Best. Teaser. Image. Ever.

Har har! Leave it to Brian Ross' team to come up with this one! Man! The wingers are tearing him a new one right now on the Hastert thing but this is one great image he has up.

Ken Lay, Guilty as a bastard...

If you haven't been living under a rock this morning you know that Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling Were convicted today of cooking the books at Enron. It' sall over the internets but if you want to see for yourself feel free to click the link.

It's nice to see corporate america being held to account for their misdeeds. Hopefully this will keep other corporate bigwigs from engaging in future shenanagans.

Damn! Everyones in the crosshairs!

ABC's "The Blotter" Has a bit of titillating information about House Speaker Denny Hastert...

The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Dennis Hastert, is under investigation by the FBI, which is seeking to determine his role in an ongoing public corruption probe into members of Congress, ABC News has learned from high level official sources.

Federal officials say the information implicating Hastert was developed from convicted lobbyists who are now cooperating with the government.

Part of the investigation involves a letter Hastert wrote three years ago, urging the Secretary of the Interior to block a casino on an Indian reservation that would have competed with other tribes.

The other tribes were represented by convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff who reportedly has provided details of his dealings with Hastert as part of his plea agreement with the government.

The letter was written shortly after a fund-raiser for Hastert at a restaurant owned by Abramoff. Abramoff and his clients contributed more than $26,000 at the time.

Interesting...

Wherein I agree completely with George Will (Isn't that a sign of the apocalypse?)

In his column today at WAPO entitled Who Isn't A 'Values Voter'? Conservative pundit George Will has started making a whol elot of sense and has revealed a very large rift that has been steadily developing between the social conservatives and the fiscal conservatives. This is truly worth a read.

Looking into the text you can clearly see the new dynamic that is ripping at the core of the GOP: The lockstep of conservatives is becoming broken by factional infighting between the socials and the fiscals. This missive from Will is another in the salvo between the religeous right and the wall-street right, and in so being, it hits a very accurate mark.

He is parsing conservative language in a way that no democrat has yet done effectively and he has a pedigree that no one can dispute. All in all it is an interesting turning point in the conversation but I am sure that Mr. Will will be right back on the attack on liberal ideals once the social conservative threat has abated.

What is it with San Diego anyway?

Yahoo! News is running this little piece headlined "Where Does Brian Bilbray Really Live?" bringing our attention to another problem of fraud in the San Diego GOP. It's almost impossible to believe but it seems that there is now a GOP candidtate that is posibly misstating his residence in order to run for office in SD. His neighbors are on to him:

Neighbors told 10News they rarely ever see Bilbray at the house, which is his mother?s home.

"He comes here occasionally to see his mother like boys will do, but he doesn't live here," said neighbor Frank Knudsen.

"If he does live here, he must leave late at night and come back early in the morning," said neighbor Bill Rider.

Another man, who lives right next door, said he wondered when people would catch on that Bilbray does not live here.

Hmmm... It seems that they think that anything goes down there in San Diego these days. Interesting.

Meanwhile... Back at the pony corral...

Say it with me now... 33%!

Heckuvajob! Mr Bush has broken the "disapproval" record (now standing at a whopping 65%) for the 25 year old ABC News/Washington Post poll. And hey any new record is a god thing right?

I don't even know where to begin...

Only in the incomparably insane and rabidWorldNetDaily would you come across a passage so.... So.... Utterly hateful and xenophobic.

© 2006 WorldNetDaily.com


Dear Jorge plans to address the nation tonight, a speech wherein he will almost surely attempt to deceive citizens into believing that he does not wish the mass migration from Mexico to continue unabated. He will likely offer some negligible resources for law enforcement and border security – resources which will never materialize – in return for an amnesty program that will grant American citizenship to the Mexican nationals who have helped lower America's wage rates by 16 percent over the last 32 years.

And he will be lying, again, just as he lied when he said: "Massive deportation of the people here is unrealistic – it's just not going to work."

Not only will it work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take. If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn't possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don't speak English and are not integrated into American society.

I mean holy cow! How about a nice salute to the Nazis! I wonder if mr Vox Day puts on those lovely brown shirts as he marches around his moms basement with his Cheeto stained fingers?

Holy F*&^in Sh*t!

ABC news Has this doozy:

A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources.

"It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source told us in an in-person conversation.

ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.

Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.

One former official was asked to sign a document stating he was not a confidential source for New York Times reporter James Risen.

Our reports on the CIA's secret prisons in Romania and Poland were known to have upset CIA officials.

