THE TIDE IS TURNING

If you're feeling inundated with all that trash on the TV about Rev Wright and all the anti-Obama garbage being thrown by the vile insiders and their media, take a minute to watch this Roger Waters song. (Although first take a look at this Wall Street Journal/MSNBC poll which basically makes the case that even with the entire corporate media smearing Obama 24/7 about Rev. Wright, the biggest problem any candidate is facing because of an association is McCain-- and the association is George W. Bush.

In the survey, 43 percent of registered voters say they have major concerns that McCain is too closely aligned with the current administration.

By comparison:

36 percent have major concerns that Clinton seems to change her position on some issues (like driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants and the North American Free Trade Agreement, which her husband signed but which she now opposes)
34 percent say they’re bothered by Obama’s “bitter” remarks
32 percent have a major problem with the Illinois senator’s past associations with Wright and the 1960s radical William Ayers
27 percent have serious concerns that Bill Clinton would have too much influence on U.S. policy decisions if his wife is elected

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On my way back from the airport today I was listening to an interview on NPR about the political attitudes in a KKK bastion of Indiana, Martinsville. One guys who sounded like he may have spent some time running around in a sheet and pillow case once or twice in his lifetime, seemed very uncomfortable with the idea of a woman or an African-American president. But he absolutely dismissed out of hand the idea of voting for McCain who he said is too aligned with Bush. I don't think he reads the Journal. In the end he said his male chauvinist side was pushing him towards Obama. I was hoping he may have seen Pink Floyd's Obama pig (see above) floating by and that that had convinced him. But it wasn't.

"I think a lot of things would change. Probably the male chauvinist in me is going to vote for the man just because. I'm going to be honest, it probably won't be McCain, since he stands for everything George Bush stands for. I think [Obama] says he doesn't take money from the lobbyists, which I think can be real positive."

Anyway, here's Roger:

SUPREME COURT FRAUD?

The Indiana photo-ID decision sets the stage for state legislators to restrict voting rights any way they can, as long as they invoke "voter fraud"

By Jon Dodson
DWT constitutional correspondent

The Supremes recently decided the biggest voting rights case since Bush v. Gore. The issue was whether Indiana's law requiring state-issued photo IDs for everyone voting in person violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

ABOUT THE EQUAL PROTECTION CLAUSE

In a long line of cases, the Equal Protection Clause attaches to certain fundamental rights. The landmark case on voting rights was Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, 383 US 663 (1966), where the Court held Virginia's poll tax unconstitutional. The Court concluded that any state "violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment whenever it makes the affluence of the voter or payment of any fee an electoral standard." Moreover the Court stated that even rational restrictions on the right to vote would be unconstitutional if they "invidiously discriminate."

However, in Anderson v. Celebreeze, 460 US 780 (1983), the Court clarified that "evenhanded restrictions that protect the integrity and reliability of the electoral process itself" are not invidious. This is the law the Court applied to Indiana's statute.

NOW, A WORD ON PHOTO IDs

We've all had the luxury of a visit to the DMV, which has become a trite parody of bureaucratic excess and inefficiency. In Florida, getting a photo ID costs $20 and about an hour of waiting at DMV--when one has all the documentation one needs.

But birth certificates can get lost or destroyed, and (as I found out) can be relatively expensive to replace (over $50 if you were born in North Carolina). So, depending on the various hoops one must jump through, getting an ID can take hours and a significant sum of money.

The good news is that if a person has the documentation and transportation he or she needs, the Indiana law ensures that photo identification can be obtained for free. The plurality repeatedly pointed this out, which leads me to believe--or desperately hope--that the Court may hold unconstitutional a law requiring voter ID that costs money.

On the other hand, the Virginia poll tax held unconstitutional in 1966 cost $1.50, so maybe that's the cutoff. But then the Court would have to calculate how much $1.50 is in 2008 dollars. And so, really, "not free" would be the easiest place to draw the line.

IF YOU DON'T HAVE A PHOTO ID . . .

The other good news is that the Indiana law provides an alternative for persons who do not have an ID: They can cast a provisional ballot, which will be counted so long as they fill out an affidavit at the circuit court clerk's office within 10 days.

Now, if there's anything more likely to drive a person to suicide than going to the DMV, it's going to the clerk's office. Clerks in any populous jurisdiction are incredibly busy, generally grumpy, and, from the standpoint of customers, painfully slow. Not to mention that this alternative does nothing for persons without transportation.

So, again, the provisional-ballot/affidavit method is easier said than done. One can't help but wonder, why not fill out the affidavit right there at the voting precinct? Wouldn't that be a lesser burden on the voter? Although the Indiana law is not nearly as bad as it could be, it still places severe obstacles in the way of many people--particularly poor persons, elderly persons, naturalized immigrants, college students, and anyone else with transportation, financial, or paperwork problems.

HOW THE COURT ACTUALLY RULED (UH-OH)

What's more troubling than the law itself is the Supreme Court's opinion. Once again, the Court stuck its head in the sand, rather than deal with what everyone knows: First, these laws are politically motivated, and second, no state has had an even moderate problem with voter fraud.

Regarding the politics behind this law, the Court concluded that "valid neutral justifications for a nondiscriminatory law . . . should not be disregarded simply because partisan interests may have provided one motivation for the votes of individual legislators."

This understatement is in line with the Equal Protection cases basically holding that discriminatory intent is not enough to offend the Constitution where there's no discriminatory effect--see Washington v. Davis, 426 US 229 (1976). But it also appears to be an application of the relaxed "rational basis" standard of review, in a case where strict scrutiny is warranted.

Under the rational basis standard, so long as the legislators can dream up a "conceivably rational" justification, the law should be upheld. This standard is supposed to apply in cases that involve neither a fundamental right nor a suspect classification such as race or gender. Strict scrutiny requires a more compelling justification of the state.

So the Court seemed to apply the wrong standard of review, or misapply the correct standard, in discounting the impermissible political motivations of the law. (Can we say "invidious"?)

In contrast to the short shrift given to the obvious political motivations, the Court took very seriously the rationale that the law was intended to prevent voter fraud, despite the paper-thin record of voter fraud ever being a problem. As far as I could tell, the Court cited two incidents of the kind of fraud to be prevented here--voter impersonation. One happened in a gubernatorial race in Washington state, and another in a mayoral race in Indiana. Justice John Paul Stevens concluded for the plurality that this "demonstrates a real risk that voter fraud could affect a close election's outcome."

If another justice had written the majority opinion in this case, I would insert here a rant about the hypocrisy of such hand-wringing over whether "fraud" would determine the outcome of an election. Because, frankly, I consider the justices in the majority of Bush v. Gore a fraud. That case exposed them as partisan hacks rather than judges. But, Justice Stevens actually wrote a brilliant, biting dissent in Bush v. Gore. So I must concede that his concerns with voter fraud must have been genuine in this case.

Be that as it may, the record is very, very flimsy. In a case where the Court supposedly applies some iteration of strict scrutiny, it's hard to believe that such a lack of evidence could be the basis of a compelling state interest which trumps Equal Protection when it comes to voting.

A FINAL NOTE: POSSIBLE RELIEF?

One final note: the challenge to Indiana's law was a facial challenge, essentially arguing that the law is unconstitutional per se. The Court did leave open "as applied" challenges to the law in the future.

So perhaps a person who tries to vote in person without an ID because of financial or transportation issues but can't . . . perhaps she will somehow come up with the resources and lawyers to challenge the statute as applied to her. Or barring that, maybe this person who could not afford to vote will represent herself. She can just take a pro se writ of certiorari before the Supreme Court! This is a reasonable remedy, no?

At any rate, one thing is certain: The Supreme Court declared open season for state legislators to dream up all kinds of restrictions on the right to vote, so long as they remember to wink and say "voter fraud." This is not the last we will hear from the Court about this issue in the coming years.

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From the DWT Least Surprising News of the Day Department: Say, wasn't that somethin' about that Lamont fella screwin' up Joe Lieberman's website?

"On April 10, The New York Times also reported that, according to the FBI email obtained by The Advocate, 'it was not angry bloggers or Mr. Lamont's insurgent campaign workers who rendered the site inaccessible, but sheer technological ineptitude.' . . .

"Despite having reported the August 2006 allegation by Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman's re-election campaign that supporters of Ned Lamont, then his rival in the Democratic Senate primary, had "hacked" Lieberman's campaign website, numerous media outlets--including ABC, CNN, and CBS--have yet to report that an FBI investigation reportedly concluded before the November 2006 general election that there was 'no evidence of (an) attack.'"

--from Media Matters' new report on the "story of the story" of the crashing of the Lieberman campaign website in 2006, and the aftermath this month

I assume by now everyone who's found his/her way to DWT has heard the much-belated sequel to the 2006 campaign "story" of how those left-wing crazies of Ned Lamont's insurgent Connecticut Senate campaign nefariously conspired to crash the Lieberman campaign's website. The sequel, only too predictably, was that it was like the outgoing Clinton staffers' trashing of the White House as they cleared out in January 2001: It never happened.

Of course the Republicans who made up the stories about the White House vandalism were just plain flat-out lying. Imagine that! The Bush regime began, at its very instigation, with a complete, flagrant, malicious fabrication, which was never retracted, accommodated, or otherwise amended as the evidence slowly seeped out that it was all Republican lies. At least in the case of the crashed Lieberman website, the senator and his media lackey the Abominable Gerstein [above] could claim to have been misled by others, and so they continued to claim when it finally came out recently that the FBI had investigated promptly and quickly reported back to the Lieberman campaign that it was all untrue, the whole story about the demons of the Lamont campaign doing them dirt.

In fact, the vaunted Lieberman website crashed of its own lack of weight--you get the impression that it wasn't much more than a few spare parts from somebody's basement held together with duct tape and spit. Then, within a few days we learned that not only did the Liebermaniacs almost immediately know that everything they had accused the Lamont campaign of, with such certainty, was a total fabrication, but that the Democratic state attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, and the Republican U.S. attorney, Kevin O'Connor, had this information and seem to have erected an impenetrable public stonewall, which kept the facts of the matter secret and allowed the Lamont campaign to suffer continuing contumely from its already-disproved bad behavior.

Even now, not surprisingly, Holy Joe and the Abominable Gerstein bat their eyes demurely and blame it all on their wicked and deceitful computer guy, who dagnab it told them it was all the Lamont meanies' fault. And then they have the world-class chutzpah to declare "case closed." Without troubling to explain how it happened that they never got around to publicly correcting the supposedly inadvertent lies they had spread so feverishly.

Certainly you would think that the most rudimentary honest and decency require, before they go talking about any cases being closed, that they offer a public explanation and apology--if only for the inadvertent error of their accusations. It is, after all, quite possible that this lie made the difference between Holy Joe slithering back into the Senate versus shuffling off, with Mrs. Holy Joe, to full-time, on-the-books employment with their K Street masters.

What? You think His Holiness's lie about opposing the war in Iraq was the lie that got him reelected? Or the lie that he would vote as a Democrat? OK, you could be right. Considering that pretty the Lieberman campaign was pretty much all lies all the time, it's hard to know without some good-quality research the relative importance of the individual lies.

Still, don't the rules say that when you're caught in a lie, you've got to acknowledge it and apologize, however quietly and insincerely, before you can blithely move on? Apparently not in the "Connecticut for Lieberman" inner sanctum.

Nor, apparently, among the media puppets who stoogefully reported the Lieberman campaign accusations. Now those meanies at Media Matters, with their tiresome fetish for facts have investigated and found that by and large the media that reported the Lieberman accusations have similarly found no need to set the record straight, one notably honorable exception being Keith Olbermann on Countdown.

Some of the detail in the Media Matters report is staggering. I encourage you to let your eyes wander through it:

Despite having reported the August 2006 allegation by Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman's re-election campaign that supporters of Ned Lamont, then his rival in the Democratic Senate primary, had "hacked" Lieberman's campaign website, numerous media outlets--including ABC, CNN, and CBS--have yet to report that an FBI investigation reportedly concluded before the November 2006 general election that there was "no evidence of (an) attack." To the contrary, according to an April 9 article in The Advocate of Stamford, Connecticut, an October 25, 2006, FBI email indicated that the FBI had found Lieberman's website "crashed because Lieberman officials continually exceeded a configured limit of 100 e-mails per hour the night before the primary." Thus, despite coverage of the Lieberman campaign's allegations against the Lamont campaign, ABC, CNN, and CBS have yet to report that the FBI not only exonerated the Lamont campaign, but that it was reported this month that the FBI concluded the website crash was the fault of the Lieberman campaign itself.

CNN reported the Lieberman campaign's allegations repeatedly on August 8, 2006, and a total of nine times from August 8, 2006, to September 8, 2006. As late as February 23 of this year, CNN correspondent Josh Levs reported on CNN Newsroom that "back in 2006, Joe Lieberman's campaign website went down. You remember this campaign. It was a big deal, him against Ned Lamont. Well, at the very end of his campaign, his site just pretty much disappeared, and his campaign is convinced it was an attack."

On the August 9, 2006, edition of ABC's Good Morning America, senior national correspondent Jake Tapper reported: "Lieberman's campaign complained to law enforcement that its website was hacked yesterday by devious anti-Lieberman forces. Lamont said he knew nothing about the hacking. But the incident was symbolic of the tornado of anti-war liberal Internet writers, called bloggers, that Lieberman faced." On the August 8, 2006, broadcast of the CBS Evening News, then-correspondent Trish Regan reported that Lieberman supporters were "nervous not only because of this race, but also because Lieberman's campaign website was hacked into and shut down today. They're pointing the finger at the Lamont camp."

A search conducted by Media Matters for America on April 29 turned up no instances of CNN, ABC News, or CBS News programs reporting on the FBI's reported findings as of 11:59 pm ET on April 28. By contrast, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, who reported the Lieberman campaign's allegations on the August 8, 2006, edition of Countdown, covered the reported results of the FBI investigation on April 9, 2008.

Lieberman's campaign website went down on August 7, 2006, the day before the Democratic primary. Quoting from the October 25, 2006, FBI email it obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request, The Advocate reported:

A federal investigation has concluded that U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman's 2006 re-election campaign was to blame for the crash of its Web site the day before Connecticut's heated Aug. 8 Democratic primary.

The FBI office in New Haven found no evidence supporting the Lieberman campaign's allegations that supporters of primary challenger Ned Lamont of Greenwich were to blame for the Web site crash.

Lieberman, who was fighting for his political life against the anti-Iraq war candidate Lamont, implied that joe2006.com was hacked by Lamont supporters.

"The server that hosted the joe2006.com website failed because it was overutilized and misconfigured. There was no evidence of (an) attack," according to the e-mail.

A program that could have detected a legitimate attack was improperly configured, the e-mail states.

"New Haven will be administratively closing this investigation," it concluded.

[...]

The Lieberman campaign alleged it was the target of a "denial of service attack," which can involve bombarding a Web site with external communications to slow it or render it useless.

"Our Web site consultant assured us in the strongest terms possible that we had been attacked," former Lieberman campaign spokesman Dan Gerstein said in December 2006.

According to the FBI memo, the site crashed because Lieberman officials continually exceeded a configured limit of 100 e-mails per hour the night before the primary.

"The system administrator misinterpreted the root cause," the memo stated. "The system administrator finally declared the server was being attacked and the Lieberman campaign accused the Ned Lamont campaign. The news reported this on Aug. 8, 2006, causing additional Web traffic to visit the site. The additional Web traffic then overwhelmed the Web server. ... Web traffic pattern analysis reports and Web logging that was available did not demonstrate traffic that was indicative of a denial of service attack."

On April 10, The New York Times also reported that, according to the FBI email obtained by The Advocate, "it was not angry bloggers or Mr. Lamont's insurgent campaign workers who rendered the site inaccessible, but sheer technological ineptitude." The April 9 Advocate report was also published in The Greenwich Time; both newspapers are owned by Gannett Co.

After losing the Democratic primary to Lamont, Lieberman ran for re-election to the Senate as an independent. Shortly after Lieberman defeated Lamont in the November 2006 general election, The Advocate reported that the U.S. attorney's office and state attorney general in Connecticut had "cleared" the Lamont campaign and its supporters of any wrongdoing. ABC, CNN, and CBS ignored that report as well. From a December 20, 2006, article in The Advocate:

The U.S. attorney's office and state attorney general have cleared former U.S. Senate candidate Ned Lamont and his supporters of any role in the crash of U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman's campaign Web site hours before last summer's Democratic primary.

"The investigation has revealed no evidence the problems the Web site experienced were the result of criminal conduct," said Tom Carson, spokesman for U.S. Attorney Kevin O'Connor.

State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal confirmed the joint investigation "found no evidence of tampering or sabotage warranting civil action by my office." Both men declined to provide additional information, such as what might have happened to the site.

According to an April 22, 2008, Advocate article, the office of state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said it "never saw or read the [October 25, 2006] FBI e-mail until its contents were reported by The Advocate" on April 9.

"Even when we work cooperatively, the FBI never shares such internal documents with my office, a practice and policy we respect given our very different roles and responsibilities," Blumenthal said.

Blumenthal, a Democrat, said his investigation into the joe2006.com crash "was active and ongoing" until December 2006.

"Throughout the investigation there were discussions between my office and the U.S. attorney's office regarding the direction of the federal investigation but not any conclusion until after the election," Blumenthal said. "To have made any premature public predictions before our investigation ended... would have been irresponsible and improper."

Thomas Carson, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney, said in a statement that the office updated the Lieberman campaign and Blumenthal on the investigation in late October 2006.

"In accordance with our usual practice ... the Lieberman campaign, as the alleged victim, and the office of attorney general, which had been conducting a contemporaneous investigation ... were provided with limited information," Carson said. "The investigation was administratively closed several weeks later."

Like the December 2006 and April 9 articles before it, the April 22 Advocate report has also been ignored by the major media outlets mentioned above that covered Lieberman's allegations against Lamont and his supporters.

So, in addition to the need for some public acknowledgment by the sleazoids of the Lieberman campaign, there is rather urgent need for coming clean on the part of Attorney General Blumenthal, perhaps with a friendly jog from U.S. Attorney O'Connor.

But then, what really is the point? Most of the media who were so eager to pass on the bogus story seem eerily uninterested in setting the record straight. Maybe the solution would be for Senator Lieberman to do the honorable thing and resign his Senate seat. He could do so with clean conscience, knowing that he would be replaced, not by the man who would have been elected to that Senate seat in an honest race in 2006, but by an appointee of Connecticut's Republican governor, Jodi Rell--in other words, a Republican like himself.

Well, we hope not quite like himself. We'd like to think that even Connecticut Republicans have higher standards than that.

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McCranky has the gall to pass off his hare-brained "market-based" gibberish as a health-care plan. Maybe we should be calling him McBullshit?

"McCain's prescription would seek to lure workers away from their company health plans with a $5,000 family tax credit and a promise that, left to their own devices, they would be able to find cheaper insurance that is more tailored to their health-care needs and not tied to a particular job."
--reporter Michael D. Shear, in today's Washington Post

So, really, the only question is whether McCranky is too stupid to understand that no "market-based" approach can even begin to address the health-care crisis, for the screechingly obvious reason that the "market" has less-than-zero incentive to address the needs of anyone except healthy people, who by definition aren't party to the health-care crisis (at least not yet), or he's just running a little con game.

(Hypothetical Crankyman: "Everybody says I gotta have a health-care plan but I don't wanna have no health-care plan and nobody can make me have a health-care plan. Luckily American voters are really, really stupid, so I'll just sling 'em a line of bullshit.")

A number of people have pointed out that members of Congress (both houses) are in one important way uniquely un-qualified to have an opinion on health-care costs, because of the sweet plan that comes with their job. Of course in McCranky's case it's even worse: Thanks to his foresight in dumping his previous wife in favor of the lovely Cindy with her beer-heiress fortune, as long as people are still drinking beer the McCrankys won't have to worry where their next aspirin (or, more likely, designer prescription pain-killer) is coming from.

I'm not even going to bother quoting any more of the WaPo piece, which dutifully passes on all the McCranky health-care bullshit as if it were serious discussion. Well, maybe I'll offer just this additional bit:

McCain's plan is aimed primarily at giving individuals the power to make health-care decisions by granting the same tax breaks for insurance whether workers get a policy from an employer or on their own. Aides call it a "radical" rethinking of health care that would drive costs down and give people more choice.

If you really have the stomach for such insulting nonsense, by all means follow the article link above. It's a shame that so-called journalists have resolutely narrowed their job description to passing on whatever nonsense they're fed--all with a straight face, with no attempt at reality-checking the crap, except of course getting a comment from the other party in a "he said-he said" squabble.

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On tap tonight: Our crack constitutional consultant Jon Dodson ponders--SUPREME COURT FRAUD?

Our intrepid correspondent has been looking from every possible angle at the Supreme Court's peculiar ruling in the Indiana photo-ID voting-rights case--written by, of all people, Justice John Paul Stevens--trying to find an angle from which the ruling makes a lick of sense, constitutional or common.

We hope we're not giving away too much when we report that Jon didn't have a whole lot of luck.

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Bye-bye, Lurita! Life is unfair. Once upon a time, disgracing yourself and your country the way you did could have earned you a Medal of Freedom

Actually, the Bush-regime rats aren't so much deserting
this sinking ship as shoving one another over the side.

Remember the good old days of the first term of the Bush regime, when there seemed to be no malfeasance a regimist could commit that could get him/her fired? By and large, the more egregious your misdeeds, the likelier you were to find Chimpy the Prez draping a Medal of Freedom around your neck. (Personally, I don't think I would want the world's most maladroit human being getting anywhere close to my neck, especially not when he's wielding an object capable of strangulation. But hey, it was probably better than the shit-canning they deserved.)

Well, those were the old days. Now the steady outflow of regime lackeys being frog-marched out of government service in disgrace is coming to resemble a stampede. The misconduct has become so egregious that instead of the usual image of rats deserting a sinking ship, we've got the rats pushing one another over the side of this leaky tub.

Latest ejectee from this squalid swamp: the unspeakable Lurita Doan, who devoted her time as administrator of the General Services Administration to turning the GSA into just another shameless enclave of the Right-Wing Political (and Money-Siphoning) Machine. Here is the Politico's account:

Lurita Doan Finally Forced Out At GSA

By John Bresnahan

Lurita Doan, head of the General Services Administration, was forced to offer her resignation tonight, according to an e-mail she sent out this evening.

Doan was appointed in late May, 2006, becoming the first woman to serve as GSA Administrator. With 12,000 empioyees and a $20 billion annual budget, GSA has responsibilty for overseeing the thousands of building and properties owned by the federal government.

Doan became the subject of congressional scrutiny last year for allegedly using GSA to help Republican lawmakers win re-election. Doan denied the allegation, but her appearance before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee was disastrous. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the panel, called on Doan to resign over the allegations, but Doan refused to do so.

Here is the text of the e-mail that Doan sent out earlier this evening announcing her forced resignation:

"Dear Friends and Colleagues at GSA,

Early this evening I was asked to submit my resignation, and I have just done so. It has been a great privilege to serve with all of you and to serve our nation and a great President.

The past twenty-two months have been filled with accomplishments: together, we have regained our clean audit opinion, restored fiscal discipline, re-tooled our ability to respond to emergencies, rekindled entrepreneurial energies, reduced bureaucratic barriers to small companies to get a GSA Schedule, ignited a building boom at our nation's ports of entries, boldly led the nation in an aggressive telework initiative, and improved employee morale so that we were selected as one of the best places to work in the Federal government.

These accomplishments are made even more enjoyable by the fact that there were lots of people who told us they could never be done.

Best of luck to all of you, it has been a true honor."

As fellow flopperoos Gen. Tommy Franks and Iraq-occupation bungler L. Paul Bremer III look on, former CIA director George Tenet is rewarded for his bumbling by Chimpy the Choker.

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ANATOMY OF A MORTGAGE SCAM-- THE GOP DREAM OF UNFETTERED, UNREGULATED CAPITALISM

If we allow ourselves to be manipulated and cheated by cynical political hacks like McCain and Clinton, a sharp businessman might reason, why couldn't he get in on the action too? The Enron boys sure did and, under the protection of Bush and Cheney, they stole billions from American taxpayers and rate-payers. But they're part of a long and disreputable tradition that has businessman paying off politicians who allow they to plunder the citizens. Republicans call it a free market and citizens rarely hold anyone accountable anyone. If they did would McCain have even the meager support he does after he was caught red-handed taking bribes from banker Charles Keating who then proceeded-- with McCain's active assistance-- to rip his bank's customers off for hundreds of millions of dollars?

Today's Wall Street Journal asks its readers to stop thinking about Rev Wright for a moment or two and consider the case of the nation's biggest mortgage brokerage, Countrywide Financial Corp., who CEO received $100 million last year-- while the company lost $893... in the first quarter.

In an hour I'm having breakfast with a former manager of a mortgage brokerage office in Colorado. He's going to explain the internals of how his company systematically ripped off its customers and helped to wreck the housing and real estate industries while enriching top executives-- and throwing the country into recession. This is the Republican vision of unfettered capitalism. I hope to write more about this in the coming week. For now, let me commend you to today's report in that commie rag, the Journal.

A federal probe of Countrywide, the nation's largest mortgage lender, is turning up evidence that sales executives at the company deliberately overlooked inflated income figures for many borrowers, people with knowledge of the investigation say.

Some of the problems are surfacing in a mortgage program called "Fast and Easy," in which borrowers were asked to provide little or no documentation of their finances, according to these people and to former Countrywide employees. Both Countrywide and Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored company that bought many of the loans, classify the loans as "prime," meaning low-risk.

Fast and Easy borrowers aren't required to produce pay stubs or tax forms to substantiate their claimed earnings. In many cases, Countrywide didn't even require loan officers to verify employment,
according to an October 2006 presentation by Countrywide's consumer-lending division. That left the program vulnerable to abuse by Countrywide loan officers and outside mortgage brokers seeking loans for customers who might have been turned away if their finances had been more closely scrutinized, according to three current and former Countrywide senior executives and to several mortgage brokers who arranged loans through the program.

The quarterly financial results, which included $3.05 billion of credit-related charges, did not provide details about the performance of the company's "no-doc" loans, including the Fast and Easy ones.
Late payments increased across the board: About 36% of "subprime" loans to people with weak credit records were at least 30 days overdue, up from 20% a year before. For all loans serviced by
Countrywide, a category mostly made up of prime loans, the delinquency rate was 9.3%, nearly double the year-earlier 4.9%.

In early January, as fears mounted that declining home values and rising defaults had left the company close to collapse, Countrywide agreed to be taken over by Bank of America Corp. in a stock swap valued at about $4 billion.

...In recent years, about one-third of all Countrywide prime mortgages eligible for sale to Fannie Mae were Fast and Easy.

During a conference call with investors last July, Countrywide acknowledged that Fast and Easy loans were riskier than fully documented prime loans. A chart provided to investors showed that a borrower who wasn't required to document income would be at least 50% more likely to fall behind on payments than a similar borrower who did provide documentation.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking into a wide variety of Countrywide mortgages that didn't require full documentation, not just the Fast and Easy loans. People involved in the inquiry say the FBI has concluded that extensive fraud occurred on the loans, and they are looking into whether the company violated securities law by failing to disclose that to investors.

Perhaps the FBI should save themselves the trouble and go ask John McCain, who claims he doesn't know anything about economics but certainly knows more about corruption than the average politician. McCain can explain to the FBI that the cause of the mortgage crisis is irresponsible homeowners who were greedy and morally deficient and who need to fix the mess by getting second jobs and stop taking summer vacations.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN CHIMES IN-- AGAINST THE SHAMELESS PANDERING FROM McCAIN AND HILLARY

McCain and Hillary-- two pandering fools

You may think of Thomas Friedman primarily as one of the cheerleaders behind Bush's illegal attack on Iraq, but he also sometimes makes a little sense-- like in his NY Times column today. Like anyone everyone who takes the problems of the economy seriously, he is very disappointed that Hillary would lower herself to the standards of McCain-- and he explains why. Their proposal is "not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country. When the summer is over, we will have increased our debt to China, increased our transfer of wealth to Saudi Arabia and increased our contribution to global warming for our kids to inherit." He commends Obama for resisting the politician's inborn urge to pander. I'd go further and point out that their respective positions show that Obama is the only one of the three fit to be president.

our problem is so much worse than you think. We have no energy strategy. If you are going to use tax policy to shape energy strategy then you want to raise taxes on the things you want to discourage-- gasoline consumption and gas-guzzling cars-- and you want to lower taxes on the things you want to encourage-- new, renewable energy technologies. We are doing just the opposite.

