My feeble effort to put an end to the Big Media RNC shiboleth.

This is how it was distributed.

Short version: None from him directly. Less from his clients than before they became clients.

Dems Don’t Know Jack
A Prospect exclusive: A new analysis of Abramoff tribal money by a nonpartisan firm shows it’s a Republican scandal.
By Greg Sargent
Web Exclusive: 01.27.06

Print Friendly | Email Article

A new and extensive analysis of campaign donations from all of Jack Abramoff’s tribal clients, done by a nonpartisan research firm, shows that a great majority of contributions made by those clients went to Republicans. The analysis undercuts the claim that Abramoff directed sums to Democrats at anywhere near the same rate.

The analysis, which was commissioned by The American Prospect and completed on Jan. 25, was done by Dwight L. Morris and Associates, a for-profit firm specializing in campaign finance that has done research for many media outlets.

In the weeks since Abramoff confessed to defrauding tribes and enticing public officials with bribes, the question of whether Abramoff directed donations just to Republicans, or to the GOP and Democrats, has been central to efforts by both parties to distance themselves from the unfolding scandal. President Bush recently addressed the question on Fox News, saying: “It seems to me that he [Abramoff] was an equal money dispenser, that he was giving money to people in both political parties.”

Although Abramoff hasn’t personally given to any Democrats, Republicans, including officials with the GOP campaign to hold on to the Senate, have seized on the donations of his tribal clients as proof that the saga is a bipartisan scandal. And the controversy recently spread to the media when the ombudsman for The Washington Post, Deborah Howell, ignited a firestorm by wrongly asserting that Abramoff had given to both. She eventually amended her assessment, writing that Abramoff “directed his client Indian tribes to make campaign contributions to members of Congress from both parties.”

But the Morris and Associates analysis, which was done exclusively for The Prospect, clearly shows that it’s highly misleading to suggest that the tribes's giving to Dems was in any way comparable to their giving to the GOP. The analysis shows that when Abramoff took on his tribal clients, the majority of them dramatically ratcheted up donations to Republicans. Meanwhile, donations to Democrats from the same clients either dropped, remained largely static or, in two cases, rose by a far smaller percentage than the ones to Republicans did. This pattern suggests that whatever money went to Democrats, rather than having been steered by Abramoff, may have largely been money the tribes would have given anyway.

The analysis includes a detailed look at seven of Abramoff’s tribal clients, and a comparison of their giving with that of approximately 170 other tribes. (Abramoff is often said to have had nine tribal clients. But Morris omitted two of the tribes – the Pueblo of Santa Clara, whose donations were virtually nonexistent, and the Tigua Indian Reservation, because it isn’t listed in Federal lobbying files as having a lobbyist and Abramoff worked on contingency. At any rate Santa Clara’s post-Abramoff donations to the GOP were overwhelmingly higher than to Dems, so including them would have added even more to the GOP side of the ledger.)

The analysis shows:

in total, the donations of Abramoff’s tribal clients to Democrats dropped by nine percent after they hired him, while their donations to Republicans more than doubled, increasing by 135 percent after they signed him up;
five out of seven of Abramoff’s tribal clients vastly favored Republican candidates over Democratic ones;
four of the seven began giving substantially more to Republicans than Democrats after he took them on;
Abramoff’s clients gave well over twice as much to Republicans than Democrats, while tribes not affiliated with Abramoff gave well over twice as much to Democrats than the GOP -- exactly the reverse pattern.
“It’s very hard to see the donations of Abramoff’s clients as a bipartisan greasing of the wheels,” Morris, the firm’s founder and a former investigations editor at the Los Angeles Times, told The Prospect.

Bloomberg News published a similar, more limited analysis last month, which relied on a small amount of data also from Morris’ firm.” But that analysis didn't look at all of Abramoff's tribal clients, and didn't provide a detailed year-by-year analysis of their donations or a detailed comparison to other tribal giving. Since then, some observers, such as blogger Kevin Drum, have argued that a comprehensive look at the donations of all of Abramoff’s tribal clients would help shed light on the scandal.

The Prospect asked Morris to do two things: First, compare the contributions of all of Abramoff’s tribal clients before they’d signed on with Abramoff versus after they’d become his client. And second, compare the contributions of all Abramoff tribal clients with the contributions of all non-Abramoff tribes.

Here are Abramoff’s seven tribal clients, according to Morris’ analysis, complete with their pre-Abramoff and post Abramoff contributions:

1) Tribe: Saginaw Chippewa (Michigan)
Pre-Abramoff contributions to Dems (1991 - 9/2000): $371,250
Pre-Abramoff contributions to GOP (1991 - 9/2000): $285,000
Post-Abramoff contributions to Dems (9/2000 - 2003): $191,960
Post-Abramoff contributions to GOP (9/2000 - 2003): $401,500

2) Tribe: Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana
Pre-Abramoff contributions to Dems (1991 - 9/2000): $61,320
Pre-Abramoff contributions to GOP (1991 - 9/2000): $48,560
Post-Abramoff contributions to Dems (9/2000 - 2003): $64,000
Post-Abramoff contributions to GOP(9/2000 - 2003): $162,590

3) Tribe: Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana
Pre-Abramoff contributions to Dems (1991 - 4/2001): $1,000
Pre-Abramoff contributions to GOP (1991 - 4/2001): $750
Post-Abramoff contributions to Dems (4/2001 - 6/2004): $40,500
Post-Abramoff contributions to GOP (4/2001 - 6/2004): $168,750

4) Tribe: Pueblo of Sandia (New Mexico)
Pre-Abramoff contributions to Dems (1991 - 3/2002): $24,000
Pre-Abramoff contributions to GOP (1991 - 3/2002): $15,000
Post-Abramoff contributions to Dems (3/2002 - 6/2003): $18,500
Post-Abramoff contributions to GOP (3/2002 - 6/2003): $11,500

5) Tribe: Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians (California)
Pre-Abramoff contributions to Dems (1991 - 7/2002): $371,250
Pre-Abramoff contributions to GOP (1991 - 7/2002): $400,200
Post-Abramoff contributions to Dems (7/2002 - 6/2004): $70,000
Post-Abramoff contributions to GOP (7/2002 - 6/2004): $216,708

6) Tribe: Cherokee Nation (Oklahoma)
Pre-Abramoff contributions to Dems (1991 - 1/2003): $35,470
Pre-Abramoff contributions to GOP (1991 - 1/2003): $6,050
Post-Abramoff contributions to Dems (1/2003 - 12/2003): $250
Post-Abramoff contributions to GOP (1/2003 - 12/2003): $0

7) Tribe: Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians
Pre-Abramoff contributions to Dems (1991 - 1995): $4,600
Pre-Abramoff contributions to GOP (1991 - 1995): $31,000
Post-Abramoff contributions to Dems (1995 - 2004): $409,273
Post-Abramoff contributions to GOP (1995 - 2004): $884,927

As the above numbers show, four out of seven tribes -- Saginaw, Chitimacha, Coushatta and Mississippi – saw their contributions to Republicans increase significantly, even vastly, after they became Abramoff’s clients.

At the same time, two of those four tribes -- Saginaw and Chitimacha -- saw their giving to Democrats drop or remain static. The other two -- tribes Coushatta and Mississippi -- did see their giving to Dems rise under Abramoff, but by amounts that were dwarfed by the increases in giving to the GOP.

These patterns strongly suggest that Abramoff’s representation of the tribes manifested itself largely in a dramatic rise in contributions to the GOP. And it also suggests it’s likely that Abramoff had little impact on giving to Democrats.

Nor does it appear likely that Abramoff steered contributions to Dems from the remaining three tribes who didn’t see their giving to the GOP climb. Of those three tribes, one tribe -- Pueblo of Sandia -- saw a negligible shift in donations to both parties. The second -- Agua Caliente -- slashed its contributions to both parties, but even so, the percentage of that tribe’s giving that went to Republicans still rose dramatically. The third -- Cherokee Nation -- simply stopped giving altogether.

The big picture is also compelling. Taken together, Abramoff’s tribal clients gave $868,890 to Dems before hiring him; afterwards, they gave $794,483 -- a decrease of nine percent. By contrast, the tribes’ donations to Republicans went from $786,560 pre-Abramoff to $1,845,975 after he became their lobbyist -- an increase of 135 percent. In other words, when Abramoff entered the picture, contributions to Dems dropped, while donations to Republicans more than doubled.

Adding to the case, the Morris firm also did a year-by-year analysis, from 1991 to the present, of the giving of scores of tribes -- Abramoff’s clients included. The firm’s look at the year-by-year giving of his clients is eye-opening. It shows even more clearly that in some cases clients’ giving to the GOP jumped dramatically just after Abramoff signed them.

