No. (Only 2 Republicans voted against the war.) So who are the worst Democrats, the ones who, after all these years, still think Bush should have a free hand in Iraq to do whatever the hell he wants? The leaders of the rebel Democrats:
Rahm Emanuel (IL)
Steny Hoyer (MD)
(Emanuel's puppet and stooges, Tim Mahoney (FL), Heath Shuler (NC) and Melissa Bean (IL) all voted against Democrats, against progressives and against America)

Let's look at the Democrats who have been endorsed by Blue America. These are the courageous men and women who voted against endless war and against Bush and Cheney and for the American people:
Mike Arcuri (NY)
Bruce Braley (IA)
Steve Cohen (TN)
John Hall (NY)
Paul Hodes (NH)
Jerry McNerney (CA)
Patrick Murphy (PA)
Jerry Nadler (NY)
Carol Shea-Porter (NH)

(Chris Van Hollen, chairman of the DCCC, voted against Emanuel, Hoyer, Bush and Cheney)

These are the freshmen supported by Blue America who stabbed us in the back and joined Emanuel, Hoyer and Cheney today:
Chris Carney (PA)
Kirstin Gillibrand (NY)
Ciro Rodriguez (TX)
Joe Sestak (PA)




UPDATE: WHAT WOULD YOU SAY TO YOUR WARMONGER REP IF YOUR SON DIED USELESSLY, TO PROTECT BUSH'S SICK EGO?

Professor Andrew Bacevich is a right-wing Republican military expert. He recognized Bush's policies as absolutely catastrophic for America and he has been adamantly opposed to the Regime's war agenda. A couple weeks ago his officer son was killed in Iraq. "What kind of democracy is this," Bacesvich posed on NPR-- when the people do speak, and the people's voice is unambiguous... but nothing happens?" Only 14 senators had the guts to stand up against Bush and for the American people. That two of them were the front-runners in the Democratic nomination for president-- the cautious Clinton and Obama-- says something about who is paying attention to the American people and who doesn't believe in basic democracy. The Democratic senators who can hold their heads up high:

Barbara Boxer (CA)
Hillary Clinton (NY)
Chris Dodd (CT)
Russ Feingold (WI)
Ted Kennedy (MA)
John Kerry (MA)
Patrick Leahy (VT)
Barack Obama (IL)
Bernie Sanders (VT)
Sheldon Whitehouse (RI)
Ron Wyden (D-OR)

Among the cowards too scared to vote were both my Brooklyn schoolmates, Chuck Schumer (NY) and Norm Coleman (MN).

Hillary made a good statement after the vote:

Tonight I voted against the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Bill because it fails to compel the President to give our troops a new strategy in Iraq. I believe that the President should begin a phased redeployment of our troops out of Iraq and abandon this escalation. I fully support our troops, and wish the President had followed the will of the people and signed the original bill we sent which both funded the troops and set a new course of phased redeployment. But the President vetoed Congress's new strategy and so Congress must reject the President's failed policies. I will also continue to press with Senator Byrd for our legislation to end the authorization of the war in Iraq.

While I am deeply disappointed that the supplemental does not provide for a new course in Iraq, I want to recognize the many worthy parts of this bill: funding to help those sickened in the aftermath of 9/11, additional relief for Katrina and Rita victims, homeland security funds for high-threat cities like New York City, resources to protect parts of New York affected by recent flooding, $650 million for the State Children's Health Insurance Program, and the first federal minimum wage increase in ten years. I support these measures but cannot support this Emergency Supplemental which will not change our course in Iraq.

What the hell is wrong with Biden? He votes with the Republicans in favor of their hideous corporate bankruptcy bill and now is supporting Bush's war agenda.

SOME DEMOCRATS WHO REPRESENT GRASSROOTS AMERICANS ARE ADAMENTLY OPPOSED TO GIVING BUSH ANOTHER BLANK CHECK

I'm not 100% sure that 100% of the Democratic leaders-- read "reactionary war-mongers, like Rahm Emanuel, Steny Hoyer, Ellen Tauscher, and Artur Davis," for example-- are just afraid of Bush. (Of course, some are afraid and pathetic.)

Today CBS and the NY Times point out that public opposition to Bush's entire war agenda is at an all-time high. Emanuel and Hoyer are political operators and longtime war supporters. Bush and the hated Republican minority are just their excuse. And their next line of defense will be the Republican's partisan hack general Patraeus.

I'd like to mention that Democratic congressmembers who are really opposed to the war are voting against this disgraceful bill. This came from Lynn Woolsey's office:

This capitulation proves once and for all that we cannot negotiate with this President. He won't listen to his military generals on the ground, he won't listen to outside experts like the Iraq Study Group, he won't listen to the Congress, and worst of all he won't listen to the American public.

Faced with this blind arrogance we have no other choice but to take bold steps to confront this President and to hold him accountable for his continued failures in Iraq. If we refuse, if we continue to take piecemeal steps such as today's vote, then we must accept our complicity in his continued occupation of Iraq.

The American public voted Democrats into power for one simple reason-- they trusted us to act boldly to hold this President accountable and to bring our troops home. So far we are failing the very trust that they have placed in us. But more importantly, every day that we allow this occupation to continue we are failing our brave young men and women who are serving honorably and professionally in Iraq. And we are failing their families here at home, who, while struggling to keep
their lives and families together, are forced to worry whether their loved ones will come home alive, and if so in what condition.

Today is not an opportunity to claim victory, or to give bellicose speeches for partisan gain. Today is an opportunity to grieve for the soldiers who have sacrificed their lives for this President's failed
Iraq policy, to stand by our nation's sons and daughters who suffer through the irreparable physical and mental wounds of war, and to grieve for the lives that we will continue to lose so long as this
President refuses to bring our troops home, and continues to send our young men and women to die for his failure."

When Jerry McNerney called me on the phone last week to explain to me and the Blue America community why he had voted against the McGovern legislation that upset so many of us, I believed his sincerity and there was no question in my mind that he should be given the benefit of the doubt. Today he made a statement that backed up my feelings about giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Our troops have done everything we have asked of them. They have put their lives on the line in service to our country.

They deserve our utmost respect and real leadership from the Congress.

For our troops and their families, for our nation, we need a new direction in Iraq .

That is why I cannot vote for a bill that does not include enforceable benchmarks, a reasonable timetable for redeploying our troops from Iraq , or the requirements for providing the training and equipment our men and women in uniform need.

I cannot support another blank check for the President.

Beginning in January this new Congress began the process of implementing new policies, of bringing accountability to the conduct of this war, and of forging a new direction in Iraq. That is what the American people demanded.

Yet, this supplemental funding plan is a step backwards because it is a blank check for the President. I have consistently called for real benchmarks and a reasonable redeployment timetable. This bill provides neither.

Critically, the bill includes no provisions to ensure that our troops are prepared, rested, and ready for the battles they must wage - a rejection of the Pentagon's own standards.

Not only that, but this bill includes no requirement to use diplomacy to create the framework to end this conflict, the course recommended by the Iraq Study Group. And there is no plan to reduce the tremendous strain on our military or to refocus our nation's efforts on the broader war on terror.

Supporting our troops means providing our men and women in uniform all of the means necessary to carry out their mission and bring a responsible close to the conflict in Iraq. This bill does not do that and I cannot support it.

If you haven't watched Keith Olbermann's Special Comment, I want to recommend it very strongly. John Edwards' leadership today shows why he has what it takes to merit serious consideration from progressives for the presidency.


UPDATE: CONGRESS STOKES THE FIRE OF AN ANTI-INCUMBENT REVOLT

Kerry just sent out an e-mail explaining why he was voting no on giving Bush a blanks check. Here's what he said:

I'm voting no on this bill. I'm tired of the false choices of Republicans and all the recycled spin of old battles and the political calculations that do nothing for our troops who bear the real costs of this war. Bottom line: we support the troops by getting the policy right, and this bill doesn't do that. I've said it again and again and I'm not about to stop: we need a deadline to force Iraqis to stand up for Iraq and bring our heroes home, not watered down benchmarks and blank check waivers for this President. We support the troops by funding the right mission, not with a White House that opposes a pay raise for our brave men and women in uniform. Do we need to bring out the hand puppets and make the case again?

So who would Jimmy Stewart play? Well, certainly not Gordon Smith. We'll see who votes against this travesty. I know Patrick Murphy-- who won by a razor-thin margin in a GOP-leaning district-- is voting against it. As is... the bill's floor manager, Rep. Obey. And the Speaker of the House? This gets more and more interesting. So this is all the Rahm Emanuel/Steny Hoyer show. And it looks like the bad old Murtha is back, voting with Emanuel, Hoyer and the Republicans, just like in the good bad old days. On the Senate side I know we can count on Feingold and Dodd.

As Beltway Dems congratulate themselves on their shrewd strategizing over Iraq, is there any chance of us getting whatever the heck they're smoking?

"Obviously it's a good move. It gives President Bush and Republicans one less thing to shoot at."
--Democratic pollster Fred Yang [right], on his party's congressional capitulation on funding the Iraq war

In the real world where most of us live, the story about congressional Democrats' capitulation to Chimpy the Prez, giving him the blank check on Iraq he was demanding, is a story of, well, abject capitulation.

Apparently not so within the Beltway-delimited Shangri-La on the Potomac. "The crazy thing about the fight," Matt Stoller writes today on MyDD, "is that Democratic insiders are convinced that capitulation is the right strategy. They actually believe that this will put pressure on the Republicans in the fall, and that standing up to Bush is a bad idea."

Matt quotes this chunk from reporting by Susan Ferrechio on CQ.com:

Democrats said this week they would have jeopardized their fall bargaining position if they had insisted on keeping withdrawal timelines in the current supplemental spending bill (HR 2206). Persisting now would likely have resulted in another veto and would have handed Republicans talking points for the Memorial Day recess about which party supports the troops in the field.

Democrats were particularly worried about the prospect of Bush declaring at wreath-laying ceremonies that "Democrats have stopped resources for the troops," said Rep. Artur Davis, D-Ala. [right].

"The problem is that we have to provide money for the troops, and if we don't, the Democrats will be blamed," added Rep. James P. Moran, D-Va., a war opponent. "Bush has the bully pulpit, so he will define who is responsible."

"Obviously it's a good move," said Democratic pollster Fred Yang. "It gives President Bush and Republicans one less thing to shoot at" during the upcoming recess week.

Which prompts this from Matt:

Bush has the bully pulpit. Obviously it's a good move.

These are the attitudes of Democratic members and pollsters. There's no evidence that Bush moves numbers anymore. In fact, when he talks he becomes less popular. He has no credibility, which means that his access to the bully pulpit is severely diminished. Yet Democrats are afraid of him. More than that, Democratic members think that by capitulating to him that Republicans will stop saying that Democrats won't fund the troops. It's crazy. It's like they didn't notice the 2002 election where they were like 'we can take Iraq off the table'.

And while the news media is abuzz with talk of Democratic capitulation, I'm watching idiots like Louise Slaughter [right] on C-Span saying that this is not a concession to Bush, and that Congress is fighting to end the war. And she really believes it. She really thinks that Democrats are fighting Bush with this bill. It's amazing. It's like la-la land.

POSTSCRIPT: Shh! House Dems scheme to capitulate quietly

Apparently those Beltway Dems are so pleased with their victory-through-capitulation strategy that they're engineering a way of avoiding even leaving a voting trail. David Sirota reports this morning that House Democrats have come up with a way of voting for the Iraq spending capitulation without actually appearing to cast votes for it:

VOTE ALERT: Dick Cheney Dems
Plan to Hide Votes on Iraq TODAY

Today is the day House Democrats are expected to vote on Iraq - except, news out of Washington this morning says the leadership has come up with a nifty little trick to try to prevent the public from seeing who voted for giving Bush a blank check, and who voted against it. If you thought Democrats were behaving like cowards by caving into a President at a three-decade low in presidential polling and giving him the very blank check they explicitly promised not to give him during the 2006 election, you ain't seen nothing yet. Welcome to the rise of the Dick Cheney Democrats - that is, Democrats who endorse governing in secret and hiding the public's business from the public itself.