Are you sitting down?

Few Americans know it, but for almost a year now, Congress has been bickering over whether and how to renew the investment tax credit to stimulate investment in solar energy and the production tax credit to encourage investment in wind energy. The bickering has been so poisonous that when Congress passed the 2007 energy bill last December, it failed to extend any stimulus for wind and solar energy production. Oil and gas kept all their credits, but those for wind and solar have been left to expire this December. I am not making this up. At a time when we should be throwing everything into clean power innovation, we are squabbling over pennies.

These credits are critical because they ensure that if oil prices slip back down again-- which often happens-- investments in wind and solar would still be profitable. That’s how you launch a new energy technology and help it achieve scale, so it can compete without subsidies.

The Democrats wanted the wind and solar credits to be paid for by taking away tax credits from the oil industry. President Bush said he would veto that. Neither side would back down, and Mr. Bush-- showing not one iota of leadership-- refused to get all the adults together in a room and work out a compromise. Stalemate. Meanwhile, Germany has a 20-year solar incentive program; Japan 12 years. Ours, at best, run two years.

“It’s a disaster,” says Michael Polsky, founder of Invenergy, one of the biggest wind-power developers in America. “Wind is a very capital-intensive industry, and financial institutions are not ready to take ‘Congressional risk.’ They say if you don’t get the [production tax credit] we will not lend you the money to buy more turbines and build projects.”

It is also alarming, says Rhone Resch, the president of the Solar Energy Industries Association, that the U.S. has reached a point “where the priorities of Congress could become so distorted by politics” that it would turn its back on the next great global industry-- clean power-- “but that’s exactly what is happening.” If the wind and solar credits expire, said Resch, the impact in just 2009 would be more than 100,000 jobs either lost or not created in these industries, and $20 billion worth of investments that won’t be made.

UPDATE: THE HILLDOG ATTACKS OBAMA FOR NOT BUYING INTO HER AND McCAIN'S CHEAP GAS GIMMICK

You wouldn't vote for McCain, I'm sure. Hillary is better than he is... to some extent. Obama is the only one qualified to be president. He's willing to tell the truth to the American people. McCain and Hillary are just dishonest political hacks.


UPDATE: JONATHAN ALTER ASKS A RHETORICAL QUESTION

Alter is a smart guy and in Newsweek today he asked, rhetorically, why McCain and Hillary don't know any better than to propose this horribly pandering gas tax holiday. I think they did the American voters a great service by both coming out for it. It shows voters exactly who is willing to try to buy them off with cheap counter-productive tricks and who is willing to stand up and speak the real straight talk. And it shows the American people-- or at least those willing to use their noggins-- how pathetic the mass media is.

Hillary Clinton has now joined John McCain in proposing the most irresponsible policy idea of the year-- an idea that actually could aid the terrorists. What's worse, both of them know that suspending the federal gas tax this summer is a terrible pander, and yet they're pushing it anyway for crass political advantage.

Clinton and McCain have learned a destructive lesson from the Bush era: as Bill Clinton said in 2002, it's better politically to be "strong and wrong" than thoughtful and right. The goal is to depict Barack Obama as an out-of-touch elitist. By any means necessary.

I could highlight a long debate among economists on suspending the gas tax, but there is no debate. Not one respectable economist [though all of McCain's and Hillary's repulsive cadres of lobbyists]-- and not one environmentalist or foreign policy expert-- supports the idea, unless they are official members of the Clinton or McCain campaigns (and even some of them privately oppose it). To relieve suffering at the pump, send another rebate check or provide tax credits or something else, but not this.

Why is this gas pander so bad? Let me count the ways:

* It's a direct transfer of money from motorists to oil companies, which are getting ready this week to again report record obscene profits. If the federal excise tax were lifted, oil companies would simply raise prices and pocket most of the difference. Clinton's proposal to recover the money with a windfall profits tax on oil companies sounds nice but won't happen. That tax was easily blocked by the Senate in December and would likely be blocked again.

* It offers taxpayers only peanuts. The Congressional Budget Office says the average savings to motorists this summer would be a total of $30. Did I miss something, or was that measly number somehow not included in Clinton's explanation of her support?

* It sends more hard-earned money to the Middle East, which is terrible for our national security. Remember, 15 of the 19 terrorists on 9/11 came from Saudi Arabia. How did they get the terrorist training? The madrassa indoctrination? Oil money.

* It worsens global warming by encouraging gasoline consumption. When you flee your house in 2020 because of flooding, remember which politicians pandered.

* It makes it more likely you'll have a car accident or will waste even more time in traffic. The proceeds from the gas tax go for highway construction and upgrades. Because the tax (24.4 cents a gallon on diesel fuel) was last raised 15 years ago, our infrastructure is a mess, with potholes and dangerous crossings practically everywhere. Thousands of repair projects will be further delayed.

* It will cost 300,000 construction jobs, according to the Department of Transportation. Makes it kind of ironic when Clinton starts her rallies saying she wants "jobs, jobs, jobs."

* It will cost the U.S. Treasury at least $8.5 billion and probably much more, according to state highway officials. For McCain that's no money at all-- merely one month in Iraq. For Clinton it's money she's already spent. She has said in the past that any proceeds from a windfall profits tax would go for renewable energy. The $8.5 billion figure assumes the tax would be reapplied after Labor Day. Fat chance. The one-year costs are probably closer to $30 billion.

* It won't happen anyway because Congress isn't usually quite that stupid, and if it is, President Bush would veto the bill.

So why are McCain and Clinton doing this? Because when they learned that Obama had supported a similar suspension of the Illinois gas tax in Springfield, Ill., before realizing it was a bad idea, they saw an opening. It was like Hillary's whiskey shot in the bar, only sleazier. Try to show that the guy just doesn't get it.

Of course, McCain and Clinton do get it. They get that people are hurting and want some relief, even if this form of it makes no sense. They get that voters have been conned into believing that both
candidates are responsible public servants because they're not as bad as some others, so they can trade on that reputation. They get that smacking Obama is more important than anything else on the planet right now, and that for Obama to respond by calling them panderers will take Obama about as far as it took Paul Tsongas in 1992 when he leveled the same charge at Bill Clinton.

From the bookshelf: If you've been waiting to order your copy of "Nixonland," now's the time to get cracking--plus some other book notes

One thing that should be obvious by now is that the final descent into right-wing darkness marked by the Age of Bush has also stimulated and focused a wave of progressive writers like gangbusters. Howie is the DWT book guy, and he keeps you apprised of the books he's devoured. Me, in my 9-to-5 grind I mostly dream of finding the time and concentration for so grand a project as, you know, reading a book.

Now word comes from our friend Rick Perlstein that for-real retail copies of his long-awaited Nixonland : The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America actually exist and are being shipped to buyers. ("I can't really believe it myself," Rick writes. "I signed the contract for the thing in November of 2001, first started thinking seriously about it in 1998, and wanted to write just this book since I was sixteen years old.")

If you haven't heard about Nixonland, what you need to know is that Rick Perlstein has always been a close observer of the right side of the great left-right political split that erupted in the '60s. His 2001 book Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus looked at how the seeming conservative debacle of the 1964 presidential election in fact laid the groundwork for the ascension of the new Right. In Nixonland, I gather, he's carried that chronicle (watch out, it's 896 pages and weighs a whopping 2.4 pounds) forward to the years 1965-72 and the emergence of the conservative movement as a political force, with emphasis on how those culture wars looked from the other side.


WHY NOT TOSS THE REAL McCAIN IN YOUR SHOPPING CART?

If your book source of choice happens to be Amazon, you'll notice that the hefty discount offered on Nixonland, which brings the price down from $37.50 to $24.75, also drops you below the magic $25 mark for free shipping. If you're as cheap as I am, this is a problem.

Now we've probably all got so many books on our reading list that the solution is obvious: piggyback one of the others onto your order. I'd been meaning for weeks now to get hold of Cliff Schecter's The Real McCain, the book I'm hoping will provide both a framework and a lot of raw material for penetrating the fake halo of that double-talking phony McCranky and keeping his sorry ass out of the White House.

Probably you already know that The Real McCain was conceived and substantially written--by Cliff and another of our favorite writers, the patrician Bob Geiger--before the embarrassing collapse of the McCranky campaign, which seemed to drag the book down the drain with it. Until, with the GOP presidential field looking like some sort of circus freak show, the McCranky campaign was reborn, and The Real McCain was back in business.

By tossing The Real McCain in my shopping cart, thereby getting free shipping on both books, I added only about six bucks to the total I was about to pay for just Nixonland.


AND ONE LAST BOOK NOTE: PERVERSION OF LANGUAGE

I don't want to leave the subject of important new books without a quick mention of Jeffrey Feldman's latest, Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right is Poisoning American Democracy, due out May 1 from enterprising progressive publisher Ig Publishing.

You probably know Jeffrey from his Frameshop blog, in which case you know that he is a careful student of language. I've been tinkering with a set of advance galleys of Outright Barbarous, with a view to bracketing it with one of the most remarkable books I know (as much for its genesis as for its actual content), Victor Klemperer's LTI--Lingua Tertii Imperii (The Language of the Third Reich): A Philologist's Notebook, the study of the Nazi perversion of language which Klemperer (a first cousin of the great conductor Otto Klemperer) extracted after World War II from the remarkable diaries he kept secretly all through the reign of National Socialism. (As it happens the book I'm trying to get through now is the final volume of the Klemperer diaries, from 1945 throuh his death in 1959. It's a tough subway read.)

All smart politicians know that language is important. Smart totalitarians, however, understand that control of language is crucial. Manipulation of the language was a key factor in the rise of the American Far Right. One of these days we need to talk about this a little.

McCAIN AND HILLARY WANT TO FOOL YOU WITH A FAKE GAS TAX HOLIDAY

We can dedicate these to the McCain campaign ploy all over the country

This morning I was inundated with e-mails about some kind of cockamamie Jimi Hendrix porn tape story in the NY Times. Even my baby sister called me and said, "I read about you in the Times today." No, no, no... It's some other Howie Klein in L.A. It isn't me. Yes, I had a quasi-friendship with Hendrix in the late 60s but not close enough for this kind of thing. And, sure, I've had my share of vices; but porn was never one of them. The other notable occurrence in my world this morning, before running off to the airport, was watching Bush' execrable and venal speech on the economy. It made me sick just seeing him still-- even with his approval ratings headed towards single digits-- just lying his ass off.... and with the same old lies that no one believes anymore. Except McCain. McCain either believes or is making believe he believes. But even Bush couldn't go along with McCain taking the Bush Economic Miracle to it's logical conclusion.

I tried coming up with a coherent post about it before catching my plane. I love the art work Lucas did based The Blind Leading the Blind but few minutes ago I found Krugman's column, Gas Tax Follies (same edition as the Hendrix case of mistaken identity). I respect Krugman a lot and I've been disturbed over the course of the last few months as he leaned heavily in the Hillary direction. What, I thought, could make him so blind? It looks like her signing on to a version of McCain's cynical summer gas holiday ploy has finally opened his eyes (a little tiny bit). He terms McCain proposal "a really bad idea" and notes that "Hillary Clinton is emulating him (but with a twist that makes her plan pointless rather than evil), and Barack Obama, to his credit, says no."

Why doesn’t cutting the gas tax this summer make sense? It’s Econ 101 tax incidence theory: if the supply of a good is more or less unresponsive to the price, the price to consumers will always rise until the quantity demanded falls to match the quantity supplied. Cut taxes, and all that happens is that the pretax price rises by the same amount. The McCain gas tax plan is a giveaway to oil companies, disguised as a gift to consumers.

Is the supply of gasoline really fixed? For this coming summer, it is. Refineries normally run flat out in the summer, the season of peak driving. Any elasticity in the supply comes earlier in the year, when refiners decide how much to put in inventories. The McCain/Clinton gas tax proposal comes too late for that. So it’s Econ 101: the tax cut really goes to the oil companies.

The Clinton twist is that she proposes paying for the revenue loss with an excess profits tax on oil companies. In one pocket, out the other. So it’s pointless, not evil. But it is pointless, and disappointing.

I happen to agree with Hillary on the excess profits tax. She's right and Krugman's wrong but Hillary, Krugman and everyone in Washington knows that that proposal will get through Congress and be signed by Bush on the same day that Bush has Cheney arrested for treason and sent to Guantanamo for enhanced questioning. Hillary is being deceptive and treating the voters like fools to even bring it up in the context of a summer gas price reduction. It's a cheap Inside the Beltway trick that shows that she and McCain are just opposite sides of the same worthless coin. In case you missed it last time:

How far will "Big Dick" Cheney go to get whatever the hell he wants? We might equally well ask, "How deep is the ocean? How high are the stars?"

"Vice Presidential staff have previously testified before Congress and I am aware of no authority -- and counsel's letter cites none -- for the proposition that such staff could be immune from testimony before Congress."
--House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers [right], responding to the VP's office's latest preposterous claims that his staff isn't accountable to Congress, no way, no how


Am I the only one who did a double take, and then giggled, at the opening line of Dan Froomkin's Washingtonpost.com column today, "Cheney's Total Impunity"? You tell me:

"How far will Vice President Cheney go to shield himself and his office from public scrutiny?"

How far will Vice President Cheney go??? Doesn't the very act of asking such a question suggest that somewhere in the universe there exists some limit to how far this vice president will go to get what he wants? Does anyone really believe that such a limit exists?

Let's say someone had asked back in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, "How far will Vice President Cheney go to get us into war in Iraq?" Can anyone think of anything, anything at all, he wouldn't--in fact didn't--do?

So the latest blunt refusal to offer up Cheney chief of staff David Addington for congressional testimony runs true to form. Indeed it's heartening to see that stripping Big Dick's boy Irving Libby from the team hasn't led to any diminution of the gall and effrontery level. Because, of course, the Dickster still has Addington, the remaining half of his old pair of Spawns of Satan Bookends, on the job.

And the loads of crap these so-called legal geniuses of the Bush regime come up with--my goodness, if you submitted one of these briefs as a paper in a Government 101 class, you'd be lucky to come away with an F-minus.

Here's our Dan's take on the latest round:

Cheney's Total Impunity

By Dan Froomkin

How far will Vice President Cheney go to shield himself and his office from public scrutiny?

Last spring, Cheney asserted that he wasn't subject to executive-branch rules about classified information because he wasn't actually part of the executive branch.

Now his office argues that he and his staff are completely immune from congressional oversight. That's right: Completely immune.

Cheney's latest claim came in a response to a House Judiciary Committee request for vice presidential chief of staff David S. Addington to testify about his central role in developing the administration's torture policies.

Cheney lawyer Kathryn L. Wheelbarger wrote back: "Congress lacks the constitutional power to regulate by a law what a Vice President communicates in the performance of the Vice President's official duties, or what a Vice President recommends that a President communicate in the President's performance of official duties, and therefore those matters are not within the Committee's power of inquiry."

As it happens, that was only one of three startling responses in Wheelbarger's letter.

She also wrote: "The Chief of Staff to the Vice President is an employee of the Vice President, and not the President, and therefore is not in a position to speak on behalf of the President."

Disregard, for a moment, the fact that Addington wasn't actually asked to speak on behalf of the president - but about his "unique information and perspective." Contrary to Wheelbarger's central assertion, Addington actually does work for the president. When he took over the job previously held by Scooter Libby -- who has since been convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in the Valerie Plame CIA leak case -- Addington also inherited Libby's title as "assistant to the president." See, for instance, his official White House profile.

Cheney's office somehow managed to omit Addington from the White House staff list submitted to Congress. But Addington isn't on Cheney's public Senate payroll either.

Finally, Wheelbarger cites, "separate from any question of immunity from testimony," questions of privilege "protecting state secrets, attorney-client communications, deliberations, and communications among Presidents, Vice Presidents, and their advisers."

In a letter to Addington, Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers yesterday lamented Wheelbarger's "legalistic and argumentative response" and warned that if Addington refuses to appear voluntarily, he may be subpoenaed. (Conyers issued the same threat to former Attorney General John Ashcroft and former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo, both of whom also declined to appear voluntarily.)

The Conyers letter cites media reports that describe Addington as the driving force behind the administration's most controversial legal arguments. Among the citations: Jane Mayer in the New Yorker, Phillippe Sands in Vanity Fair, Barton Gellman and Jo Becker in the Washington Post and Chitra Ragavan in U.S. News.

And Conyers notes: "Vice Presidential staff have previously testified before Congress and I am aware of no authority -- and counsel's letter cites none -- for the proposition that such staff could be immune from testimony before Congress."

He also attempts to turn one of Cheney's arguments against him: "While the issue of the immunity of senior advisors to the President is currently under litigation, there has been no suggestion that such immunity, even if recognized, would reach to the Vice President's office, an entity that, as you well know, is constitutionally quite different from the Office of the President.

"As to privilege, such concerns are traditionally and appropriately raised in response to specific questions and not as a threshold reason to decline a Congressional Committee's invitation to appear."

And Conyers concludes: "Presumably, you believe that whatever actions you took were necessary and comported with the law; in such circumstances, I cannot imagine why you would decline to appear and set the record straight. The American people deserve no less."

I know it gets tiresome to keep repeating it, but that's not going to stop me from asking once again how far anyone thinks the loyal squadrons of Republican rubber-stampers--in government and in the media--will tolerate the assertion of even the slightest privilege from the next Democratic president. Why don't we get together a pool to predict the exact decibel level of the right-wing stuck pigs' squealing?

#

EVEN BUSH IS LAUGHING AT McCAIN'S CYNICAL GAS TAX PROPOSAL

The McBush economic team

When I saw the name on the article I thought it was by John McCain's embedded publicist at the Washington Post. Then I realized it was in the NY Times and saw it was John Broder, not the Post's pathetic old hack with the same last name. The story highlights what Broder calls Democratic division over McCain's cynical summer gas tax holiday. As soon as Obama pointed out that it was a bad idea, Hillary jumped in to support their respective campaign's common enemy: the American people.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton lined up with Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, in endorsing a plan to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for the summer travel season. But Senator Barack Obama, Mrs. Clinton’s Democratic rival, spoke out firmly against the proposal, saying it would save consumers little and do nothing to curtail oil consumption and imports.

While Mr. Obama’s view is shared by environmentalists and many independent energy analysts, his position allowed Mrs. Clinton to draw a contrast with her opponent in appealing to the hard-hit middle-class families and older Americans who have proven to be the bedrock of her support. She has accused Mr. Obama of being out of touch with ordinary Americans who are struggling to meet their mortgages and gas up their cars and trucks.

Mrs. Clinton said at a rally on Monday morning in Graham, N.C., that she would introduce legislation to impose a windfall-profits tax on oil companies and use the revenue to suspend the gasoline tax temporarily.

Above I referred to McCain as cynical, which he certainly is, but in the interest of fair play, I might add that Mrs. Clinton's cynicism is every bit as virulent as his. I'm so sure Miss McConnell, who has obstructed everything the Democrats have tried to do and even every bipartisan proposal to ease the energy crisis, is going to allow a windfall-profit tax on one of the Republican Party's biggest corporate donors, the oil and gas industry. And Bush is just frothing at the mouth to sign it, right? Look, McCain has made a record of not even voting for the most dire national security needs-- like safety in our ports and equipment for our troops in the field-- if it meant closing corporate tax loopholes or doing away with even a fraction of the tax breaks for people making over a $1,000,000 a year. So... this is a total non-starter.

Bush's "economic speech" this morning was one of the most nakedly partisan rants I've heard from the bumbling idiot in months.
"It's a tough time for our economy," he muttered. "Across our country, many Americans are understandably anxious about issues affecting their pocketbook, from gas and food prices to mortgage and tuition bills. They're looking to their elected leaders in Congress for action. Unfortunately, on many of these issues, all they're getting is delay." The Bush Economic Miracle was replaced by the Bush Recession, in his mind at least, by Democratic foot dragging on his incredibly unsound economic agenda-- an agenda that has been disastrous for the economy and for the American people. But what does this imbecile know? Two weeks ago he seemed flabbergasted when some mentioned that the price of gas was near $4/gallon. [I wish it would go back to that in L.A., where it is heading towards $5/gallon, thanks to the Bush-Cheney Energy Plan to enrich the few at the expense of the rest of us.] Would he like to leave the country with a full fledged Depression instead of a Recession?

But even the doltish Bush isn't stupid enough to buy into McCain's and Hillary's gas price cynicism. When a reporter asked Bush about the McCain-Hillary plan he just smirked, babbled some noncommittal answer-- not wanting to mention that McCain is even more clueless than he is-- and said he didn't want to inject himself into the ongoing presidential race.

The presidential race? McCain and the Hilldog are talking about this summer and this summer, alas, we'll have the same jerk in the White House who first stole the election in 2000. He doesn't want to inject himself? He's the only one who could sign or veto this "proposal," which is strictly campaign fodder, as even Bush recognized.

Meanwhile, not everything is getting more expensive every day. Housing prices dropped in February at the fastest rate ever, a widely watched index showed on Tuesday, reflecting that the housing slump is gaining momentum and showing no signs of letting up.


UPDATE: OBAMA REJECTS THE DC INSIDERS' PERSPECTIVE ON THE ECONOMY

"At a time when so many Americans are struggling, we deserve better than special interest giveaways from the White House and transparent political gimmicks on the campaign trail. George Bush's solution to a recession and an energy crisis of historic proportions is warmed-over Washington proposals that would pad oil company profits and give more tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans who don't need them and didn't ask for them.

"Meanwhile, the two Washington candidates in this race are playing the same old Washington game where you try to distract voters without doing anything to deliver meaningful relief for working families. As President, I'll pursue real change by providing a tax cut of up to $1000 for working families, and investing $150 billion in clean, affordable, renewable sources of energy to create millions of jobs and end our addiction to oil. It's time to stop dusting off tired Washington ideas like gas tax holidays and drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge so that we can finally be honest about the challenges we face, bring this country together, and push back against the special interests that have blocked progress for decades."

THE BIG PRIMARY NEXT WEEK: NORTH CAROLINA

Ex-Senator John Edwards could do the transformative agenda he has espoused a great deal of good by making an endorsement. One candidate is a committed, grassroots progressive and the other is a pitiful Big Money corporate shill, in some ways only marginally better than the Republican incumbent. No, no, I'm not talking about Hillary; she may be a corporate shill but she's certainly better than the Republican incumbent and she's also much better than his sadly transformed doppelgangerish would-be replacement. You see, while everyone else is urging the Edwardses to do what Governor Easley just did and endorse in the presidential race-- where I doubt he would have much impact-- I would like him to do the right thing in the race for the U.S. Senate seat, currently held by pathetic rubber stamp Republican Elizabeth Dole.

In a race like this, where not many people are aware of the giant chasm between the two candidates, Edwards really could make a difference. One candidate, Kay Hagan, stands for everything he claims to detest. She is owned, lock, stock and barrel, by the same pernicious Big Money interests that own Dole-- and whom Edwards just spent two years railing against. The other candidate-- the one endorsed by Blue America-- is Jim Neal and he has a long way to go in the next 7 days if he's going to be able to beat back the Establishment and give North Carolina voters a real choice-- other than a basically meaningless choice between generic party labels-- in November.

Hagan rarely goes on the record saying anything. Her victory plan is to just be the establishment Democrat against the outsider in the primary and the generic Democrat against the hated Republican in November. And when she does go on record about something, she comes out against the basic values and principles that differentiate between the party of FDR and the party of George Bush. A corporate tool like Chuck Schumer may love her but she can't be trusted on choice, is as clueless as Dole on Iraq, is basically a George Bush Republican when it comes to tax policy, weak on economic policy, weak on ethics, adamantly unwilling to be pinned down on Equal Rights, on the wrong side of the health care issue, untrustworthy and confused about torture, weak on privacy rights, absolutely plutocratic when it comes to campaign finance reform, etc. She sounds like one of them, not one of us-- and certainly not the kind of progressive Democrat that Edwards has evolved into. In fact, you have to ask yourself, is Kay Hagan really a Democrat in anything but name? Hers is the party of corporate campaign contributions that are exchanged for favors at the expense of regular folks. 

It isn't likely that a Republican-light version of Elizabeth Dole is going to beat Elizabeth Dole, regardless of what Chuck Schumer's lizard brain is telling him. A few days ago the weekly paper in North Carolina's most Democratic area made passionate endorsements of the two candidates for real change-- Barack Obama for president and Jim Neal for U.S. Senator. The ten cogent reason they list for endorsing Obama are all also applicable to Neal-- except for #9:

He has a better chance of beating John McCain than Hillary Clinton does.

Jim Neal has the only chance of beating Elizabeth Dole. But the editors don't need to give Jim Neal a me-too endorsement. They had a whole set of reasons why he is a far better candidates-- and would make a far better U.S. Senator-- than Kay Hagan.

On the issues, there's a clear progressive choice in the Democratic primary: Chapel Hill businessman Jim Neal is our pick to take on Republican Sen. Elizabeth Dole come November. And let's put it right out there: Neal is openly gay, which should no more influence whether he gets your vote than the fact that he's also openly white. What should influence it is his platform: Neal opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq and supports getting our troops out now; he supports universal health care; is against capital punishment; wants to scrap No Child Left Behind, Bush's counterproductive education program; proposes making the federal tax system more progressive; and advocates an Apollo-style program to wean the country from imported oil and develop alternative-energy sources, including conservation.

On gay rights, Neal supports full equality, including marriage, as a matter of law. But he also recognizes that the First Amendment guarantees religious freedom when it comes to whether same-sex unions should be sanctioned by various faiths.

Given his background as a Wall Street investment banker and venture capitalist, Neal is at his best when dissecting the causes of the nation's widening gap between rich and poor and the erosion of middle-class jobs. He calls it "unconscionable" that corporate CEOs make 400 times as much money as the average worker. His prescription for fixing what ails us includes sweeping investments in education and our economic infrastructure, not war, and for junking free-trade policies in favor of fair-trade ones. He thinks the federal government should prepare to buy mortgages and refinance them to prevent foreclosures.

CONGRESSIONAL HISPANIC CAUCUS COMPLAINS ABOUT LOU DOBBS TO TIME WARNER-- CNN RESPONDS: "CAGO EN DIOS"

I was exaggerating... un poco. The message that Time Warner and CNN actually sent the Congressional Hispanic Caucus was "Me da igual." So why is a heavily regulated company-- one very dependent on the goodwill of government-- dissing 20 members of Congress? Jennifer Yachnin has the full story in today's Roll Call. [Disclaimer: I was president at one of their divisions and know most of the people involved in this story but I have no financial connection to Time Warner any longer-- and all my remaining stock options expired, completely worthless, 2 months ago.]

When Rahm Emanuel's reactionary Know Nothing from North Carolina introduced an anti-immigrant proposal in Congress-- and then worked with the GOP to embarrass Nancy Pelosi and defeat freshmen Democrats-- it was the 20 embers of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus who stood up and said "No." They slapped down the reactionary and racist Heath Shuler and put him back in his place (in the peanut gallery with his pal Tom Tancredo).

Now they're taking on a far more formidable for, America's most vicious xenophobe, CNN's Lou Dobbs, a man who makes a living by stirring up hated every single day against immigrants. Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and CHC chairman Joe Baca (D-CA) sent Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes a letter complaining that CNN presents consistently biased coverage of immigration issues, biased against immigrants and against politicians looking for a serious and practical solution.

CHC leaders expressed outrage that their appeals for a meeting with Bewkes have been rebuffed for several months, and that even letters to the Time Warner head have landed instead in the hands of CNN President Jim Walton.

"We are deeply offended that you did not take the time or effort to respond to a request from twenty Members of the United States House of Representatives and a United States Senator, but instead simply passed the letter along to Mr. Walton," the lawmakers wrote. "It is additionally offensive that you did so on a topic as important and sensitive as your company's treatment and portrayal of Latinos in this country."

Representatives of Time Warner did not return calls Friday, and a CNN spokeswoman declined to speak for attribution.

In an April 23 letter to Menendez and Baca, Walton said Time Warner's corporate chief would be unable to address lawmakers' concerns.

"As a matter of long-standing policy, Time Warner's corporate management never interferes with the editorial decision-making of its news operations," Walton wrote.

According to the letter, Walton offered to meet with both lawmakers, as well as any other CHC member, noting that corporate employees and Congressional staff had been in contact in recent weeks.

"I share your interest in providing CNN's viewers with the accurate and balanced reporting and commentary they need to make informed decisions, and in that regard, value very much your perspective and feedback in our programming," Walton wrote.

