Wild-Eyed Chest-Thumping Bush

Columnist Georgie Anne Geyer of The Dallas Morning News reports on the alarming state of mind of the always alarming Madman in the Oval Office:

"The White House sees terrorists as born, not created by history, bearing the mark of Cain, not the mark of circumstance. There is a scarlet 'T' written on their foreheads at birth and the only answer is to destroy them. This kind of thinking, of course, relieves the thinker of any responsibility for the presence of the insurgent-terrorist-whatever in our innocent midst. . . "

"[B]y all reports, President Bush is more convinced than ever of his righteousness."

"Friends of his from Texas were shocked recently to find him nearly wild-eyed, thumping himself on the chest three times while he repeated 'I am the president!' He also made it clear he was setting Iraq up so his successor could not get out of "'our country's destiny.'" (emphasis added)

Hat tip to Digby

Bush Madman Republicans Crawford Texas Politics Psycho Bush News Georgie Anne Geyer

McCain & O'Reilly: Save the Patriarchy!

Poor Bill O'Reilly and John McCain are dripping with anxious masculinity. The white Christian men are fearful about the coming downfall of the "White, Christian, Male Power Structure."

Bill and John have discovered the feminist plot to bring down the patriarchy as they know it!

How long have they known?

I call it payback for welfare reform.

The forecast of a coming minority of white males has the conservative men so terrified that we think it may be time to introduce a little family support legislation in this dog-eat-dog nation. How about some generous paid maternity/family leave? You know, like all the other developed nations have. Want to save the white race? Universal childcare might help. Pay all families for the vital social contribution of reproductive work, and maybe white women will start having babies again. Or maybe not.

Sorry guys, putting a cap on immigration is Not going to save you. And neither will outlawing abortion or fabricating stories about semen as the cure for women's depression. Nice try, but your downfall is inevitable.

Senator McCain on the O'Reilly Factor [Video]:

Bill O'Reilly: But do you understand what the New York Times wants, and the far-left want? They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, which you're a part, and so am I, and they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have. In that regard, Pat Buchanan is right. So I say you've got to cap with a number.

John McCain: In America today we've got a very strong economy and low unemployment, so we need addition farm workers, including by the way agriculture, but there may come a time where we have an economic downturn, and we don't need so many.

O'Reilly: But in this bill, you guys have got to cap it. Because estimation is 12 million, there may be 20 [million]. You don't know, I don't know. We've got to cap it.

McCain: We do, we do. I agree with you.

McCain O'Reilly Patriarchy Anxious Masculinity News Politics Immigration

Laura Bush Sings: Liberal's Just Another Word for Gay

Laura Bush was never so honest, or funny:

If you don't speak for right wing, we'll sock you in the balls!

Laura Bush Comedy Music Video Insane Rightwingers News Politics

Bush Fights to Stop Testing for Mad Cow Disease

U.S. Government Fights to Keep Meatpackers from Testing Slaughtered Cattle for Mad Cow Disease

File this one under: If the news of the day sounds like it comes straight out of an old-time lunatic asylum, you know it must be true in America.

International Herald Tribune:

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

. . . A federal judge ruled in March that such tests must be allowed. The ruling was scheduled to take effect June 1, but the Agriculture Department said Tuesday it would appeal, effectively delaying the testing until the court challenge has played out.

. . . The Agriculture Department argued that widespread testing could lead to a false positive that would harm the meat industry. . .

Here are my best attempts to grasp what is going on in the carnivorous neocon mind:

1) Mad Cow Disease is a liberal myth like global warming.

2) Mad Cow Disease was sent here by God. We should honor it. It will bring on the Rapture.

Also see E. coli conservatism . .

Bush Mad Cow Disease Republicans Insane Conservatives News Politics USDA

Al Gore's New Book Debuts at #1

Al Gore's new book, The Assault on Reason, has been at the top of Amazon.com's best selling nonfiction book list since the day it was released, reports Jerome Armstrong at MyDD. The blogger adds that Gore's new book is expected "to debut on the NYT's non-fiction best-seller list at #1 this coming Sunday."

Don't forget that Al Gore will be here in Nashville this Friday to sign copies of The Assault on Reason. And you better be there early, or you won't get a book or get within a mile of the man who should be our president.

Al Gore Best Seller List Book Signing Assault on Reason News Politics Tennessee Nashville Gore's New Book Al Gore 2008

The Obama Health Plan

Health Reform
By ATUL GAWANDE

As a surgeon, I’ve worked with the veterans’ health system, Medicare, Medicaid and private insurance companies. I’ve seen health care in Canada, Britain, Switzerland and the Netherlands. And I was in the Clinton administration when our plan for universal coverage failed. So, with a new health reform debate under way, what I want to tell you in my last guest column is this:

First, there is not a place in this world that is not struggling to control health costs while providing high-quality, easily accessible care. No one — no one — has a great solution.

But second, whether as a doctor or as a citizen, I would take almost any system — from Medicare-for-all to a private insurance voucher system — over the one we now have. Job-based insurance is bleeding away the viability of American businesses — even doctors complain about the cost of insuring employees. And it has left large numbers of patients without adequate coverage when they need it. In the last two years, for example, 51 percent of Americans surveyed did not fill a prescription or visit a doctor for a known medical issue because of cost.

My worry is less about what happens if we change than what happens if we don’t.

This week, Barack Obama released his health reform plan. . . . It is not single-payer. . .

The ultimate measure of leadership, however, is not the plan. It is the capacity to take that plan and persuade people to find common ground in it. The politician who can is the one we want.

Read more. .

ATUL GAWANDE News Politics Bush Healthcare Single Payer Obama Edwards Universal Healthcare Canada

Fred Thompson to Run - Headquarters to Be in Nashville

So Fred Thompson, the Hollywood actor from Tennessee, will soon be a presidential candidate -- because you just can't have too many old white guys vying for captain of the Republican Disastership.

And the McCain campaign dead pool was formed yesterday.

Rightwingers are enthralled. They have finally found another actor willing to play the role of neocon president. Already there are plans to pull out Fred's shiny red pick-up truck so the Law and Order guy can better play at being a regular downhome guy. If you live in Iowa or New Hampshire, expect phony Fred in a red pick-up truck to be waxing 'folksy' at photo-op near you.

I wish I was kidding.

An adviser to the Republican actor told The New York Sun to expect the announcment of "the formation of a presidential 'testing-the-waters' committee early next week — possibly as early as Sunday."

Apparently, the tentative plan is to announce the candidacy over the 4th of July weekend. Maybe Fred will have fireworks in the background.

The divorced Hollywood actor will have campaign headquarters in Washington and Nashville.

We here in Nashville are positively thrilled at the prospect of having the Washington insider in our midst. Bill Frist and Fred Thompson too!

I knew something was up this morning even before I saw the good news for desperate conservatives in my inbox. The thrill of Thompson's potential campaign has renewed the interest in Thompson's trophy wife -- everyone wants to see this Jeri Kehn flirting with Wolfowitz photo.

Here's one of several Thompson fun facts: Fred Thompson's high school yearbook caption: "The lazier a man is, the more he plans to do tomorrow."

But Thompson is known far and wide as a "lackadaisical campaigner." Maybe that's why he has such a small role in Law and Order. In the words of a savvy Tennessee political columnist, "During his eight years in the U.S. Senate, an insertion into the Congressional Record amounted to heavy lifting."

And the fun just never quits. The WSJ reports that the infamous Tim Griffin, Rove hatchet-man and Arkansas GonzoGate attorney, may soon have a job offer from the Thompson campaign.

[Graphic: Fred Thompson and trophy wife Jeri Kehn, twenty-five years his junior. Is Fred's head big or what?]

Hat tip to memeorandum.

Tim Griffin Fred Thompson News 2008 Jeri Kehn Photo 2008 Republicans Thompson's Wife Politics Campaign Headquarters Nashville Tennessee Lazy Fred Thompson Rove

Al Gore To Sign New Book in Nashville

Al Gore will sign copies of his new book -- The Assault on Reason -- in Nashville at Davis-Kidd in the Mall at Green Hills noon this Friday.

Take some Draft Gore flyers with you.

Update: Al Gore's new book is Number One!

Al Gore Book Signing Assault on Reason News Politics Tennessee Nashville Gore's New Book Draft Gore

VIDEO: New Orleans 20 Months After Katrina

The music is "Monday Night In New Orleans" by Kermit Ruffins (and The Barbeque Swingers):

Alan Breslauer: "A short compilation of video footage I took when visiting New Orleans earlier this month. While some parts of the city have made significant progress, the poorer and lower situated areas like the Lower 9th Ward remain devastated. Yet, the most difficult part for me was not viewing the destruction but witnessing the lack of activity, building, people, hope. All were conspicuously absent. . . "

"The music is "Monday Night In New Orleans" by Kermit Ruffins (and The Barbeque Swingers) who, for my money, is the best living musician in the city."

Read more at The Brad Blog

New Orleans Bush Incompetent Republicans News Politics Katrina Video

Liberal Links

VP Cheney snubs daughter Mary for baby photo-op - Page One Q
Tough, Strong, Rational. Just Don’t Mention Ferrets. - The Heretik
Online Chatter Grows for Gore -- The Left Coaster
Crying Over Spilled Semen -- Psychology Today
Is Carl Bernstein a Sexist? -- TalkLeft
Fitzgerald wants Libby to get three years -- The Sideshow
High Number of Moms Admit Pot Use -- Drug WarRant
We are all in it together, Clinton says -- Yahoo
Fitzgerald Confirms Plame Was ‘Covert’ at Time of Leak -- The Democratic Daily
Bush Calls Attacks on Immigration Bill ‘Empty Political Rhetoric’ -- NY Times
Reviews On Obama and Edwards' Health Care Plans -- TPM Cafe
US rejects all proposals on climate change -- The Guardian
‘Put Everything’ Behind Escalation So We Can Bomb Iran and Syria -- Think Progress
An open letter to Cindy Sheehan, from the administrator of Democratic Underground - DU
"Enhanced interrogation", the Bush administration's preferred newspeak for torture, appears to have been coined by the Nazi Party in the 1937. - Josh Marshall
Women’s inferiority – in fact, their malevolence — is as ingrained in American popular culture as it is anywhere they’re sporting burkhas. -- Whedonesque

Tennessee:
The Rude Pundit To Teach at Bonnaroo:
So, like, the Rude Pundit will be teaching activist theatre classes each morning of the big ass Bonnaroo Music Festival in Tennessee, June 15-17. -- The Rude Pundit
Congressman Cohen Seeks Formal Apology for Slavery -- Memphis Commercial Appeal
Sen. Ophelia Ford Refuses to Go to Rehab -- Eyewitness News, ABC
Out-of-State White Supremacists Invade Knoxville, Tennessee -- Nashville is Talking
Neighbors dread Bible Park in Murfreesboro, Tennessee -- The Tennessean

Race Gender Gay Gore Bush News Feminist Politics Tennessee Steve Cohen

How We’re Animalistic — in Good Ways and Bad

Animal Politics
by Maureen Dowd

The odd thing is that conservatives wear pinstriped suits, when they really should be walking around in togas. The main contribution of the Greeks to modern American politics may have been Michael Dukakis, who once climbed the Acropolis in wingtips.

But that doesn’t stop conservatives — especially the Straussians who pushed for going into Iraq — from being obsessed with ancient Greece, and from believing that they are the successors to Plato and Homer in terms of the lofty ideals and nobility and character in American politics — while Democrats merely muck about with policies for the needy.

Harvey Mansfield, a leading Straussian who teaches political science at Harvard and who wrote a book called “Manliness” (he’s for it), gave the Jefferson lecture recently at the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington.

It was an ode, as his book is, to “thumos,” the Greek word that means spiritedness, with flavors of ambition, pride and brute willfulness. Thumos, as Philip Kennicott wrote in The Washington Post, “is a word reinvented by conservative academics who need to put a fancy name on a political philosophy that boils down to ‘boys will be boys.’ ”

Mr. Mansfield did not mention the war, which is a downer at conclaves of neocons and thumos worshippers. But he explained that thumos is “the bristling reaction of an animal in face of a threat or a possible threat.” In thumos, he added, “we see the animality of man, for men (and especially males) often behave like dogs barking, snakes hissing, birds flapping. But precisely here we also see the humanity of the human animal” because it is reacting for “a reason, even for a principle, a cause. Only human beings get angry.”

Read more . . .

Maureen Dowd News Politics Bush Iraq War War Czar Surge

God Speaks to Tom Delay

Tom Delay reports that God has spoken to him. God wants Tom Delay to build the conservative equivalent of MoveOn.org.

We think we have the perfect name for the Hammer's new organization:

MoveBack.org.

No word yet on whether God wants the indicted former Congressman to build his angry white male movement from inside Leavenworth Penitentiary.

Via The New Yorker -- Party Unfaithful -- The Republican implosion:

Former Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who resigned under indictment on campaign finance-related charges in Texas, also has grown dissatisfied with the president's stewardship of the conservative movement. DeLay told Goldberg that in coming years, when he is not fighting the Texas indictment, he plans to build a conservative grass-roots movement to rival MoveOn.org, insisting that divine inspiration brought him to that quest.

"God has spoken to me," DeLay said. "I listen to God, and what I've heard is that I'm supposed to devote myself to rebuilding the conservative base of the Republican party, and I think we shouldn't be underestimated."

Tom Delay Republican Fool MoveOn.org Texas MoveBack.org News Politics

Fred Thompson is Stupid (Video)

Chickenhawk Fred Thompson -- Still Phony After All These Years:

"Even though Fred Thompson avoided serving our country in Viet Nam by taking an 'extended tour' in Grad school, he still feels he has the right to use the brave sacrifices of every American veteran for his own personal political ambitions. This is a response to 'Fred Thompson, Soldier'".

"You see, it's not enough for Fred to thank the soldiers, he just can't resist putting everyone else down while he does it." -- via Americans for Change

Hat tip to Enclave

Fred Thompson Republican Pandering Iraq War News Politics Bush ChickenHawk Phony Fred Thompson

Cindy Sheehan Resigns from Anti-War Movement

She did far more than her share of the hard work of awakening this country from the deep sleep of apathy.

She's a hero, and she deserves a break. I'll miss her.

"Good Riddance Attention Whore"


Cindy Sheehan Peace Movement Casey Sheehan Iraq AntiWar News Politics Bush

David Brooks Calls Al Gore "Strange"

Al Gore is a Vulcan, sayeth the man who termed kos a "Kingpin." In a column titled The Vulcan Utopia (full column link below), David Brooks disparages Al Gore's new book and attempts to resurrect all the old superficial media critiques of the former Vice President. He's stiff, he's chilly, he's "strange."

We're guessing Brooks gets his ideas by reading Maureen Dowd.

Once again, we have a perfect demonstration of Al Gore's point: the media consistently ignores the important issues of the day in order to focus on matters better left to high school popularity contests.

Is Al Gore a cold Vulcan? Is Hillary Clinton too ambitious? Is Barack Obama hen-pecked? Is John Edwards too pretty to be president?

While David Brooks is busy finding Al Gore "strange," the possible future president is showered with standing ovations across the globe, and the pleas for Gore to enter the presidential race show no signs of abating.

As many have noted, Bobo's columns can't even pass a fact-checking test.

Read The Vulcan Utopia.

Graphic via Tom Tomorrow

Al Gore David Brooks Global Warming Climate Change Draft Gore 2008 Assault on Reason News Politics Tennessee Bush
Al Gore's New Book

Herbert: On the N.Y.P.D.

Small Incidents Are Creating a Big Problem With the N.Y.P.D.
By BOB HERBERT

These are small incidents, but they are accumulating by the tens of thousands, and someday New Yorkers are going to be shocked by the power of the anger that these seemingly insignificant incidents have generated.

The principal of Bushwick Community High School in Brooklyn told me about a student who was gratuitously insulted by a police officer at a subway station the other day. The girl had lost her MetroCard and was carrying a note on the school’s letterhead asking that she be allowed to ride the train. This was fine with the token clerk, but the clerk told the girl to show the note to a cop on duty at the station.

The cop, in front of several onlookers, told the girl she was the oldest-looking high school student he had ever seen. He demanded that she tell him the square root of 12. He loudly declared that she was stupid and refused to let her board a train.

The girl left the station devastated and in tears. No big deal. Certainly not newsworthy. Just another case of cops being cops.

Read the whole thing . .

Bob Herbert NYPD News Politics New York Race

Hundreds Boo Former Bush Chief of Staff (Video)

I guess Bush and Cheney won't be speaking at the University of Massachusetts. But the hostile reception given to Andrew Card (see video below) is exactly the kind of reception which Paul Krugman argues should be given to all the loyal Bushies.

University of Massachusetts, Amherst Students and Faculty Say LOUDLY: No Honor for Andrew Card:

"Andrew Card, President George W. Bush's former Chief of Staff, was showered with a chorus of boos and catcalls from students and faculty of the University of Massachusetts while receiving an honorary degree Friday. Protesters, who caught the embarrassing scene on video, attached anti-Card signs to their robes and drowned out Provost Charlena Seymour's remarks about Card's "public service." Even faculty sitting on stage joined in on the action, screaming their disapproval while holding signs that read 'Card: No Honor, No Degree.'"

"Card, obviously shaken by the commotion, managed a slight grin while Seymour spoke."

Andrew Card University of Massachusetts Amherst
Paul Krugman News Politics Bush Iraq War AntiWar Protest

Alabama State Website Names Gays as Potential Terrorists

Terming gays as potential terrorists sounds like what we've come to expect from the Red State Bible Belt region of the USA, but the Director of Alabama Homeland Security says he borrowed the idea from a Pennsylvania state sponsored site.

We knew stupidity wasn't confined to the southern region of the Empire, but it's always nice to have proof. Oh, I forgot, we already had proof because there are indeed Republicans in Pennsylvania too.

MONTGOMERY, Ala. -- The Alabama Department of Homeland Security has taken down a Web site it operated that included gay rights and anti-war organizations in a list of groups that could include terrorists.

The Web site identified different types of terrorists, and included a list of groups it believed could spawn terrorists. The list also included environmentalists, animal rights advocates and abortion opponents.

If the state of Alabama thinks gays are terrorists, one can only presume the Red State must also view blacks as the perpetrators of racism aimed at the dwindling white majority.

But the Alabama web site didn't stop there. It also warned that domestic terrorists can be found in "anti-government groups that believe the 'current government is violating the basic principles laid out by the U.S. Constitution.'"