Here's how it is expected to work today (though it could change). Every bill comes to the House floor with what is known as a "rule" that sets the terms of the debate over the legislation in question. House members first vote to approve this parliamentary rule, and then vote on the legislation. Today, however, Democrats are planning to include the Iraq Blank check bill IN the rule itself, meaning when the public goes to look for a vote on the Iraq supplemental bill, the public won't find that. All we will find is a complex parliamentary procedure vote. Lawmakers, of course, will then tell their angry constituents they really are using all of their power to end the war, and this vote on the rule - which was the real vote for war - wasn't really a vote on the war. It is a devious, deliberately confusing cherry on top of the manure sundae being served up to the American public, which voted Democrats into office on the premise that they would use their congressional majority to end the war.

All of this is happening at the time top Republican leaders are making ever more sociopathic statements at odds with mainstream public opinion. Today, as just one example, House Republican Conference Chairman Adam Putnam (R-FL) [right, better known to DWT readers as Rep. Howdy Doody] cheered on the blank check, telling Roll Call that "You drop Murtha [troop readiness standards], you drop withdrawal, the troops win." He doesn't explain how popular proposals to better equip and train American soldiers for combat and force the Bush administration to come up with a plan for redeploying troops out of harms way means "troops win."

Wasn't it big of Monica to admit that she "may have gone too far" with her law-breaking? Of course, she doesn't seem to get that she WAS law-breaking

I know the Devil is in the details, and I know that any reasonable scrutinizer of Monica Goodling's House Judiciary Committee testimony yesterday would surely agree that it was massively incriminating--certainly for its clear confirmation that her old boss the attorney general has been lying up the wazoo, and for her own grudging admission that she "crossed the line" (i.e., broke the law against politicizing appointments at every opportunity she had).

Nevertheless, I have to stand by my impression yesterday based on quick perusal of the Firedoglake live bloggings: no big deal. Because I can't help thinking that to people who don't understand the stakes here, meaning the American public, it will all be dismissed as (a) legal technicalities and (b) "politics? they all do it."

Sigh.

Remember how the concept of the "smoking gun" has been redefined in contemporary American politics. Democrats are guilty of anything and everything, the minute anyone thinks of anything to accuse them of (if not sooner). Republicans, however, and especially far, far right Republicans, aren't guilty of anything until you've got enough evidence to force them into plea-bargaining.

And of course under the Cheney Rule, even if you're caught with an actual smoking gun in your own personal hands, you're not guilty of anything, and in fact it's your victim who owes you an apology.

Thanks to Karl or Monica or Kyle or Idiot Al or whoever, a star of sorts is born. Ladies and gents, we bring you fired U.S. Attorney David Iglesias!

"Want to get to the bottom of this? Get Rove and company in to testify under oath."
--former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, today on washingtonpost.com

This afternoon washingtonpost.com celebrated Monica Goodling Testimony Day by having an online chat with one of her most celebrated victims, former New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias.


DI took advantage of numerous opportunities to express his support for most of his fellow U.S. attorneys and to repeat his view that a number of his fired colleagues shouldn't have been fired, noting in particular that a number of them--himself included--had ongoing investigations interrupted. Here's a question about a U.S. attorney who might have been fired:

Cheyenne, Wyo.: It was reported today that Wyoming's U.S. Attorney, Matt Mead, was on one of the first lists for consideration. This was a surprise to many of us and is hard to figure out. Have you learned what the White House originally sought to gain by carrying out these mass terminations? What political benefit did they think they would accrue by firing many of their own appointees?

IGLESIAS: Cheyenne: Matt Mead is a standup guy, and I enjoyed serving with him. What political gain could be served by firing appointees who were doing a good job? None. It was a terrible miscalculation.

DI, like the rest of us, seems focused on the mysterious provenance of The List. It has to have come from somewhere, and the possibilities aren't exactly endless.

Boston: I believe we have heard the AG and now Monica Goodling state that they did not know how the list of attorneys to be fired was developed, yet they both stated that the White House was not involved. Does this seem like a strange statement? If they do not know about the development of the list, how do they know the White House was not involved?

IGLESIAS: Boston: The list did not appear magically. Someone compiled it, and if DoJ didn't do it, then the White House did.

A number of questioners had watched or were watching Monica's House Judiciary Committee testimony.

Washington: I am half-listening to the hearing today, and get the sense we will be no closer to the bottom of this issue. What do you think it will take to finally answer all the questions pertaining to the DOJ?

IGLESIAS: Washington: Monica has dropped the dime on [recently resigned Deputy Attorney General Paul] McNulty, so that's one thing I've learned. Want to get to the bottom of this? Get Rove and company in to testify under oath. [Later Iglesias referred again to Monica's testimony that McNulty had been "appropriately briefed by Goodling."]

Many participants had questions or comments about Sen. Pete Domenici's and Rep. Heather Wilson's clearly inappropriate inquiries to DI about voter-fraud indictments, which he has previously acknowledged he should have reported immediately. (He pointed out today that his Arizona colleague Paul Charlton did, and it didn't accomplish anything, including saving Charlton's job.) When a questioner asked what the Senate should do about Senator Domenici's conduct, DI noted simply, "The Senate Ethics Committee has begun a preliminary inquiry."

One questioner elicited this tribute to the law of unintended consequences:

Washington: Has your view of the GOP changed in light of your treatment of late? Have employment prospects improved with this publicity?

IGLESIAS: Washington: I'm a disaffected Republican. My party doesn't practice what it preaches as to compassion. That being said, this scandal has resulted in unimaginable employment possibilites. Good can really come from bad.

My favorite question, I think, came from a participant in Chicago, who asked DI to forget "the underlying subject of this matter" and offer a veteran prosecutor's evaluation of the constantly shifting testimony of Attorney General Idiot Al "The Torture Guy" Gonzales.

IGLESIAS: Chicago: Any witness that keeps changing his story as to basic facts is an unreliable witness. You have to decide if you want to put this person on the stand due to credibility issues. You have to have a frank discussion with them before they testify because you know you can't put a witness on the stand that you believe may be lying.

Spoken like a canny veteran prosecutor!

A Hispanic questioner from Princeton, pronouncing himself "very dissapointed and extremely disillusioned" with Idiot Al, wondered about the effect of this scandal "on other aspiring Hispanics in the future":

IGLESIAS: Princeton: I hope this scandal does not have a chilling effect on other Hispanics/Latinos seeking public office.

What DI didn't have to say is that, ironically, he has wound up giving Hispanic-Americans a healthy jolt of the ethnic pride that was supposed to come from the appointment of "The Torture Guy" as attorney general.

It was left to a questioner from Las Cruces, in DI's home state, to wonder whether Sen. Arlen Specter will ever learn how to pronounce Iglesias's name.

IGLESIAS: Las Cruces: I sure hope so. It's not any harder than "Specter."

We tend to forget that destroying our hard-won democratic system is hard work, and requires a shitload of team players. Meet Monica M. Goodling!

"I knew she must think that everything was unraveling. And, you know, she was right about that."
--David Margolis, an official in the Justice Department, telling the Washington Post that Monica Goodling "was 'shaken to her core' by the [U.S. attorney purge] controversy and sobbed for '30 to 45 minutes' during a meeting in his office shortly before she resigned"

Let's play make-believe. Let's say you're the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia--and thus a pretty darned important person, right? Let's say it's the fall of 2006, and you need to hire a staff prosecutor. You've got an excellent candidate, a career prosecutor who has in fact worked in your office as a special assistant prosecutor. He also has federal government experience at EPA, working on civil rights cases.

The only problem is that the appointment requires the approval of a 33-year-old nonentity whose legal background is based on a worthless degree from a law school that graduates highly trained ideological attack dogs who are legal ignoramuses, and who has spent her career, such as it is, working tirelessly to turn our judicial system into a tool of far-right-wing ideologues and society's overprivileged.

As you guessed, the situation isn't hypothetical. "You" are Jeffrey A. Taylor [above]; the prosecutor you want to hire is Seth Adam Meinero; and it turns out that the blitheringly, caustically incompetent sociopath in question, one Monica M. Goodling, actually has the power to block your appointment, at least for a while (as Dan Eggen and Carol D. Leonnig report in the Post article)--

saying that Meinero was too "liberal" for the nonpolitical position, according to two sources familiar with the dispute.

The tussle over Meinero, who was eventually hired at Taylor's insistence [involving his execution of an end around through an even more powerful DoJ legal nonentity], led to a Justice Department investigation of whether Goodling improperly weighed political affiliation when reviewing applicants for rank-and-file prosecutor jobs, the sources said.

Goodling, of course, has been testifying today before the House Judiciary Committee, equipped with legal immunity--because, you'll recall, she originally refused to testify on Fifth Amendment grounds (and didn't even have the simple decency to show up to do it, the way it's normally done). She took the Fifth, you'll recall again, because she was fraidy-scared of the hostile environment in the committees. Those meanies function in the reality-based world, which is so different from the intergalactic world of outer-space thugs, megalomanical sociopaths, and full-blown psychopaths that she's accustomed to. Why, the meanies might, you know, hold her to account for her behavior!

According to the Post account, everyone seems to agree that Monica was a tireless (if sharp-tongued and domineering) worker. But tireless work in the cause of implacable evil, willfully advancing the ideological smithereening of the most fundamental fairness of the U.S. justice system, isn't admirable, not the tiniest bit. It merely compounds the evil--and in all likelihood it has also been, along the way, multifariously illegal. It is, in other words, something that a competent and fair-minded team of prosecutors should be scrutinizing for appropriate indictments.

Unfortunately, it looks as if she has to be given a "Get Out of Jail Free" card in the hope of getting even a tiny bit of truth out of her about the people she serviced so zealously.

Goodling had been a divisive figure at the Justice Department since she arrived in early 2002, gaining a reputation for having a mercurial temperament and being prickly toward career employees, said numerous current and former officials who worked with her.

Goodling and [D. Kyle] Sampson [above, then chief of staff to Attorney General Idiot Al "The Torture Guy" Gonzales] "knew politics, not law," said Bruce Fein, a senior Justice official during the Reagan administration. "This extent [of] neophytes running the department is highly irregular."

[Note, for the benefit of young folk with no memory of Bruce Fein [left]: Back in the Nixon-Reagan years he was known as a whiny little snot whom the media turned to to represent the most extreme right-wing legal position then expressable outside mental institutions. Cultural and legal historians will note the galactic distance our society has traveled in the intervening decades.]

Of course, what we know so far about our Monica's shenanigans is surely only the tip of the iceberg.

E-mails and other documents show that Goodling, who was also Justice's liaison to the White House, played a central role in arranging for the appointment of Tim Griffin, a former Republican National Committee official and aide to presidential adviser Karl Rove, as the U.S. attorney in Little Rock.

Goodling also met last summer with two New Mexico Republicans who complained about then-U.S. Attorney David C. Iglesias, who was later fired. In another case, she single-handedly blocked the dismissal of a North Carolina prosecutor who for more than a year had been on the list of candidates to be fired.

The dispute with Taylor came last fall, when Taylor heard that Goodling was thwarting his effort to hire Meinero, sources said.

Taylor complained to Goodling directly, according to two sources who were told about the conversation, saying that a U.S. attorney's office hires all kinds of people. Taylor also complained to Sampson, who was a friend and eventually gave Taylor the authority to bypass Goodling.

