Speaker-of-the-House Hastert Prepares To Unleash

his lizard tongue--which he keeps coiled in the pouch under his chin-- to catch a passing stuffed porkschop.

"I didn't believe 'em when they told me you can see right through his ears...

...But it's TRUE: I can see straight through 'is fuukin 'aid..."

"Do people really think Ah'm dumber than him?"

Ah swear, Ah GOTTA be smarter than that macaca..."

Bush To Foley: "Did you meet the kid...

...whose schlong was that long?

Doonesbury.com for the boots on the ground

I hate like poison to promote anything on Slate, but that's where Gary Trudeau has placed his blog from the boonies:

"Welcome to The Sandbox, our command-wide milblog, featuring comments, anecdotes, and observations from service members currently deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. This is GWOT-lit's forward position, offering those in-country a chance to share their experiences and reflections with the rest of us. The Sandbox's focus is not on policy and partisanship (go to our Blowback page for that), but on the unclassified details of deployment -- the everyday, the extraordinary, the wonderful, the messed-up, the absurd. The Sandbox is a clean, lightly-edited debriefing environment where all correspondence is read, and as much as possible is posted. And contributors may rest assured that all content, no matter how robust, is currently secured by the First Amendment. To submit a post, click here"

Is Your Senator Siding With The Fascist Jeebo-Fux?

The Establishment Clause in the Bill of Rights is supposed to keep our government from interfering with religion, guard against the states' use of religion for political purposes, and ensure that the government does not act in a way that prefers one religion over another, so that we may all worship freely--or not at all, as our individual consciences move us.

But while the Establishment Clause protects our basic freedoms, it is not self-enforcing. If someone is forced to sue the government to protect their constitutional rights, justice and fairness dictate they be able to recover their legal fees expended to do so.

The Public Expression of Religion Act would prevent citizens from recovering their litigation costs if they sue to stop state-sponsored religion. This law is brazenly designed to make it next to impossible for private citizens to sue to protect their First Amendment rights because lawsuits are prohibitively expensive.

In other words, Congress and the Religious Right want to cement the establishment of their own religion as dominant via the force of the government, and the force of law.

Tell your Senators that religious freedom is more important than the agenda of the religious right!

My Comment, upon signing the petition:
I cannot believe that anyone sworn to uphold the Constitution could lend their support to this travesty. If you have a spine, you must oppose this abomination of a Right-Wing effort to shut off criticism and legal challenges to the illegal and unconstitutional imposition of 'religious' doctrine upon the public sphere.

Add your voice to the chorus. There are over 10,000 signatures on the petition as I write this. Many more are needed. Do your DUTAY!!!!

How Wal-Mart Blows Smoke Up Your Ass

On September 11, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley used his veto power for the first time in seventeen years to block a measure that would have given Wal-Mart employees and workers at other "big box" stores at least $10 per hour plus benefits worth at least $3 per hour. The City Council had passed the bill by a 35-to-14 vote margin. Daley's brash act was a temporary victory for the chorus of conservative pundits and corporate flacks who have been singing Wal-Mart's virtues for the past year.

Click the headline on this post to read this piece (from The Nation.com) to learn who these willing whores for Wal-Mart are, and why they're (sur-PRAHS, sur-PRAHS!!!) so full of shit.

Truthout Interview w/Bill Moyers (@10 mins)

Quoth Marc Ash:
"Capitol Crimes," part one of the series "Moyers on America," follows the Abramoff money trail. If you want to know how Abramoff did it, what part DeLay played, who's getting hurt and who profited - make sure you're sitting down, and watch "Capitol Crimes."

Parts two and three of his interview will examine the second and third broadcasts in the series, "Is God Green?" airing October 11th, and "The Net at Risk," airing October 18th. Stay tuned.

Listen: This is basically Moyers' boilerplate talk: 65 lobbyists for each elected member of congress; they spend 200 million $$$/PER MONTH on the 535 members; campaign contributions = bribery...

The next installment is Oct. 11, on PBS: Moyers On America. Check your local listings...

The King of Macaca Never Reported Stock Options Won From CorpoRAT Revolving Door

From the AP: Allen didn't disclose stock options
By SHARON THEIMER and BOB LEWIS, Associated Press Writers 22 minutes ago

RICHMOND, Va. - For the past five years, Sen. George Allen has failed to tell Congress about stock options he got for his work as a director of a high-tech company. The Virginia Republican also asked the Army to help another business that gave him similar options.

Congressional rules require senators to disclose to the Senate all deferred compensation, such as stock options. The rules also urge senators to avoid taking any official action that could benefit them financially or appear to do so.

