10 Most Corrupt Politicians Of 2007

Judicial Watch Announces List of Washington’s “Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians” for 2007.

Although I find the list to be a bit inaccurate and auspicious that bush and cheney didn't dominate the 1 & 2 spot.

Washington, DC –Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, today released its 2007 list of Washington’s “Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians.” The list, in alphabetical order, includes:



1. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY): In addition to her long and sordid ethics record, Senator Hillary Clinton took a lot of heat in 2007 – and rightly so – for blocking the release her official White House records. Many suspect these records contain a treasure trove of information related to her role in a number of serious Clinton-era scandals. Moreover, in March 2007, Judicial Watch filed an ethics complaint against Senator Clinton for filing false financial disclosure forms with the U.S. Senate (again). And Hillary’s top campaign contributor, Norman Hsu, was exposed as a felon and a fugitive from justice in 2007. Hsu pleaded guilt to one count of grand theft for defrauding investors as part of a multi-million dollar Ponzi scheme.



2. Rep. John Conyers (D-MI): Conyers reportedly repeatedly violated the law and House ethics rules, forcing his staff to serve as his personal servants, babysitters, valets and campaign workers while on the government payroll. While the House Ethics Committee investigated these allegations in 2006, and substantiated a number of the accusations against Conyers, the committee blamed the staff and required additional administrative record-keeping and employee training. Judicial Watch obtained documentation in 2007 from a former Conyers staffer that sheds new light on the activities and conduct on the part of the Michigan congressman, which appear to be at a minimum inappropriate and likely unlawful. Judicial Watch called on the Attorney General in 2007 to investigate the matter.



3. Senator Larry Craig (R-ID): In one of the most shocking scandals of 2007, Senator Craig was caught by police attempting to solicit sex in a Minneapolis International Airport men’s bathroom during the summer. Senator Craig reportedly “sent signals” to a police officer in an adjacent stall that he wanted to engage in sexual activity. When the police officer showed Craig his police identification under the bathroom stall divider and pointed toward the exit, the senator reportedly exclaimed 'No!'” When asked to produce identification, Craig presented police his U.S. Senate business card and said, “What do you think of that?” The power play didn’t work. Craig was arrested, charged and entered a guilty plea. Despite enormous pressure from his Republican colleagues to resign from the Senate, Craig refused.



4. Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA): As a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee's subcommittee on military construction, Feinstein reviewed military construction government contracts, some of which were ultimately awarded to URS Corporation and Perini, companies then owned by Feinstein's husband, Richard Blum. While the Pentagon ultimately awards military contracts, there is a reason for the review process. The Senate's subcommittee on Military Construction's approval carries weight. Sen. Feinstein, therefore, likely had influence over the decision making process. Senator Feinstein also attempted to undermine ethics reform in 2007, arguing in favor of a perk that allows members of Congress to book multiple airline flights and then cancel them without financial penalty. Judicial Watch’s investigation into this matter is ongoing.



5. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R-NY): Giuliani came under fire in late 2007 after it was discovered the former New York mayor’s office “billed obscure city agencies for tens of thousands of dollars in security expenses amassed during the time when he was beginning an extramarital relationship with future wife Judith Nathan in the Hamptons…” ABC News also reported that Giuliani provided Nathan with a police vehicle and a city driver at taxpayer expense. All of this news came on the heels of the federal indictment on corruption charges of Giuliani’s former Police Chief and business partner Bernard Kerik, who pleaded guilty in 2006 to accepting a $165,000 bribe in the form of renovations to his Bronx apartment from a construction company attempting to land city contracts.



6. Governor Mike Huckabee (R-AR): Governor Huckabee enjoyed a meteoric rise in the polls in December 2007, which prompted a more thorough review of his ethics record. According to The Associated Press: “[Huckabee’s] career has also been colored by 14 ethics complaints and a volley of questions about his integrity, ranging from his management of campaign cash to his use of a nonprofit organization to subsidize his income to his destruction of state computer files on his way out of the governor’s office.” And what was Governor Huckabee’s response to these ethics allegations? Rather than cooperating with investigators, Huckabee sued the state ethics commission twice and attempted to shut the ethics process down.



7. I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby: Libby, former Chief of Staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was sentenced to 30 months in prison and fined $250,000 for lying and obstructing the Valerie Plame CIA leak investigation. Libby was found guilty of four felonies -- two counts of perjury, one count of making false statements to the FBI and one count of obstructing justice – all serious crimes. Unfortunately, Libby was largely let off the hook. In an appalling lack of judgment, President Bush issued “Executive Clemency” to Libby and commuted the sentence.



8. Senator Barack Obama (D-IL): A “Dishonorable Mention” last year, Senator Obama moves onto the “ten most wanted” list in 2007. In 2006, it was discovered that Obama was involved in a suspicious real estate deal with an indicted political fundraiser, Antoin “Tony” Rezko. In 2007, more reports surfaced of deeper and suspicious business and political connections It was reported that just two months after he joined the Senate, Obama purchased $50,000 worth of stock in speculative companies whose major investors were his biggest campaign contributors. One of the companies was a biotech concern that benefited from legislation Obama pushed just two weeks after the senator purchased $5,000 of the company’s shares. Obama was also nabbed conducting campaign business in his Senate office, a violation of federal law.



9. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA): House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who promised a new era of ethics enforcement in the House of Representatives, snuck a $25 million gift to her husband, Paul Pelosi, in a $15 billion Water Resources Development Act recently passed by Congress. The pet project involved renovating ports in Speaker Pelosi's home base of San Francisco. Pelosi just happens to own apartment buildings near the areas targeted for improvement, and will almost certainly experience a significant boost in property value as a result of Pelosi's earmark. Earlier in the year, Pelosi found herself in hot water for demanding access to a luxury Air Force jet to ferry the Speaker and her entourage back and forth from San Francisco non-stop, in unprecedented request which was wisely rejected by the Pentagon. And under Pelosi’s leadership, the House ethics process remains essentially shut down – which protects members in both parties from accountability.



10. Senator Harry Reid (D-NV): Over the last few years, Reid has been embroiled in a series of scandals that cast serious doubt on his credibility as a self-professed champion of government ethics, and 2007 was no different. According to The Los Angeles Times, over the last four years, Reid has used his influence in Washington to help a developer, Havey Whittemore, clear obstacles for a profitable real estate deal. As the project advanced, the Times reported, “Reid received tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Whittemore.” Whittemore also hired one of Reid’s sons (Leif) as his personal lawyer and then promptly handed the junior Reid the responsibility of negotiating the real estate deal with federal officials. Leif Reid even called his father’s office to talk about how to obtain the proper EPA permits, a clear conflict of interest.

Forced Democracy

Benazir Bhutto's assassination Thursday should put a bitter end to the Bush Administration's misguided policy of shoving democracy down the throat of the Middle East and Muslim world. Since 9/11 there has not been a single country in that region that has had peaceful and successful elections. Hamas's victory in Gaza, the stalemate in Lebanon, elections in Iraq and now Pakistan — none of them have led to the stability, modernity and civil society this Administration promised us.

The common denominator between Pakistan, Gaza, Lebanon and Iraq is an ongoing war, wars without end, wars that poison democracy. The Bush Administration is particularly culpable in creating the chaos in Pakistan because it forced a premature reconciliation between President Musharraf and Bhutto; it forced Musharraf to lift martial law; it showered money on Musharraf to fight a war that was never popular in Pakistan. The Administration could not understand that it can't have both in Pakistan — a democracy and a war on terrorism.

The immediate reaction in the United Sates will be visceral: al-Qaeda killed Bhutto because she was too secular and too close to the United States, an agent of American imperialism. It will be of some comfort that the front lines of terrorism are thousands of miles away; that we are fighting "them" there rather than in lower Manhattan; that there are heroes like Bhutto ready to fight and die for democracy, moderation and rationality.