Taylor mentioned the experience to U.S. Attorney Chuck Rosenberg of Alexandria, the sources said. After Rosenberg became Gonzales's temporary chief of staff following Sampson's resignation, he asked the department's inspector general to look into Taylor's allegations, they added.

You wonder whether a hack like Monica, so desperate to devote body and soul to the bidding of the slimiest of ideological hooligans, is even capable of identifying "truth." What little she has already said publicly appears to be either barefaced lies or delusions--like the notion that the purged U.S. attorneys were fired for poor performance, notwithstanding the stellar reviews many of them had in their files. (Is it possible to imagine such a person having any say at all in such decisions, let alone the quite considerable say she seems to have had?)

As often happens, people who devote their lives to the service of lies and delusions wind up playing the "unfairness" card. Eggen and Leonnig note: "Goodling's attorney, who has accused Democratic lawmakers of having already made up their minds about his client's role, did not return e-mail and telephone messages left at his office yesterday." A quick skim of the firedoglake live bloggings of Monica's testimony in this morning's session (they resume at 2), it doesn't appear as if she has a whole lot more to say.

BUSH RAMPS UP WAR ON ALL FRONTS-- SEEMS TO BE DEMANDING IMPEACHMENT

Yesterday ABC reported that the madman in the White House is now actively goading Iran into a war, a tactic tyrants and aggressors have used all through history. And today the Bush Regime propaganda machine is hard at work-- on full blast-- screeching about Iran planning to attack Europe and about bin-Laden planning to attack Paducah. Encouraged by Congress backing off from Bush's game of chicken with the safety of American troops in Iraq and agreeing to fund the war with no strings attached, Bush is determined to expand the war and bankrupt the U.S. government.

Progressives and moderates supported the Democratic leadership's approach to the Supplemental Funding bill-- to fund war efforts so long as they were tied to a reasonable withdrawal strategy. Bush rejected the reasonable part and Democrats are now stuck with a Rove-inspired conundrum: cut off funds from our troops or give Bush a blank check. MoveOn.org makes the case for why the new bill-- without withdrawal dates-- should be opposed.

Voters elected Democrats in November to lead the way out of the mess in Iraq, but the supplemental bill to be voted on this week won't end the war.

There are no real timelines or real accountability for the Bush administration-- just a blank check for an endless war.

A vote for this bill is a vote to continue President Bush's failed Iraq policy, and we'll be urging every last member of Congress to vote against it.

MoveOn members are asking us to consider all options for Democratic members of congress who ran on ending the war but vote for more chaos and more troops in Iraq-- including in-district advertising and recruitment of primary challengers.

And we'll work hard so that Republicans who refuse to listen to the country on Iraq face a great political backlash in their home districts.

In an email this morning, MoveOn encouraged all 3.2 million of its members to urge Congress to vote no. In part, the email reads: "Every single Democrat must vote against this bill. This is a key test vote on whether your representative is serious about ending the war."

If Bill O should demand a recount, will U.S. attorneys probe for voter fraud in his latest loss to Oxy-Rush for "Worst Person in the World" status?

Unfortunately for Bill O'Reilly, it's hard to imagine Karl Rove taking sides against Oxy-Rush Limbaugh, so perhaps he won't be willing to unleash his personally owned corps of U.S. attorneys to prosecute voter fraud in Bill O's ongoing quest to elbow Oxy-Rush aside for the title of Top Loon.

It would be interesting to know exactly how the boys stand competitively. Probably we could get hard data from the Countdown people themselves. They must keep running totals on Keith Olbermann's daily honorees as Worse, Worser, and Worst Person in the World, wouldn't you think? Or maybe the stats supremos, the Elias Sports folks, have the numbers?

While we wait for the hard data, wouldn't we have to guess that the elite finishers--the worstest of the worst, as it were--are the most bellicose, dishonest, and shameless blabbermouths in the land, Oxy-Rush Limbaugh and Bill "Shame of the Old Sod" O'Reilly? Over the long haul, is there anyone in their class?

Where it gets interesting is the one-two ranking. Who really is the worstest of the worst?

Intuitively, you'd have to figure that Oxy-Rush has the edge. After all, he has mastered the art of yammering on for hours without saying anything that isn't both dishonest and unfairly hurtful, whereas Bill O is encumbered by fragile but apparently unseverable threads of connection to reality.

And yet there is that indefinable, even ineffable "thing" between Bill O and Keith O. You know Keith's always got Bill in his sights.

When we get the data, we can see not only who has racked up the most "Worsers" and "Worsts" (and who scores highest in a weighted-point combined total), but how often our Bill and our Rush have finished one-two, and who's come out ahead in those head-to-head clashes of the titan loons.

(Frankly, at this level of competition, I'm not sure we should even give credit for mere "Worses." Last night's, for example, went to "a jewelry thief in Brooklyn, New York--he stole thousands of dolars in gems and othe ritems frm the home of a local politician, but he left some evidence: his keys and his resume; police called the number on the resume, and the guy asked them, 'D'jew find my keys?'" See? Strictly amateur stuff.)

Now, here's "runner-up Bill O" (unfortunately without the impossible-to-reproduce layer of heavy sarcasm)--

comparing extremists on the immigration debate to the quote talk-show nuts who are telling you that they're going to nuke Tehran.

Last December 5, Bill O said, "We may have to level cities like Tehran, kill hundreds of thousands of people."

A year ago January, Bill O said, "It's a matter of time before the United States of America and Great Britain will have to bomb the country of Iran."

Hmm. [Reading.] "Talk-show nuts who are telling you that they're going to nuke Tehran." [Into camera.] First time I've ever agreed with you, Billy.

"But even worse, comedian Rush Limbaugh" (again, dripping with sarcasm)--

complaining today that the "liberal media," particularly MSNBC, never actually listens to him while he's on the air and thus gets things like his racist Al Sharpton-Barack Obama song second-hand and out of context. Of course, he admitted that he didn't see any of the criticism on MSNBC, he just read the transcripts.

I happen to know he said all this because today I was actually listening to him while he was on the air, while I was at ABC Radio in New York, where I do The Dan Patrick Show from, listening from the perfect venue, where they pipe in Comedian's show and you can't turn it off: THE TOILET.

Comedian Rush Limbaugh, today's Worst Person in the World!

Now, you can tell that Keith's heart is with the "runner-up," who after all contemplates without blinking the death-by-nuking of hundreds of thousands of Iranians, whereas Oxy-Rush is merely making fun of "liberal media," and kind of pathetically at that. (I think the transcripts tell us as much as we need to know about the context of his rants. Personally, I don't intend to get any closer to the genuine article than the occasional clips Jon Stewart shows on The Daily Show.)

But darn it all, there's Bill O fatally undercutting his claim to Top Loon by making fun of . . . of . . . well, people like himself. Can you imagine Oxy-Rush ever doing that?

DOUBLE WHAMMY-- BEST OF BOTH WORLDS IN KENTUCKY TODAY

I just arrived in DC and the very first news I heard was awesome-- a double win in Kentucky for the good guys. First of all, the Republican base renominated the most hated and corrupt governor in Kentucky history, Ernie Fletcher, for a second term. [Almost everything in the linked Washington Post article is wrong except for that fact that Fletcher beat Northup, which is all I wanted to point out anyway.] Why did we want this? The general voting population of Kentucky has made it clear in poll after poll that they don't want Fletcher to even remain as governor, let alone get a second term. He's far too right-wing and he's far too corrupt... and in a very messy way. But the religionist reich nutcases who control the GOP primaries... well they just love him. He's their kind of off-the-wall kook.

A much closer call was that the Democrats might nominate someone just as bad, Buce Lunsford, a corrupt, reactionary fake-Dem, cut from the Zell Miller/Joe Lieberman mold. Not only did he go down to defeat at the hands of Steve Beshear, he was whipped so badly that there won't even be a run-off!

Cliff Schecter has all the details about what this means for Kentucky and especially what this means for the crucial battle next year to beat the Bush Regime's #1 Senate Obstructionist, closet case Mitch McConnell, who was backing Northup and has alienated his own party's extremists.


UPDATE: FLETCHER CONCEDES... SO DOES NORTHUP

This morning's Louisville Courier-Journal has all the details and agrees that Fletcher's corruption scandal "still threatens his election to a second term in November, when he would need to attract votes from Democrats and independents to beat the Democratic nominee, former Lt. Gov. Steve Beshear." Of course, first Fletcher will have to unite Republicans who are disgusted with him-- as many of half his party's members. "Northup's television ads said Democrats will be relentless in their attacks on Fletcher in November and argued that she-- not the incumbent-- was the only Republican who could win the general election... When asked by an interviewer if she would attend a Republican 'Unity Rally' Saturday in Frankfort, Northup walked away without answering."

JIM MARSHALL... DEMOCRAT?

Jim Marshall, (slightly) left of Zell Miller

Jim Marshall voted for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker and for a Democratic Party reorganization of the House, putting committee chairmen like Henry Waxman, Barney Frank, Louise Slaughter, George Miller, Ed Markey, and John Conyers into place. What more could you ask? Well, unless you like a lot of "sorry, no" answers, you'd better not ask much more. Unless, you're a Republican. Then Jim Marshall's voting record should make you pretty happy. The Georgia Democrat has one of the most reactionary records-- across the board, of any member of the House Democratic caucus-- not as horrible as Dan Boren's (OK) or Gene Taylor's (MS), but worse than Jim Matheson's (UT) and Henry Cuellar's (TX)-- and far worse than primaried faithless Dems like Al Wynn (MD) and Jane Harman (CA). Marshall is in a fairly Republican district; Bush beat Kerry with 55% of the vote and his voting patterns seem to be popular among his constituents, although he was one of only a small handful of Democratic incumbents who almost lost out in the midst of the anti-GOP tidal wave last year. He pulled 51% of the vote, less than 2,000 more than his opponent, ex-Congressman Mac Collins.

Collins probably isn't running again next year. Retired Maj. Gen. Richard Goddard is. Inside the Beltway Democrats are already worried. The DCCC has added Marshall to it's Front Line list, congressmen they ask grassroots, rank-and-file Democrats to contribute money to. I asked DCCC Chairman Chris Van Hollen if it's kosher to ask Democrats to donate to guys like Marshall when they consistently vote for Republican positions on key issues-- like Iraq, equal protection for minorities, women's right to choice, etc. Van Hollen suggested it was up to bloggers to let people know about Marshall's record. DWT reporting for duty.

Marshall's Republican opponent will attack him from the right and, ironically, call him a liberal and a supporter of Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats' agenda. If it were true, I'd urge people to come to his aid. The illegal partisan marching orders Karl Rove sent to government departments urging them to sabotage certain incumbent congressmen, made it clear that the GOP is hoping to pick up Marshall's seat-- as well as that of fellow Georgia reactionary Democrat John Barrow (voting-wise, pretty much a Marshall clone, albeit without the right-wing fervor).

Assuming you'r a progressive and not some kind of treacherous Liebermanoid freak, how exactly should this type of situation be handled? Let's say there are 40 GOP-held seats Democrats are serious about contesting in the House and let's say the Republicans are seriously going after 30 Democratic-held seats. That's 70 seats in play. If you max out contribution-wise, that'd be $150,000. If you don't want to donate quite that much, let me suggest you target your funds to Democratic incumbents who vote for progressive ideals and principles-- like Steve Cohen (TN), John Hall (NY), and Carol Shea-Porter (NH) for example-- and for progressive grassroots challengers like Victoria Wulsin (OH), Eric Massa (NY), Angie Paccione (CO), and John Laesch (IL). Let the Inside the Beltway folks take care of the Jim Marshalls and John Barrows, guys who may support them on procedural matters but who we can never count on when it comes to substantive issues. One stop shopping donating for progressives.