Those requirements exist so the public can police lawmakers for possible conflicts of interest, especially involving companies with government business that lawmakers can influence.
Allen's stock options date to the period from January 1998 to January 2001 when Allen was between political jobs and had plunged into the corporate world.

An Associated Press review of Allen's financial dealings from that era found that the senator:
_Did not have to look far to find corporate suitors, joining three Virginia high-tech companies he assisted as governor. Allen served on boards of directors for Xybernaut and Commonwealth Biotechnologies and advised a third company called Com-Net Ericsson, all government contractors.
_Twice failed to promptly alert the Securities and Exchange Commission' of insider stock transactions as a Xybernaut and Commonwealth director. The SEC requires timely notification and can fine those who file late.
_Kept stock options provided to him for serving as a director of Xybernaut and Commonwealth, but steered other compensation from his board service to his law firm.

Allen, a potential 2008 presidential candidate, rose to prominence as a conservative from Virginia, serving in the U.S. House and as governor. From 1998 through 2000, he worked as a private lawyer and businessman before joining the Senate in 2001.

He now faces a tough re-election campaign against Democrat Jim Webb.

(MORE) if you click the headline of this post...

The "Mother-ship of Balance" Lists Heavily Starboard

PBS's highly vaunted and widely touted nightly news program, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, is blowing smoke up the public's ass with its claims of "balance and diversity."

According to FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), PBS touts its "signature style--low-key, evenhanded, inclusive of all perspectives"; Corporation forPublic Broadcasting ombud Ken Bode called it "the mother ship of balance." But a new FAIR study finds that the NewsHour fails to provide either balance ordiversity of perspectives--or a true public-minded alternative to its corporate competition.
To evaluate the NewsHour's evenhandedness and commitment to the public interest, Extra! studied its guestlist during the six-month period spanning October 2005 through March 2006. Among the most prominent findings:
* Public interest groups accounted for just 4 percent of total sources. General public--"person in the street," workers, students--accounted for only 14 percent, while current and former government and military officials totaled 50 percent of all sources.
* Male sources outnumbered women by more than 4-to-1 (82 percent to 18 percent). Moreover, 72 percent of U.S. guests were white males, while just 6percent were women of color (and more than half of them were Condi Rice, all by herself!)
* People of color made up only 15 percent of U.S. sources. African-Americans made up 9 percent, Latinos 2 percent, and Asian-Americans and people ofMideastern descent made up one percent each. Alberto Gonzales accounted for more than 30 percent of Latino sources, while (again) Condoleeza Rice ALONE accounted for nearly 13 percent of African-American sources.
* Among partisan sources, Republicans outnumbered Democrats on the NewsHour by 2-to-1 (66 percent vs. 33 percent). Only one representative of a third party appeared during the study period.
* "Stay the course" sources outnumbered pro-withdrawalsources more than
5-to-1, at a time when a large proportion of the U.S. public already favored withdrawal from Iraq, In the entire six months studied, not a single peace activist was heard on the NewsHour on the subject of Iraq.
* Segments on Hurricane Katrina accounted for less than 10 percent of all sources, but provided nearly half (46 percent) of all African-American sources during the study period. Those African-Americans were largely presented asvictims rather than leaders or experts: In segments on the human impact of the storm, African-Americans made up 51 percent of sources, but in reconstruction segments, whites dominated with 72 percent of sources; 59 percent of all African-American sources across Katrina segments were general public sources.

So much for balance and diversity. I haven't sent a dime to PBS for 15 years, and I doubt I ever shall again.

Avoidance: The TOP 25 Censored Stories of 2006

What major stories did SCUM* a) ignore or b) actively censor last year?

The top one was Net Neutrality:

Throughout 2005 and 2006, a large underground debate raged regarding the future
of the Internet. More recently referred to as “network neutrality,” the issue has become a tug of war with cable companies on the one hand and consumers and Internet service providers on the other. Yet despite important legislative proposals and Supreme Court decisions throughout 2005, the issue was almost completely ignored in the headlines until 2006.1 And, except for occasional coverage on CNBC’s Kudlow & Kramer, mainstream television remains hands-off to this day (June 2006).2Most coverage of the issue framed it as an argument over regulation—but the term “regulation” in this case is somewhat misleading.
Groups advocating for “net neutrality” are not promoting regulation of internet content. What they want is a legal mandate forcing cable companies to allow internet service providers (ISPs) free access to their cable lines (called a “common carriage” agreement). This was the model used for dial-up internet, and it is the way content providers want to keep it. They also want to make sure that cable companies cannot screen or interrupt internet content without a court order.