But Hispanic lawmakers dismissed Walton's explanations.

"It really is a slap in the face, that as many members as there are in the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, in the House and the Senate, that we don't get a direct response," Menendez said in an interview on Friday.

According to Menendez, many of CNN's news programs have adopted "the language Lou Dobbs uses," referring to the host of "Lou Dobbs Tonight," who uses the platform to complain about illegal immigration.

"The news program has become the equivalent of opinion and not information," Menendez said, asserting that news anchors opt for language describing "hordes" of immigrants crossing borders, and use phrases such as "illegal" rather than "undocumented" when describing such immigrants.

Baca said he met with Walton several weeks ago to raise the matter-- not as a CHC representative, he said, but as an individual lawmaker. He recommended that the network produce a show to "counterbalance" Dobbs.

"It was a very positive meeting. I said look, there's a lot of good programs that CNN puts on, and we watch a lot of it. We're only talking about a specific individual. The other programs are pretty good in terms of the news that they bring out," Baca said.

He said the CHC's opposition to Dobbs does not infringe on the First Amendment.

"You still have freedom of speech, but you've got to put out the facts and information. He lavishes it in a negative connotation, and that goes beyond freedom of speech. He's a news broadcaster and he should be fair and objective," Baca said. "He oversteps his bounds on the freedom of speech."

HRC HAS SOME BAD POLITICAL ADVICE FOR GAY PEOPLE AND THEIR ALLIES

So whose side is HRC on, anyway?

In the gay political universe HRC doesn't only stand for the candidate working with John McCain to tear down the Democrat McCain will face in November. It also stands for something far more loathsome and treacherous than Hillary, the Human Rights Campaign. HRC is an Inside the Beltway kiss ass advocacy group for gay people. I was very proud in 1997 when they gave me a Leadership Equality Award for my work at fostering equality in the workplace at Warner Brothers. I even wrote them into my will.

But what opened my eyes to what HRC has become was their endorsement of Holy Joe Lieberman over Ned Lamont. After I learned more about them I smashed my award and removed them from my will. HRC is one of those Inside the Beltway organizations that has long ago lost sight of its original mandate. Instead of fighting for gay equality, they fight to win DC status games and to enhance the future career prospects of the staff. When it comes to electoral politics, you can almost always expect the worst from HRC.

This past February their in house magazine prominently featured Republican rubber stamp and fake moderate Susan Collins (R-ME), including a 2 page spread giving the false impression that Collins is not the enemy of gay people. One of the more outrageous parts of their interview with Collins is a bit about the Gang of 14. They make it sound like her membership in it should be praised, but that’s pretty naive considering that one of the only accomplishments of the Gang was to ensure the confirmation of viciously homophobic, right-wing crazies on the federal bench like Janice Rogers Brown, Priscilla Owen, and Bill Pryor. But that's exactly what HRC has turned into-- an organization so concerned with looking "mainstream" and "adult" Inside the Beltway, that they will support the worst enemies of gay people on the political scene.

Today HRC announced its endorsements for Senate races around the country. They are asking the gay community to donate money to 10 cash-rich incumbents and four Democratic challengers, Jeanne Shaheen (DLC-NH), Mark Udall (D-CO), Tom Udall (D-NM), and Al Franken (D-MN). Among the incumbents is Collins, of course, who is running against a Democratic congressman, Tom Allen, who's voting record on gay issues is excellent and who is a true friend of the gay community and someone who, again, unlike Collins, will never ever, vote to confirm rabid homophobic judges. Among the other incumbents they endorsed are some outstanding senators like Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), John Kerry (D-MA), Tom Harkin (D-IA), and Jack Reed (D-RI) and at least one with a spotty voting record, Louisiana's conservative Democrat, Mary Landrieu, who, like Collins, routinely rubber stamps homophobic judges the Bush Regime pushes for lifetime appointments.

This morning I called Tom Allen and asked if I missing something about why HRC has endorsed Collins. Tom, the most positive campaigner I've ever met, never wants to say a negative word about anyone. Instead he wanted to talk about his own record on his support for gay people. “My record of fighting discrimination on all levels and for standing up for equality is consistent. When I was on the Portland City Council in Maine, we led the state in nondiscrimination practices by banning bias based on sexual orientation for housing, credit and employment. As a Member of Congress, I have consistently supported fairness and equality measures while opposing discrimination. As a member of the Senate, I will continue to do what is right for all people. Specifically, I will not support judicial nominees who don’t understand fairness and equal rights.” It would have been nice if HRC could have at least wrung something like that out of Collins before sending a confusing signal to gays and lesbians in Maine.

HRC's own scorecard for the 109th Congress-- the 110th isn't out yet-- gave Tom Allen a 100% rating and gave Collins a 78% although that rating doesn't reflect her votes and maneuvering for anti-gay judges. (She voted for both Alito and Roberts). None the less, aside from fundraising against Tom on her behalf, they claim they are also doing "on-the-ground organizing [and] GOTV efforts" on behalf of Collins and pushing her at gay pride events.

But it was a Senate race they chose to ignore that is the most shocking and disappointing element of their announcement today. North Carolina has two extreme right wing senators, Elizabeth Dole and Richard Burr, each of whom can always be counted on to do whatever they can to make the lives of gay men and women less palatable and less safe. One, Elizabeth Dole, is up for re-election in November. There are two Democrats in a neck and neck primary battle to take her on, Republican-lite Establishment-backed Kay Hagan and grassroots progressive Jim Neal. Frankly, I don't know where Hagan stands on gay issues. I do know where Neal stands-- 100% with the gay community, of which he is an upfront member. Yes, one of the first times that an uncloseted gay man is running for the U.S. Senate-- in a race he can win-- and HRC is... abstaining. When we reached Jim this morning, he seemed disappointed. "There's no question their endorsement would have helped in fundraising and I certainly would have liked to have had it. People look to the HRC to encourage participation and promote change in the political system. Is it doing that? That's a valid question, and after this election is over, I think we need to look at groups like HRC and their endorsement process." Amen!

Tom Allen and Jim Neal have both been endorsed by Blue America. If you're a member of HRC how about skipping your HRC dues this year and sending the money to where it will do some good instead? Like here, for Tom and Jim. By the way, the first five donations today of at least $30 get, as a thank you, an autographed copy of Al Franken's book The Truth.


UPDATE: PAM SCHOOLS ME ON WHERE KAY HAGEN STANDS... THE MYSTERY DEEPENS

Pam pointed out this afternoon that Jim Neal is very clear on where he stands on gay issues. Kay Hagan? Not so much.

Even when I saw Hagan's communications coordinator Colleen Flanagan in person at the BlueNC blogger gathering yesterday (many pro-LGBT candidates were there, including Jim Neal), she didn't say when or if Hagan would issue any positions on:

1. Federal hate crimes legislation.
2. Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA).
3. "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" repeal
4. The Uniting American Families Act (H.R. 2221, S. 1328)
5. The federal Defense of Marriage Act
6. Whether her view that the definition of marriage should be left up to state law can be reconciled with 1967's Loving v. Virginia, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that invalidated state bans on interracial marriages and whether that should have been left a state matter.

This is basic stuff. Sen. Hagan has in fact sponsored anti-discrimination measures at the state level, but for whatever reason, she can't manage the gumption to state her positions on the above for publication. A simple "Yes" or "No" would have been clear. Follow up questions to the campaign were not only not answered, but not acknowledged in any way, as I said above.

If HRC is looking at who would be the best candidate on our issues, we already have a non-responsive fossil sitting in that seat right now-- Elizabeth Dole. No matter what you think of Jim Neal, he has been both responsive and clear on our issues, and Kay Hagan has been MIA.

NOTHING COULD BE MORE APT THAN ROVE WORKING FOR McCAIN

Lucas updates Lukacs

I haven't read a biography of Karl Rove and I don't know when he made his particular pact with Satan. I do know he started working for the Utah Republican Party when he was still in college and that that was followed by stints working for Bob Bennett and then for Ralph Smith's unsuccessful re-election bid in Illinois. Like Cheney and the majority of the Bush Regime higher ups, he gamed and manipulated the system to avoid fighting in the Vietnam War. His first documented criminal activity involving political campaigns was in 1970 when he used false ID to sneak into the campaign office of Alan Dixon (D-IL) and steal campaign letterhead so he could forge and distribute fake flyers in order to disrupt a Dixon rally. After he was exposed, Rove excused this earliest known example of his criminal behavior in politics as "a youthful prank at the age of 19 and I regret it." Perhaps if he had been punished then he wouldn't have gone on to commit the serious crimes he has since.

After Rove dropped out of college he went to work for the Nixon campaign under future federal prisoner Donald Segretti, from whom he learned even more about lying, cheating and corrupting democracy. He also became close with another GOP practitioner of filthy campaign tactics, Lee Atwater. He was well on the way to a life of crime.

There were other chances to save Rove's soul as a young man but he was in the Republican Party where saving souls is a catch phrase you use to lure in sucker votes, not something anyone tackles seriously. Ironically, the one person who did take Rove's serial criminality seriously was a secular Republican, George H.W. Bush, this one's father. In 1973 Rove, then trying to steal an intra-party election-- for himself, as chairman of the College Republicans-- made the Washington Post for the first time. The article (August 10, 1973) was titled, "Republican Party Probes Official as Teacher of Tricks." Nixon had the FBI investigate Rove. After it was determined that Rove had indeed stolen the election and that he had no morals and would stoop to any level to win, Bush senior made sure he got the job and later promoted him into other jobs. (Eventually he fired him for leaking material during the Reagan-Bush 1980 presidential campaign.) One of his jobs for Bush had been to run errands and one led to a meeting with George II. Rove, who many gay Insiders will swear is a closet homosexual, fell head over heals in love (literally) with young Bush: "Huge amounts of charisma, swagger, cowboy boots, flight jacket, wonderful smile, just charisma-- you know, wow" (The Guardian, October 9, 2004- The Brains).

Rove married a wealthy Houston socialite in 1976 but she divorced him soon after, purportedly because he was more interested in men than in women. Eventually he managed to find another woman to marry him and even managed to father a child, all part of a life built on deception and self-loathing. Ironically, Rove helped Bush II win his Texas governorship by planting stories that Ann Richards' campaign was dominated by lesbians and "homosexual activists." Despite his own closeted homosexuality he has never shrunk from playing the gay card-- even when it was false-- against his opponents.

As time went on Rove bounced from campaign to campaign and was always involved in dirty tricks, more often than not crossing the line into criminal behavior. He has never been held accountable in any meaningful way and his descent into criminality has accelerated over time. In 1992 George H.W. Bush fired him from his presidential campaign for planting a negative story with Bob Novak about a close Bush friend and financier, Robert Mosbacher. It would not be the last time Rove used Novak to spread his poison.

I don't mean to go through every instance of Rove's criminal behavior; that would take up the whole day. I just want to bring up that on the same day the disgraced former advisor to the most hated president in history decided to offer some unsolicited "advice" to Barack Obama, the case that many hope will finally land him in prison may be breaking. Marcy at Emptywheel has the whole low down on Rove's troubles and how he (with the assistance of Newsweek writer Michael Isikoff) is attempting to worm out of them again.

Oh, and about the "advice" to Obama. It's just a thinly veiled typically vicious Rovian attack on Obama's strengths, part of his job as an advisor for... you guessed it, the Senate's most deceitful phony-baloney hypocrite, John W. McCain.


Driving to the airport the other day I was listening to the Thom Hartmann Show and heard an interview with Gov. Don Siegelman. I know what a criminal Rove is but this was actually astounding. Please listen:

THE MORTGAGE INDUSTRY FIGHTS FOR ITS RIGHT TO PARTY

I went to a lovely party this weekend. And there were so many smart people there. Two who I was talking with-- both health care experts-- were absolutely positive than no matter who was elected president, there was absolutely no chance that there would be any transformational change in the way the people of this country receive health care. Gee, I thought that was part of the reason we were electing Democrats in a big way this year. But what do I know?

Today's NY Times has a story in the Business Section that probably belongs on page one. It explains why some things get done and why some things don't. It's only trying to talk about the mortgage industry. But the health care industry is much, much worse. Stephen Labaton, who has decided-- or was assigned-- to tackle the issues begins by mentioning that the mortgage industry is fighting back-- intensively-- against threats of regulation. Societies regulate industry when industry's greed gets out of control and threatens the well being of society. Despite Republicans, meat packing plants had to be regulated because... well, people were dying. The "free market" wasn't quite righting the wrongs fast enough. How many more families need to lose their homes before people start dragging mortgage bank executives out and hanging them from lamp posts? Do you think a jury would find anyone guilty? Not around here.

As the Federal Reserve completes work on rules to root out abuses by lenders, its plan has run into a buzz saw of criticism from bankers, mortgage brokers and other parts of the housing industry. One common industry criticism is that at a time of tight credit, tighter rules could make many mortgages more expensive by creating more paperwork and potentially exposing lenders to more lawsuits.

To the chagrin of consumer groups that have complained that the proposed rules are not strong enough, the industry’s criticism has already prompted the Fed to consider narrowing the scope of the plan so it applies to fewer loans.

The debate over new mortgage standards comes in response to a severe crisis in the housing and financial markets that many economists trace back to overly loose credit and abusive loans. Those practices, combined with low interest rates, led to inflated market values that have declined rapidly in recent months as investors have begun to lose confidence in the financial instruments tied to those loans.

Congress is usually easy to buy off-- less so under Democrats, but... well, still not that hard. A conservative coalition of virtually all Republicans, the quasi-Republican Blue Dogs and the insidious Rahm Emanuel Caucus can always be counted on to thwart the will of the working and middle class... as long as their members are well greased  by their friends from K Street.

In 2006 the finance, insurance and real estate industries donated a total of $258,824,573 to candidates for office, most of it to Republicans and reactionary Democrats. So far this year-- and we're not even halfway done-- these public-minded industrialists have already given $209,078,445, an amount estimated to reach around $750,000,000 before November. Isn't that special? 54% has gone to Democrats, although much of it to very conservative Democrats who work closely with the GOP to push the agendas of these paymasters. Not counting presidential candidates, all of whom got huge amounts (Hillary the most by far-- $17,060,270), the biggest congressional benefactors of this largess were Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell, Norm Coleman, John Cornyn, Richard Durbin, and Max Baucus, all of whom-- with the exception of Durbin-- can be counted on to always put the agenda of business interests ahead of the interests of their constituents and of American families. The biggest recipient of these legalized bribes through her own PAC is notorious Blue Dog villain Melissa Bean among Democrats and Mitch McConnell among Republicans. Other big players in tamping down the idea of effective, let alone transformative, legislation in this area who take massive legalized bribes through their PACs are Rahm Emanuel, Norm Coleman, Susan Collins, Eric Cantor, John Boehner, John Sununu, and Steny Hoyer, each of whom builds his own power base inside Congress by doling out the cash to other members who... vote "right." [Note: many of this industry's favorite bribe recipients from 2006 have left or have announced they are leaving Congress including defeated Republicans Rick Santorum ($676,095), Sue Kelly ($459,631), James Talent ($457,235), Mike DeWine ($431,086), Mark Kennedy ($422,966), and George "Macacawitz" Allen ($400,936), as well as retiring Republicans Deborah Pryce ($793,128), Richard Baker ($567,157), Denny Hastert ($461,000), Jim McCrery ($437,500), and Tom Reynolds ($421,760). Lucky they fond so many Blue Dogs willing to sell out their constituents or what ever would have happened to all that money!

It's unlikely that Congress will act this year and the weak, laughable "plan presented by the Fed was proposed by its chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, and Randall S. Kroszner, a former White House economist in the Bush administration who is now a Fed governor and leads the Fed’s consumer and community affairs committee."

The plan would not cover existing mortgages but would apply only to new ones. It would force mortgage companies to show that customers can realistically afford their mortgages. It would require lenders to disclose the hidden fees often rolled into interest payments. And it would prohibit certain types of advertising considered misleading.

The Fed is expected to issue final rules this summer.

Earlier this month, as the comment period was about to close, the Fed was deluged with more than 5,000 comments, mostly from lenders who said the proposals could affect loans that have not presented problems. Some bankers and brokers also said the rules would discourage them from lending to some creditworthy borrowers.

The plan was criticized in separate filings by three of the industry’s most influential trade groups-- the American Bankers Association, the Mortgage Bankers Association and the Independent Community Bankers of America. More modest concerns about some of the provisions were also raised by the National Association of Home Builders and the National Association of Realtors.

...Some economists and housing experts say the Fed’s lax oversight helped enable lending companies to reap enormous profits by providing millions of unsuitable and abusive loans to homeowners who often did not fully understand the terms or appreciate their risk... [and] consumer groups say that the proposed rules are already weak and that efforts to further weaken them would render them all but useless.

And that's the idea. In fact, that's why this industry is willing to offer legislators close to a billion dollars in bribes this year.

“The Fed has accurately diagnosed that this is a brain tumor and responded by prescribing an aspirin,” said Kathleen E. Keest, a former state regulator who is now a senior policy counsel at the Center for Responsible Lending, a group supporting home ownership. “In the industry, there is a fair amount of denial. They just don’t get it. There is a calamity within the industry, and they don’t have a new script yet, so they rely on the old script, which is that regulation will raise costs.”

But, she went on, “What we now see is that the unintended consequences of deregulation are worse. Their line is that regulation will cut back access to credit. That’s been their line ever since the small loan laws were adopted in the early 1900s.”

At the same time, letters urging the Fed to further tighten the rules were sent by Sheila C. Bair, the Republican head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, as well as senior members of the House Financial Services Committee.

In her letter, Ms. Bair, whose agency regulates many banks, urged the Fed to apply the proposed restrictions to loans that are three percentage points or higher than equivalent Treasuries. To prevent lenders from evading the limit by creatively structuring the loan and fees, she also suggested that the Fed impose the tighter restrictions if the loan fees exceeded a dollar amount.

Of course if you listen to McCain, you just get the idea that a bunch of irresponsible home buyers were gaming the system and show get second jobs and stop taking so many vacations and pay off the banks.

IS McCAIN'S FOREIGN POLICY AGENDA EVEN WORSE THAN HIS DOMESTIC AGENDA?

I love it that people have been digging some of the posts here at DWT. One steady digger, Harry, has gotten very pushy lately though. He's always asking when the next post is going up and demanding more, more, more. After I posted on McCain's blatant hypocrisy on fiscal matters, Harry demanded a companion piece on McCain's even more dangerous stance on foreign affairs.

Ken and I have been posting about the dangers of McCain's warmongering and his truculent schoolboy bully attitude towards other countries. After 8 years of Bush and Cheney, it's the last thing America needs! When Bush was running for President in 2000 he laid out a "humble foreign policy" to the voters. Please take a look at him explaining it then:



After he started attacking countries, breaking treaties and making outrageous demands on (small) sovereign nations, he explained that 9/11 changed everything. Yet, reading Against The Tide by Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee paints a very, very different picture. Exactly one day after the Supreme Court made Bush president, Cheney came striding over to the Senate for a meeting with the Republican moderate caucus. Keep in mind that half a dozen far right GOP senators had been defeated and that the Senate was evenly split 50 Democrats to 50 Republicans. Chafee felt that Cheney was coming over to meet with the moderates about getting a centrist consensus together. Was he wrong!

In steady, quiet tones, the Vice President-elect laid out a shockingly divisive political agenda for the new Bush administration, glossing over nearly every pledge the Republican ticket had made to the American voter. President-elect Bush had promised that healing, but now we moderate Republicans were hearing Richard Cheney articulate the real agenda: A clashist approach on every issue, big and small, and any attempt at consensus would be a sign of weakness. We would seek confrontation on every front. He said nothing about education or the environment or health care; it was all about these new issues that were rarely, if ever, touted in the campaign. The new administration would divide Americans into red and blue, and divide nations into those who stand with us or against us. I knew that what the Vice President-elect was saying would rip the closely divided Congress apart. We moderates had often voted with President Clinton on things that powerful Republican constituencies didn't like: an increase in the minimum wage, a patients' bill of rights, and campaign finance reform. Mr. Cheney knew this, but he ticked off the issues at the top of his agenda and did it fearlessly. It made no difference to him that we were potential adversaries; he was going down his to-do list and checking off Confrontation Number 1.

More than anything else, Cheney and his treasonous cabal of future war criminals wanted to attack Iraq. And they were going to do it by hook or by crook. McCain is doing his best to lull Americans into believing he's the Bush they fell for in 2000 instead of the Cheney they got the day after the election. Can't be fooled again? We'll see. The new issue of Newsweek takes measure of McCain's foreign policy pronouncements and paints a picture that makes Cheney look almost moderate! And sane. You see, Cheney and Bush just wanted to attack small, weak countries that couldn't defend themselves. McCain wants to play tough with real countries-- ones that can and will fight back... like Iran, Russia and China.

On March 26, McCain gave a speech on foreign policy in Los Angeles that was billed as his most comprehensive statement on the subject. It contained within it the most radical idea put forward by a major candidate for the presidency in 25 years. Yet almost no one noticed.

In his speech McCain proposed that the United States expel Russia from the G8, the group of advanced industrial countries. Moscow was included in this body in the 1990s to recognize and reward it for peacefully ending the cold war on Western terms, dismantling the Soviet empire and withdrawing from large chunks of the old Russian Empire as well. McCain also proposed that the United States should expand the G8 by taking in India and Brazil-- but pointedly excluded China from the councils of power.

We have spent months debating Barack Obama's suggestion that he might, under some circumstances, meet with Iranians and Venezuelans. It is a sign of what is wrong with the foreign-policy debate that this idea is treated as a revolution in U.S. policy while McCain's proposal has barely registered. What McCain has announced is momentous-- that the United States should adopt a policy of active exclusion and hostility toward two major global powers. It would reverse a decades-old bipartisan American policy of integrating these two countries into the global order, a policy that began under Richard Nixon (with Beijing) and continued under Ronald Reagan (with Moscow). It is a policy that would alienate many countries in Europe and Asia who would see it as an attempt by Washington to begin a new cold war.

...The neoconservative vision within the speech is essentially an affirmation of ideology. Not only does it declare war on Russia and China, it places the United States in active opposition to all nondemocracies. It proposes a League of Democracies, which would presumably play the role that the United Nations now does, except that all nondemocracies would be cast outside the pale. The approach lacks any strategic framework. What would be the gain from so alienating two great powers? How would the League of Democracies fight terrorism while excluding countries like Jordan, Morocco, Egypt and Singapore? What would be the gain to the average American to lessen our influence with Saudi Arabia, the central banker of oil, in a world in which we are still crucially dependent on that energy source?

The single most important security problem that the United States faces is securing loose nuclear materials. A terrorist group can pose an existential threat to the global order only by getting hold of such material. We also have an interest in stopping proliferation, particularly by rogue regimes like Iran and North Korea. To achieve both of these core objectives-- which would make American safe and the world more secure-- we need Russian cooperation. How fulsome is that likely to be if we gratuitously initiate hostilities with Moscow? Dissing dictators might make for a stirring speech, but ordinary Americans will have to live with the complications after the applause dies down.

To reorder the G8 without China would be particularly bizarre. The G8 was created to help coordinate problems of the emerging global economy. Every day these problems multiply-- involving trade, pollution, currencies-- and are in greater need of coordination. To have a body that attempts to do this but excludes the world's second largest economy is to condemn it to failure and irrelevance. International groups are not cheerleading bodies but exist to help solve pressing global crises. Excluding countries won't make the problems go away.

McCain appears to think that he can magically unite the two main strands in the Republican foreign-policy establishment. But he can't. This is not about personalities but about two philosophically divergent views of international affairs. Put together, they will produce infighting and incoherence. We have seen this movie before. We have watched an American president unable to choose between his ideologically driven vice president and his pragmatic secretary of State-- and the result was the catastrophe of George W. Bush's first term. Twenty-five years earlier, we watched another president who believed that he could encompass the entire spectrum of foreign policy. He, too, gave speeches that were drafted by advisers with divergent world views: in that case, Cyrus Vance and Zbigniew Brzezinski. It led to the paralyzing internal battles of the Carter years. Does John McCain want to try this experiment one more time?

A more important question one might ask is if the American people want to try this experiment one more time with John McCain instead of Bush and Cheney.

McCAIN AND HIS $40 MILLION FORTUNE SAY OBAMA IS "INSENSITIVE" TO THE POOR

Click to enlarge

I would bet that the McCains don't pay their servants less than the minimum wage. Of course there's no way to know that because McCain keeps all his expenses hidden by not releasing Cindy's tax returns-- and that is, after all, where all the money is in the McCain household. Her father's beer distributorship bought them their 8 houses, their airplane, cars and extravagant lifestyle. But even if McCain is fair to his domestic servants-- and I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt-- he has always voted his class in the Senate. McCain's record on standing up for the working families of this country is crystal clear; he hasn't. Not ever. Not even a little. He may be a good tipper in restaurants and whore houses but when it comes to giving working families a break, McCain has been a nightmare. You want to know why American jobs get shipped overseas and why American workers who lose their jobs are left in the lurch? Just examine McCain's voting record, a voting record that has tossed the poor, native Americans, veterans, our country's children, and the unemployed under the bus. McCain was one of only 28 right-wing extremists who voted to kill the minimum wage and has long opposed legislation to increase the minimum wage, even filibustering to prevent working people from getting a hike in the minimum wage. Similarly, McCain has opposed health care for poor children and when Bush vetoed a bill that increased health care for children, McCain loudly rubber stamped his decision. Clearly, John McCain has been no friend to poor people.

And yet, today this hypocritical tool of big corporations has had the gumption to call Barack Obama "insensitive to poor people." And the corporate-owned media just lets it go right by. McCain, came out of one of his 8 mansions and told the press that Obama is "out of touch on economic issues." Like Goebbels said, if you say it often enough and loudly enough-- and if you can get the mass media to play dead-- then it doesn't matter how big or how outrageous a lie you tell. It worked for the Nazis and it's been working for the Republicans.

Obama was interviewed on the GOP cable channel today and said that McCain "not only wants to continue some of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and corporations, he actually wants to extend them, and he hasn't told us really how he's going to pay for them. It is irresponsible. And the irony is he said it was irresponsible."

HAS ENOUGH HAPPENED TO MAKE AMERICANS TAKE BACK OUR COUNTRY FROM THE GOP SPECIAL INTERESTS... EVEN IN THE HEART OF TEXAS?

We haven't heard much from Republican back-bencher Michael Burgess, a far right hack from north Texas' 26th CD, since he unexpectedly beat Dick Armey's pathetic son in a GOP primary to replace the retiring Papa Armey in 2002. Since then, though, Burgess has amassed one of the ugliest and most reactionary voting records imaginable. He participated in 58 roll calls regarding Iraq and all 58 times he found no flaws in the Bush-Cheney agenda. He voted to rubber stamp Bush all 58 times. Burgess never tires of chanting, zombie-like, about how we have to support the troops. But his voting record on supporting the troops is the worst in the entire U.S. Congress! Of the 22 roll calls relating to the well-being of America's military personnel, Burgess voted against them all 22 times. Similarly he has voted against military veterans every single time a piece of legislation has come up to ease their burdens. Of the 22 roll calls Burgess has participated in since 2003, he has voted against veterans  all 22 times! But Burgess isn't against everything; he has voted 100% of the time to support the corporate lobbyists who have underwritten his political career. When it comes to fair play for the middle class, Burgess is AWOL; when it comes to government welfare for corporations, Burgess is leading the charge, especially for Big Pharma and Big Energy, his two top campaign funding sources (over $900,000 from Big Pharma, HMOs and corporate "health" care groups and over $200,000 from energy companies).

TX-26, northwest of Dallas, is one of the redder districts in America (PVI is R +12). John Kerry only managed to bring in 35% of the vote against Bush in 2004 and in 2006 Burgess took 60% against Tim Barnwell (who spent $15,412 to Burgess' $942,742). This year Burgess has an energetic, dedicated opponent in Ken Leach, whose resume and posture brings our northern California pal Charlie Brown immediately to mind. This morning Ken wrote a message to other Democratic candidates at NovemberVictory about how the corporate infotainment media has been distorting politics and doing an injustice to democracy. He gave me permission to republish his statement:

The wrong message is getting out

Children in this country die because their parents cannot afford health insurance... and we are hearing about whether the candidate wears a flag pin or not.

Some of our smartest students cannot go to college because Republicans cut student aid... and we are flooded with what the candidate's preacher said.

Our bravest and finest are being killed in Iraq... and they are talking about what the candidate's spouse said.

People in America work three jobs and are still below the poverty level... and the media is reporting gotcha politics.

