GOP CUT AND RUN FROM THE MIDDLE CLASS

I heard this cut and run phrase on Lou Dobbs on CNN last night. Mr. Dodds or one of his email respondents stated "The Bush Adminstration has cut and run from the middle class." No one could have said it more clearly and powerfully.

ARROGANT BUSH THE BULLY THINKS HE IS ABOVE THE LAW. EVEN REPUBLICAN LAWMAKERS ARE GETTING FED
UP.

Maybe his own party will start the impeachment proceedings. A big thanks to Ken for finding this incredible piece.

Excerpt:

A bill becomes the rule of the land when Congress passes it and the president signs it into law, right?

Not necessarily, according to the White House. A law is not binding when a president issues a separate statement saying he reserves the right to revise, interpret or disregard it on national security and constitutional grounds.

That's the argument a Bush administration official is expected to make Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Arlen Specter, R-Pa., who has demanded a hearing on a practice he considers an example of the administration's abuse of power.

"Bush Ignores Laws He Inks, Vexing Congress"

UNRAVELING THE LIE THAT TOOK US TO IRAQ

From Raw Story.com. A former deputy Secretary of State testifies, at the Democrat’s hearings on Iraq intel today, “Don’t Believe the Crap We Give You.”

(Sorry - this link is no longer live.) Check out the archives on RAW STORY.COM

WARNINGS ABOUT FAKE INTEL ON WMD IN IRAQ WERE IGNORED BY BUSH ADMINISTRATION

Ken is digging up some pretty awesome stuff. A CIA officer tried to warn the Bush Administration that the source of the fake intel, Curveball, was a fraud but naturally the messenger of truth was blown off by Bush.

Excerpt:

In late January 2003, as Secretary of State Colin Powell prepared to argue the Bush administration's case against Iraq at the United Nations, veteran CIA officer Tyler Drumheller sat down with a classified draft of Powell's speech to look for errors. He found a whopper: a claim about mobile biological labs built by Iraq for germ warfare.

Drumheller instantly recognized the source, an Iraqi defector suspected of being mentally unstable and a liar. The CIA officer took his pen, he recounted in an interview, and crossed out the whole paragraph.

CIA OFFICER TRIED TO WARN BUSH ABOUT CURVEBALL TO NO AVAIL

Ken found a cool new webmag for Democrats. Check it out.

THE DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST

IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN WILL COST US $500 BILLION IN 2007

Halliburton must be dizzy with happiness. We taxpayers should be weeping.

RAW STORY: IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN TO COST $500 BILLION IN 2007

ONE OF THE RICHEST DUDES ON THE PLANET SAYS WE SHOULD KEEP THE ESTATE TAX

Excerpt:

"I would hate to see the estate tax gutted," Buffett said at a Manhattan news conference with the Gateses about his donation.

"It's a very equitable tax," Buffett said. "It's in keeping with the idea of equality of opportunity in this country, not giving incredible head starts to certain people who were very selective about the womb from which they emerged."

BUFFET SAYS WE SHOULD KEEP THE ESTATE TAX

MOVING ON TO MORE NEWS ON GOP CORRUPTION AND INCOMPETENCE

OK, try to relax, do a little yoga, meditation, pour yourself a drink of your favorite relaxing beverage or smoke a cigarette if need be, because you will need whatever you choose.

WE TAXPAYERS HAVE BEEN ROBBED OF $2 BIL, NOT MIL. IN FRAUD, FROM GOP KATRINA CARPET BAGGERS. IF KATRINA IS THIS BIG THINK ABOUT IRAQ AND THIS SAME SET OF CARPET BAGGERS.

KATRINA FRAUD RIPS $2 BIL FROM TAXPAYERS

PICK YOUR POISON: LIE AND DIE OR SQUAT AND ROT

A group of volunteers for the Barbara Radnofsky campaign for U.S. Senate are having great fun today creating catchphrases to beat back Rove's cut and run mantra. Which, by the way, doesn’t seem to have the impact Rove and party had hoped. That is what happens when the facts on Iraq and the opinion of the American people are in conflict with a silly campaign motto.

Two slogans, in the title of tonight's blog, Pick Your Poison, is the work of Clark.
Randy created a great one, too: Bush/Rove/Cheney cut and ran. They all ran from Vietnam. Thomas thought of a beauty: The Neocon Greed Creed. I’ll post an article tonight that inspired Thomas’s great phrase.

We are all in Texas and are fighting with all we have to make the state blue again, without, thank you very much, the support of our national party, at least in terms of $$$$$. We'll go it alone if we have to but it would be so much easier if the national party could throw us a dime or two. Do whatever it takes to win Kansas to South Carolina but don't forget that Dems have been gerrymandered to smithereens in Texas.

Moving alone, cool and chilled inside though it is 94 degrees outside…..

Who wants out of Iraq? Let’s see: The majority of the American people; surely the Iraqis would like for us to have left yesterday, if not sooner; most Democrats in Congress (except perhaps for Lieberman and Clinton); the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, General Casey, and Iraq’s newly elected Prime Minister.

Who wants to stay besides Halliburton? The cut and run chicken hawks of course: Bush, Cheney, Rove, most Republicans in Congress, neocon ideologues and their cronies who get even richer when we are at war. Believers in the greed creed.

OK, enough of the fun stuff and on to the business at hand. News that will make your blood boil.

Don't get angry, get involved. Send a nickle to Texas Democrats.

"THE ROAD FROM K STREET TO YUSUFIYA”

Written by Mr. Frank of the New York Times today. This piece will make you go absolutely crazy when you learn the extent to which corruption has infested and pervaded our government.

The piece can be found in NYT Select or below is a link to Truthout.org

Excerpt:

Privates Tucker and Menchaca made the ultimate sacrifice. Their bodies were so mutilated that they could be identified only by DNA. Mr. Safavian, by contrast, can be readily identified by smell. His idea of wartime sacrifice overseas was to chew over government business with the Jack Abramoff gang while on a golfing junket in Scotland. But what's most indicative of Mr. Safavian's public service is not his felonies in the Abramoff-Tom DeLay axis of scandal, but his legal activities before his arrest. In his DNA you get a snapshot of the governmental philosophy that has guided the war effort both in Iraq and at home (that would be the Department of Homeland Security) and doomed it to failure.

Mr. Safavian, a former lobbyist, had a hand in federal spending, first as chief of staff of the General Services Administration and then as the White House's chief procurement officer, overseeing a kitty of some $300 billion (plus $62 billion designated for Katrina relief). He arrived to help enforce a Bush management initiative called "competitive sourcing." Simply put, this was a plan to outsource as much of government as possible by forcing federal agencies to compete with private contractors and their K Street lobbyists for huge and lucrative assignments. The initiative's objective, as the C.E.O. administration officially put it, was to deliver "high-quality services to our citizens at the lowest cost."

The result was low-quality services at high cost: the creation of a shadow government of private companies rife with both incompetence and corruption. Last week Representative Henry Waxman, the California Democrat who commissioned the first comprehensive study of Bush administration contracting, revealed that the federal procurement spending supervised for a time by Mr. Safavian had increased by $175 billion between 2000 and 2005. (Halliburton contracts alone, unsurprisingly, went up more than 600 percent.) Nearly 40 cents of every dollar in federal discretionary spending now goes to private companies.

FRANK RICH: 'THE ROAD FROM K STREET TO YUSUIFYA"

ABRAMOFF HID MONEY THROUGH TAX EXEMPT FIRMS WITH THE WILLING ACCEPTANCE OF THOSE IN CHARGE

His buddy Norquist would pocket several thousand dollars before passing the money on.
Money was also used to buy face time with Bush, facilitated by Rove, of course.

