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Democratic Party - Green Party - Club FDR - Election 2004 - Election 2008 - Progressive Democrats - Heresy Party

Democrat stares into Republican headlamps

Voter-cagers-R-us

The Scariest Website of All Time:

Republicans on Elm Street:

the diplomats of death

or The Kinder Gentler Nazis

"Upon them are the fine garments, and they are unable to discern the truth." - Jesus

"You can put lipstick on a Republican, but it's still a pig." - Andrew Homer

2009 Sep 30 If the Republicans in Congress and the Senate think that govenment-run medical care is so bad, why do they use the healthcare plans available to members of Congress? Why do they go to the doctors at Bethesda Naval Hopital? I'll believe the Republicans in Congress are honest AFTER they reject their use of government-run healthcare!!

What Republicans have wrought: "The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot" by Naomi Wolf

"Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law" by Marjorie Cohn

A vote for a Republican candidate is a vote for Satan.

"Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans - Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild" by Greg Palast

2009 Feb 09 Republican Racists Hold Out - Noticed that during his debates with Senator Barack Obama, that Senator John McCain looked so angry that he looked like he could hit someone? Well, that's how a redneck racist looks like when they're in the same room with the target of their animosity.

Likewise, that's why the Republicans in Congress have withheld their votes on ANY bailout bill. Racists hated Martin Luther King, Jr. because he proved that an African American could be more spiritual than a white person - at least more spiritual than white Republicans. Racist Republicans hate Barack Obama because he proves a black person can be wiser than a white person - at least wiser than white Republicans.

The sociopathy within the unspiritual Republicans runs so deep that they want to punish both the Democratic Party AND the 52% of American voters who elected Obama as President. Rather than being either team players or decent Americans, the Republicans are willing to have the national economy slide from recession into a depression for revenge, because one of their fellow vapid racists wasn't placed into the White House.

"Conservatives Without Conscience" by John Dean, former Nixon cabinet member

"The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism" by Naomi Klein (related video)

"Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush" by Robert Draper

"Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches" by John Dean

Alberto Gonzales’s Never-Ending Story - NY Times

California Trippin' - Further Proof That Republicans Can Only Win by Deception

If elected, John McCain will be the oldest president ever inaugurated. And after months of slamming Barack Obama for "inexperience," here's who John McCain has chosen to be one heartbeat away from the presidency: a right-wing religious conservative with no foreign policy experience, who until recently was mayor of a town of 7,000 people.

Huh? Who is Sarah Palin? Here's some basic background:

* 1 - She was elected Alaska's governor a little over a year and a half ago. Her previous office was mayor of Wasilla, a small town outside Anchorage. She has no foreign policy experience.
* 2 - Palin is strongly anti-choice, opposing abortion even in the case of rape or incest.
* 3 - She supported right-wing extremist Pat Buchanan for president in 2000.
* 4 - Palin thinks creationism should be taught in public schools.
* 5 - She's doesn't think humans are the cause of climate change.
* 6 - She's solidly in line with John McCain's "Big Oil first" energy policy. She's pushed hard for more oil drilling and says renewables won't be ready for years. She also sued the Bush administration for listing polar bears as an endangered species — she was worried it would interfere with more oil drilling in Alaska.
* 7 - How closely did John McCain vet this choice? He met Sarah Palin once at a meeting. They spoke a second time, last Sunday, when he called her about being vice-president. Then he offered her the position.

Campaign 2006: The Republicans' Secret Weapon

Corrupt Republicans

"One Party Country: The Republican Plan for Dominance in the 21st Century" by Tom Hamburger, Peter Wallsten

Why Al Franken Loves Republicans

American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush by Kevin Phillips

The Police State Is Closer Than You Think

all about Republicans & Hurricane Katrina.

Good Mourning, Vietnam: Pew, AP Probe Iraq Link

Impeach Bush

Anti-War Voices from Montana

 
 

Fears & Smears:

The Evil Republinazi Party of the United States

Annenberg Political Fact Check

Bush and the House of Saud

"Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism." - George Washington, General & President

New York Times Books@barnesandnoble.com

"Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the President or any other public official save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country." - President Theodore Roosevelt, 1908

"The Islamics and Republican Party are going to have to pull the Bill of Rights out of my cold dead hands." - Andrew Homer

Sociopaths-R-Us

"When New Orleans gets rebuilt it's going to be a lot whiter." - cabinet member of President Bush (Republican, of course)

"We can't provide Medicare to the destitute victims of the hurricanes, because that would create a new criterion to qualify for Medicare." - Director of Health & Human Services (Republican, of course)

123Counter

Scientists have discovered what makes Republicans tick: Pathological liars found to have brain abnormalities.

When my first wife and I lived in Latin America, I talked to folk in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile who saw friends or family members taken away, in the middle of the night, by the ruling dictators. In the case of Chile, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was the go-between for General Pinochet and U.S. President Richard Nixon. Pinochet murdered 3,000 of his fellow countrymen. I consider Republicans an accomplice to mass murder. Apparently, not only do Republicans have difficulty regarding democratically-elected government in other countries, they seem to have a problem with democratically-elected government in America.

Two Republican Presidential Candidates Actually Made a GOOD Point

* 2007 Jun 05 - In the Republican Presidential candidate debate tonight, Senator Brownback actually suggested that the money being wasted on an unnecessary war in Iraq would be better spent on fighting the war on cancer, since 1,500 Americans die every day from that disease.

* 2008 Oct 07 - In the Presidential debate tonight with Barack Obama, Senator McCain said that home owners with a sub-prime loan facing foreclosure should be able to renegotiate their mortgage at the CURRENT market value. (The National Association of Realtors already had that idea before September 29th: "Changes to existing mortgages can include (but are not limited to) revisions in principal, interest rate and period for repayment.")

* Now, we have to wait another 4 years for Republicans to come up with another good idea.

"With all the hoopla on Amy Goodman's show about Ford pardoning Tricky Dick and giving the green-light for the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, let's not forget that Gerald Ford, as a junior Congressman from MI, was the youngest member of the Warren Commission and helped to put the sheen of legitimacy on the government's "lone gunman" conspiracy. And not a contrary peep out of Ford since, so he was also instrumental in the ongoing cover-up. Ford's political career was given a real boost by this, as was Dan Rather's media career, which also involved conducting an enormous snow-job against the American people on the JFK assassination. Like Dan Rather, Gerald Ford proved that he was willing to lie to the American people and continue lying to the American people for the rest of his life." - 12/27/06 Jan

Finally : a Republican, Actually Tells the Truth!!

Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the The Federal Reserve, in his autobiography just published, exposed that the main reason for the U.S. second invasion of Iraq was OIL!!!

"I accuse you, Mr. Bush, of lying this country into war. I accuse you of fabricating in the minds of your own people a false implied link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. I accuse you of firing the generals who told you that the plans for Iraq were disastrously insufficient.... I accuse you of subverting the Constitution, not in some misguided but sincerely motivated struggle to combat terrorists, but to stifle dissent. I accuse you of fomenting fear among your own people, of creating the very terror you claim to have fought. I accuse you of exploiting that unreasoning fear, the natural fear of your own people who just want to live their lives in peace, as a political tool to slander your critics and libel your opponents. I accuse you of handing part of this Republic over to a Vice President who is without conscience and letting him run roughshod over it ...."

"From Iraq to Scooter Libby, Bush and Cheney have lost Americans' trust and stabbed this nation in the back. It's time for them to go."

- Keith Olbermann, MSNBC, July 2008

Inbreeding Makes for Republicans With Lower Center of Gravity

Reverse human evolution plausible, testable, U.S. biologist says

A much-derided theory that five people who walk on all fours are products of “backward evolution” is plausible, and testable, said a U.S. biologist who weighed in on the controversy last week.

The debate erupted last month after a Turkish scientist proposed that the five siblings in Turkey, who also speak what he called a primitive language, had undergone backward evolution. The claim met with skepticism, even jeers, from some fellow scientists.

But Keith Crandall of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, said the idea is nothing extraordinary, calling it a “nice and testable hypothesis.”

Reverse evolution occurs when an organism returns to the genetic state of its ancestors, said Crandall, who wrote a paper on the topic in the Oct. 2003 issue of the research journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution. In that work, he wrote that reverse evolution is documented in various organisms, such as fish that lose their eyes after living in dark caves for generations.

The Turkish researcher, Uner Tan of Cukurova University Medical School in Adana, Turkey, argued that something similar may have afflicted the family in Turkey: a mutation stripped them of the genes or genes that let humans walk upright, returning them to the pre-human state of quadrupedalism, or four-limbed walking.

The stakes are high. If Tan is right, it would suggest the quadrupedal siblings accurately reflect what our ape-like ancestors were like in some ways. They thus could give biologists unprecedented insights into human evolution.

Laurence Mueller, a biologist at the University of California, Irvine, was skeptical.

“My opinion is that the chance that this human disorder is related to the evolution of our early ancestors and their mode of walking is remote,” he wrote in an email.

It’s doubtful that just one or a few genetic changes in evolution could have caused upright walking, he said, but that’s what Tan’s theory implies: if one mutation caused the four-limbed walking in the siblings, and this is reverse evolution, then one mutation would distinguish upright walkers from quadrupeds.

The key difficulty in proving a case of reverse evolution, Crandall said, is that what looks like a real case of it, could really be an evolution of new genes that mimic the effects of the old.

“Genetics research is rife with examples” of similar events, Mueller wrote.

Henrique Teotónio, of the Gulbenkian Science Institute in Oneiras, Portugal, sided with Mueller. He called the idea that one mutation caused upright walking “untestable,” arguing that to test it, one would need to find another lineage of upright-walking primates besides humans. Then one would have to compare the species. The fossil evidence so far, he argued, points the opposite way, hinting that not one but “several gene changes were involved.”

Crandall argued that modern genetic techniques can test the contrasting claims, because biologists can use these methods to reconstruct an organism’s genetic past with some confidence.

To demonstrate reverse evolution here, he wrote, one would have to identify the genetic changes associated with four-limbed walking, then show that the same changes appear in a reconstruction of ancestral human genes.

Tan said he has begun such a testing process, by mapping the defect causing the quadrupedalism to one of the areas of the genome that is most different between humans and other primates. That hints that the gene at issue was important in human evolution, consistent with his hypothesis, he suggested.

Crandall said more work is needed to show this, in particular to prove that evolution promoted the gene’s spread as a beneficial mutation. Evolution is the process in which occasional helpful mutations spread throughout a population, as the organisms that have them reproduce more. This leads to gradual changes in whole species.

Reverse evolution would occur when genes recently acquired through evolution are lost again, or when genes become reactivated after falling into disuse.

Tan has gone as far as to propose that the “reverse evolution” of the family in Turkey affects the mind as well as the body, noting that victims of the syndrome are retarded. Crandall said he doesn’t buy many of Tan’s ideas, but that at least with regard to walking, Tan may have suggested a concept worth testing.

Scientific doubts on reverse evolution, Crandall wrote, have nothing to do with a popular misconception that evolution “has no direction.” It does to some extent, he argued—species tend to become better suited to their environment—and that may be irrelevant anyway, since a return to an ancestral state can occur whether or not one thinks of evolution as directed.

“I don’t know of any evolutionary biologists who would subscribe to the notion that reverse evolution is impossible,” Crandall wrote. “It doesn’t take long in evolutionary biology to figure out that nothing is impossible!”

March 6, 2006 Special to World Science

The Chairman of the Republican National Committee said that any similarities with knuckle-dragging Republicans was purely coincidental.

"Rather than looking to the left or to the right, I think that the American voters this next General Election will look deep and vote for Rudi Giuliani." - Chris Matthews on the 07/18/06 Tonight Show with Jay Leno

* In 2003, who primarily benefitted from the U.S. invasion of Iraq was Israel. Those $25,000 checks to the families of suicide bombers stopped.

