What about Bill Clinton for Party Chair?

The LA Times ask.

My concern: Clinton may sell gays, and others, to the wolves in order to win. He reportedly urged Kerry to chuck us overboard, telling Kerry to endorse the anti-gay state amendments. And you'll note that Clinton, while I do love the man, has still never repudiated his DOMA vote (and you KNOW he doesn't buy this anti marriage crap).

Anyway, still an interesting thought. He would be one hell of a ledaer. Read the rest of this post...

Facts schmacts - we're from red states!

Do you think we can get the French and the Mexicans and the Spanish to take them all back?

In several states, women considering abortion are given government-issued brochures warning that the procedure could increase their chance of developing breast cancer, despite scientific findings to the contrary.

More than a year ago, a panel of scientists convened by the National Cancer Institute reviewed available data and concluded there is no link. A scientific review in the Lancet, a British medical journal, came to the same conclusion, questioning the methodology in studies that suggested a link....

"We're going to continue to educate the public about this," said Karen Malec, president of the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer, an anti-abortion group. She dismissed the National Cancer Institute's findings as politically motivated and maintained that the link has been scientifically proven.

The effort to write the issue into state law began in the mid-1990s, when a few studies suggested women who had abortions or miscarriages might be more likely to develop breast cancer. The warnings are now required in Texas and Mississippi, and health officials in Kansas and Louisiana voluntarily issue them.

In Mississippi, women who want abortions must sign a form indicating they've been told there is a "medical risk" of breast cancer. In other states, brochures say there is a link or that evidence is mixed.

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Chilly evening open thread

Brrrrrrrrrrrr Read the rest of this post...

Bush, CEO's to fight for less accountability

The one constant I've found with this administration has been a total lack of accountability for massive, historic failures and deceptions.

Now the administration's corporate sponsors would like the same treatment. My sources tell me the administration is working with a handful of CEO types to ratchet back the one law passed in the last four years that actually holds corrupt liars accountable -- the law known as "Sarbanes-Oxley." This is the law that, among other things, punishes CEO's and CFO's directly when they lie about their earnings to investors. Naturally, Bush opposed this law at first but succumbed to overwhelming political pressure.

There's a clever strategy in place, and it's starting now. A survey has just been released trying to make the case that Sarbanes-Oxley is bad for American business. Next thing you'll hear is a bunch of business associations and right-wing think tanks -- never the businesses themselves -- talk about how the law "goes too far." Then you'll see an increase in campaign contributions to Congressman Oxley to make sure he's not too emasuclated when they gut his law. You may even see Bush make a visit to his district. Then, realizing the majority of Americans are still against them, they'll try to pass changes to the law as part of a larger bill -- maybe a tax cut, something related to fighting terrorism, or an appropriations bill.

Remember, this is the law that prevents another Ken Lay or Bernie Ebbers from stealing your retirement. And this is the law they want to water down. THIS, along with more tax cuts, more roll-backs in environmental regulations, and a few other goodies, is the real republican agenda. This is what they really want. Honestly, these people don't lie awake at night worrying about what the feminists or homosexuals are doing. They just want money.
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More amazing pics from that site

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Why do home schoolers hate America?

ABC News just reported that authorities think they've identified the guy known as Azzam the American. You know him. He's the self-proclaimed Al Qaeda terrorist who appeared on a video a few weeks ago, in somewhat accented English, threatening to kill us all.

Well, in addition to thinking they know who he is, ABC News reports that the guy was home schooled.

Now, I'm not saying that all home schoolers raise terrorist babies. But using the religious right's favored tactic - find one bad apple and use that person to tarnish an entire group of Americans - that's exactly what you'd conclude. Read the rest of this post...

Army only starting to get a clue re: rape victim

An update on 1st Lieutenant Jennifer Dyer from the Newark Star Ledger:

The Army has dropped its demand that an AWOL New Jersey National Guard
lieutenant who said she was raped at a base in Mississippi report back to duty
at the scene of the alleged assault. Instead, Lt. Jennifer Dyer was directed to
report to an Army installation in New Jersey.

The Army also plans to "investigate" its own actions in the treatment of Lt. Dyer.

I'm just gonna let the readers come up with their own comments at this point.
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Dean reportedly pondering bid at DNC Chair

AP:

Former presidential candidate Howard Dean is considering a bid to become chairman of the national Democratic Party.