But this misses the point. The real problem in Pakistan undermining democracy is that it is a deeply divided, artificial country, created by the British for their expediency rather than for the Pakistanis. Independent Pakistan has always been dominated by a strong military. And democracy will only be nurtured when the wars on its border come to an end, whether in Afghanistan or Kashmir, and the need for the military to meddle in politics is removed. And never before.

Another irony underscored by Bhutto's assassination is that after 9/11 the Bush Administration justified going to war in Iraq to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction. But as of today all that it has managed to do is invade two countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, neither of which has weapons of mass destruction, while leaving Iran and Pakistan to fester — two countries that one day very well promise to threaten us with their weapons of mass destruction.

It is high time Americans return a pragmatic President to the White House. When George H.W. Bush, James Baker and Norman Schwartzkopf decided not to occupy Iraq in 1991 at the end of the first Gulf War, they understood that imposing an American-style democracy wasn't going to work.

Economic Disaster

During the holiday shopping season, Americans bought fewer gifts while paying more for necessities.

From Thanksgiving to Christmas, spending rose only 3.6 percent over the same period last year, the weakest performance in at least four years, according to early tallies from MasterCard Advisors, a unit of the credit card company. One-third of that increase was for gas purchases.

That’s bad news for an economy that is dependent on free-spending shoppers for growth. When consumers pull back, the economy slows. Employers respond by delaying hiring plans, reducing work hours and, if problems persist, laying off workers. Once a downturn starts, it is always hard to reverse, and especially now, with the White House unwilling to acknowledge that six years of debt-fueled growth is proving unsustainable and with most candidates for president only beginning to talk about how they would fix the economy.

Of course, one season does not a trend make. And after-Christmas bargain hunters have yet to spend their last penny. But the preliminary results are not likely to change much. Earlier this month, the government reported that personal spending surged in November, but the boost was mostly due to higher outlays for food and gasoline. More troubling, the rise in spending far outstripped the rise in Americans’ income, with the mismatch covered, in part, by a significant drain on savings.

All of that portends economic pain for families, even if growth, over all, does not contract — the general definition of a recession. That’s because even optimistic growth forecasts — about 1.5 percent for this quarter and next — are too tepid to counter recessionlike conditions in which job growth slows, unemployment rises and paychecks shrink or disappear. If inflation continues, rising prices will only feed the pain.

To make matters worse, many Americans are ill-prepared for tougher times.

Since the end of 2001, the economy has posted positive growth every month. That is a performance much trumpeted by President Bush and his aides. There is another aspect of that performance that they don’t talk about. With the Bush-era expansion apparently bottoming out, it may well become the first in which median family income, after inflation, never makes it back up to its level at the peak of the previous business cycle.

A new study by the Economic Policy Institute uses Census data to trace the dismal trajectory. Economic growth during the Clinton administration peaked in 2000, followed by a brief recession. Growth resumed at the end of 2001, the beginning of the Bush-era expansion, but real family income continued to fall through 2004. It has turned up since then, but as of the end of 2006, it was still about $1,000 below its peak in 2000.

Even if that difference is made up this year (and it’s still too early to tell if that will happen) Americans would be merely breaking even. That would be a pathetic outcome after six years of strong labor productivity.

Dismal income growth is no accident. It is the result of misguided tax, labor and social policies — including government disregard of the downsides of globalization for many Americans — that have concentrated income in the hands of the few.

The ease of borrowing has made it possible for many people to live beyond their means. But, the end of easy money is now exposing Americans’ vulnerability. Today’s stingy shopper may be tomorrow’s angry voter. To deserve those votes, a candidate must articulate a plan not only for restoring growth, but for ensuring that in the next upswing, the benefits are shared.

60's Protests And Now

Forty years ago, this country entered what would turn out to be the most politically charged, disorienting, violent and tragic year in modern American history.

The year we're now heading into has some surface similarities to 1968: a protracted and wrenching war in Asia, an unpopular president, a wide-open presidential campaign and raw-nerve controversies over civil rights (with gays and immigrants this time) and geopolitics (featuring jihadists instead of communists).

History repeating itself: It's a tidy premise.

In fact, it's irresistible -- and wrong.

But wrong in interesting ways that shed light on both years. Sure, elements of '68 persist in the world and in America today, but the difference between 2008 and 1968 is the difference between needing psychotherapy and requiring a brain transplant.

In 1968, the country came close to political disintegration. Authority wasn't merely questioned; it literally lost control. The Tet Offensive in late January 1968 shocked those who had assumed we were winning the Vietnam War. President Lyndon B. Johnson essentially quit his job on live television. Days later, the apostle of nonviolent resistance was gunned down in Memphis.

The cities burned.

Just like today, millions of people vehemently opposed the war, but for many of them it was a highly personal matter: The military announced in early 1968 that it would draft 300,000 more troops. Americans were dying in Vietnam by the dozens and even the hundreds every week. Countless young people lost all confidence in the ordered, officially sanctioned version of reality.

The big question is not why 2008 has so many echoes of 1968, but why the two years are so different.

No draft, obviously. And technology may have supplanted politics as the dominant agent of change. Information runs riot, not protesters. The news cycle spins so much faster; for every action there is an instant reaction. The odd result is not a world where things are out of control, but one in which issues get quickly categorized, organized, bureaucratized and, if necessary, outsourced. Everything is more precisely measured and calibrated. There's an expert for every problem -- just ask Google.

On the campaign trail, you will occasionally feel an aftershock of the '60s. Sen. John McCain is still tweaking Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton for earmarking $1 million for that "hippie museum" at the site of the Woodstock festival, which took place while he was a POW in Hanoi. A demonstrator at the Iowa straw poll a few months back carried a sign saying, "Defeat Hillary Clinton and Jane Fonda." Sen. Barack Obama, trying to cruise a high road, declares that we shouldn't re-fight the battles of the 1960s.

This may be the most unpredictable political year since 1968, when President Johnson, stunned by rising antiwar sentiment and Sen. Eugene McCarthy's strong showing in the New Hampshire primary, announced that he wouldn't seek another term. Robert F. Kennedy jumped into the race. Long viewed as a ruthless operator and Cold Warrior, Bobby had transformed himself into a liberal, inciting frenzied adulation -- rock-star stuff -- as he took his campaign into impoverished rural towns and inner-city ghettoes.

Where is the spirit of that Kennedy campaign? Certainly with Obama, who's so often described as Kennedyesque. But you can also find it in the candidacy of John Edwards.

A week before Christmas, Edwards stopped in Keene, a small city in a valley in the southwest corner of New Hampshire -- prime turf for liberals, leftists, artists, organic farmers, college professors. Edwards brought Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne as his warm-up act. They sounded terrific, the lyrics saturated in idealism.

Out came Edwards, and he was on fire. The former senator talked about ending the war in Iraq and taking power away from big corporations. He said 35 million Americans last year went hungry. He talked about the uninsured Americans who must take their sick kids to the emergency room in the middle of the night and beg for treatment. He talked about a man who spent 50 years with a cleft palate, unable to talk, without money or insurance to pay for an operation that would finally let him speak. "In America," he said. His rhetoric could easily have come from Kennedy or King in early 1968. He predicted that he will ride a wave of popular sentiment that will shock the mainstream. He was, in essence, describing what in the '60s would have been known as The Movement.

Therein lies his challenge: Can a candidate inspire a popular movement in a society that over the last 40 years has cubbyholed itself into self-selected social groups and generally been co-opted by consumerism?

The polls indicate massive antiwar sentiment in America, but if 500,000 people descended on the Mall anytime recently to protest what's happening in Iraq, I missed it. The only way people would riot in this country is if you announced that Best Buy just got in a new shipment of Wiis.

The feverish rhetoric and verbal mayhem of the blogosphere is deceptive: America on the whole isn't as political as it was in 1968. In Iowa, many citizens told me they have no intention of going to the caucuses. Why not? It's simply not something they do. What they don't articulate is the obvious fact: They just don't care.

Todd Gitlin, a Movement veteran and the author of "The Sixties," says 1968 still stands apart.

