This afternoon I begin my Sherman-esque march down the southeastern U.S. coast, conquering and liberating, wielding my Sword Of Truth and Justice, on route to my parents' residence in Palm Beach County, FL (specifically, a district represented in the U.S. Congress by E. Clay Shaw (R), who some people might remember).

AmCop will be back on Sunday!

Please click this link and donate $5, $15, $25, to help keep this important add on TV and send a big 'Fuck You' to Marc Racicot's squadron of lawyers.

MoveOn.org writes:

The Republican National Committee is trying to silence us. Last week, they sent ominous legal letters to over 200 TV stations that are running our "Worker" ad. They falsely accused the MoveOn Voter Fund of breaking campaign finance laws in running the ad. And then they demanded that the stations take it off the air.

Not a single station has pulled our ad, of course – what we're doing conforms in every way to the letter and the spirit of the campaign finance law. But we're determined to demonstrate that RNC scare tactics will not silence us. That's why, given the poor jobs figures announced last Friday, we're planning on spending an additional million dollars, starting today, to get this message out.

Help us show the RNC that bullying tactics won't silence us by chipping in today.

Dawkins writes:

Tuning in this morning to Brian Lehrer's talk show on WNYC New York public radio. What follows is a close paraphrase (best approximation of actual quotes and the gist) of the discussion about how five Britons were recently released from Guantanamo Bay after being held without charge, without cause, without access to lawyers or any other outside contact, by the Bush administration for two years. Lehrer was interviewing a female reporter from the London Guardian on the issue.

The conversation went something like this:

Lehrer: So why were the men released?
London Guardian: As far as we can tell, the men did not pose a threat to the United States or Britain.
L: How do we know they didn't?
LG: We don't know for sure because there were no charges filed against them nor stated cause for the detention.
L: So they could be very dangerous, right?
LG: Of course, but they could also be not dangerous, we just don't know since there are no charges filed.
L: But does no charges filed mean they're not dangerous?
LG: Not necessarily…
L: So maybe they're very dangerous. We just don't know the circumstances under which they were picked up in Afghanistan.
LG: That's true, and we also don't know why they were being held in detention, as the American authorities never released that information.
L: But we don't know for sure that they posed no threat.
LG: Well, actually, the British home secretary, Jack Straw, had seen the dossier on the five men and based on that, just recently announced publicly that they posed no threat to the United States or Britain.
L: But they must have been dangerous since they were being held for so long…

Just your typical reasoned, independent-minded "sane alternative" talk radio journalism from Mr. Brian Lehrer on New York's WNYC public radio!



Blicero adds: The longer they are held, the more potentially dangerous they become...Kafka is rolling in his grave.

Dawkins writes:

Not that this will ever do any good (in light of the recent revelations that John Kerry has dedicated his entire Senate career to undermining the security of the United States by voting against every major weapons program ever devised), but Josh Marshall presents a cogent, articulate explanation for why Kerry's position on the war (a vote for the war resolution, followed by criticism of Bush's prosecution of the war) is sensible and correct and how it can be defended during the election. Worth a read for when you're forced to educate and persuade your Republican friends.

I've been asked by many people recently how John Kerry will manage to explain his vote for the Iraq war resolution and subsequent criticism of the war itself. For myself I don't find the explanation or rather the position one of great difficulty since it so closely mirrors my own position.

Full commentary.

Sen. McCain open to being Kerry's VP

WASHINGTON -- Republican Sen. John McCain allowed a glimmer of hope Wednesday for Democrats fantasizing about a bipartisan dream team to defeat President Bush.

McCain said he would consider the unorthodox step of running for vice president on the Democratic ticket -- in the unlikely event he received such an offer from the presidential candidate.

As speakingcorpse notes: Batten down the hatches. Duct tape the windows. Fire-proof your mortal coil. Mass-casualty terrorism, at the very least, and, more likely, apocalypse, are on the horizon.

I'm actually not joking. This is pretty unbelievable nastiness.

ALABAMA artist Frank Bear illustrated support for George W. Bush as a follower of Jesus Christ by this work, titled "Our Christian President." The artist pieced together individual portraits of Jesus Christ to make the image of President Bush. Despite criticism, Bear insists the artwork is not blasphemous. (RNS Photo)

Do you think Mr. Bear's "point" might be (in part) that Bush's personal relationship with Jesus causes him to look like a burn victim or a man suffering from smallpox?

Liberal activist group "NASA"--whose "scientific" "findings" about the origin of the universe run counter to Biblical teachings--has released a series of radical secularist photographs, evidently intended to recruit U.S. youth into an anti-Biblical lifestyle.

The occasion also served as a reminder of the plight of the Hubble telescope, which is operating under a controversial death sentence.

