Whistleblowers about fraud in Iraq subject to illegal detention and torture.
Where is America these days, we’ve lost it.
Impeach Dick Cheney todays, go zero tolerance on Haliburton’s corruption, and impeach George W. Bush tomorrow.
Category: Corruption
Another Guy Who Writes Better Than I Ever Will
It appears that Paperwhite is one such individual.A he said / he said misunderstanding? Seriously, that’s what Larry Craig (R-My Own Private Idaho) is saying?
LOL!!!! I wish I had thought of “My Own Private Idaho“.
Look, closeted gay self-hating Republicans, wouldn’t it just be easier if you could just lay it all out there, something like this:
I’m a rich white guy who has nothing but contempt for poor people, worships Mammon, knows that the babymaking apparatus means that women aren’t really full persons, and thinks that blowing shit up is the extent of foreign policy, so vote for me! Oh, and I’m really into other guys. Yes, in that way.
Word up. This guy can write.
Another Corrupt Rat Leaving the Ship
Buh bye!
My guess is that given that it’s a competitive district, and Renzi is being investigated for crooked land deals, campaign law violations, and a significant roll in the US attorney firings, he though that it was time to get out of dodge.
On the brighter side, unlike some other people who have returned to private life *cough* Gonzalez *cough* Rumsfeld *cough* Bremer *cough*, he won’t have to worry about being hauled off to the Hague.
Corrupting the Military for Politics
Well, it looks like the Pentagon is setting up a propaganda office to sell their phony report.
I am so not surprised.
FWIW, a Pentagon propaganda operation directed at the American public is technically illegal, but that’s never stopped Bush and His Evil Minions&trade before.
Heavily criticized plane is defunded
Finally, the graft supported DP-2 aircraft is to be defunded. Duncan hunter’s favors for campaign cash (he’s gotten $36K from Anthony duPont, president of duPont Aerospace, over the years) is at an end.
Now, I want to see investigations for wrongdoing.
Breaking Abu Gonzalez to Resign
Anonymous source in Bush Admin tells NY Times. Heard it on radio. One wonders what sh&$ is about to hit the fan that they want this news to obscure. It has to be big.
From the Dept of the Blatantly Obvious: Lieberman is Not a Schmuck, Because a Schmuck Has a Head
FWIW, a schmuck is uncircumcised. A putz is more generic.
That is all.
OH MY GOD! We Must Stop Bush and His Evil Minions™ NOW!!!!
Marty Kaplan of the Huffington Post is right. This is all about the Bush and His Evil Minions™ attempting to revisit, and relitigate, the 1970s.
There’s no longer any doubt about the master narrative of the Bush Administration. Their purpose is to re-litigate the 1970s. Nixon’s downfall, let alone all that followed, clearly has stuck in Cheney’s craw. All his New American Centurions were so scarred by the fall of Saigon and the Church Committee reforms that even Morning in the Gipper’s America didn’t do enough to restore the imperial executive and the American imperium. So now we watch as FISA and FOIA are dismantled, checks and balances are declared Congressional overreaching, and the bully pulpit is being used like Stalin’s commissars used scissors and a paste-pot to purge and doctor the historical record.
So what’s next? No doubt some reactionaries are drooling to undo Nixon’s putting the coffin-nail in the gold standard. Perhaps others want to retake the Panama Canal which, after all, we stole fair and square. The Supreme Court’s already doing a decent job rolling back civil rights and civil liberties from the 60s; surely overturning Buckley v Valleo’s campaign contribution limits is next in line.
I’m putting my money on an attempt by GOP culture warriors to expunge disco from the national memory. Don’t you have a feeling that this crowd is still in a world o’ hurt from humiliations they suffered beneath a twirling mirrored ball yea many generations ago?
He’s wrong, and they must be stopped. They will be trying to bring disco back.
The horror….the horror….
New York Politics: Have I Mentioned Lately that Republicans Suck Wet Farts From Dead Pigeons?
As you may or may not be aware, New York Governor Elliot Spitzer and Republican Senate Leader Joseph Bruno have been in a bit of a pissing contest lately.
Bruno used state travel resources, including helicopters to go on political junkets, and Spitzer used the state police to document it and leak it to the press.
At this point, you could call it a run of the mill political pissing contest, with the Republican controlled state senate investigating misuse of the state police, and stricter rules being implemented on use of official travel, but the Republicans hired a man with the ability, and the history, that allowed him to take this well into the twilight zone of sleaze, Roger J. Stone Jr.
Mr. Stone, the youngest of Nixon’s dirty tricks sleaze operatives at 19, while still a student at George Washington University, he has not mellowed with age.
Well, Roger Stone made threatening phone calls to Elliot Spitzer’s 83 year old father. He was threatening arrest over a campaign loan that was made to an earlier Spitzer campaign, and he called the governor a “phony” and a “psycho.”
Caller ID confirmed that the phone was in his apartment, and in his wife’s name.