"You have one president who's disgraced by a war and cuts short what had been one of the brilliant political careers of the century, you have the Democratic Party cracking up, you have two major assassinations, you have a growing number of American students who think they're on the brink of, or on their way to, a revolution. You have a political secession of the white South amidst a civil rights revolution," Gitlin wrote. "You have millions of people thinking the end of history is at hand."

You can see that side of 1968 in the face of Bobby Kennedy in a framed photo in Frank Mankiewicz's living room.

Mankiewicz served as Kennedy's press secretary for those thrilling, chaotic, ultimately tragic 85 days from March to June of 1968. The black-and-white photo shows RFK conferring with Mankiewicz on April 4; they're aboard a plane flying from Muncie, Ind., to Indianapolis, where Kennedy is scheduled to go into the black part of town and give a speech about race and poverty. But Kennedy's forehead is furrowed, his whole face heavy with the weight of horrible news: Martin Luther King has been shot in Memphis.

They got to Indianapolis and motorcaded toward the event, but the police peeled away because they didn't want to go into the black neighborhoods. Mankiewicz had thrown together a speech, but by the time he reached the stage, Kennedy was already speaking, extemporaneously. To gasps, he told his listeners that King had been killed. He said he understood their pain, because he too had lost a family member to violence. Then he quoted his favorite poet, Aeschylus, by heart: "Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."

Mankiewicz still has the yellow sheet of paper with the notes he jotted down for Kennedy's last speech, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on the night of June 4. Kennedy, celebrating his victory in the California primary, extemporized once again.

"I think we can end the divisions within the United States," Kennedy told his supporters. "We can work together in the last analysis . . . We are a great country, an unselfish country and a compassionate country."

Minutes later, Mankiewicz was helping Ethel Kennedy off the stage when he heard what at first he thought might be firecrackers.

He rushed to Kennedy's side. He heard him say one word: "Noooooooo."

Charles Kaiser's book "1968 in America" quotes a young college student who despaired after RFK's murder: "It really was like the last straw -- that there was no longer reason to hope for anything; that the world was now just totally off its rocker, and that evil was ascendant."

Evil may have been ascendant, but ultimately, it could not vanquish the dream of King and Kennedy. People do, in fact, prefer to work together. And so it is that, 40 years later, the world is so much smaller, so highly networked. No one in 1968 had heard of the Internet or the cellphone or nanotechnology. Or the Human Genome Project. Or the "Information Age."

Today's America looks rich and fat and comfortable compared with the 1968 version. In fact, many of our chief challenges come from the consequences of our economic successes: transferring carbon from Earth to the atmosphere, income inequality, suburban sprawl.

At the moment, no one can tell who the presidential nominees will be. What's also uncertain is how much the identity of the next president will matter, at least compared with other cultural and technological vectors. Truly revolutionary change seems more likely to come from physics than from politics.

Of course, we can't predict anything about the future with confidence, except that it will surprise us. It's highly probable that 2048 will be radically different from 2008. History replays certain notes, but it shouldn't be slandered as circular. The world is just more interesting than that.

Happy fucking New Year.

bush Spreading Peace

bush was asked at a White House press conference last week if he would consider a “goodwill mission to restore the country’s good name abroad.” The idiot said, “That’s what I do during my presidency. I go around spreading goodwill and talking about the importance of spreading freedom and peace.”

And even though it provided me with a great laugh, apparently, the fucking moron meant it.

Yes, the president is taking his dog and pony show on the road again.

President George W. Bush’s diplomatic passport will acquire a slew of new country stamps during his final year in office as he tries to rebuild the U.S.’s international standing and create a foreign-policy legacy beyond Iraq.

The president plans trips to the Middle East, Africa, Asia and South America, which would make 2008 his busiest year abroad. While his major domestic initiatives may get stalled by a Democratic majority in Congress and the gridlock caused by election-year politics, he still has an opportunity to exert his influence overseas. […]

While the president will strive to strengthen alliances, it won’t come at the expense of continuing to prosecute the war on terror, said Jim Jeffrey, the deputy White House national security adviser.

“We want to be well-perceived in the world,” Jeffrey said in an interview. “But more importantly, we want to formulate policies that will protect the American people.”

Maybe we’ll be “well-perceived in the world” if the president stays home and changes his policies, instead of traveling abroad and keeping his existing policies?

Merry Christmas

Art Conrad has an issue with the commercialism of Christmas, but instead of just shunning the malls and turning off his television, he's decided to share his distaste with his West Bremerton neighbors by displaying a 15-foot crucifix bearing Santa Claus in place of Jesus.

"Santa has been perverted from who he started out to be," Conrad said. "Now he's the person being used by corporations to get us to buy more stuff."

He photographed the crucified Santa for his own Christmas cards, bearing the message: "Santa died for your MasterCard."

The front-yard display is also Conrad's way of poking fun at political correctness. He believes people don't express their feelings because they're afraid of what other people might think.

His neighbors found the will to express their feelings this week. Some were offended but many were just curious.

Jake Tally of Bremerton walked by the display Friday and chuckled, but didn't pretend to understand the message.

"I don't really know what to think. I know it's about God but Santa has nothing to do with it," he told the Kitsap Sun newspaper.

One woman said she was offended and another feared how children might respond. At least one guessed at the anti-commercialism message.

Weapons Of Mass Distraction

I feel that its important to keep bushies lies in front of the snoozing public.

Christmas Wishes BACK AT The Candidates

Al-HOLLYWOOD-Qaeda

Al-Qaeda's media arm, al-Sahab, has invited individuals, organisations and journalists to submit questions for an open interview with Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Advertisements posted on Jihadist websites said questions sent to them over the next month would be passed to al-Qaeda's deputy leader for his reply.

It said the questions would be sent "without alteration, whether it comes from someone who agrees or disagrees".

The offer also came at the end of an interview by Zawahiri posted on Sunday.

In the video, also produced by al-Sahab, Zawahiri said the US-led coalition in Iraq was "defeated and looking for a way out" and said the decision of UK forces to "flee" Basra showed insurgents were gaining strength.

Iraq took formal responsibility for security in Basra province on Sunday, four-and-a-half years after the invasion.

'Brief and focused'

The adverts published by al-Sahab invited "individuals, organisations and media establishments" to submit questions for an "open interview" with Zawahiri by sending them by 16 January to the websites where it usually posts its messages.

"Care should be taken in making the questions brief and focused," the advert asked.

"We also ask the brothers, the supervisors [of the websites] to collect the questions and transmit them without alteration, whether it is comes from someone who agrees or disagrees," it added.

The advert finished with al-Sahab saying that "with God's help and support" it will try to publish Zawahiri's answers to the questions "as soon as possible".

Egyptian-born Zawahiri has emerged as al-Qaeda's most prominent spokesman in recent years, appearing in at least 16 videos and audiotapes this year - four times as many as its leader, Osama Bin Laden.

The two have evaded capture since US-led forces overthrew the Taleban in Afghanistan following the 11 September 2001 attacks on the US. They are thought to be hiding on the Afghan-Pakistan border.

IntelCenter, an organisation which monitors Jihadist websites, said the invitation was the first to have been issued by a high-ranking al-Qaeda leader.

Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University in Washington DC, said al-Qaeda wanted to "look more cutting-edge and give the perception of greater legitimacy".

"It shows how this group with 7th Century ideology is exploiting 21st Century media capabilities," he told the Associated Press.

Made In China

Antibiotics in the meat, pesticide used as preservatives, mercury in the drinking water -- Chinese author Zhou Qing says China's food industry is poisoning the country in its greed for profit. If ordinary people knew, there would be a revolution, he adds.

Chinese journalist Zhou Qing, a critic of the regime, unearthed political dynamite in his two-year investigation of China's food industry. He interviewed grocers, restaurant owners, farmers and food factory managers for an exposé for which he won a prize as part of the German "Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage" in 2006.

