Loyalty without truth
is a trail to tyranny.
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a middle-aged George Washington
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Saturday, 13 September 2008 at 15h 49m 25s | McCain ruled by corporate lobbyists | So McCain is gonna bring "real change" eh?
Politico reports today that “at least 16” of Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) former Senate staffers have gone on to careers in lobbying,
according to an analysis of federal lobbying records. In some cases, McCain staffers have gone to K Street and then returned to
McCain’s office:
In many cases, they went to work for clients whose issues the staffers dealt with in the Senate. … Still, during McCain’s nearly 25
years in Congress, the revolving door has remained open. As his aides have moved downtown from Capitol Hill, they’ve drawn from
their experience on the senator’s personal staff or on his key committees: Armed Services, Commerce and Indian Affairs
[SOURCE: Thinkprogress.org | 11 September 2008]
If they lie, they steal.
| Saturday, 13 September 2008 at 15h 43m 53s | Republican election year voting games |
It was a mainstay of Jim Crow segregation: for 100 years after the Civil War, Southern white Democrats kept eligible blacks from
voting with poll taxes, literacy tests and property requirements. Starting in the 1960s, the U.S. Supreme Court declared these
assaults on the heart of American democracy unconstitutional.
Now, with the help of a 2008 Supreme Court decision, Crawford vs. Marion County (Indiana) Election Board, white Republicans in
some areas will keep eligible blacks from voting by requiring driver's licenses. Not only is this new-fangled discrimination
constitutional, it's spreading.
GOP proponents of the move say they are merely trying to reduce voter fraud. But while occasional efforts to stuff ballot boxes
through phony absentee voting still surface, the incidence of individual vote fraud—voting when you aren't eligible—is virtually
non-existent, as "The Truth About Vote Fraud," a study by the
Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, clearly shows. In other words, the problem Republicans claim they want to
combat with increased ID requirements doesn't exist. Meanwhile, those ID hurdles facing individuals do nothing to stop the
organized insiders who still try to game the system.
...
In Crawford, the court upheld an Indiana law essentially requiring a passport or driver's license in order to vote. But more than
two thirds of Indiana adults have no passports and nearly 15 percent have no driver's licenses. These eligible voters,
disproportionately African-American, will need to take a bus or catch a ride from a friend down to the motor vehicles bureau to
make sure they obtain a nondriver photo ID. Otherwise, they cannot vote in Indiana this year.
[SOURCE: Jonathan
Alter | Newsweek | ]
That, my friends, is how the Republicans support Democracy. In order to prevent maybe 100 cases of potential voter fraud, they
deny 50,000 voters the right to vote.
Click on the NYU study link and read how much of a sham this "voter fraud" issue really is.
If they lie, they steal.
| Saturday, 13 September 2008 at 15h 34m 34s | Breaking the truce, and then lying |
The two presidential campaigns had declared a truce for the anniversary of 9/11. Traditional campaigning, especially of the
negative sort, was supposed to be put on hold. But John McCain's campaign, it's now clear, broke that truce -- and did so with an
ad that nonpartisan watchdog FactCheck.org calls "particularly egregious" for its distortions.
[SOURCE: Salon.com | 12 September 2008]
According to The non-partisan
factcheck.org
The McCain-Palin campaign has released a new TV ad that distorts quotes from the Obama campaign. It takes words out of
context to make it sound as though the Democratic ticket is belittling Palin:
- The ad says "they said she was doing 'what she was told.' " But the Obama adviser who's being quoted didn't accuse Palin of
meekly following orders. What he actually said is that she made a false claim about Obama's legislative record and added, "maybe
that's what she was told."
- It says "they lashed out at Sarah Palin; dismissed her as 'good looking,' " But "they" didn't lash out at all. Obama – who is the
one pictured – didn't say anything like that. The only one the McCain campaign quotes is Obama's running mate, Biden, and he
actually offered the remark as a compliment. Biden said the "obvious" difference between Palin and himself is "she's good
looking."
- The ad says Obama was "disrespectful" when he accused Palin of "lying" about her record. But the truth is Palin's claim to
have "said no" to the "bridge to nowhere" is indeed a dubious one, as we and many have pointed out.
If they lie, they steal.
| Saturday, 13 September 2008 at 15h 6m 57s | Palin lies profusely | Uhk-ummm, I mean making a "clarification".
WASHINGTON - Sarah Palin's visit to Iraq in 2007 consisted of a brief stop at a border crossing between Iraq and Kuwait, the vice
presidential candidate's campaign said yesterday, in the second official revision of her only trip outside North America.