UPDATE: OR...

Will Marshall just give up on GA-08 and run against Saxby Chamberpot instead? This makes no sense at all, of course. Marshall is unlikely to fire up the Democratic base and he apparently doesn't have much support from independents or moderate Republicans (judging by his last House race); so why run statewide?

Russ Feingold laments congressional Dems' Iraq "collapse" (Maybe the senator can't afford his own cadre of caution-counseling Democratic handlers?)

"We can't back down when the stakes are so high. I know you'll keep ratcheting up the pressure, and that's exactly what we need right now. Now is the time to be pulling out all the stops to end the war."
--Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold

Speaking of political truth-telling, as we just were, and charisma (or lack of it) as well, I suppose most politically savvy observers would say that Russ Feingold could never be a serious presidential candidate because he has too little of the latter and indulges in too much of the former. Well, maybe that's why he's worth paying attention to. He posted this on Daily Kos a couple of hours ago:

A Collapse for Democrats
by Senator Russ Feingold

Tue May 22, 2007 at 09:28:13 AM PDT

I wanted to link to a couple really good posts that I've seen in the past few days about the Democrats' strategy on the Iraq supplemental spending bill. They drive home what a mistake it is to just give up and pass a supplemental that doesn't include language to stop the war:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/5/21/17842/4957

http://electioncentral.tpmcafe.com/blog/electioncentral/2007/may/18/liberals

This situation is a collapse for Democrats. We had a strong start, pushed back against the President's failed policy and held our ground that the supplemental should include binding language to end the war. But now, as Congress gets ready to send the President a bill that does nothing to get our troops out of Iraq, we are just folding our cards. As one person commented under Greg Sargent's great post at TPM cafe, "Send the Congressional Dems over to my place for some poker--I could use a windfall right now."

This is no time to back down. This fight to end the war isn't something that we can just put off or kick down the road. As mcjoan pointed out, it doesn't make any sense to wait until this "mythical September" when Republicans will suddenly decide that we need to get out of Iraq. Why should this wait until September? First Americans had to put up with a Republican Congress that did nothing, and now we are faced with a Democratic Congress that is giving the President exactly what he wants-- continuing his failed policy and leaving our troops stuck in the middle of a civil war. Some strategy. We can't back down when the stakes are so high. I know you'll keep ratcheting up the pressure, and that's exactly what we need right now. Now is the time to be pulling out all the stops to end the war.

Does Al Gore really have to run for president to get us to pay attention to the harsh truths he has to tell about political (and other) realities?

"What [Gore] is telling us today--with the moral authority of a man who many believe was wrongly barred from the presidency--is that American democracy and indeed American society are in danger from the authoritarians of the right. Without much polite varnish, he warns that self-serving plutocrats and self-righteous theocrats have nearly banished reason from the public square; their machinations disable us as we try to confront the enormous problems that threaten our future. According to Gore, Americans cannot adequately protect the nation from terrorism because our ideas about national security have been distorted by fear and falsehoods. Nor can we address what he calls 'the carbon crisis,' potentially 'the worst catastrophe in the history of human civilization,' because the truth about global warming has been obscured by industrial and government propaganda."
--Joe Conason, in his L.A. Times review of Al Gore's new book, The Assault on Reason

Kudos to the L.A. Times. Normally you would expect a book as explosive as the former vice president's appears to be to be assigned for review to a neocon hack, or at the farthest left to a neolib one like the New Republic-ans. It's hard to think of anyone further from that mold than Joe Conason, who is the plainest-speaking of plain-speakers.

It's not surprising, in fact, that Joe begins by addressing this age-old question of politicians unwillingness or inability to say straight-out what they mean:

Why do our leaders feel that they can speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth only after they have left politics? After spending nearly half his life in public office, from which he was separated involuntarily in the 2000 election, Al Gore knows the answer. As he explains in his new book, the American political system has degenerated into a rigged game that suppresses honesty and rewards deception.

Gore, of course, was damned if he did and damned if he didn't. The fact is, if on the campaign trail he paid more attention than we wished to the handlers who counseled blandness, as Democratic political handlers usually do, he spoke a lot of plain truth in his years in government. But Gore the truth-teller got little credit--and Joe tells us that in the book that he "employ[s] the same didactic method that used to provoke irritation or even ridicule during his hotly contested presidential campaign."

Yet Gore's professorial style, with its touches of sarcasm, omniscient tone, erudite asides, and yes, its occasional exasperated sighs, elicits a different response today than it did seven years ago. Many of the same publications that once poured scorn on him now offer up paragraph after paragraph of admiring prose.

It doesn't hurt to have been proved right, as Gore has been, most notably on the issue of global climate change, with the suggestion that "those who mocked him were fools in the first place and that we can continue to ignore him only at our own peril."
But Gore himself has changed, Joe stresses:

Always unusually smart and farsighted, he nevertheless spent most of his public career emphasizing the expedient and conventional rather than the critical and visionary as nearly every ambitious politician must. Liberated from those constraints by defeat, he kept silent until fall 2002, when he spoke out forthrightly against the invasion of Iraq.

The tentative, calculating, painfully moderate approach of the past was gone, along with all of the baggage of the Democratic Leadership Council that he had helped to found.

We all know that Al Gore is never going to be Mr. Charisma. There's a suggestion in Joe's review that he doesn't in fact place great stock in charisma, and has a frustratingly keen awareness of the difficulty of dealing with substance in American political life:

His insistence on detail and thoroughness, which may seem like a personal tic in an era of sound bites, is rooted in his conviction that most Americans have little understanding of the world in which they live. He worries that mass alienation from politics and immersion in the entertainment culture along with poor civic education have created a population that is woefully uninformed.

Joe notes that Gore "remains remarkably optimistic that the emerging technologies will enable democracy's advocates to triumph":

At a time when we are learning that political responses tend to be more emotional than rational, as he surely understands, his stubborn faith that we will someday return to reason is touching. That faith inflected his political career, for better and for worse. It does not explain why this most qualified and courageous Democratic candidate has--so far--decided not to run for president again.

I don't know how successful a candidate even now Gore would make, or how effectively, if elected, he would be able to deal with the 24/7 Right-Wing Noise Machine. But it does sound as if he has some important things to say about our political system, and I'm putting the book on my reading list.

WITH BUSH WE DIDN'T HAVE FLYING CARS THAT RUN ON VEGETABLE OIL-- AND WITH PRESIDENT GORE'S UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE, PEOPLE ARE LIVING MUCH LONGER

Yesterday John over at Crooks and Liars told me to watch a clip from the hilarious episode of THE SIMPSONS from the night before. It was hilarious! But, apparently Fox-TV was on a roll-- bashing its own Murdoch crowd. Another friend just turned me on to this clip from FAMILY GUY. It's even more... inspiring. You gotta watch it-- unless Dick Cheney shooting Scalia, Rove and Tucker Carlson in a hunting accident is too offensive for ya.

PLENTY OF BLAME TO GO AROUND FOR POISONED FOOD SUPPLY: BUSH, McCONNELL, MILTON FRIEDMAN... MEAN JEAN SCHMIDT

In yesterday's NY Times, Paul Krugman addressed the poisoned food supply and tried to figure out who to blame.

These are anxious days at the lunch table. For all you know, there may be E. coli on your spinach, salmonella in your peanut butter and melamine in your pet’s food and, because it was in the feed, in your chicken sandwich.

Who’s responsible for the new fear of eating? Some blame globalization; some blame food-producing corporations; some blame the Bush administration. But I blame Milton Friedman.

Now, those who blame globalization do have a point. U.S. officials can’t inspect overseas food-processing plants without the permission of foreign governments-- and since the Food and Drug Administration has limited funds and manpower, it can inspect only a small percentage of imports. This leaves American consumers effectively dependent on the quality of foreign food-safety enforcement. And that’s not a healthy place to be, especially when it comes to imports from China, where the state of food safety is roughly what it was in this country before the Progressive movement...

Without question, America’s food safety system has degenerated over the past six years. We don’t know how many times concerns raised by F.D.A. employees were ignored or soft-pedaled by their superiors. What we do know is that since 2001 the F.D.A. has introduced no significant new food safety regulations except those mandated by Congress.

This isn’t simply a matter of caving in to industry pressure. The Bush administration won’t issue food safety regulations even when the private sector wants them. The president of the United Fresh Produce Association says that the industry’s problems “can’t be solved without strong mandatory federal regulations”: without such regulations, scrupulous growers and processors risk being undercut by competitors more willing to cut corners on food safety. Yet the administration refuses to do more than issue nonbinding guidelines.

Why would the administration refuse to regulate an industry that actually wants to be regulated? Officials may fear that they would create a precedent for public-interest regulation of other industries. But they are also influenced by an ideology that says business should never be regulated, no matter what.

The economic case for having the government enforce rules on food safety seems overwhelming. Consumers have no way of knowing whether the food they eat is contaminated, and in this case what you don’t know can hurt or even kill you. But there are some people who refuse to accept that case, because it’s ideologically inconvenient.

That’s why I blame the food safety crisis on Milton Friedman, who called for the abolition of both the food and the drug sides of the F.D.A. What would protect the public from dangerous or ineffective drugs? “It’s in the self-interest of pharmaceutical companies not to have these bad things,” he insisted in a 1999 interview. He would presumably have applied the same logic to food safety (as he did to airline safety): regardless of circumstances, you can always trust the private sector to police itself.

Two days ago I explained the role in all this of China's representative in the U.S. Senate, Mitch McConnell, ostensibly the senator from Kentucky, who blocks the importation of inexpensive drugs from Canada as "unsafe" while fighting tooth and nail for unlimited imports of poisoned food from China in the name of free trade (and unrestricted profits for himself and his so-called "wife.")

Sensing an issue that could make her popular, the distinctly unpopular congresswoman from southwest Ohio, Mean Jean Schmidt, waded into the food issue last week. Best known, at least recently, for having gotten drunk at a Capitol Hill party and slipping into a freshly deposited pile of Michele Bachmann's vomit, Mean Jean doesn't normally come to mind when someone is about to debate serious matters involved with the food supply. She only weighs 93 pounds and hardly ever thinks about food; crack will do that to you.


The Cincinnati Enquirer reports that Schmidt is demanding to know if people on food stamps are using it to buy unhealthy snack food instead of apples and bananas. While many in her district consider her to be bananas, she was demanding another government study. "I was shocked to find out that the federal government has no data telling us what types of food are being purchased with food stamps" and more interference in peoples' lives.

And, yes, this Big Government throwback is indeed a Republican. Getting government off peoples' backs, to Mean Jean, just means low taxes for the wealthy-- and authoritarian government for the rest of us. She opposes rules that would regulate the safety of the food chain but will do anything to protect corporate profits, no matter how egregiously harmful their operations are to the public good. But families on welfare better hide the Frito Lays cause Mean Jean is sending the sheriff their way.


Republicans won't have much of a choice in their party's primary which will pit Mean Jean against an even more loathsome character, another far right goon, County Commissioner Phil Heimlich, son of the man who invented the Heimlich Maneuver. He's reported to be even more vicious and nasty than she is so this is likely to look like one of those fights between a crocodile and a python. In debates, he is known for his propensity for taking out a handkerchief and loudly blowing his nose when his opponent is speaking. He is the grandson of the TV dance instructors Arthur and Kathryn Murray. Heimlich is a right-wing Christian fundamentalist, having converted from Judaism a few years ago after getting a message while in a Bob's Big Boy (in Michigan). Our Mean Jean Department Head, Karen Allen, who gathered all the info in this report, is trying to track down the nature of the message. Was it like in a fortune cookie or was there a Saul on the Road to Damascus scene in the Bob's Big Boy or something of that nature? You want to get an idea of who Mean Jean's Republican opponent is, take a look at the video of him turning on a reporter who asked him about reports that he's been taking "commissions" (i.e.- bribes).