* In 2006, who primarily benefits from the U.S. occupation of Iraq is Iran. Iran's former enemy is, now, much weaker and Iran is funding Shia insurgents in Iraq.

* I don't appreciate American troops dying for the benefit of Israel or Iran.

* The only part of the US Government that is "at war" is the U.S. Army and select portions of the U.S. Air Force. The rest of the government is NOT at war, and simply pursuing business as usual. Our war on terrorism is ineffective in the sense of capturing specific terrorists, and counter-productive in the sense of producing tens of thousands more, as Chomsky recounts in "Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy," citing RAND and other studies, 85% of the "foreign fighters" in Iraq were mobilized and radicalized by the US invasion of Iraq.

* The current White House Administration lied about the reasons to go to war with Iraq." - all 16 national security agencies, 28 Sep 2006

The growing nation-wide effort to impeach George W. Bush and Dick Cheney is emblematic of a larger issue: what kind of country is the United States to become.

Yesterday’s news brought out two explosive pieces of information:

* Lewis Libby, the indicted chief aide to Dick Cheney, has admitted under oath before a Federal Grand Jury that it was George W. Bush himself who authorized Libby to illegally “leak” classified information to New York Times reporter Judith Miller in July, 2003 in an effort to discredit Ambassador Joseph Wilson who had publicly stated that “there is nothing to the story” that Saddam Hussein’s government was trying to buy uranium for a nuclear weapons program. Wilson is the husband of Valerie Plame, the undercover CIA operative whose identity was revealed to the media as retaliation for Wilson’s contention that Bush’s assertions about Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction were false. The “classified information” that Bush and Cheney authorized Libby to plant in the New York Times turned out to be entirely false.

* Bush’s Attorney General admitted yesterday that Bush believes that he has the authority to personally authorize the secret wiretapping, without any court order, of any and all conversations and emails between Americans that occur exclusively within the borders of the United States. Earlier it was revealed that Bush set up a massive secret wiretapping operation monitoring a huge number of Americans, but he had asserted that it was only to listen in on conversations of people in the United States who were making international calls and emails.

The fact that Bush has not already had articles of impeachment filed in the House of Representatives is clear evidence that the people must act forcefully as the true guardians of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. That is exactly what the ImpeachBush.org movement is doing. When impeachment looked remote, there were still tens of thousands of individuals who tirelessly worked to collect petitions, hold rallies, wrote and called members of Congress and donated so that we could place newspaper ads all across the country.

Today, impeachment is not remote at all. It reflects the majority sentiment. Recent polls show that by 52% to 43% majority the American people favor impeachment if it is proved that Bush lied about the reasons for going to war. A nearly similar majority support impeachment if the President broke Federal wiretapping laws by authorizing the secret wiretapping of Americans without a court order when there is no evidence or inquiry of criminal wrongdoing.

Yesterday’s revelations confirm again that this is a lawless administration. Impeachment is imperative. This is a challenge for every person in this country who has a commitment to the Constitution. The people must continue to act rather than wait for the politicians to lead.

Now that more than 700,000 people have voted for impeachment at http://www.impeachbush.org/ it is urgent that we do everything in our power to make the issue of Bush’s criminal conduct a major issue between now and the November Congressional elections. The newspaper ads are an excellent way to keep the issue of impeachment front and center. We have succeeded in placing more and more ads because of the donations of the people who are committed to this course.

Telling the Truth about Bush’s Iraq War

We have reprinted below an excerpt of the eloquent message sent 8 December 2005 by British playwright Harold Pinter as he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature. Mr. Pinter has been a leading voice in opposition to the criminal war in Iraq. We wanted to share parts of his statement:

“The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading - as a last resort - all other justifications having failed to justify themselves - as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.

We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East'.

How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice...

Death in this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place death well away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don't exist. They are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead. 'We don't do body counts,' said the American general Tommy Franks ... The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported to their graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, out of harm's way. The mutilated rot in their beds, some for the rest of their lives. So the dead and the mutilated both rot, in different kinds of graves.”

-Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter

In Association with Amazon.com

Five Days in Philadelphia:

The Amazing "We Want Willkie!" Convention of 1940 and How It Freed FDR to Save the Western World by Charles Peters

Political mavens will recall Zell Miller's praise for Wendell Willkie at last summer's Republican Convention. Those who view the current political polarization as unprecedented should harken back to 1940. Charles Peters provides the back story on Willkie's principled support for FDR's wartime initiatives during the 1940 election season.

As the 1940 presidential election approached, FDR, the Democratic Party Presidential incumbent, was reviled by the rich as a "traitor to his class." While most New Dealers were internationalist, the nation leaned toward isolationism although Hitler was engaged in the conquest of the Low Countries and France.

Into this fray stepped Wendell Willkie, a Republican Party dark horse candidate for President - a previously obscure utility executive. Willkie was a dynamic personality with a folksy charm. Willkie - the only internationalist in a field of avowed isolationists -- wrested the Republican nod from the grip of Dewey, Taft and Vandenberg, each of whom was implacably opposed to providing material assistance to the Allies as the Nazi juggernaut marched across Europe.

Willke astonished party regulars by taking the Republican nomination by storm in Philadelphia. While critical of many aspects of the New Deal, he was also socially conscious and sensitive to abuses by the wealthy and powerful. Peters, the founding editor of the Washington Monthly, illustrates how Willkie moved the Republican Party away from isolationism.

The political implications of the Libby indictment
by Barry Grey, 31 October 2005


Friday's indictment of I. Lewis Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice in the Justice Department probe of the outing of a CIA agent has shaken not only the White House, but the entire political establishment in the US.

Libby was one of the chief architects of the invasion of Iraq. His indictment for lying about an administration "dirty tricks" operation against a critic of the war implicates both the vice president and Bush himself.

As the New York Times wrote on October 29, Libby "had the exalted position of being a full member of President Bush's inner circle ... holding three pivotal jobs at once: assistant to the president, chief of staff to the vice president and Mr. Cheney's national security adviser."

Underlying Libby's indictment is a deep crisis of American foreign policy—first and foremost the disastrous results of the US invasion of Iraq—which has come together with growing internal opposition to both the war and the worsening economic situation confronting broad masses of working people.

This crisis is more than the end result of the personal limitations of Bush and the subjective predilections of Cheney, Rumsfeld and their fellow conspirators. It is rooted in an objective crisis of historical proportions: American imperialism has arrived at a blind alley, for which it has no way out other than war and reaction.

That is fundamentally what imparts to the US government its criminal character, and dictates that the more it becomes caught up in its own contradictions, the more dangerous and violent it becomes. It would be the most serious mistake to believe that the response of the Bush administration to the indictment of Libby will be to compromise and retreat from its policies of militarism and social reaction. Its instinctive response will be to adopt even more extreme measures.

This can already be seen in the Bush administration's signals to the Christian right, following the collapse of the Harriet Miers nomination for the Supreme Court, that the president's next choice will meet the specifications of the administration's neo- fascist "base."

Despite the crisis and disarray of his administration, Bush has one great advantage: his nominal opposition, the Democratic Party, has no interest in seeing his government collapse. The Democrats' combination of cowardice and complicity in the war ensure that Bush will be given time to work out his plans for a counteroffensive.

Libby's indictment arose out of the attempt by the White House to discredit former diplomat Joseph Wilson. In July of 2003, after US occupation forces had failed to turn up any evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and the anti-US insurgency had begun to grow, Wilson published a column in the New York Times exposing as a lie one of the main pieces of "evidence" cited by Bush and other top administration officials to back up their tales of a nuclear-armed terror regime in Baghdad. This was the claim that Saddam Hussein had sought to purchase uranium from the African country of Niger.

Wilson revealed that he had been sent by the CIA the previous year to Niger to investigate the uranium claim, and had found it to be false. He accused the Bush administration of "twisting" intelligence to drag the American people into war.

The administration responded by feeding to the press the fact that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, was a CIA operative, and suggesting that she had played a role in assigning Wilson to check out the African uranium story. The aim was to smear Wilson and dissuade any other would-be whistle blowers from exposing the government's lies.

This plot to silence a critic of the war was only a small part of an immense web of criminality and lies. It flowed from the central crime: the unprovoked invasion of Iraq, justified through the systematic and deliberate deception of the American people. If the principles laid down by the Nuremburg trials were enforced, this conspiracy to wage aggressive war would itself result in Bush, Cheney, Libby and others suffering the maximum penalty.

The Bush administration elevated the illegal premises underlying the Iraq war to the foundation of its foreign policy, in its doctrine of "preventive war," which is a direct repudiation of international law. The pursuit of this policy has entailed the widespread use of torture, the practice of "disappearing" alleged terrorists and the establishment of American-run gulags in various parts of the world.

Given the enormity of these crimes, and the scale of the lying used to justify or conceal them, what is remarkable is not that one small aspect of the conspiracy has unraveled, and one of the culprits has been indicted, but that it has taken years for the administration to suffer any serious consequences.

This is a government that has carried out one cover-up after another: of its role in the so-called "intelligence failure" that enabled a band of Islamic terrorists to blow up the World Trade Center and bomb the Pentagon; of its policy of torturing detainees in the so-called "war on terror;" of its conspiracy to drag the country into an illegal war that has already cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and more than 2,000 American soldiers.

It is a government, moreover, that came to power on the basis of fraud and the suppression of votes.

Yet it has been given a free pass by the Democratic Party, Congress, the courts and the media. The CIA leak investigation that has resulted in Libby's indictment did not come about as a result of demands from the Democratic Party, Congressional probes, or investigations by the establishment press.

Rather, it was the result of mounting tensions and jurisdictional disputes between the CIA and the State Department on the one side and the White House, Cheney and the Pentagon on the other. Within the CIA, bitterness and anger grew over the open contempt with which Cheney and Rumsfeld treated the agency and its staff. Dissatisfied with the reports coming from the CIA on Iraqi WMD, Cheney tried to bully CIA analysts into producing intelligence that could justify an invasion, and simultaneously set up his own intelligence unit to bypass the normal channels and churn out the most dire reports.

When the administration outed Valerie Plame Wilson, a covert operative, the CIA bureaucracy was shocked that the government would violate so basic a principle of the spy apparatus for political ends. It decided to retaliate. It was, in fact, an official request from the CIA for an investigation of Wilson's exposure that forced then-attorney general John Ashcroft to appoint a special counsel to conduct a probe.

That the administration's claims of Iraqi WMD were either gross exaggerations or outright lies was known throughout the political and media establishment. Even the United Nations weapons inspectors and the International Atomic Energy Agency had rebutted Washington's assertions. And it was well known that the Bush administration was dominated by neo-conservatives who had been agitating ever since the first Gulf War of 1991 for a new war to topple Saddam Hussein and turn Iraq — with its vast oil resources — into an American protectorate.

Defenders of the war and the Bush administration repeatedly point to the fact, as supposed proof that the White House did not deliberately lie, that the preceding Democratic administration of Bill Clinton had insisted that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction. Clinton used this claim to justify relentless American pressure on the Baathist regime, including the launching of air wars and the maintenance of sanctions that destroyed the country's infrastructure and led to the death of hundreds of thousands of its citizens.

The argument that both parties promoted the myth of Iraqi WMD is, of course, true. What it demonstrates, however, is not the innocence of Bush, but rather the degree to which the Iraqi WMD canard had for a decade served as an essential premise of US imperialist foreign policy. This lie had become so pivotal that it took on a life of its own and could not be challenged.