His book is a dark account of a ruthless food mafia that stops at nothing to maximize its profits, for example by using contraceptives to accelerate the growth of fish stocks, lengthening the shelf-life of cucumbers with highly toxic pesticide DDT, using hormones and poisoned salt in food production and putting absurd amounts of antibiotics in meat.

The investigation was risky. "It was more dangerous than chasing drug dealers," Zhou, who lives in Beijing, recalled in a speech in Heidelberg, southwestern Germany, this month.

Anything goes when it comes to cutting production costs, said Zhou. By comparison, the culprits in recent German scandals about rotten meat seem like model butchers.

Zhou said uncontrolled greed had caused a food disaster of unimaginable proportions. "I can only warn you never to go in a restaurant." The danger of food producers being taken to task for their actions is slight. Everything disappears in China's endless bureaucracy, he said.

Zhou's claims may sound exaggerated, but they're borne out by recent developments. In early December the Shanghai city council slapped an export ban on products made by the Shanghai Mellin Food Company after cancer-causing substances were found in its pork products.

In July the former director of the state food and drug supervisory authority, Zheng Xiaoyu, was executed after being convicted of taking bribes to award licences for forged drugs, some of which had lethal side effects.

Increase in Cancer Cases

The children are the biggest sufferers, said Zhou. Poisoned baby food has led to severe diseases and physical deformities. Zhou writes that 200,000 to 400,000 people fall victim to poisoned food each year. A third of cancer cases, which are increasing at double-digit rates, can be attributed to food, he writes.

Zhou spent two years in jail for taking part in the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. After his release he founded a newspaper but had to shut it down after pressure from the authorities. Since then he has worked as an author, covering human rights abuses and the origins of the SARS epidemic.

The title of his book on the food industry -- "What Kind of God?" -- refers to the importance of food in Chinese culture.

"The traditional Chinese saying that 'Food is the people's Heaven' shows the importance of food in people's daily lives ... In today's world, in which people have become more and more closely tied to the computer, you only have to type in the words 'food' or 'eat' in a Chinese search engine, you will find that the words that crop up the most in the list of results are 'safety' and 'poisoning'. This is an ironic state of affairs in a country that has prided itself on its fine cuisine," said Zhou.

"Ordinary people don't know about it. If the people knew about it there would be a revolution. The wrath of the people would be unstoppable."

For thousands of years the power of China's rulers hinged on their ability to feed the people. "Revolutions aren't caused by political differences, they're caused by a lack of bread."

To My Most Avid Listener...

...and rabid fan.

Snoopy Vs Red Baron Snoopy Christmas | Funny Jokes at JibJab

Merry Christmas.

Pimping Jesus

As Christians across the world prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus, it's a fitting moment to contemplate the mountain of moral, and mortal, hypocrisy that is our Christianized Republican Party.

There's nothing new, of course, about the Christianization of the GOP. Seven years ago, when debating Al Gore, then-candidate George W. Bush was asked to identify his favorite philosopher and answered "Jesus." This year, however, the Christianization of the party reached new heights with Mitt Romney's declaration that he believed in Jesus as his savior, in an effort to stanch the flow of "values voters" to Mike Huckabee.

My concern isn't the rift that has opened between Republican political practice and the vision of the nation's Founders, who made very clear in the Constitution that there would be no religious test for officeholders in their enlightened new republic. Rather, it's the gap between the teachings of the Gospels and the preachings of the Gospel's Own Party that has widened past the point of absurdity, even as the ostensible Christianization of the party proceeds apace.

The policies of the president, for instance, can be defended in greater or (more frequently) lesser degree within a framework of worldly standards. But if Bush can conform his advocacy of preemptive war with Jesus's Sermon on the Mount admonition to turn the other cheek, he's a more creative theologian than we have given him credit for. Likewise his support of torture, which he highlighted again this month when he threatened to veto House-passed legislation that would explicitly ban waterboarding.

It's not just Bush whose catechism is a merry mix of torture and piety. Virtually the entire Republican House delegation opposed the ban on waterboarding. Among the Republican presidential candidates, only Huckabee and the not-very-religious John McCain have come out against torture, while only libertarian Ron Paul has questioned the doctrine of preemptive war.

But it's on their policies concerning immigrants where Republicans -- candidates and voters alike -- really run afoul of biblical writ. Not on immigration as such but on the treatment of immigrants who are already here. Consider: Christmas, after all, celebrates not just Jesus's birth but his family's flight from Herod's wrath into Egypt, a journey obviously undertaken without benefit of legal documentation. The Bible isn't big on immigrant documentation. "Thou shalt neither vex a stranger nor oppress him," Exodus says the Lord told Moses on Mount Sinai, "for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt."

Yet the distinctive cry coming from the Republican base this year isn't simply to control the flow of immigrants across our borders but to punish the undocumented immigrants already here, children and parents alike.

So Romney attacks Huckabee for holding immigrant children blameless when their parents brought them here without papers, and Huckabee defends himself by parading the endorsement of the Minuteman Project's Jim Gilchrist, whose group harasses day laborers far from the border. The demand for a more regulated immigration policy comes from virtually all points on our political spectrum, but the push to persecute the immigrants already among us comes distinctly, though by no means entirely, from the same Republican right that protests its Christian faith at every turn.

We've seen this kind of Christianity before in America. It's more tribal than religious, and it surges at those times when our country is growing more diverse and economic opportunity is not abounding. At its height in the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was chiefly the political expression of nativist Protestants upset by the growing ranks of Catholics in their midst.

It's difficult today to imagine KKKers thinking of their mission as Christian, but millions of them did.

Today's Republican values voters don't really conflate their rage with their faith. Lou Dobbs is a purely secular figure. But nativist bigotry is strongest in the Old Time Religion precincts of the Republican Party, and woe betide the Republican candidate who doesn't embrace it, as John McCain, to his credit and his political misfortune, can attest.

The most depressing thing about the Republican presidential race is that the party's rank and file require their candidates to grow meaner with each passing week. And now, inconveniently, inconsiderately, comes Christmas, a holiday that couldn't be better calibrated to expose the Republicans' rank, fetid hypocrisy.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/18/AR2007121801634.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns

Stupid People

What The World Thinks

A Democrat Finds His Balls - And Wins!

Majority Leader Harry Reid has just pulled the FISA bill from consideration in this session. It will be brought up at some point next month.

Without Senator Dodd's leadership today, it is safe to assume that retroactive immunity would have passed.

This is a great victory for the American people. His outspoken opposition to retroactive immunity and the Intelligence Committee's FISA bill made it impossible to move forward now. From a process standpoint, that took the persistent shadow of a Dodd filibuster on this legislative process, a "hold" against any legislation that included retroactive immunity, and today, a refusal to grant unanimous consent to rules of debate that would have made it harder to strip retroactive immunity from the Intel Committee's bill through the Dodd-Feingold Amendment.

He brought along some of the Senate's most passionate voices -- Senator's Feingold, Kennedy, Boxer, Wyden, Brown and Bill Nelson joined him to stand up to the President today.

Throughout the day Senator Dodd stood on the Senate floor and spoke out against the Bush administration's abuse of executive powers. He spoke out against granting retroactive immunity for telecom companies who helped the Bush administration spy on Americans without warrant - noting that if we grant immunity now, we may never know the full extent of what happened behind closed doors and what arguments were used to justify warrantless surveillance.

For now, the FISA debate is over. It will come up again down the road, but for now everyone who supported Senator Dodd's leadership against retroactive immunity and supported his promise to filibuster should be proud of their work to defend the Constitution and the rule of law.

You're A Mean One, mr bush

Revolution Calling

OK, its a Ron Paul ad made by someone but the slide show and soundtrack are pretty cool. Lighten up.

Unlike the show trial put on by Republicans against President Clinton, a proper impeachment hearing would involve a fair and objective presentation of the facts without hyperbole or political gamesmanship. The hard evidence that is presented at the hearings will be judged fully both by Congress and the American people. The evidence alone will determine the outcome, and if it is determined that Vice President Cheney committed “High Crimes and Misdemeanors” he should be properly impeached and put on trial before the Senate.