Um, in other words, if you are not a heterosexual loyal Bushie, you might be a terrorist.

Stephen P. Gordon, political director of the Libertarian National Committee, charges that "Alabama Homeland Security would incarcerate Madison, Washington and Jefferson at Guantanamo Bay, if they had that option."

Alabama Homeland Security Director Jim Walker defends the website and whines that he didn't hear any complaints until the wrath of the blogs was unleashed. Translation, there were no complaints about the bizarre website until people actually knew that the damn thing existed.

There's more at The Blend.

Red State News Gay Rights News Politics Alabama Homeland Security Gay Terrorists War on Gays Republicans Pennsylvania

Radical Christians Attack Gay Demonstrators in Moscow

Gawd! Is there no place on the planet that has not been invaded by the radical Christianists?

Russian Police Suppress Gay Rights Rally:

MOSCOW, May 27 — Police officers and riot troops quashed a gay rights rally in Moscow today, detaining organizers as well as at least two European lawmakers, while members of Orthodox Christian and nationalist groups threw insults, eggs and fists at demonstrators.

. . Today’s protest was the second attempt by organizers to hold a gay pride demonstration in Moscow. A similar event last year ended in bloodshed when more than 100 ultranationalists and radical Orthodox Christians attacked gay rights demonstrators in Moscow.

. . In contrast with some Western European countries, there is little public acceptance of homosexuality in Russia, where even prominent public officials have made disparaging remarks about gay people.

Representatives from gay rights groups, however, seemed undaunted by the violence and vowed to continue organizing demonstrations.

Cool Graphic via Pink News UK

There's more at aTypical Joe

Gay Rights News Politics Moscow Russia Gay Pride Radical Christians Religion War on Gays

Trust and Betrayal

Betrayal
by PAUL KRUGMAN

“In this place where valor sleeps, we are reminded why America has always gone to war reluctantly, because we know the costs of war.” That’s what President Bush said last year, in a Memorial Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery.

Those were fine words, spoken by a man with less right to say them than any president in our nation’s history. For Mr. Bush took us to war not with reluctance, but with unseemly eagerness.

Now that war has turned into an epic disaster, in part because the war’s architects, whom we now know were warned about the risks, didn’t want to hear about them. Yet Congress seems powerless to stop it. How did it all go so wrong?

Future historians will shake their heads over how easily America was misled into war. The warning signs, the indications that we had a rogue administration determined to use 9/11 as an excuse for war, were there, for those willing to see them, right from the beginning — even before Mr. Bush began explicitly pushing for war with Iraq.

In fact, the very first time Mr. Bush declared a war on terror that “will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated,” people should have realized that he was going to use the terrorist attack to justify anything and everything.

Read more at Free Democracy

Paul Krugman News Politics Bush Osama is Back Iraq War Giuliani McCain Romney 9/11 War on Terror

Michael Moore on Maher's Real Time & Moore

The discussion centered on Sicko and the health care crisis in the U.S. - see it at Youtube.

Michael Moore's appearance on Bill Maher's Real Time was the first live interview he's given in two and a half years.

Unless I blinked, there was no discussion of the Bush Administration's harassment/investigation of Michael Moore for taking 9/11 first responders to Cuba for the health care they couldn't get in the U.S.

But why should the Evil Doer Pursuer always get to steal the show? There was plenty to talk about without bringing the subject of the Oval Office Madman in. Also, Moore's lawyers may have advised him to stay mum on the subject.

Here's Moore's statement on the subject from earlier this month:

Filmmaker Michael Moore has accused the White House of having political reasons for investigating his trip to Cuba to get health care for U.S. workers.

Moore took a group of ailing Sept. 11 rescue workers to Cuba to seek medical treatment while making his documentary Sicko.

"For five and a half years, the Bush administration has ignored and neglected the heroes of the 9/11 community. . These heroic first responders have been left to fend for themselves without coverage and without care. I understand why the Bush administration is coming after me — I have tried to help the very people they refuse to help, but until George W. Bush outlaws helping your fellow man, I have broken no laws and I have nothing to hide."

Michael has another interview - the cover story - in Entertainment Weekly: Ready for Moore?

Cartoon via Progressive Daily Beacon

Sicko -- The Trailer
Sicko' Preview and Rave Reviews

Michael Moore Bill Maher Real Time Sicko Video Trailer Universal Health Care Cuba Bush News Politics Health Care Crisis In America

Bush’s Fleurs du Mal

W.’s Fleurs du Mal
By MAUREEN DOWD

For me, the saddest spot in Washington is the inverted V of the black granite Vietnam wall, jutting up with the names of young men dying in a war that their leaders already knew could not be won.

So many died because of ego and deceit — because L.B.J. and Robert McNamara wanted to save face or because Henry Kissinger wanted to protect Nixon’s re-election chances.

Now the Bush administration finds itself at that same hour of shame. It knows the surge is not working. Iraq is in a civil war, with a gruesome bonus of terrorists mixed in. April was the worst month this year for the American military, with 104 soldiers killed, and there have been about 90 killed thus far in May. The democracy’s not jelling, as Iraqi lawmakers get ready to slouch off for a two-month vacation, leaving our kids to be blown up.

The top-flight counterinsurgency team that President Bush sent in after long years of pretending that we’d “turned the corner” doesn’t believe there’s a military solution. General Petraeus is reduced to writing an open letter to the Iraqi public, pleading with them to reject sectarianism and violence, even as the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr slinks back from four months in Iran, rallying his fans by crying: “No, no, no to Satan! No, no, no to America! No, no, no to occupation! No, no, no to Israel!”

W. thinks he can save face if he keeps taunting Democrats as the party of surrender — just as Nixon did — and dumps the Frankenstate he’s created on his successor.

“The enemy in Vietnam had neither the intent nor the capability to strike our homeland,” he told Coast Guard Academy graduates. “The enemy in Iraq does. Nine-eleven taught us that to protect the American people we must fight the terrorists where they live so that we don’t have to fight them where we live.”

The president said an intelligence report (which turned out to be two years old) showed that Osama had been trying to send Qaeda terrorists in Iraq to attack America. So clearly, Osama is capable of multitasking: Order the killers in Iraq to go after American soldiers there and American civilians here. There AND here. Get it, W.?

The president is on a continuous loop of sophistry: We have to push on in Iraq because Al Qaeda is there, even though Al Qaeda is there because we pushed into Iraq. Our troops have to keep dying there because our troops have been dying there. We have to stay so the enemy doesn’t know we’re leaving. Osama hasn’t been found because he’s hiding.

The terrorists moved into George Bush’s Iraq, not Saddam Hussein’s. W.’s ranting about Al Qaeda there is like planting fleurs du mal and then complaining your garden is toxic.

The president looked as if he wanted to smack David Gregory when the NBC reporter asked him at the news conference Thursday if he could still be “a credible messenger on the war” given all the mistakes and all the disillusioned Republicans.

“I’m credible because I read the intelligence, David,” he replied sharply.

But he isn’t and he doesn’t. Otherwise he might have read “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” in August 2001, and might have read the prewar intelligence reports the Senate just released that presciently forecast the horrors in store for naïve presidents who race to war because they want to be seen as hard, not soft.

Intelligence analysts may have muffed the W.M.D. issue, but they accurately predicted that implanting democracy in Iraq would be an “alien” idea that could lead to turbulence and violence; that Al Qaeda would hook up with Saddam loyalists and “angry young recruits” to militant Islam to “wage guerrilla warfare” on American forces, and that Iran and Al Qaeda would be the winners if the Bushies botched the occupation.

W. repeated last week that he would never retreat, but his advisers are working on ways to retreat. After the surge, in lieu of strategy, come the “concepts.”

Condi Rice, Bob Gates and generals at the Pentagon are talking about long-range “concepts” for reducing forces in Iraq, The Times reported yesterday, as a way to tamp down criticism, including from Republicans; it is also an acknowledgment that they can’t sustain the current force level there much longer. The article said that officials were starting to think about how to halve the 20 American combat brigades in Iraq, sometime in the second half of 2008.

As the Hollywood screenwriter said in “Annie Hall”: “Right now it’s only a notion, but I think I can get money to make it into a concept and later turn it into an idea.”

Hat tip to Donkey O.D.

Maureen Dowd News Politics Bush Press Conference Iraq War Vietnam Bush Miserable Failure David Gregory Dowd Surge

Al Gore Late Night with David Letterman

Brilliant, witty, beloved, that's Al Gore. David Letterman and AL GORE discuss the climate crisis, the Iraq War, and Gore's new book The Assault On Reason.

Al Gore on Letterman Part 2

Ask Al Gore to run for President! Send your letter to: The Office of the Honorable Al Gore, 2100 West End Avenue, Suite 620, Nashville, Tennessee 37203. (Send me a copy of your letter and I'll post it - egalia-at-earthlink-dot-net.)

Al Gore David Letterman Video Global Warming 2008 President Gore News Politics Tennessee Bush Assault on Reason

Al Gore on Nightline

This one is more personal -- about Al Gore the man and, maybe, future President.


Ask Al Gore to run for President! Send your letter to: The Office of the Honorable Al Gore, 2100 West End Avenue, Suite 620, Nashville, Tennessee 37203. (Send me a copy of your letter and I'll post it - egalia-at-earthlink-dot-net.)

Al Gore Nightline Video Global Warming 2008 President Gore News Politics Tennessee Bush 2000 Assault on Reason

Arrested While Grieving

Unfair Arrests
By BOB HERBERT

No one is paying much attention, but parts of New York City are like a police state for young men, women and children who happen to be black or Hispanic. They are routinely stopped, searched, harassed, intimidated, humiliated and, in many cases, arrested for no good reason.

Most black elected officials have joined their white colleagues and the media in turning a blind eye to this continuing outrage. And many black cops have joined their white colleagues in the systematic mistreatment.

Last Monday in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, about three dozen grieving young people on their way to a wake for a teenage friend who had been murdered were surrounded by the police, cursed at, handcuffed and ordered into paddy wagons. They were taken to the 83rd precinct stationhouse, where several were thrown into jail.

Leana Matia, an 18-year-old student at John Jay College, was one of those taken into custody. “We were walking toward the train station to take the L train when all these cops just swooped in on us,” she said. “They cursed us out and pushed the guys. And then they handcuffed us. We kept asking, ‘What are you doing?’ ”

Children as young as 13 were among those swept up by the cops. Two of them, including 16-year-old Lamel Carter, were the children of police officers. Some of the youngsters were carrying notes from school saying that they were allowed to be absent to attend the wake. There is no evidence that I’ve been able to find — other than uncorroborated statements by the police — that the teenagers were misbehaving in any way.

Everyone was searched, but nothing unlawful was found — no weapons, no marijuana or other drugs. Some of the kids were told at the scene that they were being seized because they had assembled unlawfully. “I didn’t know what unlawful assembly was,” said Kumar Singh, 18, who was among those arrested.

. . .

New York City cops stopped and, in many cases, searched individuals more than a half million times last year. Those stops are not happening on Park Avenue or Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Thousands upon thousands of them amount to simple harassment of young black and Hispanic males and females who have done absolutely nothing wrong, but feel helpless to object.


Read more . . .

Bob Herbert Race Ethnicity Discrimination Politics Police Harassment New York Freedom News

Islam vs. The West: Smash the Otherness (Video)

Stop the Clash of Civilizations -- Global Public Opinion, the New Superpower


Now if we could only get material like this into the schools.

Stop the Clash of Civilizations -- Avaaz.org

Peace Bush Osama Iraq War Gender News Politics Otherness
Middle East The West

Bush Sh*t in the Rose Garden

Just as Bush heaped absurd praise onto his failure of an Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, a bird flew overhead and dropped her weighty thoughts on the matter onto the Commander Guy's left sleeve.

Bush tried to get it off, but it was like the blood on his hands. It just wouldn't come off.


Bush Alberto Gonzales Press Conference Bird Poop News Politics

Sen. Ford Carried Out of Wildhorse Saloon

Here we go again. State Sen. Ophelia Ford keeps saying she's not falling off bar stools because she's drunk, she's only falling off bar stools because she's anemic. Last week, the Senator fell off a bar stool and was video-taped in the throes of a bizarre and drunken anemic rant.

This week anemia caused Ophelia Ford to be carried out of the Wildhorse Saloon in downtown Nashville. Heh. She said that. The cabbie who picked her up must not be familar with anemia. But what do cabbies know?

The cab driver who whisked Senator Ford away from the Wildhorse Saloon says he plans to "pursue criminal charges" because the drunken Senator was choking him during one of her anemic rants:

Ford, Hashi said, was intoxicated and brought out to the cab under a blanket to keep the public from seeing her.

She said 'Take me to my (expletive) hotel, (expletive),'" Hashi said, during an interview Thursday. "She kept saying, 'I will fire a lot of people tomorrow.' I didn't know who she was talking about."

During the ride, Hashi said, Ford grabbed the collar of his shirt from behind and pulled it back, tearing a button off. . . The driver said he took Ford to the Holiday Inn Select on West End, where he and her friend helped Ford to her room. He realized afterward that Ford left her shoes in the cab.

Update: Apparently, the Senator slapped her cab driver. You can view the police report here. Thankfully, Ophelia Ford's family plans to intervene. It can't be too soon. Eventually someone is going to slap her back.

News Politics State Senator Ophelia Ford Drunk Again Tennessee State Senator Anemia Wildhorse Saloon Nashville Memphis

Americans Want Iraq War Deadline, Bush Doesn't

The Dems' capitulation to the Commander Guy comes just when a new CBS/New York Times poll finds that six in ten Americans want a timetable for troop withdrawal.

The Iraq War Funding Bill -- minus a troop withdrawal deadline -- passed the Democratic controlled House by a vote of 280-142.

The Senate succumbed to the Commander Guy with a vote of 80 to 14.

Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama and Chris Dodd all voted against the bill. Sen. Joe Biden voted for it.

In the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi was one of the 140 Democrats who voted against the measure. Two Republicans joined the 140 opposing Democrats -- Republican Reps. John Duncan of Tennessee and Ron Paul of Texas voted against the bill.

But back to that poll - the number of Americans who say the war is going "badly" has risen by 10 percentage points this month to a new high of 76 percent!

HOW IS THE WAR GOING?

Well
23%
Badly
76%

And when it comes to feeling pessimistic about the path Bush is taking this country down, the poll records "the highest number since the CBS/NYT poll started asking the question in 1983."

DIRECTION OF THE COUNTRY

Wrong track
72%
Right direction
24%

Meanwhile, the combative Commander Guy who rules us warns that we can expect a "bloody" summer in Iraq.

Bush Iraq War Funding Bill Democratic Congress News Politics Obama Clinton Jimmy Duncan Tennessee

Immigrants and Politics

Immigrants
by Paul Krugman

A piece of advice for progressives trying to figure out where they stand on immigration reform: it’s the political economy, stupid. Analyzing the direct economic gains and losses from proposed reform isn’t enough. You also have to think about how the reform would affect the future political environment.

To see what I mean — and why the proposed immigration bill, despite good intentions, could well make things worse — let’s take a look back at America’s last era of mass immigration.

My own grandparents came to this country during that era, which ended with the imposition of severe immigration restrictions in the 1920s. Needless to say, I’m very glad they made it in before Congress slammed the door. And today’s would-be immigrants are just as deserving as Emma Lazarus’s “huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.”

Moreover, as supporters of immigrant rights rightly remind us, everything today’s immigrant-bashers say — that immigrants are insufficiently skilled, that they’re too culturally alien, and, implied though rarely stated explicitly, that they’re not white enough — was said a century ago about Italians, Poles and Jews.

Yet then as now there were some good reasons to be concerned about the effects of immigration.

There’s a highly technical controversy going on among economists about the effects of recent immigration on wages. However that dispute turns out, it’s clear that the earlier wave of immigration increased inequality and depressed the wages of the less skilled. For example, a recent study by Jeffrey Williamson, a Harvard economic historian, suggests that in 1913 the real wages of unskilled U.S. workers were around 10 percent lower than they would have been without mass immigration. But the straight economics was the least of it. Much more important was the way immigration diluted democracy.

In 1910, almost 14 percent of voting-age males in the United States were non-naturalized immigrants. (Women didn’t get the vote until 1920.) Add in the disenfranchised blacks of the Jim Crow South, and what you had in America was a sort of minor-key apartheid system, with about a quarter of the population — in general, the poorest and most in need of help — denied any political voice. . .

[A]s before, one of the things making antiworker, unequalizing policies politically possible is the fact that millions of the worst-paid workers in this country can’t vote. What progressives should care about, above all, is that immigration reform stop our drift into a new system of de facto apartheid.

Read more . .

Paul Krugman Immigration Inequality Immigrant News Politics Bush Race

Abortion: The Fetal Consent Bill

Wonder why Tennessee lawmakers haven't introduced this bill? Somebody tell Stacey Campfield, this one is 'better' than death certificates for abortions!


New Abortion Bill To Require Fetal Consent

via Feministing

Abortion The Onion Reproductive Freedom Feminism News Politics Video

Tell Congress - No Blank Check For Iraq

Tell Congress To Grow a Spine and Stop the Endless Bush War

Via MoveOn.org:

Tell your Member of Congress to vote NO on the Iraq supplemental this week. The American people voted to end the war - no more blank checks for Bush.


Cursor:

"Democrats 'Back Down' and 'Capitulate' on troop withdrawal deadlines, "abandoning their top goal of bringing U.S. troops home," and handing President Bush a 'blank check,' while taking "another step toward endless war.'"

Edwards and Dodd urge Congress to Stand up to Bush:

Edwards told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City today that the current war-funding bill is a "capitulation" to President Bush, since it does not include a timetable to begin a troop withdrawal.

"Congress should send the president the same bill he vetoed again and again until he realizes he has no choice but to start bringing our troops home," Edwards said. "We need to get out of Iraq on our own timetable, not when we are forced to do so by events."

On Wednesday Dodd announced that he will vote against the measure, calling it another "blank check" for the president. "Half measures and equivocations are not going to change our course in Iraq," said Dodd. "If we are serious about ending the war, Congress must stand up to this president's failed policy now -- with clarity and conviction."

Iraq Troop Withdrawal Timetable Democratic Congress News Politics Bush Iraq Supplemental

Rep. Campfield, the TN Black Panthers, & Angry Rep. Rowland

Tennessean columnist Dwight Lewis asked Rep. Stacey Campfield (R-Knoxville) why he voted against the Tennessee Rosa Parks Act.