People questioned by the FBI about leaks of intelligence information say the CIA was also disturbed by ABC News reports that revealed the use of CIA predator missiles inside Pakistan.

Under Bush Administration guidelines, it is not considered illegal for the government to keep track of numbers dialed by phone customers.

The official who warned ABC News said there was no indication our phones were being tapped so the content of the conversation could be recorded.

A pattern of phone calls from a reporter, however, could provide valuable clues for leak investigators.

Now they are really trying to controll the press. This is getting a bit more scary every day....

Remember when the government used to protect us from the phone company?

Oh yeah, those were the days. The US government broke up the Bell System to keep the phone company from becoming "Big Brother." Well, in a stunning judo-flip on reality Qwest decided to protect it's customers from the government. Poetic justice is served.

Oops!

Yeah... Things aren't lookin good for "Dusty" Foggo.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Law enforcement officials executed search warrants Friday on the house and office of CIA's outgoing executive director, the FBI said.

The agency's third ranking official, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, has been under investigation by the FBI, IRS, Defense Criminal Investigative Service and the CIA's inspector general, said FBI spokeswoman April Langwell in San Diego.

That must be some kind of record. I mean, how many different agencies can one guy be investigated by anyway?

Ponys all around!!!!

Holden from First-draft is sitting pretty on a veritable gyser of ponies today! the news is out:

Bush job approval falls to 29 pct in new poll - Yahoo! News

Can peak-pony be far behind?

I guess I'm just a paranoid lefty wacko..

Unlike the majority of americans I don't want the government to be spying on my phone calls just to keep me safe from a perceived terrorist threat.

Sixty-five percent say it's more important for the government to investigate possible threats, even if that intrudes on personal privacy, than for it to avoid privacy intrusions if that limits its investigative ability. It was the same in January, although higher still in 2002 and 2003 polls.

To me it's not the monitoring of my calls that bothers me, it's the prescedent that this sets. It is a slippery slope towards a totalitarian state that I don't want to be a part of. By agreeing to allow this the prople of the US are allowing themselves to have their rights to privacy stripped away. They are allowingthe Bush administration more and more unfettered access to their lives and are giving up their own controll. This is just plain dangerous.

CNN and the gift of understatement

Ummmm... Yeah. You think?

Meanwhile, in other NSA news...

Yahoo! News has the following information just coming out:

It seems that the NSA has refused to grand security clearance to Jusitce Dept lawyers investigating the warrantless eavesdropping program.

 

The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR, sent a fax to Rep. Maurice Hinchey (news, bio, voting record), D-N.Y., on Wednesday saying they were closing their inquiry because without clearance their lawyers cannot examine Justice lawyers' role in the program.

"We have been unable to make any meaningful progress in our investigation because OPR has been denied security clearances for access to information about the NSA program," OPR counsel H. Marshall Jarrett wrote to Hinchey. Hinchey's office shared the letter with The Associated Press.

Jarrett wrote that beginning in January, his office has made a series of requests for the necessary clearances. Those requests were denied Tuesday.

Must be nice to be the NSA (or the Bush administration) you can just choose not to give clearance to anyone and make all of that pesky congressional oversight go away. Isn't that called a dictatorship?

Tell me if you've heard this one...

ABC News: Government Monitoring About 200 Million Americans' Calls

"Chances are that your cell phone calls, as well as your home phone calls, have been tracked," said Leslie Cauley, the reporter who broke the story. She said there was a "high likelihood" that this information was being passed on to the FBI and CIA.

Bush said any intelligence activities specifically target terrorists. "Our intelligence activities strictly target al Qaeda and their known affiliates," Bush said. "We are not mining or trolling through the personal lives of innocent Americans."

The paper reports that three of the nation's largest phone companies — AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth — have been turning over detailed call histories of all their customers since Sept. 11, 2001, to help the NSA compile what it hopes will be "the largest database ever assembled in the world."

About 200 million people have had their call records monitored, Cauley said. This means the NSA keeps track of the outgoing and incoming calls, but not the callers' Social Security numbers or addresses.

Whew! I'm so glad that they're not tracking my Social Securtiy number as well as my phone usage! What a relief! This government wouldn't do anything to me, they've been so up front about all of the other things they have done in the interest of National Security so far.... Oh wait.......


BTW isn't 200million people just about all of the people in the US with phones? I mean there are like 265million people in the US as a whole and that includes infants and children under the afe that they could operate a telephone. Do you think those conservatives will be more or less apt to vote for this administration now?