"He told me he was thinking about it," Steve Grossman, himself a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said Monday. Grossman was a Dean backer during the former Vermont governor's failed presidential bid.

....if Dean were to run for DNC chair, he would need to pledge that he would serve the full four-year term, thus ruling out a presidential bid in 2008.

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Arafat is dead... or just about

Reuters:

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat suffered a brain hemorrhage on Tuesday and aides said he had died at a French hospital, but confusion over his fate grew as officials insisted in public that he still clung to life.

Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath, in a strenuous denial, said the Palestinian president, 75, was "very much alive," but at least five senior sources said he had succumbed to the mystery illness that led to his being flown to Paris on Oct. 29.

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Priceless

A letter to the editor reportedly printed in a newspaper, somewhere, today:

Accept election results

Ever since we learned that President Bush had won
reelection, a flow of letters and editorials has
talked about how the voters who supported John Kerry
cannot fathom living under a second Bush
administration.

It is time for all Americans to remember that the
reason our government has survived for so long is that
we vote for the leaders we prefer and then, win or
lose, we stand behind those leaders whom the majority
of Americans have chosen. That is what has made
America strong over the past centuries.

How do the Kerry supporters think we conservatives
felt during eight years of President Bill Clinton? We
did not gnash our teeth, cry in anguish and scream
about how we must leave the country. We accepted the
will of the majority and moved on, as Americans,
dedicated to making life and government better.

It is time for everyone to grow up and pull together.

Ted Howland
Mickleton

Let me just conclude by saying the writer is absolutely correct. We should treat George Bush exactly as they treated Bill Clinton. Read the rest of this post...

Ashcroft announces resignation

No more details, other than he won't serve in a second term. Read the rest of this post...

Muslim-luvr

The religious right is again ticked at Bush for - eh gads! - tolerating them there Muslims. I hear tell - and get this - that apparently Bush is inviting Muslims to the White House! My God, I hope they clean and count the silverware afterwards!

But at least America's Taliban recognizes that we Amurikans have to at least pretend we don't hate Muslim, at least "in the current climate."

If Bush wants a real, or at least metaphorical, civil war, he's going to get one if he doesn't get the Jesus freaks under control. Read the rest of this post...

God is a Republican?

Either that:

So God is indeed a Republican. He must be. His hand helped re-elect a President, with a popular mandate, whose job approval ratings were the lowest since ratings began of any President who has been re-elected. His hand helped re-elect a President in a country where "wrong track" was way ahead of "right track." His hand helped re-elect a President in a country where, in the rust belt and the South, millions of jobs have been lost.

Hmmm... which supernatural being is more likely to prefer a world based on war, in which hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians are wantonly killed, in which we jail people simply for who they love, and in which we pit human beings against each other based on their basest hatreds and prejudices?

Sounds to me like the devil is an even bigger Republican. Read the rest of this post...

"For some reason, some votes were counted twice"

Yeah, you think?

Sarpy County [Nebraska] election officials are trying to figure out how they ended up with more votes than voters in the general election. As many as 10,000 extra votes have been tallied and candidates are still waiting for corrected totals.

Johnny Boykin lost his bid to be on the Papillion City Council. The difference between victory and defeat in the race was 127 votes.

Boykin says, "When I went in to work the next day and saw that 3,342 people had shown up to vote in our war, I thought something's not right."

He's right. There are not even 3,000 people registered to vote in his ward.

For some reason, some votes were counted twice.

Deputy Sarpy County Election Commissioner Ed Gilbert says, "It affected 32 of the 80 precincts. And I suppose as many as 10,000 votes."

Sarpy County BORROWED the election equipment from Omaha-based ELECTION SYSTEMS & SOFTWARE. ITS EMPLOYEES operated the machines that are now double-checking the ballots.

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Imperial Hubris

Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA's Osama Bin Laden unit is talking again. He's the author of the bestseller "Imperial Hubris," an excellent book that focuses in on the threat of Al Quaeda and Bush's incompetent response to 9-11. (Scheuer is no liberal; he thinks Bush wasn't ruthless enough.) We all pretend to be open-minded, but on the big issues we rarely change our points of view. Scheuer's book -- published under the name Anonymous -- changed mine on a number of issues related to the Middle East and terrorism and Al Quaeda. Read it.

""The American people need a better understanding of how we got to 9/11," [Scheuer] said. "But I think the 9/11 commission was bound and determined not to find any culpability. By finding no one guilty, they managed not to deal with the real problems."

