Commentary on whatever I am thinking about, usually written while watching baseball.
Friday, October 09, 2009
Their real goal
with programs like NCLB, "issues" like gay marriage, networks like Fox News and amendments like this is to try to keep us ignorant. The less informed and more distracted from the real issues we are, the more crimes they can get away with.
Sarah Palin has decided to mark the Independence Day weekend by reducing the amount of ignorant public officials concerned more about special interests and their own net worth and electability than the welfare of their constituents. She accomplished this by resigning as governor of Alaska.
I imagine this is a dark day for stand-up comics everywhere.
But seriously folks, the speculation that she's resigning in order to run for president in 2012 doesn't hold water. She ran for VP last year while being governor. And the senior citizen she ran with last year kept his day job while running for president (granted he neglected the shit out of said day job), so why couldn't she? Why wouldn't a candidate want to bring the prestige of a governorship to a presidential campaign? I have to think some serious shit is about to hit the fan. Her complaint about investigations of “all sorts of frivolous ethics violations” is telling. Maybe the latest ethics violation isn't so frivolous (Perhaps she meant to say that the investigations, not the ethics violations, were frivolous, but perhaps not).
It's not easy for a governor and former vice presidential candidate's sudden resignation under mysterious circumstances to fly "under the radar," but Palin's announcement at the beginning of a three-day weekend marking a national holiday looks like that's what she was trying to do. Between the long weekend and the memorial service for Michael Jackson, the media may never get around to this story.
And while she is probably pissed off about the recent Vanity Fair article about her and her conduct during the 2008 presidential campaign, it's unlikely she would resign over something like that. You don't emerge from a vice presidential campaign with such thin skin.
The bottom line is that the American people are better off without a public official who apparently considers some ethics violations frivolous. And we are better off without an ignorant blank slate who will say anything, and support anything, to get elected.
Outgoing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is facing yet another ethics complaint — the 18th against her and the very thing that helped to prompt her resignation.
The latest complaint alleges she abused her office by accepting a salary and using state staff while campaigning outside Alaska for the vice presidency. It's the third complaint filed against the Republican since she announced July 3 that she was stepping down.
Drink it in, folks: the sweet image of the Bushes packing their shit and getting the fuck out. You may never see a more beautiful photo of a moving truck.
Naturally, Dana Perino lied about this last week. Can’t help herself, I guess.
Bush's visit came after Defense Secretary Robert Gates' unannounced stop in Iraq on Saturday, at a sprawling military base in the central part of the country. Gates will be the lone Republican holdover from the Bush Cabinet in the Obama administration.
For those of you keeping track, that makes exactly zero pre-announced visits to Iraq by a Bush administration official since Bush started the war. These are the same people who for years have told us how much the security situation in Iraq has improved.
It's just not improved to the point that officials can announce their plans to enter the country. And it appears that, under Bush, it never will be.
Here are a couple of facts that Republicans leave out of their smears of ACORN:
Most states require voter-registration organizations to submit every registration form they collect, even ones that bear the name Mickey Mouse. To not do so could constitute voter suppression.
Two weeks ago, ACORN explained in a statement, "As part of our nonpartisan voter registration program, we have reviewed all the applications submitted by our canvassers. When we have identified suspicious applications, we have separated them out and flagged them for election officials. We have zero tolerance for fraudulent registrations. We immediately dismiss employees we suspect of submitting fraudulent registrations."
Organizations that are trying to commit fraud usually don't tip off investigators. ACORN tries to help out local officials by identifying for them registrations that the organization considers suspicious, and Republicans twist that into "ACORN is trying to commit voter fraud!"
While we're talking about voter fraud, the Republican talking point that ACORN is responsible for voter fraud because a few of the people the group hired to help register voters submitted a few fake registrations is typical GOP bullshit, because voter fraud doesn't happen until someone actually shows up at the polls and tries to cast a fraudulent vote. And that, of course, hasn't happened.
The truth is that conservatives don't like groups like ACORN because these groups help minorities and poor people register to vote. And minorities and the poor generally do not vote for conservative candidates because conservatives don't represent their interests. So, essentially, conservatives have no interest in strengthening the backbone of democracy: improving efforts to register Americans to vote. Talk about having anti-American views--another bullshit charge that Republicans, including the McCaincampaign, are leveling at their opponents. And so much for that "country first" lie.
John McCain paid $175,000 of campaign money to a Republican operative accused of massive voter registration fraud in several states, it has emerged.
As the McCain camp attempts to tie Barack Obama to claims of registration irregularities by the activist group ACORN, campaign finance records detailing the payment to the firm of Nathan Sproul, investigated several times for fraud, threatens to derail that argument.
