Friday Orchid Blogging

(click photo to see a larger version)

This is a gorgeous Cattleya from the recent orchid show here in DC. I can't grow these things, kill 'em every time. But for a lot of people they're not that hard, so long as you have many hours of sunlight each day, or else they just won't bloom for you. In my case, they get lots of sunlight and die.

Enjoy. Read More......

Bush and Rummy defend their Iraq strategy -- our goal is "clear and unchanging"

Staying the course in Iraq is working for the Bush administration. They are sticking to their plan -- despite the carnage:

President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld yesterday defended the U.S. strategy in Iraq, saying the ultimate goals remain unchanged despite escalating violence and increasingly somber assessments from military leaders on the ground.

Speaking at a Washington fundraiser, Bush said the U.S. goal in Iraq "is clear and unchanging": creating a country that can govern and defend itself and "that will be an ally in the war against these extremists."

Had enough? Read More......

Missouri's Republican Senator Jim Talent must lose

Democrat Claire McCaskill is trying to burn a hole in the GOP firewall. She can beat Talent. Read More......

Cliff's Corner (A Bit Abbreviated)

The Week That Was 10/20/06

Another week. More preposterousness to report.

I keep thinking I've lost the ability to be shocked by the GOP, and yet continue to discover that a party whose organizing philosophy resembles Caligula can find ways to continually astonish me. Crazy Curt Weldon is accused of illegally funneling lobbying funds to his daughter and threatens supporters of his opponent. Nevada gubernatorial candidate Jim Gibbons Don-Sherwoods a woman (not to be confused with Mark-Foleying a boy) during the final weeks of his campaign.

Is there a company out there like Manchurian Global that manufactures all Republicans, so that they’re predestined to be pernicious and sexually perverted? A place, perhaps, that may help J.D. Hayworth to act homosapien in public while nourishing his Neo-Wagnerian social values in private?

Because something's got to be going on here when we reach the point where the Republicans spew false religiosity but are literally representative of everything the Bible warned against. Who doesn’t think that if a Republican officeholder saw a man who needed help on the side of a highway, they would behave slightly differently than the Good Samaritan?

I'm thinking they might ask him if he were gay or had illegally crossed the border, and before he answered, insult him for being poor and cut his healthcare services while signing him up to go to Basra.

I mean have you read about this Craig Schelske character? He ran for Congress as a Republican in 2002 (on family values of course) and is now involved in a messy divorce with Dancing With The Stars dropout Sarah Evans. Now Schelske wasn’t just satisfied to fill his computer with pornography, oh no, he allegedly needed pics — to use popular GOP lingo — of himself doing Mark-Foley’s-priest-type-things to women who were not his wife and, I am not kidding, scores of online photos of himself naked and erect.

Nice hard drive pal.

We had better close the deal on this one, Democrats, or this entire country is going to become that alternative universe Marty McFly returns to in Back To The Future II.

There is just nothing quite like the potent mixture of sleaze and faux-piety that is today’s GOP. Nothing.

Well one thing.

Joe Lieberman.

(I apologize for the brevity, I have been a bit busy taking care of my newborn son (sorry, just beaming a bit).)

Very funny episode of Republican Sexcapades on The Young Turks this past week.

Finally, I was on a show called The White House Chronicle on PBS today. It will be on WHUT in DC on Sunday at 6:30 PM Eastern. If the rest of you are interested, look up the show, it should be on sometime this weekend on your local PBS affiliate. Read More......

Open thread

Man what a news day. Read More......

GOP congressman Rodney Alexander's (R-LA) office sued for sexual harassment. Congressman allegedly was informed and did nothing.

This would be the same Congressman Alexander embroiled in the Mark Foley child sex predator scandal.

From Roll Call:

Rep. Rodney Alexander (R-La.), already enmeshed in the ex-Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) page scandal, now faces a new controversy as a former staffer has sued his office for sexual harassment.

Elizabeth Scott, Alexander's former scheduler, claims that Royal Alexander, the Congressman's chief of staff, "engaged in a course of misconduct" that included "inappropriate sex-based comments, ogling and touching" and "sexual advances," according to Michael Hoare, Scott's attorney. Scott told the Congressman of his aide's alleged improper behavior but the Louisiana Republican took no action to correct the situation, Hoare said....