Howard Dean was not kidding when he said the Republican Party is a culture of corruption. I don't think
Dr. Dean knew at the time he uttered these words that the party was as bad as it is.

Excerpt:

Among the organizations used by Abramoff was Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform. According to an investigative report on Abramoff's lobbying released last week by the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, Americans for Tax Reform served as a "conduit" for funds that flowed from Abramoff's clients to surreptitiously finance grass-roots lobbying campaigns. As the money passed through, Norquist's organization kept a small cut, e-mails show.

A second group Norquist was involved with, the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy, received about $500,000 in Abramoff client funds; the council's president has told Senate investigators that Abramoff often asked her to lobby a senior Interior Department official on his behalf. The committee report said the Justice Department should further investigate the organization's dealings with the department and its former deputy secretary, J. Steven Griles.

Norquist has long been an architect of tax-cutting policies and political strategies that have boosted the Republican Party. He and Abramoff have been close since their days as young conservative leaders of the College Republicans more than two decades ago.

The Senate committee report also details Abramoff's dealings with two others from the College Republicans crowd: Ralph Reed, former Christian Coalition executive director; and Amy Moritz Ridenour, president of the National Center for Public Policy Research, which sponsored a golf trip in 2000 to Scotland for then-Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.).

WASHINGTON POST: "Nonprofit Groups Funneled Money For Abramoff"

MORE ETHICALLY CHALLENGED WHITE HOUSE STAFFERS

Including Rove. Found on MSNBC.com

ETHICALLY CHALLENGED WHITE HOUSE STAFF

MOVING ALONG FROM THE STENCH OF ABRAMOFF, ROVE AND SAFAVIAN INTO THE NEOCON GREED CREED SEWER

Here is the article that inspired Thomas's slogan.

CEOS EARN 262 TIMES PAY OF AVERAGE WORKER
From Yahoo.News.Com

THE NEOCON GREED CREED

NEWLY ELECTED PRIME MINISTER OF IRAQ WANTS US OUT OF THERE

He also extends an olive branch to insurgents. Found on The Huffington Post.

IRAQI PM WANTS US OUT OF IRAQ

CLUELESS CHICKENHAWKS

REALITY CHECK BY MURTHA

Congressman Murtha seems to be one of the few honest political souls around. Meanwhile, back at the hacienda in Washington, an increasingly desperate coterie of GOP chicken hawks, driven by Rove, who somehow got off for committing treason, are screaming that the Democrats want to cut and run. Cut and run is the GOP's desperate and almost funny political slogan du jour. A billion bumper stickers have probably been printed already. Stay on message, evil idiots. You are more about lying and having someone else die for your lies.

Remember, Bush, Cheney and Rove all cut and ran from Vietnam. And there is no plan for Iraq.

Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld have opened a Pandora's Box of horrors in Iraq. My friend and co-volunteer for Radnofsky for US Senate sent me this link today showing photos of something we never see on TV, our fallen soldiers coming home. This is what the chickenhawks who cut and ran from Vietnam visited upon us with Iraq.

"THE RETURN OF THE FALLEN"

It's Rove's job to somehow make the war in Iraq seem like a good thing. Or blame its misfortunes and screw ups on someone else, like the Democrats.

And then the media, who have sold out to Bush and have been duped by Rove, must go after Democrats, too, in order to salvage their non existent credibility.

Turn off the TV news and the talk radio spewers of untruths and fabricated realities. Read non-partisan publications; watch the Congressional hearings on CSPAN, check out the Library of Congress, study the voting records, go to on line publications mentioned in the top of the blog, next to Libby Shaw, and make your own decisions. Don't let the likes of a treasonous trailer trash attack dog like Rove do it for you. LS

Below is the link to the article Murtha wrote for The Huffington Post.

Excerpt:

I am appalled that while manning a traffic checkpoint near Baghdad, three of our valiant soldiers was ambushed, one killed on the spot and two kidnapped, tortured and brutally killed. It is essential that we find the circumstances of their deaths. Why were they in such an isolated situation without additional back-up and who is responsible for these heinous acts?

Despite our most strenuous security efforts in the Baghdad area over the past several days, this area continues to be rocked by violent attacks, kidnapping and murderous acts, frequently aimed at our troops.

I continue to be concerned with the fact that our military men and women fighting in Iraq often tell me that they do not know who the enemy is. They do not know who they can trust; they are concerned that their camps have been infiltrated by Iraqis who are plotting to kill them; one day the Iraqis are smiling and waving at them on the streets, the next day the same people are throwing grenades at them.

"KNOWING YOUR ENEMY"

PRESS AND MEDIA AREN'T REPORTING OR ARE MISINTERPRETING POLLS ON IRAQ

Bottom line, over 50% of us want to get out of Iraq with a planned withdrawal. But our lawmakers and President aren't listening to us and the media is not reporting our wishes.

From Editor and Publisher.com

Excerpt:

But here's the key finding. The pollsters stated a series of positions, ranging from opposing gay marriage to repealing the estate tax, and asked if a candidate running for congress who embraced such a position was more or less likely to gain their vote. One position was: "Favors pulling all American troops out of Iraq within the next 12 months."

That couldn't be more simple and clear. The result? Some 54% said they would be "more likely" to vote for such a candidate and only 32% said "less likely."

They were then asked to rank the most important issues for this fall's election. Iraq topped the list at 53% with illegal immigration far behind at 32%. This survey, and recent ones from Gallup, strongly show that the public very much prefers Democrats in this year's races and, in fact, would like to see a Democratic congress to balance the Republican White House.

Of course, time will tell if they actually go ahead and vote their beliefs. But reading the latest poll results, one might conclude the opposite of what many reporters and pundits now seem to be suggesting: that, actually, the GOP faces an uphill fight on re-selling the Iraq war, now in its fourth year.

EDITOR AND PUBLISHER ON POLLS ON IRAQ

TRYING DIVERT OUR ATTENTION AWAY FROM THE CARNAGE IN IRAQ, THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION IS LOOKING FOR ANOTHER VICTIM. WILL IT BE IRAN OR N. KOREA, ASKS MR. RAY MCGOVERN

From Truthout.org.

Excerpt:

The question today is whether that war-decision-then-intelligence sequence remains in effect as President Bush's advisers weigh whom to attack next. This is hardly a frivolous question. As the president's poll numbers sink and the embarrassment of Iraq rises, Vice President Dick Cheney, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and presidential adviser Karl Rove no doubt are trying to choose the best way to enable Bush to polish his favorite image as "war president" in order to stem Republican losses in the mid-term elections this November. There are only two countries left in the "axis of evil." Which will it be: Iran or North Korea?

TRUTHOUT.ORG; "NEXT VICTIM: IRAN OR N. KOREA?"

"KARL ROVE'S BIGGEST MISTAKE"

Written by Stephen Schlesinger of The Huffington Post

Excerpt:

Let's hear Rove convince the parents of the two US soldiers who were tortured and killed earlier this week or the relatives of the four American soldiers slain yesterday in Iraq -- or the American public which has watched this repeated mayhem for months now -- that the Bush plan to stay indefinitely in Iraq is the answer to this forlorn, mistaken war.

"KARL ROVE'S BIGGEST MISTAKE"

REALITY CHECK NUMERO DOS

Want the real scoop on the realities of immigration? Read the article below written by Mr. Eduardo Porter of The New York Times. Found via Truthout.org

The article is absolutely incredible. It gives us an in-depth glimpse into the lives of illegal immigrants who live here and how the companies who hire them exploit them. The Bush Administration naturally wants to continue to misuse this group of folks who should be called refugees from incompetent and economically abusive countries. Sort of the same direction where we are heading under the GOP, don’t you think? LS

"HERE ILLEGALLY WORKING HARD AND PAYING TAXES"

Excerpts:

Despite becoming a fixture of the labor market, illegal immigrants remain vulnerable at work. Wages declined as illegal immigrants entered the janitorial labor pool. Janitors' median earnings fell by 3 percent in real terms between 1983 and 2002, when the Labor Department changed the definitions of building maintenance jobs and other occupations.

