Abu Alberto

Wolf is softballing Gonzales right now. He’s a piece of work.

“No one can produce credible evidence of abuses of the PATRIOT Act.”
Yes, that’s because the PATRIOT Act allows all investigations to be conducted in complete secrecy. Number of terror convictions? Now 1, Lynne Stewart, and that was a PR stunt. She wasn’t shopping eBay for Cesium-237.
“It’s (The PATRIOT Act) one of the reasons we haven’t had a terrorist attack in 3 years.”
Hogwash. There’s no evidence of this. The absence of an attack does not validate allowing the government to spy on its citizens. It was 8 years between attacks on the World Trade Center.
“We don’t engage in torture.”
Well, schmeeve submits Exhibit A into the record: Abu Grahib. For which people have been convicted.
Alberto also spread-headed getting a narrow definition of torture, and the President is exempt! Ain’t that fucking grand!
“We don’t want to hold [imprison] people indefinitely…”
Gitmo: 4 years and counting. Convictions? 0.

What an asshat. I’ve watched less than 5 minutes, and I can’ts takes no more…

JimmyJeff

I have a bit of politics fatigue, so haven’t been so active lately, but this Jeff Gannon/JD Guckert thing is worth following. Nutshell: GOP plant asking softball questions of Bush & McClellan, and a former gay escort now (well, until recently) anti-gay writer for “fake” news organization owned by powerful Texas GOP organization. “8”+ cut, Top!” in case you were wondering. I wonder about the “+”
Salon’s got the low-down.
AMERICAblog for continuing coverage. (and links to naked Gannon!)
Anderson Cooper grilled the fellow “family” member — and did a shockingly good job. Media Matters has the video.
Seems Armstrong Williams was tip of the iceberg.
Seriously, don’t you people get tired of being lied to?

SS

Chuck Schumer gives us a handy calculator letting you know how poor you ass be when Bush finishes “fixing” Social Security.

Hilter Youth

Link:

One in three U.S. high school students say the press ought to be more restricted, and even more say the government should approve newspaper stories before readers see them, according to a survey being released today.
The survey of 112,003 students finds that 36% believe newspapers should get “government approval” of stories before publishing; 51% say they should be able to publish freely; 13% have no opinion.

Disturbing, yes.. but think about it. Once these coddled lil’ darlings get a taste of the “real world,” this shit’ll change. Poor bastards still think the government is honest and is there to serve them. They don’t even pay taxes yet fer Christsake. And do you remember your American History textbook? Factually influenced fiction at best, but a glorious read revealing that America does, indeed, have the biggest wang.
So, not so surprising…

‘The Poor Lost’

David Korn via Kos. God these people are disgusting:

Though there was no official poem for the occasion, impressionist Rich Little, emceeing the Constitution Ball at the Hilton Washington, did provide a bit of inaugural doggerel.
The gist of it was: “Let’s get together, let bitterness pass, I’ll hug your elephant, you kiss my ass!” And the crowd went crazy.
Little said he missed and adored the late President Ronald Reagan and “I wish he was here tonight, but as a matter of fact he is,” and he proceeded to impersonate Reagan, saying, “You know, somebody asked me, ‘Do you think the war on poverty is over?’ I said, ‘Yes, the poor lost.’ ” The crowd went wild.

In the same piece, Korn exposes Newt for the scumbag that he is. Not like anyone needed to draw you a picture, but he’s such a bottom feeder.

Master Control Center

$2 billion for new Iraqi embassy. That’s one fancy-schmancy embassy.
Just one gem in the $80B request from the Bush admin. today for “military operations.”
Something tells me we could get a lot more “freedom” by giving each and every one of those 40 million Iraqis $50 each and scraping the Baghdad “gleaming tower of democracy*.”
Compare and contrast: that mammoth Freedom Penis we’re erecting at ground zero costs a mere $1.5B.
Bush hearts Iraq.
* Americans only. No furiners.