Stone has been fired, but is claiming innocence, maintaining that his landlord is a Democrat, and that he allowed someone into his apartment to make the call.
Of note, this is the same excuse he used in 1996, when it turned out that he and his wife put out ads in a swingers publications looking for group sex. (Ad here if you can stomach it) He claimed that someone had stolen his information, and sock puppeted him.
Yeah, right. Yeah, right. They were SO scared of you that they broke into your apartment, and made threatening phone calls to an old dude.
He’s also the most likely guy to have fed Dan Rather the forged docs about Bushes military (non)record.
This is a Cover Up
This is mighty convenient, they are dropping the most serious charges against the only officer charged in the Abu Ghraib affair.
They send a bunch of soldiers and non-coms to jail, but when it comes time to try a relatively senior officer, one who probably has the goods on higher ups, there are procedural issues.
Yeah Right.
A military judge on Monday dismissed two of the most serious charges against Army Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, 51, a reservist, after a general who investigated the scandal acknowledged he had not read Jordan his rights before interviewing him. The action left Jordan still facing four counts and a possible 8 1/2 years in prison.
Prosecutors on Monday amended one of those remaining counts, a cruelty and maltreatment charge, by narrowing its scope from three months to one day.
Is it just me, or has someone ordered these guys to throw the case?
…
In court Monday morning, prosecutor Lt. Col. John P. Tracy announced that Maj. Gen. George Fay had contacted prosecutors Sunday to say that he “misspoke” during a March 12 pretrial hearing in which he testified under oath that he had advised Jordan of his rights during an interview in 2004.
Tracy said Fay realized his error while preparing to testify at Jordan’s trial this week. Fay told government lawyers that “he indeed did not read Lt. Col. Jordan his rights,” Tracy said.
Does Fay have it right now? Or is he lying to keep things out of the public lie? If he did neglect to read him his rights, was it intentional, to provide a “get out of jail free” card for silence?
Jordan’s defense, led by Capt. Samuel Spitzberg contends that although Jordan was the titular head of the interrogation center, he spent most of his time trying to improve Soldiers’ deplorable living conditions at Abu Ghraib. The defense argued during an October hearing that interrogation conditions were set by two other officers: Col. Thomas Pappas, an intelligence brigade commander who was the highest-ranking officer at Abu Ghraib, and Capt. Carolyn Wood, leader of a unit within the interrogation center called the Interrogation Command Element.
Neither Pappas nor Wood has been charged with crimes. Pappas was reprimanded and fined $8,000 for once approving the use of dogs during an interrogation without higher approval.
So, now that Jordan can roll over on regular army officers, and ones who do know how high it goes, suddenly, there are “procedural errors”.
Mighty convenient, that.
Contractors in Iraq Have Become U.S. Crutch – washingtonpost.com
This is what killed the Roman Empire, it’s a destructive and immoral turn of affairs, and it further weakens the army by pulling people high value skills into mercenary duty.
Bush wants American Children to Die
Or, more accurately, he wants it more than his he wants to disappoint his campaign contributors in the US insurance industry, because he’s doing his level best to make sure that children don’t get medical care.
First, he threatens to veto improvements to SCHIP, and now he’s crippling the existing program.
This Guy is a DINO Who Needs a Serious Primary Challenge, and No Support in the General
This article praises him for reaching across the aisle to right wingers.
I understand that he can’t be Paul Wellstone, but we need no more Liebermans.
Cases in point:
- Voted against the hate crimes bill when he specifically promised to support it. He was one of only 14 Dems who voted against the bill. Let’s put it clearly, when he had a choice between voting what he promised, and voting with the Klan in his district, he voted with the Klan.
- Gave a “non-endorsement endorsement” of Hagel/Bloomberg for President. Note that Hagel supports criminalizing abortion, and has voted for every Bush judicial nominee).
- He’s specifically cut down a potential Dem Presidential Nominee ( (“Certainly we are not Hillary Clinton. We don’t govern like she does.”)
- He’s constantly voted for Bush and against the Bill of Rights.
So he’s a lying sack of excrement DINO Dem, but I repeat myself.
Note that his re-election is a priority of the DCCC, so I would suggest that you give either directly to the candidates, or someone like Act Blue.
FWIW, any DCCC money going to him is largely wasted anyway. Last time, he ran against a guy who was being sued for choking his mistress. Won’t happen again.
The DCCC should not throw good money after bad.
See also Down With Tyranny on this if you want get a better written take on the situation.
If a member of the DCCC wants to dispute this, I’ll publish it, unedited.
I’m Sure that Petraeus Testifying on 911 is Just a Coincicence
NOT!!!!
We already know that Bush and His Evil Minions™ did not want the general testifying publicly before congress, and that the so called “Petraeus Report” is really being written by white house hacks, but now we are supposed to believe that his testimony being scheduled on 911 is just a coincidence.
I want to stop living in “The Onion” world.