"He remains deeply frustrated by the failures of leadership at the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and other agencies that he witnessed before the Sept. 11 attacks, and believes that top officials have escaped personal accountability," reports the New York Times.
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FUCKtheSOUTH.com

From FUCKtheSOUTH.com:

Fuck the South. Fuck 'em. We should have let them go when they wanted to leave. But no, we had to kill half a million people so they'd stay part of our special Union. Fighting for the right to keep slaves - yeah, those are states we want to keep.

And now what do we get? We're the fucking Arrogant Northeast Liberal Elite? How about this for arrogant: the South is the Real America? The Authentic America. Really?

Cause we fucking founded this country, assholes. Those Founding Fathers you keep going on and on about? All that bullshit about what you think they meant by the Second Amendment giving you the right to keep your assault weapons in the glove compartment because you didn't bother to read the first half of the fucking sentence? Who do you think those wig-wearing lacy-shirt sporting revolutionaries were? They were fucking blue-staters, dickhead. Boston? Philadelphia? New York? Hello? Think there might be a reason all the fucking monuments are up here in our backyard?

No, No. Get the fuck out. We're not letting you visit the Liberty Bell and fucking Plymouth Rock anymore until you get over your real American selves and start respecting those other nine amendments. Who do you think those fucking stripes on the flag are for? Nine are for fucking blue states. And it would be 10 if those Vermonters had gotten their fucking Subarus together and broken off from New York a little earlier. Get it? We started this shit, so don't get all uppity about how real you are you Johnny-come-lately "Oooooh I've been a state for almost a hundred years" dickheads. Fuck off....

Well this gravy train is fucking over. Take your liberal-bashing, federal-tax-leaching, confederate-flag-waving, holier-than-thou, hypocritical bullshit and shove it up your ass.

And no, you can't have your fucking convention in New York next time. Fuck off.

WHAT YOU READ ABOVE WAS FROM THAT WEB SITE, THIS IS NOW FROM ME, JOHN: As an aside, I have to admit I'm intrigued by the notion of how much money blue states pay in taxes and how much the red states GET from the federal government. That's always a big fight in Congress, with highway funding, etc. Perhaps we need to put our lobbying where our mouth is. Figure out the programs that most benefit the red states and target them. If my relationship doesn't get social security benefits, then red states will lose other benefits. Works for me. You need to get their attention.

I'm quite serious about this. Take the battle to them and make THEM pay a price. Teach them that we are a union of states, a union of people, and you cut out part of that union at your peril. It's how the religious right does it - they don't kill their politicians with kindness, they put a metaphorical gun to their head. Read the rest of this post...

Memo to the World: We're Sorry

Absolutely BRILLIANT Web site.







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So what do the Iraqis think of the US storming into Falluja?

Hmmm, it doesn't look like they're very thrilled with the attack either. Don't they know that we're saving them?

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Too mean or too wimpy?

Some folks got upset that I posted the following ad on a few of the other blogs. They felt it diminished my credibility, was too mean, and too freeper-like. I'm curious what you guys think. Personally, I think we could use being a bit more freeper-like. And comparing Bush's revival of the "uniter" talk to putting lipstick on a pig, well, in my book, that's being downright generous to him. The man is a charlatan, a liar, and quite possibly a war criminal for having intentionally violated the Geneva Conventions. Somehow lipstick pales, in my view.

So, now you know my side of it. Is this a tad too mean, just right, or not nasty enough? Here's the ad:

Lipstick on a Pig



Until there's a new president, there's AMERICAblog.org

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Prison Stats -- Crime Down, People Behind Bars Are Up

The latest prison stats are out and while convictions of violent crimes continue to fall, the prison population continues to rise. Among the most disheartening figures: almost 1 in 10 of all black men between the ages of 25-29 are in jail right now. 44 percent of all state and federal prisoners are black.

I'm no bleeding heart liberal when it comes to crime and I hold each individual responsible for their actions. (The vast majority of people who are desperately poor DON'T commit crimes.) Society has clearly failed when an entire class of people are so bedeviled by helplessness and despair and a culture of violence.

USA Today breaks it down by state. The clear winner? Texas, of course, with 162,000 behind bars. And it's not just because they've got so many people. Texas matched Louisiana, Alabama and Oklahoma for the highest rate of incarceration by population.

According to the Washington DC-based Sentencing Project, half of all prisoners are serving time for non-violent offenses.
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Late morning open thread

Having my coffee. Read the rest of this post...