Our money is becoming worthless... and there is upset because there may not be another debate.

More than 69,000 of our bravest and finest have been permanently injured in Iraq... and the reports are the convention may be deadlocked.

Our environment is being raped by Republican subsidized corporations and headlines report the race card has been played.

Bush is trashing the U. S. constitution... and the news channels loop sound bites.

McCain wants to stay in Iraq 100 more years... and pundits discuss election point spreads.

Middle class Americans are paying a higher rate of tax than the richest 1.5% in this country... and the news is how much money each candidates has raised.

American companies are sending American jobs overseas reaping the Republican tax breaks... and voters are told about voting patterns.

The few jobs being replaced after jobs being sent overseas pay lower wages... and conflicting polling results are blasted across the airwaves.

The American bridges and highways are in need of repair... and we learn when candidates get haircuts.

Reagan, Bush One, and Bush Two have racked up 70 percent of the total national debt accumulated during all administrations... and we discover the candidate's tour bus has been named.

The Supreme Court is one vote away from overturning Roe V. Wade... and we are shown what the candidates may look like after aging eight years in the White House.

Gasoline may reach $4.00 a gallon by this summer... and it is revealed young voters cannot be counted on in the general election.

Ken Leach
Democratic Nominee
Texas 26th Congressional District

If you'd like to help him get his message out, his ActBlue page is open and ready for business-- our business. Fat cat Republicans and corporate lobbyists will funnel hundreds of thousands of dollars into a dependable shill like Michael Burgess. Grassroots Democrats like Ken have proven again and again around the country that they don't need to match a Republican dollar for dollar to beat them. But they do need to be able to raise enough to make their case known to the voters. And, believe me, the National Association of Realtors, AT&T, Valero Energy, the National Beer Wholesalers Association, the AMA, and Koch Industries, all mega-donors to Burgess, are not going to be writing checks for tens of thousands of dollars to Ken. And if you're worried that sending money to a "red district" like this is somehow a waste, think again. On March 4, 42,000 Republicans turned out in the primary. Nice turnout, huh? 73,000 Democrats turned out the same day. In fact, Texans are so fired up to make up for sending Bush to Washington that statewide over 400,000 more Democrats voted in the primary this year than voted for Kerry in the 2004 general election! [NOTE: And this isn't just a Texas phenomena. Dispirited and disgusted Republicans look at McCain and decide to just give up-- while over a million new Democrats have registered to vote-- in just the last 7 primary states!]

CAN DAVID BRODER AND OTHER LOVE STRUCK McCAIN PROPAGANDISTS SAVE HIS DOOMED PRESIDENTIAL BID?

The only substantial difference between the Washington Post's chief political journalist and a John McCain campaign press release writer is that there is no proof that Broder takes any money from McCain. I had to laugh this morning when I detected shock in Broder's column, A Not-So-Solid Republican South. Background: McCain spent last week stumbling from photo-op to photo-op that took him to places Republicans don't ever bother with. In other words, he went to visit working class neighborhoods instead of country clubs for well-off white folks. But "on the same day that Pennsylvanians gave Clinton a victory... voters in Mississippi's 1st Congressional District failed to settle who will fill the seat left vacant when Republican incumbent Roger Wicker was appointed to the Senate." Actually voters in MS-01 gave over half their votes to the two Democrats and between the Democrat, Travis Childers, and Greg Davis, the Republican, who will be in the run-off, the Democrat had 49% and the Republican-- who outspent him by more than double-- had 46%.

Broder points out that "As a mayor and former state representative from the district's most populous county, Davis was the early favorite. He had the endorsements of Gov. Haley Barbour, Sen. Thad Cochran, Wicker and the man Wicker replaced, Trent Lott. Davis also outspent Childers by almost 2 to 1 and pummeled his opponent with a flood of negative ads, emphasizing the standard GOP menu of social issues and adding a vivid recital of alleged scandals in Childers's nursing home business."

Childers talked about the policies promulgated by Bush-- and rubber stamped by McCain-- that have resulted in staggering inflation (certainly at the gas pump, even if not in Broder's columns), the reality of catastrophic unemployment, and, of course, the endless Republican Party war in the Middle East. As Broder points out, the last special election resulted in a shock for the GOP and a shock for McCain, when McCain's candidate Jim Oberweis was beaten by a lackluster and previously unknown Democrat for the exurban seat vacated by Denny Hastert in Illinois. "The message to Republicans," Broder advises his boy McCain, "could not be more plain: At a time when the public has soured on President Bush and the GOP, the old appeals are just not enough. To have a chance, Republican candidates have to expand their reach and reframe their message." For some reason, he doesn't mention that they also need to go back into history and change their voting records. McCain's couldn't be clearer. He was on the wrong side... of everything.

Still, Broder sees hope for his candidate. He senses McCain has "grasped that warning. Over the past week, as he toured the South from Selma, Ala., to Little Rock, he clearly was signaling a shift from the traditional GOP way of courting Dixie voters." Although McCain fought for over a decade to sabotage the Martin Luther King national holiday, Broder assumes most Americans-- if not most African-Americans-- don't have enough of an attention span to remember that McCain was consistently on the wrong side of that issue. "In Selma, McCain praised the African Americans who, more than four decades ago, were clubbed and tear-gassed by Alabama state troopers at the start of their anti-segregation protest march to Montgomery. He vowed, in their memory, to bring his campaign-- and the publicity it attracts-- to the "forgotten places" of America, and to help the families in those communities if he becomes president." Those places have only been "forgotten" by McCain's party and not by the people who live there. Broder neglects to mention-- unlike the Wall Street Journal-- that almost everyone who came out to greet McCain at these stops was white-- and rich. "The first rally of the week, here in the heart of central Alabama’s Black Belt, attracted a crowd of about 75 people. And although Selma is 70% black, the small gathering was almost exclusively white. Although a third of the town lives below the poverty line, the people in attendance looked affluent." Broder is hoping that by making ritual denunciations of the poor schnook who fronted the regime-- and the policies-- he has supported, he can hoodwink people into thinking he represents some kind of change.

At other stops, including the Kentucky hamlet where Lyndon Johnson launched the War on Poverty and in New Orleans's hurricane-obliterated Lower Ninth Ward, McCain condemned the performance of the Bush administration and offered his own free-market ideas for creating more jobs, improved schools and better health care.

...But what is incontestable is the fact that McCain sees the need for Republicans to reach beyond their past comfort level and engage the many Americans who have every reason to doubt they are anywhere on the GOP agenda. To many of those struggling to survive, who are accustomed to being ignored, if not exploited, the Bush administration's blindness to the plight of the residents of New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit is all too typical of the Republicans' mind-set.

Relying on the same old right-wing messages cost the Republicans heavily in 2006 and lost them Hastert's seat this year. Roger Wicker's may be the next "safe" Republican bastion sacrificed by that blindness. John McCain does not want to find himself on the same list.

Broder is the dean of the blinkered Beltway media establishment that will never recognize that their boy McCain is very much a part of that right-wing neo-Confederate Republican Party that makes their skin crawl. The NY Times' Frank Rich doesn't carry the same baggage (McCain's) that Broder carries. His column today points out that McCain was the big political loser last week.

First of all, the message the mainstream media missed in Pennsylvania was not how the bickering Democrats have destroyed their chances to win the presidency in November-- which is relentlessly pushed by right-wing propagandists and endlessly repeated by empty-headed talking heads on CNN, CBS, NBC and ABC-- but how Pennsylvania voters have reiterated that any Democrat is preferable to another 4 years of Bush (i.e.- a McCain presidency).

...27 percent of Republican primary voters didn’t just tell pollsters they would defect from their party’s standard-bearer; they went to the polls, gas prices be damned, to vote against Mr. McCain. Though ignored by every channel I surfed, there actually was a G.O.P. primary on Tuesday, open only to registered Republicans. And while it was superfluous in determining that party’s nominee, 220,000 Pennsylvania Republicans (out of their total turnout of 807,000) were moved to cast ballots for Mike Huckabee or, more numerously, Ron Paul. That’s more voters than the margin (215,000) that separated Hillary Clinton and Mr. Obama.

Those antiwar Paul voters are all potential defectors to the Democrats in November. Mr. Huckabee’s religious conservatives, who rejected Mr. McCain throughout the primary season, might also bolt or stay home. Given that the Democratic ticket beat Bush-Cheney in Pennsylvania by 205,000 votes in 2000 and 144,000 votes in 2004, these are 220,000 voters the G.O.P. can ill-afford to lose. Especially since there are now a million more registered Democrats than Republicans in Pennsylvania. (These figures don’t even include independents, who couldn’t vote in either primary on Tuesday and have been migrating toward the Democrats since 2006.)

For such a bitterly divided party, the Democrats hardly show signs of clinical depression. The last debate, however dumb, had the most viewers of any so far. The rise in turnout and new voters is all on the Democratic side. Even before its deathbed transfusion of new donations, the Clinton campaign trounced the McCain campaign in fund-raising by 2.5 to 1. (The Obama-McCain ratio is 3 to 1.)

Frank's reporting about the McCain photo-ops among the "poor folk" isn't blinkered by the same constraints that makes Broder worthless as a journalist when it comes to covering anything McCain-related. His analysis of McCain's attempts to "reach out" to Alabama voters was not based on wet dreams of a President McCain, the ways Broder's was.

The “action” the candidate outlined in the text of his speeches may strike many voters as running the gamut from inaction to inertia. Mr. McCain vowed that he would not “roll out a long list of policy initiatives.” (He can’t, given his long list of tax cuts.) He said he would not bring back lost jobs, lost wages or lost houses. But, as the Birmingham News reported, this stand against government bailouts for struggling Americans didn’t prevent his campaign from helping itself to free labor underwritten by taxpayers: inmates from a local jail were recruited to set up tables and chairs for a private fund-raiser.

The Bush Economic Miracle-- even more so than the Bush foreign policy agenda-- has been completely rubber stamped by John W. McCain. As the economy continues to deteriorate McCain-- and vulnerable Republican incumbents like Norm Coleman, Susan Collins, John Cornyn, James Inhofe, John Sununu, etc-- will find it more and more difficult to run away from their own voting records and from their own complicity in Bush's disastrous presidency. And meanwhile, voters will be watching more and more statements of fact from the DNC, like this one:




UPDATE: McCAIN LOSES NEVADA GOP CONVENTION

The far right's presumptive nominee couldn't keep the Nevada state Republican Party convention from disbanding in confusion as a majority of delegates proved to be loyal to Ron Paul, rather than McCain. The Party establishment closed down the whole shebbang and will probably reconvene in Guantanamo or someplace else where the GOP can keep everything buttoned down and under control. So, as of now, Nevada has no delegates to the Hate Fest in Minneapolis.

WHO REALLY TRIED TO ASSASSINATE KARZAI TONIGHT-- A TERRORIST FOR SURE, BUT WHICH BRAND?

I loved my two long visits to Afghanistan, the better part of a year when taken together, though split up by over a year in India, Nepal and Sri Lanka. Two things you learn about Afghanistan really fast is that every single male is armed at all times-- armed and ready to shoot at the slightest provocation-- and that almost everyone is stoned out of their head on hash as strong as acid. It was like traveling back in time for me-- like to Biblical times. And I loved every bizarre moment of it. Now that tourism is being touted and encouraged, I have to admit, Afghanistan is probably one of the last places on earth I would consider visiting. And I'm no wimp when it comes to travel. Last December I was wandering around Myanmar's Irrawaddy Delta, skipping right past signs that said travel is prohibited to foreigners. Last week I finished my travel plans to Mali.

But Kabul? Not me. According to a late night bulletin from AP in the NY Times "Automatic gunfire broke out at a ceremony in Kabul on Sunday, forcing the Afghan president and other dignitaries to take cover." From what I can gather, a couple of members of parliament were either killed or wounded. The Taliban took credit. Although...

The incident comes the day after Karzai lashed out at the Bush Regime's disastrous record of non-accomplishment in his country. The NY Times ran an interview with Karzai just hours before the attempted assassination in which he was very critical of the Americans and British. NATO sources claims he was posturing in the lead up to elections.

Mr. Karzai said that he wanted American forces to stop arresting suspected Taliban and their sympathizers, and that the continued threat of arrest and past mistreatment were discouraging Taliban from coming forward to lay down their arms.

He criticized the American-led coalition as prosecuting the war on terrorism in Afghan villages, saying the real terrorist threat lay in sanctuaries of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Pakistan.

The president said that civilian casualties, which have dropped substantially since last year, needed to cease completely. For nearly two years the American-led coalition has refused to recognize the need to create a trained police force, he said, leading to a critical lack of law and order.

The Times was sure to lard it's story with anti-Karzai propaganda from the CIA which doesn't appreciate his demands for independence: "Complaints have been rising for months among diplomats and visiting foreign officials [Cheney and Rice] about what is seen as Mr. Karzai’s weak leadership, in particular his inability to curb narcotics trafficking and to remove ineffective or corrupt officials. Some diplomats have even expressed dismay that, for lack of an alternative, the country and its donors may face another five years of poor management by Mr. Karzai."

Did Bush or Cheney order a hit on Karzai? Is there anything these two wouldn't do?


UPDATE

There's more this morning-- mortars as well as bullets were flying. One legislator and one tribal chief were killed and 11 others were wounded, several crtically. Two suspects were killed and others were arrested. And Matt Dupee at the Long War Journal has a few more pieces of the story:

Afghan security personnel stormed the location of the gunmen and arrested nine men. Witnesses also claim three armed men were shot and killed during the raid. At least 100 people have been rounded up for questioning, according the head of Afghan intelligence. Taliban spokesman Zabibullah Mujahid called several media outlets claiming responsibility for the attack. “We fired rockets at the scene of the celebration. We had placed six personnel in the area,” he said from an undisclosed location. “Our aim was not to directly hit someone. We just wanted to show to the world that we can attack anywhere.”

I'm sure Cheney would never call the Jalalabad Daily JIhad and announce he had ordered the hit. So we'll wait and see if anything substantive comes out... ever.

JOHN McCAIN LIKES MAKING RULES FOR THE REST OF US-- AS LONG AS HE DOESN'T HAVE TO EVER FOLLOW THEM HIMSELF

Although the McCain-friendly corporate media has studiously avoided the topic, McCain has refused to release his multimillionaire wife's tax returns, even though she has financed his career-- and has acted as a bag lady at least once for his corrupt dealings (with Charles Keating of the Keating Five scandal)-- and even though the exact same media outlets, namely Fox, CNN, ABC, NBC and CBS, screamed their collective heads off about John Kerry's wife. Teresa Heinz Kerry married John Kerry when he already was a senator. She did release her tax returns, which were gone over with a fine tooth comb by the corporate media. Cindy McCain financed John McCain's political ambitions from Day One and there is no question that he would never have come close to winning his first congressional race without her wealth. Since then he has sworn he would not use her immense wealth to push his political career forward. Like much of what McCain says, that was a blatant lie meant to mislead the media (who don't care anyway) and the public.

McCain is not just one of the most personally corrupt men in the U.S. Senate, he is also one of the 10 wealthiest members of that millionaires club-- although he never actually earned any of it. He married it, and dumped a crippled wife and family to do it, first cheating on her for a year and calculating all the angles. Tomorrow's NY Times spills the beans about how McCain has managed to skirt the campaign finance laws (which he helped pass) while still staying out of prison. After prominently huffing and puffing how he wouldn't use corporate jets, unbeknownst to the public-- and unreported by his pals in the corporate media-- McCain has been using his wife's jet. The Times reminds us that "he backed legislation last year requiring presidential candidates to pay the actual cost of flying on corporate jets. The law, which requires campaigns to pay charter rates when using such jets rather than cheaper first-class fares, was intended to reduce the influence of lobbyists and create a level financial playing field." But, McCain being McCain, rules and regulations are always for other people, never, never, never for John McCain.

Allow me to run off on a tangent for a moment. A dear friend of mine, Mike Rogers, is the guy who helped out several hypocritical, right wing extremist members of Congress, lowlife Republicans who were voting to destroy the lives of gay men and women while sneaking around in the dark of night looking for anonymous sex. Because of Mike right-wing hypocrites like Ed Schrock (R-VA), Mark Foley (R-FL), James McCrery (R-LA), and Larry Craig (R-ID) have ended their shameful and destructive political careers-- and disreputable closet queens like David Dreier (D-CA), Patrick McHenry (R-NC), Lindsey Graham (R-SC) spend half their lives worrying about being outed. Not everyone appreciates Mike stellar work. I've heard him attacked not just from right wing hacks, but even from Inside the Beltway Democrats, who have benefited so mightily from his efforts. What does any of this have to do with McCain's deceitful nature? Stay with me; I appreciate the patience. Let me quote from the new issue of Out:

Once upon a time, closeted gay people mostly feared outing by Washington cops or counterintelligence agents. Now the main danger to closeted Republicans -- especially those working for antigay legislators-- comes from other gay people like Washington activist Michael Rogers. Rogers’s website BlogActive regularly outs gay Republicans-- whom Rogers considers fair game if they actively fight against the rights of gay people in their public lives or work for a legislator who does. (Because Larry Craig has a miserable record on gay rights, readers of Rogers’s blog knew all about the Idaho senator’s bathroom-based proclivities long before he was arrested for them in Minneapolis.)

What Rogers does makes some Democrats squeamish, because they think no one should ever decide for someone else when he must come out of the closet. But Representative [Barney] Frank is not among Rogers’s detractors.

“I think what Rogers does is legitimate,” Frank tells me. “I think hypocrisy is something to go after. If you had pro-life people having abortions, or if Sarah Brady had a gun, there would be no hesitation. Think of any other context in which people would be allowed to blatantly violate the public policies they advocate and say, ‘I have a right to keep this secret.’”

The erudite Frank-- often voted the smartest member of Congress by Hill staffers-- cites John Locke’s second treatise on civil government as the “philosophical grounding” for his position.

“Locke says that one of the major arguments for, in effect, representative government is, if the people who make the laws are not subject to the laws, they will make bad laws with impunity,” Frank says. “That was a very important principle in the document that was the single most important influence on our Constitution. A basic principle of free government is that rulers must be subject to the laws they make.”

You see where I'm going? Locke (and Barney) are correct and it doesn't only apply to psychotic homophobes like Larry Craig prowling men's rooms across the country looking for quickies in the stalls. McCain entire life-- starting even before he ever got into politics-- has always been premised on rules not applying to him. It's his biggest flaw and, more than anything else, the reason he shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the levers of power. His Republican colleagues in the Senate all know it as well, but their patriotism is in chains and being dragged along behind the Double Talk Express.

Back when McCain was a young navy flyer he kept crashing planes-- at least half a dozen of them-- and in one instance caused a serious diplomatic incident with Spain and in another killing scores of American seamen and destroying hundreds of millions of dollars in aircraft and military equipment. These accidents had two things in common: McCain was at the controls and McCain was never, ever, ever at fault in any of them. He was grounded though and told he would never be allowed to fly again, something he was able to circumvent by pulling some family strings. His instructors at the Naval Academy were unanimous in their assessment: McCain, who graduated 5th from the bottom of his class, never followed any rules or regulations. He had over a hundred demerits while he was at the Academy. Rules have always been for the little people, never for Leona Helmsley and John McCain.

...over a seven-month period beginning last summer, Mr. McCain’s cash-short campaign gave itself an advantage by using a corporate jet owned by a company headed by his wife, Cindy McCain, according to public records. For five of those months, the plane was used almost exclusively for campaign-related purposes, those records show.

Mr. McCain’s campaign paid a total of $241,149 for the use of that plane from last August through February, records show. That amount is approximately the cost of chartering a similar jet for a month or two, according to industry estimates.

The senator was able to fly so inexpensively because the law specifically exempts aircraft owned by a candidate or his family or by a privately held company they control. The Federal Election Commission adopted rules in December to close the loophole-- rules that would have required substantial payments by candidates using family-owned planes-- but the agency soon lost the requisite number of commissioners needed to complete the rule making.

Because that exemption remains, Mr. McCain’s campaign was able to use his wife’s corporate plane like a charter jet while paying first-class rates, several campaign finance experts said. Several of those experts, however, added that his campaign’s actions, while keeping with the letter of law, did not reflect its spirit.

“This amounts to a subsidy for his campaign, which is notable given how badly they were struggling last year,” said Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that collects and analyzes campaign data.

Mr. McCain was not available to be interviewed, a campaign spokeswoman said. In response to written questions, the spokeswoman, Jill Hazelbaker, said his campaign had acted legally and ethically in paying first-class airfares for Mrs. McCain’s corporate aircraft.

“The campaign carefully followed all the relevant laws and F.E.C. regulations on air travel at all times, and paid for travel exactly as required by those rules,” Ms. Hazelbaker said.

Last summer, just before starting to use his wife’s plane, Mr. McCain was quoted in a newspaper report as saying that he did not plan to tap her substantial wealth to keep his bid for the Republican presidential nomination going.

“I have never thought about it,” Mr. McCain was quoted by The Arizona Republic as saying at a July appearance. “I would never do such a thing, so I wouldn’t know what the legalities are.”

The McCain campaign turned to using the jet last August, a time when it faced mounting debts and the possibility of financial collapse. It stopped doing so in March, those records indicate.

During the first half of 2007, a time when Mr. McCain’s campaign did not use his wife’s jet, it paid out over $1.04 million for travel on noncommercial planes, F.E.C. records indicate. Over the year’s second half, when that jet was used almost constantly for campaign-related purposes, his campaign’s total spending for noncommercial flying was about one-half that much, or $542,160, those records suggest.

I don't have much sympathy for right wing Republicans, but when they complained about McCain being a hypocrite and being the most untrustworthy man in Washington... they knew exactly what they were talking about.

CNN WILL SOON BE AS FAIR AND AS BALANCED AS FOX-- AND JUST AS PRO-McCAIN

No differences at all-- not where it matters

I get the feeling that many of the CNN anchors really don't have a political agenda; they're just empty-headed news readers. Not so the network's newest hire. Tony Snow is an unabashed right wing propagandist and GOP partisan who does whatever he can to twist the news in favor of right-wing Republicans. Great goin', CNN. The world certainly needs more of that, right?

So last night Wolf Blintzer sat down for a Q&A with the network's newest GOP plant and he promptly admitted that McCain will say whatever it takes to win the election.

Wolf Blitzer: What do you think about McCain's decision yesterday? He was very forceful in making it clear he did not like the Bush administration's handling of Katrina.

Tony Snow: Of course he also doesn't know a lot about what went on behind the scenes, but you would expect that. You've got somebody who's running for a nomination. The president's popularity ratings are low. He's going to put a distance between himself and the president. Everybody hates what happened in Katrina, including the president. It's an easy critique to make.

Wolf Blitzer: Do you think he'll be doing more distancing of himself on other issues?

Tony Snow: I think he'll do it when it's easy. But on the other hand, there are things, like the war, where he's agreed with the president. I suppose in some sense it would be easy to disagree with the president, but McCain has been pretty firm on that. You look at any person who's getting the nomination and trying to run when you've got an incumbent president, whether it's Al Gore saying I want to be my own man, George Herbert Walker Bush talking about a kinder, gentler America after the Reagan years, you're going to look for a way to distance you're from your predecessor so that you have an independent identity. Right now, Democrats have made it clear they don't have any issue other than the fact they're not George Bush. What McCain wants to be able to do is say, 'neither am I.'

Bush is not just the least popular president in American history, he is the most hated man to have ever lived in the White House-- and we have barely begun to reap what his policies have sewn. I think I just heard someone on CNN muttering something about 20% inflation. And the housing market isn't even close to bottoming out yet. The war in Iraq has accomplished nothing to make us safer; in fact, it has done exactly the opposite. (Let me quote something from Arianna Huffington's new book, Right Is Wrong: "The truth is that, far from making us safer, "an aggressive posture on Iraq has had the opposite effect. In a survey of one hundred top foreign policy experts-- both Republicans and Democrats-- eighty-four said they believed that we're losing the war on terror and eighty-seven thought Iraq has had a negative impact on our efforts to defeat terrorists.") Bush will get most of the blame-- and he deserves it (and much worse)-- but there were no execrable Bush policies, not at home and not abroad, that weren't strongly supported by McCain-- including many cases where McCain has flip-flopped on signature issues, like torture, which he claims to oppose but votes in favor of.

So McCain will have a difficult time-- not with the media, of course, but with people paying attention-- distancing himself from Bush; and distancing himself from McCain. Blintzer asked CNN's GOP plant if Cheney headlining a fat cat fundraiser for McCain in North Carolina is maybe a bit of a giveaway about a McCain election being a third Bush term "Is that going to be smart for McCain to be associated with Dick Cheney?" Would it surprise you to find out that Snow thinks it's just a wonderful idea? "Yeah. I think so. Look, it's not going to be smart if you are trying to get Nancy Pelosi's vote. But if you're trying to make sure you've got the Republican base on your side, absolutely. Dick Cheney is somebody who still really has earned the respect and admiration of a lot of Republicans." Snow is correct, something like 25% of Americans think the Bush Regime is just dandy. Over 75% think its an abomination-- and that number increases every month and should increase much more as the economy really starts feeling the impact of the Bush-Cheney-McCain economic policies. Democrats are ecstatic whenever Bush or Cheney show up at a fundraiser for a Republican-- kind of a nail in the coffin. Anyway, I'm just thrilled that CNN will be offering lots of this kind of incisive commentary all through the election season.

BLUE AMERICA TAKES A PEEK AT THE OREGON SENATE RACE

Steve and Jeff, two great candidates in Oregon

No live guest today-- and no Blue America endorsement. Or, let's put it another way. Both candidates running in the Oregon Democratic primary are so excellent-- and so much better than the rubber stamp incumbent-- that Blue America is eager to get behind either one. We're happy to leave that up to Oregon Democrats to decide. Normally, the only time we feel comfortable inserting ourselves into a primary is when there is a truly progressive Democrat fighting a reactionary one-- like our latest pick, Ed Fallon in Iowa. (Meet him here May 10.) Fallon is going up against a Bush Dog/Blue Dog, Leonard Boswell, who has been almost as supportive of the Bush-corporate agenda as he has been of Democratic congressional initiatives. And soon we'll be hearing more about Georgia state Senator Regina Thomas' campaign to win in Georgia's 12th CD, a seat currently help by someone far to the right of even Boswell, John Barrow.

Oregon is a very different story. The Republican incumbent, Gordon Smith, although-- like many Republicans-- claiming to be a "moderate" and an "independent," has a voting record that is extremely right wing and in almost total lockstep with the extremist Bush agenda-- on everything. Both Democrats, Jeff Merkley and Steve Novick are incredibly good progressive alternatives. If either one of them winds up in the U.S. Senate, it will mean a giant step forward towards a more progressive America.

Their positions on all the big issues are virtually identical-- identical to each other and identical to the Blue America ideals. Each has endorsed the Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq and both will support efforts to end the occupation as fast as can be done safely. Both of these guys have strong and exemplary plans on the environment, health care, the economy and education. And both are strong supporters of civil rights and have come out against Bush's telecom immunity plans. Each also has a history of working for progressive issues and candidates-- Jeff Merkley as Oregon House Speaker and leader of FuturePAC (which helped flip the Oregon House from red to blue in 2006) and Steve Novick as an effective political consultant and advisor to many of Oregon's prominent progressive candidates for office and organizations (including Governor Kulongoski, SEIU and AFL-CIO).

Oregon bloggers are extremely impassioned about the primary, and partisans on each side make the Clinton-Obama contest look like a garden party. It's really a shame and benefits no one but the execrable Gordon Smith. There's an hour-long "debate" between Merkley and Novick (and two minor candidates) at the Willamette Weekly editorial office and now available at Oregon Blue. It's about an hour long but if you have the time and interest, it will be well worth your while.

We plan to invite the winner of the May 20th primary to come over to Blue America and talk with us about the race against Smith. But if you've got some spare change in your pocket this week and want to do a good turn, please consider sending some toward Kentucky progressive Greg Fischer, our guest here a few weeks ago. Earlier today I posted a new video that could help Greg against the reactionary shill Bruce Lunsford and I'm hoping we can help him put ads like this on the air. It's either that or a sure-fire victory for Mitch McConnell in November. (And if you believe me when I say Gordon Smith is no good... there are barely words to describe how awful McConnell is.) Anyway, I have 5 autographed copies of Al Franken's book, The Truth for the first 5 people who donate at least $30 to Greg's campaign here.


OREGONIAN ENDORSES NOVICK

Merkley has had most of the institutional support-- and he's certainly Schumer's choice (which might make any self-respecting grassroots Democrat suspicious)-- but tomorrow' Oregonian endorses Novick.