Source: Buzzflash.com, July 18, 2005Title: “Web of Deceit: How Internet Freedom Got the Federal Ax, and Why Corporate News Censored the Story”Author: Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D.Student Researchers: Lauren Powell, Brett Forest, and Zoe HuffmanFaculty Evaluator: Andrew Roth, Ph.D.

#2 Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran

According to journalist Jason Leopold, sources at former Cheney company halliburton allege that, as recently as January of 2005, Halliburton sold key
components for a nuclear reactor to an Iranian oil development company. Leopold says his Halliburton sources have intimate knowledge of the business dealings of both Halliburton and Oriental Oil Kish, one of Iran’s largest private oil companies.
Additionally, throughout 2004 and 2005, Halliburton worked closely with Cyrus Nasseri, the vice chairman of the board of directors of Iran-based Oriental Oil Kish, to develop oil projects in Iran. Nasseri is also a key member of Iran’s nuclear development team. Nasseri was interrogated by Iranian authorities in late July 2005 for allegedly providing Halliburton with Iran’s nuclear secrets. Iranian government officials charged Nasseri with accepting as much as $1 million in bribes from Halliburton for this information.
Oriental Oil Kish dealings with Halliburton first became public knowledge in January 2005 when the company announced that it had subcontracted parts of the South Pars gas-drilling project to Halliburton Products and Services, a subsidiary of Dallas-based Halliburton that is registered to the Cayman Islands. Following the announcement, Halliburton claimed that the South Pars gas field project in Tehran would be its last project in Iran. According to a BBC report, Halliburton, which took thirty to forty million dollars from its Iranian operations in 2003, “was winding down its work due to a poor business environment.”

Source:Global Research.ca, August 5, 2005Title: “Halliburton Secretly Doing Business With Key Member of Iran’s Nuclear Team” Author: Jason LeopoldFaculty Evaluator: Catherine NelsonStudent Researchers: Kristine Medeiros and Pla Herr.

Click the headline of this post to link with the rest. It's pretty scary what's being suppressed.

Henry Kissinger: A Piece of Shit in a Silk Suit

Molly Ivins, may her cancers cease, says she has "never lost one ounce of rancor toward Henry Kissinger, that cynical, slithery, self-absorbed pathological liar." She is not alone. Of all the war criminals as large upon the planet today, that old toad Kissinger is the most odious. On his hands is the blood of literally millions of people, and I hope the fate of Pinochet befalls him.

But mainly she's dismayed at the fawning of the SCUM* over Bob Woodward for the "revelations" in his new book: "The War Criminal’s return is the only piece of news I have yet found in Bob Woodward’s new book, and what amazes me is the reaction to the work. Gosh, gasp, imagine, Woodward says the war’s a disaster!"

Which leads to an interesting juxtaposition at Truthdig.com, where Sheer calls Woodward "Truthdigger of the Week."

Check it out. Truthdig's a necessary stop on any good liberal blogger's daily rounds...



*SCUM: So-Called Unbiased Media

At Ease, Folks. MSgt Goff Needs Your Attention...

Stan Goff, a retired Master Sergeant and 26-year veteran of the U.S. Army Special Forces, sounds a warning call that many of the historical precursors of fascism—white supremacy, militarization of culture, vigilantism, masculine fear of female power, xenophobia and economic destabilization—are ascendant in America today. During an active-duty career that spanned 1970 to 1996, Goff served with the elite Delta Force and Rangers, and in Vietnam, Guatemala, Grenada, El Salvador, Colombia, Peru, Somalia and Haiti.

One of his concerns is that neo-fascist elements are more and more finding places in the US military, as the casualties of ICORP-ing* Iraq require more and more replacements from a diminishing pool of volunteers. There is Aryan Nation graffiti on walls in Baghdad. “There is a kind of interlocking directorate between white nationalists, gun culture, right-wing politicians, mercenary culture (like Soldier of Fortune), vigilante and militia movements, and elements within both Special Forces and—now—the privatized mercenary forces (e.g., Blackwater). It is hyper-masculine, racialist, militaristic and networked.”

And armed.

Click on the title of this post to read the whole thing. It is long, nuanced, almost academic in complexity of both thought and conclusion...

As you were.

*ICORP-ing: Invasion, Conquest, Occupation, Rape & Pillage-ing

Mr. Moyers Speak, We Listen

Lincoln Weeps
By Bill Moyers
TomPaine.com
Tuesday 03 October 2006

Back in 1954, when I was a summer employee on Capitol Hill, I made my first visit to the Lincoln Memorial. I have returned many times since, most recently while I was in Washington filming for a documentary about how Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist, among others, turned the conservative revolution into a racket - the biggest political scandal since Watergate.