And so it should. And, being sentenced to death, it should repent and rejoice, like any good Christian.


"When you say the universe is 14.5 billion years old, I weep."

Please visit this site for more accurate information:

http://www.creationscience.com/

Does the Bush campaign (and their NY Times hack Elizabeth "Bulimia" Bumiller) really want to talk about embarrassing cuts in defense spending? As Atrios reminds us, there have been some rather more recent episodes the GOP might not want re-aired:

In his final budget request for the fiscal year 2003 submitted on Sept. 10 to the budget director, Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., the attorney general called for spending increases in 68 programs, none of which directly involved counterterrorism. Upgrading the F.B.I.'s computer system, one of the areas in which he sought an increase, is relevant to combating terrorism, though Mr. Ashcroft did not defend it on that ground.

But in his Sept. 10 submission to the budget office, Mr. Ashcroft did not endorse F.B.I. requests for $58 million for 149 new counterterrorism field agents, 200 intelligence analysts and 54 additional translators.

Mr. Ashcroft proposed cuts in 14 programs. One proposed $65 million cut was for a program that gives state and local counterterrorism grants for equipment, including radios and decontamination suits and training to localities for counterterrorism preparedness.

And this, from the Newsweek story about Bush's infamous "jut-jawed, disjointed discourse" following the BUSH KNEW revelations of May 2002:

Bush was just getting warmed up. "Now you guys really got me going," he said. He threatened to block the entire defense bill if it contained money for the controversial and costly Crusader artillery system. "I mean it. I'll veto it," he said tersely, glancing at Sen. Don Nickles of Oklahoma, where Crusader would be built.

Say what? President Bush blocking the Crusader artillery system--yes, that's right, the Crusader artillery system? After 9/11? How the hell are we supposed to fight a global war on terror without a proper Crusader artillery system?

Bring It On, indeed.

Contribute to Kerry.

Scat-Man sends me this Buzzflash article, which includes a convenient Who's Who of Fundie Wingnut Theo-Corporatist organizations, their leaders and affiliates.

Have fun!

From MoveOn.org:

Last month, President Bush's Secretary of Education, Rod Paige, called America's largest teachers' union a "terrorist organization." Why? Because the union had the gall to insist that President Bush live up to his own promises to adequately fund education. Please sign our petition demanding that President Bush fire Secretary Paige.

http://www.FirePaige.org/index.asp?ms=1

MEDIA ADVISORY:
GOP Rhetoric on Kerry's Voting Record Goes Unchallenged

After John Kerry emerged as the likely Democratic nominee for president, the Republican National Committee (RNC) began criticizing his record on military spending. The campaign against Kerry's record escalated on February 22 when the RNC released a list of weapons systems that Kerry allegedly "voted against."
...
CNN anchor Judy Woodruff (2/25/04) framed the issue this way in an interview with Rep. Norm Dicks (D.-Wash.): "The Republicans list something like 13 different weapons systems that they say the record shows Senator Kerry voted against. The Patriot missile, the B-1 bomber, the Trident missile and on and on and on."

Embarrassingly, Dicks had to explain to Woodruff that most of the weapons "votes" weren't individual votes at all, but a single vote on the Pentagon's 1991 appropriations bill. Woodruff responded with surprise to this information: "Are you saying that all these weapons systems were part of one defense appropriations bill in 1991?"
...
One of the few reporters to take a serious look at the RNC's list-- on which 10 of the 13 items refer to the single 1991 vote-- was Slate's Fred Kaplan (2/25/04). Kaplan noted that 16 senators, including five Republicans, voted against the bill. Kaplan concluded that the claim against Kerry "reeks of rank dishonesty."

Kaplan also pointed out that at the time of the 1991 vote, deeper cuts in military spending were being advocated by some prominent Republicans-- including then-President George H.W Bush and Dick Cheney, who was secretary of defense at the time. As Kaplan noted, Cheney appealed for more cuts from Congress: "You've squabbled and sometimes bickered and horse-traded and ended up forcing me to spend money on weapons that don't fill a vital need in these times of tight budgets and new requirements."

Cheney went to name the M-1 tank and the F-14 and F-16 fighters-- all of which appear on the RNC's list-- as "great systems" that "we have enough of."

Full load.

Angry? Donate to Kerry.

speakingcorpse writes:

In case anyone was confused by this tragic New York Whore Times account of "peaceful" demonstrators "singing" lovely freedom songs in Creole, only to be shot by savage supporters of Aristide, I offer an alternative account, which can be obtained by reading 2 or 3 news articles (from last month, before the coup became official U.S. policy) and then thinking for about two minutes.