The Carpetbagger Report » Blog Archive » A stunning tolerance for corruption in Iraqi reconstruction aid

I try not to do this too often but this time I just have to. The following post was made on The Carpetbagger. I think you'll see why I quoted the whole thing:

"Occasionally, I think I can no longer be surprised. Stories like this one in the Wall Street Journal prove me wrong.

The Senate last week approved $109 billion in additional spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including $1.5 billion in added Iraq reconstruction money. The administration has spent $20.9 billion to reconstruct Iraq's infrastructure and modernize its oil industry, but the effort hasn't restored the country's electricity output, water supply or sewage capabilities to prewar levels.

A behind-the-scenes battle among legislators has made a crucial distinction between the new reconstruction money and that already spent: The new funds won't be overseen by the government watchdog charged with curbing the mismanagement that has overshadowed the reconstruction.

The administration's main vehicle for rebuilding Iraq has, in the past, been designated 'Relief and Reconstruction' funds, which by law are overseen by a special inspector general, Stuart Bowen. The new money going toward similar reconstruction goals will be classified as coming from 'Foreign Operations' accounts. The State Department is responsible for spending both pools of money.

Here's the deal: Stuart Bowen has led the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. When the White House tapped Bowen for the job in January 2004, Bush critics were deeply disappointed — Bowen was widely recognized as a close Bush ally, so few expected him to be thorough and aggressive.

The critics were wrong. Bowen has not only taken his job as inspector general seriously, he's been the leading figure in exposing fraud and corruption. The Wall Street Journal reported in July that Bowen 'has become one of the most prominent and credible critics of how the administration has handled the occupation of Iraq,' and considering his record, it's a more-than-fair description. The guy even took on Halliburton.

So, what do Republicans do in response? They quietly make it easier for corruption to take place by going around Bowen.

By law, Mr. Bowen can oversee only relief and reconstruction funds. Because the new money technically comes from a different source, Mr. Bowen, who has 55 auditors on the ground in Iraq, will be barred from overseeing how the new money is spent. Instead, the funds will be overseen by the State Department's inspector general office, which has a much smaller staff in Iraq and warned in testimony to Congress in the fall that it lacked the resources to continue oversight activities in Iraq.

Wait, the story gets even better.

Now that the secret change that allows more corruption has come to light, everyone's asking how and why this measure was included in the Pentagon spending bill.

In fact, the WSJ reported today that a group of senators, upon learning about the provision that would circumvent Bowen, offered an amendment that would have kept his oversight duties in place. For reasons that are not altogether clear, sponsors of the amendment were denied the chance to bring their measure to the floor for a vote.

So, who wanted the change? Who else? 'Republican Appropriations Committee aides say legislators shifted the Iraq money to the foreign operations accounts at the request of the White House,' the WSJ reported. The White House says it simply did this for budgetary purposes and to help 'streamline accounting.' The fact that the move cuts off the most effective auditor in Iraq at the knees, the Bush gang says, is a coincidence.

As Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) put it, 'This is nothing more than a transparent attempt to shut down the only effective oversight of this massive reconstruction program which has been plagued by mismanagement and fraud.'"

I mean holy crap! They are now so corrupt that they feel like they can get away with anything.

Your tax dollars at work. (At work for Halliburton, that is...)

I think I'd just shoot myself...

Via ABC News

By NEDRA PICKLER

ORLANDO, Fla. May 10, 2006 (AP)— President Bush suggested Wednesday that he'd like to see his family's White House legacy continue, perhaps with his younger brother Jeb as the chief executive.

The president said Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is well-suited for another office and would make "a great president."

God! Just stop now. Another Bush in the whitehouse would kill this country totally. Look at what this one has managed to do in five short years....

The right to be secure in your papers...

CBS News Has a short story about a sanitation worker who found the detailed schedule for the Prez'nit on his last trip to Florida hours before he left. Sounds like someone was having a bad security day....

31%

The New York Times has the details.

Ouch! that's gonna leave a mark!

Rumsfeld denies making claims Iraq had WMDs

Rumsfeld denies making claims Iraq had WMDs

In this article in my hometown Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Eric Rosenberg puts the lie to the Secretary of Defence's statements on Iraq with quotes from his own mouth! You can't make this up!


The Money:

Rumsfeld said, according to an official Pentagon transcript. "The area in the south and the west and the north that coalition forces control is substantial. It happens not to be the area where weapons of mass destruction were dispersed. We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."

His comments in Atlanta were in line with an earlier attempted revision.

Six months after the invasion, on Sept. 10, 2003, Rumsfeld revisited the WMD issue in remarks at the National Press Club.