Romney Buys Clear Channel

What would it cost to buy the support of just about every nationally-syndicated neocon talk show host in America?

About $19.5 Billion, which is what Mitt Romney’s private equity firm, Bain Capital, and Thomas H. Lee Partners have agreed to pay in a leveraged buyout agreement with Clear Channel Communications, the largest radio station owner in the country.

Clear Channel owns over 1,100 full-power AM, FM, and shortwave radio stations, twelve radio channels on XM Satellite Radio, and more than 30 television stations in the United States. Premiere Radio Networks, which is the largest syndication company in the United States, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Clear Channel and is home to Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and many others. Sean Hannity recently signed a large multi-market contract with Clear Channel, as well.

From an anonymous email:

“I’ll bet those hosts won’t reveal that conflict of interest, but it’s worth noting when you hear them begin hyping Romney, which has already begun. A lot of GOP supporters will support whomever they are told to support, so be prepared for a big push for Romney. On the bright side, Romney has more vulnerabilities than Rudy, based on his record. Look at this as the GOP establishment doing us a favor. Rich men can bankroll their own campaigns (a la John Kerry), but it takes a special breed to use investors’ money to buy entire networks that can operate as passive wings of a presidential campaign.”


About Bain Capital Partners, LLC

Bain Capital (www.baincapital.com) is a global private investment firm that manages several pools of capital including private equity, high-yield assets, mezzanine capital and public equity with more than $40 billion in assets under management. Since its inception in 1984, Bain Capital has made private equity investments and add-on acquisitions in over 230 companies around the world, including investments in a broad range of companies such as Burger King, Warner Chilcott, Toys "R" Us, AMC Entertainment, Sensata Technologies, Burlington Coat Factory and ProSiebenSat1 Media. Headquartered in Boston, Bain Capital has offices in New York, London, Munich, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Shanghai.

Link to announcement:
http://www.clearchannel.com/Corpora...sReleaseID=1824

No Place In Government

The office of the president is a secular office in a secular government.

There is not a word in the Constitution that authorizes the president or anyone else in the federal government to make a religious decision.

NOT FUCKING ONE!

Why then are both voters and candidates wasting their time talking about religion? The personal religious beliefs of the candidates should be considered irrelevant. Furthermore, people should not forget that there are a lot more professors of religion than practitioners. What a person claims to believe and how that person leads his or her life are often quite different.

Laws are, in the final analysis, words on paper. They cannot and do not control human behavior. If they could, there would be no crimes. Americans, especially politicians, have developed the bad habit of thinking that there ought to be a law to cover every conceivable human action. Consequently, there are so many laws today that no human being can possibly know what they all are. This defeats one of the useful purposes of laws, which is to educate the public.

As for religion, people should recognize that all the world's religions have failed to eliminate sin, and therefore no one should expect the government to do that. Christianity in particular is based on the twin concepts of sin and forgiveness. Governments are better at finding sin than at forgiving.

Religion has a legitimate role in our society. George Washington said religion is the best way known to instill virtue in masses of people. That is job enough for religion, and religion should stay out of politics as an organization. Religious individuals, of course, have the same rights and duties as any other citizen.

Religion itself has enough problems to solve. Christian Zionists, for example, are a heretical cult without any biblical foundation and with a political agenda. Other Christians have perverted the religion into a weekly course on how to be rich and happy. Christianity, in fact, teaches that it is easier to pass a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. Militant Christianity is a contradiction in terms.

If you are trying to find someone actually practicing Christianity, whom would you choose – a preacher with a six-figure salary, a limousine and a private jet or an actor, like Brad Pitt, who has committed $5 million of his own money to build homes for people in New Orleans' 9th Ward?

In judging human affairs, always look for actions, not words. What a person says tells you nothing reliable; what a person does gives you a better clue as to what kind of a person he or she is. At the same time, don't forget the dual nature of human beings.

One can find faults with all religions. One should not forget, however, that the same can be said of all secular philosophies, ideologies and institutions. Nothing human is or ever will be perfect.

As for the presidential candidates, people should be asking not what these people claim to believe about God, but what have they actually done? How do their lives measure up to their speeches? Do they demonstrate a belief in and a concern for the Constitution? Do they have a wide knowledge of the world as it truly is? Are they catering to special interests? Are they independent thinkers or followers?

The presidential race is, after all, a search for a secular leader, not for a pope or ayatollah. The United States is in deep trouble politically, financially and economically. It will take a smart, sane and courageous person to get us out. Opportunists and people who sell their souls for campaign contributions may well preside over our national collapse.

The Death Of Liberty

One reason the United States finds itself at the edge of a foreign policy disaster is its underinformed citizenry, a key weakness in democracy.

First they tortured a U.S. citizen and gang member ...
I remained silent;
I wasn't a criminal

Then they tortured a U.S. citizen, whistleblower and navy veteran ...
I remained silent;
I wasn't a whistleblower

Then they locked up an attorney for representing accused criminals ...
I remained silent;
I wasn't a defense attorney

Then they arrested a young father walking with his son simply because he told Dick Cheney that he disagreed with his policies ...
I remained silent;
I've never talked to an important politician

Then they said an entertainer should be killed because she questioned 9/11 ...
I remained silent;
I wasn't an entertainer

Then they arrested people for demanding that Congress hold the President to the Constitution ...
I did not speak out;
I've never protested in Washington

Then they arrested a man for holding a sign ...
I did not speak out;
I've never held that kind of sign

Then they broke a minister's leg because he wanted to speak at a public event ...
I remained silent;
I wasn't a religious leader

Then they shot a student with a taser gun and arrested him for asking a question of a politician at a public event ...
I remained silent;
I wasn't a student

When they came for me,
Everyone was silent;
there was no one left to speak out.

What's this poem saying?

That we all have to stand up, speak out and take action NOW while we still can. If we do so, we will win the struggle for liberty. If we do not, freedom will die ... just like it did in Nazi Germany.

From The "Are You Fucking Kidding Me" Department

Let me get this straight. People are dying in mass numbers in Iraq. The president of the United States has proven himself to be nothing more than a liar and a traitor to America. The republican ship is sinking fast and the rats who orchestrated the biggest fuck up in history are jumping off at an amazing rate, putting as much distance between themselves and bush as they can to save their political lives.

But THIS is whats happening today on the floor of congress:

Many congressional Republicans have complained lately that lawmakers aren’t doing enough to tackle the policy issues that really matter. To help highlight his caucus’ concerns, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), easily among the top five looniest members of the chamber, will bring H.Res. 847 to the floor today. It will put the House on record stating that Christmas and Christians are important.

Are you fucking kidding me?

Seriously. John Bresnahan noted:

As someone with a Christian background, I can safely say this may be the silliest resolution ever introduced by, or voted upon, by Congress, although I am a little curious to see if anyone will vote against it.

Do we really need Congress to say Christmas and the Christian faith are important? Isn’t that pretty self evident by now? Don’t we already get Dec. 25 off?

Bresnahan’s tongue-in-cheek Grinch-itude notwithstanding, the measure will state that the House of Representatives “recognizes the Christian faith as one of the great religions of the world,” “expresses continued support for Christians in the United States and worldwide,” and among other things, “acknowledges and supports the role played by Christians and Christianity in the founding of the United States and in the formation of the western civilization.”

This shit seems to be straight out of the pages of The Onion, and I wish that it was, but this is really happening at the expense of the American taxpayer.

The House passed this bill today.

The vote, surprisingly, was 372-9, with 10 members also voting "Present," meaning they took no position on the legislation, and 40 not voting. One of the "Present" votes was cast by Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.). More Democrats -195 - voted for the bill than Republicans, 177.

The nine members who voted against the bill are Reps. Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.), Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.), Diana DeGette (D-Colo.), Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.), Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), Bobby Scott (D-Va.), Pete Stark (D-Calif.) and Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.).

Here's the text of H.Res. 847, just so you know how important Christianity and Xmas are:

"Recognizing the importance of Christmas and the Christian faith.