(See The Black Commentator piece for an array of links to mainstream press articles describing Chamblain and Phillipe as the criminals that they are, and explaining that the "gangs" of Aristide supporters--unlike the criminal "gangs" or death-squads lead by Chamblain and trained by America--are actually masses of otherwise silent slum-dwellers who have had, apart from Aristide, absolutely no voice whatsoever in Haitian politics, even though they constitute the majority of the Haitian population.)

So, here is a translation of today's article about the massacre of the innocent and peaceful black demonstrators, singing freedom songs like they did in the days of Martin Luther King: "minority of wealthy Aristide-haters and U.S.-backed gang-leaders escorted from rich Port-Au-Prince suburb to center of town, where they are seen, from within unspeakably squalid slums, by destitute and despairing people who know they are about to be ruthlessly silenced and/or killed by U.S.-backed dictatorial power; some of these soon-to-be-victims, numbering in the hundreds of thousands and living in downtown Port-Au-Prince, see the relatively small parade of suburbanites and tanks, and, in a helpless rage, fire on the forces that have disenfranchised them and destroyed their democracy, killing five."

speakingcorpse writes:

Some outraged liberals, black and white, have taken to suggesting that Colin Powell and others like him are not really black. This is what Rep. Corrine Brown said to human shit-blower/shit-sucker Roger Noriega, who is an assistant secretary of state to Colin Powell (whose shit he undoubtedly eats every day for lunch). Before we fucked Aristide for good, Brown said to Noriega, who was desecrating the halls of Congress with a shit-explosion, that our Haiti policy was "racist" and was concocted by a "bunch of white men." Human Asshole Noriega expelled an obscene retort in which he claimed that he was offended by Brown's remark because he was not white but Mexican-American. Brown then said, "You all look alike to me." She was then scourged and crucified (but not to the benefit of humanity; unlike our Savior, she deserved it). Republican House members vomited up calls for her resignation. (Note: google "Corrine Brown Roger Noriega" and you will be given a limitless supply of links to right-wing websites decrying Brown's "racism." The intensity of the response to Brown's words is, after the fact of our Haiti policy itself, the best indicator I know of the state of race-relations in America.) Brown later apologized.

Anyway, as this excellent article by The Black Commentator makes clear, Brown was mistaken to suggest that Noriega and the man at whose hands he is raped daily, Colin Powell, are not people of color. Noriega IS, of course, a Mexican American, and Powell IS a black man. The confusion results from the fact that hundreds of thousands of supposedly black "people," like Maxine Waters and Randall Robinson and Corrine Brown, continually claim that they are black "people"; moreover, they claim that there are hundreds of thousands more black "people" living in Haiti. These claims, as The Black Commentator points out, must be incorrect. How could they possibly be correct, when every reputable news organ in the United States of America has explained to us that Brown and Waters and Robinson are not people but demented and deluded fools, and that the masses of Haiti are not people but piles of soon-to-be-voiceless corpses?

I hope that this article by The Black Commentator clears all of this up, so that we can put these conspiracy theories behind us and look forward to a better and more prosperous future for the Haitian non-corpses.

On second thought, maybe it would be better if we could just forget about whatever it is that lives in Haiti for another 10 years, until the next corpse pile-up.

Dawkins writes:

How does the Times' Elisabeth Bumiller get this kind of access? How does she twist the arms of these anonymous White House sources into giving her all the hottest dish on all the behind-the-scenes executive machinations we follow so intently?

However she gets it, we love it!

See her spill the beans in today's "White House Letter," entitled, "Bush Ready and Bursting to Bring It On"!

Bumiller, craftily winning the confidence of Republican campaign officials, reveals that the president is active in campaign decision-making!

"I don't think there are any major decisions coming out of the campaign that he's not making," said one Republican official close to the re-election effort…. "You don't have a situation where the president is removed, as maybe his father might have been."

In another reportorial coup, Bumiller breaks the story on the President's unusually good moods!

White House officials described the president last week as in an unusually good mood, and revved up to engage politically after a protracted weigh-in on the sidelines of the primaries.

And...

Mr. Bush was in an equally good mood at a $25,000-a-person fund-raiser for the Republican National Committee last Wednesday at the Bel Air home of A. Jerrold Perenchio, the chairman and chief executive of Univision Communications, the leading Spanish-language television network in the United States.

And...!

Mr. Bush was in such a good mood last week, Republicans said, that he took the unusual action of calling Mr. Kerry to congratulate him on Tuesday night, after the senator swept 9 of 10 states to become the presumptive Democratic nominee.

And...?!?!

Finally, Mr. Bush may have been in a really good mood this past week because he ignored the annual Gridiron dinner, a 119-year tradition of Washington journalists, for a meeting with President Vicente Fox of Mexico at the Bush ranch in Crawford, Tex.

