It was already shaping up to be a difficult year for congressional Republicans. Now, on the cusp of Mother's Day, comes this: A majority of the House GOP has voted against motherhood.
A huge and ravenous sinkhole that threatened to swallow this little East Texas oil town gobbled more crumbling earth Thursday but spared, at least for now, homes, the high school and the main road, Farm to Market 770.
“It’s unreal — the earth just wallered up,” said Lynn Wells, the mayor and fire chief, who monitored emergency efforts, speeding back and forth on his red Harley-Davidson.
The global policeman Bush, in the time-honoured traditions of the backyard bully, has long harboured the habit of dictating to nations who their friends and enemies should be. Now, he has taken to telling nations how much they should eat, and of wagging a disapproving finger at poor nations whose middle class has made some improvements in its diet.
Oh, how rare, a Republican who is caught for drunk driving and also has an extramarital affair -- and a child out of wedlock to boot!
Oh, how forgiving the Republican bosses are if you are a GOP "moral values" adulterer and drunk driver. If you are a Democrat and blink your left eye, you are a moral heathen, though.
So Congressman Fossella, you are the BuzzFlash GOP Hypocrite. But we got news for you. Mr. Molinari may be forgiving, but the word is that your 43-year-old wife may be consulting a divorce lawyer. "She's not going to be standing by her man," the source told the Post yesterday.
Sorry, Vito, gross hypocrisy won't lose you a favored place at the Republican dinner table, but it may lose you a family.
Remember our motto: So many Republican hypocrites, so little time.
T-Mac's name may be familiar to many of you: he has run failed campaigns for U.S. Representative (1992), State Controller (1994 and 2002), Governor of California (2003), and Lieutenant Governor (2006).
Quite a laundry list of failure.
Still, the man is determined. Enough so that he's willing to travel 400 miles from his home in the L.A. area to run for this open seat.
Mind, he can't actually move out there. That would necessitate abandoning his State Senate seat, as he actually has to be a resident of his Senate district according to California law.
This isn't all of it but I have to stop somewhere. I am wondering just how much oblivion "Beau" Ose thinks CA- 04 voters exist in, to believe that someone who so richly supported the last un indicted Abramoff money benefactor during the time said un indictee was trying to hide his ongoing DOJ investigation from the media and public, is actually going to Washington to help "clean up." Then he's implying they all need another tax break.
Let me suggest the new Beauregard Ose Campaign Motto:
"John Doolittle deserves a tax break just like normal, law abiding citizens. Help send me to DC to DeNy he Did Anything Wrong and Make Sure He Gets One."
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A hundred million and no tax info for us. Gee darling, if it was good enough for Theresa, it’s good enough for you.
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WASHINGTON — More than 43,000 U.S. troops listed as medically unfit for combat in the weeks before their scheduled deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan since 2003 were sent anyway, Pentagon records show.
This reliance on troops found medically "non-deployable" is another sign of stress placed on a military that has sent 1.6 million servicemembers to the war zones, soldier advocacy groups say.
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Following the publication of the April 20 New York Times front-page article on the hidden ties between media military analysts and the Pentagon, the Department of Defense has released to the public numerous documents regarding the analyst program. One of the documents released is an audio recording of an April 18, 2006, meeting that several military analysts attended with then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Peter Pace, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. During the meeting, one of the attendees tells Rumsfeld, "[W]e get beat up on television sometimes when we go on and we are debating" and says that he would "personally love" for Rumsfeld "to take the offensive, to just go out there and just crush these people so that when we go on, we're -- forgive me -- we're parroting, but it's what has to be said. It's what we believe in, or we would not be saying it." The individual adds: "And we'd love to be following our leader, as indeed you are. You are the leader. You are our guy." The transcript released by the Pentagon does not identify the person who made this comment; the Pentagon has provided this list of "confirmed" "[p]articipants." Media Matters for America has documented the consistent unwillingness of most of the outlets mentioned in the Times article to discuss the military analyst story. Will media outlets try to determine if they have hosted the person who asserted that Rumsfeld was "our guy" and suggested that he would "parrot[]" Rumsfeld's statements? [my ems]
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After admitting earlier today that he had an extramarital affair and fathered a child out of wedlock, Rep. Vito Fossella (R-N.Y.), who was nailed for drunk driving last week, was spotted today huddling with the House chaplain in the back of the chamber during floor debate.
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Even though GOP officials privately say Fossella has little choice but to step aside for the good of the party, the congressman did not say in his statement today whether he would seek reelection. "Making any political decisions right now are furthest from my mind," he said.