The bipartisan consensus surrounding this lie, and its inevitable and bloody consequences, were spelled out during the 2004 election campaign by James Rubin, a top Clinton-era State Department official and adviser to Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. Rubin declared that had Democrat Al Gore won the 2000 election, the US would have invaded Iraq anyway.

These political facts show that every institution of American capitalism is implicated in the crime of aggressive war, and the conspiracy against the democratic rights of the American people of which it is a part. However, no matter how complicit and prostrate the Democratic Party and the media, taking the country into war on the basis of lies is an enormously reckless enterprise, fraught with consequences unforeseen by those who conspired to carry it out.

In the end, what has produced the Libby indictment and the broader crisis of the US political system is the failure of the American military to suppress the Iraqi resistance and the mounting opposition of the American people to the war. The growth of popular opposition has been compounded by the disastrous response of the government to Hurricane Katrina and the escalating assault of big business against the jobs and living standards of the working class.

Every one of those who conspired to invade and occupy Iraq richly deserves whatever legal punishment may be eventually meted out. But militarism, war, the assault on democratic rights and living standards will not be halted by the institutions of the very system that is responsible for these crimes.

On the contrary, the American people face the danger that the ruling elite, in response to its mounting and intractable problems, will strike out both abroad and at home. No matter how extended and bogged down the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan, the impulse will be to widen the war in the Middle East.

The editorial page of the October 29 New York Times is instructive. One day after Libby's indictment, the Times, which played a key role in promoting the administration's lies and its drive for war against Iraq, published an editorial on Iran that stated—as a matter of fact— "the trouble is that Iran has a nuclear weapons program..."

This claim, which has been rejected by the International Atomic Energy Agency and for which not a shred of evidence has been produced, serves the same function in preparing for military action against Iran as the WMD fabrications about Iraq.

The only basis for ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and preventing future and even more bloody catastrophes is the independent political mobilization of the working class in opposition to the two-party system and the financial aristocracy whose interests it serves.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/oct2005/libb-o31.shtml

Running From The Running
Why are so many Republicans staying out of next year's Senate races?

by David Weigel
Web Exclusive: 10.05.05

On Monday morning, West Virginia Congresswoman Shelley Moore Capito dashed five years of Republican hopes and announced she would not run against Senator Robert Byrd. The formerly rock-solid Democratic state (52 percent for Michael Dukakis) gave George W. Bush a 13-point landslide last year, and Republicans had considered a Thune v. Daschle-style upset of the 87-year-old Byrd a top 2006 goal. In July, the National Republican Senatorial Committee charged in with the cycle's first negative ad -- $53,000 of airtime for a TV spot attacking the senator. But it couldn't get Capito in the race.

Coming only four days after North Dakota Governor John Hoeven's decision not to challenge Senator Kent Conrad, Capito's bluff should wave a matador-sized red flag about Republican chances for 2006. In these crucial few months when candidates are entering races, raising funds, and recruiting staffs, Republican hopefuls are quietly keeping their hats out of the ring. While GOP leaders have located some strong candidates in open seats like Minnesota and Maryland, they can't find strong candidates to challenge Democratic incumbents in red or swing states.

This is a marked change from the last two cycles, when Karl Rove used the power of the White House to cajole first-tier candidates into dozens of races. In 2002, the White House encouraged Saxby Chambliss (Georgia), Norm Coleman (Minnesota), Jim Talent (Missouri), and John Thune (South Dakota) to run against incumbent Democrats, even though Coleman and Thune had originally wanted to run for governor. In 2004, when southern Democratic retirements created open seats that favored the GOP, Rove greased the wheels for superior candidates like Mel Martinez (Florida) and Richard Burr (North Carolina).

But this year, Rove isn't getting what he wants. In Michigan, Representative Candice Miller passed on challenging Senator Debbie Stabenow despite polls that showed them neck and neck. In Florida, Representative Katherine Harris has refused to drop her Senate campaign even though she badly trails Senator Bill Nelson. And in Rhode Island, conservative Cranston Mayor Stephen Laffey brushed aside months of high-up pressure to challenge liberal Senator Lincoln Chafee in the Republican primary -- even though polls show Chafee could retain the seat but Laffey would lose it to Democrats.

There's one obvious reason why Republican candidates aren't listening to the White House and the national party: For the first time, George W. Bush is an unpopular president. In Virginia, which is holding state elections next month, Republican candidate Jerry Kilgore has notably failed to call in the president to stump for him. One reason might be a Washington Post poll released in September that put Bush's popularity at 47 percent in this state he'd easily won 10 months ago. Startlingly, 45 percent of the polled said that Bush's endorsement would make them "less likely" to vote for the Republican candidate, compared with 28 percent who'd be more likely.

This makes a stark change from 2002, when Bush may have been the most popular president ever facing a midterm election. The national exit poll put his popularity at 66 percent, with 71 percent of voters approving of his handling of terrorism and 58 percent supporting him on the then-foundering economy. But now, according to the national polling outfit Survey USA, Bush's approval ratings outweigh his disapproval ratings in only 12 states, all in the Deep South and Mountain States. In Florida, Michigan, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Washington, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont -- all states with potentially hot Senate races -- his approval is mired in the 30s.

The first signs of the GOP's problems cropped up in February, when the president began stumping for Social Security privatization. Following the playbook that had worked very well for the 2001 tax cuts, Bush flew into red states that still had Democratic senators and started hard-selling his idea. But at the first stop, Montana, Senator Conrad Burns told reporters he was merely "intrigued" by Bush's plan and would "continue to look" at it. Right away it was clear that Republicans weren't happy taking this issue to voters.

The White House's objectives for this term -- spending projects, private accounts, and the war in Iraq -- are weighing down Republican candidates and making the 2006 climate look increasingly ominous. On the first issue, candidates who want to upset Democratic senators or take open seats in blue states would have a tough time arguing against the projects Democrats want to bring to their states. The latter issues are simply unpopular with voters. Support for the war and Republican handling of terrorism has been faltering since January, and according to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll, support for private Social Security accounts fell from 57 percent in November 2002 -- before the president's campaign -- to 44 percent in June 2005.

Republicans who've expressed early worries about their chances have talked about shifting the agenda to more favorable turf, putting tax-reform and tax-cut extensions back on the agenda. But that wouldn't be a cure-all. The prominence of Social Security and Iraq in voters' minds might give Democratic candidates a foothold in arguing against another round of tax cuts. And a debate on tax reform could present its own problems. Minnesota Senate candidate Mark Kennedy, one of the GOP's few remaining hopes for a pickup, is on the record supporting a national sales tax, which always polls poorly. While sales-tax booster Jim DeMint won a Senate seat last year in South Carolina, he squandered a huge early lead and finished with 4 percentage points fewer than George W. Bush. A Republican running 4 points behind Bush in Minnesota wouldn't be so lucky.

As Republicans have faltered, Democrats have had an easy time convincing candidates that this is the year to run. Pennsylvania Treasurer Bob Casey, who has long wanted to run for governor, was recruited easily as polls showed him crushing Senator Rick Santorum. Claire McCaskill, the auditor of Missouri who'd lost a close 2004 governor's race and wanted a rematch, entered the Senate race as polls showed incumbent Jim Talent looking weaker. Montana's shaky Burns, formerly seen as a safe bet in a red state, is being challenged by two Democrats with statewide support, John Morrison, the state auditor, and Jon Tester, president of the state Senate. And on Monday, about 12 hours after Capito gave up on her Senate race, popular Marine Major Paul Hackett entered the race against Ohio Senator Mike DeWine.

The polls will keep shifting over the next year, and Republicans not named Newt Gingrich will put on their game faces when asked about their party's chances for 2006. So far, though, their best candidates are taking a look at the battlefield, sizing up their opponents -- and running the other way.

David Weigel, a journalist based in Fairfax, Va., is a regular contributor to Campaigns & Elections magazine. His blog can be read at davidweigel.blogspot.com.

Copyright © 2005 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: David Weigel, "Running From The Running", The American Prospect Online, Oct 5, 2005.

 

 

Satire Alert!
It's a Class War and We're Still Winning
Billionaires for Bush Internal Memo
From the Estate of Billionaires for Bush

Fellow Plunderers:

In between and writing the country's energy policy, privatizing Iraq, starving government, and shredding environmental regulations, it has been a busy year for us since the re-coronation of ol' W.

Brushing aside a few scandals (Karl Rove Is Not A Traitor!), indictments (Delay Is Innocent!), and memos (Downing St. What?), things have been going well. The number of Americans living in poverty rose 12.7% last year; that's 1.1 million more people joining the ranks of the have-nots! As we always say, it's a class war-- and we're winning!

But it's not all no-bid contracts and Ferragamo shoes. Thanks to Hurricane Katrina, the deep economic divide we've worked so hard to create in America has come under uncomfortable scrutiny. The President's poll numbers are down to record lows, and we were just getting ready to shove through Congress the permanent repeal of the dynasty tax, finally freeing millionaires from supporting social programs we don't need like Medicaid, veterans' benefits, student grants.... Sure, infrastructure like roads will suffer, but hey, we can always buy more helicopters.


If the majority have their way, we could see a rebirth of quaint yet dangerous notions like the common good, equality and "fair play". [...]

That is from their email alert; I can't find the same thing on their web page, but there is a lot more fun to be had anyway: http://billionairesforbush.com/index.php

NextCard Internet Visa

Whose Fault Is Pork?

The huge expansion of government overseen by the supposed party of small government has provoked a conservative backlash. The Heritage Foundation, which is usually respectful of Republican Party officeholders, recently noted that the party's ascendancy has coincided with an extraordinarily expensive Medicare prescription drug bill, the most costly farm bill in modern history, a 51 percent increase in spending on veterans and an increase in the annual number of pork projects from 6,000 in 2001 to 14,000 this year. Rank-and-file Republican House members are fed up with this unconservative record; on Wednesday they rebelled against Majority Leader Tom DeLay's scheme to have a big-spending ally keep his throne warm while he fights a criminal indictment. But the conservative revolt should logically be taken a step further. It should target President Bush.

When they are at their most timid, which means frequently, critics of government profligacy are content to blame "the system." They point to the pressures on members of Congress to grasp for favors for their districts. They invoke the old truth that special interests hire lobbyists to fight for subsidies while the public that pays for them goes unrepresented on K Street. But blaming systemic forces for political cronyism is like blaming crime on societal forces such as poverty. It's part of the explanation, but it isn't the whole one. Conservatives should know this better than anybody, since they believe most ardently in personal responsibility.

Who should be held responsible for runaway government spending? Mr. DeLay is certainly a good place to start. His governing principle was not to stand on principle but rather to rain taxpayers' money on every lobby that could return the favor with campaign contributions. But the biggest responsibility lies not with any member of the legislature but with Mr. Bush. Unlike senators and House members, the president represents the whole nation; he is supposed to defend the general interest against particularist claims. Moreover, he has the power to do so. If Congress serves up wasteful bills, the president can veto them.

Mr. Bush has been too cowardly to do that. He is the first president since John Quincy Adams to have served a full term without once exercising his veto, and his second term has so far been no different. This summer Mr. Bush promised to veto the transportation bill if it cost more than $256 billion. His threat brought the bill's size down quite a bit, but in the end he caved and signed a package that cost $295 billion. Why did he blink? Doesn't his administration pride itself on defending the power and prerogatives of the presidency? Mr. Bush's father had the courage to veto 44 bills in four years, and President Ronald Reagan once vetoed a transportation bill because it contained about 150 pork projects. But the bill that Mr. Bush just signed contained at least 6,000 pork projects.