For example, the Saginaw Chippewa became Abramoff’s client in late 2000, and in the election cycle that immediately followed, the tribe’s giving to Republicans more than doubled -- from $78,000 to $167,000 -- while giving to Dems rose only $12,000.

“The giving of Indian tribes in general has increased dramatically over the last decade,” Morris told The Prospect. “But if you single out Abramoff’s clients year by year, you can see that the giving increases far more to Republicans when Abramoff became their lobbyist.”

Finally, Morris did an extensive comparison of the donations of both Abramoff tribes and non-Abramoff tribes. Morris added up giving from 1991 to the present by virtually all of the approximately 170 tribes that gave politically but are not affiliated with the lobbyist.

The totals show that in the past 15 years, the tribes gave more than $15.5 million to Democrats and just over $6 million to the GOP -- well over twice as much to Democrats as to Republicans.

By contrast, if you total up all the contributions Abramoff’s clients made, it comes to $1,845,975 to Republicans and $794,483 to Democrats -- well over twice as much to Republicans as to Democrats. So the pattern of giving of Abramoff’s clients, who gave with far more generosity to Republicans, is almost exactly the reverse of that of virtually all other tribes not connected with Abramoff. Those tribes, by contrast, gave far more to Democrats.

“If you’re going to make the case that this is a bipartisan scandal, you have to really stretch the imagination,” says Morris. “Most individual tribes were predominantly Democratic givers through the last decade. Only Abramoff’s clients switched dramatically from largely Democratic to overwhelmingly Republican donors, and that happened only after he got his hands on them.”

Note: The analysis The Prospect commissioned is available here. The first chart refers to the tribes’ pre- and post-Abramoff donations. The second is the total giving of non-Abramoff tribes. The third is a year-by-year breakdown of tribal giving.

Greg Sargent, a contributing editor at New York Magazine, writes bi-weekly for The American Prospect. He can be reached at greg_sargent@newyorkmag.com.

© 2006 by The American Prospect, Inc.

I'm enjoying it a little bit even though this expansion of democracy and freedom in the Middle East (or whatever vile crap pours out of the Idiot-in-Chief's mouth) is awful news for Israel (notwithstanding the extent to which it enabled Hamas in the first place) and, to a lesser degree, the entire Middle East.

Hamas wins a majority in a landslide.

Wonderful what free people can do, isn't it Mr. Preznit? The Palestinians happily give terrorists legal power and we happily elect a President whose administration is full of America-haters destroying America.

Thank God for freedom!

Anyone think any lobbyist reforms won't consist of lightweight limits balanced with a broad assortment of loopholes?

But the K Streeters are coming out in force. In modern Congressional SOP, the K Streeters'll write the reform bill.

Buried deep in the 26 Times (is burying a story the Times' idea of highlighting its importance?):

Lobbyists Oppose Efforts to Impose New Restrictions

Dr. Rath speaks (at his own expense) in the 26 January Times:

Dr. Rath's Open Letter

George Bush, Do Not Attack Iran
In Order To Pass Your Patriot Act!
Corporate Interests Are Destroying Our Democracy

Never before in US History were civil rights violated and democratic rights destroyed so systematically as today. Phone calls, e-mails, bank accounts and even patient records are being spied upon - authorized by the man who was sworn into office to be the first to protect the Constitution - the President. All this happens under the pretense of fighting 'terrorism.' If this is so, why has the Bush Administration deceived the American people about 'September 11' and the war on Iraq? Or is there another agenda behind the destruction of democracy in America? Of course, there is.

Drug Industry Needs Dictatorial Powers to Continue its Business
The pharmaceutical industry promises health, but its entire business is based on the promotion of diseases. Class action lawsuits against Vioxx and other drugs are beginning to expose this fraud. Now an NIH study shows that the answer to the entire cancer epidemic is not the multi-billion dollar business with 'chemo'-therapy, but effective safe and affordable vitamins.
To prevent their demise, the drug industry became the largest donor of Bush's election campaigns. His task: protect the continuation of its multibillion dollar global health fraud.

The Patriot Act - The Key Tool to Abolish Democracy in America
The key tool to allow the continuation of the pharmaceutical fraud against the health and life interests of 280 million Americans is the socalled 'Patriot Act.' It lends dictatorial powers to the executive branch, i.e. the Bush Administration. And the drug industry needs these powers not only to cover their fraud for now - but forever.
This is why Bush is putting up the battle of his Presidency to make the Patriot Act indefinite! With that step the pharmaceutical drug cartel would be cementing its reign forever - from within the White House.

To Pass the Patriot Act, the Drug Cartel Needs a Global War!
Considering the growing distrust of George Bush by the American people, the 'Patriot Act' will not be passed indefinitely - unless a global state of terror and fear is created that surpasses the horror of 9/11 by an order of magnitude. This can only be achieved by the use of weapons of mass destruction against Iran or any other country. This unimaginable scenario would serve as the pretense to pass the Patriot Act without significant opposition. George Bush just needs to copy the events of 1933 in Germany.

Do you really want to watch this happen?

Even one old Republican is scared of the wingnuts:

January 24, 2006
Unfathomed Dangers in PATRIOT Act Reauthorization
by Paul Craig Roberts

A provision in the "PATRIOT Act" creates a new federal police force with the power to violate the Bill of Rights. You might think that this cannot be true, as you have not read about it in newspapers or heard it discussed by talking heads on TV.

Go to House Report 109-333 USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act of 2005 and check it out for yourself. Sec. 605 reads:

"There is hereby created and established a permanent police force, to be known as the 'United States Secret Service Uniformed Division.'"

This new federal police force is "subject to the supervision of the Secretary of Homeland Security."

The new police are empowered to "make arrests without warrant for any offense against the United States committed in their presence, or for any felony cognizable under the laws of the United States if they have reasonable grounds to believe that the person to be arrested has committed or is committing such felony."

The new police are assigned a variety of jurisdictions, including "an event designated under section 3056(e) of title 18 as a special event of national significance" (SENS).

"A special event of national significance" is neither defined nor does it require the presence of a "protected person" such as the president in order to trigger it. Thus, the administration, and perhaps the police themselves, can place the SENS designation on any event. Once a SENS designation is placed on an event, the new federal police are empowered to keep out and arrest people at their discretion.

The language conveys enormous discretionary and arbitrary powers. What is "an offense against the United States"? What are "reasonable grounds"?

You can bet the Alito/Roberts court will rule that it is whatever the executive branch says.

The obvious purpose of the act is to prevent demonstrations at Bush/Cheney events. However, nothing in the language limits the police powers from being used only in this way. Like every law in the U.S., this law also will be expansively interpreted and abused. It has dire implications for freedom of association and First Amendment rights. We can take for granted that the new federal police will be used to suppress dissent and to break up opposition. The Brownshirts are now arming themselves with a Gestapo.

Many naïve Americans will write to me to explain that this new provision in the reauthorization of the "PATRIOT Act" is necessary to protect the president and other high officials from terrorists or from harm at the hands of angry demonstrators: "No one else will have anything to fear." Some will accuse me of being an alarmist, and others will say that it is unpatriotic to doubt the law's good intentions.

Americans will write such nonsense despite the fact that the president and foreign dignitaries are already provided superb protection by the Secret Service. The naïve will not comprehend that the president cannot be endangered by demonstrators at SENS at which the president is not present. For many Americans, the light refuses to turn on.

In Nazi Germany, did no one but Jews have anything to fear from the Gestapo?

By Stalin's time, Lenin and Trotsky had eliminated all members of the "oppressor class," but that did not stop Stalin from sending millions of "enemies of the people" to the Gulag.

It is extremely difficult to hold even local police forces accountable. Who is going to hold accountable a federal police protected by Homeland Security and the president?

Dr. Roberts is John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He is a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.

We don't give people a reason to vote for us, we don't give them a reason to vote at all, we don't give them a reason not to vote against the GOP destroyers of America because the elected Dems don't believe in doing anyting to stop them.

From Salon's War Room:

You can make an argument that the president is entitled to some senatorial deference when it comes to Cabinet picks. The guy runs the executive branch, so maybe there's a rebuttable presumption that he gets the people he wants to work for him there. But the judiciary isn't part of the executive branch. It's the independent third branch of government, and it's hard to articulate a reason why the Senate must defer to the president's judgment on how it should be staffed. So yes, Bush has nominated exactly the sort of nominee that Democrats probably expected. But that doesn't mean that they're bound -- legally, morally or otherwise -- to put such a nominee on the court.

To the contrary, most Democrats in the Senate have run for election and reelection by promising that they'd do what they could to prevent a president from packing the court with judges who will vote to overturn Roe. By voting against Alito -- as almost all of them now seem likely to do -- they're keeping their campaign promises just as surely as Bush did when he nominated him. As Feinstein put it today, "If one is pro-choice in this day and age, in this structure, one can't vote for Judge Alito. It is simply that simple."