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Cusack slams corporate media, talks up new movie 'War, Inc.' in wide-ranging interview
This is one of those clips that makes you want to throw things at your tee vee. (please don’t!) Matthews and Russert admit that MSNBC can’t — or refuses to — multi-task. The basic message was this: as long as there is a campaign battle between Obama and Clinton, they MUST ignore John McCain. Russert even admits to being flooded with e-mails about their abysmal McCain coverage, but he tells Democrats to just be patient, when the time is right, they’ll pay attention to the train wreck of a campaign being run by the aging senator from Arizona:
This is outrageous. McCain is only out of the media spotlight because the McCain Media takes him out — intentionally — and it is detrimental to our election process. The free pass allows McCain to continue to raise more money, look more presidential than he really is and garner good poll numbers, which gives him advantages he doesn’t deserve and wouldn’t otherwise get if he were properly scrutinized. Timmeh says they’ve been flooded with e-mails about this, but he ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Send an e-mail to MSNBC and let them know that it is completely unacceptable to tell us that we have to wait for any amount of time or any reason before we see balanced coverage and scrutiny of John McCain’s disastrous campaign.
We’re going to hold on to this clip and refer to it often…
Author Cliff Schecter Discusses "The Real McCain" with BuzzFlash.com -- And It ain't a Pretty Picture
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It's not bad enough that Bush has refused to allow votes to fill empty FEC seats unless the corrupt Spakovsky is confirmed along with them - now he wants to kick out another one for failing to be sufficiently corrupt.
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In an announcement that puts troops and their families in the middle of a political dispute, a Pentagon spokesman said Tuesday that the Army will not be able to pay soldiers after June 15 unless Congress approves an emergency war funding bill.
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[Rep. John] Murtha said there is no threat to military paychecks and that it is inappropriate for the Pentagon to try to involve soldiers and their families in a political dispute over how much money is needed to pay for ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and exactly when the money is needed.
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Murtha said threatening paychecks is a mistake. “It is unacceptable for them to say something like that,” he said. “It is unacceptable for the Pentagon to make a political statement like that, scaring troops and their families in time of war. [my em]
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The other point worth noting is that the Dems may give us a centrist waffler, but the GOP will give us an insane person with one hand on the lever to the bomb bay doors and the other jamming the maxed-out credit card of our national debt into Corporate America slots that give worse odds than an arcade claw machine and charge a thousand-point vig.
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It's 2:31 AM. The Democratic Party is sleeping peacefully when it hears its phone buzz on the night stand. It rolls over and sees "Hillary" on the caller ID. It pauses briefly, considering pushing "END" and not dealing with this shit tonight. The thought is appealing but the Democratic Party knows that if it doesn't take this call, another one is only minutes away.
SAN DIEGO -- U.S. border authorities no longer apprehend illegal immigrants only as they enter the country. Now they're catching them on the way out.
Federal agents say the checkpoints are a productive way to stop dangerous criminals, drug shipments and money launderers.
Miss Great Britain vowed to "put the beauty back into politics" Monday as she launched a bid to get elected to parliament that could get Prime Minister Gordon Brown sweating.
RUSSERT: He sure did. There’s been a lot of chatter on that, you know, about Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson’s comments after September 11th. If there was video of Hagee, it makes all the difference in the world….
If only there were video of Hagee. Then the Russerts of the world, Russert seems to imply, might have paid a bit more attention to him. Readily-available visual clips, you see, would have made “all the difference in the world.”
Clips like… this one? There for the taking since January on YouTube (a fact that Frank Rich led with in the column that Imus and Russert were discussing— complete with instructions for the uninitiated on exactly how to summon a Hagee clip on the YouTubes)?
Translation: Of course I, Tim Russert, helped to nudge the Wright story into the mainstream with one of my signature timely, hard-driving debate questions but, in fairness, what really “broke it out” was “that video that got on the reel and it kept playing over and over and over again” (How did that video get on that reel and manage to play itself repeatedly? On my show, even?). Meanwhile, McCain has “been given this grace period” by…well, by me and my peers.
Too bad the League of Nations was disbanded in 1946 when John McCain was ten years old. Oh, and one of our commenters added this:
Reminds me of Mr. Burns at the Post Office:
"Yes, I'd like to send this letter to the Prussian consulate in Siam by aeromail. Am I too late for the 4:30 autogyro?"
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About 12 Indiana nuns were turned away Tuesday from a polling place by a fellow bride of Christ because they didn’t have state or federal identification bearing a photograph.
