Republican Guilty of Petty Theft

Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham (Thief-CA) resigned from Congress today after pleading guilty to taking $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors. The Dukester, you may recall, was the genius who sold his home to a defense contractor for $700,000 MORE THAN IT WAS WORTH and figured no one would notice. He also took bribes "through a variety of methods, including checks totaling over $1 million, cash, rugs, antiques, furniture, yacht club fees and vacations. " He must feel totally bewildered today. After all, he was only doing what many of his fellow Republicans do every day. His problem was that he was just a little too obvious, but more importantly, he didn't steal enough. Notice that this administration has not even accused anyone of stealing over $8 BILLION that "disappeared" from US funds earmarked for Iraq reparations. We also haven't heard about any problems with all the $100 million no-bid contracts from post-Katrina relief. Nobody from Halliburton or Enron (other than small fish) are in jail today, and Ken Lay and Cheney's buddies will surely get pardoned if they are ever convicted. Cunningham is only the first of many Republicans to fall. Speculation is that the Abrahoff investigation will involve up to 35 Republican congressmen involved in taking bribes or in Republican speak "lobbying activities". And those that don't resign will surely be turfed out in the November, 2006 election landslide of honest, Democratic candidates.

Even Texas Has Seen the Light

Yes, indeedee, politics does make for strange bedfellows. I never thought that I would want to link to Aljazeera.com. But they have the uplifting story of The Daily Texan calling in an editorial for the resignation of Dick Cheney calling him "a pandering liar and a corporate tool”. Now, I have very seldom looked positively at ANYTHING that comes out of Texas. The list is almost endless: Bush, DeLay, Enron, Big Oil, bigger hair, big, stupid belt buckles, big egos (for no apparent reason), line dancing, the Cowboys, the Astros, pickup trucks, and just general stupidity. When a newspaper in Texas, even a college one, calls for the removal of the biggest threat to democracy, you have to think twice about maybe there's some good in Texas after all. In discussing why Big Oil executives lied before Congress last week about meeting with Cheney early in 2001 to help write the disastrous energy policy the adminstration has foisted on the American consumer, the editors posit that they lied "because they fear being associated with the Vice President, who assembled an energy bill that ignored the needs of consumers and was rigidly biased towards energy industries like coal and oil, whose executives and lobbyists sought and were sought out to influence and guide our nation's energy policy directly into their coffers”. As proof of why Cheney must go, they point out his seeming inability to ever tell the truth, “Over the course of his tenure in office he has proved himself to be a dependable geyser of misinformation, revisionism and bald-faced lies. From the hubris of his pre-Iraq lies "[Saddam] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons" to his more recent lies (denying on a cable news show that he was Lewis Libby's source for outed CIA agent Valerie Plame's name) our Vice President just can't seem to prevent himself from telling tales." And most entertainingly, they show that Cheney even lies about lies, "Cheney even lies about his previous lies, so as to not get caught lying, as is the case with his statements regarding Mohamed Atta on June 20, 2004. In that instance, Cheney directly contradicted a video document of himself on a previous news show, saying the exact things he had just denied he had ever said". Come on, Dick, for once in your miserable life, do the right thing...resign! Even your home state wants you out. Well, technically Cheney quickly shifted his residence to Wyoming in 2000 as he was picking himself to be vice-president...this guy even lies about where he lives!

What a Difference a Delay Makes

It seems in the past month or so that the fog is starting to lift in this country and we may finally be back on the right track. The Republican game plan of telling the same lie over and over no longer appears to be working. As Cheney comes out of his hole and makes a few speeches asserting that his administration did not lie to Congress and the American people to justify their precipitant (and profitable for his Halliburton cronies) rush to war, no one is paying any attention. It's clear to everyone that he is simply lying through his fangs.
The game plan of attacking as unpatriotic anyone who questions their lies and incompetence is also not working. When they attack Jack Murtha for telling the truth about their failure to plan for anything (outside of securing oil wells) on how to help Iraq govern itself, even their own party doesn't buy it, and Bush is forced to backtrack from their usual nasty tactics.
Why did things change in such a positive manner? Why did the press finally start asking questions that make obvious how evil and incompetent this administration is? I think it might relate back to October 19 and the indictment of Tom Delay. That seems to have been the catalyst. Like the pulling down of Stalin's statue seemed to energive the former Soviet citizens clammoring for change, the toppling of the Republican poster boy for bullying and abuse of power has seemed to have started us back on the path of progress. Here's hoping this is just the beginning.

