Happy New Year

As 2005 comes to a close, I want to wish everyone a New Year filled with peace and prosperity.

2006 will be a year of work and challenge for the Committee specifically and Democrats around the country. It is vital that the Democrats take control of one or both of the halls of congress. This is the only hope to hold this administration to account for their rampant cronyism and utter incompetence.. The one party rule of the republican party has left this country facing a combination of more corruption, death, deficits and destruction to our freedoms since our Founding Fathers gave birth of this great land.

Here Paul Krugman's peice in the NY Times. Enjoy the read and GET TO WORK TO ELECT DEMOCRATS!!!

A year ago, everyone expected Bu$h to get his way on Social Security. Pundits warned Democrats that they were making a big political mistake by opposing plans to divert payroll taxes into private accounts.

A year ago, everyone thought Congress would make Bu$h's tax cuts permanent, in spite of projections showing that doing so would lead to budget deficits as far as the eye can see.
But Congress hasn't acted, and most of the cuts are still scheduled to expire by the end of 2010.

A year ago, Bush made many Americans feel safe, because they believed that he would be decisive & effective in an emergency. But Bush was apparently oblivious to the first
major domestic emergency since 9/11. According to Newsweek, aides to Bush finally decided, days after Hurricane Katrina struck, that they had to show him a DVD of TV newscasts
to get him to 'appreciate the seriousness' of the situation.

A year ago, before "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job" became a national punch line,
the rising tide of cronyism in government agencies and the rapid replacement
of competent professionals with UN-qualified political appointees attracted hardly
any national attention.

A year ago, hardly anyone outside Washington had heard of Jack Abramoff, and Tom DeLay's position as House majority leader seemed unassailable.

A year ago, DICK Cheney, who repeatedly cited discredited evidence linking Saddam to 9/11,
and promised that invading Americans would be welcomed as liberators - although he hadn't yet declared that the Iraq insurgency was in its "last throes" - was widely admired for his "gravitas."

A year ago, Howard Dean - who was among the very few prominent figures to question
Colin Powell's pre-war presentation to the United Nations, and who warned, while hawks
were still celebrating the fall of Baghdad, that the occupation of Iraq would be much more difficult than the initial invasion - was considered flaky and unsound.

A year ago, it was clear that before the Iraq war, the Bush Administration suppressed information suggesting that Iraq was not, in fact, trying to build nuclear weapons. Yet, few people in Washington or in the news media were willing to say that the nation was deliberately misled into war until polls showed that most Americans already believed it.

A year ago, the Washington establishment treated Ayad Allawi as if he were Nelson Mandela. Allawi's triumphant tour of Washington, back in September 2004, provided a crucial boost to the Bush-Cheney campaign. So did his claim that the insurgents were "desperate." But Allawi turned out to be another Ahmad Chalabi, a hero of Washington conference rooms and cocktail parties who had few supporters where it mattered, in Iraq.

A year ago, when everyone respectable agreed that we must "stay the course," only a handful of war critics suggested that the U.S. presence in Iraq might be making the violence worse, not better. It would have been hard to imagine the top U.S. commander in Iraq saying, as Gen. George Casey recently did, that a smaller foreign force is better "because it doesn't feed the notion of occupation."

A year ago, Bush hadn't yet openly reneged on Scott McClellan's 2003 pledge that "if anyone
in this administration was involved" in the leaking of Valerie Plame's identity, that person
"would no longer be in this Administration." Of course, some suspect that Bush
has always known who was involved.

A year ago, we didn't know that Bush was lying or at least being deceptive, when he said
at an April 2004 event promoting the Patriot Act that "a wiretap requires a court order.
...When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary
to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution."

A year ago, most Americans thought Bush was [sic] honest. [ No, we didn't!! ]

A year ago, we didn't know for sure that almost all the politicians and pundits who thundered, during the Lewinsky affair, that even the president isn't 'above the law' have changed
their minds.

Bush is a Lying SOB

I apologize if the title of this post is offensive. The bush apologists will argue that the bushtanistas did not lie about WMD, the intelligence was wrong. On and on, issue after issue, they lie with just enough "wiggle room", maybe a modicum of truth, to allow for debate and argument. The best case scenario for the entire bush cabal is they mislead, obfuscate and say something that is technically true but the intent is to mislead. Yes, I call that a lie. We teach our children that very point almost daily.

I would love for any bush supporter to offer a defense of the following quotes by gw bush as it relates to the violation of law and the Constitution vis a vis his domestic spying. The fact they are bypassing the FISA court and failing to get a warrant as DIRECTLY REQUIRED (what's up with that, strick constructionist?) by the fourth amendment. READ THESE QUOTES WITH THE FULL UNDERSTANDING OF WHAT bush HAS ACKNOWLEDGED SINCE SATURDAY.

President Bush -- April 19, 2004:
For years, law enforcement used so-called roving wire taps to investigate organized crime. You see, what that meant is if you got a wire tap by court order -- and, by the way, everything you hear about requires court order, requires there to be permission from a FISA court, for example.

President Bush -- April 20, 2004:
Secondly, there are such things as roving wiretaps. Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution.