Whereas Christmas, a holiday of great significance to Americans and many other cultures and nationalities, is celebrated annually by Christians throughout the United States and the world;

Whereas there are approximately 225,000,000 Christians in the United States, making Christianity the religion of over three-fourths of the American population;

Whereas there are approximately 2,000,000,000 Christians throughout the world, making Christianity the largest religion in the world and the religion of about one-third of the world population;

Whereas Christians identify themselves as those who believe in the salvation from sin offered to them through the sacrifice of their savior, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and who, out of gratitude for the gift of salvation, commit themselves to living their lives in accordance with the teachings of the Holy Bible;

Whereas Christians and Christianity have contributed greatly to the development of western civilization;

Whereas the United States, being founded as a constitutional republic in the traditions of western civilization, finds much in its history that points observers back to its roots in Christianity;

Whereas on December 25 of each calendar year, American Christians observe Christmas, the holiday celebrating the birth of their savior, Jesus Christ;

Whereas for Christians, Christmas is celebrated as a recognition of God's redemption, mercy, and Grace; and

Whereas many Christians and non-Christians throughout the United States and the rest of the world, celebrate Christmas as a time to serve others: Now, therefore be it

Resolved, That the House of Representatives--

(1) recognizes the Christian faith as one of the great religions of the world;

(2) expresses continued support for Christians in the United States and worldwide;

(3) acknowledges the international religious and historical importance of Christmas and the Christian faith;

(4) acknowledges and supports the role played by Christians and Christianity in the founding of the United States and in the formation of the western civilization;

(5) rejects bigotry and persecution directed against Christians, both in the United States and worldwide; and

(6) expresses its deepest respect to American Christians and Christians throughout the world."

Lewis Black from Comedy Centrals Last Laugh

Lewis Black takes the stage on Comedy Centrals Last Laugh discussing 2007 in typical Lewsi Black fashion. The censors bleeps piss me off but we all know what he's saying, which makes the censors efforts seem comical in and of itself.

Killing In The Name Of Gawd

Once again this week we hear of a Christian going crazy and shooting up a church and then killing himself. This young man was tortured since birth with delusional religious brainwashing and he finally snapped.

Who could blame him?

But then you get another religious asshole that comes out with the following:

In its Action Update today, the Family Research Council (FRC) partially cast blame for the tragic shooting at a megachurch in Colorado yesterday on “the secular media.” In the e-mail, which was sent under the name of FRC Action President Tony Perkins, the group says it’s “hard not to draw a line between” the shooting and “hostility” by “some in the secular media toward Christians”

Oh, I see now, it’s the media that performed mind control on this kid, not his schizophrenic parents or the brain washing of the church that influenced him. How stupid of me not to see that.

“It is hard not to draw a line between the hostility that is being fomented in our culture from some in the secular media toward Christians and evangelicals in particular and the acts of violence that took place in Colorado yesterday. But I will say no more for now other than that our friends at New Life Church and YWAM are in our thoughts and prayers” Perkins explained.
When Perkins can’t explain why this sick young man turned against his church and why God spared some people, but allowed others to be slaughtered, he sloughs it off on “evil secularists.”

Do you think that the fact this kid was kicked out of the missionary school he shot up had anything to do with it?

Isn’t it possible that this rejection may have driven him to seek revenge?

The secular media didn’t reject this young man, nor did it give him access to the gun. Mr. Perkins, you might want to look at the real root causes of this tragedy rather than blaming secularists.

You need only to look as far as your back yard.

Talk About Mitt's Speech

Did I hear someone say that Christianity approved of slaves for more than 1500 years?

Although being TRUE, does America REALLY want a leader whose religious faith thought that it was cool to own another human being? Oh thats right, they never thought of slaves as human beings. That slipped my mind.

Americans need to wake up and realize what it is they follow and who they elect to office.

Religion has no place in politics. It needs to be abolished.

The Price Is Right

“I think it’s clear by now that the federal government needs to reclassify marijuana. People who need it should be able to get it – safely and easily,” says The Price Is Right and Power of 10 host Drew Carey in a new Reason.tv video examining medical marijuana and the war on drugs.



One of the most outrageous consequences of the war on drugs is the federal crackdown on medical marijuana, which is used by patients to help treat the effects of cancer, glaucoma, HIV-AIDS, chronic pain and nausea, and other severe symptoms associated with serious illnesses. Medical marijuana prescribed by a physician is legal in 12 states, yet federal agents are raiding state-approved dispensaries and preventing patients from having safe access to this drug.

In Episode 2 of Reason.tv's Drew Carey Project, http://reason.tv/video/show/57.html Drew takes a look at patients who need and use medical marijuana in California, and how the federal government is making their lives even worse. What a surprise.

Marijuana SHOULD be reclassified. It should be made legal. Not just for medical purposes but also for recreational use. The American government wastes WAAAAAAAY too much money in their feeble attempts to curb sales and use of recreational pot.

2008 - A Turning Point For America

Will the presidential election of 2008 mark a turning point in American political history?

Will it terminate with extreme prejudice the conservative ascendancy that has dominated the country for the last generation?

No matter the haplessness of the Democratic opposition, the answer is yes.

With Richard Nixon's victory in the 1968 presidential election, a new political order first triumphed over New Deal liberalism. It was an historic victory that one-time Republican strategist and now political critic Kevin Phillips memorably anointed the "emerging Republican majority." Now, that Republican "majority" finds itself in a systemic crisis from which there is no escape.

Only at moments of profound shock to the old order of things -- the Great Depression of the 1930s or the coming together of imperial war, racial confrontation, and de-industrialization in the late 1960s and 1970s -- does this kind of upheaval become possible in a political universe renowned for its stability, banality, and extraordinary capacity to duck things that matter. The trauma must be real and it must be perceived by people as traumatic. Both conditions now apply.

War, economic collapse, and the political implosion of the Republican Party will make 2008 a year to remember.

Iraq is an albatross that, all by itself, could sink the ship of state. At this point, there's no need to rehearse the polling numbers that register the no-looking-back abandonment of this colossal misadventure by most Americans. No cosmetic fix, like the "surge," can, in the end, make a difference -- because large majorities decided long ago that the invasion was a fiasco, and because the geopolitical and geo-economic objectives of the Bush administration leave no room for a genuine Iraqi nationalism which would be the only way out of this mess.

The fatal impact of the President's adventure in Iraq, however, runs far deeper than that. It has undermined the politics of fear which, above all else, had sustained the Bush administration.

In fact, the politics of fear may now be operating in reverse. The chronic belligerence of the Bush administration, especially in the last year with respect to Iran, and the cartoonish saber-rattling of Republican presidential candidates (whether genuine or because they believe themselves captives of the Bush legacy) is scary. Its only promise seems to be endless war for purposes few understand or are ready to salute. To paraphrase Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for many people now, the only thing to fear is the politics of fear itself.

And then there is the war on the Constitution. Randolph Bourne, a public intellectual writing around the time of World War I, is remembered today for one trenchant observation: that war is the health of the state. Mobilizing for war invites the cancerous growth of the bureaucratic state apparatus and its power over everyday life. Like some over-ripe fruit this kind of war-borne "healthiness" is today visibly morphing into its opposite -- what we might call the "sickness of the state."

The constitutional transgressions of the executive branch and its abrogation of the powers reserved to the other two branches of government are, by now, reasonably well known. Most of this aggressive over-reaching has been encouraged by the imperial hubris exemplified by the invasion of Iraq.

It would be short-sighted to think that this only disturbs the equanimity of a small circle of civil libertarians. There is a long-lived and robust tradition in American political life always resentful of this kind of statism. In part, this helps account for wholesale defections from the Republican Party by those who believe it has been kidnapped by political elites masquerading as down-home, "live free or die" conservatives.

All I Want For Christmas

I want bush to have a dream

like the one that Ebenezer Scrooge had
I want him to be visited by the ghosts of

Iraqi children who cry out,

"But mankind was your business."