The president's defenders plead that it's hard to veto bills when his own party controls Congress. But as the conservative commentator Bruce Bartlett points out, this defense is nonsense. President Franklin D. Roosevelt held office at a time of huge Democratic Party majorities in Congress, but that didn't stop him from vetoing a record 635 bills. Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Jimmy Carter also coexisted with large Democratic majorities,

yet Kennedy vetoed 21 bills during his short presidency, Johnson vetoed 30 and Carter vetoed 31.

The truth is that there is nothing to stop Mr. Bush from wielding his veto -- witness the fact that the administration threatened Friday to veto a defense bill if, among other potential offenses, it contained language outlawing cruel and inhuman treatment of foreign detainees. But while Mr. Bush cares fervently, and scandalously, about the imperative of keeping inhumane practices legal, he does not care as much about waste of taxpayers' money. This is why he has not made vigorous use of his veto to restrain the growth of pork. This is why an anti-spending backlash that focuses only on Mr. DeLay is missing its main target.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company, 2 October 2005

A Letter to All Who Voted for George W. Bush from Michael Moore


To All My Fellow Americans Who Voted for George W. Bush:

On this, the fourth anniversary of 9/11, I'm just curious, how does it feel?

How does it feel to know that the man you elected to lead us after we were attacked went ahead and put a guy in charge of FEMA whose main qualification was that he ran horse shows?

That's right. Horse shows.

I really want to know -- and I ask you this in all sincerity and with all due respect -- how do you feel about the utter contempt Mr. Bush has shown for your safety? C'mon, give me just a moment of honesty. Don't start ranting on about how this disaster in New Orleans was the fault of one of the poorest cities in America. Put aside your hatred of Democrats and liberals and anyone with the last name of Clinton. Just look me in the eye and tell me our President did the right thing after 9/11 by naming a horse show runner as the top man to protect us in case of an emergency or catastrophe.

I want you to put aside your self-affixed label of Republican/conservative/born-again/capitalist/ditto-head/right-winger and just talk to me as an American, on the common ground we both call America.

Are we safer now than before 9/11? When you learn that behind the horse show runner, the #2 and #3 men in charge of emergency preparedness have zero experience in emergency preparedness, do you think we are safer?

When you look at Michael Chertoff, the head of Homeland Security, a man with little experience in national security, do you feel secure?

When men who never served in the military and have never seen young men die in battle send our young people off to war, do you think they know how to conduct a war? Do they know what it means to have your legs blown off for a threat that was never there?

Do you really believe that turning over important government services to private corporations has resulted in better services for the people?

Why do you hate our federal government so much? You have voted for politicians for the past 25 years whose main goal has been to de-fund the federal government. Do you think that cutting federal programs like FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers has been good or bad for America? GOOD OR BAD?

With the nation's debt at an all-time high, do you think tax cuts for the rich are still a good idea? Will you give yours back so hundreds of thousands of homeless in New Orleans can have a home?

Do you believe in Jesus? Really? Didn't he say that we would be judged by how we treat the least among us? Hurricane Katrina came in and blew off the facade that we were a nation with liberty and justice for all. The wind howled and the water rose and what was revealed was that the poor in America shall be left to suffer and die while the President of the United States fiddles and tells them to eat cake.

That's not a joke. The day the hurricane hit and the levees broke, Mr. Bush, John McCain and their rich pals were stuffing themselves with cake. A full day after the levees broke (the same levees whose repair funding he had cut), Mr. Bush was playing a guitar some country singer gave him. All this while New Orleans sank under water.

It would take ANOTHER day before the President would do a flyover in his jumbo jet, peeking out the widow at the misery 2500 feet below him as he flew back to his second home in DC. It would then be TWO MORE DAYS before a trickle of federal aid and troops would arrive. This was no seven minutes in a sitting trance while children read "My Pet Goat" to him. This was FOUR DAYS of doing nothing other than saying "Brownie (FEMA director Michael Brown), you're doing a heck of a job!"

My Republican friends, does it bother you that we are the laughing stock of the world?

And on this sacred day of remembrance, do you think we honor or shame those who died on 9/11/01? If we learned nothing and find ourselves today every bit as vulnerable and unprepared as we were on that bright sunny morning, then did the 3,000 die in vain?

Our vulnerability is not just about dealing with terrorists or natural disasters. We are vulnerable and unsafe because we allow one in eight Americans to live in horrible poverty. We accept an education system where one in six children never graduate and most of those who do can't string a coherent sentence together. The middle class can't pay the mortgage or the hospital bills and 45 million have no health coverage whatsoever.

Are we safe? Do you really feel safe? You can only move so far out and build so many gated communities before the fruit of what you've sown will be crashing through your walls and demanding retribution. Do you really want to wait until that happens? Or is it your hope that if they are left alone long enough to soil themselves and shoot themselves and drown in the filth that fills the street that maybe the problem will somehow go away?

I know you know better. You gave the country and the world a man who wasn't up for the job and all he does is hire people who aren't up for the job. You did this to us, to the world, to the people of New Orleans. Please fix it. Bush is yours. And you know, for our peace and safety and security, this has to be fixed. What do you propose?

I have an idea, and it isn't a horse show.

Yours,
Michael Moore
www.michaelmoore.com
mmflint@aol.com

"Was Pat Robertson's Call For Assassination Of A Foreign Leader A Crime?
Had He Been a Democrat, He'd Probably Be Hiring A Criminal Attorney" by John W. Dean

Bush Has "Flipped-Out" Over Anti-War Protestors

"Fifties Republicans were giants compared to today’s. Richard Nixon was the last Republican leader to feel a Christian obligation toward the poor." - Garrison Keillor

House Commerce Committe Harrass Environmental Researchers

* "There religion is supply-side economics... Tax cuts is their Jesus" - Bradley Whitford, actor on The West Wing, panel discussion on "Real Time with Bill Maher"

White House delay release of thousands of documents on Supreme Court appointee Roberts

Q - "What's the difference between the Vietnam War and the Iraq War?

A - Bush had a plan for getting out of the Vietnam War!"

"As democracy is perfected, the office of President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." - H.L. Mencken

"Been there & done that in 2000 & 2004." - Andrew Homer

 

"One quick way to trace which political party has a corner on the market of sociopaths is to see who cuts back funding to the Rural Housing Mortgage Program of the USDA once they get into the White House." - Andrew Homer

".. the Texas Legislature decided it's OK for gay couples to be foster parents, but only if they're not married. I would explain what message that sends, if only I understood it.

Look at it this way: At least we can hunt inside city limits now. My personal fave was the day they voted themselves a huge retirement pension and the next day cut retirement benefits for the teachers. Classy move, boys. Retiring solons will now get $36,000 a year after 12 years in the Lege. The job pays $7,200 a year and requires 140 days of work once every other year. Welcome to a Republican-dominated state." - Molly Ivins, 2 Jun 05, Progressive Magazine

Dear Red States,

We're ticked off at the way you've treated California, and we've decided we're leaving. We intend to form our own country, and we're taking the other Blue States with us.

In case you aren't aware, that includes Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and the entire Northeast. We believe this split will be beneficial to the nation, and especially to the people of the new country of New California.

To sum up briefly: You get Texas, Oklahoma and all the slave states. We get stem cell research and the best beaches. We get Elliot Spitzer. You get Ken Lay. We get the Statue of Liberty. You get OpryLand. We get Intel and Microsoft. You get WorldCom. We get Harvard. You get Ole Miss.

We get 85 percent of America's venture capital and entrepreneurs. You get Alabama. We get two-thirds of the tax revenue; you get to make the red states finally pay their fair share.

Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22 percent lower than the Christian Coalition's, we get a bunch of happy families. You get a bunch of single moms. And of course, 31% higher unwanted pregnancies.

Please be aware that Nuevo California will be pro-choice and anti-war, and we're going to want all our citizens back from Iraq at once. If you need people to fight, ask your evangelicals. They have kids they're apparently willing to send to their deaths for no purpose, and they don't care if you don't show pictures of their children's caskets coming home. We do wish you success in Iraq, and hope that the WMDs turn up, but we're not willing to spend our resources to find them.

With the Blue States in hand, we will have firm control of 80 percent of the country's fresh water, more than 90 percent of the pineapple and lettuce, 92 percent of the nation's fresh fruit, 95 percent of America's quality wines (you can serve French wines at state dinners) 90 percent of all cheese, 90 percent of the high tech industry, most of the U.S. low-sulfur coal, all living redwoods, sequoias and condors, all the Ivy and Seven Sister schools, plus Stanford and Cal Tech.

With the Red States, on the other hand, you will have to cope with 88 percent of all obese Americans (and their projected health care costs), 92 percent of all U.S. mosquitoes, nearly 100 percent of the tornadoes, 90 percent of the hurricanes, 99 percent of all Southern Baptists, virtually 100 percent of all televangelists, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Jones University, Clemson and the University of Georgia.

We get Hollywood and Yosemite, thank you.

Additionally, 38 % of those in the Red states believe Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale, 62 % believe life is sacred unless we're discussing the death penalty or gun laws, 44 % say that evolution is only a theory, 53 % that Saddam Hussien was involved in 9/11, and 61 % of you crazy bastards believe you are people with higher morals than we lefties.

Sincerely,

Author Unknown in New California

2005 Inaugural Speech

It appears that every American journalist missed the point of Shrub Jr's inaugural speech. His focus on fighting for freedom glossed over a fews crucial points. It appears that the Republicans have borrowed strategy tips from Nicolo Machiavelli and Adolph Hitler. Hitler said that the people are more likely to fall for a big lie rather than a little lie. Bush covered over the fact that his invasion of Iraq had NOTHING to do with any war against terror nor eradicating weapons of mass destruction since none were there. Machiavelli advised to get the people to keep their attention on a foreign war, so that they won't notice how incompetent the government is regarding the handling of domestic issues.

Years ago, Bush Daddy was smart enough to form a coalition when it came to throwing Hussein's troops out of Kuwait. But with Shrub Jr's stance on unilateral military efforts, he's made it clear that he wants the American taxpayers to pay for foreign military excursions and he wants American troops to die fighting other peoples battles.

With friends like Republican Presidents and Republican law makers, the American people don't need any enemies. - Andrew Homer

A Republican Proletariat


Don't Know Much About Algebra

Catch other Republican lies at the Center for American Progress

Program on International Policy Attitudes

To find out more about those wanting to prevent America from having a real multi-party system, read "TheRepublican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy" by David Brock (thanx Bill Moyers)

The Imminent Demise of the Republican Party

I'm a black sheep in a Republican family. If you have to be a black sheep, it may as well be in a Republican family. Out of the last 5 generations I'm the only one who has never registered to vote Republican. - Andrew Homer

Democrats may be unethical, but Republicans are outright evil. No, make that Satanic.

A Republican dentist in Edgewood, New Mexico deliberately overfiled my new tooth cap, knowing that it would endanger the long term well-being of that tooth and the opposing tooth. Why? Because he heard of the nasty things I said about Republicans at the Moriarty Chamber of Commerce.

"Apocalypse Bush!: Why care for the planet when the End Times are almost here? Vote Bush and hop on the salvation train!"

$4.4 trillion in public debt

Washington, D.C. - Here is a dossier on Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr.:

AGE: 50

BORN: Buffalo, New York

MARRIED TO: Jane Sullivan Roberts, attorney at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman

RACE: White

RELIGION: Catholic (Church of the Little Flower, Bethesda, Maryland, whose members include L. Paul Bremer III)

PROTÉGÉ OF: Chief Justice William Rehnquist

NET WORTH: $3,782,275

SCOTUS RECORD: Argued 39 cases; won 25

SHERPA: Fred Thompson, former Tennessee senator and current Law and Order star, will guide Roberts through the congressional maze.

LEGAL GROUPS: Republican National Lawyers Association, National Legal Center for the Public Interest's Legal Advisory Council, which includes Ken Starr and C. Boyden Gray (Roberts was a member until 2003). He is a favorite of Federalist Society lawyers. (Roberts denies that he was ever a Federalist Society member.)