"I said, 'We know they're in that area,' " referring to the weapons. "I should have said, 'I believe we're in that area. Our intelligence tells us they're in that area,' and that was our best judgment."

...

On Feb. 20, 2003, a month before the invasion, Jim Lehrer asked Rumsfeld on PBS' "NewsHour" program whether he thought the invasion would "be welcomed by the majority of the civilian population of Iraq."

"There is no question but that they would be welcomed," Rumsfeld said, referring to American forces in Iraq.

He then tried to merge the earlier invasion of Afghanistan with the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

"Go back to Afghanistan. The people were in the streets playing music, cheering, flying kites, and doing all the things that the Taliban and the al-Qaeda would not let them do," Rumsfeld continued. "Saddam Hussein has one of the most vicious regimes on the face of the Earth. And the people know that."

On Sept. 25, 2003 -- six months after the invasion and a day on which one U.S. soldier was killed in an ambush, eight Iraqi civilians died in a mortar strike and a member of the U.S-appointed governing council died after an assassination attempt five days earlier -- Rumsfeld was asked about his prewar claims.

"Before the war in Iraq, you stated the case very eloquently, and you said ... they would welcome us with open arms," Sinclair Broadcasting anchor Morris Jones said to Rumsfeld as the prelude to a question.

The defense chief quickly cut him off.

"Never said that," Rumsfeld said, according to the official Pentagon transcript. "Never did. You may remember it well, but you're thinking of somebody else. You can't find anywhere me saying anything like either of those two things you just said I said. I may look like somebody else."

There's more! Rummy sounds like a kid who has his hand stuck in the cookie jar telling his mom that there's no way he could have ever tried to take a cookie. I especially love the blatant "You can't find anywhere me saying anything like either of those two things you just said I said. I may look like somebody else." He is literally daring reporters to find is lies.

Thanks Eric! What a good find!

Nice try dirtbag, but a little late...

ABC News has the latest little factoid on the web:

WASHINGTON May 8, 2006 (AP)— Zacarias Moussaoui has said he lied on the stand about being involved in 9/11, and he has asked to withdraw his guilty plea.

Disputing the facts of a case after you have been sentenced is a bit late eh?

The ghost of Fitzmas future

Talking Points Memo has a truly in depth post about the unfolding scandal at CIA that is tied inexorably to the Randy "Duke" Cunningham bribery investigation. It is beginning to look like there are a whole lot of prople who are at the very least tainted by the rampant corruption perpetrated by Mitchell Wade and Brent Wilkes, the two bribers in the Cunningham case. It looks like more heads are getting set to roll over this thing and they might not be all.

In the last season of the Abramoff bribery scandal there was much talk about his being the most pervasive bribery operation in the history of the US government. This might give Jack a run for his money. Add to that the other activities stipulated by Mr. Wade in his guilty plea and it adds up to a massive indictment of the militray-industrial complex. Truly, if half of what is being said about these characters is true this is like the motherlode of corruption. There is nearly no-one in the leadership of the intelligence community who is untouched.

We should watch this thing carefully. In the mean time to get up to speed click he link at the top of this post. It clarifies most of this convoluted rats nest pretty well.

While we were drinking...

The Raw Story reports: Kennedy to check in to clinic over addiction

Not that Kennedy! His son Patrick. Last night in a possible drunken haze or possibly while sleep-driving under the influence of Ambien, (I don't know which is scarier) Patrick Kennedy (D-RI) crashed his car into a barricade on Capitol hill and was given a very (*Ahem*) soft treatment by the Cap Hill Police. This has been fueling up a mighty wind on the right side of the blogosphere.

(You can get the profanity-laced info on that here.)

Alas, I would be remiss if I was not equal opportunity in my blasting of law-breaking-members-of-congress. Congressman Kennedy has behaved atrociously and needs some help. He is apparently getting it. Good luck with that Patrick!

Now it's time for the breakdown...

Josh Marshall Breaks it down as to why the Porter Goss resignation is possibly such a big deal, and why there is likely to be a lot more flowing out of the Randy "Duke" Cunningham shenanigans than even the most ardent conspiiarcy theorists on the left could have ever hoped for. This story has it all: power, money, defense contracts, and illicit sex. Just what the scandal hungry DC media apparattus has been waiting for.

If, as Josh mentions, the new guy in the cross hairs turns out to be Brent Wilkes (the Uber-Briber of the Dukestir scandal) there will be plenty of other shoes dropping before it ends.