So where's the filibuster? If no Dem can at least try to filibuster Alito there is no justification for the existence of the party. It has proven its irrelevance, it has acquiesced to one-party rule.

And, also from the War Room, yet another example of why the GOP is absolute scum -- as if it's needed or would change anything. And this too.

Life in aone-party state is wonderful. Not.

Two from Buzzflash:

Governing by "Soap Opera": The GOP Fine Art of Demagoguery vs. the Dazed and Confused Democratic Leadership Appeal to Reason

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

Republican campaign consultants are, in one way, right about the Democratic leadership.

It is out of touch with the meat and potatoes American who watches the equivalent of 77 days a year of television. The Democratic leaders, college-educated and generally a bit contemptuous of television outside of PBS, "The Daily Show" and some other hip offerings, don't get what's going on.

Just look at the on-cue crying jag and trembling flight of Mrs. Alito from her husband's hearings, egged on by Lindsey Graham, a former impeachment floor manager and now a senator who unethically was involved in the "coaching" of Alito during "mock Senate hearings" to prepare him. We can also safely assume that Graham was involved in the scripting of the hearings that included the soap opera dramatic moment of Mrs. Alito breaking down in tears.

It's not like the Democrats should have been surprised. For one thing, it was a warmed-over script. Clarence Thomas's wife had the same calculated "soap opera" moment during his hearings, and some of the Dem Senators were around then.

And despite the Democratic leadership's derisive dismissal of these tactics, they work in the elusive "Middle America," among those Americans for whom news and entertainment are so intertwined that they are indistinguishable. Take this account of a talk radio "experience" the Capital Times (Wisconsin) columnist Dave Zweifel had after the Mrs. Alito-staged "cry me a river" moment:

I got firsthand experience the other day on how this phenomenon some call "attack radio" is creating a misinformed and distrustful public....

I was treated to the tail end of strident attacker Vicki McKenna's ranting and raving over the news that Sam Alito's wife had to leave the hearing on her husband's Supreme Court nomination in tears. This was the first I heard of the episode so I listened more closely.

Clearing implying that the nasty Democrats on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee had caused this embarrassing situation with their over-the-top questioning of Alito, McKenna said if it was her she wouldn't have left in tears, but instead have thrown something at the nasty senators.

What really happened, obviously, was a far cry from what the attackers had led me to believe.

Incredibly, a fair number of Americans list attack radio shows as the place they get their news.

- Madison Times, January 16, 2006

And the crying scene (p. 43 of the White House script, no doubt) coverage wasn't limited to the right wing media echo chamber -- as vast as it is -- it was all over mainstream television and print, particularly Cable TV news. The people involved with the Swift Boat attacks were handing out press releases that they had no doubt prepared in advance, egging on coverage of the fabricated personal emotional moment. It was quite a propaganda operation.

The Democrats in Congress always looked dazed and confused when this tactic occurs, as if a nude streaker had suddenly jogged into the hearing, run a celebratory lap, and then disappeared. But that is why they are not blameless; this is a technique that Republicans almost daily employ -- and certainly trot out at decisive moments to compensate for their vulnerabilities and incompetence.

When John Kerry expressed admiration for how the Cheneys handled their daughter being a lesbian in a debate in which he, for the third time, pummeled Bush in the polls, the GOP propaganda machine was ready with an onslaught of feigned outrage. The claim was that Kerry was a cad who was using Mary Cheney's sexual orientation for political gain.

The fake uproar from the Cheneys was disingenuous and calculated, given that John Edwards had made a similar compliment directly to Cheney during the vice-presidential debate and Cheney thanked him for it.

But given Bush's lamentable performance during the debates, the Republicans desperately needed a "soap opera moment" to distract from Kerry's clear superior debating and policy articulation skills. So they turned to the same type of emotional news/entertainment story that dominates television: the GOP White House version of the "runaway bride." They made the debate pivot on a personal emotional moment, a diversion that dominated the airwaves of television and radio, because this is a story (the "protective parents" appeal) that voters who no longer have a choice between news and entertainment (since they are now pretty much one and the same) can relate to.

That's why the Republican consultants employ the formulaic appeal of the soap opera to get out of a jam, while the Democrats attempt cautious public policy approaches, urged on by fat cat consultants who are clueless except in knowing how to milk a cash cow. In this sense, the Republican consultants earn their money, while the Democratic veteran campaign and policy advisors don't.

In a nutshell, putting the multi-billion dollar funded right wing think tanks aside for the moment, almost the entire "appeal" of a radical, extremist political fringe element to television-addled Americans can be attributed to "soap opera" tactics to manipulate emotions.

There is a word for this and it's called acting like a demagogue.

And people who play the demagogue card usually end up being dictators. It doesn't matter whether they are Fascists, Communists or Nationalists, the two go hand in hand. That is how we go from "soap opera" moments that manipulate emotions, to the creation of a concept of a permanent war that manipulates fear, to the solidification of a "unitary executive" with powers to break the law and ignore the Constitution.

It's a sleight of hand all right. While many Americans are diverted by a tearful Mrs. Alito, her husband, who believes in the imperial Republican Il Duce, gets seated on the Supreme Court to help coronate King George.

The Democratic leadership in Congress believes you can appeal to public policy issues and the separation of powers in a Senate confirmation hearing. But reason and logic are not tools in the arsenal of the GOP demagogue. The GOP radicals have only emotions as their target, not reason.

The Democrats are looking to appeal to the brain; the Republicans to the manipulation of emotions that race through the heart -- and are subject to the strategic use of television "stories" and photo ops.

The parties are targeting two different body organs.

And in a world dominated by trivial news that appeals to the emotions -- and sensational celebrity gaffes, romantic entanglements and crimes -- the appeal to the brain has but the shortest of shelf lives.

It's barely but a blip on the radar screen of the evening news.

And:

"The Big Show" -- Confirming Alito Moves Us One Step Closer to Erasing the American Revolution

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

A Washington Post headline on January 9th blared, "Democrats Ready to Go After Alito". But, it's probably too late, as usual. And this time, the Democrats are signing their own death warrant -- and that of Congress -- if Alito gets seated.

As usual, the hearing will all just be a farce, a sparring match like pissing into the wind. These hearings almost always are, as the Madison Capitol Times pointed out: "When the Senate Judiciary Committee begins questioning Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito this week, Americans will again be reminded of the limitations of the confirmation process for presidential picks to serve on the federal bench. Alito will lie to the committee, intentionally and repeatedly."

While the Democratic senators once again surrender to the concept that stage-crafted hearings filled with lies and evasions by the Republican Supreme Court nominees matter, the GOP has been running ads, holding rallies, and grassroots lobbying like a well-oiled machine. The Republican junta isn't waiting to make up its mind.

That's why Jerry Falwell already proclaimed joyous victory for a fundamentalist Supreme Court that would accede to the demands of the Executive Branch in all things totalitarian and religious. On the latest in the rounds of Sunday religious/political rallies for Alito, Falwell let you know Alito was their guy in no uncertain terms. He didn't need to wait for the "performance" of the hearings:

"What we've worked on for 30 years, to mobilize people of faith and value in this country, what we've done through these years is coming to culmination right now," Falwell said at a rally on the eve of Alito's confirmation hearing.

"Now we're looking at what we really started on 30 years ago, reconstruction of a court system gone awry," Falwell said.

-- "Christian Conservatives Rally for Judge Alito," Reuters, January 9, 2006

Alito will facilitate the merger of church and state under the nearly full control of a Republican executive branch that will be able to use any means it wants to ensure permanent rule, including wiretapping of political opponents in the guise of national security.

You see, Alito is a key architect, as we have pointed out in two previous BuzzFlash commentaries, of the absolute authority of a Republican President. Not only is he a firm believer in near dictatorial powers and making congress irrelevant, he was a key strategist in having the Republican executive branch assume such powers incrementally so as not to be noticed -- and therefore disarm any opposition among the American people or in Congress.

In short, Alito believes in the boiling frog theory of the Republican Executive Branch takeover of the American Constitution and democracy: boil it slowly and no one will realize that our balance of powers is being killed.

Howard Dean and Ted Kennedy are among the few Democratic leaders to take notice of the threat that Alito poses to the American Constitution and to democracy. Most of the other Democrats in the Senate express "concern" about Alito's championing of Executive Branch domination of government and exemption from following Congressional laws, but these Democratic senators -- wishy-washy and timid as usual -- say, "well let's wait and see what he has to say at the hearings."

This is the cruelest cut of all. The hearings are carefully crafted by the White House to make Alito appear as moderate and non-committal as possible in order to make the Democrats appear extreme if they filibuster Alito.