ELECTORAL-POLITICS ACTIVITIES: Executive committee of D.C. Lawyers for Bush-Quayle '88; member of Lawyers for Bush-Cheney

TOUGH LOVE: "No one is very happy about the events that led to this litigation," he wrote in an opinion upholding the arrest of a 12-year-old girl caught eating on a D.C. subway. "Her shoelaces were removed, and she was transported in the windowless rear compartment of a police vehicle to a juvenile processing center, where she was booked, fingerprinted, and detained until released to her mother some three hours later—all for eating a single french fry." Roberts added, "The question before us, however, is not whether these policies were a bad idea, but whether they violated the Fourth and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution. Like the District Court, we conclude that they did not, and accordingly we affirm."

POSSIBLE CONFLICTS INVOLVING WIFE'S WORK: Cases involving Jane Sullivan Roberts's clients and firm. She gave $250 to Illinois Senate candidate Peter Fitzgerald in 1998, but her contributions to her firm's PAC have totaled $3,772, and the firm's clients include American Express, Chevron, Deutsche Bank, GE, JPMorgan Chase Bank, SBC, and Stanford University. She is currently legal counsel to the anti-abortion group Feminists for She is currently legal counsel to the anti-abortion group Feminists for Life of America (FFLA).

POSSIBLE CONFLICTS INVOLVING ROBERTS'S PAST WORK: Roberts, while at Hogan & Hartson, played a behind-the-scenes role in George Bush's election court battle in Florida in 2000. Roberts's campaign contributions in 2000 included $1,000 to George Bush and $500 to Indiana GOP senator Richard Lugar. In the '98 cycle, he gave $1,235 to Illinois GOP Senate candidate Peter Fitzgerald, who went on to defeat Senator Carol Moseley Braun, and $1,000 to Indiana Senate candidate Peter Rusthoven, who lost in the GOP primary. Fitzgerald's campaign was heavily bankrolled by right-to-life groups. Roberts's other political contributions were through Hogan & Hartson's PAC, totaling $7,450 over the years. In all, Roberts's contributions to federal candidates, PACs, and parties have totaled $11,185.

ROBERTS'S HISTORY WITH HOGAN & HARTSON: He was a partner for 10 years. Since 1989, the D.C. law firm and its members have given $2.3 million in campaign contributions. Hogan & Hartson, with 451 lawyers in the capital and 1,000 overall, had been No. 1 in D.C. in billable hours in recent times—until last year, when it fell to second. Average yearly profit for partners is $905,000, according to Legal Times. Major recent work by the firm has included moving Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. operation from Australia to the U.S., and the News Corp. acquisition of General Motors' stake in Hughes Electronics. Since Roberts's 2000 election work in Florida, ties between the law firm and Florida governor Jeb Bush's administration have grown, reports Knight Ridder. Jeb Bush's former counsel Carol Licko joined Hogan & Hartson as a partner after it bought her Miami firm. Hogan & Hartson is developing its Latin American activities, using Miami as a springboard. The firm, which first opened offices in Florida in 2000, has represented the state in water rights disputes with Georgia and Alabama and against Coastal Petroleum over Gulf of Mexico leases, according to Knight Ridder.

ROBERTS'S CLIENTS AT HOGAN & HARTSON: Included Litton Industries (merged with Northrop Grumman), Pulte Corp. (major home builder in U.S. and Mexico), National Credit Union Association, and Intergraph Corporation.

ROBERTS'S LOBBYING ACTIVITIES AT HOGAN & HARTSON: Western Peanut Growers Association in 1996, for which he was paid $20,000, and Panhandle Peanut Growers Association in 1997 ($10,000), lobbying the Department of Agriculture, Justice Department, and U.S. House on warehouse-storage loan program and peanut price supports.

NOMINATION SCORECARD (TO DATE): Supporting Roberts (partial list): Concerned Women for America, Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, Southern Baptist Convention, Christian Coalition, Heritage Foundation, American Center for Law and Justice, Progress for America. Opposing Roberts (partial list): Americans United for Separation of Church and State, National Organization for Women, moveon.org, NARAL. Leaning toward opposing, but not yet decided: People for the American Way ("serious concerns, questions"), Alliance for Justice ("initial review has led to serious concerns"), American Civil Liberties Union ("deep concern"), Feminist Majority.

My favorite Republicans

* President Dwight David Eisenhower - as Allied Supreme Comander, this U.S. Army General was victorious in World War II - which is why, since 1945, every teenage boy overseas wants to learn the American version of the English language.

* President Abraham Lincoln - the first and only Republican in the White House who understood that racism, besides not aiding the American economy, was also not the Christian way to treat anyone.

* U.S. Representative Pete McCloskey - from San Mateo, California (the only Republican in Congress who was against the Vietnam war & ran against Nixon in the 1972 primary - McCloskey was a Marine Captain who fought in Vietnam).

* President Teddy Roosevelt - he fought for the Panama canal and against a central bank and against mogul J.P. Morgan. Unfortunately, he played the viking card on Japan and sent battleships into Tokyo harbor forcing the Japanese to do business with us. The attack on Pearl Harbor 50 years later was their response. We should have let Japan stay in the 16th century.

RESUME


GEORGE W. BUSH
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20520

EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE

Law Enforcement:
I was arrested in Kennebunkport, Maine, in 1976 for driving under the influence of alcohol. I pled guilty, paid a fine, and had my driver's license suspended for 30 days. My Texas driving record has been "lost" and is not available.

Military:
I joined the Texas Air National Guard and went AWOL. I refused to take a drug test or answer any questions about my drug use. By joining the Texas Air National Guard, I was able to avoid combat duty in Vietnam.

College:
I graduated from Yale University with a low C average. I was a cheerleader.

PAST WORK EXPERIENCE:
I ran for U.S. Congress and lost. I began my career in the oil business in Midland, Texas, in 1975. I bought an oil company, but couldn't find any oil in Texas. The company went bankrupt shortly after I sold all my stock.
I bought the Texas Rangers baseball team in a sweetheart deal that took land using taxpayer money.
With the help of my father and our friends in the oil industry (including Enron CEO Ken Lay), I was elected governor of Texas.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS GOVERNOR OF TEXAS:
I changed Texas pollution laws to favor power and oil companies, making Texas the most polluted state in the Union. During my tenure, Houston replaced Los Angeles as the most smog-ridden city in America.
I cut taxes and bankrupted the Texas treasury to the tune of billions in borrowed money.
I set the record for the most executions by any governor in American history.
With the help of my brother, the governor of Florida, and my father's appointments to the Supreme Court, I became President after losing by over 500,000 votes in 2000.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS PRESIDENT:
I am the first President in U.S. history to enter office with a criminal record.
I invaded and occupied two countries at a continuing cost of over one billion dollars per week.
I spent the U.S. surplus and effectively bankrupted the U.S. Treasury.
I shattered the record for the largest annual deficit in U.S. history.
I set an economic record for most private bankruptcies filed in any 12-month period.
I set the all-time record for most foreclosures in a 12-month period.
I set the all-time record for the biggest drop in the history of the U.S. stock market.
In my first year in office, over 2 million Americans lost their jobs and that trend continues every month.
I'm proud that the members of my cabinet are the richest of any administration in U.S. history.
My "poorest millionaire," Condoleeza Rice, has a Chevron oil tanker named after her.
I set the record for most campaign fund-raising trips by a U.S. President.
I am the all-time U.S. and world record-holder for receiving the most corporate campaign donations.
My largest lifetime campaign contributor, and one of my best friends, Kenneth Lay, presided over the largest corporate bankruptcy fraud in U.S. History, Enron.
My political party used Enron private jets and corporate attorneys to assure my success with the U.S. Supreme Court during my election decision.
I have protected my friends at Enron and Halliburton against investigation or prosecution. More time and money was spent investigating the Monica Lewinsky affair than has been spent investigating one of the biggest corporate rip-offs in history.
I presided over the biggest energy crisis in U.S. history and refused to intervene when corruption involving the oil industry was revealed.
I presided over the highest gasoline prices in U.S. history.
I changed the U.S. policy to allow convicted criminals to be awarded government contracts.
I appointed more convicted criminals to administration than any President in U.S. history.
I created the Ministry of Homeland Security, the largest bureaucracy in the history of the United States government.
I've broken more international treaties than any President in U.S. history.
I am the first President in U.S. history to have the United Nations remove the U.S. from the Human Rights Commission.
I withdrew the U.S. from the World Court of Law. I refused to allow inspector's access to U.S. "prisoners of war" detainees and thereby have refused to abide by the Geneva Convention.
I am the first President in history to refuse United Nations election inspectors (during the 2002 U.S. election). I set the record for fewest numbers of press conferences of any President since the advent of television.
I set the all-time Presidential record for most days on vacation in any one-year period.
After taking off the entire month of August, I presided over the worst security failure in U.S. history.
I garnered the most sympathy ever for the U.S. after the World Trade Center attacks and less than a year later made the U.S. the most hated country in the world, the largest failure of diplomacy in world history.
I have set the all-time record for most people worldwide to simultaneously protest me in public venues (15 million people), shattering the record for protests against any person in the history of mankind.
I am the first President in U.S. history to order an unprovoked, pre-emptive attack and the military occupation of a sovereign nation. I did so against the will of the United Nations, the majority of U.S. citizens, and the world community.
I have cut health care benefits for war veterans and support a cut in duty benefits for active duty troops and their families in wartime.
In my State of the Union Address, I lied about our reasons for attacking Iraq and then blamed the lies on our British friends.
I am the first President in history to have a majority of Europeans (71%) view my presidency as the biggest threat to world peace and security.
I am supporting development of a nuclear "Tactical Bunker Buster," a WMD.
I have so far failed to fulfill my pledge to bring Osama Bin Laden to justice.

RECORDS AND REFERENCES:
All records of my tenure as governor of Texas are now in my father's library, sealed and unavailable for public view.
All records of SEC investigations into my insider trading and my bankrupt companies are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public view.
All records or minutes from meetings that I, or my Vice-President, attended regarding public energy policy are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public review.

PLEASE CONSIDER MY EXPERIENCE WHEN VOTING IN 2004!
PLEASE SEND THIS TO EVERY VOTER YOU KNOW!

 

 
How to Be a Good Republican

by Ann Richards (former Democratic Governor of Texas)

1 - You have to believe that America's 8-year prosperity under President Bill Clinton was really due to the work of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, but yesterday's gasoline prices are all Clinton's fault.

2 - You have to believe that those privileged from birth achieve success all on their own.

3 - You have to be against all government programs, but expect Social Security checks on time.

4 - You have to believe that AIDS victims deserve their disease, but smokers with lung cancer and overweight individuals with heart disease don't deserve theirs.

5 - You have to appreciate the power rush that comes with sporting a gun.

6 - You have to believe everything Rush Limbaugh says.

7 - You have to believe that the agricultural, restaurant, housing and hotel industries can survive without immigrant labor.

8 - You have to believe God hates homosexuality, but loves the death penalty.

9 - You have to believe society is color-blind and growing up black in America doesn't diminish your opportunities, but you still won't vote for Alan Keyes.

10 - You have to believe that pollution is OK as long as it makes a profit.

11 - You have to believe in prayer in schools, as long as you don't pray to Allah or Buddha.

12 - You have to believe Newt Gingrich and Henry Hyde were really faithful husbands.

13 - You have to believe speaking a few Spanish phrases makes you instantly popular in the barrio.

14 - You have to believe that only your own teenagers are still virgins.

15 - You have to be against government interference in business, until your oil company, auto manufacturer, or Savings and Loan is about to go broke and you beg for a government bail out.