Meanwhile, earnings across all occupations rose by 8 percent, after accounting for inflation. Though unionization has helped push janitors wages back up in many cities, they remain lower in markets with many illegal immigrants in the labor force.

In New York City, janitors cleaning commercial buildings make $19 an hour. Mike Fishman, president of the Service Employees International Union's local in New York, points out that the union never lost ground in the city, and it is still unusual to find illegal immigrants cleaning office buildings there.

In Southern California, by contrast, unions were decimated in the 1980's, and only started recovering in the late 1990's. According to Mike Garcia, president of the union's main local in the state, Southern California's unionized janitors earn between $8.50 and $11 an hour.

Unscrupulous employers still victimize illegal workers frequently. Veronica, a 39-year old illegal immigrant from Mexico, had been working for a temporary employment agency for about a year, crating boxes of beauty products for Aveda, when the agency fired her, then rehired her under a different Social Security number to avoid paying her for the vacation time she had earned.

"They don't want you to gain seniority," she said.

When Adriana started her cleaning job downtown, she said, the supervisor recorded her on the payroll under a different name. But rather than change the entry on ABM's payroll, he asked her to buy a set of documents with the new name - forcing her to live for years with two identities, one for work and one for everything else.

Adriana only managed to recover her real name by tagging it on as a middle name when Harvard took over the contract at her building and she reapplied for her job. Now, the name on her state ID is similar to the one on her Social Security card and paycheck.

Mr. Porter: "Here Illegally Working Hard and Paying Taxes"

ON MEDIA SELL OUTS AND IDIOTS
What else is new?

Ken sent this piece today from The Huffington Post. LS

"THE PRESS PLAYS DUMB ABOUT BUSH BOUNCE"

THE EVIL DOING CHENEY

Ron Suskind, who wrote 'The Price of Loyalty," a book about former Republican Secretary of the Treasury, Paul O’Neill, who resigned from his post under the Bush Administration, has written yet another book on how Cheney drives our national and foreign policies. In short, Cheney does policy and Bush does the politics. Does that tell you something? LS

SUSKIND: THE ONE PERCENT DOCTRINE

TIME FOR A REALITY CHECK

Would you like to know what is really happening in Iraq after our silly, ridiculous and tall tale telling GOP House members spent all day Friday wasting our hard earned money self-righteously pontificating about the war as if they were personally fighting it. HA! In their cowardly wet dreams. Oh what bad actors they all are. How pathetic and low. They must think we tax payers are morons.

If we don’t fire them, we are.

OK taxpayer, this is what is really happening in hell, aka Iraq from Editor & Publisher.

Excerpt:

The subject of the memo is: "Snapshots from the Office -- Public Affairs Staff Show Strains of Social Discord."

As a footnote in one of the 23 sections, the embassy relates, "An Arab newspaper editor told us he is preparing an extensive survey of ethnic cleansing, which he said is taking place in almost every Iraqi province, as political parties and their militiast are seemingly engaged in tit-for-tat reprisals all over Iraq."

Among the other troubling reports:

-- "Personal safety depends on good relations with the 'neighborhood' governments, who barricade streets and ward off outsiders. The central government, our staff says, is not relevant; even local mukhtars have been displaced or coopted by militias. People no longer trust most neighbors."

-- One embassy employee had a brother-in-law kidnapped. Another received a death threat, and then fled the country with her family.

-- Iraqi staff at the embassy, beginning in March and picking up in May, report "pervasive" harassment from Islamist and/or militia groups. Cuts in power and rising fuel prices "have diminished the quality of life." Conditions vary but even upscale neighborhoods "have visibly deteriorated" and one of them is now described as a "ghost town."

-- Two of the three female Iraqis in the public affairs office reported stepped-up harassment since mid-May...."some groups are pushing women to cover even their face, a step not taken in Iran even at its most conservative." One of the women is now wearing a full abaya after receiving direct threats.

-- It has also become "dangerous" for men to wear shorts in public and "they no longer allow their children to play outside in shorts." People who wear jeans in public have also come under attack.

-- Embassy employees are held in such low esteem their work must remain a secret and they live with constant fear that their cover will be blown. Of nine staffers, only four have told their families where they work. They all plan for their possible abductions. No one takes home their cell phones as this gives them away. One employee said criticism of the U.S. had grown so severe that most of her family believes the U.S. "is punishing populations as Saddam did."

WASHINGTON POST RECEIVES SHOCKING MEMO FROM US EMBASSY IN BAGHDAD

MORE TROUBLE IN BUSH'S PARADISE

TEN KIDNAPPED FROM BAGHDAD BAKERY from yahoo.news.com

TEN WORKERS KIDNAPPED FROM BAGHDAD BAKERY

POLLS SHOW THAT MOST OF US WANT TO GET OUT OF HELL BUT THE BUSH GOP DOES NOT CARE WHAT WE THINK
From cnn.com

MAJORITY WANTS PULLOUT DATE SET

HOUSES SELLS OUT ON U.S. MILITARY IN IRAQ

The House Chickenhawk Show on Friday is an appalling and tragic sellout to our U.S. military who are fighting in Iraq. Why don't the chickenhawks trade places with our military? Like wear heavy gear, carry 70 lbs. in 130 degree heat with no relief of air conditioning, while being shot at or blown up. Talk the talk but shirk the walk, House members.

HOUSE SELLS OUT U.S. MILITARY IN IRAQ

WHY DO AMERICAN TAX PAYERS HAVE TO PAY ROVE'S SALARY? He is useless to us. He spends our money telling lies and attacking people who disagree with him. He outs a CIA agent and gets away with it. He does not do the work of the people. He is merely a political attack dog and we should not have to pay him for spinning lies and undermining our democracy.

CONGRESSMAN MURTHA ON ROVE
From the Huffington Post

MURTHA ON ROVE

MORE GOP EVIL DOING LIES, SMEAR TACTICS AND FABRICATION

ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS LIED ABOUT CHENEY’S INVOLVEMENT WITH HALLIBURTON CONTRACTS

Found on Raw Story.com

A conservative watch dog group found the documents suggesting Cheney’s involvement with the Halliburton no bid contracts and the Army. Are you shocked? I wouldn't think so. LS

RAW STORY.COM: ARMY LIED ABOUT CHENEY’S INVOLVEMENT WITH HALLIBURTON CONTRACTS

More on this can also be found on Firedoglake.com

GOP ARTICULATES ITS STRATEGY OF LYING, SMEARING, FAKING AND PERSONAL ATTACKS IN WRITING.

Ken found this unbelievable and despicable piece of work on Think Progress.org

Excerpt:

Think Progress has obtained a “Confidential Messaging Memo” from Boehner instructing his caucus to conduct a very different kind of deliberation. Here’s a quick summary:

1. Exploit 9/11. The two page memo mentions 9/11 seven times. It describes debating Iraq in the context of 9/11 as “imperative.”

2. Attack opponents ad hominem. The memo describes those who oppose President Bush’s policies in Iraq as “sheepish,” “weak,” and “prone to waver endlessly.”

3. Create a false choice. The memo says the decision is between supporting President Bush’s policies and hoping terrorist threats will “fade away on their own.”