The documents show that a joint committee of the McCain-Palin campaign, the Republican National Committee and the California Republican Party, made the payment to Lincoln Strategy, of which Mr Sproul is the managing partner, for the purposes of “voter registration”.
Mr Sproul has been investigated on numerous occasions for preventing Democrats from voting, destroying registration forms and leading efforts to get Ralph Nader on ballots to leach the Democratic vote.
In October last year, the House Judiciary Committee wrote to the Attorney General requesting answers regarding a number of allegations against Mr Sproul’s firm, then known as Sproul and Associates. It referred to evidence that ahead of the 2004 national elections, the firm trained staff only to register Republican voters and destroyed any other registration cards, citing affidavits from former staff members and investigations by television news programmes.
One former worker testified that “fooling people was key to the job” and that “canvassers were told to act as if they were non-partisan, to hide that they were working for the RNC, especially if approached by the media,” according to the committee’s letter.
A useful rule of thumb is that if Republicans are accusing others of something, there's a very good chance that they are doing that very thing themselves. Right Newt?
A former CIA operative who says he tried to warn the agency about faulty intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs now contends that CIA officials also ignored evidence that Iran had suspended work on a nuclear bomb.
The onetime undercover agent, who has been barred by the CIA from using his real name, filed a motion in federal court late Friday asking the government to declassify legal documents describing what he says was a deliberate suppression of findings on Iran that were contrary to agency views at the time.
The former operative alleged in a 2004 lawsuit that the CIA fired him after he repeatedly clashed with senior managers over his attempts to file reports that challenged the conventional wisdom about weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. Key details of his claim have not been made public because they describe events the CIA deems secret.
The consensus view on Iran's nuclear program shifted dramatically last December with the release of a landmark intelligence report that concluded that Iran halted work on nuclear weapons design in 2003. The publication of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran undermined the CIA's rationale for censoring the former officer's lawsuit, said his attorney, Roy Krieger.
"On five occasions he was ordered to either falsify his reporting on WMD in the Near East, or not to file his reports at all," Krieger said in an interview.
In court documents and in statements by his attorney, the former officer contends that his 22-year CIA career collapsed after he questioned CIA doctrine about the nuclear programs of Iraq and Iran. As a native of the Middle East and a fluent speaker of both Farsi and Arabic, he had been assigned undercover work in the Persian Gulf region, where he successfully recruited an informant with access to sensitive information about Iran's nuclear program, Krieger said.
The informant provided secret evidence that Tehran had halted its research into designing and building a nuclear weapon. Yet, when the operative sought to file reports on the findings, his attempts were "thwarted by CIA employees," according to court papers. Later he was told to "remove himself from any further handling" of the informant, the documents say.
But I’m sure all the killing the administration can’t wait to start doing in Iran someday will be explained away as the result of “faulty intelligence” and not a predetermined course of action justified by cherry picking intelligence and ignoring information that didn’t support the administration’s war plans.
The tragic milestone was reached on Easter Sunday. The Times story I linked to has the stories and writings of several of the fallen. Reading them, seeing them deal alternately with everyday family issues and the absolute horror of hell on earth is a reminder that this is more than a statistic. These were 4,000 fathers and mothers and sons and daughters and sisters and brothers and boyfriends and fiancees whose lives touched hundreds of thousands more. Four thousand lives interrupted and, ultimately, ended by senseless violence. This is more than just “a number.” It’s 4,000 human tragedies. It will be generations before our country fully recovers, if it ever does.
And don’t forget Afghanistan, where at least 488 servicemembers have been killed. But even the appalling total of 4,488 dead doesn’t even count people like James McDonald, whose death isn’t counted toward the official total as part of the administration’s fuzzymath to keep this tragedy from looking so tragic, to keep its folly from looking so foolish.
If this sad occasion is a “sober moment” in the war, as the White House calls it, what does that make every other moment in this senseless war?
George Bush wanted to get out in front of a House vote on an eavesdropping bill that doesn't give his telecommunications executive friends immunity for their lawbreaking.
The bill addresses the fake concern that allowing the lawsuits that have been filed against telcos to proceed would make public classified information that would help terrorists by allowing “phone companies to present their defense behind closed doors in federal court, with the judge given access to confidential government documents about eavesdropping begun after the September 11 attacks.”
But it doesn’t give Bush and his co-conspiratorsbuddies co-conspirators what they want, so Bush decided to (or was told to) malign the bill publicly before it is even voted on. But all he had to offer the gathered press were the same old bullshit talking points. Ho hum.