I want all the Tiny Tims of the world
to get their 401k money back
from the white collar criminals who stole it

I want them to not go to war for oil,
good ratings, or weapon sale quotas
because this white collar mafia is in power

I wish bush would have an affair
I wish he'd take off his black pointed cowboy boots
and look at the moon more often

And then I wish he'd wake up
and be inflicted with what Jim Carey had
in the movie "Liar Liar"

I wish all the billboards across the country read:
"Give back the votes your brother stole"
and the poets would shout from every street corner,
"The emperor wears no clothes"

I want his mouth washed out with soap
every time he says "freedom and liberty"
and for him to wear a Darth Vader helmet
if he ever says "the axis of evil" again

I hope bush looks out his White House window
when we descend on Washington marching for peace
like hordes of starlings who know their way home
because it is in their nature

I want bush to have a dream
like the one that Martin Luther King had
I want him to be visited by the ghosts of King,
John Lennon, Paul Wellstone, and the Kennedys

I want the New York Times to cover the story
when his mother scolds him for being a bully
I hope he gets some Gi Joes for Christmas
and starts to play with real toys
and not with real people

I think bush should go back to school
and look up some words in the dictionary
or study history - like the Roman Empire
I'd like him to write on the blackboard 100 times,
"I will not promote propaganda - or the far right agenda"
" I will not join gangs"

I want bush to be haunted
by the ghosts of our Founding Fathers
until he learns this lesson:
that killing civilians is a terrorist act
and pre-emptive strike is invasion

I want him to break out in song
at his next Address to the Nation
singing "Give Peace a Chance" is all we are saying
and "We Shall Overcome"

I want bush to have an epiphany
or else I want him gone
I want Americans to say "yes" when the polls ask,
"Should regime change begin at home?"

And I want him to stop shouting "Fire!"
in the theatre when he is the one with the matches
I want him to care about children
more than slogans and re-elections

If bush doesn't have a real dream soon
he should step aside for those who do
He should impeach himself
and ask for forgiveness
for imposing his nightmare on the world

The Tale Of Christmas

It's the Christmas tale the Religious Right doesn't want you to hear: Their spiritual forebearers hated the holiday and even banned its celebration.

As we are in the middle, once again, of that great spending orgy called the holidays, I would like to ask you a simple question.

What IS Christmas?

OK, well maybe not a SIMPLE question, but does anyone really know of the origins of some of the Christmas traditions that are currently practiced by people this time of year?

It's ironic to hear Religious Right groups portray themselves as the great defenders of Christmas - their spiritual forebears hated the holiday and even banned its celebration.

The Puritans of Massachusetts Bay frowned on Christmas revelry, considering the holiday a Roman Catholic affectation. A law in the colony barred anyone from taking the day off work, feasting or engaging in other celebrations on Christmas, under penalty of a five-shilling fine.

The law was repealed in 1681, but Christmas celebrations remained unpopular in New England and other colonies for many years. That did not change after the Revolution, because many Americans viewed Christmas as a Tory custom, a reminder of the expelled British.

Although Christmas became popular in the South as early as the 1830s, other regions were apathetic. Writer Tom Flynn notes in his 1993 book The Trouble with Christmas that Congress did not begin adjourning on Christmas Day until 1856. Public schools in New England were often open on Dec. 25, as were many factories and offices. Many Protestant churches refused to hold services, considering the holiday "popish."

Not until after the Civil War did Christmas begin to seriously affect American cultural and religious life. European immigration increased sharply after the war, and many of the newcomers came from countries with strong Christmas traditions. Germans, Italians, Poles, Swedes, Norwegians and others brought the holiday and many of its features, including Christmas trees and Santa Claus, to America in a big way.

The celebration spread, and in 1870 Christmas was declared a federal holiday by Congress. But practices in the states continued to vary. As late as 1931, Flynn reports, nine states still called for public schools to remain open on Christmas Day.

It might also surprise Religious Right activists to learn that many of the Christmas traditions they defend so vociferously have, at best, a tenuous connection to Christianity.

Several of the holiday's most common features grow out of pre-Christian religions. The ancient Romans celebrated Saturnalia in mid-December, a time of general merriment, feasting and gift exchanges. Slaves were given time off and were even permitted to play dice games in public. During this period, many Romans decorated their homes with evergreens as a reminder that life would persevere through the dark days of winter.

Evergreen trees had long been viewed as a symbol of fertility by Pagan peoples. When winter came and most trees lost their leaves and appeared to die, the evergreen was a reminder that life would endure and that long days, warmer weather and a harvest would come again. Germans were early boosters of the Christmas tree and brought it to America. (The pious legend that Martin Luther decorated the first Christmas tree is not taken seriously by scholars.)

Candles, a necessary item during the dark winter period, were a common Saturnalia gift. Some scholars consider them a precursor to Christmas lights.

Originally celebrated on Dec. 17, the Roman Saturnalia eventually expanded to last an entire week, ending on Dec. 23.

So where did the Dec. 25 date for Christmas come from?

Many scholars believe that date came from another Roman festival, one that became popular around the middle of the third century - the feast of Sol Invictus, the unconquered sun.

During this festival, various gods related to the sun in the Roman pantheon were honored. The festival was most popular during the reign of the emperor Aurelian (270-275 A.D.), who attributed his military victories to the sun god and may have wanted to establish a solar deity as supreme in the Roman pantheon. Images of Sol Invictus remained popular and appeared on Roman coinage even during the reign of Constantine the Great (306-337 A.D.).

There is some evidence that early Christians celebrated the festival alongside Pagans, and that church leaders, seeing these practices under way, simply appropriated the date for the birth of Jesus as Christianity grew and became the dominant religion of the empire throughout the fourth and fifth centuries.

Michael Grant, the late scholar of the ancient world, noted in his 1985 book The Roman Emperors that Dec. 25 was "a bequest of the solar cult to Christianity, converted into Christmas Day."

Legal codes laid down by the emperors Theodosius I and later Justinian made Christianity the state religion and banned Paganism. Church leaders were generally tolerant of people taking old practices and adding a Christian gloss to them. Overt worship of Pagan gods disappeared but the Dec.25 date - and many residual practices associated with the old festival - remained.

As strange as it may seem, when Religious Right legal groups go to court to battle the "War on Christmas," they may really be defending practices historically associated with the worship not of the son of God but the sun in the sky.

Be Heard

Watch the videos of Rick Jacobs, Courage Campaign’s Chair, and Bill Carrick, a long-time consultant to Senator Feinstein, on KNBC’s News Conference.

Now, with Senator Feinstein facing one of the most important decisions of her 14-year tenure in the Senate, we need your help to make sure she responds by standing up for the Constitution.





Next week, a Senate Intelligence Committee bill re-authorizing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) will likely come to the Senate floor. This Intelligence Committee bill includes retroactive amnesty for telecom companies guilty of wiretapping Americans *without* a warrant.

Senator Chris Dodd, Senator Russ Feingold and several other Senators have recently said they will filibuster any legislation that contains retroactive telecom immunity. However, to date, Senator Feinstein has failed to indicate that she will support such a courageous stand in defense of our Constitution.

The Courage Campaign can use your help to keep the pressure on DiFi.

Mitt The Nit Wit Strikes Again

Religious liberty is, as Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney declared yesterday, "fundamental to America's greatness." With religious division inciting violence across the globe, he is right to celebrate America's tradition of religious tolerance. He's right, too, that no one should vote against him, or for him, because he is a Mormon. We only wish his empathy for religious minorities such as his own extended a bit further, to those who do not believe in God.

It is regrettable that 47 years after John F. Kennedy felt the need to promise voters that his Catholic faith would not dictate his conduct as president, Mr. Romney felt compelled to offer similar assurances that "no authorities of my church, or of any other church for that matter, will ever exert influence on presidential decisions."