We think the candidate they should send to face Smith is, in some ways, the unlikeliest one of all: Steve Novick, an Ivy League lawyer who stands 4'-9" and has a hook instead of a left hand.

This choice is unorthodox not just because of Novick's remarkable personal characteristics and history, but because the Democratic Party establishment is supporting another solid candidate, Oregon House Speaker Jeff Merkley. Merkley launched his campaign after other prominent Oregon Democrats decided not to undertake the rigors and risks of a race against a well-heeled incumbent.

Merkley is an accomplished, decent and dignified politician. He has presided over a refreshingly productive legislative session-- one-and-a-half of them, in fact-- and has a compelling resume and personal story as the son of a southern Oregon mill worker and the first in his family to attend college.

...Merkley has been everything Oregonians could want in a House speaker. Even his opponents harbor him little ill-will, crediting him with restoring a measure of civility to a divided chamber. But watching this campaign, Democrats may want to take a sharper course.

Novick is an unusual man with an unusual resume-- characteristics that some suggest aren't suited to the U.S. Senate. But we think his passion, his intellect and his personal style give him an intriguing combination of qualities that most senators don't possess.

We think Novick represents a bold choice for Democrats who seek to dislodge a veteran incumbent. He has the potential to press Smith as he has done Merkley. And, should he pull off what would be a major electoral upset and go to Washington as the new junior senator from Oregon, he has the potential to make Oregonians proud.

CAN KENTUCKY'S REACTIONARY OBSTRUCTIONIST MITCH McCONNELL BE BEATEN IN NOVEMBER?

In Kentucky Bush's approval ratings have followed the economy into the tank. And with Mitch McConnell being such a high profile sycophant and the ultimate rubber stamp, his powerful position in the Senate has brought him plenty of misery back home. McConnell's current approval rating-- as of April 14 (so before his latest obstructionist jihad of blocking equal pay for equal work and aid for veterans)-- is 46%, coupled with a 46% disapproval. In 2006, no Republican Senate incumbent survived who had such a low approval rating. The only thing that could possibly save McConnell at this point is if an even worse "Democrat," Bruce Lunsford, gets foisted onto the Democratic ticket by New York party boss Chuck Schumer.

The way Kentucky voters can keep that from happening is by supporting Greg Fischer, the progressive alternative to the execrable Lunsford. Greg has been traveling back and forth all over Kentucky introducing himself to voters. Many Democrats already know what a lowlife Lunsford is and wouldn't vote for him even if he was running against Beelzebub. But there are also plenty of voters who care barely find the time to make ends meet, let alone pay attention to politicians who never seem to do them any good anyway. Last January Yellow Dog at Blue in the Bluegrass laid out the case against Lunsford.

Bruce Lunsford is by all accounts a personable guy. I met him once, and the Mark of the Beast is barely visible.

But here's why all true Democrats curse his name.

Lunsford made his millions with a Louisville health care company called Vencor. He touted it as the next Humana, and drew thousands of small investors from all over Kentucky eager to invest in a local boy done well. But Vencor was less Humana than Enron.

When expectations outgrew revenues, Lunsford starting throwing old, sick, poor people out of his nursing homes to make room for rich old people who could pay more. When that didn't work, he pulled out the remaining cash and left the empty shell for creditors to fight over. Thousands of middle-class Kentucky investors lost millions.

Lunsford skated away from the disaster he'd created, and turned his attention to politics.

As I wrote back in April, when Lunsford was running in the Democratic gubernatorial primary: (Just substitute "McConnell" for "Fletcher.")

It's a close call as to which is more important: defeating Fletcher, or defeating Lunsford.

Lunsford’s a multi-millionaire (he sank $8 million into his 2003 primary run before quitting), supposedly willing to put his personal fortune into the general election. That’s why some seriously deluded/desperate Democrats are claiming he has the best chance to beat Fletcher.

Bruce Lunsford made his millions off the backs of two groups: the poor, sick old people he threw out of his nursing homes to make room for richer patients, and the poor, trusting Kentucky families who lost their life savings investing in Lunsford’s company before he bankrupted it.

His vicious ads attacking State Attorney General Ben Chandler in the 2003 gubernatorial primary fatally wounded Chandler in the general election, especially after Lunsford dropped out of the primary and endorsed Ernie Fletcher.

Read that again, slowly: A Democratic primary candidate endorsed the Republican primary winner. After promising to support the Democratic primary winner.

Ernie won, and gave Lunsford a nice job. Since 1995, Lunsford has given more than $40,000 to Republican candidates, and less than $12,000 to Democratic candidates.

Now he wants to be the Democratic nominee.

Ernie Fletcher has been one of the worst governors in Kentucky history. Cleaning up the mess he’s created will take years if not decades and billions of dollars Kentucky doesn’t have. We can’t afford another four months, never mind another four years of Ernie Fletcher.

But a lot of Democrats will be voting for Fletcher – if Bruce Lunsford gets the nomination.

Not all Kentucky voters read blogs and Lunsford and Schumer are doing their worst to make it seem like the only "choice" Kentucky voters will have in November will be between two sides of the same rotten coin. Plenty of grassroots Kentucky groups are trying to help combat the Lunsford menace. Below is an answer to his latest misleading ad. Greg's got to run ads like this on television; so far he hasn't. If you'd like to see Mitch McConnell defeated in November, please help Greg Fischer now. You can do it at the Blue America ActBlue site.



This one says it even better and here's an oldie but goodie from Ben Chandler that will probably get a reprise from Lunsford's dear friend Miss McConnell .

McCAIN SELECTIVE MEMORY LOSS SYNDROME

McCain has always had a very convenient way of playing with his memory. Many people have noted that he seems to be in the early stages of dementia although a close look at his record should suffice to say that a lifetime of serial dishonesty is probably more to blame for the way "straight talk" has turned into double talk. Wednesday the disingenuous old man was in New Orleans claiming-- like Denny Hastert did-- that for all he cares they could just abandon the 9th Ward and not rebuild it.

He also told reporters he was not sure if he would rebuild the lower 9th ward as president.

"That is why we need to go back is to have a conversation about what to do-- rebuild it, tear it down, you know, whatever it is,” he said.

Whatever... But confronted about his destructive statement yesterday, he claimed he didn't remember having ever even said it!

Today, still visiting places other Republicans have been afraid to tread, he was talking with African-Americans in Arkansas. He either had a pronounced senior moment or slipped into defensive... fibbing mode again. Fibbing is a nice way of putting it, but his selective memory seemed to turn years into minutes. The video below shows him explaining that his decade of opposing a Martin Luther King National Holiday was "a very short time." McCain voted against MLK Day in 1983, opposed a state holiday in 1987 (four years later), opposed a new federal holiday in 1989 (six years later) and voted against funding for the commission established to encourage all states to recognize the King holiday in 1994—11 years after his original anti-MLK Day vote. Watch how slick he is. Or is he really just senile?

YES, McCAIN WOULD INDEED BE A NIGHTMARE-- BUT NOT NEARLY AS MUCH FOR HAMAS AS FOR THE AVERAGE AMERICAN

John McCain has proven throughout a long winding career that, if elected president he will be the dream candidate for all the worst corporate interests that have been in cahoots with the Bush Regime-- Big Oil and Gas, predatory lenders, those who want to squeeze extra pennies out of our country by shipping jobs overseas, polluters, and, most of all, the MilitaryIndustrial Complex every thoughtful American from George Washington to Dwight Eisenhower to Naomi Klein and John Cusack has warned us about. But McCain isn't talking about who he's the dream candidate for-- or pointing to the 66 lobbyists on the Double Talk Express this year. Instead he's trying to claim he'll be Hamas' worst nightmare-- just the way Bush and Cheney always claimed al-Qaeda was against them. And the claims of McCain, who has hired on Karl Rove as a political advisor-- the man who exposed his wife as a drug addict and thief in 2000-- are as patently false and pernicious as Bush's and Cheney's. And misleading. Al Qaeda would probably cease to even exist as a viable entity with Bush and Cheney. McCain, who begged radical religionist loon and bigot, John Hagee, for an endorsement, has taken to trying to separate himself from Hagee's vicious anti-Catholic, anti-gay, anti-Semitic and anti-American ravings. Now he even calls Hagee's wild and hate-filled pronouncements "nonsense, nonsense, nonsense, nonsense, nonsense." When lunatics like Hagee endorse Obama-- and some do, although, unlike McCain, Obama doesn't seek their endorsements-- Obama has told them to take their endorsement somewhere else. But McCain is still trying to smear him by claiming he's somehow "the Hamas candidate." More of the same kind of Karl Rove crap Americans are sick and tired of hearing.

The real nightmare that a President John McCain who present would be for the entire world and, particularly for the American people. Obama gets that and McCain is on a rampage against him, hoping against hope that he gets a chance to run against fellow Establishment Insider Hillary Clinton. Neither Clinton nor McCain can make a credible case to personify the kind of genuine change that Americans crave after 7 years of Bush-Cheney. McCain is a one trick money; he wants war, war, war. An OpEd in today's Orlando Sun-Sentinel points out that what Americans do want-- relief from the economic crisis that McCain-supported Republican policies have caused-- are beyond McCain's grasp.

John McCain has stated that he does not understand economics, and various statements he has made certainly prove he needs to take Economics 101.

According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, which is far from being any left-leaning, anti-McCain newspaper, McCain has proposed tax cuts of over $650 billion a year, much of which would benefit the wealthy and large corporations. Much of these cuts would come from extending Bush's tax cuts, despite the fact that McCain voted against them twice, saying they mostly benefited the wealthy.

Asked how he would pay for these cuts, he has claimed that he would eliminate congressional earmarks, i.e., bridges to nowhere, and cut $160 billion a year from the discretionary budget. Where the $160 billion a year in cuts would come from, were not addressed. Once again, McCain-Omics are devoid of reality. The facts, according to The Wall Street Journal, are that total discretionary spending totals about $1 trillion a year, and the chances of a 16 percent cut are "non-existent," according to the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan group that promotes fiscal discipline.

WHAT'S THE REAL RAP ON ED FALLON?

On May 10th Blue America will welcome Iowa progressive Democrat Ed Fallon to Firedoglake. He's in a hot primary race with conservative Democrat Leonard Boswell and if you'd like to prepare for the discussion please check out whoreallyownscongress.com... and watch this kewl vid:

DHS capo "Judge Mike" Chertoff ruffles some Canadian feathers with his, er, unexpected conception of just what constitutes "privacy"

Bag that glass and send it to the lab for prints! Sec'y Chertoff's orders.

"A fingerprint is hardly personal data because you leave it on glasses and silverware and articles all over the world. They're like footprints. They're not particularly private."
--Homeland Security Secretary "Judge Mike" Chertoff


HS Sec'y Chertoff will go down in history for, um, let's see . . . OK, first, for being the longest-serving out of all the first two overlords of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), having succeeded the legendary Tom "Plastic Sheets 'n' Duct Tape" Ridge (we can't of course count pathetic Rudy Giuliani stooge Bernie Kerik, whose nomination to succeed "Old Plastic Sheets 'n' Duct Tape" had to be withdrawn amidst, well, all that unpleasantness); and, then, for being as such the boss of Heckuva Job Brownie (of FEMA fame, or infamy) through all the unpleasantness down there along the Gulf Coast awhile back; and, finally . . . well, maybe the best is yet to come--as in going down for the third time, maybe?

Now Judge Mike (you'll recall that the secretary sat briefly on the bench of the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals being tapped for the DHS job) finds himself in the crosshairs of our lampooning marksman pal Al Kamen in his Washington Post "In the Loop" column today. It seems Sec'y Judge Mike raised some hackles among our persnickety friends to the north. His scheme to do some grand-scale fingerprint swapping among our allies in the English-speaking world ran into unexpectedly stiff resistance from Canadian officialdom:

Wacky Canadians Still Believe in Privacy

By Al Kamen
Friday, April 25, 2008

Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff caused a little ruckus up north a couple weeks ago as he was pushing his plan to share databases of international air travelers' fingerprints with the Canadians, Brits and Aussies.

In an interview with an excessively squeamish Canadian reporter, Chertoff was told: "Some are raising that the privacy aspects of this thing, you know, sharing of that kind of data, very personal data, among four countries is quite a scary thing."

Nonsense, Chertoff responded. "Well, first of all, a fingerprint is hardly personal data because you leave it on glasses and silverware and articles all over the world. They're like footprints. They're not particularly private," he said, according to Canadian news reports and privacy lawyer Peter Swire, a senior fellow and guest blogger at the Center for American Progress.

Absolutely. But the old-fashioned Canadians seem to think otherwise. They even have someone who monitors privacy issues, Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart, who promptly wrote the minister of public safety and preparedness to object, noting that Canadian law "defines fingerprints as personal information" and that "fingerprints constitute extremely personal information for which there is clearly a high expectation of privacy." That's why, she wrote with a hint of huffiness, "Canadians rightly expect their government to respect their civil liberties and personal information from abuse."

Oh yeah? Well, our Supreme Court ruled in 1985 that you have to have probable cause before you haul someone off and fingerprint them. Justice Byron R. White wrote the opinion, joined by Warren E. Burger and William H. Rehnquist, no less.

But in wartime, maybe we have different expectations, okay? As Chertoff, who after all was recently a federal appeals judge, knows quite well, no one should expect privacy in a restaurant or anywhere else where a fingerprint might be left.

And we don't. That's why many diners here are beginning to use gloves when they eat at restaurants and some even wear those hospital booties. Others prefer just a discreet swipe of utensils and glassware with a Wet-Nap to ensure against DNA retrieval from saliva. (There is a growing -- and deplorable -- trend to bring personal cutlery, but that really seems excessive and, in finer establishments, downright disrespectful, especially if it's plastic.)

Is it possible the Canadians thought those signs at beachfront eateries -- "No shirt, no shoes, no service" -- were an effort to maintain appropriate attire? Everyone down here knows the restaurants just wanted to prevent the feds from trying to collect toe prints.

Canadians probably still go to barbershops -- where a single hair in the right hands can provide DNA, general health info, recent drug use data and other information. Our cousins probably haven't read about the growing in-home trim movement here.

And there's an easy way to guard against theft of your secret mattress Sleep Number. Just change the setting every morning before you leave.

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DON CAZAYOUX SHOWS HIS COLOR... BUT DO THEY CALL THAT BLUE IN LOUISIANA?

Democrat Don Cazayoux looks like he will beat KKK Republican Woody Jenkins in the race to replace lobbyist Richard Baker in a Louisiana congressional district centered on Baton Rouge. How happy should progressives be? Well, there can be little doubt that Cazayoux will vote for a pro-worker/pro-middle class agenda more often than the radical right-- some say neo-fascist-- Jenkins. And that's a good thing. Unfortunately, it's the only good thing.

A story in today's L.A. Times illustrates the problems with electing reactionary Democrats like Cazayoux. Allow me to veer off on a tangent and I promise to come back to Cazayoux in a moment. I'm reading 3 books simultaneously now-- one by Arianna Huffington, one by Cliff Schecter and one by Senator Lincoln Chafee (it just depends on which room I'm in when I get an urge to step away from the computer). I want to quote the defeated Republican senator's recollections of the first big battle the Congress had in their struggle with the Unitary Executive, soon after the radical right stole the 2000 election for Bush and Cheney.

For many Americans the first real memory of the Bush presidency is date-stamped September 11, 2001. They forget the pitched political battles of the first nine months in office. The central front in his war on Congress was this $1.6 trillion raid on the public purse [tax curs for the rich].

The outcome was uncertain given the dynamics of an evenly divided Senate. Democrats were largely opposed, but Georgia Democrat Zell Miller, a throwback to the pre-civil rights South, had defected and even signed on as a cosponsor of the Bush tax cuts. Democrats were especially worried that John Breaux of Louisiana and Ben Nelson of Nebraska might waver.

In the end Miller, true to form, voted with the GOP, while Breaux and Nelson worked within the Democratic Party to water down opposition and force the caucus-- in return for their "support"-- to give way drastically to Bush's demands.

We don't have to go back into history to find how Republican-lite Democrats rot the Democratic Party from within and disillusion and turn off the base. Largely due to Rahm Emanuel's and the DCCC's recruitment policies-- "me too Democrats," who could as easily be Republicans on the big issues-- the Democratic congressional caucus is often held hostage by conservatives unfriendly towards the needs and aspirations of working families. Whether on Iraq, on trade policy, on tax policy, on health care, Blue Dogs, Bush Dogs and the insidious Rahm Caucus either break with Democrats entirely and vote with the GOP or else work to water down progressive legislation in return for their votes. When it comes to substantive issues that narrowly divide the two parties, there are 18 reactionary Democrats-- Jim Marshall (GA), Nick Lampson (TX), John Barrow (GA), Joe Donnelly (IN), Dan Boren (OK), Brad Ellsworth (IN), Jason Altmire (PA), Heath Shuler (NC), Jim Matheson (UT), Chris Carney (PA), Zach Space (OH), Gene Tayor (MS), Melissa Bean (IL), Harry Mitchell (AZ), Baron Hill (IN), Tim Mahoney (FL), Mike McIntyre (NC), and Gabby Giffords (AZ)-- who have actually voted more frequently with the GOP than with the Democrats... but only on the important stuff. [Lincoln Davis (TN) and Bud Cramer (AL) have voted an equal number of times for and against the Bush agenda.]

The election of Don Cazayoux will add another "Democrat" to this list. And that brings us back to today's story in the L.A. Times, ostensibly about Obama's campaign and the radical right's attacks on him but, in reality, about political courage, or lack of it.

In Louisiana, a TV ad attacking Obama's healthcare agenda as "radical" proved so threatening that the House candidate it targeted, Democrat Don Cazayoux, distanced himself from Obama on Thursday, issuing a stern statement saying that he "has not endorsed any national politician."

Today's Washington Post points to an ad from a right wing extremist smear outfit, Freedom's Watch: "'A vote for Don Cazayoux is a vote for Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi,'" the narrator says, referring to the House speaker." The ad refers to Obama's health care proposals as a "radical health care agenda." Many Clinton supporters are reluctant to back Obama because they claim his health care proposals don't go far enough. Americans, unlike the extreme right Big Pharma-funded 527s, want meaningful health care reform. If Cazayoux can't stand up and defend this... what good is he?

This morning I spoke with a progressive PAC chairman and asked him why progressives like him aren't matching the gigantic budgets the far right PACs are pouring into the Baton Rouge district. "Money is scarce and why prop up conservatives who can't be counted on to support us when real progressives like Gary Peters in Michigan, Darcy Burner in Washington and Dennis Shulman in New Jersey won't need their arms twisted to go in there and fight for working families. There isn't enough money to go around for every Democrat and we're using ours to support candidates who take strong stands on our issues, not people who will be likely to listen to the same corrupt lobbyists the Republicans listen to. He seems to have a lot more money than Jenkins and maybe he can get some more from his buddies at the NRA."

I looked around a little and found that Cazayoux has a position on health care. From his website: "Cazayoux does not believe a big government program is the solution; he supports a market-based solution that will increase access to quality, affordable healthcare.  Cazayoux believes that increasing access to health care for everyone will drive down the cost of premiums for those who currently have insurance." I'd love to find out how this differs from your garden variety Republican.

McCAIN GETS A TEST OF LEADERSHIP-- FAILS IN NORTH CAROLINA

McCain can't control KKK faction of North Carolina GOP-- or doesn't want to

I was so relieved to read yesterday evening that some of the top lobbyists running the Double Talk Express had called the head of the North Carolina Republican Party and told her flat out that McCain doesn't want her running the racist ad they put together about Obama's former minister.

McCain senior campaign adviser Charlie Black has told Steve Holland of Reuters that he has been informed by the Republican National Committee's representative in North Carolina that the state party has agreed to withdraw the ad. McCain personally had called on the state GOP to can the ad.

But then, when I drove to visit a friend I heard an interview with Republican Party Chairman Linda Daves. No doubt she will soon be fired from her job-- McCain has never had any patience for backtalk from Republican women as he has demonstrated over and over throughout her career-- and at that point she can start a career as an actress, playing character roles: Nazi dominatrix, organizer of women's auxiliary for KKK groups, sadistic nun... things that come naturally to her. I listened in stunned silence to the pinched and vicious uptight hack mouthing right-wing platitudes about why she didn't care what McCain claims he wants.

“Contrary to any media reports, the ‘Extreme’ ad will run as scheduled next week. There has never been any intention to pull the ad and it will air.

The ‘Extreme’ ad has garnered attention around the country. I want to thank the people across North Carolina and across the country who have shown overwhelming support for us. Our aim is to tell the truth and ask difficult questions. We will continue to do so.

She also claims McCain never called her personally-- not that it would matter, she added. Racists, bigots and reactionaries of all stripes are pouring money into the state GOP to signal their approval. One major Raleigh TV station, WRAL, said they had rejected the ad and another, WTVD,
said they might do the same if the GOP asked them to run it. [UPDATE: Charlotte powerhouse WSOC turns down the GOP/KKK ad.]

Howard Dean made a good point today: "This is a test of leadership for John McCain. If he can't pick up the phone and make members of his own party stop airing a television ad he claims to oppose, how can he lead our country through an economic crisis or the war in Iraq?" I think an Obama campaign staffer, Hari Sevugan, came closer to what's going on with this ad though: "The fact that Senator McCain can't get his own party to take down this misleading, personal attack ad raises serious questions about his promise to the American people that he will run a civil, respectful campaign."

This might not actually be a matter of McCain not being able to control his own party, as bad as that is. Far more serious is the possibility-- very distinct possibility when you look around at who's on the Double Talk Express with him-- that the long planned gutter attacks on Obama, the ones one of McCain's top advisors, Mark McKinnon, warned us to expect will be ostensibly denounced by the campaign while put into operation by "naughty" surrogates. Expect lots of gutter attacks from the right-- and lots of posturing and hand-wringing from Gramps.


UPDATE: McCAIN CLAIMS NORTH CAROLINA RIGHT WING GOP IS OUT OF TOUCH

McCain was on Today this morning and he came off all grumpy with the North Carolina Republicans. "They're not listening to me because they're out of touch with reality and the Republican Party. We are the party of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan and this kind of campaigning is unacceptable." But asked if the NC GOP's decision to air the spot anyway raised questions about his leadership, McCain didn't have quite as sure-footed an answer:  "I don't know exactly how to respond to that."

Wth the National Day of Prayer approaching, feel free to pray--as long as you do it the way the commandos who hijacked the day say you should

"I call upon every citizen of this great Nation to gather together on that day in homes and places of worship to pray, each after his or her own manner, for unity of the hearts of all mankind."
--President Ronald Reagan, proclaiming 1983's National Day of Prayer

It happens that next Thursday, being May 1 and therefore also the first Thursday in May, is the National Day of Prayer, as set forth by Congress in 1988. The day has existed in some form for much of the nation's history, but has been celebrated annually since the last year of the Truman administration, 1952.

In his 1983 proclamation of the National Day of Prayer, President Ronald Reagan argued that since 1952--

the National Day of Prayer has become a great unifying force for our citizens who come from all the great religions of the world. Prayer unites people. This common expression of reverence heals and brings us together as a Nation and we pray it may one day bring renewed respect for God to all the peoples of the world.

From General Washington's struggle at Valley Forge to the present, this Nation has fervently sought and received divine guidance as it pursued the course of history. This occasion provides our Nation with an opportunity to further recognize the source of our blessings, and to seek His help for the challenges we face today and in the future.

Now, Therefore, I, Ronald Reagan, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim Thursday, May 5, 1983, National Day of Prayer. I call upon every citizen of this great Nation to gather together on that day in homes and places of worship to pray, each after his or her own manner, for unity of the hearts of all mankind.

"Each after his or her own manner."

"For unity of the hearts of all mankind."

True, President Reagan wrote as if "all mankind" is religious. But that's a discussion for another day, as is the question of whether we even ought to have a National Day of Prayer in a country whose founders had the wisdom to foresee that both the state and religion would prosper best if the state was kept the hell out of religious affairs and religion was damned well kept out of affairs of state. Foolish people have always tried to break down that ingeniously planned separation, and they win occasional battles, but so far they've never come close to winning their war against the Founders' shrewd idea of separating church and state.

The legality of the National Day of Prayer has withstood all challenges, and I really don't see much reason for the nonreligious among us to worry overmuch. It's a day, after all, for those who do believe, and it's hard to quarrel with the goals outlined by President Reagan.

Somewhere along the line, though, something happened, and it's hard to describe it as anything other than a hijacking of the National Day of Prayer by the most dictatorial and controlling elements of the Evangelical movements. As Bruce Falconer blogged yesterday in his post "Holy Wars: Evangelicals Attempt to Exclude Non-Christians From National Day of Prayer" on Mother Jones' MoJoBlog:

Shirley Dobson, wife of James Dobson, the conservative founder of Focus on the Family, is this year's chairperson of the National Day of Prayer Task Force, a non-governmental organization based in Focus on the Family's offices in Colorado Springs and charged with organizing various events. According to Jay Keller, national field director of the Interfaith Alliance, Dobson has made a point of "excluding Jews, Muslims, Catholics, Buddhists, and even mainline Christians" from the National Day of Prayer.

Thanks to Dobson, this year's task force volunteers are required to sign pledges, stating: "I commit that NDP activities I serve with will be conducted solely by Christians while those of differing beliefs are welcome to attend." Volunteers must also affirm that they "believe that the Holy Bible is the inerrant Word of The Living God" and that "Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the only One by which I can obtain salvation and have an ongoing relationship with God." Such oaths violate the non-sectarian nature of the National Day of Prayer and clearly align "a government-sponsored event with a particular Christian denomination, in violation of the basic provisions of the First Amendment to the Constitution," says Keller.

Now we come to the true horror. "Dr. Ravi Zacharias, the honorary chairman of this year's event, has refused to invoke the name of Jesus Christ in his official prayer, so as not to offend the faithful of other religions."

Pow! No mention of the name of Jesus Christ! You can imagine the effect this has had on the Fake Christians who plaster Jesus' name all over the place despite their obviously total unfamiliarity with any aspect of either Jesus' spirit or his teachings, which directly contradict pretty much everything our Fake Christians work so hard to shove down everyone else's throat.

Christian Newswire issued a fatwa, "Ashamed of Jesus at the National Day of Prayer," going after not just Zacharias but Mrs. Dobson for allowing Jesus' name to be bypassed. Blogger Falconer quotes this excerpt from the press release:

According to the truth of God's Word, the entire counsel of God, we do not pray in "God's Holy Name" to God the Father. We pray to God the Father in the name of His only Son, Jesus Christ, who alone provides us access to the Father. It is appalling that Dr. Zacharias is willing to capitulate to the un-Scriptural, interfaith ecumenism and discard the name of Jesus. NDP Chairwoman, Shirley Dobson, owes a biblical explanation to Christians around the nation as to why the name of Jesus is absent from the official prayer. We are not here as Christians to appease those of other world religions. We cannot come to God except through His Son's righteous merits. To pray as "Christians" in any other way is both a farce and a mockery. While other believers around the world are dying for that name, in America, Dr. Zacharias will not even breathe that name in his official public prayer because it might "offend".

If evangelical leaders want God's help in the midst of America's deepening national crisis, we must come to Him on His stated terms, not ours. Either God's Word is truth, or it is not. There is no middle ground. There are no special interfaith prayer models in Scripture for evangelical activists hoping to maintain conservative political coalitions. Such tacit denial of Jesus Christ will court God's righteous wrath, not His blessing. Dr. Zacharias owes an apology to those throughout history who have paid the ultimate price for their fealty to King Jesus. May God grant repentance to those pragmatic evangelicals who place cultural concerns before Scriptural truth.

Now of course these people are entitled to pray however they wish, and they are entitled to believe that they are the only ones who know how to pray correctly. There is, at the same time, not the slightest possibility that Jesus would be anything but horrified by their authoritarian and impositional beliefs, which are wholly unrelated to anything he believed or preached. He wouldn't have turned his back on them, of course. I imagine he would have tried to explain the errors of their ways, and prayed for them. But it seems impossible to believe that he would have been anything but appalled by their belief that they own this day of prayer.

Note that no one is telling, suggesting, or even in the teeny-tiniest way hinting to them how they should pray. In accordance with the religious freedom that we as Americans cherish, they have absolute, uncontested freedom to make their trashy mockery of the teachings of Jesus in any way they wish.

