Rick Santorum - Big Flip Flopper, Bigger Liar

Satorum says he is cut[ting] ties to law center after 'intelligent design' defeat.

What a puss. Rick Santorum is a fairweather friend indeed. If I were on the board of a Law Center that was integral in the ID debate being brought to trial in the first place and if I had been spouting my mouth off to every reporter in Washington about how the ID folks were just "attempting to teach the controversy of evolution," if I were, in short one of the principal instigators of the ID Media feeding frenzy, I might just suck it up and take my lumps. You can't unring the bell as much as you would like to. Lying is still lying even when you are a republican.

Shut up and take it like a man.

Merry Fuckin' Christmas You Paranoid Bastards!

Yep, that's Santa holding a terrorist at gunpoint while protecting the little kiddies... Yep that's a terrorist in a bomb vest. Yes this is a real Christmas card. What can you say? This card went out to a number of recipients from John Michael Snyder, public affairs director of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. It is not doctored in any way. This is just as they wanted to send it out. You might just beware though, I'm assuming that the blast radius from a bomb of that size would definately take out santa and the kiddies.

Man what a world we live in.

Judge to Bush: Get bent!

ABC News (and just about everyone else) is reporting that Judge James Robertson has resigned from his post on the FISA court to protest President Bush's illegal wiretapping by the NSA. I guess this might just be a hint that the justice Dept sees this as a very big deal indeed and might be disinclined to give the executive branch a pass on it. Stay tuned for yet another story of the corruption and lawlessness of the now completely graft filled GOP.

Holy Shit! Rattlesnakes are starting to kill each other!

This WAPO headline says it all:
Abramoff Reportedly Negotiating a Deal in Which He Would Plead Guilty, Testify

I would appear that Uberlobbyist Jack Abramoff is starting to sing like a rusty squeezebox. There will be hell to pay in congress if this deal is approved. Almost every single GOP member of congress has recieved at least some of the tainted funds from this guy. They all have the potential to become targets of indictments.

Break out the popcorn and the champaign!

Why I haven't commented on the NSA spying scandal

So today I have finally gotten some time to comment about a variety of stories that have been circulating around the Blogoshpere over the last few days and weeks. The foremost on my mind has been the spying on americans by the Bush Administration and the fallout from that.

I think that the main reason I have not written anything about this has been the near apoplectic rage I have felt and also the fear. To have so many issues summed up in one overriding abuse of power is almost unprecidented (think Nixon) in our history. I have been seeing the Bush administration as a passing niusance in my life, but this is starting to sound more like the diabolical musings of the tinfoil hat brigade. I have resisted bbeing labeled a crazy person u to now but I have to admit that some of the conspiracy theories are gaining strength.

It now is sounding, from the news and blogs that I read insessantly, like the spying is occuring on a much more massive scale or, perhaps more correctly, using a more all encompassing new technology. This change of information gathering authority is beginning to scare me to death. Taken all alone the NSA deal is still big news but when it is added to the already existing USAPATRIOT act initiatives, the scope of what the government can find out about it's own citizens is amazing. Even Senators havea major problem with this. Senmator Rockefeller wrote a letter by hand to the Vice President that spelled out a number of his own concerns about what he heard about the program and was so certain that he would be disavowed that he wrote a second copy and sealed it up in the secure area of the Senate Intelligence Committee for safe keeping. I don't know which is worse, that he had to write the letter at all, or that he needed to make a secret copy to keep from being politically blackballed.

For those of us who are used to finding the good in all things it is hard to see this as anything less than what the conspiracy theorists have said all along. This is slowly becoming a police state. It started on election day 2000 and was accelerated by 9/11. It is still continuing to accelerate. I have never been really afraid of my government. I am not yet truly afraid, but I am very concerned for all of us. These are the policies and procedures that our constitution was designed to protect us from. God help us all of they can consolidate these new powers.

Jane shows us an instance of "Framing"

firedoglake's Jane Hamsher is at it again in a fabulous piece that has opened my eyes to the idea of framing as a PR concept. My wife just recently completed another quarter in the Commmunications Dept at the University of Washington and just dealt with this concept. For some reason I resisted her explanations of the Framing concept but I did eventually get it. This (fairly long) piece seems to show Democratic difficulties, and do so by showing the framing issues that the GOP is hitting us with. It's a great article and it it very worth reading.

Finally some reason will be found in Science

The New York Times is running a stiory from Dover PA saying that a federal judge here has ruled that the Dover Area School Board "violated the Constitution when they ordered that its biology curriculum must include the notion that life on Earth was produced by an unidentified intelligent cause..."

The Judge went on, "The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy."

I am happy to see that not all of the reason has left the country these days. Imaging though that I was actually shocked to see that this ruling occured. I had assumed that the School Board would be cleared or at least not slapped down so hard. What does that say about where we are now that I thought that?

Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy!

This hheadline was on Yahoo News today and it caught my eye:N.H. Republican Guilty in Phone Jamming

Read the story and then follow up by checking out Josh marshall's Talking Points Memo for all of the juicy details.

The GOP, The "values party"

Pandagon Has the goods on the latest Duke Cunningham revelations, and boy, they are getting stranger and stranger every day. I thought that there were limits to what the "family values party" would do... I think that might not be an operational theory any more.

It seems that the Duke had this buddy who was one of the guys who got the Duke much of that illegal cash and that that individual might end up getting pinched for one of the bigger sex scandals in the hisory of DC politics. According the the San Diego Union Tribune The guy, Brent Wilkes, "ran a hospitality suite, with several bedrooms, in" DC -- "first in the Watergate Hotel and then" in a Capitol Hill hotel."

What do you think a bunch of GOP Congressmen and Senators might use "hospitality suites" registered in someone else's name for anyway?

Hmmmmm..... Values indeed.

Oh HELL Yeah!

The headline says it all:

IS GEORGE BUSH THE WORST PRESIDENT -- EVER? - Yahoo! News

Here are the bullet points from the article:

...The History News Network at George Mason University has just polled historians informally on the Bush record. Four hundred and fifteen, about a third of those contacted, answered -- maybe they were all crazed liberals -- making the project as unofficial as it was interesting. These were the results: 338 said they believed Bush was failing, while 77 said he was succeeding. Fifty said they thought he was the worst president ever. Worse than Buchanan.This is what those historians said -- and it should be noted that some of the criticism about deficit spending and misuse of the military came from self-identified conservatives -- about the Bush record:


He has taken the country into an unwinnable war and alienated friend and foe alike in the process;



He is bankrupting the country with a combination of aggressive military spending and reduced taxation of the rich;



He has deliberately and dangerously attacked separation of church and state;



He has repeatedly "misled," to use a kind word, the American people on affairs domestic and foreign;



He has proved to be incompetent in affairs domestic (New Orleans) and foreign ( Iraq and the battle against al-Qaida);



He has sacrificed American employment (including the toleration of pension and benefit elimination) to increase overall productivity;



He is ignorantly hostile to science and technological progress;



He has tolerated or ignored one of the republic's oldest problems, corporate cheating in supplying the military in wartime.

I couldn't have said it better myself. Gosh, it's nice to see that there are serious people discussing this...