Scott said she was demoted from her position as scheduler to staff assistant by Royal Alexander in May 2006 when "she complained of possible sex discrimination" by him. She met with the Congressman shortly after that and informed him about the alleged improper behavior by his chief of staff, according to Hoare. Rodney and Royal Alexander are not related.

Scott eventually left the office at the end of June, saying it was "intolerable" for her to work there any longer.

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Major new Curt Weldon (R-PA) scandal breaking

From CREW:

E-mails received by CREW have prompted us to ask the Department of Justice to investigate whether Congressman Curt Weldon (R-PA) violated the law by intimidating government personnel "in the national security field" who support his opponent, Joe Sestak.

The first e-mail describes a "hit list" compiled of Weldon opponent's supporters. In addition, that e-mail notes the Weldon said something to the effect of "If they don't think there will be retribution before or after the election, they're kidding themselves." The second e-mail states that Weldon had his staff contact Navy personnel to get information on [his Democratic opponent Joe] Sestak.

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We've raised $10,015.80 for Democratic Scott Kleeb (NE-03) in under 24 hours, let's finish the day off with a last push

Thank you so much everyone. Over $10,000 for this kind of race - in a rural state where ad buys are actually affordable as compared to NYC - is huge.

I've checked with friends who do such ad buys for a living, and they tell me that $2500 a day is a good TV advertising buy in this market, $4000 a day is a huge buy. Well, we've already given Kleeb enough to have four good days, and two and a half great days. And with only 18 days left in the race, that's rather huge.

Or in other terms, look at it this way. Kleeb has raised around $600,000 for his race to date. We've just added 1% to his total take - that's not insignificant.

And one final comparison. John Kerry's PAC gave Kleeb $4,000. You've already given him over $10,000.

Let's have one final push to donate. Then tomorrow we'll start highlighting other key races in which your money can and will make a difference.

Scott Kleeb (NE-03) $

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Six more once-safe GOP House seats now "competitive"

And the hits just keep on coming. What's particularly important here is that the more seats that become competitive - meaning, that move from safe to not-so-safe, the more races the GOP has to keep an eye on and spend money in. Multi-front wars are bad things. Read More......

White House spokesman defends Condi Rice calling gay man's mother his "mother in law"

White House spokesman Tony Snow just said the following at today's White House press briefing:

REPORTER: At the swearing in of Mark Dybul as an AIDS ambassador, Secretary of State Rice referred to the mother of a gay partner as "mother in law," and my question, how does this adhere to the President's belief and policy that marriage is between one man and one woman?

WHITE HOUSE SPOKESMAN TONY SNOW: The secretary said what she said and she was showing due deference to the people involved.

Note that Snow didn't just say that Condi said what she said, and leave it that. Snow went one step further and decided to defend what Condi said. He said that Condi showed "due deference" by treating the gay couple as married. That's a value judgment that Snow is making. And the values he's supporting are the values of a gay married couple over the values of homophobe Jerry Falwell and the men at the Concerned Women for America.

While I'm certainly pleased that George Bush's White House stands behind a cabinet secretary recognizing the validity of a gay marriage, I can't see how the religious right bigots are going to find this a very comforting response, to say the least.

It's one thing for Condi Rice to recognize a gay marriage on television in front of Laura Bush (and it's difficult to believe that Mrs. Bush wasn't in on the whole thing), but it's quite another for the White House to then have the chance to "fix" things, and instead, choose to defend what could have been written off as "her personal opinion" or a "slip of the tongue."

I think the White House, and the Republicans at large, have decided that they need to make a choice in these final weeks before the election. Do they embrace the Terri Schiavo wing of the party or the Mary Cheney wing?

And the Marys just won. Read More......

GOP candidate for governor of Florida outed as gay

The independent candidate for governor in Florida says that Charlie Crist, the Republican candididate, is gay. And he's not just basing the claim on idle gossip - he says he knew the GOP candidate twenty years ago.

According to Linn, during the course of conversations with Crist he learned that the future attorney general is gay. The two talked about “what would happen if [Crist’s sexual orientation] comes out” during a political campaign, Linn said....

Crist, 49, was married for seven months in 1979, but otherwise has lived a single life.