ROE RIP

It's absolutely comical to watch the right wing and Alito himself backpedal to try to explain the smoking gun which proves he will be the swing vote to overturn Roe v Wade. It's like Louie in Casablanca declaring that he is "shocked, shocked that there is gambling going on" in Rick's Cafe as he is pocketing his winnings. What a surprise to find evidence that a judge nominated by a president who kowtows to the religious right, from a party that has plainly stated its intent to overturn Roe is actually anti-choice. Roe was overturned on November 2, 2004 when the majority of this country who are pro-choice either didn't bother to vote or voted against their interests. These same people will be surpised when they see that overturning Roe is just the first step of this unholy alliance between the religious right and the republican party. The mullahs who control republicans will see to it that sex is put back where it was in the 50's. The next step is eliminating morning after bills for political, not medical reasons. I predict that by the next presidential election, it will be impossible for unmarried women to obtain birth control pills in at least 15 of the red states.

Torture's Path of Destruction

With the latest horrors from Iraq showing that Iraqi government troops are torturing prisoners , the cynical viewpoint is to say that the Iraqi military is learning well from their American teachers. One might also say that the orders passed on to out troops from Rumsfeld, Gonzalez, and Cheney that led to torture abuses were picked up by the new Iraqi military command. However, the more important issue to deal with is that because the US has fostered torture, we are now viewed in the world community as no better than these animals who have tortured their prisoners to the point that "two appeared paralyzed and others had some of the skin peeled off their bodies by their abusers." The US has no moral standing on these abuses and our soldiers and civilians will suffer similar torture for many years because of the immoral actions of the Bush-Cheney administration. Not only do we have a President who obviously is so totally out of the loop that he continues to make speeches claiming that the US doesn't torture, but we actually have a vice-president doing all he can to keep any law being passed that would forbid torture in the future. How embarassing is this? It's like "The Omen" movies storyline has come true, and Satan has been elected and is dragging the country lower and lower. As horrible as it is with the torture situation, the real problem comes with Iran. There is no doubt that Iran is developing nuclear weapons and that their religious dominated quasi-govenment that calls for the destruction of Israel is unstable enough to use them. With our moral influence being at its nadir due to the abuses of torture and lies to support precipitantly invading Iraq, the US has no chance to stop the approaching disaster from Iran. Is there hope on the horizon? Maybe. The Senate passed a resolution with 79 votes that takes the first steps in getting out of the Iraq quagmire. The same Senate passed the anti-torture bill with 90 votes. The truly sad thing is we had to have an anti-torture bill. That's what happens when you have a venal administration that actually is pro-torture!

Talking Points = Lie

Here's a shorthand version of the Republicans daily talking points bulletin: LIE. Telling a lie over and over again has been a very successful tactic of this administration. In a blatant example yesterday, Stephen Hadley, Bush's national security adviser, stated on CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer" that the facts that have shown Bush and Cheney misled the country into war were "flat wrong." What rabbit hole did this guy climb out of? "We need to put this debate behind us," he said. Yeah, if I got caught telling a series of blatant lies that caused thousands of deaths, I'd want people to forget it, too. He then had the unmitigated gall to say, "It's unfair to the country. It's unfair to the men and women in uniform risking their lives to make this country safe." Yeah, isn't it a little unfair to the 2,000 plus US soldiers who have died for a lie, too. It gets worse...Hadley said the intelligence Bush used to push for war"was roughly the same intelligence that the Clinton administration saw. They drew the conclusion that Saddam Hussein was a threat to peace, that he had weapons of mass destruction. They acted against him militarily in 1998," Hadley said, referring to the administration of Bill Clinton, a Democrat. Yeah, remember all the thousands of US troops and Iraqi civilians that were killed under Clinton's measured response?
John Edwards also wrote in yesterday's Washington Post, "The argument for going to war with Iraq was based on intelligence that we now know was inaccurate," Edwards wrote. "The information the American people were hearing from the president -- and that I was being given by our intelligence community -- wasn't the whole story. Had I known this at the time, I never would have voted for this war." Shorthand version of Edwards position: Bush lied to rush the nation into an unnecessary war. If John Kerry had repeated this statement forcefully 13 months ago, he would be President today.

It's the Oligopoly, Stupid!

As the Senate holds hearings to grill oil company executives on their obscene, windfall profits, no one mentions the actual reason why these windfall profits exist. The fact that they only needed to talk to executive from FIVE companies is the problem. Ever since Reagan, and the corporate cronies that controlled him, allowed the antitrust laws and regluations to be gutted and flooded the federal courts with "free-market" judges who think monopolies are just fine, the oil industry has been in an orgy of merger and consolidation. How difficult is it to control prices when you now have only 4 or 5 companies that control virtually the entire US oil and gas market? It's comical to listen to these hypocrits defend raising gas prices 24 cents in the hours after Katrina hit as a proper market response! Anyone with a basic knowledge of supply and demand knows that if the market is running properly, prices rise and fall according to market conditions. Why is it that gas prices are raised instantly everytime there is a remote threat to production like a hurricane 1,000 miles away from the Gulf, but weeks after prices haven't fallen back down? The polite terms are inperfect competition in an oligopoly. The plain reason is that a small number of people fix the price of oil and gas and have no fear of the White House or Republican controlled Congress doing anything about it. Senators complain that the oil companies should at least invest their profits in America. I say they already have. They spent millions on buying a president and vice-president.