Alito is the mastermind behind presidential signing statements that allow Bush to -- in essence -- rewrite congressional law by stating his interpretation of the law. This, in reality, eliminates the need for a Congress at all. (Alito is also similarly a key advocate behind the strategy of dismantling Roe v. Wade in increments until people don't realize that it has been overturned through a series of "smaller" decisions. This, he believes, will bolster judicial consensus and help avoid political fallout to the Republican Party.) He is, in short, acutely conscious of the political context of how to achieve radical judicial objectives.

In not promising to filibuster Alito, the Democrats AND the Republicans in Congress are signing the death warrant of Congress as an institution.

Polls show the American public is about evenly split on Alito, or leaning slightly in favor of him. They would be adamantly opposed if the Senate Democrats had come out early and vigorously against his anti-Constitutional positions and extreme judicial viewpoints. He's not a virgin. He's a known quantity and an important architect of the imperial Republican presidency.

He will say whatever he needs to say to make a Democratic filibuster seem like extremism, when he is the extremist who threatens the very foundation of our democracy and system of checks and balances.

The Democrats in the Senate have already made an enormous tactical mistake in once again deferring their courage until "the big show" gets under way. Everyone has seen this play before, just some of the lies and evasions change. And then the Dems will cave, and promise to fight the next nominee. It's deja vu all over again.

As for Alito's skill in doing the Senate hearings rope-a-dope, "Sam was the kind of person you want when the entire world is going to be flyspecking everything you write and challenging every construct you advance," a former colleague in the Reagan/Meese Justice Department said of the man the Democrats claim they will "pin down."

And to those Republicans who have started yelling every nominee should have an up or down vote, then why did the right wing sink the Harriet Miers nomination before it even got to a hearing room?

This isn't a theatrical production. We're about to see the balance of powers guaranteed in our Constitution dismantled.

An election was stolen in 2000 by a 5-4 vote. It's about to get a lot worse.

Thousands still missing after Katrina

Medical examiner wants search to resume in hardest-hit areas

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AP) -- More than 3,200 people are officially still unaccounted for nearly five months after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, and the state medical examiner wants the search to resume for those missing from the most devastated neighborhoods.

Of course, there's also this:

January 22, 2006

The Nation

In New Orleans, Smaller May Mean Whiter

By JAMES DAO

MAYOR C. RAY NAGIN of New Orleans was greeted with yowls of protest last week when he declared that it was God's will for New Orleans to be a "chocolate" city. Whites shouted racism; tourist groups threatened to cancel bookings; even his friends rolled their eyes at Mr. Nagin's penchant for saying the wrong thing at the wrong moment.

But one group, the displaced black residents of New Orleans, might have welcomed Mr. Nagin's message. The city, nearly 70 percent African-American before Hurricane Katrina, had lost some of its largest black neighborhoods to the deluge, and many fear it will never be a predominantly black city again, as it has been since the 1970's.

Of course the GOP monied special interests want the poor people out. Only news is the above appeared on the Times' front page.

Terrorists kill 3,000+ and destroy a chunk of allegedly prime real estate.

The response:

Approximately 2,200 Americans dead, tens of thousands of others, and a lot of real estate, prime and otherwise, destroyed. And a nation destabilized.

See something wrong with this picture?

The 2008 Dem frontrunner of the moment:

"We have a culture of corruption, we have cronyism, we have incompetence," she said. "I predict to you that this administration will go down in history as one of the worst that has ever governed our country."

That was Hillary.

Don't remember her husband exactly helping to ensure getting replaced by another Dem in '00. So no, she has no right to complain. They were in position to prevent what she's bitching about and chose not to.

Martin Garbus: 'How close are we to the end of democracy?'
Date: Saturday, January 21 @ 09:04:49 EST
Topic: Commander-In-Thief

Martin Garbus, The Huffington Post

We have today seen President Bush's legal defense for the surveillance program. There is, he tells us, an unparalled crisis.

It reminds me of the United States Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore, stating they had to interfere with the election and overrule the Florida Supreme Court because we were in a national crisis -- we couldn't have a president elected at the appropriate time and place.

There was then a democracy with the Constitution telling us exactly how the election should be handled.

There is no crisis today that justifies suspending the constitution. There is a constitution in effect today. That constitution has endured for over 200 years.

Bush's cry of "crisis" is as false as former Chief Justice Rehnquist's (and four other Justices) cry of crisis. Each time both Rehnquist and Bush tried to set aside the Constitution to get an illegal result.



No president in over 200 years of our history has ever before claimed the "unitary powers" that Bush claims are his. Not President Lincoln during the Civil War, not President Wilson during World War I, not President Roosevelt during World War II, not President Truman during Korea, and not Presidents Johnson and Nixon during Vietnam.

Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and James Madison all saw the danger -- they never arrogated that power to the presidency.

Alito and Roberts, Thomas and Scalia, claim it, Bush claims it. Kennedy, who said in Bush v. Gore the Court was reconsidering the design of the government, will surely go along.

The President claims that he has the right to interpret laws "in a manner consistent with the Constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as the Commander-in-Chief and consistent with constitutional limitations on judicial power."

Bush bridled when asked by a reporter if "unchecked" presidential powers were dictatorial, angrily said, "I disagree with your view of unchecked power. There is the check of people being sworn to uphold the law for starters. There is oversight. We're talking to Congress all the time . . . to say unchecked powers is to ascribe dictatorial powers to the president, to which I object."

His objection is dishonest.

What does "unitary powers" mean? It means that if the President alone decides that the country is faced with what he alone defines to be a critical problem, his authority is unchecked. In other words, he decides where the powers lies in the Constitution -- he decides the contour of his power. This sounds more like a monarchy, more like authoritarianism than a democracy.

The taking of this power is not a coup d'état because the people today have the power of the vote in 2008. But it is dangerously close on that path -- the Founders recognized the danger of a too-powerful President.

The Bush Administration told us it does not deal with reality -- it creates reality -- Bush has created a legal façade allowing him to create his own world and then react to it as he chooses. Unfortunately, we are all dragged into his make-believe world with its make-believe legal system.

Samuel Alito, John Roberts (in his Circuit Court decisions), Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, and wunderkind John Yoo give the President unchecked domestic and foreign powers to create that world. Bush can start his own wars, preemptive or otherwise, is the ultimate interpreter of foreign treaties, he defines enemy combatants as he wishes, he detains prisoners for as long as he wishes, he continues surveillance on foreign intercepts for as long as he wishes, he tortures as he wishes, he can ignore Congressional directives and statutes such as those creating FISA, as well as essential elements of our Constitution.

This litany has no end. We cannot now anticipate all the ramifications of the "unitary" president and his claim of "inherent powers," except that it clearly allows him to fully take over the government.

Although the Alito nomination process was largely a waste, it was very valuable in showing us how long and hard the Conservatives have thought about the "unitary" president. In Alito's earliest days with the Reagan administration, he laid out his concept of unchecked power -- of inherent authority. Tracing the clear, straight line from Meese to Bork to Alito to Thomas to Yoo to Gonzalez is easy, for those who can look. We can see the further immediate development, deepening and expansion of the concept of the unitary President that it became, long ago, before anyone was aware of it, a critical tenet of the Federalist Society and of the Conservative wing of the Republican Party.

The new power the President has come from somewhere. If you give him new powers, it comes at the expense of the people who previously had the power through the Congress to make those decisions.

This idea of this change of the power structure was not a flash in the pan idea -- it is not a concept without a meaning -- it is very serious and must be treated as such.

Gonzalez, Alito and Roberts argue that if the Constitution does not very specifically preclude the President's actions, he has a free hand. They claim they are writing on a clean slate. If the Founding Fathers did not anticipate everything a President might try and do and did not prohibit it, then Bush can do it. Only a document far, far longer than this Constitution could even attempt to scratch at the surface of these unforeseen events.

The Bush Administration ignore centuries of Constitutional decision-making that limits the President, decisions during the Civil War, World War II, World War II and the Korean, Vietnamese and Cold Wars. In the unlikely event the new Supreme Court does not give him all he wants, he will ignore those decisions as well.

That is truly what a "unitary" president means. If America did not pay attention before, it must now.

So what. Of course it doen't make it right.

But some facts are here.

Mel Gibson is apparently a clleague of mine here at Blogspot.

Check out his blog here!

As we in the legal biz are often forced to put it, the the whatever speaks for itself.

In Alito's case, his unfitness for a seat on the Supreme Court is based on his record: writings and judicial decisions.

Of course, the wingnuts do not have a substantive response, just agitprop and worse.

Id he was OK for the appeallate bench years ago he must be just as approvable now. No, now he has a record as a judge and that changes everything.

Or, better: all those writings of Alito's, well, they're inoperative, they were never true, just some sort of babble.

Whatever.