President Bush -- June 9, 2005:
One tool that has been especially important to law enforcement is called a roving wiretap. Roving wiretaps allow investigators to follow suspects who frequently change their means of communications. These wiretaps must be approved by a judge, and they have been used for years to catch drug dealers and other criminals. Yet, before the Patriot Act, agents investigating terrorists had to get a separate authorization for each phone they wanted to tap. That means terrorists could elude law enforcement by simply purchasing a new cell phone. The Patriot Act fixed the problem by allowing terrorism investigators to use the same wiretaps that were already being using against drug kingpins and mob bosses.

White House fact sheet - June 9, 2005:
The Patriot Act extended the use of roving wiretaps, which were already permitted against drug kingpins and mob bosses, to international terrorism investigations. They must be approved by a judge. Without roving wiretaps, terrorists could elude law enforcement by simply purchasing a new cell phone.

President Bush -- July 20, 2005:
The Patriot Act helps us defeat our enemies while safeguarding civil liberties for all Americans. The judicial branch has a strong oversight role in the application of the Patriot Act. Law enforcement officers need a federal judge's permission to wiretap a foreign terrorist's phone, or to track his calls, or to search his property. Officers must meet strict standards to use any of the tools we're talking about. And they are fully consistent with the Constitution of the United States.

White House fact sheet -- July 20, 2005:
The judicial branch has a strong oversight role in the application of the Patriot Act. Law enforcement officers must seek a federal judge's permission to wiretap a foreign terrorist's phone, track his calls, or search his property. These strict standards are fully consistent with the Constitution. Congress also oversees the application of the Patriot Act, and in more than three years there has not been a single verified abuse.

President Bush -- December 10, 2005:
The Patriot Act is helping America defeat our enemies while safeguarding civil liberties for all our people. The judicial branch has a strong oversight role in the application of the Patriot Act. Under the act, law enforcement officers need a federal judge's permission to wiretap a foreign terrorist's phone or search his property. Congress also oversees our use of the Patriot Act. Attorney General Gonzales delivers regular reports on the Patriot Act to the House and the Senate.

I submit that when gw bush made these statements, HE WAS A LYING SOB!

My Letter to the Daily Press

I sent the following Letter to the Editor to the Daily Press a couple of days ago.

Editors:

There you have it. Bush proclaims that 30,000 dead Iraqis (Johns Hopkins and other independent organizations place the actual total in excess of 100,000), 2140 dead soldiers and Marines and tens of thousands maimed, dismembered and severely wounded, on both sides, is a justified price for installing a democratic form of government in Iraq.

Would he be so cavalier if it was one of his twins dead for his war of choice? If your son or daughter was the price paid for this trumped up war sold with deceptions, would you consider it an acceptable price? What if the price was your brother, sister, father or mother. Now is the price alright? This “acceptable price” is not a number, Mr. Bush, but real human beings dying for your lies (whoops, we mean “wrong intelligence”). Real blood is being shed and real families are suffering an unimaginable loss.

Let me offer the Bush apologist some different numbers to ponder. Zero - the number of promised WMD’s found. One - the number of inappropriate jokes this contemptible man told in the very next sentence after acknowledging his death and carnage. Two - the number of Shiite theocracies, along with an ecstatic Iran, that will be in the Middle East very shortly. Three - the number of years before this country and world are freed from this incompetent and Bush is retired to the “Lazy W” ranch in Crawford.100 - the percentage increase in the price of a barrel of oil since the start of the war. Lastly, $300 billion (and growing) will be spent on this boondoggle. For that price, we could have bought a democracy, giving $125,000 to every man woman and child still alive in Iraq. I guess that would have bypassed his oil buddies, political donors and contractor friends profiting off this war. That is one price this president is unwilling to pay.

Charles F. Stanton
Newport News, Va.

Is buying good press in Iraq a "Big Deal"

Here is the best analysis I have read on why the press story in Iraq is a "Big Deal".

The payola scheme has immensely corrosive longer-term implications for media institutions, for American credibility, for building the institutions of pluralism and democracy. Most immediately it has devastaging implications for the credibility of pro-American voices in the region (hence Alhomayed's dismay). Every pro-American voice in Iraq and in the region now comes under greater suspicion of having been on the take. Those voices already — often unfairly — risked being tarred as American puppets. Now their burden has become that much heavier.

These incompetents screw up everything the touch with deadly consequences.

Makes one proud to be an American

Today, the Washington Post revisits the story of Khaled Masri, a German citizen who was arrested, beaten, and imprisoned by the CIA for five months because his name was similar to that of an actual terrorist. Turns out he's just an ordinary schmoe.

Meanwhile, the New York Times tells us that security at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan is so bad that genuinely dangerous al-Qaeda members held there can pick the locks on their cells and sneak out through the fence.

Finally, the Los Angeles Times confirms last week's Telegraph story that private contractors are shooting "scores" of Iraqis just for the hell of it and pretty much doing it with impunity.
And of course the black sites in Eastern Europe are still operational, Dick Cheney still opposes the torture bill, the insurgency still appears to be quite a long way from being its last throes, and the pope has decided that gays are officially pariahs in the eyes of the Catholic Church.

Have a nice