16 - You love Jesus and Jesus loves you and, by the way, Jesus shares your hatred for AIDS victims, homosexuals, pacifists, and President Clinton.

17 - You have to believe government has nothing to do with providing police protection, national defense, and building roads.

18 - You have to believe a poor, minority student with a disciplinary history and failing grades will be admitted into an elite private school with a $1,000 voucher.

While the President has called for greater democracy throughout the Muslim world, the White House has forged ties with some of the most repressive regimes in the world – risking international credibility on human rights issues. For instance, the Administration touts its close relationship with Saudi Arabia and Egypt, despite those countries' awful human rights record (see reports on the Saudi and Egyptian human rights records). In fact, while the State Department's 2002 Human Rights Report cites the Saudis as a major human rights violator, the report goes out of its way to go easy on the Saudis. For instance, while the report says, "there were no reports of the arbitrary or unlawful deprivation of life committed by the Saudi government" in the next sentence it says, "the Government executed persons for criminal offenses after closed trials in which forced confessions were common." While the Administration had a chance to appoint a new ambassador to Saudi Arabia with human rights credentials, AP reports it instead appointed "Texas oil lobbyist James Oberwetter." Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) had asked Bush to withdraw Oberwetter's nomination because "it sends the message that the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia is based on oil." He "contends that in an attempt to maintain good relations with the kingdom because of its oil, U.S. officials ignore its lack of democracy, religious intolerance and halfhearted efforts to fight terrorism. - 2003 Dec 10 Progress Report

* Regulations and regulators help to prevent the public from being exploited, injured, or abused. The Republican battle cry of "Lower taxes" is the cover story for permiting Republican business owners to save money and make money by continued neglect of the public good and public safety.

* U.S. Representative DeLay, of Florida, sent staff and friends to harrass the vote counters at the office of the Bureau of Elections - preventing a resolution to the corruption of the U.S. general election in 2000.

U.S. President Richard Nixon's "plumbers" break into the Democratic National Headquarters. Nixon lies to the American people about having before-hand knowledge of the break-in. When Nixon resigned he never apologized to the American people.

* General Haig, Henry Kissinger, US President Richard Nixon were responsible for General Agusto Pinochet's military coup which executed President Salvador Allende of Chile.

* Henry Kissinger and U.S. President Gerald Ford provide munitions to Indonesian President Suharto who uses them to invade and conduct mass murder in East Timor.

The Republicans are definitely trying to develop private schools at the sacrifice of public school systems. The mis-named "No Child Left Behind" bill cuts off funds to school districts which the average student test scores fall below a specified minimum. This Bush program is intended to leave the students of poor districts to be left BEHIND. Then the Republicans will pretend that the voucher system will rectify the problem.

When the U.S. Republican Party attacks:

# - They shut down the Federal Government for 12-months, because President Clinton got a "massage" from an intern.

# - Broke into the Democratic Party National headquarters about 30-years ago.

# - The U.S. Republican Party uses Nicolo Machiavelli's "The Prince" for their foreign and domestic policy. They start a war whenever they get into the White House so as to pull attention away from their incompetent governing.

# - Florida is required by law to have hand recount of ballots if the votes of the top 2 cantidates is within 0.5% of each other. Texas Republican Congressman Tom Delay's staff were caught on video deliberately disrupting the recount attempt in the Florida Bureau of Election offices in 2000. The vote was within 0.009% and the recount was cancelled in favor of George Bush.

# - Another example proving Republicans lacking integrity is the Supreme Court vote regarding the outcome of the 2000 General Election in Florida. Instead of doing the right thing, the Republican Justices voted straight down the party line, thus joining the blatant conspiracy to steal the 2000 Presidential election.

# - A Republican think tank 40 years ago recommending the U.S. aggressively go after other's oil.

The 3rd parties I've been a member of the last 30+ years have always pushed for research for alternative energy sources. By now the U.S. would have been energy independent - instead of drilling in the Alaska North Bank and wasting the lives of American troops invading Vietnam and Iraq.

# - Enron scam to steal $billions from California energy consumers.

# - Republican President Dwight Eisenhower sent the CIA into Vietnam. So, that's WHEN the U.S. started on it's Vietnam roll.

There was only ONE Republican in Congress with the humanity to be against the Vietnam war: Vietnam veteran Marine Captain Pete McCloskey, Congressman from San Mateo, California. (I'd bump into him every so often when we'd be shopping in downtown San Francisco.)

# - Republicans fly cocaine from Colombia into the Orlando, Florida airport to sell the cocaine in ghettos so as to buy guns for the Contras in Nicaragua.

# - Wasn't someone with the last name of Bush (Neil) at the center of the Savings and Loan scam 20 years ago which stole $10s of billions from American families?

# - President George W. Bush lied about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction so as to use as an excuse to invade Iraq.

# - Why did Bush Daddy instead of finishing the invasion in Iraq 18 years ago, pulled out early thus abandoning 12 Iraqi rebel generals who were with allied forces - leaving them behind to be executed by Hussein?

# - President Richard Nixon violates international law by having the Air Force bomb Cambodia.

# - According to family psychology, not everyone in a dysfunctional family "acts out". The more criminal element of the U.S. Republican Party reveals that the entire group endorses thug values to one extent or another.

# - Keep up on the Republicans newest mask on fascism at New Century Project.

# - To learn more about the sociopathy of Republicans, read The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues About the So Called Psychopathic Personality by Hervey Cleckley. (Thanks Kurt Vonnegut.)

What I Didn't Find in Africa

by Joseph C. Wilson 4th - 6 July 2003

Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq?

Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.

For 23 years, from 1976 to 1998, I was a career foreign service officer and ambassador. In 1990, as chargé d'affaires in Baghdad, I was the last American diplomat to meet with Saddam Hussein. (I was also a forceful advocate for his removal from Kuwait.) After Iraq, I was President George H. W. Bush's ambassador to Gabon and São Tomé and Príncipe; under President Bill Clinton, I helped direct Africa policy for the National Security Council.

It was my experience in Africa that led me to play a small role in the effort to verify information about Africa's suspected link to Iraq's nonconventional weapons programs. Those news stories about that unnamed former envoy who went to Niger? That's me.

In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report. While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake - a form of lightly processed ore - by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990's. The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president's office.

After consulting with the State Department's African Affairs Bureau (and through it with Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick, the United States ambassador to Niger), I agreed to make the trip. The mission I undertook was discreet but by no means secret. While the C.I.A. paid my expenses (my time was offered pro bono), I made it abundantly clear to everyone I met that I was acting on behalf of the United States government.

In late February 2002, I arrived in Niger's capital, Niamey, where I had been a diplomat in the mid-70's and visited as a National Security Council official in the late 90's. The city was much as I remembered it. Seasonal winds had clogged the air with dust and sand.
Through the haze, I could see camel caravans crossing the Niger River (over the John F. Kennedy bridge), the setting sun behind them. Most people had wrapped scarves around their faces to protect against the grit, leaving only their eyes visible.

The next morning, I met with Ambassador Owens-Kirkpatrick at the embassy. For reasons that are understandable, the embassy staff has always kept a close eye on Niger's uranium business. I was not surprised, then, when the ambassador told me that she knew about the allegations of uranium sales to Iraq - and that she felt she had already debunked them in her reports to Washington. Nevertheless, she and I agreed that my time would be best spent interviewing people who had been in government when the deal supposedly took place, which was before her arrival.

I spent the next eight days drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people: current government officials, former government officials, people associated with the country's uranium business. It did not take long to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place.

Given the structure of the consortiums that operated the mines, it would be exceedingly difficult for Niger to transfer uranium to Iraq. Niger's uranium business consists of two mines, Somair and Cominak, which are run by French, Spanish, Japanese, German and Nigerian interests. If the government wanted to remove uranium from a mine, it would have to notify the consortium, which in turn is strictly monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Moreover, because the two mines are closely regulated, quasi-governmental entities, selling uranium would require the approval of the minister of mines, the prime minister and probably the president. In short, there's simply too much oversight over too small an industry for a sale to have transpired.

(As for the actual memorandum, I never saw it. But news accounts have pointed out that the documents had glaring errors - they were signed, for example, by officials who were no longer in government - and were probably forged. And then there's the fact that Niger formally denied the charges.)

Before I left Niger, I briefed the ambassador on my findings, which were consistent with her own. I also shared my conclusions with members of her staff. In early March, I arrived in Washington and promptly provided a detailed briefing to the C.I.A. I later shared my conclusions with the State Department African Affairs Bureau. There was nothing secret or earth-shattering in my report, just as there was nothing secret about my trip.

Though I did not file a written report, there should be at least four documents in United States government archives confirming my mission. The documents should include the ambassador's report of my debriefing in Niamey, a separate report written by the embassy staff, a C.I.A. report summing up my trip, and a specific answer from the agency to the office of the vice president (this may have been delivered orally). While I have not seen any of these reports, I have spent enough time in government to know that this is standard operating procedure.

I thought the Niger matter was settled and went back to my life. (I did take part in the Iraq debate, arguing that a strict containment regime backed by the threat of force was preferable to an invasion.) In September 2002, however, Niger re-emerged. The British government published a "white paper" asserting that Saddam Hussein and his unconventional arms posed an immediate danger. As evidence, the report cited Iraq's attempts to purchase uranium from an African country.

Then, in January, President Bush, citing the British dossier, repeated the charges about Iraqi efforts to buy uranium from Africa.

The next day, I reminded a friend at the State Department of my trip and suggested that if the president had been referring to Niger, then his conclusion was not borne out by the facts as I understood them. He replied that perhaps the president was speaking about one of the other three African countries that produce uranium: Gabon, South Africa or Namibia. At the time, I accepted the explanation. I didn't know that in December, a month before the president's address, the State Department had published a fact sheet that mentioned the Niger case.

Those are the facts surrounding my efforts. The vice president's office asked a serious question. I was asked to help formulate the answer. I did so, and I have every confidence that the answer I provided was circulated to the appropriate officials within our government.

The question now is how that answer was or was not used by our political leadership. If my information was deemed inaccurate, I understand (though I would be very interested to know why). If, however, the information was ignored because it did not fit certain preconceptions about Iraq, then a legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses. (It's worth remembering that in his March "Meet the Press" appearance, Mr. Cheney said that Saddam Hussein was "trying once again to produce nuclear weapons.") At a minimum, Congress, which authorized the use of military force at the president's behest, should want to know if the assertions about Iraq were warranted.

I was convinced before the war that the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein required a vigorous and sustained international response to disarm him. Iraq possessed and had used chemical weapons; it had an active biological weapons program and quite possibly a nuclear research program - all of which were in violation of United Nations resolutions. Having encountered Mr. Hussein and his thugs in the run-up to the Persian Gulf war of 1991, I was only too aware of the dangers he posed.

But were these dangers the same ones the administration told us about? We have to find out. America's foreign policy depends on the sanctity of its information. For this reason, questioning the selective use of intelligence to justify the war in Iraq is neither idle sniping nor "revisionist history," as Mr. Bush has suggested. The act of war is the last option of a democracy, taken when there is a grave threat to our national security. More than 200 American soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq already. We have a duty to ensure that their sacrifice came for the right reasons.

Joseph C. Wilson 4th, United States ambassador to Gabon from 1992 to 1995, is an international business consultant.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Karl Rove's America
By Paul Krugman

John Gibson of Fox News says that Karl Rove should be given a medal. I agree: Mr. Rove should receive a medal from the American Political Science Association for his pioneering discoveries about modern American politics. The medal can, if necessary, be delivered to his prison cell.