There is No Patreaus Report
You know how all of Bush and His Evil Minions™ have been talking about David Petraeus’s report on progress in Iraq? It now appears that there is no such thing as the Petraeus Report. Instead, “Despite Bush’s repeated statements that the report will reflect evaluations by Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, administration officials said it would actually be written by the White House, with inputs from officials throughout the government.”
But it gets EVEN BETTER. It appears that the Bush administration won’t even let Petraeus testify before congress at a public hearing. “Senior congressional aides said yesterday that the White House has proposed limiting the much-anticipated appearance on Capitol Hill next month of Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker to a private congressional briefing, suggesting instead that the Bush administration’s progress report on the Iraq war should be delivered to Congress by the secretaries of state and defense.”
I guess that they are afraid that the good General might tell the truth.
allofmp3.com Owner Acquitted
Well, the owner of allofmp3.com just got acquitted in Russia. This is not surprising. While the IP laws in Russia are not what the record distributors would want, it has always been fairly clear that Denis Kvasov was operating within those laws.
The question now is whether Putin finds more advantage in joining the WTO, or giving Washington the finger.
One thing that needs to be said though, this dispute does not affect the amount of money that performers get for their recordings by one cent. That number is still zero. I’ve yet to hear of a performer who has actually received royalties, due to corrupt record company accounting.
Bush Toadies Need to be cleaned out of the US Military Needs to Cleaned
Think Progress has the video and this remarkable quote from Gen. Casey:
A questioner asked, “What are the prospects in Iraq and how will this war end?”
Casey responded: Right now, there’s so much residual mistrust left over from the time under Saddam Hussein that they’re not quite ready to go forward. But they have an educated population, they have oil wells, they have water, they have some of the most fertile land I’ve ever seen. In a decade or so, this will be a remarkable country, if we stick with it.“
Bush and His Evil Minions™ (Karl Rove) has succeeded in poisoning almost every branch of government by purging competent reality based people, and replacing them with those who are insane.
Wall Street Investment Banks to Create System to Hide Insider Trades
Seriously. Notwithstanding protestations to the contrary, this is what a private bourse like this is for.
Banks to start trading platform
Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and others are setting up a private system to trade stocks of companies looking to avoid public scrutiny.
August 14 2007: 1:34 PM EDTNEW YORK (Reuters) — Five of Wall Street’s biggest banks, including Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch, said on Tuesday they were setting up a private system to trade stocks of companies eager to avoid the scrutiny of public markets.
The group, which also includes underwriter Morgan Stanley and Bank of New York Mellon, said the new platform is designed to ease trading for privately sold securities. It will target companies looking to raise capital while avoiding the rules imposed on publicly listed shares.
…
If the SEC were really concerned about healthy markets, it would take steps to prevent secret transactions by actors who are likely to have inside information.
Why Mercenaries Are a Bad Thing, Part II
This story has a picture mercenaries in Iraq, and it is not pretty.
They operate with little or no supervision, accountable only to the firms employing them. And as the country has plummeted toward anarchy and civil war, this private army has been accused of indiscriminately firing at American and Iraqi troops, and of shooting to death an unknown number of Iraqi citizens who got too close to their heavily armed convoys.
Not one has faced charges or prosecution.
There is great confusion among legal experts and military officials about what laws — if any — apply to Americans in this force of at least 48,000.
They operate in a decidedly gray legal area. Unlike soldiers, they are not bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Under a special provision secured by American-occupying forces, they are exempt from prosecution by Iraqis for crimes committed there.
What follows is a litany of misdeeds that would get a soldier locked away in Leavenworth for decades, and in Bush’s Texas, get them executed.
Their behavior alienates the local population, endangering our troops, and they are a massive brain drain on the military.
Violence in the context of a military operation must be the monopoly of the military, not mercs.
Linda Chavez is a Bunco Artist
So is her Husband, Christopher Gersten.
The Monday WaPo had a very very good article describing how Chavez and Gersten used a phony PAC to bilk people out of money. Only 1% of the money contributed went to politics. The rest went to salaries and expenses of Chavez, Gersten, and her friends and family.
Instead, most of the donations were channeled back into new fundraising efforts, and some were used to provide a modest but steady source of income for Chavez and four family members, who served as treasurers and consultants to the committees. Much of the remaining funds went to pay for expenses such as furniture, auto repairs and insurance, and rent for the Sterling office the groups share. Even Chavez’s health insurance was paid for a time from political donations.
“I guess you could call it the family business,” Chavez said in an interview.
There is nothing illegal about running political committees the way she and her family have done, and Chavez said that none of the money has been spent for personal items and that she has done nothing wrong.
They are useless, both of them. Linda Chavez is little more than a talking head, and Gersten took AIPAC down it’s right wing Likudnik path.
In a community with a moral center, it is unlikely that either of them would ever work again. In Washington, DC, not so much. They probably got high fives from political consultants on both sides of the aisle.