If democracy can be said to have temples, the Lincoln Memorial is our most sacred. You stand there silently contemplating the words that gave voice to Lincoln's fierce determination to save the union - his resolve that "government of, by, and for the people shall not perish from the earth." On this latest visit, I was overcome by a sense of melancholy. Lincoln looks out now on a city where those words are daily mocked. This is no longer his city. And those people from all walks of life making their way up the steps to pay their respect to the martyred president - it's not their city, either. Or their government. This is an occupied city, a company town, and government is a subservient subsidiary of richly endowed patrons.

Once upon a time the House of Representatives was known as "the people's house." No more. It belongs to K Street now. That's the address of the lobbyists who swarm all over Capitol Hill. There are 65 lobbyists for every member of Congress. They spend $200 million per month wining, dining and seducing federal officials. Per month!

Of course they're just doing their job. It's impossible to commit bribery, legal or otherwise, unless someone's on the take, and with campaign costs soaring, our politicians always have their hands out. One representative confessed that members of Congress are the only people in the world expected to take large amounts of money from strangers and then act as if it has no effect on their behavior. This explains why Democrats are having a hard time exploiting the culture of corruption embodied in the scandalous behavior of DeLay and Abramoff. Democrats are themselves up to their necks in the sludge. Just the other day one of the most powerful Democrats in the House bragged to reporters about tapping "uncharted donor fields in the financial industry" - reminding them, not so subtlely, of the possibility that after November the majority leader just might be a Democrat.

When it comes to selling influence, both parties have defined deviancy up, and Tony Soprano himself couldn't get away with some of the things that pass for business as usual in Washington. We have now learned that Jack Abramoff had almost 500 contacts with the Bush White House over the three years before his fall, and that Karl Rove and other presidential staff were treated to his favors and often intervened on his behalf. So brazen a pirate would have been forced to walk the plank long ago if Washington had not thrown its moral compass overboard.

Alas, despite all these disclosures, nothing is happening to clean up the place. Just as the Republicans in charge of the House kept secret those dirty emails sent to young pages by Rep. Mark Foley - a cover-up aimed at getting them past the election and holding his seat for the party - they are now trying to sweep the DeLay-Abramoff-Reed-and-Norquist scandals under the rug until after Nov. 7, hoping the public at large doesn't notice that the House is being run by Tom DeLay's team, minus DeLay. All the talk about reform is placebo.

The only way to counter the power of organized money is with organized and outraged people. Believe me, what members of Congress fear most is a grassroots movement that demands clean elections and an end to the buying and selling of influence - or else! If we leave it to the powers that be to clean up the mess that greed and chicanery have given us, we will wake up one day with a real Frankenstein of a system - a monster worse than the one created by Abramoff, DeLay and their cronies. By then it will be too late to save Lincoln's hope for "government of, by, and for the people."

The Schumann Center for Media and Democracy gives financial support to TomPaine.com.
--------
Bill Moyers is a veteran television journalist for PBS and the president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy. "Capitol Crimes," the first episode of Bill Moyers' latest series of documentary specials, airs Wednesday on PBS. (Check local listings.) Click here to listen to an audio version of this commentary.

The Attack of the Wiley Pages

I have not commented here about the trials and tribulations of former Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL), because it has seemed to me to be more a titillating distraction than a serious story. Of course, CongCritters are gonna be venal; of course, they're gonna lie. That's how the game is played.

Lately the GOPukes, intent on damage control, have begun to try to 'blame the victims,' alleging the pages in question weren't entirely blameless in the matter. Some, like Drudge, accuse the pages of truly nefarious plots, involving tricks to lure the CongCrit into lapses.

I am totally sure that at least some of the pages were using what they knew about CongCrit Foley to their own advantage.

The pages were, after all, off-spring of politically connected families, and were all volunteers for this indoctrination into the mysteries of USer politics.

Foley's stupid and deserves to be thrown out of Congress, if for no other reason than for allowing himself to be used that way. It's exemplary of why, in the old days, gays were considered security risks: they had to hide their appetites, and it made 'em ripe for the picking by agents who'd exploit their weaknesses.

When I went in service in '64, the USAF spent a couple hundred thousand dollars to prove me a good security risk. I was to be working with highly classified material, but mainly processing it, not necessarily internalizing it.

You'd think that, given the sensitivity of much of the info to which CongCritters are exposed, they'd spend a couple grand to dig into the backgrounds of candidates, if only to forestall exactly the kinds of exploitation that the Flying Monkeys are now projecting onto Foley and his victims...

Alerts from The Nation: You Read!

