Fool Me Once ...

Can You Name All the PUBLICLY KNOWN Corrupt GOP Officials In One Breath?

An Evangelical Affair

Bush Arm-in-Arm with Disgraced Evangelical Hypocrite Haggard.

Bush Terminates Auditor That Found Iraq Contracting Fraud
Investigations led by a Republican lawyer named Stuart W. Bowen Jr. in Iraq have sent American occupation officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy charges, exposed disastrously poor construction work by well-connected companies like Halliburton and Parsons, and discovered that the military did not properly track hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces ... And tucked away in a huge military authorization bill that President Bush signed two weeks ago is ... (Bowen's) reward for repeatedly embarrassing the administration: a pink slip. ... 'the administration wants to silence the messenger that is giving us information about waste and fraud in Iraq' ..."

Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rove Think Americans Are STUPID
"George Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld think you’re stupid. Yes, they do ... They think that they can get you to overlook all of the Bush team’s real and deadly insults to the U.S. military over the past six years by hyping and exaggerating Mr. Kerry’s mangled gibe at the president. What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to the U.S. military than to send it into combat in Iraq without enough men ... without the proper equipment ... without any coherent postwar plan for political reconstruction there ... and then go out and finance the very people they’re fighting against with our gluttonous consumption of oil? ... That is the kind of genius Karl Rove is. He is not a man who has designed a strategy to reunite our country around an agenda of renewal for the 21st century — to bring out the best in us. His “genius” is taking some irrelevant aside by John Kerry and twisting it to bring out the worst in us, so you will ignore the mess that the Bush team has visited on this country ... Please, please, for our country’s health, prove him wrong this time ... Let Karl know that you think this is a critical election, because you know as a citizen that if the Bush team can behave with the level of deadly incompetence it has exhibited in Iraq — and then get away with it by holding on to the House and the Senate — it means our country has become a banana republic. It means our democracy is in tatters because it is so gerrymandered, so polluted by money, and so divided by professional political hacks that we can no longer hold the ruling party to account. It means we’re as stupid as Karl thinks we are. I, for one, don’t think we’re that stupid. Next Tuesday we’ll see."

The Worst Congress Ever

Matt Taibbi gives a sickening account of just how bad it's gotten on Captial Hill. Take the time to read this if you have not already...

"Congress has repeatedly refused to look at any aspect of the war. In 2003, Republicans refused to allow a vote on a bill introduced by [Rep. Henry] Waxman that would have established an independent commission to review the false claims Bush made in asking Congress to declare war on Iraq. That same year, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Porter Goss, refused to hold hearings on whether the administration had forged evidence of the nuclear threat allegedly posed by Iraq. A year later the chair of the Government Reform Committee, Tom Davis, refused to hold hearings on new evidence casting doubt on the "nuclear tubes" cited by the Bush administration before the war. Sen. Pat Roberts, who pledged to issue a Senate Intelligence Committee report after the 2004 election on whether the Bush administration had misled the public before the invasion, changed his mind after the president won re-election. "I think it would be a monumental waste of time to re-plow this ground any further," Roberts said...Despite an international uproar over Abu Ghraib, Congress spent only twelve hours on hearings on the issue. During the Clinton administration, by contrast, the Republican Congress spent 140 hours investigating the president's alleged misuse of his Christmas-card greeting list.

One could go on and on about the scandals and failures of the past six years; to document them all would take . . . well, it would take more than ninety-three fucking days, that's for sure. But you can boil the whole sordid mess down to a few basic concepts. Sloth. Greed. Abuse of power. Hatred of democracy. Government as a cheap backroom deal, finished in time for thirty-six holes of the world's best golf. And brains too stupid to be ashamed of any of it. If we have learned nothing else in the Bush years, it's that this Congress cannot be reformed. The only way to change it is to get rid of it.

Fortunately, we still get that chance once in a while."

ITCS XII: Karl Rove Upbeat? Maybe It's The GOP ELECTION FRAUD
" KFDM continues to get complaints from Jefferson County voters who say the electronic voting machines are not registering their votes correctly. Friday night, KFDM reported about people who had cast straight Democratic ticket ballots, but the touch-screen machines indicated they had voted a straight Republican ticket ... KFDM spoke to another voter who says it's not just happening with straight ticket voting, he says it's happening on individual races as well ... Several South Florida voters say the choices they touched on the electronic screens were not the ones that appeared on the review screen — the final voting step ... in Broward County, for example, they don't know how widespread the machine problems are because there's no process for poll workers to quickly report minor issues and no central database of machine problems."

GOP Sex Crimes - Women (and Pages) Are Just Vassals Vessels After All ...
"Just how many GOP senators or congressmen are currently accused of sex-related crimes? ... We have Rep. Foley (R-FL) accused of various inappropriate sexual contact with underage congressional pages. Then we have Rep. Gibbons (R-NV) in an on-going story about allegedly accosting/propositioning a woman other than his wife in a parking garage in Las Vegas... Next we've got the older story of Rep. Don Sherwood (R-PA) who allegedly tried to strangle his mistress... Then just last night we learned that the apparently more traditionally-minded Rep. John Sweeney (R-NY) 'got into [a] verbal argument [with his wife] that turned a little physical by her being grabbed by the neck and pushed around the house...'"

Another Insider Book Shows Corruption, Incompetence of Bush Admin
"Tyler Drumheller, the recently retired CIA Chief for the European Division during the build up for the war in Iraq is out with a great new book, On the Brink. Tyler's account takes you inside the CIA during the month before 9-11 and through the start of the war in Iraq ... Tyler offers a devastating critique of how the Bush Administration has engaged in an unprecedented politicization of the CIA. In corrupting the intelligence community the Bush Administration has put the nation at greater risk and hobbled an important government resource ... He traces the dismantling of the intelligence communtiy by political operatives and sounds an important alarm ..."

ITCS XI: Cheney Calls In The Shredder Trucks

"Spotted on 10/19... The Mid-Atlantic Shredding Services truck making its way up to the Cheney compound at the Naval Observatory ... Mid-Atlantic Shredding Services has been contracted by the Secret Service for our Executive Branch’s record-not-keeping needs ... You better get crackin’, Dick — that evidence won’t destroy itself!

ITCS X: GOP White House & Congress Lies on Election Fraud
"former U.S. Elections Assistance Commission (EAC) chair Rev. DeForest Soaries ... excoriates both Congress and the White House, referring to their dedication to reforming American election issues as "a charade" and "a travesty," and says the system now in place is "ripe for stealing elections and for fraud" ... he believes he was "deceived" by both the White House and Congress, and that neither were ever "really serious about election reform" ... we now have an "inability to trust the technology that we use" to count votes in our American democracy ... I was basically deceived by the leaders of the House, the Senate and the White House" ... "Someone in America has got to hold America accountable for protecting the most fundamental right in a democracy and that is the right to vote."