The Rosa Parks Act would pardon people like Rosa Parks for crimes like sitting in front of the bus.

Rep. Campfield, aka Stacey X, replied that he was against pardoning members of groups that advocate violence, such as "the Black Panthers."

Lewis replied, "In Tennessee?"

Lewis also asked Rep. Donna Rowland (R-Murfreesboro) why she voted against the Rosa Parks Act:

When I contacted her at her Middle Tennessee home Friday morning, Rowland wanted to know whether I had read the bill. After replying that I had not but had read a story about it and the vote in The Tennessean earlier that day, she angrily said:

"Go read it, and get educated about it. Then, call me back."

Race Black News Rosa Parks Act Rep. Campfield Politics Donna Rowland Tennessee Black Panthers News Murfreesboro Knoxville

Voting Against the TN Rosa Parks Act

Who would vote against a bill that would expunge the record of people like Rosa Parks for crimes like sitting in front of the bus?
Every single one of the six legislators who voted against the Tennessee Rosa Parks Act is a Republican.

The Rosa Parks Act "would allow people charged with a misdemeanor or felony while challenging old segregation laws to have their records expunged."

The bill passed unanimously in the Senate. In the House, it passed by a vote of 88-6.

Here are the six guilty Republicans:

• Rep. Kevin Brooks, R-Cleveland (rep.Kevin.brooks@legislature.state.tn.us)
• Rep. Stacey Campfield, R-Knoxville (rep.Stacey.campfield@legislature.state.tn.us)
• Rep. Chris Crider, R-Milan (rep.chris.crider@legislature.state.tn.us)
• Rep. Bill Dunn, R-Knoxville (rep.bill.dunn@legislature.state.tn.us)
• Rep. Joey Hensley, R-Hohenwald (rep.joey.Hensley@legislature.state.tn.us)
• Rep. Donna Rowland, R-Murfreesboro (rep.donna.Rowland@legislature.state.tn.us)

Also see: Rep. Campfield, the TN Black Panthers, & Angry Rep. Rowland

Rosa Parks Act Campfield Bill Dunn Politics Donna Rowland Tennessee News Race Black News

Sicko - The Trailer

The official trailer of Michael Moore's -- goddess love him -- Sicko.


Damn, this looks good! (This is not the sneak preview posted earlier.)

Michael Moore News Politics Sicko Video Trailer Universal Health Care Cuba Bush

Mary Cheney Gives Birth to Son

Mary Cheney's baby has much to overcome. It may well take more than two mothers to trump the venomous genes of Dick.

Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter, Mary Cheney has given birth to her first child.

Samuel David Cheney was born at 9:46 a.m., weighing 8 lbs., 6 oz. The baby is Dick Cheney's sixth grandchild.

"Under Virginia law, Mary’s partner of 15 years, Heather Poe, 'will have no legal relationship with her child. She can’t adopt as a second parent. She won’t have her name on the birth certificate.' President Bush will still not say whether or not he supports gay adoption." [via Think Progress]

Mary Cheney Lesbian Gay Adoption Politics Virginia Bush Dick Cheney Hypocritical Republicans News Gay Rights

Cheney Does Not NOT Use Prostitutes

"Vice President Cheney isn’t not on the phone records of the alleged D.C. Madam, who is accused of running a high-price call-girl ring in Washington, the accused madam’s lawyer said on Tuesday," reports Emily Heil at Roll Call.

The DC Madam's lawyer added that phone numbers from a Virginia neighborhood that Cheney once called home are under investigation.

Sex Scandal Client List DC Madam Politics Virginia Bush Dick Cheney Deborah Palfrey News

Bush's Political Capital

"I promised the President today that I wouldn't say anything bad about... this piece of shit bill."

-- House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH)
via The Hotline

The Minority Leader was speaking of Bush's beloved immigration bill. The Madman in the Oval Office continues to push the legislation despite cries of outrage from his base.

From Michelle Malkin to the Heritage Foundation, they say the plan pushed by their failure of a pResident stinks!

Ironically, the Heritage Foundation insists that the bill "Undermines The Rule of Law." That must be why Bush the Nixonian lawbreaker loves it so!

Politics Bush Lame Duck Immigration Bill John Boehner News Ohio

GonzoGate: Monica Goodling Testifies

Monica Goodling testifies - with immunity - before the House Judiciary Committee this morning at 9:15 (central). Will Monica's memory be any better than that of Alberto "I Don't Recall" Gonzales?

The graduate of Pat Robertson's Regent University is said to be in a fragile emotional state and considerably less experienced than Gonzales, so perhaps some semblance of truth about the Justice Department Attorney Firings will accidentally slip out.

Goodling is under investigation for her efforts to "block the hiring of a career prosecutor last fall because he was too liberal." The loyal Bushie has also blocked the hiring of prosecutors who appeared to be Democrats. That is a violation of federal law.

Monica Goodling Alberto Gonzales News Politics Bush House Judiciary Committee Democratic Congress Purging Liberals

Video: President Gore's Beautiful World - Family Guy

Via The Largest Minority:

"Fox ran a train on their loyal Republican audience last night with scathing episodes of The Simpson and Family Guy. In this Family Guy episode, Death allows Peter to go back in time, but when he returns to the present he discovers he is married to Molly Ringwald and Lois is married to Quagmire. An alternate version of the world is presented in which Al Gore is president, Osama is no longer a problem, flying cars run on vegetable oil, universal healthcare exists, crime is virtually non-existent, education is well-funded, and Supreme Court Justice Scalia, Karl Rove, and Tucker Carlson are all dead. Basically, it's paradise on earth."

Al Gore Family Guy Video Draft Gore 2008 President Gore News Politics Tennessee Bush

Gore Unplugged

Re: Maureen Dowd's 'Pass the Clam Dip' (full column link below) -- From John Edwards' hair to Al Gore's weight, no one proves the point of Al Gore's new book better than gossip columnist Maureen Dowd.

Dowd says she's read Gore's book, but don't expect to learn anything about it in her column.

Doesn't the New York Times have a women's section [tongue firmly in cheek] they can stick her petty columns in? The Times should be embarrassed to have her on the Op-ed page.

Pass the Clam Dip
By MAUREEN DOWD

It’s no wonder Al Gore is a little touchy about his weight, what with everyone trying to read his fat cells like tea leaves to see if he’s going to run.

He was so determined to make his new book look weighty, in the this-treatise-belongs-on-the-shelf-between-Plato-and-Cato sense, rather than the double-chin-isn’t-quite-gone-yet sense, that he did something practically unheard of for a politician: He didn’t plaster his picture on the front.

“The Assault on Reason” looks more like the Beatles’ White Album than a screed against the tinny Texan who didn’t get as many votes in 2000.

The Goracle does concede a small author’s picture on the inside back flap, a chiseled profile that screams Profile in Courage and that also screams Really Old Picture. Indeed, if you read the small print next to the wallet-sized photo of Thin Gore looking out prophetically into the distance, it says it’s from his White House years.

A subliminal clue to his intentions, perhaps? He must be flattered that many demoralized leading Republicans and Bush insiders think a Gore-Obama ticket would be unbeatable. And he must be gratified that his rival Hillary has never cemented her inevitability, even with Bill Clinton’s lip-licking Web video pushing her.

But though he’s on a book tour clearly timed to build on his Oscar flash and Nobel buzz, and take advantage of the public’s curiosity about whether he’ll jump in the race, he almost seems to want to sigh and roll his eyes when he’s asked about it.

“I’m not a candidate,” he told Diane Sawyer on “Good Morning America.” “This book is not a political book. It’s not a candidate book at all.”

Of course, his protestation was lost given the fact that he was sitting in front of a screen blaring the message “The Race to ’08,” and above a crawl that asked “Will he run for the White House?”

He is so fixed on not seeming like a presidential flirt that he risks coming across as a bit of a righteous tease or a high-minded scold, which is exactly what his book is, a high-minded scolding. He upbraided Diane about the graphics for his segment, complaining about buzzwords and saying “That’s not what this is about.”

Diane was not so easily put off as he turned up his nose at the horse race and the vast wasteland of TV, and bored in for the big question: “Donna Brazile, your former campaign manager, has said, ‘If he drops 25 to 30 pounds, he’s running.’ Lost any weight?”

Read more . . .

Maureen Dowd Al Gore Gore 2008 Assault on Reason News Politics Tennessee Bush Diane Sawyer Gore's New Book Bill Richardson Pass the Clam Dip

Al Gore on Good Morning America (Video)

Al Gore discusses his new book in spite of Diane Sawyer on Good Morning America. Are you paying attention, Maureen Dowd?




Al Gore Good Morning America Climate Change Draft Gore 2008 Assault on Reason News Politics Tennessee Bush Diane Sawyer Gore's New Book Video

The Impeach Gonzales Movement is On

Video via Robert Greenwald's Brave New Films and Howard Dean's Democracy for America. Go sign the Impeach Gonzales petition and check out this compelling Impeach Gonzales video, cause Bush the Delusional Wannabe Emperor is once again defying the will of the people and standing by his man lackey.


"He has got my confidence. He has done nothing wrong. . . I, frankly, view what's taking place in Washington today as pure political theater. And it is this kind of political theater that has caused the American people to lose confidence in how Washington operates. . . I stand by Al Gonzales . ." -- George Dubya "Worst pResident Ever" Bush

Gonzales should be impeached -- Robert Kuttner, Boston Globe
The Call to Impeach Gonzales -- The Nation
Impeach Gonzales -- Taylor Marsh
13 State Democratic Parties Demand Impeachment -- Democrats.com
Gonzo Goes: Not "If" But "When" (and How) -- MoJo Blog
Let's Start Using the "I" word -- Impeach -- Robert Greenwald at Huffington Post

Alberto Gonzales Impeach Gonzales Petition News Politics Bush Video DOJ

American Cities and the Great Divide

Great Divide
By BOB HERBERT

A public high school teacher in Brooklyn told me recently about a student who didn’t believe that a restaurant tab for four people could come to more than $500. The student shook his head, as if resisting the very idea. He just couldn’t fathom it.

“How much can you eat?” the student asked. When I asked a teacher in a second school to mention the same issue, one of the responses was, “Is this a true story?”

A lot of New Yorkers are doing awfully well. There are 8 million residents of New York City, and roughly 700,000 are worth a million dollars or more. The average price of a Manhattan apartment is $1.3 million. The annual earnings of the average hedge fund manager is $363 million.

The estimated worth of the mayor, Michael Bloomberg, ranges from $5.5 billion to upwards of $20 billion.

You want a gilded age? This is it. The elite of the Roaring Twenties would be stunned by the wealth of the current era.

Read more. .

Bob Herbert Two Americas Inequality News Politics Class

'Sicko' Preview and Rave Reviews

Watching this clip from Michael Moore's film -- Sicko -- brings back memories of the days when I lived in Canada, a country where people actually get something of enormous value in return for their taxes.

And not just health care. In Canada, I also had the comforting and exceedingly odd knowledge that when it came to looking after my family, I could trust the government to be on my side.

When I lived in Canada, 'social security' meant a lot more than a retirement check, and 'homeland security' meant a lot more than readiness for an attack. In a multitude of ways, the Canadian government behaved as if the well-being of my family was an important priority.

In America, the concept of a nurturing and trustworthy, or competent, government is damn near unimaginable.


"After the screening, several hard-nosed U.S. critics and journalists admitted to crying during the film." -- Anthony Kaufman, Wall Street Journal

"Brilliant and uplifting" -- Fox News

"Movie mogul Harvey Weinstein has confirmed reports he is protecting Michael Moore's latest movie Sicko from U.S. authorities."

Washington Post: CANNES, France -- In Cannes, Michael Moore is a rock star _ mobbed by fans, assailed by cameras . . . Moore's documentary "Sicko" _ a ferocious attack on the U.S. health care industry _ is the talk of the film festival, and he is hot property. Moore caught his breath Monday to tell The Associated Press about the urgent need to reform America's health system, and why he thinks the Bush administration is out to get him.

Much of "Sicko" consists of moving testimony from Americans who have suffered at the hands of insurance companies, drug firms and HMOs. That includes a mother whose daughter died because the nearest hospital could not treat her, and a man who was told the cost of reattaching his two severed fingers would be $60,000 for the middle finger and $12,000 for the ring finger.

Several interview subjects died before the film was completed.

"It was pretty somber working on this film," Moore said. "We just kept thinking, the only reason this person is dying is because they hold American citizenship. If they lived in Canada or Britain or France, they'd have a chance."

Michael Moore News Politics Sicko Video Bush Universal Health Care Canada Homeland Security

Gore's 'Assault on Reason' is Assault on Bush

I don't have a copy yet, but according to Jake Tapper over at ABC News, Al Gore's new book -- The Assault on Reason -- is an assault on that irrational fool in the White House! You know the one.

Tapper speculates that Gore's book will likely drive the presidential candidates further to the left. Cuz that's what leaders do.

Gore Blasts Bush in The Assault on Reason:

In the book, Gore is accusatory, passionate, and angry. He begins discussing the president by accusing him of sharing President Richard Nixon's unprincipled hunger for power -- and the book proceeds to get less complimentary from there. While Gore stops short of flatly calling for the impeachment of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, he certainly gives the impression that in his view such a move would be well deserved. He calls the president a lawbreaker, a liar and a man with the blood of thousands of innocent lives on his hands.

Most of Gore's ire stems from, not surprisingly, the war in Iraq, a war that Gore opposed from the beginning. Bush, he writes, "has exposed Americans abroad and Americans in every U.S. town and city to a greater danger of attack because of his arrogance and willfulness."

. . . It seems likely that even if Gore opts not to run for president in 2008, this book may serve to drive presidential candidates, including Sens. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., Barack Obama, D-Ill., and former Sen. John Edwards, even further to the left, both in rhetoric and substance. The former Tennessee congressman and senator accuses his former colleagues on Capitol Hill of complicity with what he sees as nefarious deeds committed by the Bush administration. The book opens with Gore wondering why Senate Democrats were so silent during the debate before going to war in Iraq and toward the end faults them for being so silent about the administration's warrantless surveillance program.

"We have dug ourselves into a 20-foot hole, and we need somebody who knows how to build a ladder. Al's the guy," Apple's Steve Jobs told Time. "Like many others, I have tried my best to convince him. So far, no luck."

Al Gore Global Warming Climate Change Draft Gore 2008 Assault on Reason News Politics Tennessee Bush Democrats Gore's New Book

Fred Thompson's Work Ethic

In today's Tennessean, columnist Larry Daughtrey -- who may well be the paper's only redeeming feature -- addresses Fred Thompson's famously missing work ethic. Thompson was evidently tagged as lazy even in his high school days! Maybe that's why the slacker party loves him so.

And how many laws does Thompson break by sucking on his Cuban cigars? Guess we'll find out if or when the Law and Order guy actually enters the race.

An excerpt from Daughtrey's column:

Oh, to be in the somewhat sizable shoes of Fred Dalton Thompson.

Ol' Freddie, or Moose, as they remember him in Lawrenceburg, has stumbled yet again into a memorable acting role. This one is about how to run for president by not running for president.

Fred has got that supposedly all-powerful world of the bloggers, at least those of the neo-conservative persuasion, all atwitter by, well, not doing anything at all. It is a role for which he is perfectly suited.

In the Washington world of workaholics, Fred is remembered as a virtual teetotaler. During his eight years in the U.S. Senate, an insertion into the Congressional Record amounted to heavy lifting.

His high school yearbook sized him up early: "The lazier a man is, the more he plans to do tomorrow."

Maybe Fred will get around to running for president. Maybe not. But by not running, he is running as high as second in some polls of a less-than-overwhelming field of Republicans. Some Republicans believe he is Ronald Reagan, arisen.

Sliding back and forth between the fantasy worlds of the silver screen and politics is nothing new for him. Back in 1992, the Gucci loafers, Lincoln Continental and high-dollar lobbying fees of Fred D. Thompson, Esquire, weren't playing too well at the political box office in Tennessee. So, he bought an old red pickup and a pair of $100 boots, tuned up the drawl and beat a Harvard man for the Senate in Big Orange country.

As Reagan said, here he goes again.

Read more . . .

Fred Thompson News Politics Larry Daughtrey Tennessee Lazy Fred Thompson 2008 Republican Moose

Tennessee Food Tax Blues (Video)

One month's worth of groceries taken from every single family each and every year in the state of Tennessee for taxes on food. -- Tennesseans for Fair Taxation


Tennessee now has the NATION'S HIGHEST AVERAGE SALES TAX at 9.35%, with the maximum rate of 9.75% in 30 counties.

Food Tax - Cigarette Tax Swap... Act Now!
Email state legislators in support of the Tax Swap

"It’s criminal to tax basic necessities."

Food Tax Politics Bredesen News Tennessee Regressive Tax

The Price of Gas

Gas prices topped $4 a gallon recently in San Francisco.

'New Hampshire and Tennessee are each within two cents of having their average price top $3.'

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- "Gasoline prices hit their record high for the seventh straight day Saturday, as gas costing less than $3 a gallon is becoming a rare find anywhere in the country. . ."

"[T]he state-by-state breakdown now shows New Jersey and South Carolina are among only seven states with an average below $3, with the 43 states and the District of Columbia now above that benchmark."

Graphic adaptation of San Francisco prices via All Hat No Cattle

Gas Prices Politics Iraq News Tennessee Bush California

The Reverend Falwell’s Heavenly Timing

Intolerant Falwell
by Frank Rich

HARD as it is to believe now, Jerry Falwell came in second only to Ronald Reagan in a 1983 Good Housekeeping poll anointing “the most admired man in America.” By September 2001, even the Bush administration was looking for a way to ditch the preacher who had joined Pat Robertson on TV to pin the 9/11 attacks on feminists, abortionists, gays and, implicitly, Teletubbies. As David Kuo, a former Bush official for faith-based initiatives, tells the story in his book “Tempting Faith,” the Reverend Falwell was given a ticket to the Washington National Cathedral memorial service that week only on the strict condition that he stay away from reporters and cameras. Mr. Falwell obeyed, though once inside he cracked jokes (“Whoa, does she look frumpy,” he said of Barbara Bush) and chortled nonstop.