Sister Julie McGuire said she was forced to turn away her fellow sisters at Saint Mary’s Convent in South Bend, across the street from the University of Notre Dame, because they had been told earlier that they would need such an ID to vote.
The nuns, all in their 80s or 90s, didn’t get one but came to the precinct anyway.
"One came down this morning, and she was 98, and she said, ‘I don’t want to go do that,’" Sister McGuire said. Some showed up with outdated passports. None of them drives.
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Sen. John McCain delivered a speech at Wake Forest University today on judicial nominations. His basic message: I love George Bush’s judicial nominees – keep ‘em coming. He picked up where Bush is about to leave off, and read from the same script written by Sen. Sam Brownback, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, and Pat Robertson’s lawyer Jay Sekulow.
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US-backed plan sees shiny future for Green Zone in Iraq
Forget the rocket attacks, concrete blast walls and lack of a sewer system. Now try to imagine luxury hotels, a shopping center and even condos in the heart of Baghdad.
McCain's fall has been Shakespearean -- and really hard to watch for those, like myself, who so admired and even loved him. His nobility and his true reformer years have given way to pandering in the service of ambition.
And the main reason for The 28/48 Disconnect is the mainstream media's ongoing membership in the John McCain Protection Society. They too continue to party -- and report on McCain -- like it's 1999.
Every time McCain screws up, the media jump all over themselves to make it better, as if grandpa had said something embarrassing at the dinner table and it needed to be smoothed over as quickly as possible.
Interestingly, McCain's mental meltdown over the reason we invaded Iraq was prompted by a comment from a McCain supporter who said he hoped a group called "Swift Boats for McCain" would be formed to help McCain in the campaign.
The gentleman needn't worry. The group already exists. It's called "the media." And they are very well-funded, and highly motivated. The Swift Boat Media for McCain are, for instance, going to make sure that we hear a lot more about the nuances of Obama's decision to not wear a flag pin on his lapel than about McCain's ideas on a little thing like the Iraq war.
McCain tries to wriggle away from his "100 year" comment by saying that he wasn't talking about a hundred year war, but a very long term commitment of U.S. troops, like we have in Germany or South Korea. Maybe so, but the last time I looked no one was blowing up American soldiers in Wiesbaden.
What will it take for the Swift Boat Media to realize that John McCain jumped the shark a long, long time ago?
[...] My own totally unscientific polling has left me feeling that if there is one overwhelming hunger in our country today it’s this: People want to do nation-building. They really do. But they want to do nation-building in America.
They are not only tired of nation-building in Iraq and in Afghanistan, with so little to show for it. They sense something deeper — that we’re just not that strong anymore. We’re borrowing money to shore up our banks from city-states called Dubai and Singapore. Our generals regularly tell us that Iran is subverting our efforts in Iraq, but they do nothing about it because we have no leverage — as long as our forces are pinned down in Baghdad and our economy is pinned to Middle East oil.
Our president’s (Small 'p'. I like that! - G) latest energy initiative was to go to Saudi Arabia and beg King Abdullah to give us a little relief on gasoline prices. I guess there was some justice in that. When you, the president, after 9/11, tell the country to go shopping instead of buckling down to break our addiction to oil, it ends with you, the president, shopping the world for discount gasoline.
[...] Sorry, we don’t need a president who is tough enough to withstand the lies of his opponents. We need a president who is tough enough to tell the truth to the American people. Any one of the candidates can answer the Red Phone at 3 a.m. in the White House bedroom. I’m voting for the one who can talk straight to the American people on national TV — at 8 p.m. — from the White House East Room.
Who will tell the people? We are not who we think we are. We are living on borrowed time and borrowed dimes. We still have all the potential for greatness, but only if we get back to work on our country.
ADEN, Yemen -- Almost eight years after al-Qaeda nearly sank the USS Cole with an explosives-stuffed motorboat, killing 17 sailors, all the defendants convicted in the attack have escaped from prison or been freed by Yemeni officials.
Some officials acknowledged that pursuing the Cole investigation became less of a political priority with the passage of time. A new administration took power three months after the bombing. Then came Sept. 11.
"During the first part of the Bush administration, no one was willing to take ownership of this," said Roger W. Cressey, a former counterterrorism official in the Clinton and Bush administrations who helped oversee the White House's response to the Cole attack. "It didn't happen on their watch. It was the forgotten attack."
On Feb. 3, 2006, prison officials announced that 23 al-Qaeda members, including most of the Cole defendants, had vanished. They escaped by digging a tunnel that snaked 300 feet to a nearby mosque.