What Mr. Rove understood, long before the rest of us, is that we're not living in the America of the past, where even partisans sometimes changed their views when faced with the facts. Instead, we're living in a country in which there is no longer such a thing as nonpolitical truth. In particular, there are now few, if any, limits to what conservative politicians can get away with: the faithful will follow the twists and turns of the party line with a loyalty that would have pleased the Comintern.

I first realized that we were living in Karl Rove's America during the 2000 presidential campaign, when George W. Bush began saying things about Social Securityprivatization and tax cuts that were simply false. At first, I thought the Bush campaign was making a big mistake - that these blatant falsehoods would be condemned by prominent Republican politicians and Republican economists, especially those who had spent years building reputations as advocates of fiscal responsibility. In fact, with hardly any exceptions they lined up to praise Mr. Bush's proposals.

But the real demonstration that Mr. Rove understands American politics better than any pundit came after 9/11.

Every time I read a lament for the post-9/11 era of national unity, I wonder what people are talking about. On the issues I was watching, the Republicans' exploitation of the atrocity began while ground zero was still smoldering.

Mr. Rove has been much criticized for saying that liberals responded to the attack by wanting to offer the terrorists therapy - but what he said about conservatives, that they "saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war," is equally false. What many of them actually saw was a domestic political opportunity - and none more so than Mr. Rove.

A less insightful political strategist might have hesitated right after 9/11 before using it to cast the Democrats as weak on national security. After all, there were no facts to support that accusation.

But Mr. Rove understood that the facts were irrelevant. For one thing, he knew he could count on the administration's supporters to obediently accept a changing story line. Read the before-and-after columns by pro-administration pundits about Iraq: before the war they castigated the C.I.A. for understating the threat posed by Saddam's W.M.D.; after the war they castigated the C.I.A. for exaggerating the very same threat.

Mr. Rove also understands, better than anyone else in American politics, the power of smear tactics. Attacks on someone who contradicts the official line don't have to be true, or even plausible, to undermine that person's effectiveness. All they have to do is get a lot of media play, and they'll create the sense that there must be something wrong with the guy.

And now we know just how far he was willing to go with these smear tactics: as part of the effort to discredit Joseph Wilson IV, Mr. Rove leaked the fact that Mr. Wilson's wife worked for the C.I.A. I don't know whether Mr. Rove can be convicted of a crime, but there's no question that he damaged national security for partisan advantage. If a Democrat had done that, Republicans would call it treason.

But what we're getting, instead, is yet another impressive demonstration that these days, truth is political. One after another, prominent Republicans and conservative pundits have declared their allegiance to the party line. They haven't just gone along with the diversionary tactics, like the irrelevant questions about whether Mr. Rove used Valerie Wilson's name in identifying her (Robert Novak later identified her by her maiden name, Valerie Plame), or the false, easily refuted claim that Mr. Wilson lied about who sent him to Niger. They're now a chorus, praising Mr. Rove as a patriotic whistle-blower.

Ultimately, this isn't just about Mr. Rove. It's also about Mr. Bush, who has always known that his trusted political adviser - a disciple of the late Lee Atwater, whose smear tactics helped President Bush's father win the 1988 election - is a thug, and obviously made no attempt to find out if he was the leaker.

Most of all, it's about what has happened to America. How did our political system get to this point?

E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com - http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/15/opinion/15krugman.html?th&emc=th

Bush aims weapons of malnutrition at Cuba

by Sarah Stephens

Washington – The values of faith and family mean a lot to Ana Karim, a Cuban-American from Richmond, Va. and a Mennonite pastor. She has two very ill uncles living in Cuba. For the past decade, she has used a US license granted to Cuban-Americans to travel to Cuba and care for these elderly and infirm relatives.

On her last visit to Havana, she bought a gift of soap for them at a dollar store; a necessity they can no longer afford because of rising prices. She carried a suitcase with her, jammed with medicines for her uncles that are costly and scarce in Cuba.

Ana's uncles, like so many Cubans, depend on visits, financial support, and gifts to keep body and soul together. She's now lamenting the real possibility that she will never see them again. Like thousands of other Cuban-Americans, Ana realizes her ability to visit Cuba will be radically restricted under new sanctions embraced by President Bush.

For 45 years, well before we learned the term "regime change," US presidents have tried to drive Fidel Castro from power. Bush's plan, effective last Wednesday, is the latest such attempt. Its goal is to destabilize Cuba economically - to dry up the flow of US dollars to the island. But the president's strategy will only hurt American and Cuban families, and do nothing to change Cuba's form of government.

The plan cuts visits Cuban-Americans can make to their families on the island from one a year to one every three years. It redefines "family" - aunts, uncles, or cousins no longer count. It slashes what travelers may spend in Cuba from $164 to $50 per day. New limits have no exceptions for visits to a sick or dying relative or to attendance at a funeral. As four US senators wrote recently, it squeezes "the Castro regime at the expense of the Cuban people." These tougher sanctions against Cuba are a terrible idea for several reasons.

First, they'll increase hunger in Cuba. On my most recent trip to Havana, last month, there was a sharp spike from previous visits in stories of deprivation and hardship for average Cubans. A pound of pork costs 25 pesos - a tenth of the average monthly wage. A few weeks ago, there were shortages of cooking oil. An official of the Havana Catholic archdiocese told me of visiting people in rural Cuba; many are living on a subsistence basis, some eating no more than a couple bananas per day.

While problems with hunger are rooted largely in the centralized control of the Cuban economy, the US embargo causes others. Blame aside, Cuban families depend on assistance from the US to eat, and the Bush administration's plan will dramatically reduce the funds average Cubans have to put food on their tables.

Second, this plan hits the wrong target. Sanctions against a foreign government have never so directly hit American families. During the cold war, freedom to travel was recognized as an important human right. The US didn't try to stop Eastern European families from visiting their relations behind the Iron Curtain. It shouldn't stop families from taking care of their own in Cuba.

Finally, these sanctions violate a core tenet of US foreign policy. Ever since President Carter's discredited sanctions preventing grain sales to Russia, most US politicians have disavowed the use of hunger as a weapon.

In 2000, George W. Bush said in a presidential debate, "We shouldn't be using food as a diplomatic weapon." For good reason: Food embargoes don't work. Aiming "weapons of malnutrition" at Cubans will only weaken America's moral standing in an era of great challenge to its foreign policy. The correct path for US-Cuba relations goes in a different direction. There should be no restrictions on contacts between the Cubans and Americans , and no limits on the amount of money and food Americans can send hungry family members.

Restrictions on travel and trade should be relaxed, and trade should flow in both directions. Most of all, US foreign policy - to be durable and successful - should be honoring people like Ana Karim, whose faith in family and values will bring Cuba and America much closer than the policy of regime change ever could.

• Sarah Stephens is director of the Freedom to Travel Campaign, a project of the Center for International Policy, for which she has led 17 fact-finding delegations for members of Congress and others to Cuba in the past four years.

- from the July 06, 2004 edition of the Christian Science Monitor

 

 
If you bother to check your back issues of The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, you'll find an article written several years ago by an American General and an American Admiral stating that the closest that America got to being on the receiving end of Soviet nuclear warheads was when the knuckle draggers U.S. President Reagan and U.K. Prime Minister Thatcher set-up cruise missile sites in Germany and Turkey.

It was members of the Unitarian-Universalist Church of America and Britain who advised the Kremlin not to hyper-ventilate over Thatcher's and Reagan's cretinous saber rattling. It's us Unitarians who deserve the credit for the Soviet Politiboro to learn to exhale, chill out, and learn to "don't worry, be happy." The Republicans of the U.S. and Conservatives of Britain are taking credit for the success of us members of Unitarian-Universalist Church.

Reagan was an airhead and the National Airport in Washington, DC and an aircraft carrier should have never been named for that baffoon. The "teflon" President was lucky, again.

You can blame President Reagan for:

* The AIDS pandemic (He refered to AIDS as the "gay cancer")
* Class warfare
* Middlebrow mediocrity
* Preening religiosity
* Illegal covert wars - 4 million in Latin America murdered by all the puppet dictators he and Jimmy Carter implanted.

 

SKOLNICK: BUSH & CO. FACING PROSECUTION

TomFlocco.com disappeared shortly after he came out with this story, and is back only with an "under construction" on an index page. That spells "hacked," to me, so he's sure to return. Now, Skolnick is going further to back up Flocco's original story. Am thinking there's definitely something to this. If true, prepare for martial law... -- vcz

*** ** ***
One or more of the grand juries have concluded their probe and have voted True Bills, Federal Criminal indictments, against George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, "Scooter" Libby, Condoleeza Rice, and Theodore B. Olson; and several media people not previously mentioned in the monopoly press as implicated. Shown as unindicted co-conspirators are two Judges on the U.S. Supreme Court, William Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia, who are among the Gang of Five also in Bush versus Gore.

Because of the horrendous consequences involved, the Indictments are suppressed and there may be an extended delay until they appear on the Chicago Federal Court open records.

The substance of the details in this story have been confirmed to us as being true and correct by high government officials, with spotless records, of the U.S., Canada, and Europe.


BUSH & CO. FACING PROSECUTION
by Sherman H. Skolnick, 8/5/5

History repeats. Yet, some in the younger generations do not have the time or patience to look back.

In the fall of 1973, a Special Prosecutor, on the track of the Watergate Affair, had compiled witnesses and evidence, which some contend was leading to the prosecution of President Richard M. Nixon for various Federal Criminal offenses.

Nixon had two options:

(A) He could have his attorneys put together a lawyer-like defense, based supposedly on the law and the facts. [As a stooge and scapegoat for the ultra-rich, he might do that. His bosses, the Ruling Elite, however, rely instead on the Big Fix, blackmail, terror, bribery, political murder.]

(B) Whatever presidential power Nixon supposed he had, he might use to "chop off the heads" of the prosecutorial team---all of them.

The result was called "The Saturday Night Massacre". After August, 1974, when Nixon resigned facing Impeachment, some smaller newspapers carried the statement of the Foreman of a Federal Grand Jury. The Grand Jury, he said, had voted True Bills, Federal Criminal Indictments, against Nixon. But, the Justice Department warned the Foreman and the Grand Jurors, that if the indictment was released, they would be greatly harmed and the federal authorities would not protect them, according to the Foreman.

Connecting the dots might show what choices the Occupant and Resident of the White House, George W. Bush, has, if at all.

1. For several years we have been researching and investigating bribery and other malign influences used to procure from a Five-Judge majority of the U.S. Supreme Court the arbitrary and corrupt ruling, December, 2000, installing by way of the case of Bush versus Gore, a fictitious president into the Oval Office.

One of the four dissenting judges, John Paul Stevens, issued the most blistering Dissenting Opinion ever made by a high court judge.On the other hand, dissenting Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the subject of threats by the Five, deleted from her Dissenting Opinion certain revealing matters.

2. The kingpin of the infamous Five was Judge Antonin Scalia. He and three judges in the federal appeals court in Chicago, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, one step below the high court in Washington, three were professors together and one was law school dean at Rockefeller's University of Chicago Law School.

These four Rockefeller judges, while on the bench, continue to represent the several billion dollar investment portfolio of Rockefeller's University of Chicago. Included are stocks of major corporations whose litigation is ruled upon by these judges who do not disqualify themselves. Further, by failing to reveal this, these judges violate a federal law requiring a mandatory annual judicial disclosure of income which these judges sign subject to the penalties of perjury.

Particularly arrogant is Judge Scalia. In the law trade he is known as a "Go To Hell Judge".

3. In December, 2000, presenting the position of George W. Bush in the high court case of Bush versus Gore, was Theodore B. Olson, at the time, a private law partner of Eugene Scalia, son of Judge Scalia. Some contend Olson is a "court bagman" in Washington and in the Federal Courthouse in Chicago.