It's regrettable, too, that the skepticism and even hostility some voters feel toward Mormonism has been played upon by the man who has emerged as his chief rival in Iowa, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who is running commercials that proclaim him to be a "Christian leader." That is why Mr. Romney felt the need to detail his creed: "I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God and the savior of mankind." If, as Mr. Romney correctly says, the country's founders took care not to impose a religious test for any public office, a candidate's belief, or not, in the divinity of Christ ought to be irrelevant.

Where Mr. Romney most fell short, though, was in his failure to recognize that America is composed of citizens not only of different faiths but of no faith at all and that the genius of America is to treat them all with equal dignity. "Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom," Mr. Romney said. But societies can be both secular and free. The magnificent cathedrals of Europe may be empty, as Mr. Romney said, but the democracies of Europe are thriving.

"Americans acknowledge that liberty is a gift of God, not an indulgence of government," Mr. Romney said. But not all Americans acknowledge that, and those who do not may be no less committed to the liberty that is the American ideal.
Did anyone else note that yesterdays speech from Mitt Romney to explain his Mormonism only mentions the word Mormon once?

It was reflective of bushies speech from a couple of years ago when his speech was filled with the words freedom and liberty. Yesterday's Romney speech contained the words freedom and liberty also. As a matter of fact freedom was repeated 11 times and liberty 12.

But what struck me funny was the amount of times he repeated the word religion. In his effort to state that Mormonism is a religion and not a cult, the word religion was repeated 35 times.

He even mentions OTHER Christian flavors like Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopalian, and all the others several times. Hell, he even said Islam on 4 different occasions.

But the mention of his own religion/cult Mormonism, only once.

He further went on to expose his understanding of American history by claiming that the founding father were Christian and that America was founded on Christian principles, which is FAR FROM accurate.

And then, TERROR OF TERRORS, he aligns himself with the withered carcass of papa bush and his George Washington look alike fossil of a wife.

The pundits immediately claimed the speech as being powerful and comparing Mitt to Kennedy, which is yet another historic inaccuracy.

ANYONE that votes for this guy is a complete fucking idiot.

bush Has No Business Being President

There are few choices more terrifying than the one bush has left us with yesterday.

We have either a president who is too dishonest to restrain himself from invoking World War III about Iran at least six weeks after he had to have known that the analogy would be fantastic, irresponsible bullshit or we have a president too stupid not to have asked, at what now appears to have been a series of opportunities to do so, whether the fairy tales he either created or was fed were still even remotely plausible.

A pathological presidential liar, or an idiot-in-chief.

It is the nightmare scenario of political science fiction: A critical juncture in our history and, contained in either answer, a president manifestly unfit to serve, and behind him in the vice presidency an unapologetic warmonger who has long been seeing a world visible only to himself.

After spokeswoman Dana Perino’s announcement from the White House late last night, the timeline is inescapable and clear.

In August the president was told by his hand-picked major-domo of intelligence, Mike McConnell, a flinty, high-strung-looking, worrying-warrior who will always see more clouds than silver linings, that what “everybody thought” about Iran might be, in essence, crap.

Yet on Oct. 17, the president said of Iran and its President Ahmadinejad:

“I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge to make a nuclear weapon.”

And as he said that, bush knew that at bare minimum there was a strong chance that his rhetoric was nothing more than words with which to scare the Iranians.

Or was it to scare the Americans?

In August, any commander-in-chief still able-minded or uncorrupted or both would have invoked the quality the job most requires:

mental flexibility.

A bright man, or an honest man, would have realized no later than the McConnell briefing that the only true danger about Iran was the damage that could be done by an unhinged, irrational Chicken Little of a president shooting his mouth off, backed up by only his own hysteria and his own delusions.

The Chicken Little of presidents is the one, bush, that you see in the mirror.

And the mind reels at the thought of a vice president fully briefed on the revised intel as long as two weeks ago, briefed on the fact that Iran abandoned its pursuit of this imminent threat four years ago, who never bothered to mention it to his boss.

It is nearly forgotten today, but throughout much of Ronald Reagan’s presidency it was widely believed that he was little more than a front man for some never-viewed, behind-the-scenes string-puller.

Today, as evidenced by this latest remarkable, historic malfeasance, it is inescapable that Dick Cheney is either this president’s evil ventriloquist or he thinks he is.

What servant of any of the 42 previous presidents could possibly withhold information of this urgency and gravity and wind up back at his desk the next morning, instead of winding up before a congressional investigation or a criminal one?

Mr. Cheney has usurped bushies constitutional powers, cut the idiot in chief out of the information loop and led him down the path to an unprecedented presidency in which the facts are optional, the intel is valued less than the hunch and the assistant runs the store.

The problem is Cheney is robbing you and your country blind.

Not merely in monetary terms, but, more important, of the traditions and righteousness for which we have stood, at great risk, for centuries: honesty, law, moral force.

Mr. Cheney has helped to make bushies administration into the kind our ancestors saw in the 1860s and 1870s and 1880s, the ones that abandoned Reconstruction and sent this country marching backward into the pit of American apartheid.

Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland — presidents who will be remembered only in a blur of failure. Presidents who will be remembered only as functions of those who opposed them, the opponents whom history proved right.

Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland ... bush.

Would that we could let this president off the hook by seeing him only as marionette or moron.

But a study of the mutation of his language about Iran proves that though he may not be very good at it, he is, himself, still a manipulative snake-oil salesman.

It is staggering.

• March 31: “Iran is trying to develop a nuclear weapon...”
• June 5: Iran’s “pursuit of nuclear weapons...”
• June 19: “consequences to the Iranian government if they continue to pursue a nuclear weapon...”
• July 12: “the same regime in Iran that is pursuing nuclear weapons...”
• Aug. 6: “this is a government that has proclaimed its desire to build a nuclear weapon...”

Notice a pattern?

Trying to develop, build or pursue a nuclear weapon.

Then, sometime between Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, those terms are suddenly swapped out, so subtly that only in retrospect can we see that somebody has warned the president, not only that he has gone out too far on the limb of terror but there may not even be a tree there.

McConnell, or someone, must have briefed him then.

• Aug. 9: “They have expressed their desire to be able to enrich uranium, which we believe is a step toward having a nuclear weapons program...”
• Aug. 28: “Iran’s active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons...”
• Oct. 4: “you should not have the know-how on how to make a (nuclear) weapon...”
• Oct. 17: “until they suspend and/or make it clear that they, that their statements aren’t real, yeah, I believe they want to have the **capacity**, the **knowledge**, in order to make a nuclear weapon.”

Before Aug. 9, it’s: Trying to develop, build or pursue a nuclear weapon.

After Aug. 9, it’s: Desire, pursuit, want ... knowledge technology know-how to enrich uranium.

And we are to believe that the National Intelligence Estimate this week talks of the Iranians suspending their nuclear weapons program in 2003....

And bush talked of the Iranians suspending their nuclear weapons program on Oct. 17.

And that’s just a coincidence?

And we are to believe that nobody told the president any of this until last week?

bushies insistence that he was not briefed on the NIE until last week might be legally true, something like “what the definition of ‘is’ is,” but with the subject matter being not interns but the threat of nuclear war.

Legally, it might save you from some war crimes trial, but ethically it is a lie.

It is indefensible.

He has been yelling threats into a phone for nearly four months, after the guy on the other end had already hung up.

bush, once again proves that he is a bald-faced liar.

And moreover, he has also revealed that John Bolton and Norman Podhoretz and the Wall Street Journal editorial board are also bald-faced liars.

bush not only knew all of this about Iran in early August, but he also knew it to be accurate.

And instead of sharing this good news with the people he has obviously forgotten, he represents, he merely fine-tuned his terrorizing of those people, to legally cover his own ass.

While bush filled the factual gap with sadistic visions of, as he phrased it Aug. 28, “nuclear holocaust,” and, as he phrased it Oct. 17, “World War III.”

My comments, bush, are often dismissed as simple repetitions of the phrase “george bush has no business being president.”

Well, guess what?

Tonight: hanged by his very own words, convicted by his own deliberate lies is proof.

bush has no business being president.