I sent a PDF copy of the memo to the Houston Chronicle this morning. Let’s see if they cover it. LS

THINK PROGRESS.ORG: “Confidential Messaging Memo – Floor Debate on Iraq and the Global War on Terror”

The Washington Post.com covers the House debate today and mentions part of Boehner’s memo, but not in sufficient detail. LS

Excerpts:

"As a result of our efforts during this debate, Americans will recognize that on the issue of national security, they have a clear choice between a Republican Party aware of the stakes and dedicated to victory, versus a Democratic Party without a coherent national security policy that sheepishly dismisses the challenges America faces in a post-9/11 world," Boehner wrote.

But the day-long debate will also give voice to some GOP lawmakers' misgivings about Bush administration policy -- and years of congressional support for it -- in an election year in which Iraq will be a central issue. The news of recent days has buoyed Republican spirits, but the party is still saddled with a war that remains deeply unpopular and is imperiling its continued control of Congress. Some House Republicans have complained that their party has taken flight from its responsibility to debate and oversee administration policy.

"I can't help but feel through eyes of a combat-wounded Marine in Vietnam, if someone was shot, you tried to save his life. . . . While you were in combat, you had a sense of urgency to end the slaughter, and around here we don't have that sense of urgency," said Rep. Wayne T. Gilchrest (Md.), a usually soft-spoken Republican who has urged his leaders to challenge the White House on Iraq. "To me, the administration does not act like there's a war going on. The Congress certainly doesn't act like there's a war going on. If you're raising money to keep the majority, if you're thinking about gay marriage, if you're doing all this other peripheral stuff, what does that say to the guy who's about ready to drive over a land mine?"

”GOP Measure Forces House Debate on War”

THE REAL LOW DOWN ABOUT OIL

George, a volunteer for the Radnofsky for US Senate campaign, found yet another extraordinary and thought provoking article written by Mr. Greg Palast.

Mr. Palast argues that the powerful owners of the world’s oil supplies, whether government or privately controlled, are highly motivated to keep Iraq's oil in the ground . You can guess why. Mr. Palast provides footnotes exposing a history of the suppression of Iraq’s oil over the years. LS

Excerpt:

It began with a character known as "Mr. 5%"-- Calouste Gulbenkian -- who, in 1925, slicked King Faisal, neophyte ruler of the country recently created by Churchill, into giving Gulbenkian's "Iraq Petroleum Company" (IPC) exclusive rights to all of Iraq's oil. Gulbenkian flipped 95% of his concession to a combine of western oil giants: Anglo-Persian, Royal Dutch Shell, CFP of France, and the Standard Oil trust companies (now ExxonMobil and its "sisters.") The remaining slice Calouste kept for himself -- hence, "Mr. 5%."

The oil majors had a better use for Iraq's oil than drilling it -- not drilling it. The oil bigs had bought Iraq's concession to seal it up and keep it off the market. To please his buyers' wishes, Mr. 5% spread out a big map of the Middle East on the floor of a hotel room in Belgium and drew a thick red line around the gulf oil fields, centered on Iraq. All the oil company executives, gathered in the hotel room, signed their name on the red line -- vowing not to drill, except as a group, within the red-lined zone. No one, therefore, had an incentive to cheat and take red-lined oil. All of Iraq's oil, sequestered by all, was locked in, and all signers would enjoy a lift in worldwide prices. Anglo-Persian Company, now British Petroleum (BP), would pump almost all its oil, reasonably, from Persia (Iran). Later, the Standard Oil combine, renamed the Arabian-American Oil Company (Aramco), would limit almost all its drilling to Saudi Arabia. Anglo-Persian (BP) had begun pulling oil from Kirkuk, Iraq, in 1927 and, in accordance with the Red-Line Agreement, shared its Kirkuk and Basra fields with its IPC group -- and drilled no more.

MR. GREG PALAST: “KEEPING IRAQ’S OIL IN THE GOUND”

BUSH AND THE GOP ARE BEING TRICKED INTO GOING TO WAR WITH IRAN BY AL-QAEDA

Ken sent this article from the Associated Press today. Documents found on one of Al Qaeda’s safe house computers in Iraq suggest the Al Zarqawi wing of Al Qaeda wanted to foment a conflict, i.e. WAR, between the US and Iran. Apparently Iraq’s Al Qaeda needed to find a way to distract the US in order to take the heat off of its weary and perhaps weakened insurgency. Pathetic Bush and his incompetent rubber stamping GOP were (are?) about ready to fall into Al Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda trap. Imagine that. LS

FROM USA TODAY: “Al-Qaeda in Iraq sought war between United States, Iran”

JUST WHEN YOU THINK THE GOP COULD NOT GET ANY WORSE, WELL, THEY ACTUALLY GO THE EXTRA MILE AND DO

From the Huffington Post: GOP SENATORS DEFEND PROPOSAL THAT GIVES AMNESTY TO TERRORISTS WHO KILL U.S. TROOPS

We can finally know for a fact where the hearts ands minds of the Bush GOP reside. LS

”GOP SENATORS DEFEND PROPOSAL THAT GIVES AMNESTY TO TERRORISTS WHO KILL US TROOPS: ‘IF THAT'S AMNESTY, I'M FOR IT’...”

THE ISSUE OF VOTER FRAUD CONTINUES TO REAR ITS UGLY HEAD

DEMOCRAT CANDIDATE IN FLORIDA IS CHARGED WITH FELONIES FOR ALLEGING VOTER FRAUD

This story is so totally mind blowing it is almost unbelievable. The story exposes something so awful that I wish it were untrue. The article suggests that democracy as we know it does not exist in states like Florida (and Ohio – the next horror story below).

In short, a Democrat in Florida ran for office as a candidate for state representative. He accused the local election officials of vote tampering and intimidation. As a result the candidate finds himself charged with a number of felonies. LS

Found on Raw Story.com

”Florida House Candidate to Face Litany of Criminal Charges
After Alleging Vote Fraud”

OHIO WAS STOLEN

You know it. I know it. The Bush people know it. Why isn’t the Democratic Party screaming and filing lawsuits?

The story is written by Bob Herbert for the New York Times. If you do not subscribe to the paper or NYT Select, you can read excerpts on Raw Story.com (below).

Bob Herbert of the New York Times claims that although no one has proven the election in Ohio was stolen, he writes “But whenever it is closely scrutinized, the range of problems and dirty tricks that come to light is shocking. What's not shocking, of course, is that every glitch and every foul-up in Ohio, every arbitrary new rule and regulation, somehow favored Bush.” LS

NYT's Herbert: “Kerry 'almost certainly' won Ohio in 2004”

DON'T BELIEVE ME ABOUT OHIO? WELL, PUT THIS IN YOUR FLIGHT FROM REALITY PIPE AND SMOKE IT.

Inhale deeply and remember that Blackwell and the CEO of Diebold both promised to deliver Ohio to Bush. LS

DIEBOLD LOBBYIST GIVES $10K TO BLACKWELL CAMPAIGN.

Found on Truthout.org

TRUTHOUT ORG.: DIEBOLD LOBBYIST GIVES $10K TO BLACKWELL CAMPAIGN


TROUBLE IN CALIFORNIA, TOO?

Utah Election Clerk is astonished over California’s security issues with both procedure breakdowns in San Diego and with the Diebold voting machines. Found on The Brad Blog.

Utah Election Clerk 'in Shock' About E-Vote Security Breach in Busby/Bilbray Election"

MOVING ON FROM VOTER FRAUD BUT NOT REALLY, BECAUSE THE NEXT STORY IS ABOUT ROVE.

Mr. Jason Leopold tell us why Rove has not yet been indicted in the Valerie Plame case in his article written on Truthout.org LS

TRUTHOUT.ORG "SEALED VS. SEALED"

WHERE HAS MY DEMOCRACY GONE?