This is the great spiritual leader whom John McCain and Mitt Romney raced to praise when he died on Tuesday, just as the G.O.P. presidential contenders were converging for a debate in South Carolina. The McCain camp’s elegiac press release beat out his rival’s by a hair. But everyone including Senator McCain knows he got it right back in 2000, when he labeled Mr. Falwell and Mr. Robertson “agents of intolerance.” Mr. Falwell was always on the wrong, intolerant side of history. He fought against the civil rights movement and ridiculed Desmond Tutu’s battle against apartheid years before calling AIDS the “wrath of a just God against homosexuals” and, in 1999, fingering the Antichrist as an unidentified contemporary Jew.

Though Mr. Falwell had long been an embarrassment and laughingstock to many, including a new generation of Christian leaders typified by Mr. Kuo, the timing of his death could not have had grander symbolic import. It happened at the precise moment that the Falwell-Robertson brand of religious politics is being given its walking papers by a large chunk of the political party the Christian right once helped to grow. Hours after Mr. Falwell died, Rudy Giuliani, a candidate he explicitly rejected, won the Republican debate by acclamation. When the marginal candidate Ron Paul handed “America’s mayor” an opening to wrap himself grandiloquently in 9/11 once more, not even the most conservative of Deep South audiences could resist cheering him. If Rudy can dress up as Jack Bauer, who cares about his penchant for drag?

The current exemplars of Mr. Falwell’s gay-baiting, anti-Roe style of politics, James Dobson of Focus on the Family and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, see the writing on the wall. Electability matters more to Republicans these days than Mr. Giuliani’s unambiguous support for abortion rights and gay civil rights (no matter how clumsily he’s tried to fudge it). Last week Mr. Dobson was in full crybaby mode, threatening not to vote if Rudy is on the G.O.P. ticket. Mr. Perkins complained to The Wall Street Journal that the secular side of the Republican Party was serving its religious-right auxiliary with “divorce papers.”

Yes, and it is doing so with an abruptness and rudeness reminiscent of Mr. Giuliani’s public dumping of the second of his three wives, Donna Hanover. This month, even the conservative editorial page of The Journal chastised Republicans of the Perkins-Dobson ilk for being too bellicose about abortion, saying that a focus on the issue “will make the party seem irrelevant” and cost it the White House in 2008. At the start of Tuesday’s debate, the Fox News moderator Brit Hume coldly put Mr. Falwell’s death off limits by announcing that “we will not be seeking any more reaction from the candidates on that matter.” It was a pre-emptive move to shield Fox’s favored party from soiling its image any further by association with the Moral Majority has-been and his strident causes. In the ensuing 90 minutes, the Fox News questioners skipped past the once-burning subject of same-sex marriage as well.

What a difference a midterm election has made. The Karl Rove theory that Republicans cannot survive without pandering to religious-right pooh-bahs is yet another piece of Bush dogma lying in ruins, done in by two synergistic forces. The first is the raw political math. Polls consistently show that most Americans don’t want abortion outlawed, do want legal recognition for gay couples, do want stem-cell research and never want to see government intrude on a Terri Schiavo again. On Election Day 2006, voters in red states defeated both an abortion ban (South Dakota) and, for the first time, a same-sex marriage ban (Arizona).

Read more . . .

Frank Rich Politics Jerry Falwell Romney McCain Gay Karl Rove Abortion Religious Right Radical Republicans News Giuliani

Résumé of Doom

Résumé of Doom
By MAUREEN DOWD

Paul Wolfowitz may be out of a job soon, but think of what an amazing résumé he’ll be shopping around:

Work Experience

President of World Bank: 2005-2007

Responsibilities: Reining in European lefties, raining tax-free money on Arab girlfriend, and giving anti-corruption efforts a bad name.

Achievements: Paralyzed the international lending apparatus to the point where small countries had to max out their Visa cards to pay for malaria medicine. Learned the traditions of many cultures, including those of Turkey, where you apparently are not supposed to take off your shoes at mosques to reveal socks so full of holes that both big toes poke blasphemously through.

Deputy Secretary of Defense for President George W. Bush: 2001-2005

Responsibility: Starting a war.

Achievements: Mismanaged the world’s most powerful army. Shattered the system of international diplomacy that kept the peace for 50 years. Undermined the credibility of American intelligence operations. Needlessly brought humankind to the brink of nuclear war. Destroyed Iraq.

Demented Visionary: 1993-2001

Responsibility: Concocting a delusional plan for regime change in Iraq with pals like Shaha Riza, Ahmad Chalabi and his merry band of Iraqi exiles who conjured up phony intelligence about Saddam’s W.M.D.

Achievements: Imagining an Iraq that didn’t exist.

Having Wolfie back on the job market is a tremendous opportunity. What do we want destroyed next? Could this walking curse on the world run Halliburton into the ground?

At the Pentagon, Wolfie tried to help Vice get rid of anything multi — multilateral treaties, multilateral institutions, multilateral alliances, multiculturalism. Multi, to them, meant wobbly, caviling, bureaucratic and obstructionist. Why be multi when you could be uni?

In the end, the forces of multilateralism took their revenge: Old Europe got rid of Wolfie.

But not before his gal pal played the multicultural victim card. In her statement to World Bank directors, Shaha complained that she had been denied promotions even before Wolfie got there. “I can only attribute this to discrimination — not because I am a woman, but because I am a Muslim Arab woman who dares to question the status quo both in the work of the institution and within the institution itself,” Shaha wrote.

She said that she had “met a wonderful American woman who told me that I should fight back for ‘us’: WOMEN. It never occurred to me as an Arab and Muslim woman that one day I would be asked by an American woman to fight on her behalf.”

Already aggrieved, Shaha got really furious when Wolfie came in 2005 and she was told she’d have to work out of the State Department.

“I was ready to pursue legal remedies,” she wrote in her statement, adding, “my life and career were torn asunder.”

According to Xavier Coll, the bank’s human resources vice president, Shaha outlined conditions for her departure that were “unprecedented” in terms of guarantees and rewards and way out of line with bank policy. Mr. Coll deemed it “inappropriate and imprudent for the president to offer Ms. Riza these terms.”

Bob Bennett, Wolfie’s lawyer, told Michael Hirsh of Newsweek that it was Shaha who “worked up the numbers” on a $60,000 raise to a $193,590 salary and cushy new deal. “She was outraged that she had to leave,” Mr. Bennett said.

The self-righteous Shaha played on Wolfie’s guilt, becoming “greedy in terms of power,” as a friend of the couple told Newsweek. Even though she had been a mere flack a few years ago and then a gender coordinator at the bank, Shaha mau-maued her man into giving her a salary that topped the secretary of state’s.

It’s like when Bill Clinton tells friends that he has to work hard to get Hillary elected president because he feels he owes her for bringing her to Arkansas in the 70s and interrupting her career. (But do we?)

Or when Tony Soprano gets Carmela some fancy piece of jewelry after he strays. Indeed, Wolfie sounded Sopranoish when he agitatedly told Mr. Coll to warn those at the bank he believed were attacking him: “If they $%#! with me or Shaha, I have enough on them to $%#! them, too.”

Wolfie used public compensation for private contrition. Gilt for guilt — not a good deal.

[Graphic via Internet Weekly]

Maureen Dowd Wolfowitz Shaha Ali Riza News Iraq War Republican Corruption Politics World Bank Wolfowitz Resigns Bush

Sen. Sam Brownback's Womb Envy

Wannabe Republican President Senator Sam Brownback has Serious Womb Envy

Zeus birthed Athena from the womb inside his head, but when the manly god gave birth to Dionysus, the womb was tucked inside his thigh. Vishnu also had a womb hidden within his thigh, from which the he-god birthed Ayyapa. But when Vishnu birthed Brahma, he did it from a lotus womb inside his navel. Adam's womb was, of course, stuck inside his rib. And now, Senator Sam Brownback also has a womb!


During the Fox News Debate, Sam Brownback (R-KS) repeatedly motioned to an imagined womb, "Here in the womb," he said.

Senator Brownback hopes to overturn Roe v. Wade.

What they're saying:
Brownback thinks he has a uterus.
Womb envy: The evidence mounts
Senator Brownback, the Pregnant Rape Victim
Rape and incest don't matter, this is a child we are talking about!!!
More on Republican Debates

Sam Brownback Politics News Abortion Video Presidential Race 2008 Candidates Reproductive Freedom Republican Womb Envy Kansas

Al Gore Defeats Bush in 2000 (Video)

George Bush sees what life would be like if Al Gore had assumed the office that he won in the 2000 presidential election . . .


See another clip from the comedy film: George Bush Goes to Heaven.

Also see: Al Gore's New Book

Al Gore Global Warming Climate Change Draft Gore 2008 George Bush Goes to Heaven News Politics Tennessee Bush

Young, Ill and Uninsured

Young and Ill
By BOB HERBERT

Fourteen-year-old Devante Johnson deserved better. He was a sweet kid, an honor student and athlete who should be enjoying music and sports and skylarking with his friends at school. Instead he’s buried in Houston’s Paradise North Cemetery.

Devante died of kidney cancer in March. His mother, Tamika Scott, believes he would still be alive if bureaucrats in Texas hadn’t fouled up so badly that his health coverage was allowed to lapse and his cancer treatment had to be interrupted.

Ms. Scott, who has multiple sclerosis, understood the grave danger her son would be in if he were somehow to be left without the Medicaid coverage that paid for his chemotherapy, radiation and other treatment. She submitted the required paperwork to renew the coverage two months before the deadline.

“I was so anxious to get it processed,” she said, “so we wouldn’t have a lapse of coverage.”

In Texas, as in many other states, there is a concerted effort to undermine programs that bring government-sponsored health care to poor and working-class children. It is not an environment in which bureaucrats are encouraged to be helpful, not even when lives are at stake.

“They kept losing the paperwork,” Ms. Scott told me, her voice quivering with grief. She submitted new applications, made dozens of phone calls and sent off a blizzard of faxes. Despite her frantic efforts, the coverage was dropped. . . .

Keeping American children alive and healthy should be . . important . . .

Read more. . .

Bob Herbert Politics Health Care Dickens America 2008 Devante Johnson Universal Health Care News 47 Million

Best Political Web Videos So Far (2008)

2008 WEB VIDEO ODYSSEY -- The Presidential Race via Youtube


PoliticsTV's new Best 2008 Web Videos so far clip.

via MyDD

News Politics Video Presidential Race 2008 Candidates Democratic Republican

Bill Frist, Tony Blair Possible Wolfowitz Replacements

The only thing surprising about the Wolfowitz scandal is that the comb-licking guy actually has, or had, a girlfriend. And, no, the object of Wolfowitz's leer in the photo here is not his girlfriend, Shaha Ali Riza, rather the object of Wolfowitz's leer is Fred Thompson's wife.

After Wolfowitz was caught drooling over Fred Thompson's wife, his alleged girlfriend may well have come to her senses.

So Wolfowitz has finally resigned from the World Bank, effective June 30, reportedly as the first president to ever leave the World Bank "under a cloud of scandal."


You won't be surprised to hear that loyal Bushies think Wolfowitz has been ousted not because of ethics violations but rather as payback for the Iraq War. The Wall Street Journal claims the charges against Wolfowitz are "bogus."

But some 13,000 World Bank staffers are happy to see the comb-licking man go. According to the World Bank Group Staff Association: "[Wolfowitz] has demeaned the Bank, insulted the staff, diminished its clients, and dragged this institution through the mud."

In keeping with the flat-earth Heritage Foundation's advice to Bushie, the list of possible replacements are qualified to fill the position because they are loyal Bushies.

So, of course, Bill Frist, failed Senate Majority Leader, is on the list, as is Bush poodle Tony Blair. But since it is an American tradition that World Bank presidents can only be Americans, Tony Blair will undoubtedly be crossed off the list. Despite a plethora of neocon scandals, indictments, and corruption, Bush continues to have no shortage of incompetent American poodles to choose from.

While we loath the idea of inflicting the Frist Disease upon the World Bank, if it means the cat-killer will abandon his plans to become the Governor of Tennessee, we say, take him, please!

Wolfowitz Shaha Ali Riza Bill Frist Tony Blair Fred Thompson News Jeri Kehn Picture 2008 Republicans Thompson's Wife Politics World Bank Wolfowitz Resigns Bush

On the Death of Jerry Falwell - Christopher Hitchens (Video)

Jerry Falwell was just another pick-pocket with clerical qualifications -- Christopher Hitchens on CNN


News Politics Jerry Falwell Christopher Hitchens CNN Gay Anderson Cooper Video Bush Bigot

Don’t Blame Bush

Blame G.O.P.
By PAUL KRUGMAN

I’ve been looking at the race for the Republican presidential nomination, and I’ve come to a disturbing conclusion: maybe we’ve all been too hard on President Bush.

No, I haven’t lost my mind. Mr. Bush has degraded our government and undermined the rule of law; he has led us into strategic disaster and moral squalor.

But the leading contenders for the Republican nomination have given us little reason to believe they would behave differently. Why should they? The principles Mr. Bush has betrayed are principles today’s G.O.P., dominated by movement conservatives, no longer honors. In fact, rank-and-file Republicans continue to approve strongly of Mr. Bush’s policies — and the more un-American the policy, the more they support it.

Now, Mr. Bush and Dick Cheney may have done a few things other Republicans wouldn’t. Their initial domestic surveillance program was apparently so lawless and unconstitutional that even John Ashcroft, approached on his sickbed, refused to go along. For the most part, however, Mr. Bush has done just what his party wants and expects. . .

.. [A]side from John McCain, who to his credit echoed Gen. Petraeus (and was met with stony silence), the candidates spoke enthusiastically in favor of torture and against the rule of law. Rudy Giuliani endorsed waterboarding. Mitt Romney declared that he wants accused terrorists at Guantánamo, “where they don’t get the access to lawyers they get when they’re on our soil ... My view is, we ought to double Guantánamo.” His remarks were greeted with wild applause. . . .

What we need to realize is that the infamous “Bush bubble,” the administration’s no-reality zone, extends a long way beyond the White House. Millions of Americans believe that patriotic torturers are keeping us safe, that there’s a vast Islamic axis of evil, that victory in Iraq is just around the corner, that Bush appointees are doing a heckuva job — and that news reports contradicting these beliefs reflect liberal media bias.

And the Republican nomination will go either to someone who shares these beliefs, and would therefore run the country the same way Mr. Bush has, or to a very, very good liar.

Read more . . .

Paul Krugman Republican Party News Politics Bush GOP Rudy Giuliani Mitt Romney John McCain Cheney Pro Torture

Democrats Call for No Confidence Vote on Gonzales

Democrats have called for a no confidence vote on loyal Bushie Alberto Gonzales. Sens. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., and Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. are leading this effort. The vote will happen next week.

Pat Roberts, Norm Coleman and Chuck Hagel are some of the influential Republicans who have called for Gonzales' resignation. Earlier today, Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., predicted that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will resign.

The announcement of the no-confidence measure, which was first reported by Roll Call, comes as Gonzales finds himself under a growing avalanche of criticism. Five Republican senators -- joined today by Sen. Norm Coleman -- already have called for his resignation, and experts say his close, personal friendship with President Bush is the only reason he still has a job.

"It seems the only person who has confidence in the attorney general is President Bush," Schumer told reporters, according to The Associated Press. "The president long ago should have asked the attorney general to step down."

Alberto Gonzales News Politics Bush Republicans Democrats Barbara Feinstein

White House Opposes Military Pay Raise

The Army Times reports that the White House opposes a raise in the military pay by 3.5 percent. Because in Bush's view, "support our troops" means let them stay in Iraq forever and let them do it for wages that qualify their families for food stamps!

And this Moron-in-Chief has the support of 30 percent of the people?

God, do we live in a stupid country, or what?

The White House's policy statement opposed several other Congressional provisions as well, including a death gratuity for civilians who die in support of military operations and benefits for disabled retireees and their survivors.

Democratic Caucus Chairman Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) sharply criticized the administration for its opposition.

"We ask our troops to risk their lives for our nation," said Emanuel. "We ask their spouses to raise families and make ends meet without them as they serve. The President is a lot of talk when it comes to supporting the troops and their families."

Support Our Troops News Politics Bush Republicans Culture of Corruption Democratic Congress

Al Gore's New Book

Time has an excerpt from Al Gore's long awaited new book, The Assault on Reason. With the publication of this book, we should, thankfully, be seeing more of Gore on the talk shows and news channels. (He'll be on Larry King next Tuesday!) [Update: Al Gore's new book is reportedly an assault on Bush.]

A story in the same edition of Time describes the perfect stealth candidate for 2008:

You would want a candidate with the grass-roots appeal of Barack Obama—someone with a message that transcends politics, someone who spoke out loud and clear and early against the war in Iraq. But you would also want a candidate with the operational toughness of Hillary Clinton—someone with experience and credibility on the world stage.

In other words, you would want someone like Al Gore—the improbably charismatic, Academy Award–winning, Nobel Prize–nominated environmental prophet with an army of followers and huge reserves of political and cultural capital at his command.

Al Gore is still probably not running, but I am still hoping!



Book Excerpt -- The Assault on Reason

Not long before our nation launched the invasion of Iraq, our longest-serving Senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate floor and said: "This chamber is, for the most part, silent—ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing. We stand passively mute in the United States Senate."

Why was the Senate silent?

In describing the empty chamber the way he did, Byrd invited a specific version of the same general question millions of us have been asking: "Why do reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions?" The persistent and sustained reliance on falsehoods as the basis of policy, even in the face of massive and well-understood evidence to the contrary, seems to many Americans to have reached levels that were previously unimaginable.

A large and growing number of Americans are asking out loud: "What has happened to our country?" People are trying to figure out what has gone wrong in our democracy, and how we can fix it.

To take another example, for the first time in American history, the Executive Branch of our government has not only condoned but actively promoted the treatment of captives in wartime that clearly involves torture, thus overturning a prohibition established by General George Washington during the Revolutionary War.

Read more . . .

Al Gore Global Warming Climate Change Draft Gore 2008 Assault on Reason News Politics Tennessee Bush

Teletubbies Remember Jerry Falwell

Jerry Falwell is no longer with us and Teletubbies everywhere are dancing. And that goes double for Tinky Winky.

But the Teletubbies have lots of company.

Gawker reports that it is a great day for Larry Flynt.

Kim Pearson at Blogher has a nice round up of Falwell's venom spewing life and some interesting reactions to his death. Don't miss the link to rightwing Newsbuster's round-up of "tasteless and mean" liberal reactions.

But the best way to 'grieve' hatemonger Jerry Falwell is to take a look at what he stood for -- in his own tasteless and mean words.