Guantanamo Show Trials Halted By Court

Bush will be angered to find out that activist judges have ruled he is NOT above the law and halted the unconstitutional show trials at Guantanamo Bay, saying the President overstepped his powers and went against the Geneva Convention.

"Stephen Saltzburg, a professor at the George Washington University Law School, said it was inevitable that a federal judge somewhere would find fault with the administration's approach "that you can keep people locked up for two and three years and you still don't really know who they are and why we're keeping them,"" reports the New York Times.

Remember, military court martials were begun in the first place because military commissions were considered unfair and prone to abuse. Can you imagine being held for trial where you can rarely if ever speak to an attorney and you aren't allowed to see the evidence against you? Talk about Kafkaesque.

This ruling is a great day for those who cherish moral values and doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. It's certainly an improvement over the sad spectacle of a day earlier. The panel's presiding judge continued to show incompetence and a lack of understanding of the law while it took an alleged terrorist to remind us of what America stands for.

"The Yemeni who appeared Saturday denied through his translator that he had any affiliation with Al Qaeda. He said the United States had no proof and "should know that a person is innocent until proven guilty, not the other way around." Throughout the hearing, the man, whose name may not be published under the conditions set by the military, complained, sometimes with sarcasm, that "this is like a game,"" reported the New York Times. Read the rest of this post...

Did someone mention jobs?

The president had something to celebrate with his first Clinton-esque job growth number last week. (the unemployment rate actually went up, but hey, nobody's perfect.) A week later, it's back to reality.

Thousands of job cuts at Marsh and SBC announced this morning. Delta's now giving us some details on their previously announced cuts, where a little more than one out of every ten people working there now won't be soon. Just in time for the holidays.

For those about to lose their jobs -- stop whining. This administration will get another corporate tax cut over to the Hill for rubber-stamping in no time.
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The New Face of America

Here's another example of the Republican "Values" in action:

Clearly this child has no idea what the sign she's holding means. If she does, her parents should have their children taken away. She's far to young to be exposed to such a word.

This is the face of the Religious Right. This is the face of "Values" America. This is also, clearly, the face of low quality education (someone didn't quite get the spelling right and had to go back and correct it) and limited economic opportunity (clearly didn't have enough money to buy more than two pieces of poster board and one black pen). You cannot reason with this face. You cannot have a conversation with this face.

This is the face of a nation without reason. This is the face of darkness enveloping America. This is the face of hate. This is the face of George Bush's America. Read the rest of this post...

Anti-choice activist priest arrested for kiddie porn

Sick story from the Boston Globe. No word yet on how long the Catholic church knew about this guy.

A question -- how many voters' guides do you think he passed out last week?
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We don't do body counts...well, OK maybe we actually do

Now that the news is playing its role in the hyping of this latest round of violence in Iraq, we are receiving "body counts" from the field. The problem is, the body counts for civilians do not appear to be part of the reporting. With Rummy telling us yesterday that the locals had been warned, any civilians caught in the crossfire will dismissed as casualties of war, next question. Considering the source for the body counts, those killed may or may not be enemy fighters.

Elsewhere in Iraq, violence, violence, violence. But don't let that distract you from the main event in Falluja where the Pentagon would like us to believe is the only trouble spot in the country.
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Would Jesus Risk Passenger Safety in the Name of Corporate Profits?

Normally this would be a logical post with an article from Reuters about how corporate interests (note that the only two airlines in the article are based in Texas) have once again trumped passenger safety. I would note that oil costs have skyrocketed since Bush took office. I would mention that the economy stinks so no one is flying. But hey, this is the New America. So instead, I'll just start off with this:

And lo, The Bush said, let the planes drop from the sky so that they might see the glory of the Lord more quickly.

Regulators are letting some airlines carry smaller reserves of fuel on international flights to reduce weight and save money, the Federal Aviation Administration said on Monday.
...
Carrying heavy debt and battling discounters, big airlines are looking for any savings advantage, especially in fuel use.

This summer, the FAA relaxed a long-standing requirement that aircraft on international flights carry 10 percent extra fuel to cover detours because of weather, navigational problems or the need to extend the flight to an alternate airport.
...
So far, American Airlines and Continental Airlines are the only two carriers that have been permitted to carry less fuel, the FAA said.

American, a unit of AMR Corp., hopes to save up to $10.5 million a year by reducing its fuel reserve levels.

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