Fortunately Ohio's second congressional district has a sensible alternative in the general election, Dr. Victoria Wulsin. What a contrast between Dr. Wulsin and the two rightist imbeciles running as rubber stamp Republicans! In fact, if you're feeling a little flush today and you want to do something for a sane America, let me suggest a $5 or $10 contribution to Victoria Wulsin's campaign for Congress. Or you can pick either of the e coli conservatives.

EASY TITLE: GREEN DAY-- WORKING CLASS HEROES

Green Day told me they were covering John Lennon's classic "Working Class Hero" a couple months ago but then Billie hustled off to New Orleans to help build homes for people displaced by Katrina-- the ones, unlike Trent Lott, who the Bush Regime never got to. It's coming out on May 30, on a benefit album for Amnesty International, INSTANT KARMA. The Bush Regime isn't doing much to save the folks in Darfur either so the proceeds from INSTANT KARMA will help out with that. Anyway, here are three pieces of raw footage of Green Day recording their song:







Billie Joe explained why they chose "Working Class Hero" to record: "Its themes of alienation, class, and social status really resonated with us. It's such a raw, aggressive song-- just that line: 'you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see'-- we felt we could really sink our teeth into it. I hope we've done him justice."

The whole album lineup:

Aerosmith ft The Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars "Give Peace a Chance"
Avril Lavigne "Imagine"
Ben Harper "Beautiful Boy"
Big & Rich "Nobody Told Me"
The Black Eyed Peas "Power To the People"
Christina Aguilera "Mother"
Corinne Bailey Rae "I'm Losing You"
The Flaming Lips "(Just Like) Starting Over"
Green Day "Working Class Hero"
Jack Johnson "Imagine"
Jack's Mannequin featuring Mick Fleetwood "God"
Jackson Browne "Oh, My Love"
Jaguares "Gimme Some Truth"
Jakob Dylan ft Dhani Harrison "Gimme Some Truth"
Lenny Kravitz "Cold Turkey"
Los Lonely Boys "Whatever Gets You Through the Night"
Matisyahu "Watching the Wheels"
The Postal Service "Grow old With Me"
Regina Spektor "Real Love"
R.E.M. "#9 Dream"
Snow Patrol "Isolation"
U2 "Instant Karma"
Youssou N'Dour "Jealous Guy"

WHY ARE THESE DUFUSES GRINNING? THE GENIUS OF IDIOT AL "THE TORTURE GUY" GONZALES IS TO HAVE MADE HIMSELF JUST ABOUT IRREPLACEABLE

USEFUL IDIOTS AND GRINNING A.G.'S

by Mags

Even though the hasty exit of Alberto Gonzales is predicted by many, it is likely that behind the scenes his continuing in his position for a time is functional for Bush et al.
 
It should come as no surprise that Gonzales is hesitant to leave or that Bush is hesitant to appoint another in his place. At this point in the game, who can Bush turn to? Think about it for a minute. Gonzales breaks the law whenever he is asked to break it. He has stood behind the Administration as they press further into our private lives with unwarranted wiretaps. He has been supportive of Bush policies of torture and rendition. He was instrumental in prosecuting cases that lined up with Karl Rove’s efforts to shut down the vote by claiming voter fraud. He has been at Bush’s beck and call in all willingness to do whatever it takes to whitewash his boss. It has been his job for a long time.
 
Alberto Gonzales has often been questioned by congress, and on many of those occasions he has perjured himself. As he perjured himself, he would, like George Bush get the most troubling grin on his face. Gonzales wears that eerie grin at the most inappropriate times. I first noticed it in the hearings on the torture bill, the darling of Cheney, Gonzales, and Yoo. However, one cannot believe, after hearing the stories of Gonzales’ arm-twisting of a gravely ill John Ashcroft, a person we thought would do anything for this president, that George Bush is just the happy-go-lucky idiot he is often credited with being. He is, it appears, orchestrating the illegalities and horrors that have many of us paralyzed in disbelief.
 
When you are forced to replace such an official, and I do use the term “official” lightly, what you must do is find someone with no scruples whatsoever. You must find someone who is willing to step into a situation where illegality is already under scrutiny. You must find someone who will not spill their guts about it and also will not throw you, the Commander in Chief, under the impeachment bus. This person must share your greed, your lack of character, and your disdain for the American people and the Constitution. It must be a person who is willing to hand over the machinery of this government of the people, by the people, and for the people to those incompetents who make up a pseudo-educated religious right.
 
Who will prostitute himself in such a dangerous office? Who will come in and stoop to this depth of corruption at the get go? If not even John Ashcroft could find it in himself to go along with these schemes at the height of his power and influence, then who will? That is the problem Bush faces.
 
At this point one can assume that the only folks who would accept this position would be the likes of a James Inhofe or Ted Stevens. It will take someone like Tom DeLay, who even now denies his own criminality and intent. It will take someone with that degree of self-delusion to take the place of Gonzales. In short, you need someone who will lie, who is willing to put the GOP and George Bush ahead of the rule of law and democracy, and who will betray the Constitution, thereby betraying their country and countrymen. Added to that, this person must be willing to dodge the bullets of personal liability in the face of congressional investigation.

That is a tall order. As long as Gonzales remains a target, Bush and Rove can figure out what to do next; no real change needs take place. They can buy some time to cover up. They can spin reality into something that in their last ditch effort might sound plausible. No wonder Bush is in no hurry to push Gonzales out. No wonder Gonzales is doing so much grinning lately.

[Editor's note: Whenever Howie and I talk about the "Gonzales succession," he insists that Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch is ready and willing to take the job, and points out that the chances of the Senate declining to confirm one of its own are not large.--Ken]

TWO REPUBLICAN GOVERNORS ATTACK BUSH REGIME'S ENVIRONMENTAL POLICIES

Bush and his operatives are starting to get used to high intensity explosives headed their way from Capitol Hill. But getting slammed by two high profile Republican governors, Arnold Schwarzenegger (CA) and Jodi Rell (CT) must have come as a bit of a shock. They co-authored a guest OpEd in today's Washington Post called "Lead or Step Aside, EPA." At least it didn't say "Lead or Step Aside, Chimpy," although they did zero in on an environmental executive order he issued last week as "more of the same inaction and denial" and "unconscionable."

Both governors are threatening to sue the Bush Regime, at least in part for its abysmal record of insincerity and deception on anything and everything pertaining to cleaning up the environment. Their complain stems from the Regime's refusal to take Global Warming seriously and "the malfeasance" in blocking their own efforts to protect their states' health and welfare. This is probably something Bush expects from Henry Waxman and Bernie Sanders, not from Rell and Schwarzenegger.

California, Connecticut and 10 other states are poised to enact tailpipe emissions standards-- tougher than existing federal requirements-- that would cut greenhouse gas emissions from cars, light trucks and sport-utility vehicles by 392 million metric tons by the year 2020, the equivalent to taking 74 million of today's cars off the road for an entire year.

Since transportation accounts for one-third of America's greenhouse gas emissions, enacting these standards would be a huge step forward in our efforts to clean the environment and would show the rest of the world that our nation is serious about fighting global warming.

Yet for the past 16 months, the Environmental Protection Agency has refused to give us permission to do so.

Even after the Supreme Court ruled in our favor last month, the federal government continues to stand in our way.

They also accuse the Bushies of "stonewalling" and "blocking the will of tens of millions of people in California, Connecticut and other states who want their government to take real action on global warming." And they also imply that they don't trust the Bush Regime's commitment to the law! They sound like normal Americans now!

GOOD FOR OLD MAN McCAIN-- HE SLAPS DOWN THE OPPORTUNISTIC MORMAN BILLIONAIRE

this is the kind of stuff poor old McCain is up against in the GOP

If you're trying to figure out which of the Republican presidential wannabe's is the most disgusting... well, good luck to you. I suspect it will change from day to day, just like most of their positions on important issues. Right now, though, ole Flip-flop Mitt is lookin' more repulsive than the rest of the pack-- which, predictably, has helped to vault him ahead of his colleagues.

Romney was the first to jump in and try to take advantage of Bush's immigration "reform" problem. It's a tough bill and the Republican base is the problem. Bush Regime operatives are working over-time to assure the Know-Nothings who now completely dominate GOP politics in the primary states that the bill isn't as bad as the media is making it out to be. Romney, whose opportunism is as virulent as an AIDs infection, has been using the bill to rile up the base and come off as racist and xenophobic as they are.

Of course, the Republican most associated with immigration "reform" (with in Republicanese means providing cheap labor and weakening Labor's bargaining strengths for their corporate financiers) besides Bush is John McCain. And today, on a clueless conference call with some whacked out wingnut GOP bloggers-- on which he desperately attempted to sound hip by bringing up, inappropriately the YouTubes-- McCain lit into Romney, whose positions on immigration, like everything else, have been changing depending on what he's running for and where.

McCain certainly got off a few good remarks about the deceitful candidate of the Mormon cult: "Maybe I should wait a couple weeks and see if it changes," Mr. McCain said of Mr. Romney's position on immigration this week. "Maybe he can get out his small varmint gun and drive those Guatemalans off his yard." SCORE ONE FOR GRANDPA!

GAYS IN THE MILITARY: NO PROBLEM-- CAN MITCH McCONNELL GET A SECOND CHANCE NOW?

some things never change

The far right's evangelical bigotry ministry's biggest fear about gays in the military has come true: there's nothing to it. Which makes these shamen, TV preachers, and self-proclaimed arbiters of their own psychotic vision of moral turpitude irrelevant. And that's bad for business which is, after all, the only thing any of them are all about.

"Since the British military began allowing homosexuals to serve in the armed forces in 2000, none of its fears-- about harassment, discord, blackmail, bullying or an erosion of unit cohesion or military effectiveness-- have come to pass, according to the Ministry of Defense, current and former members of the services and academics specializing in the military. The biggest news about the policy, they say, is that there is no news. It has for the most part become a nonissue."

If only they knew back in the day! Maybe Mitch McConnell could have gone on to be a military hero (rather than Bush's closeted Lord Chief Obstructionist in the U.S. Senate). Instead he was kicked out of the armed forces in 1967-- after a mere 10 days at Fort Knox. Since he refuses to allow public access to his discharge papers, the exact cause of his speedy departure from the military has always been shrouded in secrecy, although "groping a private's privates" has been bandied around for decades.

Of course, the thing is that's exactly what gay Republican closet cases could be expected to do. Maybe the U.S. should allow gays in and look a little more closely about allowing Republicans in. Oh, I forgot, most Republicans are just chicken-hawks and they don't volunteer anyway. Luckily, I guess.


UPDATE: NOT ALL KY REPUBLICANS SEEM THAT HAPPY WITH THE OLD KENTUCKY HOMO

With Miss McConnell's approval ratings in a nose-dive and a tailspin (like below 40% now, according to Frankfort rumors I'm hearing), some of the local wingnut bloggers are getting ready to back Larry Forgy for McConnell's senate seat next year.

Its time for Kentucky Republicans to nominate a US Senate candidate who can win in 2008. Mitch McConnell failed Kentucky's conservatives by undermining Governor Ernie Fletcher and backing former Louisville Rep. Anne Northup. Now his reelection numbers are well under 50 percent, and its time for the Republican Party to nominate a candidate who has a real chance to win in 2008. That candidate is Larry Forgy. Forgy is a Franklin County attorney and President of Health Kentucky, a non-profit that gives free health care to underprivileged patients in the Commonwealth. In 1995, he was the Republican nominee for Governor and received nearly 49 percent of the vote. Forgy can win in 2008. Kentucky Republicans need a nominee who will stand up for our conservative values, our veterans, our schools, and not just Anne Northup and George W. Bush.