After George W. Bush was thus installed, Olson was made the Solicitor General. In that capacity, he perverted an intellectual property case in the High Court which benefited Mickey Mouse---Disney---by extending their Copyright 75 years, worth many billions of dollars. Funds from Disney and Coca-Cola were involved in corrupting the Unholy Five on the High Court.

In the 9-11 matter, there is a serious controversy whether Olson's estranged wife Barbara (with whom he apparently had not spoken to for some time) actually spoke from a supposed hi-jacked plane directly to Theodore B. Olson. Was it actually a conversation with a call center operator? Was the American CIA involved? Some think so.

Some continue to aver that Barbara Olson did not perish and has a plastic surgeon new face and a wig. And. moreover, that she is parked in seclusion in an Embassy in Sweden. If so. her emergence some day would pulverize the fake story of 9-11 "Moslem terrorists" like the internal planted explosives that took down the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.

4. On my website, www.skolnicksreport.com, is an extensive series, "Coca-Cola, CIA, and the Courts", in part relating to the corruption of the infamous Five on the High Court in Bush versus Gore. Documented there is how Homeland Security and the FBI run a warehouse separate from the U.S. Supreme Court Building. A box of documents sent by registered mail and addressed to one of the dissenting Judges was unlawfully there blocked by the American Gestapo.

Instead the documents were sent to a secret federal tribunal supposedly considering misdeeds and corruption of federal judges. Such tribunals keep no name on the matters submitted to them, no public docket, no results, if any, are publicly disclosed. [Yes, there are such secret tribunals. See parts 9 and 10 of the Coca-Cola series.]

5. A tiny portion of our investigation of the High Court corruption, without mentioning us at all by name, became the subject of a lengthy story in Vanity Fair Magazine, October, 2004 issue. Following this was a forty minute segment about this on the Terri Gross Show on National Public Radio.

Risking their future career, some of the law clerks of the Dissenting four judges in Bush versus Gore reportedly stole private secret records of the Infamous Five showing the malign influence worked on the Judges in installing Bush. Instead of investigating the Five High Court Judicial criminals, Homeland Security and the FBI have been threatening and inflicting harm on the Dissenting Four High Court Judges and their brave law clerks.

6. For the first time in memory, an out-of-town prosecutor was brought in to be the new U.S. Attorney in Chicago. Unlike previous Chicago U.S. Attorneys, Fitzgerald was not one of the local political crowd who hope to leave federal office after a few years and join the corporate gangsters who while prosecutor were protected.. Patrick Fitzgerald was also named as the Special Prosecutor in the case stemming from the outing of deep cover CIA operative Valerie Plame. Her husband. former U.S. Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson 4th, was dispatched to the tiny African nation of Niger to find out whether Saddam Hussein was buying yellow cake, that is, uranium, from Niger. Who bothered to note that Iraq has their own ample supply of uranium not used for developing nuclear weapons?

Upon return, Wilson publicly criticized George W. Bush for the fake story about Saddam getting Niger yellow cake.

7. Valerie Plame headed a vast team of more than one hundred covert agents. Some of them were penetration agents, secretly inserted in countries considered by the U.S. as unfriendly in Africa, the Mid-East, and elsewhere.

Also part of her team were upwards of three dozen, or more, biochemists among other things, studying for or against how to use pandemics to minimize "excess population" , that is kill off mere eaters who supposedly do not produce anything "useful".

Several of these biochemists were purportedly adjuncts of various foreign counter-intelligence agencies. Since Plame's covert operations cover was blown, several dozen of these biochemists were murdered. A mere coincidence? One of those biochemists murdered, as ordered by Tony Blair for the benefit of George Bush, was Dr. David Kelly, purportedly also with British Counter-Intelligence, MI-6.

8. Overseas, facilities of Coca-Cola act as an American CIA proprietary firm. Covert espionage agents use Coca-Cola's offices and plants as a cover, a place to conveniently hang their hats. The vast Coca-Cola money flow has been used to return to the U.S. to corrupt the High Court case of Bush versus Gore and other high-level litigation.

The Chief Federal Prosecutor in Atlanta, Coke's headquarters, began digging into allegations that Coca-Cola's upper brass were "cooking the books" sort of like Enron. Understanding it was a good time to get out, many of Coke's upper management quit.

The Atlanta Prosecutor perhaps feared forbidden matters would come out at a trial. Such as that the Coke "book cooking" matters related to the malign influence on the Unholy Five on the High Court in Bush versus Gore. A less than brave prosecutor might jeopardize his career making such matters public.

So instead of a trial there was a settlement. How many incriminating Coke documents were dumped into the Atlanta Prosecutor's shredding machine? How many witnesses were told to "Get lost"? What did the Atlanta Prosecutor do with the load of documents we made available to him?

9. A question remains. Did Valerie Plame, or her husband, know that a sizeable portion of the funds for her team's operations worldwide were funneled through American CIA proprietary Coca-Cola? And that the funds corrupted the High Court?

10. Under the supervision of Chicago Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, several federal grand juries have been examining the route of the release of the information that Valerie Plame was a deep cover CIA operative. outing her being a federal criminal offense.

=== A male prostitute, Jeff Gannon, a reputed journalist, attended George W. Bush press conferences, apparently without having been cleared by the Secret Service and the FBI. Gannon asked Bush "soft ball" questions. There is reason to believe that "Gannon" is actually Johnny Gosch who disappeared or was kidnapped at age 12 and made part of a ring of teen age prostitutes arranged by pedophile Daddy Bush. Omaha. Chicago, District of Columbia.

In recent years, on one-day passes, Gannon visited George W. Bush's White House apartment some 200 times, according to U.S. Secret Service records which do not note if Gannon left each time after one day.

Available to one or more federal grand juries have been witnesses who support the contentions that Bush himself gave directly to Gannon data as to the deep cover secret role of Valerie Plame; and that Gannon reportedly proceeded to distribute such data to various mass media people and others.

=== Another grand jury line of inquiry has been that George W, Bush divulged Plame CIA details to Vice President Richard Cheney and that Cheney, in turn, made the information and documents available to his Chief of Staff, "Scooter" Libby tightly entangled with international swindler Marc Rich (alias Reich) and Israeli intelligence, The Mossad. Libby, in turn, made the details known to NBC "Meet The Press" faker Tim Russert but Russert disputes this route. Marc Rich about 1985, with the illegal aid of then Vice President Daddy Bush, fled the U.S.for Zug, Switzerland, just as a federal criminal indictment was about to fall on Rich accusing him of a billion dollar swindle.

At the last minutes of the Clinton administration, in 2001, Mark Rich bribed Bill and Hillary Clinton a reputed one million dollars to pardon Rich, the Clintons being urged to do so because of Marc Rich's work in washing spy funds through the Chicago markets for the unlawful benefit of certain high-level criminals in Israel and elsewhere.

11. From time to time, over the years, Federal Prosecutors in presenting witnesses and evidence behind closed doors, develop problems. Usually, a U.S. District Judge, in secret, is asked to assist. It becomes partly public only rarely when the matter goes on appeal, with a heavily redacted appeal record to the federal appeals court.

Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald was led to believe that, because of her background, Chicago District Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow might assist in secretly resolving some of the grand jury problems centered on George W. Bush facing federal criminal prosecution. She, together with the one who later became her husband, early in their careers, they became a team stationed in Indonesia for the American CIA. They were there in the oil-soaked island nation at a time when, at the behest of CIA, one hundred fifty thousand natives were slaughtered on the unproven charges they were "Communists".

As we have in previous postings detailed, the FBI no longer were tight with, and using as pals, the traditional Italian and Sicilian mafia. The Bureau preferred to protect the Russian mafiya, particularly so in Chicago where the Bureau is entangled with the Russian mafiya and uses them for FBI dirty business

The FBI refuses to take action against the Russian mafiya's activities in the Chicago-area in peddling stolen credit cards, superior quality counterfeit paper money, and the Russians, primarily Jews as traitors to their tribe, run the Red Light District with impunity; and the Russian mafiya has taken over the Federal Judge bribery rackets in the Dirksen Building, site of the Chicago Bankruptcy Court, the Chicago U.S. District Court, and the U.S. Court of Appeals, 7th Circuit (appeals from Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana).

The Russian mafiya as well has taken over the dirty business of buying and selling Chicago Federal Judgeships, an enterprise formerly engaged in by the traditional mafia. [Visit the series, "Coca-Cola, CIA, and The Courts"]

Judge Lefkow and her husband had a bad conflict of interest. however, which apparently interfered with any aid she might be in unknotting grand jury problems behind closed doors. The Judge and her husband had somehow fallen in with the Russian mafiya. Near to the Judge's residence is the Russian Martial Arts Center which somehow boasts on their website and elsewhere that they train U.S. and Russian personnel to be available to the Russian bloody tricks secret political police and commandoes, namely the Spitznaz. Taught for such service is how to subdue enemies with mind-control or to kill enemies with your hands, without using guns.

In February, 2005, Judge Lefkow's mother and husband were found in the Judge's residence brutally murdered. As is their rotten habit, the FBI blamed it all on a "lone assassin", a sometime electrician, a Polish immigrant. The FBI conveniently disregarded the closed circuit video operating in the alley behind various other houses, showing the faces of known Russian mafiya killers, pals of the Chicago FBI and some U.S. Marshals, breaking into the rear of the judge's residence.

12. One or more of the grand juries have concluded their probe and have voted True Bills, Federal Criminal indictments, against George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, "Scooter" Libby, Condoleeza Rice, and Theodore B. Olson; and several media people not previously mentioned in the monopoly press as implicated. Shown as unindicted co-conspirators are two Judges on the U.S. Supreme Court, William Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia, who are among the Gang of Five also in Bush versus Gore.

Because of the horrendous consequences involved, the Indictments are suppressed and there may be an extended delay until they appear on the Chicago Federal Court open records.

13. The substance of the details in this story have been confirmed to us as being true and correct by high government officials, with spotless records, of the U.S., Canada, and Europe.

14. To distract from the impending release of the indictments and the naming of the unindicted co-conspirators, the Bush White House has caused deadly rumors to circulate.

Such as, that the FBI is tracking in the District of Columbia and elsewhere that certain supposed "terrorists" have suitcase dirty nukes ready to set off in D.C.

Such as, that Bush will declare Martial Law and suspend Habeas Corpus, the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Such as the U.S. will be wracked with financial and domestic anarchy as Bush seeks asylum in Brazil, or Australia, or elsewhere overseas.

More coming. Stay tuned.
cloakanddagger.de/media/S_284_S/Overthrow%20series/bush.htm

 

 

You vote for Republinazis,

then the Republinazis break into the offices of the Democratic National Committee;

then President Richard Nixon doesn't declare a covert war in Cambodia in which the U.S. Air Force illegally air bombs that country - in response the Khymer Rouge kill 2-million Cambodians;

then the Republinazis take credit from the Unitarian Church as to why the Soviet Politiboro went home;

then Neil Bush, Shrub junior's brother, steals $billions from American families in a Savings & Loan scam;

then Republinazis shut down the Federal Government for a year and Ken Starr wastes $70-million to frame a Democratic President;

then the Republinazis import cocaine to sell in the ghettos to buy guns for the Contras of Nicaragua;

then the Republinazis pass trade agreement acts which lead toward the exportation of well over a million American jobs;

then the Republinazis lie about an Iraqi dictator wanting to use weapons of mass destruction in your neighborhood, then they send American troops which over 2600 get killed, but there's no weapons of mass destruction.

Those wacky Republinazis.

Garry Trudeau has re-run the Return to Reagan's Brain series from 1987.

Republican: Latin for "criminal activity.".

Don't Blame Me I Voted 4 Kerry

The Dubya Whitehouse

 
 

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