But for lucidity, here's this which, it's safe to say, hasnt been seen enough:

Attacks On Analysis Of Alito Record Are Pure Politics

Paul Janensch
News Media

January 19 2006

Q: Professor News, what do you think of the Republican attacks on the Knight Ridder Newspapers' story analyzing Samuel Alito's record as a federal judge?

A: Not much. The story, the result of a careful reading of Alito's 15 years on the federal bench, was based on facts. The attacks were based on politics.

The story concluded that Alito was a judicial conservative. Some leading Republicans took exception to this characterization, which seems strange.

The piece, by Stephen Henderson and Howard Mintz, was sent Dec. 1 by the Knight Ridder Washington bureau to the 32 Knight Ridder newspapers and some 300 other newspapers that subscribe to the Knight Ridder Tribune News Service.

Within days, the Republican Senate Conference issued a memo that said the piece misrepresented Alito's record. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said in a letter published by The Philadelphia Inquirer, a Knight Ridder newspaper, that the story was "neither objective nor accurate."

The story was mentioned during the Senate hearings on Alito's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, although viewers of the tedious proceedings may have missed it amid the bloviating by Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee and the bland, noncommittal responses by the nominee.

Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., made a reference to the story. Then Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., said the story "had been thoroughly discredited."

Another attack on the story came from the Republican National Committee, which said reporter Henderson must be biased because he had once been an editorial writer.

What exactly did the story say to upset Alito backers? It said that during his 15 years on the federal bench, Alito "has worked quietly but resolutely to weave a conservative legal agenda into the fabric of the nation's laws."

After examining all of Alito's 311 published opinions and interviewing legal scholars, Henderson, Knight Ridder's Supreme Court specialist, and Mintz, of the San Jose Mercury News, came to this conclusion: "Although Alito's opinions are rarely written with obvious ideology, he's seldom sided with a criminal defendant, a foreign national facing deportation, an employee alleging discrimination or consumers suing big business."

Is that so shocking? Alito was nominated by a president who promised to name conservatives to the high court and who has said that the two justices he admires the most are conservatives Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Perhaps the Republican critics of the Knight Ridder analysis wanted only conservatives to know that Alito is a conservative but wanted everyone else to think he has a totally open mind and no political views.

In defense of the story, Clark Hoyt, Knight Ridder's Washington editor, wrote that "fact-based reporting is under more relentless assault than at any time in my more than 40 years in Washington." He deplored a trend of attacking the messenger rather than debating issues.

He said it is unhealthy that zealous partisans in both parties have adopted a "with us or against us" syndrome. The job of journalists, he said, "is to be neither with them nor against them. It's to find out the facts as best we can and to report them as fully, fairly and accurately as we can."

I couldn't have put it better.

Paul Janensch is a former newspaper editor who teaches journalism at Quinnipiac University. His column appears on the first and third Thursday of every month. He can be heard at 8:35 a.m. Thursdays on the five stations of WNPR Connecticut Public Radio, including 90.5 in Hartford. E-mail: paul.janensch@quinnipiac.edu.

Copyright 2006, Hartford Courant

Looky: This drawing by the Master was done in 2000 -- and is still applicable right this second!

Can't find the link -- think it's from the N.Y. Observer, but its archives refuse to confirm -- so I have to run the whole piece:

Police-State Powers Are Our Biggest Threat

By: Martin Garbus
Date: 12/26/2005
Page: 5

What has happened in this country?

The Pentagon has a secret court created by the Foreign Intelligence Services Act (FISA). The courtroom is in a windowless room on the top floor of the Department of Justice. There are seven rotating judges. The court meets in secret, with no published opinions or public records. No one, except the FISA judge involved and the Department of Justice, knows what is done. No one, except the government and the FISA judge, knows at whom the warrants are aimed. There is no review by anyone. Over 12,000 search warrants permitting eavesdropping, surveillance and break-ins have been sought by the government. Only once has the FISA court denied a warrant.

The FISA court has issued more warrants than the more than 1,000 district judges in the federal system.

The Pentagon has already expanded its domestic-surveillance activity beyond any previous time in history. It breaks into homes, wiretaps and eavesdrops at will, and builds secret dossiers on citizens while arguing that there can be no judicial review of its activities. President George W. Bush argues that there can be no judicial review of any decision he makes when he decides whether an alien or an American citizen is or is not an enemy combatant. Congress supports this; so does the judiciary.

The expansion of Presidential powers and the expansion of police powers is the single most important issue facing this country. It is safe to say the new Supreme Court and a majority of Congress (both Democrats and Republicans) are prepared to give Mr. Bush a blank check. On Nov. 15, Carl Levin, the liberal Democratic Senator from Michigan and an outspoken opponent of the war in Iraq, joined his Republican counterpart from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, in supporting legislation validating the President’s Alice-in-Wonderland legal system and the expansion of his police powers. The Senate vote was 79 to 16 in favor.

What’s more, the Patriot Act had been extended. For the last three years, the President has justified torture, and Congress will soon give him legal permission to use it.

If or when there’s another terrorist attack, the government will seek more powers, claiming that it shows current laws are inadequate. We will certainly see, as we recently saw in Britain, the head of government ask for 90-day detentions of terror suspects without access to court. The attempt to end habeas corpus started at Guantánamo; it is now spreading to the rest of America.

Five years after we opened the Guantánamo prison, not one person in that prison has been found guilty of anything.

The legal system to treat the new prisoners of the war on terror, created out of thin air, disgraces us. No one ever before suggested such a legal system—not during the Civil War, not during World War I or World War II, and not during the Cold War.

We are better than military commissions, Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, the Patriot Act and “rendition”—the sending of prisoners overseas to be tortured at C.I.A.-controlled prisons.

This country is approaching a dangerous turning point. There has long been a desire and a political movement in America for restrictions on democratic rights, for an authoritarian government propelled by a combination of religious and nationalistic fervor. The helplessness caused by the events of Sept. 11 and the domestic and international war against Muslim “terrorists” deepened this desire. Never before was there such a possibility of such long-term constitutional violations, because there has never before been such an open-ended war.

In Weimar Germany, a feeling of helplessness led to Hitler’s rise and the creation of the ultimate police state. There are similarities—and, of course, very significant differences—between America in the 21st century and Germany in the 1920’s.

Mr. Bush has suggested that he was chosen by God to lead the United States in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The Nazi government, against religion, saw the salvation of the German people in messianic terms.

Many liberals and conservatives are concerned where all of this might lead. Professor Fritz Stern, a professor of German studies at Columbia University, pointed out that Hitler saw himself as “the instrument of providence” who fused his “racial dogma with Germanic Christianity.” Paul Craig Roberts, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a former Wall Street Journal editor, writes of the “brownshirting” of American conservatism—he says the hype about terrorism serves little or “no purpose other than to build a police state that is far more dangerous to Americans than terrorists.”

The pressure for fascism comes not just from the top. Without the people’s support, the Weimar government would not have been overthrown.

The change here is incremental and harder to see.

How we conduct the “war on terror” tells the American people who we are and what this country stands for. America has the oldest and most dynamic democracy in the world. It can right itself if the people want it bad enough to fight harder.

A bunch of legal intellectuals -- and I don't mean that in a 21st century pejorative way -- explain to Congress why the NSA spying is not legal.

Searching... searching....

Is this what Harry Reid apologised for? If so, no wonder we're going to lose in November....

Media Won't Report DoJ Inspector General Is Investigating Bush: Blocked 2002 Abramoff Case

'Nuff said.

Why we're going to lose in November even though we shouldn't:

Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it's important. -- Eugene McCarthy

No. It matters and with everything at stake, it's important. And thinking like Gene is very much part of the problem. A taste for blood is absolutely necessary. Not disdain. We can't be bothered to get off our asses and vote; the wingnuts do. We have the majority, all right -- of stay-away-from-the-voting-booth voters.

What's wrong with this picture:

President Tells Insurers to Aid Ailing Medicare Drug Plan

That the administration and its goose-steppers couldn't get it right the first time? If the bill was drafted in good faith, why couldn't it be done right the first time?

Next: Going to the source of the problem for the solution. It's like at the time of the end of welfare as we know it, going to welfare recipients and asking: What would it take for you to give up welfare. I'm sure being given a lot of money would have been a more frequent response than, say, being kicked off with insufficient support and backup services.

Or, rather, the proof of lack of same. From the front page of the Journal:

Retired Black Cops Pressure Georgia For Pension Equity
They Were Barred From a Plan By Race in '50s and '60s; Now, Trying to Set it Right
Living on $700 a Month Less

By KELLY GREENE
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
January 16, 2006; Page A1

ATLANTA -- Howard Baugh grew up next door to Martin Luther King Jr. and joined the Atlanta Police Department in 1953 as its 12th black recruit. He is a veteran of the civil-rights demonstrations that roiled this city -- and of a long struggle against bigotry within the police force itself.

