current events

More Tom Delay Scandals

From MSNBC.com:

The U.S. Family Network, a public advocacy group that operated in the 1990s with close ties to Rep. Tom DeLay and claimed to be a nationwide grass-roots organization, was funded almost entirely by corporations linked to embattled lobbyist Jack Abramoff, according to tax records and former associates of the group.
Two former associates of Edwin A. Buckham, the congressman’s former chief of staff and the organizer of the U.S. Family Network, said Buckham told them the funds came from Russian oil and gas executives. Abramoff had been working closely with two such Russian energy executives on their Washington agenda, and the lobbyist and Buckham had helped organize a 1997 Moscow visit by DeLay.
The former president of the U.S. Family Network said Buckham told him that Russians contributed $1 million to the group in 1998 specifically to influence DeLay’s vote on legislation the International Monetary Fund needed to finance a bailout of the collapsing Russian economy.

This, couple with the recent news that Abramoff may be working on a plea agreement with the authorities to deliver information on numerous congressional Republican ethical scandals is very exciting. I can’t wait to see how many people are going to take a fall.

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how much brush is on that ranch, anyway?

From three recent White Houlse press briefings:

December 27
Good morning. Let me update you on the President’s schedule. Yesterday, after arriving, he went out and did some cutting and clearing brush, and then was at his home on the ranch.
December 28
The President had his normal intelligence and daily briefings this morning, and was out clearing brush. And that’s what I have on his schedule.
December 30
He then did some brush clearing and just completed a bike ride before I came out. This afternoon he’s scheduled to sign several pieces of legislation…

Seriously, is there really that much brush? He’s been clearing it for five years now, shouldn’t it be done? How can Trent Duffy go out and say this every day with a straight face?

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100 things we (the BBC) didn’t know this time last year

According to the BBC. Here are a few of them….

7. Baboons can tell the difference between English and French. Zoo keepers at Port Lympne wild animal park in Kent are having to learn French to communicate with the baboons which had been transferred from Paris zoo.
17. Bosses at Madame Tussauds spent £10,000 separating the models of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston when they separated. It was the first time the museum had two people’s waxworks joined together.
20. The Queen has never been on a computer, she told Bill Gates as she awarded him an honorary knighthood.

Hmmm. If the Queen has never been on a computer, who’ve I been e-mailing then?

Continue Reading100 things we (the BBC) didn’t know this time last year

blowing up commuter trains, weddings, and churches?

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Really? When did this happen?

In Crawford, Texas, where Bush is spending the holidays, his spokesman, Trent Duffy, defended what he called a “limited program.”
“This is not about monitoring phone calls designed to arrange Little League practice or what to bring to a potluck dinner,” he told reporters. “These are designed to monitor calls from very bad people to very bad people who have a history of blowing up commuter trains, weddings, and churches.”

I don’t remember any churches or weddings getting blown up around here? Do you? If they are doing this, why are we just spying on them? Why aren’t we arresting them?
And the real question: why not get a warrant? Warrants to eavesdrop are really easy to get, and they’re even allowed to get them after the fact, so why not get warrants if people are blowing up weddings? Why break the law and avoid the warrants? Possibly because he’s not spying on terrorists at all?
I call bullshit.
The only terrorists in the US are the right-wing terrorists who sent anthrax and blow up gay bars and planned parenthood clinics. Osama bin Laden is not hiding under your bed. No one is out there trying to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge, or the Golden Gate Bridge, or Wall Drugs in South Dakota. You have more to fear from the price of natural gas than from Muslims. The War on Terror is just as fake as the made-up War on Christmas. It’s all about scaring you into giving up your freedom.

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The Dynamic of a Bush Scandal: How the Spying Story Will Unfold (and Fade)

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Sadly, Peter Daou’s analysis of the current spying scandal, in the context of the numerous other impeachable offenses the president has committed, is entirely correct. Bush commits a crime, the media fumbles the story, the Republicans front for him, the Democrats back down, the public gets confused, and eventually the story fades and the crimes continue. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Interesting, the comments people are making on that story. Basically, people are acknowledging that Daou is right, and predicting the end of America. Very disillusioned.

Continue ReadingThe Dynamic of a Bush Scandal: How the Spying Story Will Unfold (and Fade)

Absolute Power corrupts absolutely

Obsidian wings has some commentary:

September 11 started the war. When will it end? Maybe never. Where is the battlefield? The entire world, including the United States. Who is an enemy combatant? Anyone the President says is an enemy combatant, including a U.S. citizen–no need for a charge, no need for a trial, no need for access to a lawyer. What if they’re found not to be an enemy combatant? We can keep them in prison anyway, and we don’t have to tell their families they’re alive or their lawyers that they were cleared. What can you do to an enemy combatant? Anything you want. Detain him forever, for the rest of his life, because this is a war like any other and we have always been able to detain POWs for the duration of the war. But you don’t need to follow the Geneva Conventions, because this is a war like no other in our history. And oh yes–if the President decides that we need to torture a prisoner for the war effort, it’s unconstitutional for Congress to stop him. They took that position in an official memo, and they have not backed down from it. They have said it was “unnecessary” but they have never backed down from it.
They are not only entitled to do these things to people; they are entitled to do them in secret. When Congress asks for information about them, they can just ignore it. And they are entitled to actively deceive the public about all this.
That’s the power they claim. At what point are we going to take that claim seriously?
At some level, I think we read these things and think: well, they can’t really mean that. But by now we know that they mean it enough to have shattered a number of lives.

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Local FBI spying on vegan groups

In another article about the domestic spying on left-wing organizations, this time from the New York Times, the article mentions in passing:

One F.B.I. document indicates that agents in Indianapolis planned to conduct surveillance as part of a “Vegan Community Project.”

Wow. If they’re spying on vegetarians in Indy, what do you think they’re doing about all those crazy homos? I wonder how to file for the Freedom of Information Act.
UPDATE: Okay, the ACLU press release is a bit clearer on what this is about. Our local FBI was investigating PETA, and one of the group’s events was passing out vegetarian starter kits to students and faculty on the “University of Indiana” campus. (They mean Indiana University.)
Well, I guess that actually isn’t any clearer to me what the FBI was doing.
A link to the redacted PDF document that the ACLU obtained through the FOIA.

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