ELECTION WOES

GAO WHO HAD FOUND EVIDENCE OF ELECTION SNAFFUS IN 2000 SAID THE PROBLEMS WEREN’T FIXED IN TIME FOR 2004.

Yeah, right, so what else is new? Without meaning to insult those who did the study, why did it take years, not weeks or months, after the fact, to reveal the obvious? DUH!? What the hell do you dudes/dudettes do when you go to “work” everyday? You sure as hell aren’t very productive. Most of us in the private sector would be fired or outsourced for such ineffectiveness. LS

Found on Yahoo News.com via Buzz Flash.com

GAO ADMITS THERE IS A PROBLEM WITH OUR ELECTIONS

WATCH DOG GROUP REJECTS ELECTION IN CALIFORNIA. ASKS FOR HAND COUNT.

The GOP stealth election thieves are at it again.

Do you care? LS

Another great find on Buzz Flash.com

The Eureka Reporter: “WATCHDOG GROUP REJECTS ELECTION RESULTS, CALLS FOR HAND COUNT”

EIGHT COUNTIES IN ARKANSAS DITCH ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES JUST PRIOR TO ELECTION. Found on Brad Blog.com

Some voters/officials do care. LS

BRAD BLOG.COM

MOVING ON TO OTHER GOP DARK AND UN-REPORTED NEWS

This is yet another incredible and well-documented piece written by Mr. Greg Palast. He reveals why General Garner, who was initially sent to Iraq to oversee the transitional government, was fired almost immediately upon arrival.

We had no business going to war with Iraq in the first place, but the hideous deed could have been somewhat salvaged, at least by a nano modicum of decency, by the goals, experience and sensitivity of a General who had the interest and well-being of the Iraqi people at heart. General Garner worked hard at bringing the various religious and cultural factions together in order to achieve at least a dialogue. After a lot of hard work, tough discussions and deep reflection, a very fragile compromise was about to be reached.

But of course, the dicey part of the compromise was the plan to divide up the wealth, i.e. the spoils of war. And the oil, of course, among the various factions.

Alas, General Garner was replaced by a neocon ideologue whose mission was to make sure the Iraqi spoils of war flow straight into the pockets of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld families, friends, donors, and of course to their hacks who do their bidding. Worse, when Garner left and Bremer arrived with his neocon sledgehammer, the delicately held together factions blew apart and the insurgency began. We know the rest of the story. Mr. Palast's article is yet more proof that the Bush GOP stands for nothing but greed, power and money. Any words spewed from their collective mouths about democracy, peace, border security, the economy, immigration or any issue that has nothing to do with greed, power and money, is pure hogwash. LS

Excerpts:

"My preference," Garner told me in his understated manner, "was to put the Iraqis in charge as soon as we can and do it in some form of elections." But elections were not in The Plan.

The Plan was a 101-page document to guide the long-term future of the land we'd just conquered. There was nothing in it about democracy or elections or safety. There was, rather, a detailed schedule for selling off "all [Iraq's] state assets" - and Iraq, that's just about everything - "especially," said The Plan, "the oil and supporting industries." Especially the oil.
There was more than oil to sell off. The Plan included the sale of Iraq's banks, and weirdly, changing it's copyright laws and other odd items that made the plan look less like a program for Iraq to get on its feet than a program for corporate looting of the nation's assets. (And indeed, we discovered at BBC, behind many of the odder elements - copyright and tax code changes - was the hand of lobbyist Jack Abramoff's associate Grover Norquist.)S

But Garner didn't think much of The Plan, he told me when we met a year later in Washington. He had other things on his mind. "You prevent epidemics, you start the food distribution program to prevent famine."

In April 2003, Bremer instituted democracy Bush style: he canceled elections and appointed the entire government himself. Two months later, Bremer ordered a halt to all municipal elections including the crucial vote to Shia seeking to select a mayor in the city of Najaf. The front-runner, moderate Shia Asad Sultan Abu Gilal warned, "If they don't give us freedom, what will we do? We have patience, but not for long." Local Shias formed the "Mahdi Army," and within a year, provoked by Bremer's shutting their paper, attacked and killed 21 U.S. soldiers.

TRUTHOUT.ORG “Unreported: The Zarqawi Invitation

DEMOCRACY CORPS MANUAL ON HOW TO GET RID OF THE GOP IN 2006 AND 2008

The sooner the better.....LS

Ken sent this fascinating information this morning. Below are Ken's summary, the links and excerpts from the study and analysis.

Democracy Corps has an important new study directed to Democratic congressional candidates challenging GOP incumbents. Democracy Corp’s survey and Greenberg and Carville’s analysis can be found below.

Carville and Greenberg say their survey numbers indicate that Democrats must nationalize the election to recapture the House or the Senate.

Disillusionment with Bush has grown so strong that our tests show that a Democrat who runs against Bush and the Republicans performs better than one who runs only against the Republican incumbent.

They stress the importance of Democratic challengers stating clear, strong positions in confronting GOP wedge issues, such as immigration, national security and Iraq, while advocating equally lucid policy alternatives regarding energy, American jobs, drug prices and congressional pay raises. The D Corps survey also shows that proposals to make college tuition tax deductible and to inspect 100 percent of containers coming into the U.S. also inspire broad support. They urge Democratic challengers to reassure voters that they oppose precipitous withdrawal from Iraq (to avoid GOP cut and run accusations), and articulate instead a more credible option, such as a phased redeployment over the next 12 months.

Greenberg and Carville urge challengers to make a strong effort to engage and turn out African American and Latino voters, and especially unmarried women who tend to support Democratic congressional candidates by a large margin (29 percent in the survey), but who also have an unusually low turnout rate. There are many other interesting recommendations in the DCorps study, backed up by solid opinion research.

DEMOCRACY CORPS SURVEY AND GREENBERG CARVILLE ANALYSIS HERE

BUSH THE DECIDER IS ALSO A CHICKEN

Email to Brown shows Bush is happy that Brownie was beaten up over Katrina instead of him. LS From CNN.com

E-mail shows Bush glad FEMA took Katrina flak

BUSHITES TALK THE TALK BUT SHIRK THE WALK

Below are astute and reflective observations from Steve, the husband of a friend and colleague. Steve expresses some of his political views by writing electronic letters to his “Dear Lovely Wife.” Fortunately for her friends, his lovely wife, Vickie, shares his letters. Below is one of Steve’s jewels. LS

In some ways, the Bushites remind me of our cat Monster. He thinks he's a lion, and king of the forest, but in reality he is just an itty-bitty cat. The Bushites are like that, but when it comes right down to it, they are all about denying responsibility. The main reason the Bush White House is the most secretive since the Nixon Administration is that they are busy covering up dumb decisions.

"National security" is a thinly veiled cover for "don't look at the incompetence and pandering that is really going on." For example, they are trying to avoid explaining the data mining of American phone records by claiming it would endanger national security; beyond the violation of civil rights, it is probably a bad idea because it is a high investment-low return project - there's no bang for the taxpayers' bucks.

The Bushites don't want to explain that aspect (in addition to the lack of judicial authorization), and their cronies in the Congress (and possibly their appointees in the courts) don't want that issue to come up, either. Another example of their evasion of responsibility is the refusal of Dick Cheney to even name the people who were on his energy advisory task force (and didn't they do a fine job!). After all, someone who writes a letter to the editor takes enough responsibility for his idea to sign his name and give his address; Dick Cheney's advisors were unwilling to do even that. That's really standing up for your ideas! (Unmentioned is the probability that they really didn't want anybody to know what they REALLY thought, anyway.) "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!"