In "Another Segregationist Bites the Dust," Jill at Jack and Jill Politics reminds us that this guy didn't confine his hatred to gays:

"If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God’s word and had desired to do the Lord’s will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision [Brown v. Board of Education] would never have been made…. The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line." -- Jerry Falwell

And from Reclusive Leftist:

“God is pro-war.” -- Jerry Falwell

“I listen to feminists and all these radical gals - most of them are failures. They’ve blown it. Some of them have been married, but they married some Casper Milquetoast who asked permission to go to the bathroom. These women just need a man in the house. That’s all they need. Most of the feminists need a man to tell them what time of day it is and to lead them home. And they blew it and they’re mad at all men. Feminists hate men. They’re sexist. They hate men - that’s their problem.” -- Jerry Falwell

“AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals; it is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.” -- Jerry Falwell



“Homosexuality is Satan’s diabolical attack upon the family that will not only have a corrupting influence upon our next generation, but it will also bring down the wrath of God upon America.” -- Jerry Falwell

From Boing Boing:

After the September 11 attacks Falwell said, “I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen." -- Jerry Falwell

"If you're not a born-again Christian, you're a failure as a human being." -- Jerry Falwell

Positive Atheism:

"We're fighting against humanism, we're fighting against liberalism ... we are fighting against all the systems of Satan that are destroying our nation today ... our battle is with Satan himself." -- Jerry Falwell

"The ACLU is to Christians what the American Nazi party is to Jews." -- Jerry Falwell

News Politics Jerry Falwell Teletubbies Tinky Winky Gay Anxious Masculinity Homophobia for Profit Hatemonger Falwell Falwell Quotes Teletubby Photos

Sen. Ophelia Ford's Mouth - Can We Get Some Duct Tape?

Watch this streaming video and then tell me the lunatics are not in charge of this Doomed State of Tennessee. Goddess help us!

In which Senator Ophelia Ford opens her mouth and toads proceed to fall out . .

Hat tip to Brittney

Update: Or you can see Ophelia Ford's bizarre, some say drunken, rant on Youtube.

News Politics State Senator Ophelia Ford Rant
Tennessee State Senator Lunatic Video Memphis

What Do Cuban Cigars Have to Do with Fred Thompson's Ego?

Fred Thompson vs. Michael Moore -- In Response to Michael Moore's Challenge to a Health Care Debate Charge that Thompson has a thing for Cuban Cigars, Fred Thompson Plays Macho Man on Youtube . . .


Fred Thompson criticizes Michael Moore via an op-ed in the neocon National Review. Michael Moore responds by challenging the Republican to a health care debate.

Moore also raises the touchy subject of Thompson's famed obsession for Cuban cigars. Just like a boy you knew in high school, Fred Thompson responds by playing a real man on Youtube.

In his hilarious parody of masculinity, Fred Thompson the actor pulls out all the props -- the fat cigar, the lush leather chair, and, of course, the air of insufferable superiority. The British are gonna' love this guy! [via ]

News Politics Michael Moore Fred Thompson Cuba Cigars Masculinity Health Care Sicko Video Fred Thompson vs. Michael Moore

Loving, Fighting, Sulking, Dancing, Betraying

French First Lady
By Maureen Dowd

PARIS: The French can be very, well, French when it comes to the personal lives of their leaders.

They take affairs, illegitimate children and tumultuous marriages in stride.

But they suddenly turn traditional when it comes to the role of the first lady. They do not like the idea of Nicolas Sarkozy entertaining world leaders alone at the Élysée Palace. It is not comme il faut.

Maybe that’s why this country is so mesmerized with the question of whether the beautiful Cécilia Sarkozy, a former Schiaparelli model who was for years her husband’s influential political adviser, is going to serve as the chatelaine of the Élysée, or run off again with a lover.

No one seems sure if she will bolt, leaving the entertaining duties to Sarko’s mother, an elegant lawyer, or agree to play a limited role at the palace.

“We have a hard time imagining an intermittent first lady at the Élysée,” sniffed Le Temps, a daily newspaper, online.

Cécilia was missing in action during the final weeks of her husband’s campaign. “I don’t see myself as first lady,” the 49-year-old said. “That bores me.”

Bound by strict privacy laws, and cozy with the elite ruling class, the French press shies away from printing the skinny on relationships, even though the skinny French public loves gossiping on the subject. Trying to fathom what is going on with power couples here is like watching a French movie — scenes brimming with emotion and ambiguity.

Cécilia left Sarko for several months in 2005, moving to America to live with a French events organizer — reportedly a response to her husband’s affair with a French journalist.

When Paris Match published pictures of Cécilia with her lover in New York, Sarko became furious with his good friend, Arnaud Lagardère, the magazine’s owner. Soon, the editor was fired.

Read more . . .

Maureen Dowd Cécilia Sarkozy Politics Nicolas Sarkozy French First Lady News

'Bloomberg is H. Ross Perot on Steroids'

Just when you think a presidential race can't possibly make room for any more white men, "Bloomberg poised for third-party campaign," reads a headline over at the Washington Times.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg "is prepared to spend an unprecedented $1 billion of his own $5.5 billion personal fortune for a third-party presidential campaign, personal friends of the mayor tell the Washington Times."

"Bloomberg is H. Ross Perot on steroids," opines former FEC Chairman Michael Toner.

via Taegan Goddard

News Politics Michael Bloomberg 3rd Party 2008 Ross Perot

Terrorizing Students in TN Will Get You Two Weeks Suspension

So what do you get when you stage a fake gunman attack on sixth graders in Tennessee?

Assistant principal, Don Bartch and lead teacher, Mr. Quentin Mastin each got a two weeks suspension for "unprofessional conduct and neglect of duty."

I'm sorry but I think two weeks suspension for the act of terrorizing children is simply not good enough. Parents are supposed to trust these idiots to mature into responsible adults as a result of a two week suspension?

How important are children anyway?

And reportedly there were three teachers involved, yet only one is being held accountable.

It is the number of school officials involved in this bizarre "prank" that bothers me the most -- three teachers, one assistant principal and an undisclosed number of staff members. Apparently not one of these "adults" saw anything wrong with terrorizing children with a fake gun siege. After it was over, the "adults" laughed!

They actually called it "a teaching opportunity."

A story in today's New York Times notes that "Jessica Giles, an assistant professor of psychology at the Peabody College of Education at Vanderbilt University, said such an incident could create lasting anxiety, and lead students to doubt their teachers in a real emergency."

I have serious doubts about the wisdom of letting these people anywhere near children. If I were a parent of a child at Scales Elementary in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, I would be looking for another school.

News Politics Murfreesboro Tennessee Scales Elementary School Fake Gunman Attack

Fake Gunman Attack at TN School - A Wrap-up of International Coverage

Here's a little wrap-up of some of the international condemnation of the fake gunman attack staged by some decidedly immature school officials at Scales Elementary School in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

School Workers Suspended In Fake Attack
Guardian Unlimited, UK
Outrage at teachers’ fake gun siege on school trip
Times Online, UK
US teachers stage fake gun attack during school trip
Ireland Online, Ireland
Tennessee teachers stage fake gunman attack on students during ...
International Herald Tribune, France
US teachers stage fake gun attack
The Age, Australia
Pupils petrified by gunman drill
Melbourne Herald Sun, Australia
Teachers stage fake gunman attack on 6th-graders
Toronto Star, Canada
Teacher Fake Gun Attack On Kids
ShortNews.com, Germany
School's fake gun attack scares kids, riles parents
Hamilton Spectator, Canada

Update: Yeah, I know I said international, but Brittney at NiT has a nice wrap-up of the local blog coverage/condemnation: Scales Elementary Stupidity: A Round-Up.

News Politics Murfreesboro Tennessee Scales Elementary School Fake Gunman Attack

Fox News Portrays Illegal Voters as Black

From the View of Fox News, Illegal Voters and Black Voters Look the Same

This Fox News report on possible illegal "double-voting" in South Carolina comes with stock footage of voters -- all of whom just happen to be black! As always, Fox News does a great job of speaking for the Republican Party.

Fox News Racial Bias News Politics Racism Republican Media South Carolina

The Right to Paid Sick Days

Paid Sick Days
By BOB HERBERT

It sounds reasonable: seven paid sick days a year. Why should you have to lose a couple of days pay, or maybe even your job, because you had the misfortune to catch the flu?

And it certainly seems unreasonable to penalize an employee in good standing who misses a day or two of work to care for a child who is ill or has met with a serious accident.

After all, this is the 21st century.

The reality, for a surprising percentage of the U.S. population, is more like the 19th century. Nearly half of all full-time private sector workers in the U.S. get no paid sick days. None. If one of those workers woke up with excruciating pains in his or her chest and had to be rushed to a hospital — well, no pay for that day. For many of these workers, the cost of an illness could be the loss of their job. . .

Food service workers are among those least likely to get paid sick days. Eighty-six percent get no sick days at all. They show up in the restaurants coughing and sneezing and feverish, and they start preparing and serving meals. You won’t see many of them wearing masks. . .

“At least 145 countries have paid sick days,” said Ms. Leff. “The United States is the only industrialized country lacking such a policy. Our goal is to change that.”

Read more . . .

Bob Herbert Paid Sick Days News Politics Workers Rights Family Support Policy United States

Only Men Can Be Gondoliers

While male anger and resentment come with the feminist territory, a special kind of venom is reserved for the women who set out to prove that a woman can do the job as good or better than a man.

And it takes a special kind of woman to be the first to break into the hallowed male professions. You have to prove that you can do the job and do so while simultaneously serving as easy target for the resentment and anger of all the men who thought the best jobs would forever belong only to them.

New York Times:

VENICE — For more than a thousand years, Venice has had gondolas but never a female gondolier. But now there is Alexandra Hai. After a decade of struggle, Ms. Hai has won the right to be a gondolier — sort of. A court recently allowed her to paddle around the canals of Venice, but only for the residents of one of the city’s hotels. . .

What does not flow in her wake is popularity among the 425 gondoliers of Venice, who practice a traditional, all-male craft, and who often hand down their jobs from father to son. In fact, the gondoliers are just a little fed up with her.

Roberto Luppi, president of the gondoliers’ association here, said that Ms. Hai, a 40-year-old of German and Algerian descent, had been proven incapable of the complicated duties of handling a 35-foot-long gondola, having failed four tests, and that she used the fact that she is a woman to whip up interest in the news media.

When asked about Ms. Hai’s accusations that gondoliers had physically threatened her, he reacted with scorn. “After a person accuses gondoliers of being racists and sexists, what does she expect?” he said. “That they are supposed to give her kisses?”

. . . Ms. Hai rattled off her suspicions, which are provocative but unproven: that in one test, she was forced to use an oar that was as “light as a cigarette” and that in another, her route was littered by an unusually high number of moored motorboats. After the Locanda Art Deco hotel hired her privately, she was regularly pulled over by the police to make sure her passengers were from that hotel, she said. . .

Mauro Morozini, a gondolier who is 48, said it is a question of skill and not her sex. “Let’s leave just one tradition intact,” he said. “Being a gondolier is a tradition and it is very difficult work.”

Alexandra Hai Politics Italy Sexism News Gender Gondolier Venice Patriarchy Feminist

Happy Peace Day

by MzNicky

The InternetTubes tell me that the whole "Mother's Day" thing started in ancient Greece as a day set aside to honor Rhea, the "Mother of the Gods." Then after the heathens got all conquered and everything, the Christly church guys decided to tie the day into Lent, no doubt to feed the patriarchal mandate that every woman should spawn and spawn again, for which, as a special reward, there'd be a special Mother's day each year. Then Julia Ward Howe, she of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," got the cool idea in 1872 to change "Mother's Day" into a "Day of Peace." A few decades later, some church ladies in West Virginia got all up about it and petitioned the government to have it changed back to Mother's Day.

So now here we are, faced with what has now morphed into the repugnant idea of a corporately-mandated Hallmark®/FTD®-prefab holiday that dictates that if you don’t send your mother a sappy card and a Spring bouquet then you don’t love her—a guilt trip so insidiously ground into the culture that despite my sincere protests, my own children descend upon me bearing unnecessary gifts purchased with their scarce, hard-earned money. (Well, what’s a mother to do? They never did listen to me.)

Let's stipulate that there is something to be said for women who would unhesitatingly set themselves on fire before they would permit anyone or anything to harm their children. It’s an aggressive form of love that deserves to be saluted, so if the kids want to say “thanks” by giving me scented soaps and gift certificates on my special day, hey, who am I to say they’re wrong? Let's further stipulate that some of us who have willingly and enthusiastically chosen to become mothers have also been fortunate and privileged enough to have had that whole thing work out pretty well for us, and that our whole family deal allows for such niceties. Many have not and do not. But it's still Mother's Day for them, too.

Let's also hear it for women who willingly and enthusiastically choose not to become mothers because they just damn didn't want to. And in a culture in which the misogyny-godbag-driven dictate to reproduce is practically overwhelming, those who choose to resist that pressure deserve to be saluted as well, and if no one else has ever done so, let me be the first. Let's further remember and respect the sensitivities of those who want to reproduce but can’t, of those who are forced to reproduce but don’t want to, of those who have loved and lost. Mother's Day, Mother's Day, Mother's Day, all.

What I really want for Mother's Day is for this whole guilt-tripping consumerist extravaganza to become "Peace Day" again. I have Mother's Day every time I see my kids. It's enough. And it's enough already with the floral bouquets, the bubble bath and the gift certificates for a facial and massage. Well, okay, I'll take the massage. And peace. Peace would be nice. So, Happy Peace Day.

[Cross posted at Jesus' General]

Mothers Day Peace News Politics Feminism

Mother's Day for Peace

Mother's Day Proclamation
by Julia Ward Howe, 1870

The First Mother's Day proclaimed in 1870 by Julia Ward Howe
was a passionate demand for disarmament and peace.

Arise, then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or tears!

Say firmly: "We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have taught them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the bosom of the devastated earth, a voice goes up with our own. It says, "Disarm, Disarm!"

http://mothersdayforpeace.com
http://www.alternet.org/asoldierspeaks/51545/

Mothers Day Julia Ward Howe News Politics Peace Antiwar Iraq

Greg Palast and RFK in NYC - MayDay 2007 - Part 1

Strongly recommended! I watched all of them. Palast has Karl Rove's emails. . . about our democracy, about elections.

Greg Palast author of Armed Madhouse (now out in the expanded edition paperback) and Robert Kennedy Jr. speak.

American people today are the best entertained and the least informed people on the face of the earth.

The domination of business by government is called communism and the domination of government by business is called fascism.

Parts 1-4 Greg Palast
1: above
2:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Qs7td9WRYM&mode=related...
3:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B-ZdF_pfj4&mode=related...
4:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXsi76rBDNU&mode=related...

Parts 5-8 Robert F Kennedy Jr.

Eighty percent of Republicans are Democrats who don't know what's going on.

Democracy Greg Palast News Politics Robert F. Kennedy Republicans Armed Madhouse Corporate Plunder Fairness Doctrine Fascism Corporate Crony Capitalism Rove Emails

Earth to G.O.P.: The Gipper Is Dead

Earth to G.O.P.
By Frank Rich


OF course you didn’t watch the first Republican presidential debate on MSNBC. Even the party’s most loyal base didn’t abandon Fox News, where Bill O’Reilly, interviewing the already overexposed George Tenet, drew far more viewers. Yet the few telling video scraps that entered the 24/7 mediasphere did turn the event into an instant “Saturday Night Live” parody without “SNL” having to lift a finger. The row of 10 middle-aged white candidates, David Letterman said, looked like “guys waiting to tee off at a restricted country club.”

Since then, panicked Republicans have been either blaming the “Let’s Make a Deal” debate format or praying for salvation-by-celebrity in the form of another middle-aged white guy who might enter the race, Fred Thompson. They don’t seem to get that there is not another major brand in the country — not Wal-Mart, not G.E., not even Denny’s nowadays — that would try to sell a mass product with such a demographically homogeneous sales force. And that’s only half the problem. The other half is that the Republicans don’t have a product to sell. Aside from tax cuts and a wall on the Mexican border, the only issue that energized the presidential contenders was Ronald Reagan. The debate’s most animated moments by far came as they clamored to lip-sync his “optimism,” his “morning in America,” his “shining city on the hill” and even, in a bizarre John McCain moment out of a Chucky movie, his grin.

The candidates mentioned Reagan’s name 19 times, the current White House occupant’s once. Much as the Republicans hope that the Gipper can still be a panacea for all their political ills, so they want to believe that if only President Bush would just go away and take his rock-bottom approval rating and equally unpopular war with him, all of their problems would be solved. But it could be argued that the Iraq fiasco, disastrous to American interests as it is, actually masks the magnitude of the destruction this presidency has visited both on the country in general and the G.O.P. in particular.

By my rough, conservative calculation — feel free to add — there have been corruption, incompetence, and contracting or cronyism scandals in these cabinet departments: Defense, Education, Justice, Interior, Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development. I am not counting State, whose deputy secretary, a champion of abstinence-based international AIDS funding, resigned last month in a prostitution scandal, or the General Services Administration, now being investigated for possibly steering federal favors to Republican Congressional candidates in 2006. Or the Office of Management and Budget, whose chief procurement officer was sentenced to prison in the Abramoff fallout. I will, however, toss in a figure that reveals the sheer depth of the overall malfeasance: no fewer than four inspectors general, the official watchdogs charged with investigating improprieties in each department, are themselves under investigation simultaneously — an all-time record.

Wrongdoing of this magnitude does not happen by accident, but it is not necessarily instigated by a Watergate-style criminal conspiracy. When corruption is this pervasive, it can also be a byproduct of a governing philosophy. That’s the case here. That Bush-Rove style of governance, the common denominator of all the administration scandals, is the Frankenstein creature that stalks the G.O.P. as it faces 2008. It has become the Republican brand and will remain so, even after this president goes, until courageous Republicans disown it and eradicate it.

Read more . . .

Frank Rich News Politics Bush Republicans Culture of Corruption Debate Reagan Dying Republican Male Party White Men Scandal

Labor’s Love Lost

Grumpy Gordon
By MAUREEN DOWD

London: Gordon Brown’s smile does not look at home on his face. It sits there uneasily, like an uninvited guest at a party, until his features can resume their comfortably dour grooves.

The brooding Scot ended his decade-long run as a hefty Heathcliff to Tony Blair’s chatty Cathy, stepping out of the shadows Friday with visible relief to begin a campaign for prime minister that he has already won.