Following her selection last month as John McCain's running mate, aides said Palin had traveled to Ireland, Germany, Kuwait, and
Iraq to meet with members of the Alaska National Guard. During that trip she was said to have visited a "military outpost" inside
Iraq. The campaign has since repeated that Palin's foreign travel included an excursion into the Iraq battle zone.
But in response to queries about the details of her trip, campaign aides and National Guard officials in Alaska said by telephone
yesterday that she did not venture beyond the Kuwait-Iraq border when she visited Khabari Alawazem Crossing, also known as
"K-Crossing," on July 25, 2007.
Asked to clarify where she traveled in Iraq, Palin's spokeswoman, Maria Comella, confirmed that "She visited a military outpost on
the other side of the Kuwait-Iraq border."
It was the second such clarification in as many weeks of the itinerary of what Palin has called "the trip of a lifetime." Earlier, the
campaign acknowledged that Palin made only a refueling stop in Ireland.
In her interview with ABC News Thursday night, Palin did not mention Iraq in describing the visit, saying only that she went to
Kuwait and Germany to meet with US forces.
[SOURCE: Bryan Bender | Boston Globe | 13
September]
If she lies so much about the little stuff, can you trust her to be honest on anything?
Let us count.
- Charging rape victims $300 or more for the rape kits the police use to gather evidence
- Refusing to admit she ever supported the "bridge to nowhere" during her campaign to be governor
- Saying she was against pork earmarks when she asked for more per capita than any other governor in the USA
- During the ABC interview "When Gibson noted she had requested funding to study the mating habits of crabs and other
small-bore projects that typically draw John McCain's ire, Palin said the specific requests had come through universities and other
public entities. She also said they weren't worked out by lobbyists behind closed doors.."[SOURCE: Yahoo | 12 September 2008] -- notice she admits that its not always
big bad lobbyists stealing the people's money for selfish special interests.
- She said she did not personally get involved in trying to fire the ex-husband state trooper of her sister; then the emails
surfaced.
In other words, when Republicans deny and say something isn't true -- that means it is not only true, but it's also probably much
worse than you realize.
If they lie, they steal.
Lipstick on a pig. Lipstick on a pig. Lipstick on a pig.
| Friday, 12 September 2008 at 0h 59m 18s | Because they can't win a fair election |
The chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County Michigan, a key swing county in a key swing state, is planning to use a
list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting in the upcoming election as part of the state GOP’s effort to challenge some
voters on Election Day.
“We will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses,” party chairman James
Carabelli told Michigan Messenger in a telephone interview earlier this week. He said the local party wanted to make sure that
proper electoral procedures were followed....
“You can’t challenge people without a factual basis for doing so,” said J. Gerald Hebert, a former voting rights litigator for the
U.S. Justice Department who now runs the Campaign Legal Center, a Washington D.C.-based public-interest law firm. “I don’t
think a foreclosure notice is sufficient basis for a challenge, because people often remain in their homes after foreclosure begins
and sometimes are able to negotiate and refinance.”
[SOURCE: EARTHA JANE MELZER | Michigan Messenger | 9
September 2008]
Here is the Republican tactic. Challenge as many voters as possible by using various lists. Force the challenged voters to vote on
provisional ballots that won't get counted. During the 2004 presidential elections: in Ohio, more than 300,000 provisional ballots
were thrown away before ever being
counted. In Colorado, more than 100,000 ... in New Mexico, more than 50,000.
Or how about throwing away voter ballots because ... they were mistaken for trash.
PALM BEACH COUNTY, FL -- Are the 3,478 missing ballots inside of a landfill?
Were they inadvertently thrown out by elections officials who thought they were trash? NewsChannel 5 has exclusively learned
that is the leading theory on officials' minds. We've learned that the ballots in question, likely came from a precinct in Boynton
Beach.
They were collected, as all the ballots in the county were, and the put in zippered bank-like bags.
For safety they are then loaded into duffel bags for delivery to the board of elections. We've learned that at this particular
precinct elections workers ‘ran out’ of duffel bags, and black plastic garbage bags were instead used.
Our sources tell us a sheriff’s deputy assigned to deliver the ballots shuttled the plastic bag, or bags, with the ballots in them to
the Board of Elections and handed them over. His job was done and the ballots were safely delivered.
What happened next is under investigation, but a reliable law enforcement source tells us it is believed the garbage bag was
thrown out, mistaken for trash on a very busy night.