Mr. Baugh, now 81 years old, is still fighting that battle. Together with a group of fellow officers who crossed the color line decades ago, Mr. Baugh is pressing the state of Georgia to grant him the same pension benefits as his white counterparts from that era.

Mr. Baugh and the other African-American retirees say that early in their police careers, they were blocked from participating in a state-backed supplemental retirement fund because of their color. As a result, Mr. Baugh says, he receives about $700 less each month than white officers who signed up. As many as 200 other retired black officers, many in their 70s and 80s, are in the same boat.

Referring to the Chilean presidential election:

You have a front runner, that is, the probable winner. Then run a piece that gives about 3/4 of the space to the anticipated loser.

I refer to the Times article on January 15th.

Of course, a piece actually focused on Bachelet would have to both acknowledge her background which would then involve, God forbid, an accurate precise of the Allende and Pinochet years which, of course, is something that is no interest to the Pinch/Keller regime.

Meanwhile, it's a shame that all these South and Latin American countries are all going "leftist" (actually center-left as opposed to socialist or communist or Marxist, or even Maoist). From the Journal, subscription still required):

Peru May Join Latin America's Populist Tilt to Left

Free-Trade Opponent's Lead In Polls Poses New Challenge To Market Reforms in Region

Maybe it's the lack of unrestrained greed as a driving principle of life. Or that the rightists in Latin America are a little odious. Or, as in Chile, the right is "tainted" (see the linked Times article above) by an association with some very ugly stuff.

And this socialism is pretty bad stuff. It brought the God-awful, disasterous replacement of Chile's social security system with a dreadful free market plan that, as foreseeable (being reliant on corporate welfare over the wellbeing of retirees), just isn't working.

And here's a piece of it:

Chomsky: 'There Is No War On Terror'
By Geov Parrish, AlterNet
Posted on January 14, 2006, Printed on January 15, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/30487/

For over 40 years, MIT professor Noam Chomsky has been one of the world's leading intellectual critics of U.S. foreign policy. Today, with America's latest imperial adventure in trouble both politically and militarily, Chomsky -- who turned 77 last month -- vows not to slow down "as long as I'm ambulatory." I spoke with him by phone, on Dec. 9 and again on Dec. 20, from his office in Cambridge.

Geov Parrish: Is George Bush in political trouble? And if so, why?

Noam Chomsky: George Bush would be in severe political trouble if there were an opposition political party in the country. Just about every day, they're shooting themselves in the foot. The striking fact about contemporary American politics is that the Democrats are making almost no gain from this. The only gain that they're getting is that the Republicans are losing support. Now, again, an opposition party would be making hay, but the Democrats are so close in policy to the Republicans that they can't do anything about it. When they try to say something about Iraq, George Bush turns back to them, or Karl Rove turns back to them, and says, "How can you criticize it? You all voted for it." And, yeah, they're basically correct.

How could the Democrats distinguish themselves at this point, given that they've already played into that trap?

Democrats read the polls way more than I do, their leadership. They know what public opinion is. They could take a stand that's supported by public opinion instead of opposed to it. Then they could become an opposition party, and a majority party. But then they're going to have to change their position on just about everything.

Take, for example, take your pick, say for example health care. Probably the major domestic problem for people. A large majority of the population is in favor of a national health care system of some kind. And that's been true for a long time. But whenever that comes up -- it's occasionally mentioned in the press -- it's called politically impossible, or "lacking political support," which is a way of saying that the insurance industry doesn't want it, the pharmaceutical corporations don't want it, and so on. Okay, so a large majority of the population wants it, but who cares about them? Well, Democrats are the same. Clinton came up with some cockamamie scheme which was so complicated you couldn't figure it out, and it collapsed.

Kerry in the last election, the last debate in the election, October 28 I think it was, the debate was supposed to be on domestic issues. And the New York Times had a good report of it the next day. They pointed out, correctly, that Kerry never brought up any possible government involvement in the health system because it "lacks political support." It's their way of saying, and Kerry's way of understanding, that political support means support from the wealthy and the powerful. Well, that doesn't have to be what the Democrats are. You can imagine an opposition party that's based on popular interests and concerns.

It's Jim Bakker all over again.

Christ, the preacher of humility, has no problem being associated with material greed:

Rev. Creflo A. Dollar Jr., said on this recent Saturday night about the offering time: "It's opportunity for prosperity."

"Remember," said Mr. Dollar, a familiar figure across the country because of his "Changing Your World" television show and best-selling books, "if you sow a seed on a good ground, you can expect a harvest."

Mr. Dollar, whose Rolls-Royces, private jets, million-dollar Atlanta home and $2.5 million Manhattan apartment, furnish proof to his followers of the validity of his teachings, is a leading apostle of what is known as the "prosperity gospel."

Warning! Overly pessimistic.

Or, dare I say? more likely just realistic.

We're going to lose in November.

The other guys, they get out off their asses and go out and vote. They understand and appreciate the seriousness of it. If we did, W wouldn't be your president right now. It is just that simple.

And for those wavering centrists, what do we offer? What do we have to entice them to get off their asses and vote for our guys?

Nothing. Just that we're not the wingnuts.

For example, look at this from the Times:

January 15, 2006

Glum Democrats Can't See Halting Bush on Courts By ADAM NAGOURNEY, RICHARD W. STEVENSON and NEIL A. LEWIS

WASHINGTON, Jan. 14 - Disheartened by the administration's success with the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., Democratic leaders say that President Bush is putting an enduring conservative ideological imprint on the nation's judiciary, and that they see little hope of holding off the tide without winning back control of the Senate or the White House.

In interviews, Democrats said the lesson of the Alito hearings was that this White House could put on the bench almost any qualified candidate, even one whom Democrats consider to be ideologically out of step with the country.

That conclusion amounts to a repudiation of a central part of a strategy Senate Democrats settled on years ago in a private retreat where they discussed how to fight a Bush White House effort to recast the judiciary: to argue against otherwise qualified candidates by saying they would take the courts too far to the right.

The article goes on; I can't.

But this whole right/left thing doesn't fly. It's overly simplistic and fails to get the point across.

Explain how W's illegal spying involves spying on us. Period. Let them explain how it doesn't 'cause they haven't yet.

Explain what we're losing thanks to W's tax cuts for his true supporters, not that tax cuts for the wealthy are unfair. So W gave us some crumbs. And thereby exacerbated the problem.

Have a 24/7 War Room. Administration lies, come forward with the proof now.

And so on and so forth.

And we need our Contract with America. We were a fractured party when we consisted of racist Southerners and liberals -- couldn't last forever and didn't. Well, we lost the rednecks -- and replaced them with the DLC.

Who needs them? They just dilute the message. They have nothing to offer other than to encourage pols to give in to the Republicans and rake in the lobbyists $$.

The Dems have a single weapon in the Senate: The filibuster.

We not only refused to use -- and should be using it with Alito -- but we wussed out when the nuts threatened to take it away.

These guys are absolutely ruthless; there is no reason, no benefit in accommodating them.

As I've said before, I'm not from the give 'em enough to hang themselves school -- but this is or well can be the exception.

The nuts get rid of the filibuster, we should and could scream "One Party State" so loud Big Media will have to acknowledge it.

And some day, maybe we'll run the Senate without any filibuster rule to get in our way.

Abramoff money really is OK to spend.

Mitt Romney really has the Midas Touch. The Massachusetts Governor and Chairman of the Republican Governors Association has decided that the organization will give $500,000 from newly-minted-felon Michael Scanlon to charity. But they're not in any rush. Since that's apparently what they're now running the organization on, they're going to spread the give-back over two years.

-- Josh Marshall

Josh linked to the details here.

They are all pure unaldurated scum.

And then there's this fine example:

Reed Uncensored
By Paul Kiel
From: Auction House

You can learn a lot about a person from his sense of humor. Take, for example, this so far unnoticed gem in Ralph Reed's correspondence with Jack Abramoff (pages 52-53). It took place on April 11, 2001, as Reed was mounting a campaign for the chairmanship of the Georgia Republican Party:

Jan 10, 2006 -- 12:09:06 AM EST

Reed writes:

"Jack, would you be willing to contribute personally to my state chair campaign? This race is costing me $50-100K, and i'm asking my friends to help."
Abramoff responds:

"Sure. Give me the name of the entity."

Reed deadpans:

"The actual committee is "The Reed Family Retirement and Educational Foundation." It is a 501(c)(3). The address is 200 Bay Drive, Grand Cayman, BCI, R59876."
Abramoff:

"Ha ha ha. Make sure you get me the proper committee name."
After Reed responded with the real name ("Reed for Chairman"), Abramoff wrote:

"Seriously, I'll get you the $10K this week or next from a source which owes me money."
The "source," you'll be unsurprised to hear, was the Mississippi Choctaw. In early April, the Choctaw cut a $150K check to the American International Center, one of the fake foundation slush funds Abramoff had set up with Michael Scanlon. On 4/12/01, Abramoff wrote to his assistant instructing $10K of the $150K check to be sent on to Reed's campaign (see page 54).