Grumpy Gordon is an enigma compared with Captain Showbiz, as the glib Mr. Blair is called by a morning TV host here. The 56-year-old son of a Presbyterian minister, with hooded eyes and frugal charm, will be hard pressed to compete on the European stage with Iron Frau Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, dubbed “Thatcher without petticoats.”

Mr. Brown’s school friends came on TV to say he was more fun than he looked. “He enjoys a good glass of wine,” said his pal Bill Campbell. The chancellor has been striving to move beyond his reputation as a man so obsessed with the budget that he wouldn’t even share the details in advance with Tony Blair. He traded the green eyeshade for pastel ties. He told a women’s magazine that he liked the rock band Arctic Monkeys, but later couldn’t name any of their songs.

Mr. Brown was considered the uncool half of the Cool Britannia team that swept into power on a wave of Champagne, celebrities and Cherie Blair’s New Age guru. But thanks to his role as W.’s interlocutor and translator, Tony Blair is uncool, too.

Read more . . .

Maureen Dowd Tony Blair News Politics Bush Gordon Brown

Ferrets Against Rudy Giuliani (Video)

Ferrets For Freedom - And Against Rudy Giuliani!


Hat tip to KnoxViews

Rudy Giuliani Ferrets 2008 Republican Fooliani Politics News Video

Rightwing Desperation, Howard Dean and the Vast Leftwing Conspiracy

The Democratic National Committee has filed two cease-and-desist letters in response to claims made by those bastions of make-believe, FreeRepublic and XM radio.

Rightwingers are charging that there is a vast leftwing conspiracy to make Bush appear to be an incompetent moron who is endangering the nation.

Gee, what will the Left think of next?

As the rightwing story goes, DNC Chairman Howard Dean instructed Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius to make the assertion that it is difficult to respond adequately to natural disasters when half your National Guard trucks and many well-trained personnel are in Iraq.

The website FreeRepublic.com, citing an XM radio show, said Thursday that "Dean called Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius early, around 5 am, one morning after the tornado had destroyed the town of Greensburg, Kansas and discussed with her what to say about the tornado and how to blame the war in Iraq and the Bush administration on a slow response to the aftermath."

According to Democrats, the conversation never occurred.

By early Friday afternoon, the cease and desist letter was posted on a FreeRepublic thread that had garnered more than 250 comments disparaging the Democrats. The Quinn & Rose Show homepage also was still alleging the Dean-Sebelius conversation took place. . .

The letters issued by the party's lawyer, Joseph E. Sandler, were sent to James Robinson of FreeRepublic and Dara Altman, the Executive Vice President of XM Satellite Radio.

"The statement made by Mr. Quinn, repeated on FreeRepublic.com is demonstrably, uneqivocably and absolutely false," Sandler wrote. "Governor Dean had no such conversation with Governor Sebelius, ever."

Major General Melvyn S. Montano has apparently joined in the leftwing conspiracy with his assertion that "the war in Iraq has stretched National Guard resources to a breaking point."

And the moral of the story is: if it sounds rational, it must be a leftwing conspiracy.

News Politics DNC Howard Dean Kathleen Sebelius News Kansas Free Republic Leftwing Conspiracy Rightwing Desperation National Guard Iraq Bush

Comment Trouble - Haloscan is Sick Today

Just to let everyone know, Haloscan is sick today. If you post a comment, you won't see it for a while. While it appears that your comment is not posted, it's there. I can see it; it just takes a few hours before it appears on the blog.

Hopefully, Haloscan will get well quick, and things will be back to normal by early this afternoon. I'm sorry for the inconvenience. One of these days everything is going to run perfectly smoothly for all of us, or so I tell myself (like maybe on January, 2009).

Darth Cheney Warns Iran

On carrier in Gulf, Cheney warns Iran -
“Vice President Dick Cheney used the deck of an American aircraft carrier just 150 miles off Iran’s coast as the backdrop [yesterday] to warn the country that the United States was prepared to use its naval power to keep Tehran from disrupting off oil routes or ‘gaining nuclear weapons and dominating this region.’”

"[T]he symbolism of sending the administration’s most famous hawk to deliver the speech so close to Iran’s coast was unmistakable." via Think Progress

News Politics Cheney Iran Bush

Mary Cheney's Book Sells for $.07

"It will probably be best remembered as her shameless grab for a fat check. That's seven cents, folks, for a used copy." -- Petrelis Files

Now It's My Turn: A Daughter's Chronicle of Political Life
by Mary Cheney


Amazon.com:
Hardcover Price at a Glance:
Used: from $0.07
New: from $1.89

News Politics Mary Cheney Dick Cheney Gay Rights

"Bush Resigns" -- On CNN International

"Bush Resigns" appeared on screen for 12 seconds on CNN International around midnight ET, May 11, 2007.




Somebody please tell me CNN knows more than we do and inadvertently jumped the gun.

News Politics Bush Resigns CNN International Impeach Bush

The Millions Left Out

Left Out
Bob Herbert

The United States may be the richest country in the world, but there are many millions — tens of millions — who are not sharing in that prosperity. According to the most recent government figures, 37 million Americans are living below the official poverty threshold, which is $19,971 a year for a family of four. That’s one out of every eight Americans, and many of them are children.

More than 90 million Americans, close to a third of the entire population, are struggling to make ends meet on incomes that are less than twice the official poverty line. In my book, they’re poor.

We don’t see poor people on television or in the advertising that surrounds us like a second atmosphere. We don’t pay much attention to the millions of men and women who are changing bedpans, or flipping burgers for the minimum wage, or vacuuming the halls of office buildings at all hours of the night. But they’re there, working hard and getting very little in return.

The number of poor people in America has increased by five million over the past six years, and the gap between rich and poor has grown to historic proportions. The richest one percent of Americans got nearly 20 percent of the nation’s income in 2005, while the poorest 20 percent could collectively garner only a measly 3.4 percent. . . .

In a recent interview about poverty, former Senator John Edwards told me: “Organizing is so important. We have 50 million service economy jobs and we’ll probably have 10 or 15 million more over the next decade. If those jobs are union jobs, they’ll be middle-class families. If not, they’re more likely to live in poverty. It’s that strong.”

Read more. . .

Bob Herbert News Politics Bush Poverty America John Edwards

Rape Jokes About Condi Rice on Shock Jock Radio

Update: Shock jocks apologize for laughing obscenely about raping Condi Rice. XM spokesman deplores the misogyny but will not say if offenders will be disciplined. The rape jokes may imperil the XM/Sirius merger. One can hope, because nothing will change in this woman-hating culture until there are consequences for the misogyny.

You can't yell fire in a crowded theater, so why the hell can you make rape jokes on the radio? Two idiot shock jocks called Opie and Anthony laugh up a storm while 'jokes' are made about raping Condi Rice.

You can hear the misogyny here, but be warned: it is so violently and explicitly gross that you may not want to hear it.

The New York Post reports: "The obscene exchange took place on XM, a satellite radio station . . A portion of Opie & Anthony's show is also heard on CBS-owned 92.3 "Free FM," though the Rice-rape jokes were not made during that segment."

CBS Radio says it has no plans to fire the creeps.

What's the big deal about portraying rape as a joke in a woman-hating culture?

Presumably it's okay to fantasize about raping the female Secretary of State as long as you do it on satellite radio. Is it also okay to fantasize about raping the male President as long as you do it on satellite radio?

Is the determining factor satellite or gender?

CBS fired Imus for racist jokes (the jokes were also sexist, but he was fired for the racism).

CBS fired General Batiste for daring to criticize Bush.

The hateful shock jocks should be kicked off the air.

Obviously, the fact that I disagree with Condi Rice on virtually everything is completely irrelevant. People who think politics is a valid excuse for misogyny are part of the problem. Unfortunately such people are on the Right and the Left.

via memeorandum

[Note: The headline on this post was changed and revisions made after I learned about errors in the initial reports, including that the rape joke portion of the Opie and Anthony show was not aired on CBS, though this appears to be sheer luck on CBS's part.]

What they're saying:

[T]argeting Condi Rice is ok because she’s a black Republican. To the Left she’s a traitor to her race.
It’s vile to suggest that an appropriate response to women in power who threaten you is raping them.
You'd think it would be absolutely clear but apparently men can't seem to distinguish between rape and sex. No wonder women are never believed.
OK, now can we have a national dialogue about misogyny?
BEYOND THE PALE
Rape is Hilarious
Reynolds Chokes on Straw
Last Time I Checked, Rape Jokes Still Not Funny

Rape Jokes Condi Rice CBS Radio Misogyny Opie and Anthony Gender Politics General Batiste Satellite Radio News Sexism

Loyal Bushies Publicize Michael Moore's Sicko

After learning that he is being investigated by the U.S. Treasury Department "for taking ailing Sept. 11 rescue workers to Cuba for a segment in his upcoming health-care documentary Sicko," Michael Moore wisely stashed a copy of his film in a safe place in another country.

The Smoking Gun has the official letter which Moore received from the Office of Foreign Assets Control. And see the response from Sicko's producer.

Sicko premieres at the Cannes film festival on May 19, and debuts in U.S. theaters on June 29. Thanks to the advertising efforts of the loyal Bushie infested U.S. Government, the theatres will most assuredly be packed! The story has already been all over the cable news channels and this is, no doubt, only the beginning. Why do I think Moore is already at work adding a last minute appendix to Sicko?


Politics Michael Moore Sicko News Bush Cuba Harassing Michael Moore Cannes

Gonzo-Gate featuring Steve Cohen (D-TN) via Olbermann

Alberto Gonzales testifies before the House Judiciary Committee with an air of in your face arrogance that defies description. This time, the man didn't even bother to prepare.

I'm surprised Haughty Gonzales didn't go back to the castle with the Queen of England. This is one clip of many; it closes with Gonzales' revealing answer to a well-aimed question by Tennessee's progressive pride and joy -- Congressman Steve Cohen.

See Video #1 and #2 featuring Congressman Steve Cohen's full session with Gonzales.

TPMmuckraker has more clips.

Also see smirking Gonzales say that he hasn't really thought about habeas corpus. He still has his job, but on the left and the right, the man gets little, if any, respect.

Alberto Gonzales Congressman Steve Cohen Karl Rove Impeach Gonzales Bush Keith Olbermann Attorney Firings Video News Politics House Judiciary Committee Tennessee

DINO Senator Kurita Still Working for the GOP

From R. Neal at KnoxViews comes a report that turncoat Sen. Rosalind Kurita (DINO) actually conspires with Republicans to thwart the plans of Democrats. Now why would we be inclined to believe such a thing about this Tennessee Democrat?

Senator Kurita, the darling of the rabidly conservative Tennessee Senate, wonders why she can't get any bills passed in the Democratic House.

Sources also tell R. Neal that "Kurita allegedly told senior members of the Governor's staff and at least one cabinet member that she won't vote for the Governor's Schools First cigarette tax increase because she isn't sponsoring the bill. This is apparently not the first time she has complained about not being chosen to sponsor the bill."

Kurita has long advocated a cigarette tax increase.

We're not sure if Senator Kurita's primary concern is Senator Kurita or the welfare of the Republican Party, but either way she makes a lousy Democrat and an even lousier public servant.

Don't miss the damning details at KnoxViews.

DINO Rosalind Kurita Benedict Arnold Republicans Lieberman Democrat News Politics Clarksville Tennessee Senate

Blair and Iraq

The Human Community
By DAVID BROOKS

[Tony] Blair’s decision to support the invasion of Iraq grew out of the essence of who he is. Over the past decade, he has emerged as the world’s leading anti-Huntingtonian. He has become one pole in a big debate. On one side are those, represented by Samuel Huntington of Harvard, who believe humanity is riven by deep cultural divides and we should be careful about interfering in one another’s business. On the other are those like Blair, who believe the process of globalization compels us to be interdependent, and that the world will flourish only if the international community enforces shared, universal values.

Over the past three years, people on the left and right have moved away from Blair and toward Huntington. There has been a sharp rise in the number of people who think it’s insane to try to export our values into alien cultures. Instead of emphasizing our common community, people are more likely to emphasize the distances and conflicts between cultures. Whether the subject is immigration, trade or foreign affairs, there is a greater desire to build separation fences because differences in values seem deeply rooted and impossible to erase.

Read more . .

David Brooks Tony Blair Politics Bush Iraq News

Bad News for Bush Wrap Up

AlterNet -- A majority of Iraqi lawmakers want a timetable for U.S. withdrawal.

The Democratic Daily -- A majority of Americans disapprove of Bush’s veto of the war spending bill with a timetable.

The Sideshow -- Republicans are defecting to the Obama camp.

Keloland TV -- Impeach Bush license plates are deemed free speech.

Political Wire -- Nobody wants to work for Bush.

The Gun Toting Liberal -- Thirty-nine percent of Americans say IMPEACH THE BUSH-CHENEY FAILURE!

Yahoo News -- "Three retired generals challenge a dozen members of Congress in a new ad campaign . . saying the politicians can't expect to win re-election if they support Bush's policies in Iraq."

Washington Post -- "House Republican moderates, in a remarkably blunt White House meeting, warned President Bush this week that his pursuit of the war in Iraq is risking the future of the Republican Party and that he cannot count on GOP support for many more months."

Digby -- "The situation is now so godawful, so completely coo-coo, and so totally out of control that future historians will shake their heads in amazement trying to figure out why, by the spring of '07, the US politicians and the public haven't demanded the immediate removal of the Bush administration from office and their incarceration in the Hague to stand trial."

News Politics Bush Impeach Bush Anti Bush TV Ad Iraq War Timetable Bush Legacy

Generals Against Bush (VoteVets TV AD)

This is a Stunning TV Ad -- "Mr. President, You Have Placed Our Nation in Peril, Our Only Hope is that Congress Will Act Now . . . " -- Major General John Batiste.

General Batiste is a lifelong Republican, and he voted for Bush. More importantly, before he retired he was one of the Commanders on the Ground who Bush can't stop telling Democrats to listen to. Generals talking back to the Commander Guy! What is the country coming to?

This is the first of a three part series of ads with Generals standing up to Bush. The ads will challenge a dozen Republican Congresspersons by reminding them that they can't possibly win re-election if they continue to support Bush's War. The ads come to us from VoteVets.org. Next week's ad will feature retired Major General Paul Eaton. Then there will be an ad from former NATO Allied Supreme Commander, General Wesley Clark.

Bush General John Batiste TV Ad Iraq War News Democratic Congress Politics VoteVets.org General Paul Eaton General Wesley Clark Timetable

Save the Darfur Puppy

The Darfur Puppy
by NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Finally, we’re beginning to understand what it would take to galvanize President Bush, other leaders and the American public to respond to the genocide in Sudan: a suffering puppy with big eyes and floppy ears.

That’s the implication of a series of studies by psychologists trying to understand why people — good, conscientious people — aren’t moved by genocide or famines. Time and again, we’ve seen that the human conscience just isn’t pricked by mass suffering, while an individual child (or puppy) in distress causes our hearts to flutter.

In one experiment, psychologists asked ordinary citizens to contribute $5 to alleviate hunger abroad. In one version, the money would go to a particular girl, Rokia, a 7-year-old in Mali; in another, to 21 million hungry Africans; in a third, to Rokia — but she was presented as a victim of a larger tapestry of global hunger.

Not surprisingly, people were less likely to give to anonymous millions than to Rokia. But they were also less willing to give in the third scenario, in which Rokia’s suffering was presented as part of a broader pattern.

Evidence is overwhelming that humans respond to the suffering of individuals rather than groups. Think of the toddler Jessica McClure falling down a well in 1987, or the Lindbergh baby kidnapping in 1932 (which Mencken described as the “the biggest story since the Resurrection”). . . .

If President Bush and the global public alike are unmoved by the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of fellow humans, maybe our last, best hope is that we can be galvanized by a puppy in distress.

Read more . . .

Nicholas Kristof News Politics Bush Darfur Genocide

State Kills Another Human -- No Mercy from Bredesen

The State of Tennessee executed Philip Workman at 1:38 am today. As expected, Governor Phil Bredesen was unresponsive to the pleas for clemency. Bredesen is the same poor excuse for a Democrat who yanked life-saving Medicaid away from 100,000 plus sick, elderly, and poor people. If your life depends on mercy from Governor Phil Bredesen, you are effectively screwed.

Workman's execution was scheduled for 1:00 am at the ghoulish Riverbend Maximum Security Prison. There's no word yet on why Workman died at 1:38, or why the local television stations did not break the story until 1:45.

But why do these barbaric state killings always take place at such ungodly hours? Is it to minimize the number of people who are exposed to the barbarity? Is it to make it easier for the state to control the story line the media takes away? If the state is going to practice the barbaric act of killing people, then we should all have the option of viewing it on our television screens.

The local television stations did not interrupt their regularly scheduled late night crappy programming until the killing was finished. The state's side of the story was presented to the media and no questions were allowed. Media coverage over the past few days has pretty well confined itself to the state's side of the story. If you don't get some of your news from the internet, you might never know that the prosecuting D.A. and the victim's daughter have pled for clemency because new evidence strongly suggests that the State of Tennessee just killed an innocent man.

Workman's last request was that his last meal -- a vegetarian pizza -- be given to a homeless person. The compassionate zombies at Riverbend Maximum State Prison said no. Prison spokeswoman Dorinda Carter said, "taxpayers don't really give us permission to donate to charity." You were expecting kindness? After killing another human being, denying a last request is obviously no big deal.

The human race is a fucking barbaric species. And that goes double during conservative eras.

That bastion of compassionate conservatism, the United States Supreme Court refused to halt the execution two times on Tuesday.

The one and only eye-witness in the case now says he lied. Five of the jurors say they'd never have sentenced Workman to death without the testimony of the eye-witness. Ballistics experts say the bullet that did the killing did Not come from Workman’s gun.

Last year Florida suspended executions after it took 34 minutes to kill a man, and Ohio had second thoughts after it took 90 minutes to end a life. The states use the same three drug lethal injection 'cocktail' that Tennessee fed Workman. It's been criticized as a violation of the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Apparently, the cruelty is not in the killing, but in how you do it.

Vigils were held around the state. Outside the prison, some sixty compassionate folks gathered for a vigil. One of them, Jay Gilchrist, a lay minister in Nashville, said: "I wish our governor would wake up and realize that it just doesn't work. The death penalty doesn't deter crime. It doesn't save taxpayer money. That's for sure. And it's not a civilized thing to do."

