not all republicans are liars

• *Whatever It Takes* by Peggy Noonan re: Bush's out of control spending - Libby
  • I have no interest in addressing your name calling, but - Suzie
    • Thank you!!! - Libby
      • To be fair to the present administration.. - Republican
        • Thanks for posting and for being so respectful. - Libby
          • Not the poster who identified as Republican, but - Suzie
            • Very decent post, Suzie. - Zauber
          • Respectfully, John Edwards practically bankrupt his state with malpractice lawsuits. SM - MT
            • Yes, he made his millions chasing ambulances and driving up all of - our insurance premiums. Hardly noble. nm
              • Thank you attorneys for helping the little guy - gt
                • Yeah, and pocketing most of the winnings - Rep.
                  • Would rather the attorney prosper - gt
                    • You're not getting it - Rep.
                      • big difference - gt
                      • Ever hear of a fee agreement? - JR
                        • Yes I have - Rep.
                          • Oh, those poor, poverty stricken CEOs. I really feel for them all. - JR
                            • I don't know. I worry about attorneys too - Rep.
              • LOL! Jealous are we? - Libby
                • Not at all, but YOU guys seem to be the one who hates - the rich, so I'm puzzled. nm
                  • stop with the bigotry - gt
                    • GT, you have called me a bigot.... - SM
                      • when did I call you bigot? - gt
                        • Take your eyes and gaze up ONE post. - You said stop with the bigotry. nm
                          • nine times..waiting..waiting..sigh..waiting - gt
                            • Gee, never saw that liar accusation coming! LOLOLOLOL - Ha ha
                              • making false statements - gt
                                • Oh gt, you think all reps are liars. - Ha ha
                                  • not all republicans are liars - gt
                              • And yet you just keep lying and lying and lying. Not too bright. - HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
                        • Where are the posts..SM..still waiting....and waiting... - gt
            • Truth is, Bush's Texas tort reform is hurting everyone. - Zauber
            • It tells me three things off the top of my head. - Libby
              • Oh yeah, he is a real - Peach
            • bankrupting - gt
            • I'm from that state and... - Yep
              • He paid with his own earnings? Oh how awful. - Zauber
                • Here!! Here!! - gt
                • Applauding! - Libby
                  • Very insightful, Libby! - Zauber
                • I thought you guys DESPISED rich people and would rather they be - taxed into the poor house. ?????
                  • who hates the rich? - gt
                    • Who knows any rich people???? nm - Lurker
                    • LOL, you are CERTIFIABLE.... - SM
                      • LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL - gt
                    • ^5!!! - Libby
                  • Can only speak for myself, but I'd rather their tax burden be FAIR. - Libby
                    • conservatives and stinks - gt
          • Will post back later tonight after work. nm - Republican
            • Thanks. Very much looking forward to reading more of your views. - Libby

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    Friday 30 September 2005

Voters are notoriously slow in voting out politicians accused of corruption, but they may reach the tipping point with the latest revelations.

    To be an honest Republican these days must be to wonder what awful revelation is coming next - and how the Grand Old Party, which once claimed to represent political reform, became a front for sleaze, corruption and cynical criminality. Across the country, from the Capitol to statehouses, Republican officials are under indictment, under investigation or under suspicion.

    This week's headlines featured the indictment of Rep. Tom DeLay and the probe of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, but the infection of venality among their fellow partisans is now reaching epidemic proportions. So widespread is the plague that keeping track of all the individual cases, and their increasingly baroque variations, has become a distinct challenge.

    Consider Jack Abramoff, once the prince of K Street lobbyists and a dedicated right-wing ideologue who boasted of his powerful connections to DeLay, Karl Rove, Grover Norquist and the entire Republican apparatus in Washington. Already under investigation by the Justice Department for his influence peddling among House members, including DeLay, and his swindling of Indian tribes, Abramoff was indicted last month for bank fraud in a separate South Florida case involving a casino boat company that he partly owned.

    The fraud allegedly committed by Abramoff and his business partner Adam Kidan involved a phony wire transfer they used to purchase a controlling interest in SunCruz from the company's founder, Konstantinos Gus Boulis, in 2001.

    Abramoff and Kidan later fell out with Boulis in a bitter business dispute that turned violent. In February 2001, gunmen ambushed Boulis on a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., highway and shot him repeatedly. On Tuesday, Florida authorities arrested three New York men with mob connections for the Boulis killing. Two of the men - Anthony Moscatiello and Tony Ferrari - had received payments totaling more than $240,000 from Kidan and Abramoff. Moscatiello, a longtime associate of the Gambino Mafia family, and Ferrari were supposedly providing food and consulting services to SunCruz - or so Kidan claimed when questioned by prosecutors. There is no evidence, however, that Moscatiello and Ferrari provided any services to the company.