McConnell never lifted a finger for Forgy and he let his campaign against Patton die on the vine-- and then 9 years later did the same thing to Forgy's sister when she ran against Rep. Chandler. The Forgy clan has long memories and they're hoping to do Miss McConnell some real damage-- maybe with a little help from the Club For Growth, whose Kentucky chapter has just one reason for existence: helping to rid Kentucky of Communist China's favorite senator.
 

HOW MANY YEARS WILL IT TAKE THE REPUBLICAN PARTY TO COME BACK TO LIFE AFTER 2008?

It might be too early to say kaddish over the rotting, albeit still breathing, corpse of the Republican Party. But it's more than just Bush's and Cheney's own abysmal popularity ratings that is making the party anathema to more Americans by the day. Bush's lose/lose immigration bill will surely be another nail in the GOP coffin. But this week Gloria Borger at US News & World Report asks if it is Rudy Giuliani who is splitting the Republican Party apart at the seams.

"The once predictable alliance" between the greedy and selfish on the one hand and the bigots, haters and paranoid on the other hand "is on the verge of unraveling, largely because of one unruly presidential candidate-Rudy Giuliani. He's pro-abortion rights, pro-gun control, and pro-gay civil rights. He's been married three times and is publicly feuding with his children. And, by the way, he's in the top tier in the polls."

Giuliani's prancing around in full drag, his scandalous personal life, and his flimsy positions on the life and death bread and butter issues to the professional religionist wing of the GOP, is driving them bonkers. And it isn't only crackpot Colorado ayatollah Jimmy Dobson who's threatening to blow the party apart if they nominate Giuliani. "Economic conservatives seem to be saying we're codependent on them, saying our issues are not important," sniffs Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, a large Christian conservative group. "They seem to think we'll fall in line and support their candidate. Well, they're wrong. ...We have a lot of places to go. We can go shopping."

Borger thinks the narrow-minded haters and bigots account for as much as 40% of the Republican primary voters. With someone like Dobson saying he'd rather see the GOP lose than help make someone as immoral as Giuliani president, the Republicans are in utter disarray. They built a bed on Hatred and Intolerance and now they have to suffer the consequences-- as right-wing Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Saxby Chamberpot (R-GA) both discovered when they tried defending Bush's quasi-tolerant/much unloved immigration bill... and got roundly booed and hissed... and Republican Party conventions in their own states.


The messy and prolonged battle of resignations of Republi-crooks John Doolittle (CA-04), Rick Renzi (AZ-01), Paul "Comblicker" Wolfowitz and Alberto Gonzales, played out daily on the mass media isn't doing the GOP any good either. Yesterday Republican Senator Arlen Specter said Gonzales may resign rather than face No Confidence votes in the House and Senate. (Miss McConnell, of course, plans to obstruct a vote in the Senate, where half a dozen of his own reactionary caucus members have already called on Gonzles to step down, but it will move forward in the House with bipartisan support.) Citizen activists are tired of the dilly-dallying with this non-binding stuff and are asking Congress to start impeachment proceeding against Gonzales immediately. You can click the link to watch the video and sign the petition.

BUYERS REMORSE IN CONNECTICUT... BIG TIME

Many Connecticut voters are seething that Joe Lieberman lied to them, blatantly, when he conducted his "independent" camapign for Senate last year (having been defeated by Ned Lamont in the Democratic primary). Even with the tacit support of Bush, Cheney and Rove dog-whistling Republicans all over the state that Lieberman was their man, Lieberman still needed low-info Democrats to vote for him. By lying to the public about his affinity to Democratic positions-- especially on Iraq-- and with the help of Bill Clinton, the nonchalance of Chuck Schumer and the DSCC, and the active support from a small handful of reactionary Democratic colleagues, Lieberman pulled it off. Connecticut, one of only 6 states where Bush's disapproval rating is greater than 70%, elected Bush and Cheney's most loyal supporter.

And they're stuck with him... for six years. And there is no recall. Yesterday two newspapers in Connecticut that had each endorsed his re-election effort had some heavy second thoughts. The Connecticut Post castigated local Democrats for abandoning their party to work for Lieberman and, in effect, assisting in bringing control of the Senate back to the GOP. "Surprising no one, Sen. Joe Lieberman has announced he will campaign and raise money for his good friend Sen. Susan Collins, of Maine. Collins is a Republican, and if she wins next year, it could go a long way toward putting her party back in control of the Senate. Elections have consequences. Congress is this year finally holding hearings and trying to get answers from a White House that rules by executive fiat. President Bush will be gone after next year's election, but investigators will be sorting through the wreckage of his presidency for years. Restoring to power a party dedicated to looking the other way is bad for the country."

The Post writer, Hugh Bailey, is mortified at the grab for one party rule the Bush Regime pulled with the politicization of the Department of Justice and "the rest of the federal bureaucracy." He's is appalled by Lieberman's self-centered, career-long "it's-all-about-me" attitude, his proto-Republican stance and by his assistance to the GOP's efforts to regain power by re-electing the quintessential rubber stamp Collins over progressive Democrat Tom Allen.

We'll never know what kind of senator Ned Lamont would have made, but we can be sure he wouldn't have spent time and money campaigning for Republicans. Elections have consequences, and all local Democrats who stuck with Lieberman and turned against their own party should be reminded of what their support has brought them-- no oversight, no meaningful investigations from his committee and active support for Republicans.

If anything, the Stamford Advocate is even harsher on the faithless Lieberman, primarily by contrasting his gloomy, negative and awful political existence with the glittering constancy of Ned Lamont.

We think it says something for the character of the man, as well as continuing public support for the positions he represented as a candidate. It also might, in a small way, help show a jaded electorate that there are politicians who remain committed to their positions even after they suffer rejection from voters.

Since Mr. Lamont's defeat last November, he:

* in January agreed to become a visiting fellow at Harvard University's Institute of Politics, where he shared his political experiences with students and even enticed former members of his campaign staff to do the same;

* in February promoted opposition to increasing troops in Iraq by e-mailing supporters and participating in a statewide telephone conference;

* in March endorsed the presidential campaign of U.S. Sen. Christopher Dodd, a fellow Connecticut Democrat;

* this month gave a speech to the Fairfield County Bar Association's Law Day gathering, discussing the importance of government checks and balances and of campaigns such as his in helping move lawmakers to action on important issues;

* and a few days later provided public support for Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., in congressional efforts to end the Iraq war.

And let me end with a little headline that got me really excited yesterday: Liebermen is considering quitting the government.

BAD MUSIC MAY NOT HAVE CAUSED COLUMBINE BUT ACCORDING TO ONE REPORT, IT DID TURN TANCREDO INTO... WELL YOU KNOW

Young Tommy Tancredo on the right (of course)

With a name like Tancredo, we wondered how the reactionary congressman from Colorado turned into a narrow-minded, xenophobic racist. Adam, the DWT Art Director, is also a private eye in his spare time. He recently traveled to the Tancredo family's native Italy and discovered that long before Tom Tancredo became a Republican, he was half of an Italo disco duo, Righeira. Although the band was somewhat successful in Italy, it wasn't until they released a song in Spanish (ironically), "Vamos a la Playa," that they became international superstars. Tancredo has been trying to live down the fame ever since:

HOW MUCH HAS MITCH McCONNELL BEEN PAID TO ALLOW THE CHINESE COMMUNISTS TO DUMP THEIR POISONOUS PRODUCTS ON AMERICA?

Things have quieted down a bit since Bush Regime incompetence-- now apparently accepted by most Americans as an immutable fact of Nature-- contributed to the deaths of thousands of pets. As one federal agency after another has been politicized, ideologicized and made incapable of carrying out basic functions, disasters they were designed to prevent have multiplied. Why should Bush's FDA be expected to do a better job than Bush's FEMA?

Today's Washington Post asks a crucial question every American should ask next time they go into a voting booth and consider voting for a Republican-- or for a Democrat who acts like one: Why doesn't the U.S. stop the importation of tainted food from China? It's a page 1 story so, presumably, some of our elected officials might notice it.

Dried apples preserved with a cancer-causing chemical.

Frozen catfish laden with banned antibiotics.

Scallops and sardines coated with putrefying bacteria.

Mushrooms laced with illegal pesticides.

These were among the 107 food imports from China that the Food and Drug Administration detained at U.S. ports just last month, agency documents reveal, along with more than 1,000 shipments of tainted Chinese dietary supplements, toxic Chinese cosmetics and counterfeit Chinese medicines.

For years, U.S. inspection records show, China has flooded the United States with foods unfit for human consumption. And for years, FDA inspectors have simply returned to Chinese importers the small portion of those products they caught-- many of which turned up at U.S. borders again, making a second or third attempt at entry.

Now the confluence of two events-- the highly publicized contamination of U.S. chicken, pork and fish with tainted Chinese pet food ingredients and this week's resumption of high-level economic and trade talks with China-- has activists and members of Congress demanding that the United States tell China it is fed up.

Dozens of people in Panama have died from using toothpaste made in China. Like today's Post report, yesterday's NY Times carried a report that should make every American who doesn't grow his own food and medicine to wake up and take note. "Diethylene glycol, a poisonous ingredient in some antifreeze, has been found in 6,000 tubes of toothpaste in Panama, and customs officials there said yesterday that the product appeared to have originated in China... Diethylene glycol is the same poison that the Panamanian government inadvertently mixed into cold medicine last year, killing at least 100 people. Records show that in that episode the poison, falsely labeled as glycerin, a harmless syrup, also originated in China. There is no evidence that the tainted toothpaste is in the United States, according to American government officials."

There may be no evidence that there is but if that is the case, it's because we've been lucky-- so far. It certainly isn't because we've been protected by our government, not from an incompetent executive branch hell-bent on proving that "big government" is incompetent-- one of the Bush Regime's only accomplishments-- and not from the legislative branch controlled by pocket-lining crooks like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

Yesterday during a live blog session with Kentucky activists about Tuesday's gubernatorial primary, there was a brief conversation about how the Bush Regime's chief Senate obstructionist Mitch McConnell is a closet queen. Cliff Schecter pointed out, perhaps facetiously, that McConnell sometimes emerges from the closet to do business with his Chinese communist partners. "A review of financial assets held over the past six years by Elaine L. Chao and her husband, Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, reveals that the labor secretary-designate serves as director of an insurance company that jointly owns a Lippo Group subsidiary with the Chinese government... McConnell, has received steady campaign contributions during his years in the Senate from Lippo partner American International Group Inc., and its chairman, Maurice "Hank" Greenberg."

McConnell "is China's biggest Republican booster in the Senate, fighting to liberalize trade with Beijing."

The Post story claims that "dead pets and melamine-tainted food notwithstanding, change will prove difficult, policy experts say, in large part because U.S. companies have become so dependent on the Chinese economy that tighter rules on imports stand to harm the U.S. economy, too." There is no mention of Mitch McConnell and the agenda he and his "wife," U.S. Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, have pushed, quite relentlessly, an agenda that has helped to make them enormously wealthy and powerful... at the expense of some dead dogs and cats and some people getting sick. The Post claims that so many U.S. companies are involved with China now that there is little that can be done about it. That's how McConnell and Chao planned it.

Trading with the largely unregulated Chinese marketplace has its risks, of course, as evidenced by the many lawsuits that U.S. pet food companies now face from angry consumers who say their pets were poisoned by tainted Chinese ingredients. Until recently, however, many companies and even the federal government reckoned that, on average, those risks were worth taking. And for some products they have had little choice, as China has driven competitors out of business with its rock-bottom prices.