[SOURCE: Tom Malloy | WPTV | 11 September]
From West Palm Beach, of all places ... remember the place of confusing Butterfly ballots of 2000, when thousands of older Jewish
voters mistakenly voted for anti-zionist Pat Buchanan because they were confused by the ballots?
The Republican party is a bunch of anti-democratic despots. They have only three principles: lie, cheat, and steal
| Sunday, 7 September 2008 at 17h 13m 46s | Factcheck spots a few lies | Click here for the
non-partisan FactCheck.org's analysis of the Republican convention speech dishonesty.
In 2006, the Ketchikan Daily News quoted her expressing optimism and support for the bridge at a Ketchikan campaign stop.
Palin, 2006: "People across the nation struggle with the idea of building a bridge because they’ve been under these
misperceptions about the bridge and the purpose,” said Palin, who described the link as the Ketchikan area’s potential for
expansion and growth. … Palin said Alaska’s congressional delegation worked hard to obtain funding for the bridge as part of a
package deal and that she “would not stand in the way of the progress toward that bridge.”
Palin actually ran for governor saying she was offended at the media calling it a "bridge to nowhere". She abruptly turned about face
after elected when it became a hot political issue, calling it "a bridge to nowhere" herself.
Republicans love to promote lying, hypocrites.
| Sunday, 7 September 2008 at 17h 3m 35s | The scope of the Fannie and Freddie problem |
| Sunday, 7 September 2008 at 16h 25m 12s | The shotgun marriage between a lying ruthless woman and a dishonest old man |
SARAH PALIN makes John McCain look even older than he is. And he seemed more than willing to play that part on Thursday
night.
By the time he slogged through his nearly 50-minute acceptance speech — longer even than Barack Obama’s — you half-
expected
some brazen younger Republican (Mitt Romney, perhaps?) to dash onstage to give him a gold watch and the bum’s rush.
Still, attention must be paid. McCain’s address, though largely a repetitive slew of stump-speech lines and worn G.O.P.
orthodoxy,
reminded us of what we once liked about the guy: his aspirations to bipartisanship, his heroic service in Vietnam, his twinkle. He
took his (often inaccurate) swipes at Obama, but, in winning contrast to Palin and Rudy Giuliani, he wasn’t smug or nasty.
The only problem, of course, is that the entire thing was a sham.
...
In his 26 years in Washington, most of it with a Republican in the White House
and roughly half of it with Republicans in charge of Congress, he was better at lecturing his party about reform than leading a
reform movement. G.O.P. corruption and governmental dysfunction only grew. So did his cynical flip-flops on the most
destructive policies of the president who remained nameless Thursday night....
[Governor Sarah Palin] didn’t say “no thanks” to the “Bridge to Nowhere” until
after Congress had already abandoned it but given Alaska a blank check for $223 million in taxpayers’ money anyway. Far from
rejecting federal pork, she hired lobbyists to secure her town a disproportionate share of earmarks ($1,000 per resident in 2002,
20 times the per capita average in other states). Though McCain claimed “she has had national security as one of her primary
responsibilities,” she has never issued a single command as head of the Alaska National Guard. As for her “executive experience”
as mayor, she told her hometown paper in Wasilla, Alaska, in 1996, the year of her election: “It’s not rocket science. It’s $6
million and 53 employees.” Her much-advertised crusade against officials abusing their office is now compromised by a
bipartisan ethics investigation into charges that she did the same.
[SOURCE: Frank Rich | NewYorkTimes | 7 September
2008]
Click on the source to read the complete article.
| Sunday, 7 September 2008 at 5h 1m 7s | The real Sarah Palin |
“Palin is a conniving, manipulative, a**hole,” someone who thinks these are positive traits in a governor told me, summing up
Palin’s tenure in Alaska state and local politics.
“She’s a bigot, a racist, and a liar,” is the more blunt assessment of Arnold Gerstheimer who lived in Alaska until two years ago
and is now a businessman in Idaho.
...
“The GOP is kind of like organized crime up here,” an insurance agent in Anchorage who knows the Palin family, explained. “It’s
corrupt and arrogant. They’re all rich because they do private sweetheart deals with the oil companies, and they can destroy
anyone. And they will, if they have to.”
“Once Palin became mayor,” he continued, “She became part of that inner circle.”
...