    Connecting the dots isn't difficult here: Kidan and Abramoff want to get rid of Boulis, who won't go away. Kidan and Abramoff hire Moscatiello and Ferrari with SunCruz money. Moscatiello and Ferrari allegedly whack Boulis, without any motive of their own. If the Broward County state's attorney has sufficient evidence to win convictions for a capital crime, some people will probably be talking soon in hope of avoiding the hot shot.

    The stunning fall of Abramoff, who has yet to hit bottom, is certainly the most colorful tale of Republican depravity. The corporate money laundering to Texas politicians that led to DeLay's conspiracy indictment, and the suspicious insider stock transaction that spurred investigations of Frist by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission, seem mundane by comparison. Outrage will be warranted if their misconduct is proved, but everyone sadly knows that these felonies are now common practice in our political and corporate culture.

    Corporate misbehavior has also brought down right-wing publisher Conrad Black, neoconservative strategist and former Bush advisor Richard Perle and the entire corporate board of Hollinger Inc., the Republican-friendly media conglomerate formerly controlled by Lord Black - and that he and others are plausibly accused of illicitly looting for their own benefit. Furious shareholders forced Black to relinquish control of the company and are suing him, as well as Perle and former Black deputy David Radler, for $500 million. The SEC is also suing Black and Radler, and the Justice Department is investigating the former Hollinger directors.

    Last month, US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who also happens to be the special prosecutor in the Valerie Plame case, accepted Radler's guilty plea to mail fraud and wire fraud. Radler is now believed to be cooperating in the prosecution of what former SEC chairman Richard Breeden, a Republican who investigated Hollinger on behalf of shareholders, termed a corporate kleptocracy.

    Kleptocratic morality evidently ruled at least two Republican statehouses in the Midwest as well. Currently under indictment are former Gov. George Ryan of Illinois, whose trial on bribery charges began last week, and Gov. Robert Taft of Ohio, who pleaded no contest last month to charges of accepting illegal gifts from a state contractor.

    That contractor is Thomas Noe, a coin dealer who received lucrative investment deals with the state's Workers Compensation Fund and is now at the center of a gigantic scandal known as Coingate. More than $12 million has disappeared from the fund, and former GOP official Noe stands accused of laundering money to various Republican politicians, including the Bush-Cheney campaign. Like Abramoff, Noe is a Bush Pioneer, responsible for raising at least $100,000 for the president last year.

    Still another Pioneer is currently under criminal investigation in a celebrated corruption case involving Randy Duke Cunningham, a prominent Republican representative from San Diego with a senior position on the House defense appropriations subcommittee. On Aug. 18, FBI and IRS agents raided the offices of defense contractor and Bush fundraiser Brent Wilkes.

    Wilkes is reportedly a former business associate of Mitchell J. Wade, the head of a defense contracting firm called MZM Inc. who is under investigation in San Diego for alleged bribery of Cunningham. According to newspaper reports, Wade purchased a home owned by Cunningham at a price inflated by at least $700,000, and also permitted the congressman to use his 42-foot yacht free of charge. Federal agents searched Wade's offices in July.

    Although prosecutors have brought no criminal charges in the case yet, they have filed civil court documents describing the home sale as a violation of federal bribery laws - and Cunningham, who has served in Congress for decades, has already announced that he will not seek another term next year.

    The Republican National Committee's new treasurer, Robert Kjellander, is under investigation too. (Naturally, he is also a Bush Pioneer.) Not long after he assumed his new post at the party's Washington headquarters, Kjellander received a federal subpoena for records of his dealings with the Illinois Teachers' Retirement System, a state pension fund, and the Carlyle Group. Federal prosecutors are reportedly looking into alleged corruption at the fund, and have asked Kjellander to provide information about a $4.5 million fee he received from Carlyle for his role in arranging investments by the fund with the huge private equity fund. Carlyle, of course, is closely connected to the Bush administration, including the president's father, George H.W. Bush, who has worked for the firm as a rainmaker and advisor.

    In fairness, it should be said that all these pols and parasites may be innocent (except for those already convicted), or at least not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. It is also true that voters have historically been slow to evict politicians from office because of corruption charges.

    But public opinion of congressional Republicans is hitting new lows, and Americans are growing furious about the war in Iraq, the government response to Hurricane Katrina and rising energy prices. The natural impulse to throw the rascals out can only be encouraged by the Gilded Age spectacles now unfolding in Washington and in cities across the country as the indictments continue to come down between now and November 2006.

And that is really only a handful.  There are some who post on the conservative board who may hold a different political philosophy than me, but they do not seem to be liars.

Why do you ask?