There you have it! Our forward-looking president, perpetually in a "good mood," ready to fight a positive and upbeat campaign against that dour, bad-mood "senator from Massachusetts who has a record of weakening national defense and raising taxes."

Stay tuned for next week's "White House Letter" for more of that unvarnished inside dope!

Republicans asks TV stations to pull ads by liberal group

The Republican National Committee on Friday asked about 250 television stations to pull a liberal group's ads critical of President Bush.

The RNC sent the stations a letter Friday suggesting the outlets may be complicit in breaking campaign finance laws if they air the MoveOn.org Voter Fund ads. It asked them to decline to broadcast the ads.

As Scat-Man Carothers puts it: "That sure is a nice looking broadcasting license you got there. Be a shame if anything happened to it..."

Contribute to the MoveOn Voter Fund.

A spurt of righteous venom from Jimmy Breslin, misspellings, mispunctuations and all. The headline sums it up nicely:

He molests the dead.

It features this incredible sentence:

Bush then led high school girls into insane cheers for the death penalty.

And this one:

This sudden career, this door opening to a room of gold, all started for Rudolph Giuliani when his indestructible bunker in World Trade Center building blew up.

And this:

How marvelous! At the world trade center, Kerik was in the back of his car dictating the last part of a book that was going to appear under his name. It had him writhing with delicious excitement. It was about his mother being a prostitute.

God bless the man.

Overall, Kerry -- who is expected to visit Chicago on Tuesday -- continues to lead Bush in Illinois 52 percent to 39 percent.

speakingcorpse writes:

Dear Senator Kerry:

Mr. Greenberg has given your campaign the winning strategy. His ideas represent a culmination of the campaigning you have already done--appealing to people like veterans and firefighters whose sacrifices for Americans are not being supported or recognized by Bush. What you can do is BROADEN that vision by pointing out that a whole RANGE of ideas--the value of public service, the obligation of public participation, the love of community--are being devalued. You can make broad speeches about all of this, speeches which would continue to appeal to the veteran/firefighter constituencies, but also to all Americans who feel excluded, NOT just from prosperity, but from the collective endeavor. This is the key: invite all of us to join in the American project equally--we all belong, we all deserve a shot, NOT just to make money, but to be leaders, to be HEROES. You could invite us all to be HEROES. Please think about this. This broadened perspective increases your appeal, and it changes the conversation that Bush has started about gay marriage and terror. Furthermore, this new approach is invulnerable to the Bush "class warfare" charge, though it DOES appeal to Americans' real fears about economic inequality. Finally, this approach is perfectly consistent with what you have already been saying and doing.

With respect and excessive concern,

speakingcorpse

Fly High Above the Battlefield
By STANLEY B. GREENBERG

The choice is between an America inspired by John F. Kennedy and one shaped by Ronald Reagan. When the alternatives are framed this way, Americans choose the Kennedy vision by a striking 53 percent to 41 percent. It brings increased support for Democrats among voters from across the political spectrum — in small towns and rural areas, in older blue-collar communities, among low-wage and unmarried women as well as young voters and women with a college degree.

Rather than simply criticizing specific policies of the Bush administration, Mr. Kerry should emphasize the worldview it represents. Mr. Bush favors tax cuts for business and the wealthy as the best way to bring about prosperity. He heralds individualism as the key to a healthy community. In his tenure America has retreated at home before our shared problems, but advanced alone abroad. If Mr. Kerry challenges this worldview, Mr. Bush will be forced to defend it.

And the public, far from yearning for a return to Reaganism, is looking for a return to community and country, to a time when every citizen mattered. This is not just John Edwards's vision of an America without class barriers, but a desire for a return to a time of rising opportunity, when people learned responsibility and a commitment to community and nation.

Dawkins writes:

Searing testimony before the Congress from a decorated soldier just returned from the front lines of battle:

Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of [Iraq] someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something the entire world already knows, so that we can't say we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President [Bush] won't be, and these are his words, "the first president to lose a war."

And:

We are also here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country, where is the leadership? We are here to ask where [Cheney], [Rumsfeld], [Powell], [Rice], and so many others, where are they now that we, the men whom they sent off to war, have returned? These are commanders who have deserted their troops, and there is no more serious crime in the law of war.

Sound familiar?

Could be because the words apply equally well to Iraq as they did to Vietnam.

Could be also because the words were delivered to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, on April 22, 1971, by a familiar voice, John F. Kerry.

Worth a read to see more completely what this guy was/is made of, to recall the mistakes the administration made then, and the way in which this administration is making the same mistakes in Iraq.

From the current issue of the Evergreen Review, reprinted from the Review's September 1971 issue.