For Philip Workman's side of the story see the video below.

Deadly Silence Proof Of Innocent Man On Death Row

Photo: Witnesses outside the site of the state killing gather under the cover of darkness, via The Tennessean

Philip Workman Tennessee Death Penalty News Politics Bredesen State Killing Death Row Execution Nashville Riverbend Maximum Security Prison

Is Nathan Bedford Forrest of the KKK a Republican Hero?

In 2007, you can still find an actual Congressperson from the White Men Are Best Party who feels no shame about embellishing speeches with quaint little quotes from a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

I kid you not.

"Yesterday on the House floor, Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX) argued that the United States needs to immediately authorize funds for the war in Iraq. . . To make his case, he quoted “successful Confederate general” Nathan Bedford Forrest, but left out the fact that Forrest was also one of the original Grand Wizards of the Ku Klux Klan." [via]

Quoting Nathan Bedford Forrest on the Congressional floor!?! In 2007? Apparently, members of terrorist organizations have said some very profound things. Or not. Here's the quote: “Git thar fustest with the mostest.”

Both Roll Call and the Carpetbagger Report note that not only does Ted Poe quote KKK founding member Nathan Bedford Forrest, but the Republican confounds his error by misquoting the Grand Wizard of the terrorist organization. Any day now, expect Rep. Ted Poe from Texas to be embellishing speeches with quotes from Al-Qaeda.

I'd ask what's wrong with these people, but what else can you expect from the incestuous White Men Are Best Party?

Where does the Republican Party find all these old time white men?

And why, in 2007, does a Tennessee public university have a campus building named after the Grand Wizard?

Race Ted Poe GOP Black News Texas Republican News Politics KKK Nathan Bedford Forrest Tennessee MTSU Terrorism

Change in France

Get Off the Chaise Longue
By Maureen Dowd

Paris: Beauty has been chased off by the Beast. Now France waits to see just how feral and domineering Nicolas Sarkozy will be.

The lovely Ségolène Royal — more phenomenon than politician — ran a maternal, Manichaean campaign painting her intense, Napoleon-sized opponent as an immoral political animal and a brute whose election would spark riots and “a sort of civil war.”

The luminous Sego did not even deign to address the “dark” Sarko by name, either in the debate or in her concession speech Sunday night. Cartoonists have depicted the tough guy — who bullies rivals, betrays mentors and calls young troublemakers in low-income housing in the Paris suburbs “scum” — as a gargoyle, Dracula, an evil sorcerer and a devil.

The imagery of the presidential duel tapped into mythic Gothic tales of France, like “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Phantom of the Opera,” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”

With Hungarian, Greek and Jewish roots, with a father who deserted and belittled him, with his jittery ambition and pugnacious talk, Sarko is jolting the inbred, insular and introspective world of elite French politics. The far right has called him “a foreigner with an unhappy marriage,” and a Sego adviser scorned him as “an American neocon with a French passport.”

“He’s an arriviste,” said Bruno Ract-Madoux, the owner of a vintage shop in Paris. “From the beginning, he was someone who would sell his mother as fast as possible to get ahead.”

Or as an elegant Parisian woman who voted for Sego warned guests at a postelection dinner party, “He’s like a little Donald Trump.”

Sego was serene and protective — but vague; Sarko was kinetic and pushy — and concrete. As it turned out, the French wanted to be prodded even more than they wanted to be pampered. Perhaps they have decided they have to stop being sluggish so they can continue to be supercilious.

Liberals mocked Sarko’s campaign theme: “A France that wakes up early.” Gérard Biard wrote a piece in the far-left weekly paper Charlie Hebdo: “At dawn, I ripped myself out of bed. ... I took a cold shower, put on some mismatched socks and downed eight espressos, as I headed out to meet France in the morning. ... The France that wakes up early would rather stay in the sack.”

Read more . . .

Maureen Dowd Ségolène Royal France President Election News Politics Nicolas Sarkozy French Election

Giuliani Gave Money to Planned Parenthood

If you need an abortion, you might want to call Rudy Giuliani and ask him to be your escort into the abortion clinic. Republican presidential contender Rudy Giuliani has made personal donations to Planned Parenthood.

Conservatives are either asleep or stoned when they respond to the polls because Giuliani remains the leader of the Republican presidential pack in spite of the fact that sometimes he says he is pro choice, and sometimes he says it's "Ok" if Roe v. Wade is overturned.

The New York Times reports that Giuliani gave money to national, state, and city chapters of Planned Parenthood:

The Web site Politico.com, saying it had been alerted by a rival campaign, reported before Mr. Giuliani took the stage at the conservatives’ gathering that he and his wife, Donna, made personal donations to national, state, and city chapters of Planned Parenthood totaling $900 in 1993, 1994, 1998 and 1999.

Photo: A Protest Portrait of Giuliani by artist Robert Lederman who was arrested 41 times under the reign of control-freak Giuliani. The former NYC mayor is also known as Jailiani, Fooliani and Crueliani by New York City residents.

Rudy Giuliani Abortion Parenthood Pro-Choice News Politics 2008 Conservatives

Death Row: Tennessee Kills Tonight

Philip Workman is set to be executed tonight by the State of Tennessee at 1:00 in the early morning of Wednesday, May 9th, 2007. "The restraining order that appeared to stay the execution last Friday has been overturned, and Philip has been moved to death watch."

Call Governor Bredesen's office and ask for clemency at 615-741-2001 or e-mail him at Phil.Bredesen@state.tn.us.

Victim's Daughter and D.A. Call on Gov. Bredesen to Grant Clemency -- New Evidence Points to Workman's Innocence!

• The only eyewitness who testified that he saw Workman shoot Lt. Oliver, Harold Davis, has recanted his testimony and admitted that we was not on the scene. He has even passed a lie detector test confirming this new admission.
• Ballistics experts have testified that “to a degree of medical certainty” the bullet that killed Lt. Oliver did not come from Phillip Workman’s gun.
• Five of the original jurors have signed affidavits stating that they would not have voted for death had this information been available to them at the time of trial.
• The prosecuting D.A. and Lt. Oliver’s daughter have called for the Governor to grant clemency to Philip Workman.

"If, by this afternoon, the Governor has refused to do the right thing, join a vigil near you to bear witness against an immoral and unjust execution."

Vigils:

Memphis - 9:00pm -- Immaculate Conception, 1695 Central Avenue
Jackson - 7:00-8:00 -- St. Mary’s Church, 1665 Highway 45 Bypass
Knoxville - 8:00-9:30 -- St. James Episcopal Church, 1101 North Broadway
Nashville - 7:30 - 8:30 -- Holy Name Church, 521 Woodland Avenue
Nashville - 9:00 - -- Riverbend Prison, 7475 Cockrill Bend Blvd

Most of the info above comes from the Tennessee Coalition to Abolish State Killing (TCASK) Find more info at the TCASK Blog.

MSM: Concerns about Tennessee's revised execution method
Tennessee prepares to execute only third inmate in 47 years
Salon: Doubt on death row

Philip Workman Tennessee Death Penalty News Politics Bredesen State Killing Death Row Vigil Nashville

Rudy Giuliani - Statesman Or Thug?

Video: Does Rudy Giuliani Sound Presidential To You?

Loud-mouthed Giuliani insults city bus drivers.
Town Hall Meeting June 27 2001 -- "Larry Hanley,President of ATU Local 726, tries to ask then Mayor Rudy Giuliani about an inside deal to grant bus routes to connected private bus companies that contibuted to his campaigns." (1 minute video)

Rudy Giuliani New York City Mayor News Politics Video 2008 Republicans Fooliani Bus Drivers Corruption

Mother's Day in Iraq

"Martyr Sarah Zuhair" reads the caption on a portrait of a girl killed in an explosion at a police station in Baghdad." -- In Iraq, portraits of grief . .

"A Baghdad photo shop whose orders once celebrated life now does a brisk business in memorial collages and images of carnage."


via Cathie from Canada

Martyr Sarah Zuhair Iraq War Mothers Day Grief Bush News Politics

More Than Just Talk

John Edwards on Poverty
by Bob Herbert

It was a nice moment. The sky was filled with thick, dark clouds and a monsoonlike storm was on its way, but there was the presidential candidate, John Edwards, in work boots, jeans and a navy blue shirt, talking with a handful of neighborhood people gathered outside a house that was being built in the Ninth Ward.

The former senator was there for a photo-op and the chat wouldn’t last long. But the people, most of them young, were excited to see him. They listened thoughtfully and asked a number of questions.

The scene was immensely more appealing than the overly scripted televised “debates” that feature sleep-inducing nonanswers from an army of candidates browbeaten by moderators wielding stopwatches.

New Orleans has not been a hot topic at those upscale gatherings. Much of the city is still in ruins, still in “terrible shape,” as Mr. Edwards noted. During a lengthy interview that followed his talk with the local residents, he told me that what had been allowed to happen to New Orleans was “an embarrassment for America” and that as president he would put the power of the federal government squarely behind its revival.

He said he would appoint a high-level official to take charge of the rebuilding, and he would have that person “report to me” every day. He said he would create 50,000 “steppingstone jobs,” in parks, recreation facilities and a variety of community projects, for New Orleans residents who have been unable to find any other work. And he said, “We’re also going to have to rebuild these levees.”

. . . As president, he said, he would push hard for a “significant” increase in the minimum wage, would expand the earned income tax credit, would insist on making it easier for workers to organize, and would focus a substantial portion of his administration’s energy on achieving concrete improvements in education, housing and health care. . .

It’s true that promises from politicians come at us like weeds on steroids. But the nation would get a clearer picture of the character, integrity and leadership qualities of individual candidates if the press would focus more intently on matters of substance.

Read more . .

Bob Herbert John Edwards Poverty Media 2008 News Democrats Politics

Fred Thompson Bombs in Orange County

Bad Reviews for Fred Thompson's speech at Prestigious Lincoln Club of Orange County

Fred Thompson bombed big time in his first major speech as Ronnie Reagan wannabe, according to Bob Novak. The conservative Robert Novak writes in the Washington Post that Thompson "needs preparation" and that the bit actor in the Law and Order series is no Ronnie Reagan:

"It was not Reaganesque." "No red meat." "Too low key." That was the preponderant reaction I heard to Thompson's half-hour presentation (leavened by a few favorable comments, mostly by women, that he was more "statesmanlike" and "presidential" than the announced candidates). Lincoln Club members, like many conservative Republicans, have been unimpressed by the existing field of Republican hopefuls and envisioned Thompson as the second coming of Ronald Reagan. They did not get it Friday night.

And over at the Hotline, Marc Ambinder concurs:

There was very little red meat: (The solution to America’s woes: optimism. Iraq? Democrats? They want to raise taxes and are playing “crass politics.” Taxes? Too high. Government? Too large and overbearing.) Thompson did not talk about morals, or abortion, or God, or gays, or guns.

Our local paper, the Tennessean tells us that Thompson was a bad boy and a mediocre student in high school who still managed to get a degree from Vanderbilt University.

Sound familiar?

Photo of Fred Thompson and his wife Jeri Kehn.

via Political Wire: Thompson Flops

Robert Novak Fred Thompson News Jeri Kehn Picture 2008 Republicans Thompson's Wife Politics Lincoln Club Tennessee

All in the Families

Political Families
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Before I get to the “but,” let me say that Hillary Rodham Clinton would make a terrific president.

She has spent decades wrestling with public policy questions about poverty and health care. She is smart and pragmatic on foreign policy issues. And while it would be tough for a liberal or centrist woman to be elected (it’s much easier for a conservative like Margaret Thatcher), the rising Democratic tide increasingly makes her look electable.

But ... there is another issue at stake, one that goes to the heart of what kind of a nation we are.

If Mrs. Clinton were elected and served two terms, then for seven consecutive presidential terms the White House would have been in the hands of just two families. That’s just not the kind of equal-opportunity democracy we aspire to. Maybe we can’t make America as egalitarian and fluid as we would like, but we can at least push back against the concentration of power. We can do that in our tax policy, in our education policy — and in our voting decisions.

The political aristocracy in this country is more fluid than past nobility, and that is how the Clinton family entered it. But the benefit of membership in that aristocracy has probably increased over time, as larger Congressional districts and the rising cost of campaigns make it harder for an unfinanced unknown to rise in politics.

Particularly after George W. Bush rose to the White House partly because he inherited a name and rolodexes of donors from a previous president, we should take a deep breath before replacing one dynasty with another.

Read more . .

Nicholas Kristof Bush Dynasty Clinton Hillary News Democrats Politics

Republican Law and Disorder (Video)

Republican Law and Disorder -- Wonder how Fred Thompson likes the Dems' use of his Law and Order theme song?

"In the House of Representatives, the people are represented by two separate and fundamentally different parties. The Democrats -- with a New Direction for America -- and the Republicans -- whose business is corruption.

"These are their stories."

via the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee where you can sign up to be in their rapid response network.

Bush Law and Disorder Republican Crooks GOP News Democrats Politics Republican Culture of Corruption

Bush at 28% - Republicans Vanishing Like Honey Bees

Not only has Bush's job approval fallen to a miserable 28 percent, nearly two out of three Americans view the Commander Guy as "stubborn and unwilling to admit his mistakes."

The Newsweek Poll also finds that Republicans continue to vanish from the planet just like honey bees -- while Democrats have apparently gone forth and multiplied! Who said Bush was good for nothing?

Total Rep/Lean Rep 37%
Total Dem/Lean Dem 52%

"Bush Hits All-Time Low - George W. Bush has the lowest presidential approval rating in a generation, and the leading Dems beat every major '08 Republican. . . It’s hard to say which is worse news for Republicans: that George W. Bush now has the worst approval rating of an American president in a generation, or that he seems to be dragging every ‘08 Republican presidential candidate down with him. But According to the new NEWSWEEK Poll, the public’s approval of Bush has sunk to 28 percent. . ."

Bush Newsweek Poll 28 Percent Democrats News Politics Republicans

Video: Harold Ford, Sean Penn on Maher's Real Time

Fox Democrat Harold Ford Ventures Into Liberal Country -- and Sean Penn shares his thoughts about what should happen to Tenet, Bush, Cheney, Rice, etcetera.

Harold Ford Jr., Sean Penn, Gary Schandling on Bill Maher's Real Time --

I'll give Harold Ford points for appearing on Real Time, but I wonder if he knew what he was getting into, or if he ever actually watched the show. Still, he had a much easier time here than he did on Josh Marshall's blog.

Harold "I Am Not a Liberal" Ford was definitely out of his element. At times, he appeared stiff and uncomfortable. The Bill Maher show is hardly the format for spouting well rehearsed talking points, but that didn't stop Ford. But then again, he did venture into liberal country again -- if he keeps that up he might get bitten by the liberal bug. And if he wasn't so eloquent, well, it may be hard for most anyone to wax eloquent when they're sitting next to Sean Penn.

See the other five videos comprising the May 4 Real Time Show. (Number 1 spoofs the GOP debate and more, Number 3 features more Ford, the one here is Number 4.)

Bill Maher Sean Penn Harold Ford Real Time News Politics Tenet Bush Cheney Tennessee

Dowd: La Campagne, C’est moi

Ségo’s Egomania
By MAUREEN DOWD

It’s hard not to be drawn to a presidential candidate with a name like a Bond girl, a smile like an angel, a figure that looks great in a bikini at 53, a campaign style like Joan of Arc, and a buffet for the press corps brimming with crustless fromage sandwiches, icy chocolate profiteroles, raspberry parfaits, red Bordeaux, espresso and little almond gâteaux. (When in France, let us eat cake.)

Ségolène Royal brought back the sizzle to socialism, raising the ire of Stephen Colbert’s right-wing TV host, who warned that “socialism is always a threat but never more so than when it looks like this.”

. . . France is chauvinistic — women got the vote in 1944 and compose only a small percentage of the National Assembly — but the country seems less neurotic than America about the idea of a woman as president. The trouble with Ségo’s campaign is not her gender. The trouble is that her only vision for France is herself. Hence, her nickname: Egolene.

Read more . .

Maureen Dowd Ségolène Royal France President Election News Politics Gender

Is Condi Hiding the Smoking Gun?

Condi’s Culpability
Frank Rich

If, as J.F.K. had it, victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan, the defeat in Iraq is the most pitiful orphan imaginable. Its parents have not only tossed it to the wolves but are also trying to pin its mutant DNA on any patsy they can find.

George Tenet is just the latest to join this blame game, which began more than three years ago when his fellow Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Tommy Franks told Bob Woodward that Douglas Feith, the Pentagon’s intelligence bozo, was the “stupidest guy on the face of the earth” (that’s the expurgated version). Last fall, Kenneth Adelman, the neocon cheerleader who foresaw a “cakewalk” in Iraq, told Vanity Fair that Mr. Tenet, General Franks and Paul Bremer were “three of the most incompetent people who’ve ever served in such key spots.” Richard Perle chimed in that the “huge mistakes” were “not made by neoconservatives” and instead took a shot at President Bush. Ahmad Chalabi, the neocons’ former darling, told Dexter Filkins of The Times “the real culprit in all this is Wolfowitz.”

And of course nearly everyone blames Rumsfeld.

This would be a Three Stooges routine were there only three stooges. The good news is that Mr. Tenet’s book rollout may be the last gasp of this farcical round robin of recrimination. Republicans and Democrats have at last found some common ground by condemning his effort to position himself as the war’s innocent scapegoat. Some former C.I.A. colleagues are rougher still. Michael Scheuer, who ran the agency’s bin Laden unit, has accused Mr. Tenet of lacking “the moral courage to resign and speak out publicly to try to stop our country from striding into what he knew would be an abyss.” Even after Mr. Tenet did leave office, he maintained a Robert McNamara silence until he cashed in.

Read more . . .

Frank Rich Condi Rice Tenet Bush Iraq War News Politics

Rosie Beats Bush in Time's Top 100

Time's list of the Top 100 Most Influential People in the world does not include Bush. My respect for Time Magazine has just grown by leaps and bounds. Who listens to George Bush other than people who are about to be subpoenaed?

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino says Bush doesn't feel left out, "but the feeling is mutual."

Hah! That sounds just like President Pissypants.

Rightwingers are outraged. It's not clear what bothers them most -- that Dubya didn't make the list or that Rosie O'Donnell did. If being the target of rightwing rage means you're influential, then Rosie is right up there with Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton. And there's always a heavy dose of rightwing rage reserved for Al Gore.