Reed says his campaign only got $5,500 from Abramoff and unsurprisingly claims complete ignorance about the true source of the funds.

Unfortunately for Reed, his fortunes seem to be declining lately. A recent poll showed him trailing his Republican challenger, and Sen. Cornyn (R-Tex.) on Meet the Press yesterday accused Reed and Abramoff of "bilking their Indian clients for millions of dollars."

Luckily, Reed has his sense of humor to see him through these difficult times...and maybe also a stash in the Caymans? In a less conspicuously named account, of course.

Any schmuck can buy anyone's cell records, no questions asked.

To Blitzer the other day; a refreshingly direct talk from a politico:

[Bush has] not reached out to other people. He's shown he's willing to abuse his power. He's not consulted others. And he's not interested in consulting any others.

And I think, frankly, that Joe is absolutely wrong, that it is incumbent on every American who is patriotic and cares about their country to stand up for what's right and not go along with the president, who is leading us in a wrong direction.

We're going in the wrong direction, economically, at home; we're going in the wrong direction abroad.

A courtier's sole principle is to follow orders.

Hide a source when the administration says so, out one when commanded.

The courtiers are paid by Big Media but work for the administration. And it basiscally is just that simple.

And here's a primo example from Atrios:

It really was a illustrative moment about Washington pres corps culture when they all fell all over themselves to "out" Richard Clarke as a background briefer as soon as the Bush adminstration told them to. The fact that Fitz picked up on this shows he's a bit more clever than your average bear, which we already knew, but aside from its relevance to this particular case it is something which spoke volumes about the culture of Timmeh and the Gang.

It had nothing to do with high-minded journalistic principles for people like Timmeh. He was willing to throw out the confidential source promise as soon as Rove told him to. It was about maintaining favor with his sources - that is, the Bush administration.

But there's no explaining humor....

From (or I should say, through) the General:

Good news: fewer hearts and minds to win over, up to 1,000,000 civilian deaths:

President Bush's off-hand summation last month of the number of Iraqis who have so far died as a result of our invasion and occupation as "30,000, more or less" was quite certainly an under-estimate. The true number is probably hitting around 180,000 by now, with a possibility, as we shall see, that it has reached as high as half a million.

Read the entire piece. It's essential.

People want order in their lives as long as it's not overly oppressive. That pretty much is, as the wingnuts always put it in response to criticism of one of their own oppressive policies, if you behave, there's nothing to worry about.

So what we've brought the Iraqis is anarchy and that will likely result at least two states, and if not, certainly an oppressive (anti-American) Islamist theocracy.

It's a fantasy. I'm running the link solely for technical reasons.

A little hypocricy from a wingnut (but what else is new), or chutzpah as my people say. The crap that comes out of their mouthes is really endless. If only it could work as an alternative energy source; I'm sure it would be cheap enough....

By way of the Asia Times:

Iraq, the mother of all budget busters
By David Isenberg

"If Bush had come to the American people with a request to spend several hundred billion dollars and several thousand American lives in order to bring democracy to Iraq, he would have been laughed out of court."

- noted political scientist Francis Fukuyama

It turns out the eventual cost of the war in Iraq will not be several hundred billion, but according to a new study at least a thousand billion dollars - US$1 trillion, in other words. This figure dwarfs any previous estimate by orders of magnitude.

Sure, Alito had a legitimate reason to join CAP, the reactionary organization at Princeton.

Oops! Joe Conason says it ain't so:

So when Alito became an alumnus, his motivation to join CAP probably had little to do with his worries about the ROTC, because they had largely been resolved. That issue was never a primary focus of CAP's energies, and by the time Alito mentioned CAP on his résumé in 1985, the ROTC fight had been long forgotten -- but the bitter debate over diversity on campus was still raging.

Too, was this Princeton boy really so stupid that he didn't know what CAP was about when he joined it?

You can say Worst. Justice. Ever. for the Worst. President. Ever.

Let them go Nuclear.

Please.

Big Media is all obsessed by how pleasant and nice Alito came across. It's easier than analyzing his record and assume that it was essentially truthful and reflected facts. As opposed to the Robertsesque smoke he blew up everyones' asses at the hearings.

Again, he is completely unfit and therefor filibuster-appropriate. There is no other way to keep him off the bench.

But that would probably trigger the so-called nuclear option.

I say bring it on.

The wingnuts will either blink or, indeed, go nuclear.

If the former, the nomination is in trouble.

If the latter, the wingnuts may well be the ones hurt most. They're already en route to suffering the death of a 1,000 cuts come November. Look at the GOP as a brand; it is eroding, becoming more and more negative in the public's mind -- and hopefully those of likely voters as well. It may well push things towards a more likley -- dare one say it? -- Dem takeover of one or both houses.

Given that, do the wingnuts want to be a minority in a filibuster-free Senate?

The whole shmear, nicely done. Essential.

And there's this too.

There is no justification for putting this guy on the bench: prima facie unfit.

A perfect example of utter and complete crap journalism. So crappy, it isn't even journalism. Rather, it's a complete lie, completely dishonest. From the Wall Street Journal (without a link 'cause I have no clue where/how it's archived and don't care to look):

THE EVENING WRAP
By MARK GONGLOFF

Alito Breezing Through

January 12, 2006 5:52 p.m.

In his Senate confirmation hearings, Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito may have seemed awkward compared to the butter-smooth Chief Justice John Roberts, but the end result will likely be the same: Judge Alito appears to be on a glide path to the high court.

Judge Alito kicked off his four-day ordeal with a fumbled "joke" involving I-95 and Amtrak, which was greeted by nothing more than the chirping of crickets. Later, his wife at one point left the hearing room in tears. But the rest of the process was pretty much a cakewalk for the conservative judge picked by President Bush to replace Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Given her role as a swing vote in tight Supreme Court decisions, the stakes were high for Democrats. They vowed to grill him relentlessly, and there was even talk of a filibuster. Though Judge Alito's odds of confirmation were always pretty good, Democrats had a decent shot at tripping him up. Recent opinion polls showed that most Americans were uncertain about him -- meaning they might have been willing to hear a case against him. Judge Alito's opinions favoring broad government powers seemed particularly vulnerable to attack, at a time when the nation was roiled by warrantless eavesdropping and other tests of the limits of presidential power. In the 1980s, he had spoken against Roe v. Wade and in favor of Robert Bork, not exactly majority positions in today's America.

But in his confirmation hearings, many Democrats spent more energy exercising their own vocal cords than exploring weaknesses in his testimony. And his disciplined answers were nothing to spook either liberals or conservatives: he vowed to respect Supreme Court precedent and to consider abortion cases with an open mind -- though he also declined to say Roe was "settled law." He said no president is above the law, but declined to declare specific presidential actions illegal. Today, he praised Justice O'Connor and defended the right of Americans to set the terms of their own deaths through living wills. By the time it was over, whatever hope the Democrats had of maintaining a filibuster had vaporized.

The apparent success of Judge Alito's nomination would certainly be good news for President Bush. For one thing, it brings closer the day when he can look back on last year's disastrous nomination of Harriet Miers and laugh. For another, it repesents a political win at a time when he desperately needs one.

Yeah, he breezes through with absolutely complete lies and not a scintila of honest testimony.

As someone or other said recently, instead of the Judiciary Committee show, one can look at Alito's actual record. As being noted, the two can't actually be reconciled. But of course, we're to believe what we're told not what we see. See this:

Alito's hearing, by contrast, is serving to eclipse his astonishing fifteen years as a federal appellate judge; to wipe from memory a track record hundreds of cases long. At Wednesday's hearings, Democrats zeroed in on a handful of issues--CAP, Roe, Alito's theory of executive power, his participation in a Vanguard Mutual Fund case despite investments--which Alito had long been prepared to deflect with well-rehearsed technocratic answers and evasion.

Almost absent from the witness stand was the Alito of the last fifteen years--who, as the Yale Law School's Alito Project report notes, "has sought to move the law to acheive the broad philosophical purposes" articulated in that now-notorious 1985 Justice Department memo. At day's close Democrats requested a third round of questioning. Their case now depends, in essence, on calling that Alito as a witness against the genial equivocator on stage this week.

(The rest is here.)

(Of course, his confirmation is assured but the point is to keep in mind how completely unfit he is to be an associate justice of the S.C. and of course not to be surprised by how he acts on the bench: as a true radical anti-democrat.)