China's less-than-stellar behavior as a food exporter is revealed in stomach-turning detail in FDA "refusal reports" filed by U.S. inspectors: Juices and fruits rejected as "filthy." Prunes tinted with chemical dyes not approved for human consumption. Frozen breaded shrimp preserved with nitrofuran, an antibacterial that can cause cancer. Swordfish rejected as "poisonous."

The always cynical and self-serving McConnell was key in rejecting a bill that would have allowed senior citizens to purchase inexpensive Canadian drugs because, he claimed, the U.S. couldn't guarantee their safety. When someone brings up the safety of Chinese products to McConnell he turns into a veritable dragon lady, screaming and hissing and cursing about "Free Trade."

McConnell, Chao and the Bush Regime are literally allowing their partners in Communist China to poison the American public. "So pervasive is the U.S. hunger for cheap imports, experts said, that the executive branch itself has repeatedly rebuffed proposals by agency scientists to impose even modest new safety rules for foreign foods. 'Sometimes guidances can get through, but not regulations,' said Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group. Guidances, which the FDA defines as 'current thinking on a particular subject,' are not binding. Under the Bush administration in particular, DeWaal said, if a proposed regulation does get past agency or department heads, it hits the wall at the White House Office of Management and Budget."



UPDATE: WHAT ABOUT DEMOCRATS WHO VOTE FOR THESE BAD TRADE POLICIES?

I'm glad you asked. There are Democrats, more than a few, in league with corrupt Republicans like McConnell and Bush and out to screw the American people in return for cold hard cash, sometimes directly into their pockets and sometimes in the form of "legal" bribes (campaign contributions). Today, David Sirota has a brilliant piece up at Working Assets that explains Triangulation and how unscrupulous Democratic pols sometimes act just like... Republicans.

The term "triangulation" in politics means a set of leaders trying joining with their opponents to pass measures that run counter to those leaders' own supporters. Typically, triangulation is practiced by presidents against their own parties in Congress, with the master of triangulation being President Bill Clinton who, among other things, rammed welfare reform and NAFTA "over the dead bodies" of rank-and-file Democratic lawmakers and the progressive movement. Can congressional leaders can pull the same move? Unfortunately, we're going to find out very soon, as congressional Democratic leaders are very clearly attempting to triangulate against their own party on the three issues the party ran on to win Election 2006.

Although David convincingly discusses some Democrats' faithlessness on lobbying reform and on Iraq-- and I suggest everyone read the entire story (linked above)-- I want to focus on how Democratic politicians, in conjunction with the worst Republican bribe-takers like McConnell-- are selling out voters in the trade policies they are working on with the 100% corporately-oriented Bush Regime.

On trade, Public Citizen has shown that the Democratic Party relied on candidates who ran against lobbyist-written trade deals in order to win many of the crucial conservative-leaning districts that were necessary to win the congressional majority. Yet, as we've seen over the last week, a handful of senior Democratic leaders are joining with the Bush White House in an attempt to ram an ultra-secret free trade deal through Congress, acknowledging that in order to be successful, they will rely on all Republicans and just 25 percent of Democratic lawmakers. As rank-and-file Democratic lawmakers and organizations representing millions of workers, farmers and small businesses have raised objections to the deal, Reuters reports today that Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-NY) is digging in, saying that if he knew what he knew now about how serious rank-and-file Democratic opposition to lobbyist-written trade policy was, he would have tried to negotiate the deal in even more secrecy than it was negotiated in in the first place.

On Bill Moyers' terrific PBS report on Friday about the secret deal, author John R. MacArthur says the motivations for the triangulation on trade are obvious. "This is like the NAFTA campaign of the '90s, an attempt by the Democratic leadership-- in those days it was the Clintons-- to raise money from Wall Street."

This drive to triangulate on trade has now reached a point where the handful of Democrats who made the deal are publicly attacking those rank-and-file Democratic lawmakers, labor, environmental, health, human rights, religious, consumer protection and agricultural groups raising questions about the deal. On Friday, Reuters reported that Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-NY) "offered no apology" for negotiating the deal in secret or for continuing to conceal the legislative text of the deal. Instead, he went on the attack, saying the only thing he would do differently would be to "ignore a lot of people that really were just wasting my time." He claimed innocently that "I cannot see how anybody would be upset" by the deal, even though as Public Citizen shows today, the list of reforms to current trade policies that fair trade groups forwarded to Democratic leaders many months ago was almost entirely brushed aside by Rangel, as were proposals for a whole new framework for global trade deals.

TRIANGULATION STRATEGY: The dynamics set up a situation whereby the Democratic congressional leadership and less than half of all Democratic lawmakers (as during NAFTA) join with all Republicans to ram a free trade package through Congress over the objections of the progressive movement and rank-and-file Democrats who ran against lobbyist-written trade policies in 2006.

The major culprits? Rahm Emanuel, of course, as well as Rangel and Hoyer. We'll have the list of Democrats who decide to behave like Mitch McConnell-- as soon as the votes are cast.

SOUTHERN REPUBLICAN SENATORS BOOED DEFENDING BUSH'S IMMIGRATION BILL-- AT GOP CONVENTIONS

Right-wing Republicans have been very successful cultivating Know-Nothings and bigots in the last few decades. Like "respectable" conservatives in 1930s Germany, who thought they could easily co-opt and control fascism, many GOP politicians may have made themselves a bed they won't be able to get much sleep in. Yesterday South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham got a taste of that-- while Mitt Romney decided to take the low road of xenophobia, divisiveness and hate-filled bigotry.

Look at Graham's voting record. It's rabidly right wing and extremist. There isn't a single issue he has been moderate on and not one for which he hasn't been a blazing red Bush Regime rubber stamp. Yesterday he was booed when he tried defending Bush's immigration legislation at the South Carolina Republican convention. The same crowd cheered Flip-flop Mitt when he, sensing political advantage from the Fox/Limbaugh brainwashed crowd, abandoned Bush and jumped at the chance of leading the Bigotry Parade.

Georgia also held their GOP convention today, and Senator Saxby Chamberpot, even more of an extremist, wingnut and rubber stamp than Graham, also got booed, and for the same reason. As a further show of discontent with the GOP, the Republican delegates gave more straw poll votes to non-candidate Fred Thompson (who has no stand on immigration or much of anything, but has a relatively moderate record low-information Republicans are obviously unaware of) than to front-runners Giuliani, Romney and McCain combined. Thompson garnered 44% of the vote and Rudy McRomney got 34% together.


Chamberpot and Graham will both have to face their constituents next year and both will have to depend, heavily, on these Know-Nothing voters to win re-election. But the immediate impact of the immigration bill, widely denounced by those who dominate and control the Republican base, will be felt in the presidential race where Grandpa McCain's candidacy is likely to collapse completely in the coming week or two as he becomes completely identified with Bush's bill while the others, jackal-like, abandon him and Bush to their fate. Fitting enough, it was Flip-flop Mitt who was the first to smell blood in the water and try to position himself, somewhat disingenuously, as a staunch opponent to immigrants. (Giuliani will also have a hard time worming out of his past as a posterboy for open borders.)

I somehow doubt Republicans will be embracing the balanced views espoused in today's NY Times editorial, The Immigration Deal. The Times calls it "a good plan wedded to a repugnant one."

Its architects seized a once-in-a-generation opportunity to overhaul a broken system and emerged with a deeply flawed compromise. They tried to bridge the chasm between brittle hard-liners who want the country to stop absorbing so many outsiders, and those who want to give immigrants-- illegal ones, too-- a fair and realistic shot at the American dream.

But the compromise was stretched so taut to contain these conflicting impulses that basic American values were uprooted, and sensible principles ignored. Many advocates for immigrants have accepted the deal anyway, thinking it can be improved this week in Senate debate, or later in conference with the House of Representatives. We both share those hopes and think they are unrealistic. The deal should be improved. If it is not, it should be rejected as worse than a bad status quo.

The part the Times finds most appealing-- "to give most of the estimated 12 million immigrants here illegally the chance to live and work without fear and to become citizens eventually"-- has an instant and near psychotic Pavlovian effect on Republican xenophobes. The parts of the compromise most disliked by the Times-- and by fair-minded Americans-- is all that the wingnuts find acceptable, namely that family-based immigration is partially eliminated and that it creates a class of temporary workers who will not-- ever-- be part of "us," but will always be the alien "other."

The deal calls for the creation of a new underclass that could work for two years at a time, six at the most, but never put down roots. Immigrants who come here under that system-- who play by its rules, work hard and gain promotions, respect and job skills-- should be allowed to stay if they wish. But this deal closes the door. It offers a way in but no way up, a shameful repudiation of American tradition that will encourage exploitation-- and more illegal immigration.

Yesterday, David Frum, a longtime and notorious Bush Regime toadie who has been desperately seeking ways of separating himself from the miserable policies he championed, wrote a gruesome Bush-bashing article for National Review, the premise of which is that the immigration compromise amounts to the detonation of a "slow-motion trigger on a Republican debacle in 2008." The well-founded reasons for Frum's dire predictions for GOP electoral catastrophe next year:
1) Income stagnation for American workers under the Bush Regime is bad enough but now Bush is saying, in effect, "Go look to somebody else to help you."
2) Even dullards in the Republican base will now understand that the guestworker program (cheap labor) is the GOP's highest immigration priority, [and] the deal also identifies the GOP as a party that in the crunch puts employers' interests first."
3) Contrast unified and energized Democrats with divided and demoralized Republicans even before the immigration proposal. "The president and the senators have now managed to divide and demoralize their party even further."
4) "The deal scrambles the 2008 race, in ways deeply unhelpful to the party. The deal has wounded all three of the GOP front-runners: McCain because he is deeply implicated in it; Giuliani because he has tacitly endorsed it; Romney because it has added one more flip-flop to his already too lengthy list of reversals. The deal helps the two undeclared Republicans, Gingrich and Thompson - both of whom, alas, are much less electable on a national ticket than the three declared front-runners."
5) Voters can see right through the Bush Regime's defense of the compromise and can't escape the conclusion that Bush and his people are bold-faced liars.
6) Frum, who is certainly in a position to know, feels the elitist instincts of the Regime insiders will further alienate the yahoos who make up the Republican base, "triggering an internecine party conflict on the eve of a difficult and dangerous election is no way to re-elect a damaged incumbent party."
7) The incompetence thing
8) "The deal will worsen Republican prospects among Hispanic voters. Over the years, the Republicans have done not too badly with Hispanics, typically winning about 35%-40% of the Hispanic vote as compared to under 10% of the black vote." The GOP has managed, because of its basic racist and xenophobic instincts, to unite the highly diverse Hispanic population and make them realize the overarching issue at the polls in just to defeat Republicans.

I'll give Frum the last word on this: "Nice work, guys."

READY TO ELECT THE NEXT SUPREME COURT?

Earlier today I talked about a radio interview hate talk radio host Laura Ingraham did with Republican religionist ayatollah Jimmy Dobson. The overall topic was how loathsome Giuliani is, not just to normal Americans, but to far right extremists-- albeit for different reasons-- as well. Ingragham wanted to know if Dobson would support him if it looked like he was the only one who could beat the dreaded Hillary (or Obama); he said he wouldn't. "I would rather lose," the pompous and bigoted Dobson spouted, "than throw my vote toward somebody who not only doesn't support the sanctity of human life but is not really in favor of marriage... I'm really sick of the economic Republicans who never were convinced of the moral issues anyway and they just want us to compromise." Ingraham followed up by offering a supposition-- not very far fetched-- that Giuliani comes on hands and knees to Dobson and swears, in confidence, that he believes Roe v Wade should be overturned and that if he's elected he'll only appoint ultra-extremist judges., clones of Clarence Thomas. "What if he said that to you?" she asked.