The Republicans in Congress follow the same pattern. When William Jefferson, the Democratic congressman from New Orleans, was caught taking an alleged bribe, the Republicans all jumped on that and said, "See? See? We're not the only ones who are corrupt!" This overlooks that the argument that "the other guy did it, too" is an admission of guilt; you're just angling for a lighter punishment. I don't think anyone is making the argument that Jefferson should be defended because he is a Democrat; if he's guilty, he should go to jail. (Notice that the Republicans took the automatic assumption that someone from the same party should be expected to argue for special treatment for their partisans.)

In spite of asking other people to be responsible for themselves (to lessen the burden on rich taxpayers) and their actions, the Bushites and their friends in Congress are unwilling to take responsibility for their own actions. They think they are tough, smart folks who shouldn't have to answer for their actions to people "who don't get it;" but when their critics actually point out that their judgment might be flawed and their leadership suspect, they come up with excuses, and bury the evidence under a "national security" blanket. ( Ken Lay is probably sorry he couldn't use that excuse.)

The difference between their self-image and their actual ability to govern is very much like Monster, and they are extremely paranoid about someone actually finding out. They seem to be testing the truth of Abraham Lincoln's dictum that you can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time (so who are those people they can fool all of the time?); I really don't need to add that the Bush skeptics are the folk that can't be fooled all of the time.

NEWS THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA NEGLECTED TO COVER

All of the media are spinning frantically and manically on one issue tonight and you know what it is.

Moving along.

BUSH THE FATHER QUIETLY TRIED TO HAVE RUMSFELD FIRED BUT BUSH THE SON WOULDN’T HAVE IT.

According to the article, Bush, Sr. quietly worked in the background to have Rummy fired in order to save his son’s miserable failure of a presidency (sorry, but shit happens when elections are stolen), the family legacy and finally, the country. Did son W. Bush listen to his father? Nope. Instead, as a rebellious and narcissistic teenager, W. rebelled, dug in deeper, and as the ultimate “decider” kept Rummy in office. Why, may I ask, does the planet have to be involved with and crippled by a power struggle between Daddy and Son W.? Tragically, we are. LS

Excerpts:

The elder Bush's intervention was an extraordinary attempt to rescue simultaneously his son, the family legacy and the country. The current president had previously rejected entreaties from party establishment figures to revamp his administration with new appointments. There was no one left to approach him except his father. This effort to pluck George W. from his troubles is the latest episode in a recurrent drama -- from the drunken young man challenging his father to go "mano a mano" on the front lawn of the family home in Kennebunkport, Maine, to the father pulling strings to get the son into the Texas Air National Guard and helping salvage his finances from George W.'s mismanagement of Harken Energy. For the father, parental responsibility never ends. But for the son, rebellion continues. When journalist Bob Woodward asked George W. Bush if he had consulted his father before invading Iraq, he replied, "He is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to."
The former president, a practitioner of foreign policy realism, was intruding on the president's parallel reality. But the realist was trying to shake the fantasist in vain. "The president believes the talking points he's given and repeats on progress in Iraq," a Bush administration national security official told me. Bush redoubles his efforts, projects his firmness, in the conviction that the critics lack his deeper understanding of Iraq that allows him to see through the fog of war to the Green Zone as a city on a hill.
SALON.COM: “George Bush Sr. asked retired general to replace Rumsfeld” By Sidney Blumenthal”

HILIARIOUS! DELAY TELLS FELLOW GOP TO IGNORE THE PRESS AND TO “STAND ON PRINCIPLE.”

Principle a la DeLay?

I am laughing so hard it hurts. LS

From The Washington Post.com via The Huffington Post

WASHINGTON POST.COM: DELAY SAYS TO IGNORE THE PRESS AND STAND ON
“PRINCIPLE”

NOT SO FUNNY. APPARENTLY THERE WERE BIG PROBLEMS WITH THE ELECTION IN CALIFORNIA IN CONVICTED CRIMINAL DUKE CUNNINGHAM’S DISTRICT.

Brad Friedman does not decry voter fraud or election type shenanigans. He argues against the efficacy of the Diebold and other electronic voting machines that have no paper trails. The issue at stake is “propriety ownership of the source code” that companies such as Diebold refuse to reveal for a lot of BS (aka profit driven) reasons. Bottom line, these machines have been proven to be infinitely hackable and are owned by those who need a government who will do their bidding. Never forget that the former CEO of Diebold said he would deliver the 2004 election to Bush. He and Kenneth Blackwell of Ohio followed their dreams and now we have the nightmare of Bush.

If you are not suspicious or angry with this, you need to wean yourself from whatever flight from reality narcotic you are addicted to. Maybe one in this state of denial should simply turn off the TV, radio, cancel local newspaper subscriptions and read non partisan and scholarly (yeah, I know, hard and insufferably boring stuff) or go to the library. If you hate to read you could instead watch Congressional hearings on CSPAN and decide how you feel about issues for yourself. A new thought! Make your own informed decision about an issue. Gosh! For a nation of such extraordinary wealth and with so many citizens who hold college degrees, we surely have become so.... never mind…..LS

Excerpt from Brad’s Blog

The biggest concern about the race, by far, is that San Diego County uses two types of Diebold voting systems -- optical-scan and touch-screen -- both of which have not only proven to be disastrously unreliable in San Diego County and California in the past, but have also been demonstrated over the last six months to feature dozens of exceedingly well-documented and remarkable security vulnerabilities, making them extremely accessible to tampering. Especially if anyone has unsupervised physical access for more than a minute or two with them.

The voting machines used in Tuesday's election were sent home with volunteer poll workers the night before the election, according to the San Diego County Registrar of Voters office today. As well, The BRAD BLOG has received reports that in some cases, poll workers may have had the machines alone at their houses, unsupervised, for a week or even two prior to Tuesday's election....

Last February, California Sec. of State Bruce McPherson, himself, commissioned and released an independent security analysis [PDF] regarding just one aspect of both types of Diebold voting machines used in yesterday's San Diego race, after the memory cards used in those machines were found to have been extremely vulnerable to tampering. A mock election in Leon County, Florida last December revealed that tampering with the memory cards enabled the results of a mock election, run by Election Supervisor Ion Sancho, to be completely reversed.

McPherson's own report, completed by computer scientists at the University of California, looked at just that one aspect of the Diebold system's vulnerability -- the memory cards used to store vote totals and give other instructions to the voting machines -- and determined that "there is a serious flaw in the key management of the crypto code that otherwise should protect the AV-TSx from memory card attacks."

The report described a "number of security vulnerabilities" and found that the flaws on these systems could be exploited easily without the use of any passwords or cryptographic keys.

According to McPherson's report, "Anyone who has access to a memory card...and can tamper with it (i.e. modify its contents), and can have the modified cards used in a voting machine during election, can indeed modify the election results from that machine in a number of ways."

The tampering would be invisible, according to the report. "The fact that the results are incorrect cannot be detected except by a recount of the original paper ballots."

Beyond tampering with both of the Diebold AccuVote systems used in yesterday's election, McPherson's report continues to detail another family of "more serious vulnerabilities" that "go well beyond" the type of attack described above:

The Brad Blog.com June 8 Posting on Problems with Election in California

GREG PALAST BREAKS AND EXPOSES THE GOP CODE

Tonight I have two separate postings instead of one because I did not want to demean Mr. Greg Palast, author of “Armed Madhouse” by putting excerpts of his work on the same page as revelations about Tom DeLay and his FAMILY’S, mind you, astonishing hypocritical and soul selling corruption.

The article posted below is a series of excerpts from Mr. Palast’s new book on fraud in our government.

Mr. Palast's book reveals how the Bush GOP is determined to invade oil producing countries to both obtain and control the resource, how they intend to steal elections and how media biases keep Mr. Palast's findings unreported.