I've never heard of Crist, and have no idea if he's gay or straight, but I wouldn't be suprised to find out that a GOP gubernatorial candidate was gay. This isn't new. Most gay Republicans I knew in the late 80s and early 90s were closeted - their bosses and colleagues had no idea they were gay. Today, that's totally changed. Gay men and lesbians are out and proud in the highest levels of the Republican party - just take a walk around the RNC or the White House (or George Allen's office) and see if you get out without a date - and their colleagues and bosses know about it and couldn't care less.

Don't get me wrong, a lot of those colleagues and bosses are still homophobes - at least de facto homophobes versus de jure homophobes (meaning, they may not be bigots in their hearts, but they play one when it comes time to legislate). But having said that, as vice presidential daughter and open lesbian Mary Cheney noted a while back, during the campaign her GOP colleagues would talk to her behind closed doors and tell her how much they supported her being openly gay. Those are not the kind of colleagues who give 100% when Jerry Falwell and the men at the Concerned Women for America come knocking on the door. They may pay lip service to the religious right bigots, but it's hard to believe their heart is truly in the cause of forwarding the homophobe agenda when their best friends and coworkers (and staffers) are openly gay.

That doesn't excuse gay people who work for anti-gay Republican bigots. The hatred that comes from the mouths of Republican leaders is still terribly harmful in terms of the message of hate, and even violence, it sends to the culture at large. But the one silver lining remains that so long as the Republican party secretly embraces its gay colleagues - and it does - the religious right agenda doesn't have a chance in hell of getting anywhere beyond lip service.

But then again, as I noted before, it's not like the religious right has ever demanded anything more than lip service, so up until this point the GOP has been comfortable talking out of both sides of its Bible. Read More......

Sadr militia takes control of city, again

Bush always tells us that he listens to his generals but I have a hard time believing that the generals want to have this fight with the al-Sadr militia over and over. This is insane and every few months it is the same old story.

Maybe the media can ask why Bush let al-Sadr get away with this so many times - because in a crowd of administration failures, this one has to be right up there near the top. It has to be difficult enough for US troops in Iraq but to fight the same guy so many times has to be frustrating and demoralizing.

Had enough?:

The Shiite militia run by the anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr seized control of a southern Iraqi city on Friday in one of the boldest acts of defiance yet by the country's powerful, unofficial armies, witnesses and police said.

Mahdi Army fighters stormed three main police stations Friday morning, residents said, planting explosives that flattened the buildings in Amarah, a city just 30 miles from the Iranian border that was under British command until August, when it was returned to Iraqi government control.

Read More......

Former top aide to Rep. Ney (R-OH) says GOP just pretending to be anti-gay to fool Christian right

Washington Post

"You have to separate the marketing from the reality. The reality is, these members are not homophobic. For the most part, they're using this marketing to play to our base and stay in power. They have to turn out the votes," said David Duncan, once a board member of the Lesbian and Gay Congressional Staff Association and a former top aide to Rep. Robert Ney (R-Ohio), who last week pleaded guilty to corruption charges linked to the Abramoff scandal.

That's called lying to trick people into voting for you. And the religious right wonders why the Republican congress never passes any of its must-do legislation about abortion, gays, immigration, or much of anything else. That's because:

1. The religious right always threatens to sit out the election, but they never do. The Republicans know the religious right loathes Democrats, and would never really walk no matter how badly they were treated, so, as the saying goes, why buy the (sacred) cow when you get the milk for free?

2. The second reason the Republicans never really do anything for the religious right is because the religious always settles for "attempts" to pass legislation, rather than the real thing.

Anybody can offer a bill or an amendment. Anybody can bring said bill or amendment up for a vote. But that is not the same thing as truly, honestly trying to get it passed. This is a point I make, often, about certain Democrats like Mr. Kerry (and increasingly Mr. Feingold). They seem more interested in offering legislation, or filibusters, or censure resolutions, that they know have no chance in hell of passing. And what's even worse, rather than actually construct and launch and manage a real campaign around trying to build a consensus for passage of that legislation - something that takes a bit more than the 24 or 72 hours those two gentlemen often give us between offering the legislation and the final vote taking place - they offer their ideas without a real campaign to back them up, simply because they're not interested in actually passing the legislation, they're not interested in winning policy victories. They're interested in buying off the base with cute tricks, hoping that no one understands politics well enough to realize they're being snookered - snookered the same way the Republicans snooker the religious right. "Oh we tried to pass that anti-gay bill, Mr. Falwell, really we did - I was plotting with my openly gay top staffers all night on how we could do it, but we just couldn't figure it out." Yeah, right.