Dobson: "I would not believe him... because he's got such a long history and he wants to be president, he wants power, I think, passionately and he will say what he has to say to get elected; so I would not trust that."


Of course if he could believe him... more Thomases. What more would any deranged authoritarian, mistrustful of democracy, want than more Clarence Thomases. He's their ideal. The man widely considered to be the absolutely stupidest person to ever sit on the Supreme Court of the United States, "Thomas sat through 68 hours of oral arguments in the Supreme Court’s current term without uttering a word... In nearly 16 years on the court, Thomas typically has asked questions a couple of times a term."

A recent tally by McClatchy Newspapers underscored this point: Thomas has spoken 281 words since court transcripts began identifying justices by name in October 2004. By contrast, Thomas’ neighbor on the bench, Justice Stephen Breyer, has uttered nearly 35,000 words since January.

The Georgia-born Thomas also has chalked up his silence to his struggle as a teenager to master standard English after having grown up speaking Geechee, a kind of dialect that thrived among former slaves on the islands off the South Carolina, Georgia and Florida coasts.

I was just visiting one of those islands, St. Simons and I found the folks-- of all races-- friendly, engaging, talkative and easy enough to understand. My theories about Thomas' reticence have more to do with the self-awareness he's acquired of how unsuited he sounds, intellectually, when he does attempt to address weighty legal issues than with his accent. Never has anyone been less suited to be on the Supreme Court than Clarence Thomas. They could just as well give Scalia two votes. But that's what makes him so ideal to freaks like Ingrahgam and Dobson.

And, make no mistake, the presidential election of 2008 will determine if the Supreme Court for the next two decades will be a real Court or a Court of Clarences.

The consequences of two or three moderate-to-liberal seats turning over will be either minor (under a Democrat) or potentially massive (under a Republican). As Marty detailed in this earlier post, many areas of the Court’s jurisprudence could be pushed in a substantially more conservative direction by a single vote. Marty’s point was to identify the principal doctrines and decisions that are amenable (or vulnerable, depending on your perspective) to overruling or to other significant shifts as a result of Justice O’Connor being replaced by Justice Alito.

But for those decisions that do retain their vitality after the recent appointments – most likely as a result of the effect of stare decisis, though perhaps because of the vote of Justice Alito – the same prospect for radical change arises from the potential shift of yet another vote or votes to the right. For example, though it appears that Justice Kennedy will read Roe v. Wade narrowly, he is for the time unwilling to overrule it. Justices Scalia and Thomas are clear votes in favor of overruling. The Chief Justice and Justice Alito are defenders of stare decisis, but squarely presented with the question-- and unable to reach the result they believe is right by narrowing Roe further-- it seems likely that they would vote to overturn it, as it is a decision that (insofar as their pre-judicial statements are instructive) they believe is essentially lawless...

As a consequence, whether the Court moves more fundamentally to the right, so that it could genuinely undo the jurisprudence of the Warren Court, depends on the next President. If two or three of the moderate-to-liberal votes were replaced with genuine conservatives, the existing constraints on more radical doctrinal shifts created by swing votes like Kennedy or O’Connor would be lifted.

I'll refer back to this post when I'm contemplating how dissatisfied I am when DLC hack Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee.

AFTER HITLER AND MUSSOLINI DIED, THE FAR RIGHT FELL ON HARD TIMES... BUT IT TOOK OVER THE GOP & CAME ROARING BACK... AND COULD AGAIN

You have to drive the silver stake through Dracula's heart, chop off the serpent's head... otherwise it comes back. Tomorrow's NY Times warns that although the Right is down, it may not be out, at least not permanently. And I'm certain they're quite correct. Without a serious denazification program-- starting with impeachment and trials for all the criminals in the Bush Regime and the Republican Culture of Corruption-- the American public will just convince itself that this has all been politics-- albeit grubby politics-- as usual. The Bushites have been very very good at discrediting democracy and government.

The Times story is simplistic, naive and just plain silly. "With the death on Tuesday of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the Baptist minister and founder of the Moral Majority, and the announcement on Thursday that Paul D. Wolfowitz would resign from the presidency of the World Bank, two major figures in the modern conservative movement exited the political stage. To many, this is the latest evidence that the conservative movement, which has dominated politics during the last quarter century, is finished."

Blah! Where's the silver stake? And Cheney? The Bush family? Mitch McConnell? James Dobson? Eric Cantor? Michele Bachmann? Nothing; instead it's a story about the career paths of these two nefarious, dishonest right-wing characters. Until 9/11 "the ideas espoused by Mr. Falwell and Mr. Wolfowitz, though both were valued on the right, did not mesh; they were unconnected, spokes in the large conservative wheel...

But after 9/11, neoconservatives and evangelicals found common cause in their shared belief in American exceptionalism and in the idea that the country’s values could be exported abroad. Mr. Bush was receptive to the synthesis, and it became the ideological centerpiece of the war on terror, with its stated mission to combat the “axis of evil” in a global “war on terror.”

Today, of course, this vision, has been widely repudiated, if not altogether discredited. The public has grown skeptical, or maybe just tired, of the hard-edged and often polarizing politics. And this change coincides with broad-based skepticism of the Bush presidency itself-- as witnessed by Mr. Bush’s and his party’s perilously low approval ratings. The G.O.P.’s embrace of the conservative movement is beginning, some say, to resemble a death grip.

You don't often hear ex-presidents bad-rapping other presidents, current or former. But today Jimmy Carter, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, voiced what more and more Americans have come to accept, namely that the Bush Regime "is 'the worst in history' in international relations, taking aim at the White House's policy of pre-emptive war and its Middle East diplomacy. The criticism from Carter, which a biographer says is unprecedented for the 39th president, also took aim at Bush's environmental policies and the administration's 'quite disturbing' faith-based initiative funding.

"I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history," Carter told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in a story that appeared in the newspaper's Saturday editions. "The overt reversal of America's basic values as expressed by previous administrations, including those of George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and others, has been the most disturbing to me."

It may have been politically expedient for Nancy Pelosi to take impeachment off the table-- perhaps the only thing she could do-- but, for the sake of America's soul, and for our future, it-- impeachment-- is essential. No American president has ever had to face up to his crimes before-- but no American president has ever committed crimes on a scale approaching George W. Bush. Even the right-wing loons are turning on each other in violent vicious despair. Until Ma and Pa Kettle are forced to look it full-on in the face, it will continue to thrive, even if, for a while, in dark places, like after Hitler and Mussloni.

BLUE AMERICA IN THE BLUEGRASS STATE

There probably aren't that many people who know there's an election in 3 days, let alone a really important election. In fact, I wasn't terribly shocked when I read that the turn-out could be as low as 15%. I'm talking about the gubernatorial primary in Kentucky and it's this Tuesday. The backstory is that the incumbent, Republican Ernie Fletcher was indicted last May on 3 misdemeanor charges stemming from out-of-control corruption in his administration which includes him issuing blanket pardons to many of his closest political cronies. Even after indictment he refused to resign and was arraigned on June 7, 2006. He weaseled out of a prison sentence when a judge ruled that he was protected by executive immunity until after he leaves office. Fletcher has had some of the lowest approval ratings of any governor anywhere for the last few years. The latest SUSA Survey (May 17) shows him with a 38% approval rating, overall.

Among Kentucky Republicans, however, his approval rating is 53%. And therein lies an incredible opportunity for Democrats. The least popular governor in America is almost certain to lose the general election, but is probably going to win the Republican primary. His opponent is Anne Northup, a pathetic GOP rubber stamp who was ousted from her congressional seat in November by John Yarmuth. She is so incompetent that her bungling is actually making Fletcher look ok-- at least to wingnuts. The latest polls show Fletcher beating her convincingly, 41-26%.

And that brings us to the golden opportunity for Democrats... almost. One of the two front runners, Bruce Lunsford, is as much a Democrat as Joe Lieberman or Zell Miller. Sounds strong? It's meant to. In Kentucky, Lunsford is the quintessential representative of the rotten, reactionary and corrupt old Democratic Establishment that still hasn't quite decided to go over to the GOP. He is a DLC Democrat who is always endorsing and donating money to Republicans-- from George Bush to Ernie Fletcher to Anne Northup. He's a corrupt businessman and scam-artist who is absolutely loaded. He's outspent his rival, former Lt. Governor and Attorney General Steve Beshear, 3 to 1.

Today at Firedoglake we'll talk about Steve Beshear with our guest, Cliff Schecter, but I want to say something else about why this race is so important. Even above and beyond the kind of corrupt practices and arch-reactionary policies Lunsford is promising to bring to Kentucky-- such as teaching creationism in the public schools-- this is a hack who is as damaging to the Democratic brand as any of the DLC players who have only the most tangential relationship with Democratic Party values and principles.

And there's another factor to consider every bit as important. There is no one in the Congress who has been more of an obstructionist, especially in terms of ending the occupation of Iraq, than Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, the Minority Leader. McConnell is a close friend and political ally of Lunsford. If Lunsford is elected, the chances of defeating McConnell in 2008 will become considerably slimmer. Steve Beshear already opposed McConnell for Senate-- while Lunsford was out campaigning for him (and appointing his equally corrupt "wife" to the Board of Directors of his crooked corporation-- fined for cheating Medicare of over a BILLION dollars).

Earlier I mentioned that turnout Tuesday could be as low as 15%. Lunsford has dumped a small fortune into a GOTV operation which will feature plenty of free-flowing cash. Even though the most recent polls show that Beshear has pulled ahead (27-21%), this will come down to the wire. It is unlikely that whoever gets the most votes Tuesday will avoid a June runoff. If you know anyone in Kentucky-- relatives, old school friends, former colleagues...-- please consider getting in touch with them in the next couple of days and talking to them about this race. And to help us understand it, we've got our old pal Cliff Schecter, a man who once worked for the odious Lunsford, here to answer questions about Kentucky politics in general and about Lunsford and Beshear in particular.

REPUBLICAN LEADER OF THE DAY-- MEET TED KLAUDT, SERIAL CHILD RAPIST AND RIGHT-WING EVANGELICAL LOON

I just subjected myself to a few minutes of a radio conversation between hate talk radio loon Laura Ingraham and religionist charlatan and highway robber Jimmy Dobson, two self-satisfied hypocrites celebrating their foul and reactionary vision for America. And they couch it all in the moral superiority the religionists and the Nazis always use to establish themselves as somehow superior to everyone else. No one mentioned Tom DeLay, "Duke" Cunningham, Bob Ney, John Doolittle, Mark Foley or the other paragons of GOP virtue who have led their contemptible movement. Not a word about Alberto Gonzales, Patrick McHenry, Paul Wolfowitz, or Dobson's pal and fellow fake-"Reverend" Larry Haggard. And no one mentioned today's Republican Elected Official of the Day, Ted Klaudt, 49 year old former South Dakota state representative and, like Ingraham and Dobson, right-wing hate-monger.

Like so many tightly wound repressed and mentally ill Republicans, Klaudt was preaching the moral superiority of the far right while he was abusing molesting children-- his own foster daughters and 2 state legislative pages! He "faces a long list of charges: eight counts of rape, two counts of sexual exploitation of a minor, two counts of witness tampering, sexual contact with a person under 16, and stalking."

Court documents mention five possible victims. Three were foster children between the ages of 15 and 19 who lived with Klaudt's family. One is a cousin of one of those girls, and the fifth is a friend of Klaudt's daughter.

In the most disturbing accusation, the girls say Klaudt had them convinced they could earn up to $20,000 by donating their eggs to a fertility clinic. And even though he has no medical training, the girls say Klaudt did all the supposed "exams" and "procedures" himself.

Klaudt fancied himself a radical right Republican (and an evangelical) and