But of course this has nothing to do with their freedom of worship--or, really, with their worship in any sense. It has nothing to do with their free exercise of their religious beliefs, which remain totally unimpinged upon. They are totally free, as President Reagan put it, to gather in their places of worship to pray after their own manner, "for unity of the hearts of all mankind."

No, what the people who hijacked the National Day of Prayer are about is just about power, and coercion--their ability to bully everyone else, to make them cower, tremble, and cringe before the imagined majesty of their imagined piety.

A key thing to notice here is that the Fake Christians aren't just excluding non-Christians from the right to participate in the day of prayer--though it shouldn't be forgotten that they are unequivocally and forcefully doing that. No, they seem if anything more outraged by other Christians who deviate in any particular from their Jesus-trashing dogma.

As I always have to say when religion is up for discussion, I'm not categorically against it. There are lots of religious people whose faith inspires them to lead lives of admirable, even enviable humanity, purpose, and fulfillment. Jesus would have no trouble "getting" them, whatever the terms of their specific faith.

As regular readers know, my go-to guy in religious matters is Pastor Dan of the religion-and-politics blog Street Prophets, one of the clearest-headed and most humane thinkers I know. When the subject of the Evangelicals' gleeful exclusion of non-Christians from the National Day of Prayer was raised, he observed:

It's not just non-Christians. It's gotten so bad that Catholics and mainline Protestants feel quite alienated as well. I haven't had anything to do with it for years, and won't support my congregations' involvement.

Which, come to think of it, is probably just the way the Fake Christians who hijacked the prayer day want it. When there's "official" praying to be done, folks can just pray their way or the highway.

Pastor Dan comments more fully in a Street Prophets post:

It used to be that the NDP was an excuse for the church ladies to get together with their cronies from other denominations. In recent years, it's been getting more and more conservative. I personally won't have anything to do with it, nor will I support my churches' involvement in it. There's plenty of ways to work across faith lines that don't involve empowering the narrow-minded.

Pastor Dan quotes Randall Balmer quoting Barack Obama addressing the subject of religious absolutism at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania:

Obama suggested that the danger in the political realm is a kind of religious absolutism, and the danger to the faith is self-righteousness. “And it is important for us not to try to kill the debate by saying, ‘Well, God tells me I’m right, and so I’m not going to listen to you.’ Rather, we’ve got to translate whatever it is that we believe into a language that allows for argument, allows for debate, and also allows that we may be wrong.’”

"We have got to get serious about this stuff," Pastor Dan concludes.

The National Day of Prayer might sound like an irrelevant observance of no importance. But if people like Shirley Dobson have their way, their religion will choke out all others, leaving us with a weakened monoculture. It's not good for faith, and it's certainly not good for our politics. Obama may be pathologically addicted to dialogue, but in this case, he's got a point. Politics can't work without some difference of opinion, and faith . . . well, unless you're not telling me something, ain't nobody hearing the voice of God these days.

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ISN'T THERE A LAW AGAINST ADVOCATING VIOLENCE ON THE PUBLIC AIRWAVES?

Pig-boy irrevocably answered that question himself today

When I wake up in the morning will I turn on CNN and to hear those two bran-dead robots they have reading the news in the morning chattering about how Rush Limbaugh was kicked off the air, his broadcast license revoked? Or, better yet, will I read that the FCC revoked KOA's license and will auction it off?

I was a radio dj for a good part of my life. I was always one step from saying something that would jeopardize not just my own license but the licenses of the radio stations I was broadcasting on. But I never went over the line. I think Republican Party propagandist Rush Limbaugh did today. Call me crazy but I would think calling for riots in a major American city is pretty serious stuff and maybe even the GOP's FCC should look into it... very seriously.

Talk show host Rush Limbaugh is sparking controversy again after he made comments calling for riots in Denver during the Democratic National Convention this summer.

He said the riots would ensure a Democrat is not elected as president, and his listeners have a responsibility to make sure it happens.

"Riots in Denver, the Democrat Convention would see to it that we don't elect Democrats," Limbaugh said during Wednesday's radio broadcast. He then went on to say that's the best thing that could happen to the country.

Obviously, Limbaugh is tricky enough to give himself a slick excuse for his dog whistle suggestion to his far right listeners to go make trouble. John Amato has the audio up at Crooks & Liars. Limbaugh goes on and on about his Operation Chaos plot to make sure Clinton wins the Democratic nomination and that he "dreams" that violent riots break out in Denver.

"The dream end of this is that this keeps up to the convention and we have a replay of Chicago 1968 with burning cars, protests, fires, literal riots, and all of that. That’s that’s the objective here.”

KOA is vigorously defending their star revenue source-- and not even claiming that he was on drugs or having a psychotic episode during his bizarre rant. No, they are just parsing words and trying to deny the obvious. As you can see there's an ad for Hilton on the page. I called my travel agent and asked her to make sure that under no circumstances do I wind up in a Hilton Hotel until she hears otherwise from me. I'll try to figure out who else advertises on KOA.


UPDATE: LIMBAUGH HAS NOT LOST HIS LICENSE & KOA IS STILL ON THE AIR TOO

Limbaugh was unrepentent and still calling for riots in Denver and the Bush Regime's FCC failed to take him off the air. Denver's Mayor John Hickenlooper said, "Anyone who would call for riots in an American city has clearly lost their bearings." Hickenlooper doesn't ask the question but normal people have to wonder if Limbaugh is still on probation for drug abuse or if he's fallen off the wagon again.

SENATE ETHICS COMMITTEE TO DOMENICI: "NAUGHTY, NAUGHTY"-- SO CAN HE RUN FOR PRESIDENT NOW?

Pete "Sneaky Pete" Domenici (R-NM) is well liked in the Senate-- on both sides of the aisle. That he outrageously breached Senate ethics by threatening-- and then following through on his threat-- U.S. Attorney David Iglesias' job in an attempt to get him to bring some politically-motivated indictments against Democrats, hasn't gotten many senators riled up enough to do anything to discipline him in any meaningful way. The Ethics Committee admonished him today, totally meaningless, especially for someone who is retiring.

Even if he weren't retiring it wouldn't mean much. When McCain was caught taking massive bribes for special favors from corrupt banker-- and close family friend-- Charles Keating, all the Senate did was "admonish" him. Now many Republicans are backing this corrupt turd in his lifelong goal to capture the presidency. Like in McCain's case, the pathetic and irrelevant Ethics committee did its best to soften the blow on the doddering Domenici, claiming it found "no 'substantial evidence' that Mr. Domenici 'attempted to improperly influence an ongoing investigation.'” Did it look? And wasn't he actually trying to do something else anyway-- get his execrable political protege, Heather Wilson, re-elected?

Wilson is running for Domenici's Senate seat now, though she isn't expected to win. The House Ethics Committee, every bit as much of a joke as the Senate Ethics Committee, hasn't hauled Wilson's ass in to answer questions about her role in the firing of Iglesias.


UPDATE: CREW ISN'T SATISFIED WITH SENATE'S DERELICTION OF DUTY

After reminding us that when Domenici was first asked about why he made the call, he denied everything, CREW issued a statement by Executive Director Melanie Sloan:

"The ethics committee may have been unable to wholeheartedly condemn Senator Domenici's conduct, but we have no such compunction. The committee's effort to minimize its reprimand of Senator Domenici itself reflects poorly on the Senate. Little is more destructive to our democracy than an attempt to use political power to influence a criminal investigation and it should be distressing to all Americans that the Senate Ethics Committee does not appear to share that view."

Congress again proves that it is fundamentally incapable of making or enforcing rules to regulate its own behavior. 

IS THERE SOMEONE TO BLAME FOR HIGH GAS PRICES? YOU BET YOUR ASS THERE IS!

"A Texas oil man becomes President, and the price of gas triples. Why should anyone be surprised by that? And when will people learn?"
-Alan Grayson, progressive candidate for Congress from Orlando, Florida


One of Blue America's most successful projects in the last cycle was to help North Carolina Democrat Larry Kissell make the very visceral point to voters in his district that the Bush-Cheney energy agenda led directly to much higher prices at the gas pump. Nervous that voters will continue to turn against the GOP as gas continues on its predictable surge towards $5/gallon, Republican hacks Miss McConnell and John Cornyn, are trying, desperately, to preempt the attacks they know are coming.

"Mr. President, on another issue," hissssed Miss McConnell on the Senate floor today, "two years ago today the Democrats announced they had a commonsense plan to lower gas prices. When Democrats took over control of Congress last January, the average price of a gallon of gasoline was $2.32. Today it's $3.53, according to AAA. Apparently, their commonsense plan is not working as intended. In fact, since taking control of Congress last year, Democrats not only failed to deliver on their promise to lower gas prices, they have repeatedly pushed for policies that would not lower but raise prices at the pump."

One of the very first things Cheney did after he and Bush stole the election in 2000 was to assemble a still secret conclave of oil and gas industry executives and tell them that in return for underwriting GOP electoral efforts they could write the Bush Regime energy policies. Which is what they did and which is precisely why I spent $53.75 yesterday to fill up the same car that used to cost me $20-something dollars to fill up. On December 16, 2003 the L.A. Times wrote that "the Sierra Club, an environmental group, and Judicial Watch, a conservative public interest group, sued Cheney, contending that as head of the energy task force he had violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act of 1972, which generally requires open meetings whenever outsiders offer advice to high government officials. During the litigation, Cheney refused to turn over documents detailing who met with his energy task force, and he has argued that the Constitution forbids private lawyers from asking for the information."

Bush and Cheney worked on energy policy with the ultimate scam outfit, their heroes at Enron, another Republican Culture of Corruption operation that transferred billions of dollars from average Americans into the pockets of a wealthy few-- including the Bush family-- and into the campaign warchests of the GOP. All the way back in 2002 the NY Times was already sounding the alarm about how Bush and Cheney were setting up one of the biggest rip-offs in American history: "Enron representatives met six times with Vice President Cheney or his aides on the nation's energy policy, including a discussion in mid-October just before the company's sudden collapse. In a letter to Congress, vice presidential counsel David Addington disclosed the number of meetings between the Bush White House and the former energy giant whose CEO, Ken Lay, has been among President Bush's top political supporters. One of the meetings between Lay and Cheney occurred on April 17 to discuss 'energy policy matters, including the energy crisis in California.' The day after meeting with Lay, Cheney said the Bush administration would not support price caps on wholesale energy sales in California."

But the most outrageous symptom of Miss McConnell's screaming hypocrisy is how he has personally obstructed-- with narrow partisan filibusters-- every bipartisan and Democratic initiative that has tried to deal with the energy crisis. McConnell has been a far greater danger to this country than Osama bin-Laden could ever wish for. In the middle of last December, for example, McConnell successfully filibustered and killed "an amendment that would require new corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards of 35 miles per gallon for cars and light trucks, and require 36 billion gallons of biofuels to be blended with gasoline by 2022. It also would direct the Energy Department to set new energy efficiency standards." This was just a week after Miss McConnell successfully led a Republican filibuster on amendments "to the bill that would require new corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards of 35 miles per gallon for cars and light trucks, and require 36 billion gallons of biofuels to be blended with gasoline by 2022. It would require electric utilities to produce at least 15 percent of their electricity from renewable energy sources by 2020 and direct the Energy Department to set new energy efficiency standards. It also includes a $21.5 billion package of tax incentives that would be offset in part by eliminating or reducing $13 billion in subsidies for major oil and gas companies." And six months earlier (June 21, 2007), the same Miss McConnell-- and I'm talking about the reactionary gay closet queen from Kentucky here, not some other Miss McConnell-- successfully led a filibuster of right wing Republican obstructionists on an amendment by conservative, business-oriented Democrat Max Baucus which sought to "establish $32.1 billion of tax incentives for alternative energy sources while imposing taxes on the oil and gas industry. It would create $3.6 billion worth of renewable energy bonds, establish $11 billion in tax incentives for renewable energy and authorize $2.5 billion for the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self Determination Act. The substitute would overhaul national energy policies including requiring the annual use of 15 billion gallons of biofuels by 2015, increasing the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards to 35 miles per gallon by 2020 and making petroleum price gouging a federal crime in a "national energy emergency." It would also encourage carbon sequestration research, require the federal government to purchase 15 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2015 and direct the State Department to pursue strategic partnerships with major energy-consuming and energy-producing nations."

Mitch McConnell is the living, breathing, lisping embodiment of Republican hypocrisy. The GOP has one proposal to high gas prices: more tax cuts and subsidies for robber baron oil companies. Nicole over at Crooks & Liars nailed House Republicans today for the same bad faith demonstrated by McConnell. She posted a great video of "Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) railing against the Republican special interests that prevent any real progress from being made on getting control over skyrocketing fuel prices and huge profits being realized by oil companies while consumers struggle with high fuel costs." Watch:



I think every one of our Blue America endorsees, like Alan Grayson up top, has been attacking their rubber stamp opponents for being on the Big Oil dole while voting for the Big Oil agenda. Retired Navy Commander Eric Massa, who is running against Randy Kuhl, a garden variety GOP lemming in an economically hard-pressed upstate New York district, has been hammering Kuhl for being one of Congress' worst Big Oil pawns. "Randy Kuhl and George W. Bush refuse to take responsibility for our skyrocketing gas prices. Exxon-Mobil has been raking in billions of dollars while middle class families are struggling to fill up their tanks just to get to work. Randy Kuhl has voted to continue corporate welfare handouts for Big Oil, and I think this is the wrong direction. I continue to reject corporate contributions while Randy Kuhl has taken $29,600 from Big Oil-- it is clearly time to change the way things are done in Washington." Kuhl continues getting wingnut welfare from Big Oil and voting for what they want. 293 Blue America supporters have sent in donations through our ActBlue page to help Eric continue to get his message out. And, Alan, a newer Blue America candidate has 76 donors on our site. Would you consider being #294 or #77?

While you think about it, why not contemplate how high oil prices could go with a president like John McCain and congressmembers like Randy Kuhl and Ric Keller? Here's a little oil-Republican-contemplative music courtesy of Richard Butler and his psychedelic friends:

An Alabama mayor gives the McCranky campaign all-but-free space rental and totally free inmate labor. So what else is new with Today's GOP?

The McCranky campaign's new Alabama "volunteer" brigade

"I'd be concerned with the legal ramifications of that, from the city's perspective. It could be a problem for the city to have made in-kind donations to a political candidate by charging less rent or having inmates do work for the event."
--Homewood (Alabama) City Councilman David Hooks

Our friend David Donnelly passes along this news story from the Birmingham News with the one-word epithet, "unbelievable." And "unbelievable" should be the word for it--except that the modern-day GOP has succeeded in making the "unbelievable" its everyday reality.

My goodness, this is so, er, unbelievably flagrant and utterly shameless. I wonder if we shouldn't be offended that these people are so shameless, they don't even feel any need to try to cover their tracks.

McCain gets discount on Homewood space rental

Thursday, April 24, 2008
KIM BRYAN
News staff writer

Republican presidential candidate John McCain got a deal when his campaign rented gathering space from the city of Homewood for a private fundraiser earlier this week.

His campaign was given a discount of about 80 percent off the standard booking rate for Rosewood Hall. In September, Jefferson County Democrats rented the same facility and were charged the full rate.

The McCain campaign was charged $250 to use two rooms in the hall, which normally would book for $1,200 on a weeknight. The campaign also was given free labor from Homewood City Jail inmates to set up tables and chairs for the event, avoiding a $100 set-up fee, but did pay a standard $50 cleaning fee.

Homewood Mayor Barry McCulley said the rental rate was discounted because the event was on Monday, a slow day for business. City Council members say they always vote on such discounts but didn't get a say in this deal. They're upset, as are local Democrats.

"I think it's outrageous," said Robert Yarbrough, chairman of the Jefferson County Democratic Party and a Homewood resident.

"I was charged full book rate. I was never offered any free inmate services to set up for my event. Mayor McCulley owes an apology to every citizen in Homewood as to why he arbitrarily changed the fee for this out-of-state senator from Arizona."

Yarbrough rented the entire hall, three rooms, on Thursday nights in September 2006 and September 2007 for the Democratic Blue Dot Ball fundraiser. The weekday fee is $1,700 for all three rooms, according to the official rates. Yarbrough said the Democrats paid more than $2,500 for all charges each year.

McCulley said he and City Council President Ginger Busby agreed on the lower rate for McCain's event. He said minor policy changes such as this don't require council approval.

Busby says there was a miscommunication.

"The mayor asked me if the hall could be free for the McCain event, and I said absolutely not," Busby said. "He then asked if it was appropriate to charge a lesser fee for Mondays. I said as long as it didn't cost the city money, it could be considered."

Busby said she did not know what the charge was or that city inmates were involved. She didn't attend the event and was at a soccer game Monday night, she said.

City Councilman David Hooks said that the council typically debates and votes each time there is a request to discount or waive the rent, but that didn't happen this time.

"I'd be concerned with the legal ramifications of that, from the city's perspective," Hooks said. "It could be a problem for the city to have made in-kind donations to a political candidate by charging less rent or having inmates do work for the event."

McCain campaign officials in Washington said they knew nothing about Homewood using inmate labor at no cost, nor did they ask for a cut rate.

"We paid what we were asked to pay," said Jeff Sadosky, McCain campaign spokesman.

The McCain event invoice shows an $850 total, including a $150 permit to serve alcohol and a refundable $400 security deposit.

Homewood police Chief Phil Dodd said city jail inmates had never before set up at Rosewood Hall, but did so at the mayor's request. The regular workers don't work on Sundays, when the event had to be set up, Dodd said.

Busby said she is asking the Republican Party to cover the $950 rental discount and $100 set-up waiver McCulley gave the McCain campaign.

#

The Petraeus and Odierno hearings, if handled right, offer a great chance to expose the Bush regime's military blundering and criminality

CENTCOM's "area of responsibility"--well, it does include Iraq.

On our side of the political spectrum there has been a fair amount of shock and horror at the latest round of military-political appointments from Chimpy the War Prez (check out, for example, Spencer Ackerman's take in the Washington Independent):

* The promotion of Gen. David Petraeus to take over command of CENTCOM, the U.S. Central Command (vacant since March 11, when Adm. William Fallon relinquished the post in the wake of the Esquire article in which he sort of suggested that his civilian bosses are, you know, just maybe kind of nuts), even though he has a strong vested interest in justifying his own dubious performance in Iraq and has no demonstrated knowledge of or interest in the rest of his proposed new jurisdiction, which includes such critical hot spots as Afghanistan, with the Taliban apparently gaining strength in the neglected ongoing war, and the wilds of Pakistan, home to apparently growing numbers of real Islamic terrorists (it's apparently also highly unusual to promote a theater commander to the position overseeing his former command, out of concern for lack of objectivity)

* The elevation of Petraeus's current deputy, Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, to replace him as commanding general of the "multi-national force" in Iraq, despite widespread feeling that Odierno's military skills are mostly political

Of course, from the realpolitik standpoint these appointments seem so obvious as to be inevitable, given a regime that listens only to military men it trusts--and trusts only military men who say exactly what it wants to hear. Such stoogelike devotion is apparently becoming harder to find in the upper echelons of the U.S. military, however. Still, there's an important opportunity here, or rather two opportunities, in that both positions require Senate confirmation.

Let me stress the obvious at the outset: Neither Petraeus nor Odierno is going to be denied confirmation. However, if their confirmation hearings are planned and executed with real intelligence, they can provide a glorious forum for brutally exposing a whole range of insanities and criminalities in the Bush regime's record of unbroken warmongering--and ideally forcing at least some of the traditional media to transmit some painful exposure of crucial issues like (as our friend Brandon Friedman of VoteVets has put it) "a presidential administration that has overly politicized the highest ranks of the military."

But again, those hearings have to be planned and coordinated with genuine brilliance, to make sure that the right questions are asked in the right way--and re-asked and, perhaps somewhat reformulated, re-asked--and followed up on, and that the significance of the answers, including the inevitable evasions and outright lies, be made clear. We know that the traditional media don't give a damn about the truth, and in matters of "national security" come to the table pre-rolled-over.

Both these sets of hearings offer powerful opportunities to set about setting the public record straight.

#

HOW (AND WHY) McCAIN SEEKS TO UNDERMINE MILITARY VETS WHILE SCREAMING ABOUT SUPPORTING THE TROOPS

We've been holding up the hypocrisy of Republican legilsators who falsely claim to support the troops and support U.S. veterans by emphasizing their actual voting records when it does come to supporting the troops. Recently two actual military heroes now in the U.S. Senate, James Webb (D-VA) and Chuck Hagel (R-NE), have been pushing bipartisan legislation to update the GI Bill. Simply put, they want to bring the intent of the law-- to give returning American vets a chance for an education-- into sync with what education costs today, not what it used to cost when Democrats first fought off Republican attempts to kill the concept in the 1940s.

And yet the opportunities offered under the GI Bill have been a path into the expanding middle class for millions of American families. Senators Webb and Hagel-- and dozens of co-sponsors from both parties-- want to make that a reality again. So what's standing in the way? Arch hypocrites led by Bush and McCain, one a coward who never served and despises all military men because of his own shortcomings and the other an angry old man who is basically nothing but a garden variety a control freak. The control freak and Lindsey Graham (his little light in the loafers mini-me from South Carolina) and another reactionary boob, Richard Burr of North Carolina, have offered their own version of the bill with the intent of circumventing its effectiveness.

57 senators support the Post 9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act (S.22) introduced by Webb and Hagel. All they need is 3 more backers to make it filibuster-proof-- something they will need since anti-military fanatic Mitch McConnell-- thrown out of the Army after less than two weeks when he was caught groping a private's privates (something he denies, of course)-- has vowed to use every parliamentary trick in the book to stop this from passing, the same way he prevented equal pay for women from passing yesterday (women being another "special interest" he hates). McCain's devious substitute bill could split the Senate, undermining the commonsense legislation that Senators Webb and Hagel offered. In doing so, it also undermines America's veterans, McCain's real objective. McCain blurted out his real reason for opposing the bill most senators who want to help vets support. McCain fears that if recruits are offered real educational opportunities they won't keep re-upping and then he won't have anyone to fight his hundred years war in the Middle East.

Our friends are VoteVets outline how McCain's devious bill undermines the intent of the GI Bill modernization:

1) The McCain-Graham-Burr legislation creates a flat education benefit, not taking into account the cost of state colleges where veterans live. This would mean veterans in states where the cost of education is higher than the benefit would have go to into debt to get an education, or uproot themselves and their families to move to a place where the benefit would cover college. In many cases, the McCain bill won't even cover half the cost of college.  The Webb-Hagel Bill determines the education benefit based on the highest state college tuition in a veterans' home state, allowing veterans to come home and attend college, without upheaval in their lives.

2) The McCain-Graham-Burr legislation creates second-class veterans, by offering those who serve in the military for 12 years the chance to transfer their education benefits to their children. This says to a veteran who serves for two years and loses both of his legs in combat that his service isn't as valuable as someone who has served for longer.

3) The McCain-Graham-Burr legislation leaves the National Guard and Reserve out in the cold. In the current conflicts, the National Guard and Reserve have served faithfully alongside their active duty compatriots, and deserve equal benefits. Yet, the McCain bill does nothing to reward our Guard and Reservists for their cumulative service. Under the McCain bill, over 160,000 members of the Guard and Reserves who have done more than one tour in Iraq or Afghanistan would get no credit towards an education for their additional sacrifice.

PAUL VERHOEVEN'S THEORIES ARE DIFFERENT FROM RELIGION, INC'S

Paul Verhoeven claims knowledge about a famous bastard

A few days ago Ken explained how, in "The Ring Cycle," Wagner's Norse gods and godesses didn't have superpowers. That kind of made the narrative make more sense to me-- as if making sense matters in any way whatsoever when we're talking about gods and godesses. It's all the same to me-- a tree, a talking burning bush, Quetzalcoatl, Mohammed getting on a horse and ascending to Heaven, Jesus, Mitt Romney's underwear... to me it's always been all Buy Bull, Buy Bull, Buy Bull. Whatever gets you through the night...

A couple of days ago the Hollywood Reporter ran a story on Dutch film director Paul Verhoeven and the biography of Jesus he wrote. He worked on it for 2 decades and he claims it's the most realistic portrayal of Jesus ever. Realistic? How do you portray a myth realistically? Doesn't it defeat the whole purpose of the myth?

One of his conclusions deals with the fact that Jesus was probably the son of Mary and a Roman soldier who raped her during the Jewish uprising in Galilee. Verhoeven also claims that Christ was not betrayed by Judas Iscariot.

I have a feeling there are a couple billion people-- not counting Muslims-- who wil be willing to overlook the latter but could turn pretty nasty over the former. And needless to say, Fox "News" is stoking those flames. The book will be out in English next year, although Dutch readers like myself will get a chance to read it in September. I'll probably pass and just get reports about what O'Reilly and Hannity have to say about it in a never ending quest for the kinds of ratings that sell advertising that provide them with their salaries. Their first critique comes not from a biblical scholar, but from a loud-mouthed political hack, Catholic League President Bill Donohue who calls Verhoeven's claim about Mary "laughable."

"Here we go again with idle speculation grounded in absolutely nothing," Donohue told FOXNews.com. "He has no empirical evidence to support his claim, which is why they say 'may have.'"

Hard to imagine a Buy Bull thumper demanded empirical evidence of something related to Jesus and Mary. I mean, does that make any sense at all? Isn't the whole religion racket-- regardless of brand-- entirely predicated on mumbo jumbo and the suspension of reason? I think I'll just stick to the Jesus and Mary Chain:



UPDATE: McCAIN, IN NEED OF SUPPORT IN THE BUY BULL BELT, HAS FOUND RELIGION

Paul Verhoeven's theories about the origins of Jesus aside, John McCain, a lifelong secularist, has made sure the word is out-- big time-- that he is "privately" being baptized. Whatever it takes! Let's be happy that eating live, beating hearts of sacrificial victims isn't in mode.

NOT ALL REPUBLICANS ARE NAZIS-- NOT EVEN ALL INDIANA REPUBLICANS

Indiana GOP candidate pledges allegiance to his hero

It would be unfair to tar all Republicans as Nazis. I fondly remember NY Republican Senator Jacob Javits when I was growing up. And John Lindsey was a decent Republican even before he switched parties and became a Democrat. And... I'm sure there are some other decent Republicans, though none seem to show up on TV. Instead we get a steady stream of lunatic fringe thugs like O'Reilly, Hannity, Marsha Blackburn, James Inhofe, and John Cornyn. But if you're a Nazi or a fascist and you want to get involved in politics, chances are you know exactly where your ideas will be taken seriously-- the G.O.P.

Let's take a look at some recent events in Indiana's second congressional district. In 2006 reactionary Democrat Joe Donnelly beat right wing extremist Chris Chocola (54-46%), and then went on to create a record of voting more frequently to rubber stamp the Bush agenda than any other Democrat except 3 truly wretched Dixiecrats-- Jim Marshall (GA), Nick Lampson (TX) and John Barrow (GA). Chocola says Donnelly still isn't far right enough and he's trying to get the seat back. But someone even further right than Donnelly or Chocola-- over the edge attorney Tony Zirkle-- doesn't think either of them is far enough right and he's engaged in a vicious primary battle with Chocola.

So in pursuit of his goal of being the next congressman to represent IN-02 Zirkle chose Hitler's birthday to address a Nazi Party meeting in Chicago. I think Bush and Cheney and McCain should say where they stand on their party's candidate addressing the Nazi faithful. I know, I know... McCain says he doesn't always agree with all the ideas of the people who endorse him. He just likes Zirkle's other ideas, the ones about Jews and African-Americans screwing young white Christian girls in porn films; that's Zirkle's real passion and what has driven him insane and into Republican politics. I thought you might enjoy watching the video of the Republican standing in front of a picture of Hitler on his birthday and making a speech to a roomful of Nazis. In defense of Zirkle, he says he'll speak to any group, not just Nazis. "I'll speak before any group that invites me," Zirkle said Monday. "I've spoken on an African-American radio station in Atlanta." Imagine that! If you've never heard an anti-semite babbling a bunch of vicious anti-semitism, I bet you'll be shocked by this video:

62 RIGHT WING NUTS VOTE TO CUT BILLIONS FROM MEDICAID

Rep Garrett-- one of the 62 extremists

Today most of the economic justice energy was over at the Senate. However, the Democrats in the House managed to pass-- with an overwhelming veto-proof majority-- a bill protecting the Medicaid safety net. The House responded to Bush Regime plans to slash federal Medicaid funding to states for vital programs and services by about $18 billion over the next five years. Bush and McCain are screeching like 2 old fishwives at a market about how they can't change the unfair tax code during a recession but neither has any problem whatsoever eviscerating medical care for the poorest Americans-- just as long as the richest-- the ones who donate to their political careers-- don't have to pay their fair share of taxes. The bill that passed the House today with a 349-62 vote-- most Republicans (128) abandoning Boehner, Blunt, Howdy Doody and the rest of the worst GOP extremists-- puts off any changes to Medicaid until 2009, when Bush is safely out of the White House.