It never ceases to amaze me how gullible Tony Perkins, James Dobson, Donald Wildmon, Lou Sheldon, and the men at the Concerned Women for America are. Though this does explain why they constantly misinterpret the Bible - fortunately for our side, they're clearly not the smartest bulbs in the waiting line for Heaven. Read More......

Democrats get pre-election funding surge

Republicans, not so much.

Democratic fundraising for the midterm elections is ending with a surge.

In September, the Democratic campaign committees for the House and the Senate outraised their counterpart Republican committees, reversing historical trends.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee raised $14.4 million and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee collected $13.6 million last month, they said. In contrast, the National Republican Congressional Committee raised $12 million and the National Republican Senatorial Committee collected $5.2 million.

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Violence in Iraq is rising, US campaign to quell it a failure

Had enough? And you know things are bad when the Bush people are admitting it isn't working. Read More......

Friday Morning Open Thread

Ugh. What a way to start the day -- seeing Ken Mehlman on the TODAY Show. He looks worse than usual. But, Meredith -- and Terry McAuliffe who debated Ken -- forgot to mention Abramoff. Ken's story about his relationship with Abramoff keeps changing. He needs to come clean. Media can't be letting Mehlman trash Dems. now that we know he's a key player in the Abramoff scandal.

Okay. What's going on in the real world? Read More......

Diebold voting machine code mailed to legislator

Nothing to see here, keep moving. Diebold machines are completely safe, so they keep telling us. Can someone please stick a fork in those damned machines so we can move on. The experiment with Diebold has failed so it's time to find another solution with another company who wants to be serious about modern democracy because Diebold seems unable and/or unwilling to protect their code or build serious products for e-voting. Their close ties to the GOP are also reason for concern since we still live in a two party system. It's been an expensive experiment - something the GOP really likes - but it is time to look elsewhere for a solution.

Diebold Election Systems Inc. expressed alarm and state election officials contacted the FBI yesterday after a former legislator received an anonymous package containing what appears to be the computer code that ran Maryland's polls in 2004.

Cheryl C. Kagan, a longtime critic of Maryland's elections chief, says the fact that the computer disks were sent to her - along with an unsigned note criticizing the management of the state elections board - demonstrates that Maryland's voting system faces grave security threats.

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Snow: "I think the president understands that it's important to set high standards"

So how would one precisely describe these standards? High standards for supporting a wife choker? Superior skills in being a racist? What ever happened to that higher moral standard, or does all of that go out the window when you are panicked and desperate to avoid a Congress that will actually debate and ask questions?

President Bush campaigned Thursday for a congressman who has confessed to adultery [AP includes the choking history later in the article] and a senator accused of racial insensitivity, seeking to boost incumbent Republicans once safe for re-election but now in peril.

Bush's appearances for Rep. Don Sherwood here and for Sen. George Allen in Richmond, Va., found the White House on the defensive over the decision to try to help candidates in such straits as the GOP struggles to keep control of Congress.

And here is the kicker...

Helping to raise more than $300,000 for Sherwood, Bush only obliquely addressed the controversy.

He praised Sherwood as "the right man to represent" his district, because of policy positions ranging from taxes to Iraq to highway money. Bush then offered effusive admiration for Sherwood's wife, Carol, who sat beaming beside her husband on the dais behind the president after mostly staying out of view during the campaign.

Bush called her a "caring and courageous woman" because of a letter she wrote to constituents over the weekend, in which she denounced Sherwood's opponent, Democrat Chris Carney, for airing campaign ads about the affair.

Now if that is not pathetic, I don't know what is. How does Laura feel about being choked? Is this some kind of a good ol boy routine where wife abuse is acceptable? Heavens no, it's not possible to call a wife abuser a wife abuser when he can give you a supportive vote. Just another case of Bush being the biggest coward in politics and another whore for power. Read More......

Open thread

I am so off to bed. I'll update the Scott Kleeb fundraising clock (or whatever) when I get up in the morning. Do give if you can, I want us to beat the $4000 that John Kerry gave Kleeb :-) Read More......

Join the US Torture Corps, see the world, kill innocent strangers

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