Win-win for the administration: partisan politicking with public $$ further adding to the deficit, the deficit meant to permanently cripple the government (thanks to the administration, we can't afford the Iraq adventure -- what if it was a real war?):

Labor Extends a Conservative Hand
January 09 2006 5:52 PM
Lynn Gibson, the former Director of the Young Leaders Program at The Heritage Foundation, is now the new Special Assistant for Conservative Outreach at the Department of Labor.No political giving could be determined for Gibson.

(Any relation to that vile John Gibson?)

You expected the agency to take the high road with this lawless administration?

Nah, it's worse than you think.

ABC has it but despite having it, plays it down with the rest of Big Media:

NSA Whistleblower Alleges Illegal Spying
Former Employee Admits to Being a Source for The New York Times

By BRIAN ROSS
Jan 10, 2006 — - Russell Tice, a longtime insider at the National Security Agency, is now a whistleblower the agency would like to keep quiet.

For 20 years, Tice worked in the shadows as he helped the United States spy on other people's conversations around the world.

"I specialized in what's called special access programs," Tice said of his job. "We called them 'black world' programs and operations."

But now, Tice tells ABC News that some of those secret "black world" operations run by the NSA were operated in ways that he believes violated the law. He is prepared to tell Congress all he knows about the alleged wrongdoing in these programs run by the Defense Department and the NSA in the post-9/11 efforts to go after terrorists.

"The mentality was we need to get these guys, and we're going to do whatever it takes to get them," he said.


Tracking Calls

Tice says the technology exists to track and sort through every domestic and international phone call as they are switched through centers, such as one in New York, and to search for key words or phrases that a terrorist might use.

"If you picked the word 'jihad' out of a conversation," Tice said, "the technology exists that you focus in on that conversation, and you pull it out of the system for processing."

According to Tice, intelligence analysts use the information to develop graphs that resemble spiderwebs linking one suspect's phone number to hundreds or even thousands more.


Tice Admits Being a Source for The New York Times

President Bush has admitted that he gave orders that allowed the NSA to eavesdrop on a small number of Americans without the usual requisite warrants.

But Tice disagrees. He says the number of Americans subject to eavesdropping by the NSA could be in the millions if the full range of secret NSA programs is used.

"That would mean for most Americans that if they conducted, or you know, placed an overseas communication, more than likely they were sucked into that vacuum," Tice said.

The same day The New York Times broke the story of the NSA eavesdropping without warrants, Tice surfaced as a whistleblower in the agency. He told ABC News that he was a source for the Times' reporters. But Tice maintains that his conscience is clear.

"As far as I'm concerned, as long as I don't say anything that's classified, I'm not worried," he said. "We need to clean up the intelligence community. We've had abuses, and they need to be addressed."

The NSA revoked Tice's security clearance in May of last year based on what it called psychological concerns and later dismissed him. Tice calls that bunk and says that's the way the NSA deals with troublemakers and whistleblowers. Today the NSA said it had "no information to provide."

ABC News' Vic Walter and Avni Patel contributed to this report.

Scum begets scum.

And out of respect for Howell Raines' exemplary tenures as editorial page editor and then Executive Editor of the Times, the entire piece (but it can be read here):

At this point, the policy legacy of George Bush seems defined by three disparate disasters: Iraq in foreign affairs, Katrina in social welfare, and corporate influence over tax, budget and regulatory decisions. As a short-term political consequence, we may avoid another dim-witted Bush in the White House. But what the Bush dynasty has done to presidential campaign science - the protocols by which Americans elect presidents in the modern era - amounts to a political legacy that could haunt the republic for years to come.

We are now enduring the third generation of Bushes who have taken the playbook of the "ruthless" Kennedys and amplified it into a consistent code of amorality. In their campaigns, the Kennedys used money, image-manipulation, old-boy networks and, when necessary, personal attacks on worthy adversaries such as Adlai Stevenson and Hubert Humphrey. But there was also a solid foundation of knowledge and purpose undergirding John Kennedy's sophisticated internationalism, his Medicare initiative, his late-blooming devotion to racial justice, and Robert Kennedy's opposition to corporate and union gangsterism. Like Truman, Roosevelt and even Lincoln, two generations of Kennedys believed that a certain amount of political chicanery was tolerable in the service of altruism.

Behind George W, there are four generations of Bushes and Walkers devoted first to using political networks to pile up and protect personal fortunes and, latterly, to using absolutely any means to gain office, not because they want to do good, but because they are what passes in America for hereditary aristocrats. In sum, Bush stands at the apex of a pyramid of privilege whose history and social significance, given his animosity towards scholarly thought, he almost certainly does not understand.

Here is the big picture, as drawn by the Republican political analyst Kevin Phillips in American Dynasty. Starting in 1850, the Bushes, through alliance with the smarter Walker clan, built up a fortune based on classic robber-baron foundations: railroads, steel, oil, investment banking, armaments and materiel in the world wars. They had ties to the richest families of the industrial age - Rockefeller, Harriman, Brookings. Yet they never adopted the charitable, public-service ethic that developed in those families.

Starting with Senator Prescott Bush's alliance with Eisenhower and continuing through the dogged loyalty of his son, George HW Bush, to two more gifted politicians, Presidents Nixon and Reagan, the family has developed a prime rule of advancement. In a campaign, any accommodation, no matter how unprincipled, any attack on an opponent, no matter how false, was to be embraced if it worked.

The paradigm in its purest form was seen when the first President Bush, in 1980, renounced a lifelong belief in abortion rights to run as Reagan's vice-president. His son surpassed the father's dabbling with pork rinds and country music. He adopted the full agenda of redneck America - on abortion, gun control, Jesus - as a matter of convenience and, most frighteningly, as a matter of belief. Before the Bushes, American political slogans of the left and right embodied at least a grain of truth about how a presidential candidate would govern. The elder Bush's promise of a "kinder, gentler" America and the younger's "compassionate conservatism" brought us the political slogan as pure disinformation. They were asserting a claim of noblesse oblige totally foreign to their family history.

But whether Bush the father was pandering or Bush the son was praying, the underlying political trade-off was the same. The Bushes believe in letting the hoi polloi control the social and religious restrictions flowing from Washington, so long as Wall Street gets to say what happens to the nation's money. The Republican party as a national institution has endorsed this trade-off. What we do not know yet is whether a Republican party without a Bush at the top is seedy enough to keep it going. Americans have had an ambivalent attitude toward their aristocrats. They have also believed that dirty politics originated with populist machiavells such as Louisiana governor Huey Long and Chicago mayor Richard Daley. The Bushes, with such minders as Rove, Cheney and Delay, have turned that historic expectation upside down. Now our political deviance trickles down relentlessly from the top. The next presidential election will be a national test of whether the taint of Bushian tactics outlasts
what is probably the last Bush to occupy the Executive Mansion.

In 1988, the first President Bush secured office by falsely depicting his opponent as a coddler of rapists and murderers. In 2000, the current President Bush nailed down the nomination by accusing John McCain of opposing breast-cancer research. He won in 2004 with a barrage of lies about John Kerry's war record.

With the right leadership, the US can stop the blood-letting in Iraq, regain its world standing, avert the crises in health care and social security, and even bring disaster relief to the Gulf Coast. But that's not simply a matter of keeping Bushes and Bushites, with their impaired civic consciences, out of the White House. The next presidential campaign will show us whether these miscreant patricians have poisoned the well of the presidential campaign system. If so, there is no telling what we kind of president we might get.

Gene Lyons, a columnist of journalistic integrity, says Abramoff and corruption generally isn't bipartisan.

Of course, to a certain extent, one has to be in a position of power to be significantly corrupt as opposed to a petty thief.

Responsible debate here.

W is made to say:

And when victory comes and democracy takes hold in Iraq, it will serve as a model for freedom in the broader Middle East.

An improvement over Iran where the mullahs required a revolution. In Iraq they'll take power by the votes of a majority in a system without protection for minority groups.

History has shown that free nations are peaceful nations.

Stupid is as stupid says. Or something. Absolutely not true. Gee, just one example: Free America invades Iraq for no good reason.

And by helping Iraqis build a lasting democracy, we spread the hope of liberty across a troubled region, we will gain new allies in the cause of freedom. By spreading democracy and freedom, we're laying the foundation of peace for generations to come.

Simple horsepoop.

So how good a job does M$ patching its crappy OSes to keep users security? Wht, crappy, says the Washington Post:

Over the past three years, Microsoft has actually taken longer to issue critical fixes when researchers waited to disclose their research until after the company issued a patch. In 2003, Microsoft took an average of three months to issue patches for problems reported to them. In 2004, that time frame shot up to 134.5 days, a number that remained virtually unchanged in 2005.

If you are on a machine running Windows, do your self a favor and read the whole thing, links and all.