I posted Mr. Palast’s biography a few days ago. You can find it below. LS

Excerpts of excerpts:

The Rev. Pat Robertson got a piece of the action. The Federal Emergency Management Agency's Web site encouraged those wanting to help victims to donate to the charities he controls. Within the week, the Navy penned a half-billion-dollar contract for reconstruction work with Halliburton. More would come. Our President, as he does in any emergency situation, announced additional tax cuts. He ordered immediate write-offs for new equipment used in rebuilding. That will likely provide a relief for Halliburton, but the deductions were useless to small New Orleans businesses which had no income to write off. The oil majors, the trillion-dollar babies, won a $700 million tax break. Don't think of hurricanes as horrors, but as opportunities. For the schoolchildren among the refugees, instead of schools, our President promised school "vouchers" on a grand scale. And there was a bonus. Louisiana had been a "purple" state- neither a solid Republican Red nor Democratic Blue. It was up for grabs politically. With a Democratic Senator and a new Democratic Governor, Louisiana was ready to lead the South out of the GOP. Louisiana's big blue Democratic splotch was enclosed within the city below sea level.

In 2001, Bush made Joe Allbaugh FEMA's chief and the two of them converted the agency into something more exciting, a front-line command center in the War on Terror, dissolving the agency into the Department of Homeland Security. And that's when the unexciting emergency planning work was put up for sale. (Allbaugh quit in 2003 and turned the Wal-Marted FEMA over to his old college roommate, Michael Brown, an executive with the Arabian Horse Association.) It wasn't in the Times, but a year before the hurricane, the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA signed a half-million-dollar contract with a private operator to write up "a catastrophic hurricane disaster plan for the City of New Orleans," says the press release. Their plan was innovative. We know it was innovative because the work was handed to a company called "Innovative Emergency Management." Innovative Emergency Management, said a company release, had "teamed" with expert James Lee Witt, the renowned Clinton FEMA chief, which was good news for New Orleans. The bad news was, it wasn't true. Witt, despite IEM's press release, said he was not part of the Innovative "team."

No matter. Innovative Emergency Management's founder, president and CEO, Madhu Beriwal, I believe, owns an umbrella and she's an exceptionally experienced donor to the Republican party. She has more campaign committee citations, including donations to Senator Vitter, than evacuation plans to her name. Maybe she has extraordinary credentials for saving a city from flood, but when we called seeking her experience and credentials, we got nothing.

IEM's press release, besides the fib about Witt, made this utterly truthful point: Given this area's vulnerability and elevation...a plan that facilitates a rapid and effective hurricane response is critical. Amen to that.

So I called IEM in Baton Rouge to see their critical and innovative plan that was supposed to be complete well before Katrina's landfall. The Wal-Mart of disaster prep couldn't get me a copy. In fact, they couldn't say if they had it. Nor if the City of New Orleans had it. Or if Senator Vitter or anyone had it or if it existed.

Could they tell me the name of someone at FEMA who had the evacuation plan? They hesitated, so I prompted, "Well, who do you call if there's an emergency?" The question stumped them. And it stumped FEMA, which wouldn't provide me a copy. The problem, I was informed, was that they couldn't confirm it existed.

There is nothing new under the sun. A Republican president going for the photo op as the Mississippi rolls over New Orleans. It was 1927, and President Calvin Coolidge sent Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, "a little fat man with a notebook in his hand," who mugged for the cameras and promised to build the city a wall of protection. They had their photos taken. Then they left to play golf with Ken Lay or, rather, the Ken Lay railroad baron equivalent of his day.

TRUTHOUT.ORG "A TASTE OF PALAST'S ARMED MADHOUSE"

GOP LAWMAKERS CORRUPTION EXTENDS TO SPOUSES AND CHILDREN

DELAY SETS THE BENCHMARK ON CORRUPTION.

TOM DELAY’S WIFE IS UNDER FBI INVESTIGATION FOR HAVING A RETIREMENT ACCOUNT SET UP BY, AND WITH GENEROUS CONTRIBUTIONS FROM,

…..GUESS WHO??????

A LOBBYIST, OF COURSE!

CONTRIBUTIONS ARE CLOSE TO A COOL HALF MIL….

How would you like to receive a generous salary, well over 100K per year, while having, at the same time, very liberal (that oh so loathed term that sends the Bush GOP into orbit) contributions made to your retirement account while “working” at home?

Working? Doing what? Looking up favorite GOP charities? How long did it take per week? 10-60 minutes tops?

What did you do, Christine, you, a God fearing conservative Christian, to earn such a splendid and generous salary and benefits package? Tell us, please, so that we can emulate you.

But this is nothing.

Alas, the icing on the cake of the GOP’s self perpetuating wealth making machinery extends into the next generation. DeLay’s daughter also received a liberal salary for “work” rendered to a best buddy lobbyist.

Nice. Nothing like strong family values and working hard for a living. Talk the talk but shirk the walk...the GOP’s mantra.

I found this piece on The Washington Post.com via The Huffington Post

Excerpts:

A registered lobbyist opened a retirement account in the late 1990s for the wife of then-House Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) and contributed thousands of dollars to it while also paying her a salary to work for him from her home in Texas, according to sources, documents and DeLay's attorney, Richard Cullen.

The account represents a small portion of the income that DeLay's family received from entities at least partly controlled by lobbyist Edwin A. Buckham. But the disclosure of its origin adds to what was previously known about the benefits DeLay's family received from its association with Buckham, and it brings the total over the past seven years to about half a million dollars.

An arm of the group paid Buckham a monthly consulting fee, and Buckham in turn employed its executive director as a consultant to his lobbying firm. The two of them shared a single office on the top floor of a townhouse owned by a nonprofit organization that Buckham created and directed. Buckham's role is relevant because from 2001 to Jan. 31, 2006, ARMPAC paid Christine DeLay; DeLay's daughter, Dani DeLay Ferro; and Ferro's Texas firm a total of $350,304 in political consulting fees and expenses, according to public records.

The Washington Post previously disclosed that from 1998 to 2002, Buckham's lobbying firm, Alexander Strategy Group, paid Christine DeLay a monthly salary averaging between $3,200 and $3,400. Cullen initially said the payments were for telephone calls she made periodically to the offices of certain members of Congress seeking the names of their favorite charities. Christine DeLay then forwarded that information to Buckham, along with some information about those charities.

FROM THE WASHINGTON POST.COM “Retirement Account of DeLay's Wife Traced”

GOP ELECTION THEFT, CONTINUED

Besides election theft, there is more on GOP lies about Iraq.

There were massive problems with voting machines in California, Indiana, Arizona, Alabama and Mississippi today. LS

CHECK OUT THE FACTS ON BRAD BLOG.COM

IF THE GOP DOESN'T MANAGE TO STEAL ALL ELECTIONS, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL PREDICTS THE MIDTERM ELECTIONS SIGNAL HOT WATER FOR GOP, ESPECIALLY IN THE NORTHEAST.

Excerpt:

Recent polls and primaries, however, suggest voters are gunning for the party in power. If the elections were held today, "Democrats would take at least one of the houses," says analyst Bernadette Budde, senior vice president of the Business Industry Political Action Committee, which typically favors Republicans.

Republicans won't lose for lack of funds. Mr. Bush may be a drag on his party, but he remains a money magnet. He recently raised $860,000 at one Florida event for endangered Rep. Clay Shaw -- nearly as much as many House members spend in a whole campaign.

Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois and Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, who head the Democrats' House and Senate campaign committees, have raised more than ever before. Yet Democrats fear -- and Republicans hope -- that the minority party could fall short when it comes to buying costly TV ads in suburban battlegrounds later this year.