Among the 62 extremists who ignored their governors begging them not to vote to wreck Medicaid were some really radical loons who seem to take great joy in giving their constituents the finger, as if to say "You're too stupid to even understand what I think of you, so eat this and be sure and vote for me in November, sucker." I doubt you'll find any surprises on this (partial) list of shameful Republicans.

Roscoe Bartlett (MD)
Marsha Blackburn (TN)
Roy Blunt (MO)
John Boehner (OH)
Paul Broun (GA)
Dan Burton (IN)
Steve Chabot (OH)
Virginia Foxx (NC)
Trent Franks (AZ)
Scott Garrett (NJ)
Darrell Issa (CA)
Steve King (IA)
Buck McKeon (CA)
Marilyn Musgrave (CO)
Stevan Pearce (NM)
Mike Pence (IN)
Howdy Doody (FL)
John Shadegg (AZ)
Lynn Westmoreland (GA)

I managed to get one of the most ethical men running for Congress who I know on the phone, Dennis Shulman. Scott Garrett is the lunatic fringe Republican Dennis is running against and Garrett was the only Jersey Republican on either side of the aisle to vote to deprive New Jersey of $357.3 million in Medicaid funding. Every other New Jersey Republican joined the Democrats to protect Medicaid. Dennis told me he is profoundly disappointed. "Scott Garret's vote does not reflect this district's fundamental decency or common sense. I know that Garrett's commitment to ideology over solving problems is out of step with Northern New Jersey, and this vote is just another example of why we need to replace him." Blue America is all for that-- and we've set up a page for donations to Dennis' campaign through Act Blue.

McCONNELL AND SENATE REPUBLICAN EXTREMISTS KILL EQUAL PAY FOR EQUAL WORK BILL

Perhaps Miss McConnell will take care of your (boy) child if you need to find a second job

We've been writing a bit about the equal pay for equal work bill that should have been voted on today. The House already passed it by a healthy margin. And a nice majority favored it in the Senate today. The Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act had two Republican co-sponsors and managed to win 56 votes in the Senate, including every single Democrat and both independents. McCain ducked the vote, of course-- what a maverick, what a moderate, what a hero-- but only 42 Republican wingnuts voted against equality for women. But because Kentucky closet queen Mitch (Missy) McConnell led the forces of reaction in a filibuster, the bill was killed-- without ever actually getting a chance to be voted on. You need 60 votes to break a filibuster.

Kathryn Kolbert, president of People For the American Way, one of the organization leading the charge on equal pay, seemed angry today after the vote. Remember, Kathryn was the attorney who saved Roe v Wade in front of the Supreme Court. She takes this kind of injustice very seriously.

“Republican Senators made it painfully clear tonight that they take their marching orders from business lobbyists, not the American people. Congress had a rare opportunity in the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to reverse the destructive Supreme Court ruling in Ledbetter vs. Goodyear. The House of Representatives delivered for workers, but Senate Republicans stopped it in its tracks.”

“The Ledbetter decision, written by President Bush’s nominee Samuel Alito, made it easier for businesses to practice pay discrimination with impunity. Workers who face pay discrimination but fail to file a complaint within 180 days of the initial discriminatory act are left with severely limited legal recourse, even if they do not learn of the discrimination until much later. This is unfair and unpractical but all too consistent with the larger effort by right-wing judges to undermine the ability of Americans to seek redress when wronged by powerful interests.

“We’re deeply disappointed, but not surprised, by the decision of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to aggressively fight fair pay for American workers. We encourage Senate Democrats to continue pushing for passage of the legislation. The difficulties facing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2007 drive home for us the importance of having fair-minded judges on the Supreme Court who will protect and uphold equal rights for all.”

McCain didn't bother even showing up to vote but, campaigning in rural eastern Kentucky, where poverty is higher than in most of America-- and even worse for women-- he said he would have voted no. Several treacherous Republican senators who generally rubber stamp all of Bush's most contemptible agenda items are so frightened of losing in November that they broke ranks with their extremist leaders today and slinked over to the Democratic side, including Susan Collins (R-ME), Gordon Smith (R-OR), Norm Coleman (R-MN) and John Sununu (R-NH), all of whom voted to confirm the judge who wrote this hideous opinion, Sam Alito. Kathryn Kolbert from PFAW again: "Senator Norm Coleman was against fair pay when it counted. He lined up with his Republican colleagues and voted to put President Bush’s nominee, Justice Samuel Alito, on the Supreme Court for life. Alito had a track record of right-wing judicial activism. He surprised no one when he authored a 5-4 opinion in Ledbetter v. Goodyear that made it easier for companies to pay discriminatory wages with impunity.”

“Now Senator Coleman is saying he is ‘very open’ to reversing the decision. The Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which would effectively reverse the decision, is coming up for a crucial vote in the Senate today. Coleman, rather than supporting the bill outright, has said he will seek a “compromise”
on the bill. Meanwhile his Senate Republican colleagues have already lined up to quash it.

“Senator Coleman’s half-hearted lip service to fair pay is no consolation for Americans like Lilly Ledbetter who face pay discrimination and are left without legal recourse. In fact, it’s an insult. Coleman has shown himself to be a fair-weather friend of workers-- not there when you need them, and there when you don’t.

“The Supreme Court’s ruling in Ledbetter was unfair and unreasonable, and Senator Coleman played a key enabling role. People For the American Way will work to ensure that Minnesotans don’t forget this fact.”

The Republicans who will have to face voters in November who decided equal pay for equal work isn't as important to them as massive bribes from corporate lobbyists are:

John Cornyn (R-TX)
James Inhofe (R-OK)
Elizabeth Dole (R-NC)
Michael Enzi (R-WY)
John Barrasso (R-WY)
Miss McConnell (R-KY)
Jeff Sessions (R-AL)
Ted Stevens (R-AK)
Saxby Chambliss (R-GA)
Pat Roberts (R-KS)
Lindsey Graham (R-SC)
Lamar Alexander (R-TN)
Roger Wicker (R-MS)


UPDATE: BUT WHAT ABOUT "MRS" McCONNELL?

His marriage of convenience mate is, if anything, almost as bad as he is! When it comes to denying equal pay to women Elaine Chao is a Republican extremist first and a woman... well somewhere I suppose. A few years ago she tried claiming credit for helping to shrink the wage gap but the real reason for change was that under the Bush Regime's economic policies men's wages have started dropping precipitously.

In 2007, women earned only 80 cents for every dollar a man earned. This pay gap was substantially greater for minorities, with African-American women making only 70 cents and Hispanic women making only 62 cents for every dollar earned by their male counterparts.

But Elaine and Mitch don't see a problem: in 2006 Elaine claimed the pay gap had shrunk, when all that really happened was men's wages fell, women didn't gain. Under Elaine's watch, the administration also tried to cut resources for the agency that gives women information about harassment, discrimination, family leave, and childcare.

Chao got a nice pay raise though and makes $180,100 in her day job. She and McConnell have become multimillionaires though, as unofficial lobbyists for Chinese industry in this country.

DON YOUNG IS TRAINING A WHOLE NEW CLASS OF REPUBLICANS HOW TO MAXIMIZE CORRUPTION

There's a live & interactive version here

With DeLay and Hastert gone from the House, it's hard to say which of their craven Republican Culture of Corruption lieutenants is the most corrupt. Most people, just measuring my the amount of cash misappropriated, would probably guess Jerry Lewis (R-CA) but Don Young of Alaska has many supporters on this matter as well. I'd say these two corrupt old bastards around pretty much neck and neck. Arnold Schwarzenegger is still supporting Lewis but Alaska's popular Republican governor, Sarah Palin, has urged Alaskans to retire Young. Not all Republicans agree. This year Young's political leadership PAC, Midnight Sun has been funneling corporate bribes to lots of endangered right wing Republicans and to extremist candidates the GOP are trying to get into Congress. Among the recipients of Young's tainted lucre are these rightwing Republicans busy attacking Democratic members of Congress:

Dean Andal (R-CA) who is opposing Jerry McNerney
Jeb Bradley (R-NH) who is opposing Carol Shea-Porter
David Cappiello (R-CT) who is opposing Chris Murphy
John Gard (R-WI) who is opposing Steve Kagen
Rick Goddard (R-GA) who is opposing Jim Marshall
Jim Ryun (R-KS) who is opposing Nancy Boyda

Today, in light of the Senate asking the FBI to investigate Young's criminal use of earmarks to benefit his campaign contributors, the Center for American Progress made a yeoman's effort to present a broad overview of Young's beathtaking record of corruption.

The reinstatement of the $10 million earmark which had been rejected by the Senate directly benefited a key fundraiser for Rep. Don Young (R-AK), the former chairman of the House Transportation Committee. This week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) announced she would ask the House to accept the call for a DOJ investigation, while also continuing to press for an internal inquiry by the House ethics committee. Young is "perhaps best known as the architect of the 'bridge to nowhere,' a a project in a massive 2005 transportation bill that he named after his wife, Lu, and 'stuffed like a turkey,' as he put it when the $286 billion bill was done." Young's ethics troubles-- which hardly begin with the mysterious 2005 earmark-- have forced him to spend more than $1 million in legal fees, doling out $238,000 on lawyers in 2008 alone. The New York Times editorial board said of Young's latest earmark battle, "He remains incorrigible."


A COCONUT ROAD TO NOWHERE: As chairman of the House Transportation Committee, Young visited Florida, where he "received $40,000 in campaign donations from land developers during his visit. He requited by tailoring an earmark in the 2005 transportation bill for their pet project: a cross-wetlands connection to the interstate, known as the Coconut Road Interchange, that would boost development values while abusing the environment." The interchange was "a low priority" for county officials, but it was vitally important to Young donor Daniel Aronoff because it would have increased the value of his property. In fact, "local officials ultimately refused the money and asked Congress to let them use it for its original purpose." The 2005 bill approved by Congress included a $10 million earmark for "widening and improvements for I-75 in Collier and Lee County" Florida. However, the bill President Bush signed redirected that $10 million for "Coconut Road interchange I-75/Lee County." Young's office "admitted that it may have been a staff member who altered the bill after the vote, but not to finagle it-- only to somehow 'correct' it." The congressman defended the earmark last week, saying, "I think it's the right thing for the state of Florida, and you know, right now, they're supportive of it."

YOUNG'S TIES TO ABRAMOFF: Young's dubious ethics hardly start and end with earmarks. He also has deep ties to the face of Washington corruption: convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Though Young claimed in 2006 that he had "never had any personal or professional relationship with Abramoff," just this week "a trove of old billing records from two of Abramoff's firms" were leaked, showing "that his team of lobbyists had more than 120 contacts with Young's personal and committee staffs over 25 months, including at least 10 with Young himself." In 2000, Young directly aided Abramoff and his garment industry clients in the Mariana Islands, blocking a bill addressing labor and immigration scandals there. "Young stopped it cold in his committee, refusing to hold even a hearing." He dismissed reports of "rampant abuses" in the Marianas, "notably the trafficking of women for a commercial sex trade and the exploitation of mostly female workers from poor Asian countries." Young also said "the stories of worker abuse were largely fabricated by trade unions and special interest groups promoted by the news media." In a private memo to Mariana officials, Abramoff took credit for Young's stonewalling, writing, "We erected a roadblock in the House to stop the bill from moving." Though Young tried to deny his close ties to Abramoff, the lobbyist did not mince words. "The loss of Chairman Young's authority cannot easily be measured -- or replaced," Abramoff wrote on Jan. 4, 2001. "We have lost major institutional memory and friendship."

YOUNG'S TIES TO CORRUPT OIL FIRM: Even with the Coconut Road and Abramoff scandals in the headlines, Young's most pressing legal battle centers around a completely separate issue. Last July, the FBI opened a criminal investigation into Young's ties to Alaska oil services company VECO Corp. The FBI is looking into whether Young "accepted bribes, illegal gratuities or unreported gifts" from VECO. Last January, Young recorded "$38,000 in payments to Mr. [Bill] Allen, the former VECO chief. The refunds, which haven't been previously reported, were labeled 'fund-raising costs' in documents filed with the Federal Election Commission." Just five months later, in May 2007, both Allen and VECO's chief lobbyist, Richard Smith, pleaded guilty to extortion, bribery, and fraud, admitting to bribing other state legislators. VECO employees donated at least $157,000 to Young between 1996 and 2006, and the company is at the center of another investigation into its ties to Alaska's senior senator, Ted Stevens (R). Last summer, FBI and IRS Alaska home after contractors told a grand jury "that in 2000, Veco executives oversaw a lavish remodeling of Steven's house."

You think there's any chance Dean Andal, Jeb Bradley, David Cappiello, John Gard, Rick Goddard (R-GA), and Jim Ryun might consider returning the money Young funneled into his campaigns? I doubt it.

WHY DO REPUBLICANS HATE WOMAN, PART II

Miss McConnell never liked women but this is going way too far

Beltway newspaper, The Hill has already pronounced the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2007 dead on arrival. It passed in the House 225-199 but the closet queen from Kentucky who will always be the champion of male domination, Miss McConnell, plans to use every weapon of obstructionism in his arsenal to stop it-- and if he fails, Bush has vowed to veto it.

The Hill reports that there aren't enough Republicans to join the Democrats in overcoming Miss McConnell's anti-women filibuster. The only GOP cosponsors are Olympia Snowe (ME) and Arlen Specter (PA). "Most Republicans oppose it and the White House has threatened a veto, so prospects for passage are dim. Yet it is expected to resurface as an advertising campaign against politically vulnerable GOP senators who are up for reelection, such as Norm Coleman of Minnesota and Susan Collins of Maine."

Collins and Coleman are too scared of voters back home to do their normal rubber stamp routine and each is expected to swallow hard, whimper about how unfair their miserable lives are, and abandon Miss McConnell and the right-wing, voting for cloture. Greed and selfishness advocates inside the Republican coalition are screaming that it's another unfair regulation. Yes, imagine the injustice of having to pay people equal amounts for equal work, regardless of gender. Don't you feel terrible for these rotten bastards? No, well then remember to vote against every Republican in November, because the bribes they take from these businessmen and corporations is what compels them to vote against basic fairness issues like this. Arch-coward John McCain, of course, will avoid voting today.

Another reactionary, self-loathing closet queen in the Senate, South Carolina's light in the loafers McCain Mini-Me, Lindsey Graham tried twisting the popularity of equal pay in a limp attack on the bill's sponsors. “Most Americans get this. Most people understand that the government shouldn’t mandate wages like this. It’s not going to be an issue that we can’t defend against.”

And what is Miss McConnell's (and the Senate Republicans') rationale for blocking the equal pay bill for half the country's population? After all, they can hardly admit they have to do what their corporate paymasters insist on. According to this morning's NY Times Miss McConnell tried obfuscation: "We think that this bill is primarily designed to create a massive amount of new litigation in our country.” Unbelievable!

This is exactly why the Democrats need to have 60 seats in the next Senate. 60 seats; that means victory for Tom Allen (ME), Al Franken (MN), Jeanne Shaheen (NH), Tom Udall (NM), Mark Udall (CO), Andrew Rice (OK), Mark Warner (VA), Rick Noriega (TX), Mark Begich (AK), Jim Neal (NC), and Greg Fischer (KY). (That means 60 without GOP puppet Holy Joe Lieberman.)

Ted Kennedy, the chief sponsor of the bill, and who blogged on it this morning at HuffPo, has a different way of looking at it than McConnell: "I can’t think of anything more in keeping with American ideals of fairness than equal pay for equal work."

Drum Major Institute has a well researched analysis on the impact of the bill on the American middle class. This week the Kentucky Women’s Political Caucus endorsed Greg Fischer in the Democratic Primary for U.S. Senate. Greg told the nonpartisan organization that "Women voters deserve someone they can trust to represent their values in the Senate and I am honored to have their endorsement.” When DWT contacted him today to ask him why the senior senator from Kentucky is thwarting equality for working women in Kentucky he certainly wasn't surprised. "In typical Washington fashion, Senator McConnell is blocking legislation that allows women to fight for their rights to equal pay. His obstructionism lets employers escape responsibility by hiding their decision to discriminate so they can run out the clock."

ARCH-REACTIONARY BUSH DOG JOHN BARROW GETS A SERIOUS CHALLENGER-- MEET SENATOR REGINA THOMAS

How do you figure out who's the overall worst Democratic member of Congress? A good place to start is over at Progressive Punch where you can order everyone's vote in their Chips Are Down category. The bottom of the barrel, Democrats who consistently vote with the GOP on substantive matters, turns up Jim Marshall (GA), Nick Lampson (TX), and John Barrow (GA), the three of whom rotate from week to week as the worst. By way of comparison, the 3 best scores belong to Tammy Baldwin (WI-- 97.34), Linda Sanchez (CA-- 96.79), and Nancy Pelosi (CA-- 96.55). This week Jim Marshall's score is 29.28, Nick Lampson's is 30.43, and Barrow's is 31.02. None of them are worthy of the term "Democrat."

Lampson has no primary opponent and Marshall's opponent, Robert Nowak isn't making much headway. But Friday  there was some really good news on the anti-Bush Dog Front. An impressive Democratic state Senator from Savannah, Regina Thomas, tossed her hat into the ring against Barrow. Yesterday Senator Thomas told me she considers herself a fiscal conservative but when I started asking her the Blue America questions, she had all the right answers. She's adamantly opposed to the occupation of Iraq. When she talks about being pro-choice she makes complete sense on the non-ideological human level and she already voted against an attempt by the far right to pass an anti-gay constitutional amendment in Georgia. She was first elected to the Georgia House in 1995 and served as an assistant majority whip. In 2000 she was elected to the state Senate. Her legislative passions have involved education, children's issues,  welfare reform, veterans and defense issues, technology and consumer affairs. She doesn't have a campaign website up yet but there's a wealth of information about her on her senate website.

I just wanted to share the good news. I'll get into a deeper analysis of exactly why Barrow needs to go. And I'll do an interview with Senator Thomas soon. Keep in mind that the district is around 40% African-American and that African-Americans will be over half the voters in the Democratic primary. Senator Thomas has addressed the crucial issues that concern this mega-constituency really well as a state legislator. On the other hand, Barrow has been sucking up corporate money like there was no tomorrow and his warchest is overflowing. Senator Thomas has nothing to count on but grassroots support.


UPDATE: REGINA'S CAMPAIGN IS ABOUT REAL REPRESENTATION FOR WORKING FAMILIES

I spoke with Senator Thomas again today and she emphasized to me the difefrence in her record on working families and Barrow's failure to support his constituents against the encroachments of powerful Big Business interests. "This country," she told me, "was built on the backs and at the hands and sacrifices of working-class people. My voting record is 100% for working families. To see what this country is doing to families and the working-class is an abomination. Outsourcing our jobs to foreign nations-- taking food out of the mouths of our children can not and should not be tolerated.  This is the very fact that nothing will be done to bring the jobs back to America. With the national deficit being so high we do not even own America. IT IS TIME TO TAKE OUR COUNTRY BACK!"

TONIGHT'S CONGRESSIONAL PRIMARIES: PENNSYLVANIA AND MISSISSIPPI

First Pennsylvania. Terrible news in a seat the Democrats should be able to pick up (PA-03)-- but probably won't. Less than 35,000 Republicans showed up to vote for their rubber stamp slob, Phil English, while over 86,000 Democrats voted. Unfortunately, they gave a plurality to a reactionary, anti-choice, quasi-Democrat, Kathy Dahlkemper (44.7%). The relative progressives, Mike Waltner and Tom Myers didn't break 30% between them both. Blue America has endorsed Independent Dr. Steve Porter and we'll be sticking with him through November.

In the 6th CD there were no primary challenges but Bob Roggio, the Democrat attracted 42,370 votes compared to the 20,895 for incumbent rubber stamp Jim Gerlach. Next door in the CD, freshman Joe Sestak attracted 75,499 voters and his GOP challenger managed to get 45,727 people to vote for him. Similar situation in PA-08 where 36,626 voted for Patrick Murphy and only 12,349 voted for his Republican challenger Tom Manion.

Up in the 10th CD Bush Dog/Blue Dog Chris Carney will have to face an even worse Republican, Chris Hackett. In my old CD-- the 11th-- incumbent Paul Kanjorski got 80,235 votes to the 24,854 for the heavily touted Mayor Lou Barletta, who makes Tancredo seem pro-immigration.


Best news of the night was that Blue America fave, Sam Bennett took 47,548 votes in her uncontested primary while the rubber stamp Republican lightweight incumbent Charlie Dent only managed to attacked 16,440 voters. Stick a fork in him.

In the hot Democratic primary to challenge Republican wingnut Tim Murphy (PA-18), Steve O'Donnell narrowly bested Beth Hafer, who was expected to win. His plurality was 45.3% to her 41.1%.

The race in Mississippi-01 to replace Rep. Roger Wicker, who was appointed to fill the rest of lobbyist Trent Lott's term, shouldn't have been a race at all, since it is one of the reddest and most backward districts in the U.S. John Kerry only took 37% of the vote there and the PVI is a whopping R+10 but... there will be a run-off on May 13. And the 2 Democrats in the free for all today won 50%. The biggest vote-getter was Democrat Travis Childers with 33,138 (49%) and #2 was Republican extremist Greg Davis with 31,066 (46%).

THE FOURTH AMENDMENT GONE WILD, PART III

DWT's constitutional expert Jon Dodson has been working on a 25 part series about the Fourth Amendment. You might want to check out Part I and Part II. Jon:
 
At long last, another piece on the Fourth Amendment. Eons ago, I wrote the first two installments, the first one on the difference between searches and Fourth Amendment "searches," and the second on the difference between seizures and Fourth Amendment "seizures." This matters because the Fourth Amendment only covers "searches" and "seizures." The next great bulwark of constitutional protection is the rule that any police action that through some oversight by the Supreme Court, actually falls within the operative definitions, must be supported by a "warrant" and "probable cause," occasionally. Today, "probable cause."
 
It's the second-lowest standard of judicial review in the Western legal system, and it only applies sometimes. Aside from prosecutorial discretion, it's the only thing between a person and typically, a night in jail, several thousand dollars in legal fees, court fees, probation fees, fees of the various other organizations that leech off of the criminally accused, and a criminal charge, which would forever stain your record, whether or not you're convicted. More pertinent to the Fourth Amendment, an officer must have probable cause to believe he will find something in order to conduct a "search," and must have probable cause to believe an item (or person) is relevant to a crime in order to "seize" it, sometimes.
 
When a police officer pulls someone over, she may have a hunch that the car contains contraband, or evidence of a crime. Such a hunch could come from many sources-- the stereotypes and prejudices of the officer, the race, religion, gender, or manner of dress of the person detained, political and other bumper stickers, or even concrete "evidence." The police officer need only point to some objective fact that bolsters his "hunch." Such a fact need not be verifiable later in court (such as the whether it smelled of marijuana). So long as the fact seems plausible in light of the officer's allegations, then an officer will usually have probable cause to search or seize a person or thing.
 
There are many other standards of proof a judge might use to measure the reliability and credibility of the State's allegations. In order to convict the person of a crime, the prosecutor must prove the charges "beyond all reasonable doubt." This is the highest standard. The next highest standard is "clear and convincing evidence," which is used in child custody hearings. Next is "preponderance of the evidence," which basically means "more likely than not." Statistically speaking, evidence surpasses the "preponderance of the evidence" standard, when the evidence establishes that something was 51% likely to have happened.  By implication, some allegations that are less than 51% likely to have happened meet the next lowest standard: probable cause. When the allegations are merely "as likely as not" to have happened, there is probable cause. Even when the allegations are improbable, there is usually probable cause.

Despite the ease with which any officer or false informant could manufacture probable cause, the Supreme Court found that the remains of the standard recited in the Fourth Amendment, were still too inconvenient to law enforcement. Over the last forty years, the court has devised ad hoc exceptions to the constitutional mandate. Hence, we have many Fourth-Amendment-free zones in this country. Some of them are more understandable than others. For example no probable cause is needed to search one's bags in airports, airplanes, many government buildings, large gatherings, and all kinds of commercial establishments, big and small. These exceptions are extremely inconvenient, but perhaps understandable. There's a plethora of different "automobile" exceptions to probable cause. Most people spend substantial time in their cars. We transport everything in our cars, including groceries, personal papers and documents, medications, and pretty much anything that fits. We go many different places and jurisdictions in our cars. But anything in our cars can very easily be searched. 
 
Then there's the so-called "Terry stop." This is a vague exception, whereby an officer can perform a pat-down or other limited search based on the lower "reasonable suspicion" standard. Translation: an officer can detain a person and search their pockets and bags whenever he can pull a story out of his ass that is minimally, arguably plausible. 
 
So, the venerated standard, "probable cause," is a virtual free-for-all. A dishonest officer must only articulate something not patently outrageous to meet the standard. In many situations, such as in cars or airports, the officer doesn't even need this. Moreover, as discussed previously, the standard doesn't even apply to the vast array of invasive police activity not considered a constitutional "search," or "seizure." We could take refuge in the Constitution's mandate of judicial oversight of searches and seizures, via the warrant procedure. But, as you might imagine, the warrant procedure doesn't amount to much, particularly when judges apply such deferential standards. So, despite the Fourth Amendment's historical, quintessentially American underpinnings, the grand, revolutionary ideas encapsulated, and its centuries of use, all we're really left with is perhaps all we ever had: the discretion of the powerful. 


UPDATE: THIS IS WHY WE REFER TO JON AS OUR CONSTITUTIONAL EXPERT

Supremes give the man more power for searches. "The Supreme Court offered unanimous support for police Wednesday by allowing drug evidence gathered after an arrest that violated state law to be used at trial, an important search-and-seizure case turning on the constitutional limits of 'probable cause.'"

When officers have probable cause to believe that a person has committed a crime in their presence, the Fourth Amendment permits them to make an arrest, and to search the suspect in order to safeguard evidence and ensure their own safety," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote.

IT LOOKS LIKE PENNSYLVANIANS ARE DECIDING TO DRAW OUT THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY'S MISERY

I never saw so many polls in my life. (And I'm not even talking about the poll that shows Americans have lower regard for George Bush's Regime than for the ones in Cuba and Saudi Arabia.) No,I'm talking about the polls measuring how successful the McCain/Clinton tag team is in smearing Obama. Gallup says not so good (today, at least). But the plethora of Pennsylvania polls, measuring where the most venom has been directed, show it has been working just fine. Still, one of McCain's far right propagandists even suggests Obama could pull off a miracle among late deciders.


One person who has already made up her mind, though, is Nixon's daughter Julie (the respectable one who married Eisenhower's grandson, not the fascist lunatic Tricia). Today's NY Times reports that Julie Nixon Eisenhower max-ed out to Obama's campaign.

In her decision to give to Mr. Obama, Ms. Eisenhower might have been influenced by her sister-in-law, Susan Eisenhower, who wrote an Op-Ed for the Washington Post in February entitled, “Why I’m Backing Obama,” alluding to how her grandfather, who with Nixon as his running mate, delivered the White House to Republicans after a 20-year drought, was able to attract cross-over support from Democrats.

Julie Nixon Eisenhower, who wrote a biography of her mother and is active in civic causes in the Philadelphia area, has given sporadically over the years to Republican candidates and committees, according to campaign finance records. She gave $1,000 to President Bush and another $1,000 to the Republican National Committee, for instance, in the 2004 election cycle. In the 2000 presidential race, she donated $1,000 to Senator John McCain’s unsuccessful run.

Meanwhile, as you know, turnout is very high but voters are turned off from all the negativity that the Clintons and their vile surrogates have dragged into the campaign. "Nearly two-thirds of respondents said Clinton had 'unfairly attacked' Obama while roughly half of those interviewed said Obama had attacked Clinton unfairly." It looks like most people made up their minds in the last week, good news for Clinton.

I have CNN on in the next room and it's a roundtable (I imagine) of hateful Insiders tearing Obama apart. He should run a campaign based on having all the TV pundits deported. If only! I'm not watching, just listening but it sounds like all but one work for the McCain campaign or CNN (if there's some difference there).