According to Kilkenny and others in Wasilla as well as Juneau, Palin reduced progressive property taxes for businesses while
mayor and increased a regressive sales tax which even hits necessities such as food. The tax cuts she promoted in her St. Paul
speech actually benefited large corporate property owners far more than they benefited residents. Indeed, Kilkenny insists that
many Wasilla home owners actually saw their tax bill skyrocket to make up for the shortfall. Two other Wasillian’s with whom I
spoke said property taxes on their modest, three bedroom homes rose during the Palin regime.
To an outsider, it would seem hard to do, but an oil-rich town with zero debt on the day she was inaugurated mayor was left
saddled with $22 million of debt by the time she moved away to become governor – especially since nothing was spent on things
such as improving the city’s infrastructure or building a much-needed sewage treatment plant. So what did Mayor Palin spend
the taxpayer’s money on, if not fixing streets and scrubbing sewage?
For starters, she remodelled her office. Several times over, as a matter of fact.
Then Palin spent $1 million on an unnecessary, new park that no one other than the contractors and Palin seemed to want. Next,
Sarah doled out more than $15 million of taxpayer money for a sports complex that she shoved through even though the city did
not own clear title to the land; now, seven years later, the matter is still in litigation and lawyer fees are said to be close to at
least half of the original estimated price of the facility.
She also worked hard to get voters approval of a $5.5 million bond proposal for roads that could have been built without
borrowing. Anchorage may not be the center of the financial universe but, like good Republicans everywhere, Sarah Palin knows
how to please Alaskan bankers and bond dealers.
For good measure, she turned Wasilla into a wasteland of big box stores and disconnected parking lots.
You'll have to read the article yourself. It's from the LA Progressive, by Charley James,
and the quotes are from real people who have real stories to tell.
A "reformer" my ass.
| Saturday, 6 September 2008 at 16h 11m 32s | Stalling the investigation |
Key Alaska allies of John McCain are trying to derail a politically charged investigation into Gov. Sarah Palin's firing of her public
safety commissioner in order to prevent a so-called "October surprise" that would produce embarrassing information about the
vice presidential candidate on the eve of the election.
In a move endorsed by the McCain campaign Friday, John Coghill, the GOP chairman of the state House Rules Committee, wrote a
letter seeking a meeting of Alaska's bipartisan Legislative Council in order to remove the Democratic state senator in charge of
the so-called "troopergate" investigation.
[SOURCE: Michael Isakoff | Newsweek | 5
September 2008]
Did Palin fire public safety commissioner Walter Monnegan when he refused to fire a state trooper Mike Wooten on the orders of
Governor Palin? Mike Wooten was in a bitter divorce with Palin's sister, in which Palin herself stood outside the couple's window
to write down what was said during one of the couples raging fights.
Palin was for the "bridge to nowhere" initially, and in fact made public statements about how insulting the phrase "bridge to
nowhere" is the local Alaskans. But then when it became seen as an example of pork-barrel politics, she changed her position
over-night and came out against the "bridge to nowhere" -- to the point of actually using the phrase herself, the very same
phrase that was supposed to be insulting to local Alaskans.
She was on the committee to re-elect Ted Stevens, and was a very vocally active member of the campaign team. But then
Senator Ted Stevens became embroiled in a federal corruption sting investigation, and Palin quickly removed herself from the
Ted Stevens committee, while still keeping members of the Stevens team on her staff.
Palin is just a female face-lift for the lobbyist driven, moribund John McCain presidential race. The words "middle class" and "health-care" were not
said once in the speeches of both Palin and McCain at the Rethuglican public relations convention.
Accordinginly, asPaul Krugman correctly points out
Can the vice-presidential candidate of a party that has controlled the White House, Congress or both for 26 of the past 28 years,
a party that, Borg-like, assimilated much of the D.C. lobbying industry into itself — until Congress changed hands, high-paying
lobbying jobs were reserved for loyal Republicans — really portray herself as running against the “Washington elite”?
Yes, they can.
... What struck me as I watched the convention speeches, however, is how much of the anger on the right is based not on the
claim that Democrats have done bad things, but on the perception — generally based on no evidence whatsoever — that
Democrats look down their noses at regular people....
Thus Mr. Giuliani asserted that Wasilla, Alaska, isn’t “flashy enough” for Mr. Obama, who never said any such thing. And Ms. Palin
asserted that Democrats “look down” on small-town mayors — again, without any evidence.
What the G.O.P. is selling, in other words, is the pure politics of resentment; you’re supposed to vote Republican to stick it to an
elite that thinks it’s better than you.
That's all they have. Depict the opposition as a mirror of themselves.
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