Look for falling size 13EEs in the not too distant future.

Click this link to get the promised breakdown.

More Goss info but not too much

Everyone has this AP article now.

It is running on all of the major news outlet's homepages and it is pretty generic. It mention's his service, his difficulties, and outlines some of the possible reasons that he may be ready to "spend more time with his family" but in the end it is just the first piece in the puzzle. It looks like this might have been a real quick desicion. It's timed just as the Kennedy car wreck makes big news and it will be a "Friday surprise" that will limit the force of the blow. Good timing for Goss and the WH. Though I assume that this will be looked at rather carefully by both the blogoshere and te MSM as the days go on.

Look out for more coming later.

Porter Goss Packs it in?!

Could thins have anything to do with a certain poker party and hooker scandal? Time will tell, but the coincidental timing is very suspicious....

Continue watching here...

AP Ipsos = 33%!

Ha Ha! as Nelson Muntz would say...

Our Prez'nit, What a maroon....

Watergate-gate, Hooker-gate, Limo-gate...Yadda Yadda Yadda

Josh Marshall Has the goods on the whole list of "coincidences" surrounding the emerging Duke Cunningham-hooker parties-defense contractor kerfuffle. I love it when a plan comes together, or in this case, apart. Dig in to the great reporting over at TPM and feast your eyes on what makes for a near movie-of-the-week of corruption!

Wherein I rip off Kevin Drum with a total post quote.

Because I just love this argument I have lifted Kevin Drum right out of his blog atThe Washington Monthly and plopped him down here:

"YES, NATIONAL HEALTHCARE REALLY IS THE WAY TO GO....Advocates of universal healthcare frequently claim that European-style national healthcare systems, aside from being fairer, are just more efficient than ours. They provide decent healthcare at a lower cost than the jumbled, pseudo-free market system we have in the United States.

But is it true? Do even relatively mediocre, underfunded national healthcare systems like the one in Britain perform as well as American healthcare? A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association reaches a pretty unambiguous conclusion.

The researchers studied health outcomes in both countries and controlled for age by comparing only people aged 55-64. They controlled for race by studying only non-Hispanic whites. They controlled for obesity. They controlled for income. They controlled for education. They controlled for everything they could think of. Here's what they found:

'At every point in the social hierarchy there is more illness in the United States than in England and the differences are really dramatic,' said study co-author Dr. Michael Marmot, an epidemiologist at University College London in England.

....The upper crust in both countries was healthier than middle-class and low-income people in the same country. But richer Americans' health status resembled the health of the low-income British.

The researchers are careful to say that their study doesn't prove that Britain's healthcare system is better than America's — something that would be nearly impossible to demonstrate conclusively with a study like this in any case. But that's not the point. The point is that it's obviously not worse even though the British spend about half as much as we do per capita.

So here's the deal: under the British system, you don't have to worry about which doctors your HMO allows you to see. You don't have to worry about losing coverage if you get laid off. You don't have to worry about being unable to get a new job because you have a pre-existing condition. You don't have to worry about being bankrupted if you contract a serious chronic illness. And large corporations don't have to worry about going out of business because of spiraling healthcare obligations.

And the result of all this? Healthcare that's as good as ours and delivered for about half the cost. Under a national healthcare system, when you get sick, all you have to worry about is getting well. Explain to me again why we're afraid of this?

—Kevin Drum

There. Doesn't that sound right?

The Plame game gets interesting!

The Raw Story reports, New Jersey senator calls on CIA director to conduct Plame damage assessment

Take a look at that link. Inside is a letter that was sent by NJ Senator Lautenberg to Porter Goss of CIA requesting a national security damage assessment from the Plame outing. It seems that there is a decent amount of evidence that when Plame was exposed she was working on Iran's efforts to gain Nuclear technology. That truly would be a blow to our security as we are now being led down a path to war with Iran for trying to get nukes...

From The mouths of babes

This link that is now hosted at HuffingtonPost.com is actually the site of a 15year old girl from Alabama. She has an incredible aptitude for building beautiful and moving images from stock footage. I highly recommmend that you take a good look at these.

It is also disturbing to think that this young lady has been getting graphic death threats for having the gall to post them on a website. It's amazing how low the war supporters will sink to try to shore up their hollow reasons for war. This is a fifteen year old girl who has taken a stand against an unjust and ineptly prosecuted war and they send their cowardly threats of rape and murder over email.

Show your disgust for these tactics by supporting her and watching her truly emotionally charged videos. She truly is an inspiration.

PeaceTakesCourage.com