"This litigation would undermine the private sector's willingness to cooperate with the intelligence community, cooperation that is absolutely essential to protecting our country from harm," Bush said.
Yawn.
"Unfortunately, instead of holding a vote on the good bipartisan bill that passed the United States Senate, they introduced a partisan bill that would undermine America's security," Bush said.
Stretch.
He called the House bill "unwise" and said it could lead to public disclosure of highly classified information that could help terrorists.
Getting sleepy.
Bush said the litigation against the phone companies was "unfair" because they had been assured by the U.S. government that their cooperation was "legal and necessary" to fighting terrorism after the September 11 attacks.
Nodding off.
"Companies that may have helped us save lives should be thanked for their patriotic service, not subjected to billion dollar lawsuits that will make them less willing to help in the future," Bush said.
It seems that when all those DFHs accused the Bush administration of lying us into war, they were right.
An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden's al Qaida terrorist network.
The Pentagon-sponsored study, scheduled for release later this week, did confirm that Saddam's regime provided some support to other terrorist groups, particularly in the Middle East, U.S. officials told McClatchy. However, his security services were directed primarily against Iraqi exiles, Shiite Muslims, Kurds and others he considered enemies of his regime.
The new study of the Iraqi regime's archives found no documents indicating a "direct operational link" between Hussein's Iraq and al Qaida before the invasion, according to a U.S. official familiar with the report.
In other not-at-all-surprising news, after originally planning to post the report online, the Pentagon has decided not to post it online, and not to e-mail to reporters. The Pentagon is only releasing it by snail mail to those who request it. A press release announcing the report has been canceled.
You sure it was press reports that made the report's findings "politically sensitive," not this (scroll down) and this and this and this?
I haven’t posted about — and didn’t watch — the State of the Union address for the same reason I don’t post about — or watch — the various bobbleheads on Faux News: They are all full of shit. I gave up on watching Bush give the SOTU years ago, when it became clear that it was never going to be more than the touting of accomplishments by a “president” who hasn’t accomplished anything.
For the facts behind George Bush’s fictions, click here and here.
I’m looking forward to next year, when a grown-up presumably will be in the Oval Office again, and the SOTU might actually be useful for more than just a drinking game.
The White House possesses no archived e-mail messages for many of its component offices, including the Executive Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President, for hundreds of days between 2003 and 2005, according to the summary of an internal White House study that was disclosed yesterday by a congressional Democrat.
The 2005 study -- whose credibility the White House attacked this week -- identified 473 separate days in which no electronic messages were stored for one or more White House offices, said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.).
Perhaps White House mouthpiece Tony Fratto meant that no e-mails were sent or received on those 473 days when he said “We have absolutely no reason to believe that any emails are missing; there's no evidence of that.
“We have no evidence and we have no way of showing that any email at all are missing.”
Well, other than the White House’s inability to produce e-mails from 473 days during the period 2003-2005, eh Tony?
I can see why reporters keep showing up for White House press briefings: There’s so much useful, reliable informaiton shared there. Why, if reporters were to miss that dog show, they’d be absolutely lost, their minds swimming with misinformation.
All I know is there’s nothing odd about the White House attacking the credibility of its own internal study, which it refuses to make public. Nothing at all. Got it?
This is how pathetic the GOP field of presidential candidates is: On the Strait of Hormuz “incident,” Ron Paul makes the most sense.
“Guess what, today the Navy commander of the fifth fleet was on ABC and announced that, “you know, that voice might not have come from those vessels.” So what does that mean? Was there a rush to judgment on this [Strait of Hormuz incident], ready to go to war? … And we don’t need another war, and this incident should not be thrown out of proportion to the point where we’re getting ready to attack Iran over this.”
For all you fans of nostalgia, this should really take you back to all those fake terror alerts in the summer/fall of 2004:
We hate to say we told you so, but....we told you so: Those terrorist "dry runs" at airports that bumped a slew of bad news for President Bush off the front page and scared a lot of summer vacationers in the process, were, as CNN itself confessed in a different report, "bogus."
It's hard to believe that the administration would politicize an agency responsible for public safety and issue bogus "terror threat" stories to get real news that make the administration look bad (read: "everything") off the front page.
Oh, wait. No it isn't.
And it's hard to believe that the mainstream media would fall for it over and over, or perhaps go along either because it's too lazy to check out the story or because it really enjoys being invited to the correspondent's dinner (this year's was a hoot. They had some white guys [read: "not Wayne Brady"] from "Whose Line Is it, Anyway?" Much better than that stupid Colbert! He was soooo unfunny, and I'm pretty sure he was making fun of us).
Oh, wait. No it isn't.
And Jon Stewart is the one who does the fake news, right?