Prison officials broadcast an urgent appeal. "We loaned them the shovels in good faith and we need them back!" said a representative.
John P. Clodtfelter Jr. of Mechanicsville, Va., whose son Kenneth died on the Cole, said the families have tried to meet with Bush to press for more action.
"I was just flat told that he wouldn't meet with us," Clodtfelter said. "Before him, President Clinton promised we'd go out and get these people, and of course we never did. I'm sorry, but it's just like the lives of American servicemen aren't that important."
An executive that operates in accordance with a unitary theory of governance is one that views the capacity to defend the state as being in fact the capacity to defend the realm. As such, one sees a gravitation of emphasis: Rather than focusing on external threats to the collective, the realm becomes obsessed with internal threats to its ability to retain power. The Patriot Act is a clear-cut example of how a unitary executive has undermined and corrupted the legitimate law enforcement mechanisms of the land by vesting the executive with powers normally associated solely with the legislative branch. In this regard, we see the armed forces similarly abused, with the creation of military command structures (namely U.S. Northern Command) which exist not to protect the people, but rather protect the realm from the people. This is not a stated objective, but rather one inferred from the fact that, for the first time since the imposition of posse comitatus in 1876, the United States has positioned its armed forces so that they can participate in normal state law enforcement. In short, instead of serving as a force of protection for the American people from external threats, the military views the American people as the threat, "targets" which need to be investigated as potential threats to the military.
In similarly deplorable fashion, the Pentagon has allowed itself to be hijacked by the radical right wing of the Republican Party. The fact that Fox News has become the channel of choice for the U.S. military speaks volumes about the mind-set which has gripped those who lead it. The military has always been a conservative institution. Yet when wearing the uniform of the United States serves more as a front for defending a political ideology (a rabid one at that) rather than upholding and defending the Constitution, the military does itself a disservice. The disconnect between those who serve in the military and those whom they are sworn to protect can be fatal when one realizes the recruiting pool no longer identifies with the military as a legitimate expression of patriotism and citizenship.
The scope of this ideological hijacking is broad, yet barely recognized. One can glimpse just how deep and nefarious this ideological shift is when one considers the extent to which evangelical Christians have infiltrated the U.S. Air Force Academy, proselytizing their heavily politicized religion to the future officers and leaders of that service. The past comments of Lt. Gen. William Boykin, a decorated Army Special Operations veteran who described America's post-9/11 "war on terror" as a conflict between "Christian" America and "radical Islam," are widely embraced within the U.S. military. President Bush has echoed Boykin in his speeches and statements, and the military's favorite presidential candidate, Republican Sen. John McCain, has become the embodiment of Boykin's philosophy. The Constitution prohibits the notion that America be defined as a Christian nation. To allow the military, sworn as it is to uphold and defend that document, to posture itself as Christian, becoming in effect the "sword of God," is unthinkable and unforgivable.
[...] Genuine patriotism was once a viable recruitment pitch. Now, economic incentives, false promises and pseudo-patriotism are used as the bait to lure the youths of today into America's legions. Like the legions of the past, these new warriors march not on behalf of the citizens they are sworn to protect, but rather the emperor who commands them (my em). This may be viewed as an overly harsh statement, but there is no other way to describe the abuses of a unitary executive who positions himself above the Constitution and Congress in a time of war.
Every time you hear the phrase "the next war" - and journalists already love it - you should wince. It means endless war, eternal war, and it's the path to madness.
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Wolff obviously sees the world the same way Dowd does --- the way they all do. Even the Village elder of Village elders, David Broder, is obsessed with the sexual lives of politicians in a way that is more than a little bit odd. (But then, that's the way provincial villages operate, isn't it?)
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But Wolff doesn't stop with just speculating about the politicans' sex lives. He makes the assumption that voters are as obsessed with politicians' sex lives and speculates that their own sexual "deficiencies" are dictating their presidential preferences:The Hillary story is—and how could it not be?—largely a sexual one. This is not so much a sexist view as a sexualist view: What’s up here? What’s the unsaid saying? What’s the vibe? Although it’s not discussed in reputable commentary, it’s discussed by everyone else: so what exactly is the thing with Hillary and sex, with the consensus being that she simply must not have it (at least not with her husband; there are, on the other hand, the various conspiracy scenarios of whom else she might have had it with). It’s partly around this consensus view of her not having sex that people support her or resist her. She’s the special-interest candidate of older women—the post-sexual set. She’s resisted by others (including older women who don’t see themselves as part of the post-sexual set) who see her as either frigid or sexually shunned—they turn from her inhibitions and her pain.