With Election Day around the corner, and concerns about another voting debacle of Florida 2000-proportions running high, as Katrina vanden Heuvel explains in Editor's Cut, Republicans in Congress have launched a new effort to create modern-day Jim Crow exclusionary practices through new voter ID requirements.

This effort comes on the heels of the roll-out of electronic voting machines whose vulnerabilities have been widely chronicled. In response, as Ari Berman reports in The Nation, Democratic Senators Barbara Boxer, Chris Dodd and Russell Feingold have introduced the "Confidence in Voting Act" to ensure that paper ballots are available at every polling place. (After reading Berman's post, click here to urge Congress to take up the emergency legislation before it's too late.)

(Remember, however, that no elected official EVER did anything to change the terms of art which were in place when THEY were elected. Nobody already in office wants there to be more voters, or easier voting, or better counting, or anything else that is different from the condiditons they exploited to become incumbents.)...

Hope You Did Not Miss "Bill Moyers On America."

The initial offering was called "Capitol Crimes," and focussed on the out-right criminal violations of anything resembling the public trust by three college coleagues: Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed, and Grover Norquist. I said all week it was gonna be worth watching.

It's a dizzying scope of perfidy and politics that boggles the imagination, and athough Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay have been brought down, the system remains as vulnerable as ever," says Bill Moyers. "The scale of corruption still coming to light dwarfs anything since Watergate. In one sense it's the age-old tale of greed, but greed encouraged now by the way our system works. Deep in the plea agreements of Jack Abramoff and his cronies is the admission that they conspired to use campaign contributions to bribe politicians; campaign finance is at the core of the corruption. They took great pains to cover their tracks, and they might have pulled it off except for a handful of honest people, and the work of some enterprising print reporters, Senate investigators, and the ethics team at the department of justice. Following the money in this story leads through a bizarre maze of cocktail parties, golf courses, private jets, four-star restaurants, sweatshops - and the aura of chandeliered rooms frequented by the high and mighty of Washington."

Abramoff's now in jail, and Reed's political career is circling the drain, leaving shitstains wherver he touches. This leaves Grover Norquist, whose task he always said was to reduce the Federal Govt to a size small enough that it could be drowned in the bathtub. I think a couple of sessions on a waterboard are appropriate for Grover. I'll hold the bucket, or the hose or whatever...

Visit Watch & Listen for Web-only video and audio and excerpts from the Moyers program archive and the complete show on October 5, 2005. Read the transcript of "Capitol Crimes."

Disposable Douches

Condaleeza Rice Is, Apparently, A Lying Puddle of Shit

From Democracy Now:

In his new book, State of Denial, Bob Woodward reveals that on July 10, 2001 then CIA director George Tenet called President Bush's National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to hold an emergency meeting to review the latest on Osama Bin Laden. Intelligence was showing an increasing likelihood that al-Qaeda would soon attack the United States.

According to the (book), Tenet and his counterterrorism chief Cofer Black told Rice that al-Qaeda was going to attack American interests, possibly in the United States itself. They also said that they needed to immediately take covert or military action to thwart bin Laden.

Woodward reports that Tenet hoped his abrupt request for an immediate meeting would shake Rice but he left feeling that Rice had brushed off the warnings. Two months later the World Trade Center and Pentagon were attacked.

After the publication of Woodward's book, Rice initially suggested such a meeting in July 2001 did not even take place. On Sunday, Rice told reporters said, "The idea that I would have ignored that, I find incomprehensible. I am quite certain that it was not a meeting in which I was told that there was an impending attack, and refused to respond." But on Monday the State Department confirmed that Rice did meet with Tenet and Black on July 10th and that after the meeting Rice was compelled enough to ask the CIA to give the same briefing to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and to then Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Who both then did nothing, either, except rub their hands in glee at the prospect of the forthcoming Reichstag-fire-like event. Well, and Asscrack immediately started flying on chartered military aircraft, too.

Amy and Juan interview Rand Beers, former National Security Council advisor, to discover just how deep the puddle of shit really is.

Quite deep, apparently; nearly, bottomless, in fact (not unlike the aforesaid Sec. of State herself, who may be the ONLY black woman in the US without a noticeable booty).

Has Obama Withdrawn His Endorsement of NoMoJo?

After NoMoJo's primary loss to Lamont, Obama led the little charge of 'centrist' Dumbocraps into the Lieberman camp. Obama said the next day that he would continue to support Lieberman's candidacy, even though NoMoJo had been abandonned by the Party in his own state. Both Salazars from Colorado joined in.

What I wanna know is whether Obama has yet rescinded his support for shitstain NoMoJo, or is he still working to get Lie-berman elected over Lamont, the legitemate Dumbocrap candidate?

Anybody?