Education Woes

Well, today's good news is that Democratic victories in gubenatorial races in the major states of Virginia and New Jersey are a precursor of what will happen in 2006. As I have been saying since November 3, 2004, Republicans in their drunken orgy of power mongering will so turn off the electorate that we will take back the House and Senate. Democrats can then set our sights on righting the wrongs of November 2, 2004 either through impeachment or by simply rendering this administration meaningless. What better indication do we need that Republicans and their unholy alliance with the so-called Religious Right have led this country down the wrong path than to look at the state of education? Remember, this is the party that wanted to eliminate the Department of Education. When their leadership realized that this showed their disdain for the middle class a little too obviously, they shifted gears and tried to get a voucher law passed to help drain critical resources from the public schools and transfer public tax money into their elite boarding academies and southern "Christian" (read: white) schools. On the same day that the Chicago Tribune reports that average student test scores have not improved in 5 years, and as tax money is being wasted on a publicity stunt of over 3,ooo White House employees having to return to class to learn the basics of ethics, that most Republican of states, Kansas, adopts new "science" standards that are actually the opposite of science. In their zeal to impose their religious stories as fact, Kansas redefines “science” so that it’s not limited to the search for natural explanations of phenomena. Wonder if they would be OK with teaching that it is just as likely that the so-called intelligent design came from aliens (maybe even liberal aliens - ooh, how scary!) as posited by numerous sci-fi writers. That would call their bluff and show that this ridiculous ID smokescreen is simply another way to try to force creationism into the schools as something other than fiction.

Multiple Choice Question

What item has the least chance of survival right now?
a - a chicken with a cough in China
b - a Peugeot parked outdoors in a Paris suburb
c - a lawyer on Saddam's defense team
d - Credibility in the Bush White House.
No matter how loudly Bush may scream that "We do not torture", no one believes it. It's about as believable as Nixon saying he's "not a crook" or Winnie the Pooh saying he wasn't going to eat that jar of honey but was "just going to taste it." Why can't anyone in this administration tell the truth about anything?! Look, just admit that some of these terrorists are vicious, indiscriminate murderers of innocents and are not derserving of the protections of the Geneva Convention, and the neocons want to let the CIA use torture tactics to extract info on future attacks. I think many people would be OK with this, as targeting people who behead innocent people on videotape for their own warped political/religious reasons just might be deserving of being tortured. But they'll never do this, because then they would have to admit that only a handful of terrorists fall into this category and they would have to separate them from the poor captured slobs who happen to be Saddam's driver and the like. It's much easier to lump them all together, build secret prisons and let the interrogators do their worst. When you direct your Attorney General to find loopholes in the Geneva Convention, when you put someone like Rumsfeld in charge of defining the rules of interrogation, when you insist on the CIA being excluded from any law forbidding torture of prisoners, when you continue to hide pictures of prisoners being abused in Abu Ghraib, when you build secret "black site" CIA prisons throughout Eastern Europe and Asia, you can't expect anyone to believe your claims that torture is not being done. And who will pay for these excesses? Pity any American prisoner taken in the next 20 years for it will be at least that long before the reputation of the US can be restored.

Bush Never Lies About Lying

Are Republicans so blind that they can't see the hypocrisy that comes out of their own mouths? No, it's part of the regular game plan to tell a lie over and over again in hopes that an inattentive electorate will start to believe it. Today, Bush unequivocally states that the US under "his watch" (he probably thinks that refers to his timepiece) does not torture prisoners. This follows within weeks of his administration violently opposing John McCain's amendment that took the radical position of stating that the US will not torture prisoners. Once it was clear that even the Republicans would vote for this amendment (HOW can you oppose it?!), Cheney goes to work to put in an exemption for the CIA. The debate on this issue has an increasingly isolated Cheney on one side and McCain, 89 other Senators, Rice, most of the Cabinet and human beings on the other side. It is now clear that the debate on torture has become so ludicrous that only Cheney could make it: the US will never torture prisoners but we have to have an exception to any torture restrictions for the CIA, even though they will never use it (wink, wink). How obvious is this?! I've racked my brain to come up with an example of what this is like, and all I come up is OTHER Bush/Cheney attacks on our institutions: we need to eliminate environmental regulations and the Clean Air Act to clean up the environment, we need to take money out of Social Security to solve its cash flow problems, we need to attack countries that have nothing to do with terrorism to fight the war on terror. And they wonder why Bush's approval ratings are at an all-time low domestically and internationally. Amazing.