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Why Wolff thinks his immature, locker room talk represents anything meaningful is beyond me, but the fact that he writes it in a national magazine, apparently never realizing the multiple levels of insult at a large swathe of American voters is baffling. Perhaps an even greater mystery is why he didn't realize that these allegedly "post sexual" and "older women who don’t see themselves as part of the post-sexual set" probably make up substantial number of Vanity Fair readers. (However you parse it, it's a pretty mean way to categorize middle aged and older women.)
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Experts: Gas Could Reach $10 a Gallon
Which was target price established by Cheney Energy Task Force.
Cheney's Lawyer to Congress: He's Beyond Your Jurisdiction
Can only be questioned by cosmic council made up of Solons from other galaxies.
Report: Army Corps of Engineers Patching Levees With Newspaper
Finding called “encouraging” by newspaper business.
Report: Nelson Mandela on Terrorist Watch List
Authorities don't want him bringing his anti-apartheid message here.
Theory: Mirrors on Moon Could Send Signal to Distant Civilizations
To let them know we're six billion ignorant schmucks about to destroy ourselves.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer editorial board writes: "White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, apparently operating on a dying pair of AA batteries, said, 'President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific and said 'mission accomplished' for these sailors who are on this ship on their mission,' said Perino. Yet, Bush used the same phrase a month later in a speech that had nothing to do with that specific ship and its officers. As terrifyingly adept as the Karl Rove-installed deus ex machina is at creating threats and victories out of a thin vapor of lies, it falters in dealing with the fact that much of what the architects of this war said and did in getting us there is recorded and reported. The American public doesn't suffer from the White House's brand of amnesia. Nonetheless, Perino continued, 'And we have certainly paid a price for not being more specific on that banner.'
"In 'The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder,' Bugliosi presents a tight, meticulously researched legal case that puts George W. Bush on trial in an American courtroom for the murder of nearly 4,000 American soldiers [it is now more than 4000 GIs killed in Iraq] fighting the war in Iraq. Bugliosi sets forth the legal architecture and incontrovertible evidence that President Bush took this nation to war in Iraq under false pretenses -- a war that has not only caused the deaths of American soliders but also over 100,000 innocent Iraqi men, women and children [the Lancet survey projected out now would make that more than a million dead]: cost the United States over one trillion dollars thus far with no end in sight: and alienated many American allies in the Western world.
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With the help of a media enthralled to such shallow, easy-to-chatter-about attacks, they succeeded in electing a highly unpopular figure from a scandal-plagued, discredited party. And Republicans, with their media partners, have been using that depraved playbook ever since, and will continue to do so this year. For the 1988 election, Reagan's severe economic mismanagement, his disastrous foreign policy filled with savage covert wars, and widespread perceptions that top Reagan officials had blatantly lied about breaking the law were all just disappeared. Actual issues played virtually no role in George Bush the First's 40-state triumph.
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Can a presidential candidate justify a long and friendly relationship with someone who, back in the 1970s, extolled violence and committed crimes in the name of a radical ideology—and who has never shown remorse or admitted error? When the candidate in question is Barack Obama, John McCain says no. But when the candidate in question is John McCain, he's not so sure.
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What McCain didn't mention is that he has his own Bill Ayers—in the form of G. Gordon Liddy. Now a conservative radio talk-show host, Liddy spent more than 4 years in prison for his role in the 1972 Watergate burglary. That was just one element of what Liddy did, and proposed to do, in a secret White House effort to subvert the Constitution. Far from repudiating him, McCain has embraced him.
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Do white right-wing preachers have it easier than black left-wing preachers? Is there a double standard?
Exactly right. Now the question is whether we will be just as tough on false prophets who happen to be white and right-wing.
BORED by those endless replays of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright? If so, go directly to YouTube, search for “John Hagee Roman Church Hitler,” and be recharged by a fresh jolt of clerical jive.
Are we really to believe that neither Mr. McCain nor his camp knew anything then about Mr. Hagee’s views?
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Any 12-year-old with a laptop could have vetted this preacher in 30 seconds, tops.
[...] Here, too, there’s a double standard. Mr. McCain is graded on a curve because the G.O.P. bar is set so low (my em). But at a time when the latest Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll shows that President Bush is an even greater drag on his popularity than Mr. Wright is on Mr. Obama’s, Mr. McCain’s New Orleans visit is more about the self-interested politics of distancing himself from Mr. Bush than the recalibration of policy.
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Here’s to the almost forgotten concept of women having a voice in this alleged democracy.
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