WSJ: "MIDTERM TEA LEAVES SIGNAL HOT WATER FOR REPUBLICANS"

MORE EVIDENCE BUSH LIED ABOUT IRAQ

Mr. Craig Unger, a journalist for Vanity Fair Magazine interviewed several former intelligence and military officials who have served in the CIA, State Dept. and the Pentagon. All of them believe the Niger documents were part of a campaign for the White House to deliberately mislead Americans on Iraq.

VANITY FAIR: "THE WAR THEY WANTED, THE LIES THEY NEEDED" BY MR. CRAIG UNGER

GOP HANDBOOK ON STEALING ELECTIONS

Below is the Bush Republican Party of Scum Handbook on How to Steal Elections. Rove probably wrote it, with a little help from Cheney of course.

Mr. Greg Palast wrote an editorial entitled "How They Stole Ohio" for Buzz Flash.com yesterday. Mr. Palast is no crazed conspiracy theorist or left-wing nut job. He is a well-educated journalist who received a degree in finance while studying under Milton Friedman and other well-known intellectuals who were in favor of free trade. Mr. Palast began his career as an investigator of corporate fraud and racketeering, but later turned his skills to journalism and has become a well-known investigative reporter. He has worldwide experience both as an investigator and journalist. He has written numerous books, some of which are academic. Mr. Palast has won numerous awards for his articles and books. It seems that Mr. Palate’s background in investigating fraud and racketeering is a necessary skill in examining the Bush administration on all levels. If you would like to read more about Mr. Palast you can find his bio here: BIO ON GREG PALAST

You might want to do those yoga exercises again or enjoy a glass of your favorite relaxing beverage of choice before reading the Party of Scum's How To Manual. If the mainstream media and press do not run with this story and if the perpetuators and participants of this evil, horrendous and reprehensible scheme, which makes a mockery of democracy and the will of the people, are not brought to justice, we Democrats had better start learning how to steal elections ourselves. What a disgraceful and shameful thought. Sadly, my thinking is a reflection of just how low we have sunk as a nation under the Bush people. We steal, we lie, we torture, we kill, we maim. And then we rationalize our stealing, lying, torturing, killing and maiming. Yet Bush & Co. say we are a Christian nation. No more to be said here. I think you get my drift. LS

Excerpts:

Step 1: "Spoiling" ballots -- 1,389,231 of them. In the vote-count game, these are called "undervotes" and "overvotes." You can recognize these lost ballots by their hanging chads, punch cards without punches (an Ohio specialty), paper ballots eaten by scanners, and touch screens that didn't know you touched them.

Step 2: Rejecting "provisional ballots" -- 1,090,729 in this pile. Voters finding themselves at the "wrong" precinct, or wrongly "scrubbed" from voter rolls get these back-of-the-bus ballots first inaugurated in 2002. In '04, provisional ballots were passed out like candy to voters in the poorest precincts. They handed them out -- then threw them away -- one million dumped in all. In Ohio, Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell changed state rules, allowing him to toss out the ballots of legal voters who cast ballots in the wrong precinct although these citizens were told their vote would count after confirming their registration.

Step 3: Not counting absentee ballots -- 526,420 of them. At least, that's what we figure from official stats. But it's anyone's guess how many mailed-in votes were dumped. (However, in one case, in Palm Beach, Florida, Jeb Bush's candidate for Elections Supervisor, Theresa LaPore, counted more absentee votes than absentee ballots mailed in. Not the brightest bulb in the vote-fix biz, that Theresa.)

Step 4: Scrub'm, Purge'm, Block'm. These are the voters who never got to vote at all. This group includes those who found their registrations were never entered on the voter rolls. In Ohio, about one-fourth of those registered by Jesse Jackson's 2004 voter drive, found their registrations delayed beyond the election date or lost.

Add to this un-voter group, those who were wrongly "scrubbed" from registries as "felons." For example, there was Bernice Kines, purged in Florida in 2004 because she was convicted of a felony on July 31, 2009. I repeat: 2009. There was something especially odd about the Ohio felon purge: ex-cons are ALLOWED to vote in that state, Mr. Blackwell.

How many lost their chance to vote by scrubbing, purging and blocking? That's anyone's guess, but one million would not be an unfair estimate -- and that's not included in the 3.6 million tally of ballots uncounted.

Was it deliberate? Oh, my God, yes. I'd like you to take a look at the "caging" lists the Republican National Committee concocted to challenge voters with "suspect" addresses. It included page after page of African-American soldiers, like one Randall Prausa, shipped overseas. Mission accomplished, Mr. President?


GREG PALAST ON HOW GOP STOLE THE 2004 ELECTION

STOLEN ELECTION 2004

The extraordinary and well-researched article written by RFK, Jr. broke today on Rolling Stone Magazine. I found the piece via Raw Story.com. It is extremely long so you may want to click on the print version and take your time reading it. I am sure the mainstream media will downplay the outrageous and sickening findings as much as it can. I have included a few excerpts of the article below, to give you a preview. The more I read, see, hear and learn about the Bush GOP, the more I loathe it. The lot of them are criminal monsters. LS

Excerpts:

But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots -- or received them too late to vote(4) -- after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment -- roughly one for every 100 cast.(10)

The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush's victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.(11)

But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004(12) -- more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.(13) (See Ohio's Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And that doesn?t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.(15)

As the last polling stations closed on the West Coast, exit polls showed Kerry ahead in ten of eleven battleground states -- including commanding leads in Ohio and Florida -- and winning by a million and a half votes nationally. The exit polls even showed Kerry breathing down Bush's neck in supposed GOP strongholds Virginia and North Carolina.(30) Against these numbers, the statistical likelihood of Bush winning was less than one in 450,000.(31) ''Either the exit polls, by and large, are completely wrong,'' a Fox News analyst declared, ''or George Bush loses.''(32)

But as the evening progressed, official tallies began to show implausible disparities -- as much as 9.5 percent -- with the exit polls. In ten of the eleven battleground states, the tallied margins departed from what the polls had predicted. In every case, the shift favored Bush. Based on exit polls, CNN had predicted Kerry defeating Bush in Ohio by a margin of 4.2 percentage points. Instead, election results showed Bush winning the state by 2.5 percent. Bush also tallied 6.5 percent more than the polls had predicted in Pennsylvania, and 4.9 percent more in Florida.(33)

According to Steven F. Freeman, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in research methodology, the odds against all three of those shifts occurring in concert are one in 660,000. ''As much as we can say in sound science that something is impossible,'' he says, ''it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote count in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error.'' (See The Tale of the Exit Polls)

Puzzled by the discrepancies, Freeman laboriously examined the raw polling data released by Edison/Mitofsky in January 2005. ''I'm not even political -- I despise the Democrats,'' he says. ''I'm a survey expert. I got into this because I was mystified about how the exit polls could have been so wrong.'' In his forthcoming book, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count, Freeman lays out a statistical analysis of the polls that is deeply troubling.

The evidence is especially strong in Ohio. In January, a team of mathematicians from the National Election Data Archive, a nonpartisan watchdog group, compared the state's exit polls against the certified vote count in each of the forty-nine precincts polled by Edison/Mitofsky. In twenty-two of those precincts -- nearly half of those polled -- they discovered results that differed widely from the official tally. Once again -- against all odds -- the widespread discrepancies were stacked massively in Bush's favor: In only two of the suspect twenty-two precincts did the disparity benefit Kerry. The wildest discrepancy came from the precinct Mitofsky numbered ''27,'' in order to protect the anonymity of those surveyed. According to the exit poll, Kerry should have received sixty-seven percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only thirty-eight percent. The statistical odds against such a variance are just shy of one in 3 billion.(40)


RFK, JR. ON THE STOLEN ELECTION 2004