The list of people "whose power, talent or moral example is transforming the world" includes Nancy Pelosi, Al Gore, Elizabeth Edwards, Mahar Arar, Michael J. Fox, Oprah Winfrey, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Sacha Baron Cohen, Condoleezza Rice, Bill Clinton, Raul Castro, Osama bin Laden, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gen. David Petraeus, and Rosie O'Donnell.

The list includes 29 women and 71 men from 27 different countries.

Bush Time Magazine Al Gore Rosie O'Donnell News Politics Nancy Pelosi Elizabeth Edwards Hillary Clinton 100 Most Influential People

Ronnie Reagan: Why Do Angry White Men Love Him? (Video - Rachel Maddow)

Rachel Maddow on the Macho Republican Party's Love Affair with Ronnie Reagan - It's So Gay!


Brilliant!

Rachel Maddow's Campaign Asylum - Beware the Ghost of Reagan

Ronald Reagan GOP Republican Debate Reagan Library News Politics Rachel Maddow Video Conservatism Angry White Men McCain Giuliani Romney

Ten White Men and They Call it the Republican Debate

Ten White Men Stage An Obscenely White Male Game Show and They Call it the Republican Debate.

I tried, but I couldn't find the one who is not a Bush clone. Ten straight old white men vying to be the next president -- and the Republican Party doesn't even have the sense to be embarrassed. For gawd's sake, even the questioners were white men!

But hey, they were thinking and talking about the rest of us. Were your ears burning?

They talked about women. Nine out of ten of the men were ecstatic at the thought of overturning Roe v. Wade. Sen. Sam Brownback said that the day Roe was overturned would be a "Glorious day of human liberty and freedom."

Yeah, well, there's nothing new about women being excluded from the bounds of "human liberty and freedom."

The other white man, Giuliani said overturning Roe would be "okay." Giuliani added, "I hate abortion. . . But since it is an issue of conscience, I would respect a woman's right to make a different choice." Presumably, America's Mayor means that if you find yourself having an illegal and unsafe abortion, well, he'll still respect you afterwards.

They talked about gays. Tommy Thompson said everybody and his brother has the right to fire you if you are gay and because you are gay. On the subject of gay rights, Tommy T. makes Bush look like a flaming LGBT studies scholar!

They talked about women who abstain from matrimony, but not motherhood.

Tommy Thompson, famed terrorizer of mothers and children on welfare, despises single mothers, or "out-of-wedlock" births. Elect him and it will be okay to fire single moms.

They talked about Hillary Clinton. She tried to socialize health care! And she's married to Bill! All ten white men apparently agree that Hillary and Bill in the White House would be their worst nightmare. Maybe even worse than Islamic fascists in the White House!

They talked about Islamic fascists. Mike Huckabee said "we" are better than Islamic fascists because "we" are a "culture of life," and unlike Islamic fascists "we" don't strap bombs to the bellies of children. He's right. This is America -- "we" drop our bombs on children from airplanes. Cuz that's how you do it in a culture of life.

They talked about Osama bin Laden. McCain seethed on cue that he will follow Osama "to the gates of hell." The most notable thing about McCain was his forced display of anger and passion. He should have popped some Viagra before the debate. He was out to prove that he's not really old, tired, and boring, but he proved that he is a bad actor.

They talked about tax cuts. Gawd, they love tax cuts! And next to tax cuts, they love Ronald Reagan. They talked about Ronald Reagan 19 times.

And the surprise of the night ---- Only Three Republican Candidates Do Not Believe in Evolution! Or so they said. The unsurprising, or honest, three would be Brownback, Tancredo and Huckabee.

And the winner is: Romney wins the Drudge poll with 35%. (Romney was there?!?) Giuliani wins 2nd place with 20%, and McCain is a pathetic number three with 6%. But wait, an instant SurveyUSA poll declares Giuliani to be the winner! But wait, over at Redstate, the winner is Fred Thompson!

The comedic value of the 1950s style affair was the only thing that kept me awake. This old time party has got to be on its death throes. I vote we laugh it out of existence. And while the ten white men sort of debated, planes circled the Reagan Library outside with banners reading: "Republicans, Mission Accomplished?" and "McCain, Mission Accomplished?"

Bush GOP Republican Debate Reagan News Politics Abortion Gay Rights Roe v. Wade Hillary Clinton McCain Giuliani

The Aussie ‘Big Dry’

Dry Australia
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Almost everywhere you travel these days, people are talking about their weather — and how it has changed. Nowhere have I found this more true, though, than in Australia, where “the big dry,” a six-year record drought, has parched the Aussie breadbasket so severely that on April 19, Prime Minister John Howard actually asked the whole country to pray for rain. “I told people you have to pray for rain,” Mr. Howard remarked to me, adding, “I said it without a hint of irony.”

And here’s what’s really funny: It actually started to rain! But not enough, which is one reason Australia is about to have its first election in which climate change will be a top issue. In just 12 months, climate change has gone from being a nonissue here to being one that could tip the vote.

Read more. .

Climate Change Global Warming Al Gore Thomas Friedman News Politics Environment Australia

Bush Threatens to Veto Hate Crimes Bill

Whoever is in charge of the White House didn't even wait for the Hate Crimes legislation to pass before barking out a veto threat. The House bill adds "sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or disability" to the Hate Crimes law.

The White House, in a statement warning of a veto, said state and local criminal laws already cover the new crimes defined under the bill, and there was "no persuasive demonstration of any need to federalize such a potentially large range of violent crime enforcement."

It also noted that the bill leaves other classes, such as the elderly, the military and police officers, without similar special status.

The House passed the bill by 237-180.

Currently federal law defines hate crimes as "acts of violence against individuals on the basis of race, religion, color, or national original."

Speaking of the "true intent of the bill" James Dobson warned his crazy listeners, "you may be guilty of committing a 'thought crime,"' if you read the Bible in a certain way.

I'm not sure what he means. Is Dobson the Homophobe having thoughts about acts of violence against gays whenever he reads the Bible?

The Human Rights Campaign, the country's largest gay rights group, said this federal intervention could have made a difference in the case of Brandon Teena, the young Nebraska transsexual depicted in the movie "Boys Don't Cry" who was raped after two friends discovered that he was biologically female and then murdered when local police did not arrest those responsible.

The Judiciary Committee cited FBI figures that there have been more than 113,000 hate crimes since 1991, including 7,163 in 1995. It said that racially motivated bias accounted for 55% of those incidents, religious bias for 17%, sexual orientation bias for 14% and ethnicity bias for 14%.

Gay Rights Bush Hate Crimes House Bill James Dobson News Politics Gay Veto

The Party of Gutless Wonders

UPdate: The Democratic Party is NOT the Party of Gutless Wonders!

The Washington Post lied! According to Speaker Pelosi and Senator Reid the front page WaPo story about the Democrats caving to Bush is a total fabrication. Will the WaPo's retraction be a headline story on the front page? So sorry dear readers and Dems, somedays I forget that the Washington Post is a neocon paper. (Since one of the missions of this blog is to aid in the ongoing effort to push the Dems to the left, the post below - though based on an apparent total fabrication - remains relevant.) [Thanks again, Sadie.]

The Party of Gutless Wonders - now which party would that be? According to today's front page headline story in the Washington Post -- Democrats Back Down On Iraq Timetable -- Bush and the Democrats are "negotiating" a new war spending bill.

Surprise! The first "major concession" in this 'bipartisan' effort comes not from the worst president ever -- but from the Democrats. And, yeah, it's pretty damn major.

The Dems said oh never mind about bringing the troops home. After all, they'll get home eventually, albeit in body bags.

But this is what 'negotiating' with Bush looks like. You give and give and the maniac takes and takes. Then he shakes your hand and craps all over you and your country.

Personally, I think Dick and Karl are holding the Dems' children hostage in one of Dick's bunkers.

But whatever the reason, once again we are dealing with gutless wonders.

Iraq Timetable Bush Democrats Iraq Spending Bill Veto Troops Home News Politics Iraq War Anti War

GOP Debate: What to Say About Bush

As Republicans prepare for their debate on MSNBC tonight, the weighty question on their minds is not the Iraq War, not global warming, and not the poison in our food supply.

The important question for the loser presidential contenders is:

What the hell will we say about Bush?
Gee, maybe the subject won't come up.

And, of course the debate just totally has to be in the Reagan Library. As Bill Maher says, the Republican obsession with Reagan is just so gay.

Bush Commander Guy Republican Debate Reagan News Politics Iraq War 2008

Commander Guy In the Bubble

"As you know, my position is clear – I’m the commander guy."

-- George W. Bush, aka the Decider

Face it folks, our fate is in the hands of a man who thinks, talks, and walks like a 12 year old boy.

Bubble Boy was explaining why his simple twisted view from inside the bubble should carry more weight than that of the Constitution, the Congress, and every-freakin'-body else on the planet. Gawd help us!

Did I mention that in a speech yesterday, the pResident of Arrested Development invoked bogeyman Al-Qaeda 27 times?

via memeorandum

Bush Commander Guy The Decider President Ego News Politics Bubble Boy Iraq War 2008 Al-Qaeda

Herbert: An Invisible War

by Bob Herbert

Paul Rieckhoff looked across the crowded restaurant, which was not far from Times Square.

“During World War II,” he said, “we could be in this place and there would be a guy sitting at that table who was in the war, or the bartender had been in the war. Everybody you saw would have had a stake in the war. But right now you could walk around New York for blocks and not find anybody who has been in Iraq.

“The president can say we’re a country at war all he wants. We’re not. The military is at war. And the military families are at war. Everybody else is shopping.”

Read more . . .

Bob Herbert News Politics Bush Iraq War Miserable Failure

Lincoln Davis - One of Seven Turncoat Democrats

Tennessee's Lincoln Davis is one of the Seven Turncoat Democrats who voted for Bush's veto and against the will of the American people. (Roll Call)

Voting to sustain Bush's veto were 196 Republicans and 7 DINOs. Two hundred and twenty Democrats and two Republicans voted to override the veto.

Chris Bowers over at MyDD comments on the "seven defecting Democrats":

"The seven defecting Democrats were John Barrow, Georgia; Dan Boren, Oklahoma; Lincoln Davis, Tennessee; Jim Marshall, Georgia; Jim Matheson, Utah; Michael McNulty, New York; Gene Taylor, Mississippi. I don't care how 'conservative' your district is. With 60% of Americans favoring a timeline to end the war, it probably has a majority in every Democratic held seat, and even in the majority of Republican-held seats. And that isn't going to change between now and November 2008. It needs to remain in issue in both primary and general elections."

As we've noted before, Lincoln Davis is one of Tennessee's most conservative Democrats.

If Lincoln Davis represents your district, please contact him. If Lincoln Davis represents your state -- or your party -- please contact him!

Contact info for Rep. Lincoln "DINO" Davis

Thanks Sadie!

Lincoln Davis Bush Congress Iraq Spending Bill Veto Tennessee DINO Democrats News Politics Iraq War 7 Democrats

John Edwards Ad: Standing Up To Bush

TV AD: We the People Demand that Congress Stand Up to Bush

Here's the new John Edwards TV Ad -- which will be running in the D.C. market. The polls show that when Bush vetoed the Iraq funding bill, he vetoed the will of the American people.

"The president has turned a tin ear to the wishes of the American people." -- Speaker Nancy Pelosi

TPM Cafe reports: "Edwards' supporters will also be encouraged via online outreach to record their own voices making the case to Congress in the ad's script. According to the Edwards campaign, a new version with all the new voices will at some point be posted on the Web -- the idea being that the effort will snowball as more and more people add their voices to the chorus."

Update: Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) takes John Edwards to task for the ad. "Dodd is the lone presidential candidate to voice support for the measure being sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.) that would set a date certain for not just withdrawal of American troops but for funding for the war."

John Edwards Bush Democrats Iraq Spending Bill Veto Video Ad Troops Home News Politics Iraq War Anti War Chris Dodd

Nashville Protests Bush's Veto

Anti War Rally in Nashville Today!

Today Nashville joins with Americans at more than 200 rallies across the country to tell Congress to stay strong and stand up to the pResident who vetoes the will of the people.



Nashville Emergency Response Veto Rally
Centennial Park
Centennial Park sidewalk across West End from Borders
Nashville, TN 37203
02 May, 6:00 PM
Handicap accessible.

"Congress has two options on how to respond—they can either cave to the president's pressure or stand strong and demand accountability from him on Iraq. Members of Congress are going to be gauging public reaction in the next few days to decide which path they'll follow." -- Moveon.org Email Alert

Update: Details on the Knoxville Anti War Rally

Anti War Nashville Protest Bush Iraq Spending Bill Veto Tennessee News Politics Veto Rally MoveOn.org Iraq War

Dowd: Slam's Silence

Better Never Than Late
By MAUREEN DOWD

Instead of George Tenet teaching at Georgetown University, George Tenet should be taught at Georgetown University.

There should be a course on government called “The Ultimate Staff Guy.” A morality saga about how much harm you can do as a go-along, get-along guy, spending so much time trying not to alienate the big cheese so he doesn’t can you that you miss the moment where you have to can him or lose your soul.

If Colin Powell and George Tenet had walked out of the administration in February 2003 instead of working together on that tainted U.N. speech making the bogus case for war, they might have turned everything around. They might have saved the lives and limbs of all those brave U.S. kids and innocent Iraqis, not to mention our world standing and national security.

It would certainly have been harder for timid Democrats, like Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and John Edwards, to back up the administration if two members of the Bush inner circle had broken away to tell an increasingly apparent truth: that Dick Cheney, Rummy and the neocons were feverishly pushing a naïve president into invading Iraq with junk facts.

General Powell counted on Slam Dunk — a slender reed — to help him rid the speech of most of the garbage Mr. Cheney’s office wanted in it. Slam, of course, tried to have it both ways, helping the skeptical secretary of state and pandering to higher bosses. Afterward, when the speech turned out to be built on a no-legged stool, General Powell was furious at Slam. But they both share blame: they knew better. They put their loyalty to a runaway White House ahead of their loyalty to a fearful public.

Slam Dunk’s book tour is mesmerizing, in a horrifying way.

“The irony of the whole situation is, is he was bluffing,” Slam said of Saddam on “Larry King Live” on Monday night, adding, “And he didn’t know we weren’t.” Mr. He-Man Tenet didn’t understand the basics of poker, much less Arab culture. It never occurred to him that Saddam might feign strength to flex muscles at his foes in the Middle East? Slam couldn’t take some of that $40 billion we spend on intelligence annually and get a cultural profile of the dictator before we invaded?

Read more . . .

Maureen Dowd News Politics Bush Iraq War George Tenet Slam Dunk CIA Cheney Tenet

Al Qaeda Leader Not Dead -- Again

Once again, reports of Abu Ayyub al-Masri's death are "false" and merely "part of a misinformation campaign" reports ABC News.

The news of Masri's death was breaking news on CNN and everywhere else early this morning.

Al-Qaeda's number two man has died so many freakin' times that you'd have to be a damn fool, or a diehard Republican, to believe the man would just happen to die again on the anniversary of Bush's Mission Accomplished moment. Sheesh!

Bush Abu Ayyub al-Masri Al-Qaeda Misinformation ABC News News Politics Lies Mission Accomplished

Ad: Mr. pResident, You Can't Veto the Truth

Americans United for Change TV ad

This ad is set to air on the cable news channels as soon as Bubble Boy vetoes the Iraq spending bill. Another version, almost identical - asking King George to sign the bill -- is currently playing. I've seen it 3 times on CNN in the past 30 minutes.

"George Bush still won't face reality. . Congress voted to start bringing our troops home, but the pResident vetoed the bill."

"It's the will of one nation versus the stubborness of one man."

"Mr. pResident, you can veto a bill, but you can't veto the truth."

Bush Iraq Spending Bill Veto Video Ad Troops Home News Politics CNN Mission Accomplished Iraq War

Bush's Mission Accomplished Moment - 4th Anniversary

Today is the 4th Anniversary of the Boy King's 'Mission Accomplished' moment.

Americans were already commemorating one of the fool's most delusional moments yesterday when demonstrators unfurled before the White House a 50 foot banner reading:

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED?

Bush is expected to veto the Iraq War spending bill today in an effort to make the war last at least until a Democratic president moves into the White House and begins to clean up the Decider's atrocious mess in 2009.

"Four years after President Bush said the war was over, four years after he stood before the banner 'Mission Accomplished' on the USS Abraham Lincoln and four years into a tortured and failed policy in Iraq – US forces are still caught in the crosshairs of a civil war with no end in sight."

The demonstration concluded with a chorus of "sign the bill, sign the bill," from the assembled protesters.

Mission Accomplished? News Politics 4th Anniversary Veto Bush Iraq Spending Bill White House Protest

More Human Food Contaminated

Yesterday our government warned us about eating sausage and biscuits, today we learn from our trustworthy government that chickens have also been fed the contaminated feed containing melamine.

Melamine is a chemical used in plastics and fertilizer.

An estimated 30 broiler poultry farms and eight breeder poultry farms in Indiana received contaminated feed in early February and fed it to poultry within days of receiving it, the agencies said. Other farms will probably be identified as having received contaminated feed, they added.

The FDA and USDA insist that there's no need for a recall because there's no evidence that the substance that killed our pets will harm us.

And we don't torture, and we're making progress in Iraq.

But maybe the real reason that there will be no recall is because the U.S. Government does not know "how many chickens were involved, how many entered the food supply or where they went."

If you were thinking about going vegan, now's the time. But I still fully expect to discover that the plastics and fertilizer chemical is also in our granola.

[Bush as Alfred E. Neuman image via The Nation.]

Contaminated Chicken FDA News Politics Human Food Scare Melamine China Contaminated Human Food Pork Bush Pet Food

DC Madam's Client List: Bad News for Bushies

The so-called DC Madam's list of clients includes "a Bush administration economist, the head of a conservative think tank, a prominent CEO, several lobbyists and a handful of military officials," teases The Blotter over at ABC News.

Earlier today Jeane Palfrey told reporters that “she does not know how many people will be outed by ABC, which is planning to air a report Friday on its ‘20/20′ newsmagazine.”

Previous TGW Posts on Washington sex scandal:
DC Madam's Clients Include White House & Pentagon Officials
Bushie Sex Scandal - Condi's Deputy Linked to Call Girl Service

Sex Scandal Client List Randall Tobias DC Madam Escort Service Harlan Ullman