And a news blast of unbelievable proportions: extreme and hysterical right wing nut Larry Kudlow extols the amazing prediction from far right hack Bob Novak that McCain will win and that his VP will be a Republican hack who helped engineer the transfer of millions of American jobs overseas. And-- you won't believe this-- Novak "believes Obama’s gaffes about bitter small-town people who cling to guns and religion will be an absolute killer in the general election. So will the Jeremiah Wright business, and more generally Obama’s extreme, across-the-board, liberal-left positions." I can't understand why that isn't on the front page of the NY Times.


UPDATE: CLINTON WINS NARROWLY IN PENNSYLVANIA

CNN projected Clinton over Obama. Looks like 53-47% 55-45%, far less than she was hoping for. Take a look at the transcripts of Rush Limbaugh listeners talking about how they're guaranteeing that McCain will win the presidency by voting for the only Democrat who he could probably beat.

HOW ABOUT IF MEMBERS OF CONGRESS DECLINE FREE HEALTH CARE UNTIL THE REST OF US ARE COVERED TOO?

Our congressmen have better health care than this-- shouldn't we?

The Blue America candidate from Saturday was Larry Joe Doherty, a populist Democrat running for Congress in one of the gerrymandered districts Tom DeLay created to thwart the will of Austin residents by cutting the city up into three pieces and giving each piece to a bizarre entity designed solely to elect Republicans. But even among Republicans, even among Texas Republicans, the misdeeds and incompetence of the Bush Regime-- and of the rubber stamp enablers like incumbent Michael McCaul-- have so turned off voters that Democrats are finding opportunities where none "should" exist. By all means go back and read over the archive of the chat session we had with Larry at Firedoglake Saturday.

Larry covered a whole range of positions with us but there is something he said that has stuck with me.

When I sued lawyers, I sued them for breaching their fiduciary duty, failing to put the interest of their clients above their own. I've known how to do that for more than 37 years in my law practice and I intend to see to it that Congress gets an explanation of how to put their constituents' interests above their own. We don't have a national health care plan for the public but Congress has one for itself. I've called on Michael McCaul to give up his national health care plan until he can legislate one that's at least as good for the public as he gets for himself. He hasn't responded to that.

I've already pledged that I'm not taking the national health care plan afforded congressmen until we pass a plan that's available for the public. It'll be the same for me as it'll be for them or I'm not going to have it... If you don't appreciate how suffering takes place until you've suffered a little then Congress needs to go without its medical plan until they can give one as good to the public.

Yesterday I ran this by a dozen or so other candidates to get a reading on it. Some of the responses were disappointing-- like one from a campaign manager who told me that he thought his candidate would like it but that if he told him about it, the candidate's wife would be angry. Along similar lines, although put in a way that was a lot easier to digest, another candidate said he loves the idea and it's "certainly consistent with my politics and my ethics. But I have to talk to my wife about this pledge before I can make it public." He promised to get back to me and I know he will. Russ Warner, who is running against a rubber stamp Republican who violently opposes universal health care (Republican closet queen David Dreier), told me he and his wife and decided that they will forego the congressional health care package if he ousts Dreier-- forego it until every American is covered. "I'm fortunate that I can afford to pay for my family’s health insurance," he said. "Hard working American families are struggling every day just to get by. With $4 a gallon gas and food cost rising, the average family has a decision to make. To fill their tanks to get to work or to cut back on needed food for their families. President Bush and David Dreier keep telling us that things are just fine. Tell that to America's hard working families."

Even before Russ got back with me, the very first response was from our brilliant Blue America candidate in Orlando, Alan Grayson, who gave me permission to re-print it.

It's a very interesting question. I think that the problem goes a lot deeper than that.  The problem is not only that Congressmen have a good health care plan, but that they are paid over $170,000 a year, with plenty of other perks beyond that. And the problem is not only that Congressmen are treated that way, but also TV news anchors, newspaper editors, judges, generals, and bosses of all kinds. All of these people act in concert to protect their privileges.
 
In my experience, no group of people ever acts to reduce their own privileges. It's far more likely that you will see corporations adopt "green" environmental policies than you will see corporate executives give up their private jets. It's far more likely that you'll see baseball players submit to weekly drug testing than a salary cap. And it's far more likely that you'll see national health care than you'll see any cut back in health care for members of Congress.
 
Congressmen also get free haircuts. If we all take a pledge against that, you'll still see plenty of mullets in Tennessee.
 
Here's an analogy. Jeff Flake of Arizona constantly attacks "earmarks." The result is that his district never gets any earmarks, he never passes any bills of any kind, and his committee assignments are lousy. He gets some good media out of it, but he never accomplishes anything. People think he's a flake. Not just a Flake, but a flake.
 
I'm not saying that cutting health care for members of Congress is a bad idea. Actually, as you can see, I'd not only be in favor of that, but a lot beyond that.

Vic Wulsin, the courageous physician and public health expert who's taking on Mean Jean Schmidt in southern Ohio, reminded me that she already made this pledge to the residents of OH-02. "I pledged to not take Congressional health insurance during my '06 race. During my '08 primary, I repeated the pledge even in my first TV commercial. I will proudly stand with every candidate who does the same." That's why we love her so much; and why we need her and others like her in Congress.

And, in fact, another Blue America-endorsed candidate has also already made a similar pledge. Lehigh Valley's Sam Bennett, who is running a strong campaign to oust Bush rubber stamp Charlie Dent, sent me this note yesterday: "I’ve already committed in my announcement speech that I will not accept any governmental health care plan until all Americans can have a comparable one." If anyone can think of a better answer, please let me know.

I guarantee you without a doubt that when the DCCC talks to candidates they don't ask them a question like this. And they're not looking for the kinds of attitudes we are. Yesterday Phil Munger, at Alaska's most respected blog, Progressive Alaska, did an astute analysis of who donates to Rahm Emanuel's notorious leadership PAC, Our Common Values. The common values are those shared with Emanuel by "supporters of war with Iran, defenders of the worst aspects of our health care industry, opponents of net neutrality, and enablers of the financial deregulation that allows hedge fund managers to be taxed very little, and who helped engineer the sub-prime mortgage industry meltdown. The list includes the producer of Bill O'Reilly's radio show, several Fox executives, war criminal Henry Kissinger's main business partner, and a whole host of other people who make Alaska's Corrupt Bastard Club look like a kindergarten roster."

Taking a pledge to eschew government paid health care until all Americans get the same package, is as likely to be endorsed by Rahm Emanuel and his supporters as it is to be endorsed by Dick Cheney, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner. But what about you? Would you take that pledge? Larry Joe Doherty, Sam Bennett, Russ Warner, Alan Grayson and Vic Wulsin already have. If you're not running for Congress, how about giving each of these candidates $5.01-- or whatever you can afford-- today to tell them that you approve?


UPDATE: AND ONE DEDICATED INCUMBENT

There already is a member of Congress who declined the Cadillac health care coverage members of that august body are entitled to. When Steve Kagen (D-WI) was elected in 2006 he pledged not to accept it until all Americans have access to health care. Steve also sponsored a bill to end discrimination in health care for things like pre-existing conditions, and is working on a similar bill for discount prescription drugs.

DO REPUBLICAN MEMBERS OF CONGRESS HATE WOMEN? THE ANSWER MAY SHOCK YOU

This morning People For the American Way put out an action alert, one that urges fair-minded citizens to call our U.S. Senators and urge them to pass H.R. 2831, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. We've been talking about the Ledbetter case since last year. The bill, which has already passed in the House. "remedies a terrible Supreme Court decision regarding protections against pay discrimination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Because the Court's decision had to do with a piece of legislation and not the Constitution, Congress can amend the current law to make the language clearer and more explicit about the original act's intent -- and thus correct the Court. It looks like the vote will come tomorrow so today is the day to call your senator. The toll free number is 1-866-338-1015. The senators who talk about equal pay for equal work but who are likely to vote against the bill are:

Susan Collins (R-ME)
John Sununu (R-NH)
Mitch McConnell (R-KY)
Norm Coleman (R-MN)
Elizabeth Dole (R-NC)
James Inhofe (R-OK)
John Cornyn (R-TX)
Gordon Smith (R-OR)
Lamar Alexander (R-TN)
Ted Stevens (R-AK)
Pat Roberts (R-KS)
Lindsey Graham (R-SC)

Many people are unaware that under the Bush Regime women have had a particularly hard time keeping up. Today is Equal Pay Day but the effects of the Bush Recession is falling harder on women than on men.

     •     In the past year, the unemployment rate among adult women workers has gone up more rapidly than for men—rising from 3.8% in March 2007 to 4.6% in March 2008, an increase of 20%, compared with a 17% increase among adult men.


     •     The downturn has caused women's wages to fall and this decline is significantly larger than what men have suffered.  In 2007, the real median wage for adult women workers dropped 3%; wages for adult male workers dropped by.5% over the same period. Women's wages are also more volatile than men's wages, and they face a much higher risk of seeing large drops in income than men do.


     •     Women are also disproportionately at risk in the current foreclosure crisis, since women are 32% more likely than men to have subprime mortgages.


     •     Existing pay disparities for women exacerbate the economic strain on women and on households run by women, since women earn only 77 cents for every dollar earned by men


     •     Women have significantly fewer savings to fall back on in a time of economic hardship. Non-married women have a net worth 48% lower than non-married men, and women are less likely than men to participate in employer-sponsored retirement savings programs.

On top of that, today's Washington Post reports that life expectancy for women is falling-- for the first time since the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918. Heckuva job, Bush-- let's make sure to vote in another Republican just like him (or worse) in November!

And by the way, just so you get a better understanding of what the pay gap between men and women means in practical terms, the average 25-year-old working woman will lose more than $523,000 to unequal pay during her working life. Even with the inflation Republican economic policies has brought on, that's a LOT of money. Bush's chief obstructionist, Mitch McConnell is expected to lead a filibuster against equal pay and there will be a cloture vote to shut down the debate. One senator likely to support McConnell's filibuster against equal pay is Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe. Blue America has endorsed state Senator Andrew Rice in his bid to replace Inhofe and his reactionary policies this coming November. We asked Andrew if he thought there was any hope Inhofe could be persuaded to support equal pay for equal work.

“I hope that when Senator Inhofe considers his vote on the equal pay for equal work legislation in the Senate this week, he will take into account the status of women in our state. According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, Oklahoma ranks 45th among the 50 states in a cumulative measure of quality of life issues like employment, health, earnings and general well-being.  I believe we can do better, particularly because we Oklahomans place great value on life and equality.”

Does it matter to you? It isn't just Inhofe either. Do one of the senators on the list above represent you? Let him-- or Susan Collins, Lindsey Graham or Elizabeth Dole-- know what you think. That toll free phone number, again: 1-866-338-1015

Yes, Elizabeth Dole and Susan Collins-- two women, each trying to pass herself off as an independent-minded senator and a supporter of equal rights. And yet, each has been a serial rubber stamper of the worst of the GOP program. I contacted Jim Neal, the progressive Democrat running against Dole, and, like Andrew Rice, someone who has been enthusiastically endorsed by Blue America. Jim didn't comment on Dole or her shameful record specifically but what he told us leaves no doubt about the contrast North Carolina voters will be able to choose between: "Bad economics kills. Conservative economic policies have reduced Americans' incomes, and we see now reduced their life spans as well. The GOP has launched a frontal assault on all forms of reproductive health care as a proxy for their war on a woman’s right to choose. The Republicans have spent three decades distorting the record of the Great Society and the War on Poverty, Democratic programs which actually reduced poverty and improved the health of Americans. Now the jury is in on Republican economic policies, and we see they are literally killing us."

If you have a moment, please take a look at the ad that People For the American Way is running in Minnesota. It explains the difference between a senator claiming they support a lofty abstraction, like "equal rights" and supporting or failing to support the reality on the ground.




UPDATE: TOM ALLEN ON THE LEDBETTER FAIR PAY ACT

Blue America-endorsed Tom Allen has been one of Congress' strongest advocates of the whole idea of fair pay for equal work. He was one of the co-sponsors of the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2007 last summer and this morning he came out swinging on the day when the Senate will try to overcome the Republican filibuster led by Mitch McConnell.

"Last summer I co-sponsored and helped pass the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2007.  This bill reverses the Court's unacceptable and unfair reading of Title VII so that a more realistic and appropriate deadline applies to those who face discrimination in the workplace.
 
"This was the law before the Ledbetter decision, which once again demonstrated that President Bush's appointees have moved the High Court decisively away from the interests and aspirations of ordinary, hard-working Americans.
 
"A Court that was previously enlightened by the pragmatic wisdom of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor is now controlled by the ideology-driven agenda of her replacement, Justice Alito.  
 
"When George Bush nominated him, Samuel Alito's record was clear.  
 
"I had no doubt that he would side with those who seek to turn the clock back on women's reproductive rights and who value employers' interests over those of workers. I would have voted against his confirmation for these very reasons, and as a member of the Senate, I will vote against the confirmation of any nominees who do not understand fairness and individual rights."

Susan Collins, the rubber stamp Republican senator Allen hopes to replace, voted, lemming-like, for Alito. It is expected that Tom's pressure could force her-- reluctantly-- to break with her party, something she rarely does, to vote to end McConnell's cowardly and disgraceful filibuster today.

WILL THE CORPORATE MEDIA BE ABLE TO SABOTAGE BARACK OBAMA?

I'll tell you how much the hidebound corporately-owned media fears the promise of change they sense Obama represents. The two worst of the far right extremists out of all the billionaire media moguls, Rupert Murdoch and Richard Mellon Scaife, are both backing Hillary Clinton. Scaife basically funded the impeachment of Bill Clinton and is more responsible for the hatred and discord our country has suffered in the past decade and a half than any other individual. His privately owned newspaper, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review endorsed Hillary Sunday. Virtually every other paper in Pennsylvania has endorsed Obama.

Some people are saying that Scaife is following Rush Limbaugh's lead and doing what he can to get a fatally flawed candidate as the Democratic nominee, one McCain has a chance to beat. It's possible, but I'm not so sure that is his motivation. I think he recognizes that a President Clinton will serve his interests just fine. The man who Hillary held up as the head of the "vast right wing conspiracy" personally wrote an OpEd earlier called "Hillary, Reassessed," in which he claimed to have changed his mind about her. Sunday's editorial is more of a garden variety wingnut diatribe against Obama than a real endorsement of Hillary and it is clear that between McCain and either Democrat the American version of the Völkischer Beobachter will revert to form and push for McCain.

Many of her views on domestic issues are too liberal for us, but on others she seems to have moderated. She told the Trib she opposes raising the cap on Social Security taxes, and she is less eager to raise income taxes than Obama.

More important, she is extremely knowledgeable on crucial foreign issues. Meeting with Trib editors last month, she ticked off an impressive list of international challenges and the solutions. (In Wednesday's Philadelphia debate, Obama praised George H.W. Bush's foreign policy-- apparently not realizing that one of its architects was then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, a man he regularly excoriates.)

As we noted at the time of that meeting, Clinton's decision to sit down with the Trib was courageous, given our longstanding criticism of her. That is no small matter: Political courage is essential in a president. Clinton has demonstrated it; Obama has not.

She has a real record. He doesn't.

She has experience of value to a president. He doesn't.

Clearly, she's the wiser choice to represent Democrats this fall.

Like I said, though, the rest of the editorial was just one smear after another against Obama, things most respectable newspapers wouldn't print. But even if respectable news papers won't, there's always the lowest or the low, Fox News and the host of broadcast imitators. Rather than describe how they're systematically doing all they can to destroy Obama, let me play you a short video that puts it all in living color:

SABOTAGING REGULARIORY AGENCIES, A MANIA OF THE BUSH REGIME, RESULTS IN DEATHS OF MORE THAN JUST AMERICAN PETS

The political right-- in our case the Republican Party-- always claims the market will act to weed out "bad" companies and that no rules and regulations should get in the way of a free market. That's why they oppose, ideologically, and often psychotically, federal regulatory agencies. And it's why the Bush Regime has consistently undermined them. And that's why we have an incompetent FAA whose mistakes and inability to function-- something designed at the highest level-- causes thousands of flights to get canceled. Fortunately no planes fell out of the skies. People in New Orleans who counted on a FEMA that functioned smoothly under past administrations, were less fortunate.

This morning's NY Times reports that 81 deaths in the U.S. can be traced to a contaminated blood thinner, Heparin, made in China. I hope my house won't be picketed because I'm republishing this.

The dispute is a sign of growing tensions between China and the United States over the safety of Chinese imports. China has in recent years exported poisonous toothpaste, lead-painted toys, toxic pet food, tainted fish and now, contaminated medicine.

Bills to require far more aggressive inspections of Chinese products and companies are being proposed by members of Congress. Hearings are scheduled for Tuesday in the House and Thursday in the Senate.

China has lurched between defensiveness and cooperation on issues of product safety. Last year, it initially blocked the F.D.A. from investigating tainted pet food and accused foreign forces of exaggerating the issue. Then in July, China said that it had executed its former top food and drug regulator for taking bribes and promised reforms.

The F.D.A. sent a warning letter on Monday to Changzhou SPL, the Chinese plant identified as the source of contaminated heparin made by Baxter International in the United States. It warned that the plant used unclean tanks to make heparin, that it accepted raw materials from an unacceptable vendor and that it had no adequate way to remove impurities.

Heparin is made from the mucous membranes of the intestines of slaughtered pigs that, in China, are often cooked in unregulated family workshops. The contaminant, identified as oversulfated chondroitin sulfate, a cheaper substance, slipped through the usual testing and was recognized only after more sophisticated tests were used.

...[T]he Government Accountability Office will release a report on Tuesday showing that the F.D.A. would need to spend at least $56 million more next year to begin full inspections of foreign plants. It would need to spend at least $15 million annually to inspect China’s drug plants every two years, which is the domestic standard.

Bush administration officials have acknowledged problems associated with poor inspection of overseas plants and have plans to improve the situation. But President Bush’s budget does not provide the F.D.A. with funds to hire more inspectors.

But 81 people are dead. Mitch McConnell and Elaine Chou have become multimillionaires by acting as unofficial lobbyists for Chinese industry and pushing "free trade" with that country. The entire Republican Party and the entire Blue Dog wing of the Democrats are complicit in the deaths of these people, all in the name of capitalistic excess gone awry and, of course, due to greed and avarice and campaign finance regulations that are made by the people who most need regulation! "At its present inspection pace, the F.D.A. would need at least 27 years to inspect every foreign medical device plant that exports to the United States, 13 years to check every foreign drug plant and 1,900 years to examine every foreign food plant." A good first step would be landslide defeats for every Republican and every Blue Dog Democrat up for re-election in November.

ARIZONA REPUBLICAN KEN BENNETT DEFIES McCAIN-- PASSES ON CHANCE TO RUN ON THE McCAIN TICKET IN ARIZONA

Gee, all it took was a little reminder that the residents of AZ-01 are still pissed off that Ken Bennett, then the president of the Arizona state Senate, used his influence to get his son off the hook after 40 incidents of raping young boys with broomsticks and flashlights, and whooooosh... Bennett disappeared from electoral politics again. Well, actually, that isn't exactly accurate. First Bennett tried mounting a defense by likening the rape incidents to-- his own word-- "goosing." And that was the end of the Ken Bennett For Congress campaign.

So even though McCain-- who detests the other Republican who had been favored-- demanded Bennett run, and he told the old curmudgeon that he would, he just declared today-- once again-- that he's out and not getting back in. Meanwhile, the woman who was the object of McCain's wrath, Kris Mayes, has also left the field, after McCain demanded that the local GOP not support her. Originally they had looked at her as a godsend who would save them from the aftermath of the Renzi scandal and the prospect of having to run far right extremist Sydney Hay, widely viewed as a lunatic fringe candidate with no real chance of winning.

There is now a clear path to Congress for progressive grassroots candidate Howard Shanker-- unless the Inside the Beltway types can persuade enough Arizonans to vote for their corporate careerist shill, Ann Kirkpatrick, someone who stands for nothing whatsoever (Rahm Emanuel's favorite kind of candidate). This would be a good day to donate to Howard's campaign, right here at the Blue America Act Blue page. The first 5 people who donate $25 or more today get an autographed copy of The Truth by Al Franken.

DEMOCRATS SUCK UP MORE MONEY THAN EVEN THE GROTESQUELY CORRUPT REPUBLICANS

As someone fervently hoping to wake up on that special Wednesday morning in November and find that the Republicans have been reduced to a rump annoyance in the House and to less than 40 in the Senate, maybe I should be happy that campaign contributions have continued to flood into the DCCC and the DSCC and slow to a relative trickle-- well a steady trickle-- to their 2 GOP counterpoints. But I'm not. First of all, what this means is that "smart money" recognizes that the Republican brand is a lost cause and that they need to buy a piece of the very much for sale Democratic brand. Oh, whoopee! With intermediaries like Rahm Emanuel, Chuck Schumer, Steny Hoyer, the Blue Dogs and the DLC, how long will it be before the Democrats are espousing "solutions" to the nation's problems almost as bad as the Republicans'?

Today's Congressional Quarterly has two reports on fundraising, one from the House committees and one for the Senate committees. Let's look at the situation in the House campaign first, the one that will seek to make sure unpopular Democrats who always vote with the GOP-- like Jim Marshall (GA), John Barrow (GA), Chris Carney (PA), Nick Lampson (TX)-- get massive infusions of DCCC cash from grassroots progressives who disagree with them on virtually everything and thereby keep their seats. The DCCC raked in $10.1 million in March, while the NRCC managed $7.1 million. The DCCC is now sitting on a warchest of $44.3 million and the Repugs have $7.2 million. "The cash-rich DCCC will begin to spend these tens of millions of dollars this fall, primarily to air television and radio advertisements and publish mail pieces in districts in which Republicans are the defending party."

The DCCC collected more money from individual donors and more money from members of Congress. So far the DCCC has collected $87.6 million this year (and spent $44 million), while the NRCC took in $65 million and spent $58.5 million (and I'm not sure if that includes the vast sums that were embezzled by its former treasurer, though probably not).

The Democratic members who gave the most in March:
Robert Brady (PA)- $200,000
Dave Obey (WI)- $200,000
Ed Pastor (AZ)- $150,000
William Clay (MO)- $150,000
Ellen Tauscher (CA)- $106,000
Nydia M. Velazquez (NY)- $106,000
Charles Rangel (NY)- $100,000
Martin Meehan (MA)- $100,000
Howard Berman (CA)- $85,710
Lois Capps (CA)- $85,700
Russ Carnahan (MO)- $71,420
Tammy Baldwin (WI)- $66,650
Danny Davis (IL)- $64,275
Tim Ryan (OH)- $50,000
Sheila Jackson Lee (TX)- $50,000
Richard Neal (MA)- $50,000
Nancy Pelosi (CA)- $50,000
Lincoln Davis (TN)- $50,000
Sander Levin (MI)- $50,000
Ike Skelton (MO)- $50,000
Rahm Emanuel (Darkness)- $50,000
Dennis Cardoza (CA)- $50,000
G.K. Butterfield (NC)- $50,000
Allen Boyd (FL)- $50,000
Xavier Becerra (CA)- $50,000

The GOP had much less luck gathering donations from it's dispirited and endangered members. Only 4 Republicans went over the $50,000 mark:
GOP closet queen David Dreier (CA)- $165,000
retiring GOP closet queen Jim McCrery (LA)- $100,000
Howdy Doody (FL)- $80,000
Wally Herger (CA)- $60,000

The story on the Senate side was equally grim for the GOP, where they were outraised by the Democrats nearly 2-1-- DSCC, $8.2 million and NRSC, $4.2 million.

The DSCC’s cash advantage is but one reason why it appears that the Democrats will retain their majority in the November elections-- and probably increase it. The Republicans are the defending party in 23 states, including five in which a Republican senator is retiring; the Democrats are the incumbent party in just 12 states, and all of their senators whose seats are up this year are seeking new terms. More Republican senators are at risk of losing their seats than Democratic senators.

The Senate reports indicate that the Democrats continue to outperform their Republican counterparts in attracting money from senators, who are permitted to transfer unlimited sums to national party committees from their personal campaign committees. Though their contributions amounted to a small percentage of the DSCC’s overall receipts, Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Ron Wyden of Oregon each transferred $100,000 to the Senate Democrats’ political arm in March. Pryor is up for re-election this year, but the Republicans are not fielding a candidate to oppose him.

No Republican senator reported transferring funds to the NRSC last month from his or her personal campaign committee, though some senators did give the maximum annual contribution of $15,000 via their leadership political action committees.

The DSCC gave $39,900 apiece in March to the Senate campaigns of Jeanne Shaheen, a former New Hampshire governor who is challenging Republican Sen. John E. Sununu, and Tom Udall, a five-term representative from New Mexico who is the presumed Democratic nominee for the Senate seat of retiring Republican Pete V. Domenici.

So far in this cycle the DSCC has scooped up $72.4 million and spent $34.6 million (mostly to state Democratic Party organizations in states with hot contests-- Maine, Colorado, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Louisiana and Alaska plus to one state that was once thought to present a challenge but fizzled: South Dakota), while the NRSC has taken in $43.6 million and spent $26.3 million.

LIVE BLOGGING WITH JOHN CUSACK AT C&L THIS AFTERNOON

A few weeks ago I mentioned how I had gone to see John Cusack's incredible new film, War, Inc.. John Amato and I persuaded John Cusack to join us over at Crooks and Liars for a live chat a little closer to the official release date. And today's the day. This week the film will start rolling out in the Toronto area and then in New York City. So at 3pm (PT) John is bringing two of his co-writers with him, Mark Leyner and Jeremy Pikser, and they'll be talking about the movie and answering questions for an hour or so.

The movie is hilarious but you never lose sight of an objective at least as important as entertainment: stark and compelling Truth. I'd say Cusack, who says he was inspired by Naomi Klein's 2004 article in Harper's Baghdad Year Zero, had Dwight Eisenhower's 1961 retirement speech in the back of his head, the one where the Supreme Allied Commander-turned-President points out that "We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations." Eisenhower goes on to issue a warning that has become his most memorable utterance as president:

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-- economic, political, even spiritual-- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

John Cusack and his colleagues have taken Eisenhower's warning and updated it into a chilling movie set in the not too distant future, at a time when, unfortunately, no one remembers what Ike said or why. A couple of days after I watched the film, Cusack explained why he worked so hard to make this movie, not just as an actor and a writer but also as a producer, the guy who has to raise the money.

I'm deeply troubled about the radical transformation in this country. We filmed it in Bulgaria and we were about to do it for a relatively small budget. Everyone was into it because people know that corporate "ethics" of the new militarized "defense" economy are just hollowing out what it means to be a nation state. All the things that we equate with the core functions of government, from disaster relief, armies, interrogations, jails, border patrol, all these types of things are all for-profit businesses that are kind of a part of the government, but not really. They have no accountability. That's some scary stuff. Erik Prince from Blackwater said 'I want to do to the military what FedEx did to the post office. He didn't mean it as a joke.

The government's role is to basically create the ultimate environment for corporate profit, hollowing out the core of government and just giving it to these companies. They preach about free markets but it's really a protectionist market. They're all socialists and Keynesians on the way down... when the bills come in. It's not just Boeing and Bechtel, Parsons, Lockheed-Martin, Carlyle Group-- not just the gang always hanging around the Greed Zone and locked into the State Department. On Wall Street these cowboys go crazy and the government bails them out and then the bailout isn't big enough and they want it upped. In the meantime if you lost your housing due to the scam... well, that's the "free market." There's a hypocritical way they put out two sets of rules, one for the corporate aristocracy and then one for the rest of us who have to live and die by a "free market" that's not even free... The level of greed and hypocrisy and avarice is beyond anything you can imagine.

That was a lot to think about and to juxtapose with his film. But he wasn't done. He had a polemic from Arundhati Roy he wanted to recite for me. I settled back and got another layer of understanding about what drove him to make War, Inc.

Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness-- and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we're being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they're selling-- their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

McCAIN'S ARMANI-GATE

I don't know what the story really is behind the McCain campaign spending over $2,500 in the Beverly Hills Barney's. I thought he was trying to play down the whole elitist thing so he-- one of the richest men in the Senate-- could run around at white-only Republicoid country clubs accusing Obama of being an elitist. Anyway, I figured Cindy would look fabulous in her new t-shirt.

Although now I'm hearing that the campaign claims someone stole the credit card and it won't count as a legitimate campaign expense. Even though her net worth is over $100 million, Cindy has a history of stealing (money and drugs) and it is hard to imagine that anyone else would have stolen a credit card with McCain's name on it and gone shopping at Barney's... and not gotten caught. Come on! These people are not like us; they live differently. Don't be fooled (again).