You guys really need to get a grip.  By the way, exactly what do plan to accomplish if you could prove that Pelosi did know about torture?  And if you're looking for some sort of payback for taking down Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, would that not also apply to every other senator (pub and dem) in those briefings?  What you guys are doing are playing partisan politics and failing miserably at it.

http://thinkprogress.org/2009/05/20/gingrich-hoekstra/

MARCH OF THE TITANS -

A HISTORY OF THE WHITE RACE

Chapter 64:The Racial State - The Third Reich

Part Four: The "Final Solution": Nazi Policy towards Jews

The Third Reich and Adolf Hitler will always be associated with an outburst of anti-Jewish sentiment not seen since the Crusades or the Middle Ages. Despite countless books and films having been created on the actual anti-Jewish activities themselves, almost none have focused on trying to explain why Hitler and the Nazi Party were anti-Jewish.

Nazi anti-Jewishness was based on three pillars:

• First, Jews were identified with political subversion and Communism in particular. (See chapter 61:"Jews and Communism") As outlined earlier, this sentiment was by no means a Nazi invention, and had been written about in public by Winston Churchill and a host of others including Henry Ford in America;  the political subversion of which Jews were accused ranged from the fantastic (the Protocols of Zion) to the promotion of pornography, racial mixing, degenerate art ("modern art") and other issues identified as problematic by the Nazis;

• Secondly, the Nazis associated Jews with super capitalism and economic exploitation. This descended directly from the traditional and pre-Christian objections to Jews. Hitlerian anti-Jewishness also accentuated the links between Jewish super capitalists and Communism, personified by the financing of the 1917 Russian Revolution by the American Jewish banker Jacob Schiff; and

• Thirdly, the Nazis associated Christianity with Jews, arguing that this religion was the product of Middle Eastern thought and not native Europe. The Nazis did not however dare to attack Christianity openly, rather leaving it alone to wither by itself, something that has to a large degree started to become reality by the end of the 20th century. Nonetheless, if the private comments of Hitler himself on Christianity are read, it can be seen that Hitler clearly identified Christianity with Jews.

 Only in this light can an understanding of the motivating factors behind the state that Hitler created be gained: a tradition of anti-Semitism going back centuries, modern political thought associating Jews with Communism and subversion, the degradation of Germany under the Treaty of Versailles, economic collapse, and the outstanding oratorical ability of Hitler himself. All of these factors combined to propel the Nazi Party to power in 1933.

You're right - due to the slimy, lying, underhanded tactics of the administration and your boy, Bush, the Swift Boat fiasco with Kerry may  have had an impact on the election.  You sound like you're proud of that.  Figures.

Why can't you folks just leave Sheehan alone.  Why can't someone be anti-war and speak their mind without you guys going nuts? 

                                Video-QT

The Republicans are obviously worried that this Republican talk show host's point of view isn't following their talking points and is a real problem because he's not a Democrat saying them. Joe has been honest before (Schiavo not included) and is simply exposing their ineptitude that so many people are feeling right now.

Stephen Crockett posted this twice (at least) on the Conservative Board, in response to an old quote of his being used out of context and distorted by the usual suspects there.  Each time he posted it, it was deleted from the board.  It's certainly easy to understand why they don't want anyone to see this. 

Please read quickly.  They think they should control our board, as well as their own, so it probably won't last very long here, either.

African-American Voters Scrubbed by Secret GOP Hit List

Published by Greg Palast June 16th, 2006 in Articles
Massacre of the Buffalo Soldiers
by Greg Palast
As reported for Democracy Now!

Palast, who first reported this story for BBC Television Newsnight (UK) and
Democracy Now! (USA), is author of the New York Times bestseller, Armed
Madhouse.

The Republican National Committee has a special offer for African-American soldiers: Go to Baghdad, lose your vote.

A confidential campaign directed by GOP party chiefs in October 2004 sought to challenge the ballots of tens of thousands of voters in the last presidential election, virtually all of them cast by residents of Black-majority
precincts.  Files from the secret vote-blocking campaign were obtained by BBC Television Newsnight, London. They were attached to emails accidentally sent by
Republican operatives to a non-party website.

One group of voters wrongly identified by the Republicans as registering to vote from false addresses: servicemen and women sent overseas.

*******
For Greg Palast’’s discussion with broadcaster Amy Goodman on the Black soldier purge of 2004, go to
http://gregpalast.com/armedmadhouse/palastDN6-14-06.mp3

*******

Here’’s how the scheme worked: The RNC mailed these voters letters in envelopes marked, Do not forward, to be returned to the sender. These letters were mailed to servicemen and women, some stationed overseas, to their US home addresses. The letters then returned to the Bush-Cheney campaign as undeliverable.

The lists of soldiers of undeliverable letters were transmitted from state headquarters, in this case Florida, to the RNC in Washington. The party could then challenge the voters’’ registration and thereby prevent their absentee ballots being counted.

One target list was comprised exclusively of voters registered at the Jacksonville, Florida, Naval Air Station. Jacksonville is third largest naval installation in the US, best known as home of the Blue Angels fighting squandron.

[See this scrub sheet at http://flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=160156893&context=set-72157594155273706&size=o

Our team contacted the homes of several on the caging list, such as Randall Prausa, a serviceman, whose wife said he had been ordered overseas.

A soldier returning home in time to vote in November 2004 could also be challenged on the basis of the returned envelope. Soldiers challenged would be
required to vote by provisional ballot.

Over one million provisional ballots cast in the 2004 race were never counted; over half a million absentee ballots were also rejected. The extraordinary rise in the number of rejected ballots was the result of the widespread
multi-state voter challenge campaign by the Republican Party. The operation, of which the purge of Black soldiers was a small part, was the first mass challenge to voting America had seen in two decades.

The BBC obtained several dozen confidential emails sent by the Republican’’s national Research Director and Deputy Communications chief, Tim Griffin to GOP
Florida campaign chairman Brett Doster and other party leaders. Attached were spreadsheets marked, Caging.xls. Each of these contained several hundred
to a few thousand voters and their addresses.

A check of the demographics of the addresses on the caging lists, as the GOP leaders called them indicated that most were in African-American majority zip codes.

Ion Sanco, the non-partisan elections supervisor of Leon County (Tallahassee) when shown the lists by this reporter said: The only thing I can think of - African American voters listed like this - these might be individuals that
will be challenged if they attempted to vote on Election Day.

These GOP caging lists were obtained by the same BBC team that first exposed the wrongful purge of African-American felon voters in 2000 by then-Secretary of State Katherine Harris. Eliminating the voting rights of those voters —— 94,000 were targeted —— likely caused Al Gore’’s defeat in that race.

The Republican National Committee in Washington refused our several requests to respond to the BBC discovery. However, in Tallahassee, the Florida Bush
campaign’’s spokespeople offered several explanations for the list.

Joseph Agostini, speaking for the GOP, suggested the lists were of potential donors to the Bush campaign. Oddly, the supposed donor list included residents of the Sulzbacher Center a shelter for homeless families.

Another spokesperson for the Bush campaign, Mindy Tucker Fletcher, ultimately changed the official response, acknowledging that these were voters, we mailed to, where the letter came back - bad addresses.

The party has refused to say why it would mark soldiers as having bad addresses subject to challenge when they had been assigned abroad.

The apparent challenge campaign was not inexpensive. The GOP mailed the letters first class, at a total cost likely exceeding millions of dollars, so that the addresses would be returned to cage workers.

This is not a challenge list, insisted the Republican spokesmistress. However, she modified that assertion by adding, That’’s not what it’’s set up to be.

Setting up such a challenge list would be a crime under federal law. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlaws mass challenges of voters where race is a factor in choosing the targeted group.

While the party insisted the lists were not created for the purpose to challenge Black voters, the GOP ultimately offered no other explanation for the mailings. However, Tucker Fletcher asserted Republicans could still employ the list to deny ballots to those they considered suspect voters. When asked if Republicans would use the list to block voters, Tucker Fletcher replied, Where it’’s stated in the law, yeah.

It is not possible at this time to determine how many on the potential blacklist were ultimately challenged and lost their vote. Soldiers sending in their ballot from abroad would not know their vote was lost because of a
challenge.

__________________________________

For the full story of caging lists and voter purges of 2004, plus the documents, read Greg Palast’’s New York Times bestseller, ARMED MADHOUSE: Who’’s Afraid of Osama Wolf?, Armed Madhouse: Who’’s Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal ‘‘08, No Child’’s Behind Left and other
Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War.

http://www.gregpalast.com/massacre-of-the-buffalo-soldiers

1.  My research on the black liberation movement of which Obama's church is a part tells me all I need to know about whether or not I want to see him in office.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_liberation_theology

2.  If McCain is elected I believe we will face a great depression which will make the depression of the 30s look like a Sunday School picnic.  People already losing homes, jobs, exploding deficit (and the piper will be paid sooner or later), cost-of-living getting so people can hardly afford to live.  McCain's judgement is questionable in his choice of a  running mate.  Totally reckless to name someone he has only met once but then there's oil in Alaska.

I will not support or vote for either of them as were doomed either way.

Not only did Joe Lieberman speak, there were signs "Democrats for McCain," and they didn't get beaten or threatened, like the Michelle Malkins out there.

For all the Bush-bashing (I give no one a free pass), when did he openly get credit for Colin Powell, Condi Rice, etc.? 

Funny thing about facts that way.  Pesky little things, aren't they?