Electoral College

CNN:

The normally perfunctory ceremony of counting and certifying Electoral College votes was delayed for about four hours as Democrats unsuccessfully challenged Ohio’s votes for Bush.
Bush received 286 electoral votes, 16 more than the 270 he needed to win re-election. Sen. John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, received 251 votes. One Democratic elector cast a vote not for Kerry but for former Sen. John Edwards, his vice presidential running mate.
In the vice presidential race, Vice President Dick Cheney received 286 electoral votes and Edwards received 252.
Alleging widespread “irregularities” on Election Day, a group of Democrats in Congress objected earlier Thursday to the counting of Ohio’s 20 electoral votes.
The challenge was defeated 267-31 by the House and 74-1 by the Senate, clearing the way for the joint session to count the votes from the remaining states.
The move was not designed to overturn Bush’s re-election, said Ohio Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones and California Sen. Barbara Boxer, who filed the objection.
The objecting Democrats, all of whom are House members except Boxer, said they wanted to draw attention to the need for aggressive election reform in the wake of what they said were widespread voter problems.
In a letter to congressional leaders Wednesday, members of the group said they would take the action because a new report by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee found “numerous, serious election irregularities,” particularly in Ohio, that led to “a significant disenfranchisement of voters.”
“How can we possibly tell millions of Americans who registered to vote, who came to the polls in record numbers, particularly our young people … to simply get over it and move on?” Tubbs Jones said at a press conference with Boxer.
Thursday’s joint session of the House of Representatives and the Senate to count electoral votes is specified in the U.S. Constitution. Cheney, in his role as president of the Senate, presided over the session.
The results from each state, read in alphabetical order, were ticked through quickly until Ohio was called, and a clerk read the objection filed by Boxer and Tubbs Jones.
Then, as required by congressional rules in the event that at least one member of each house objects to the vote, Cheney ordered the lawmakers back to their respective chambers for two hours of debate on the merits of the challenge and to vote on it.
It was only the second such challenge since the current rules for counting electoral votes were established in 1877. The last was in 1969 and concerned a so-called “faithless elector,” according to congressional researchers.
Four years ago, after the disputed election results in Florida, members of the Congressional Black Caucus attempted to block Florida’s electoral votes from being counted.
In a scene recalled in Michael Moore’s movie “Fahrenheit 9/11,” lawmaker after lawmaker was gaveled down by Vice President Al Gore because no senator would support the objections, as the rules require.
House Democrats involved in this year’s protest worked for weeks to enlist the support of a senator in their party, and Boxer agreed to join the effort Wednesday.
“This is my opening shot to be able to focus the light of truth on these terrible problems in the electoral system,” Boxer told the joint press conference with Tubbs Jones.
“While we have men and women dying to bring democracy abroad, we’ve got to make it the best it can be here at home, and that’s why I’m doing this.”
[…]

Look, the point here is it’s a improvement over 2000.
Did fraud exist in the general election of 2004? In Ohio? With it’s 20 electoral votes, which would of tipped the election? Yes and yes, to name a small few — but damning — examples.
Democracy was fun, wasn’t it?

Mmmmmmm… Torture

I really want to rant about this ridiculous debate over whether Torturo Gonzales should be confirmed.
The answer, of course, is no. This is a man who was more interested in the “legal opinions” of torture as the Abu Ghraib horror broke than the fact that, you know, people were being tortured.
His belief that the President is above the law should also raise eyebrows, which natch endears him to Dear Leader, but is nary of any interest to Americans. If he had epic tits, or lip synched, or had an adorable white baby consumed by the tsunamis, just then America might take notice.
NYT: (bold mine)

Mr. Gonzales’s role in seeking a legal opinion on the definition of torture and the legal limits on the force that could be used on terrorist suspects in captivity is expected to be a central issue in the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings scheduled to begin on Thursday on Mr. Gonzales’s nomination to be attorney general.
The request by Mr. Gonzales produced the much-debated Justice Department memorandum of Aug. 1, 2002, which defined torture narrowly and said that Mr. Bush could circumvent domestic and international prohibitions against torture in the name of national security.

We are so thoroughly fucked.

“Stop Hurting America”

CNN’s Crossfire is dead. Tucker’s been whining about his poor treatment at CNN for some time, so this was expected, but Crossfire had devolved into a circus over the past few years mixing all the worst elements of political hackery and facts-free punditry. It hasn’t always been that way, and it was one of the last places this side of Neptune you could find a partisan Democrat who had a bigger voice than writing angry letters from his Montana cabin. It’d be nice to have a show where useful debate took place on the air, as Crossfire once longed to be, but I don’t really see this happening outside of Air America holding a winning $500M Powerball ticket.
And no, Jon Stewart didn’t kill Crossfire. It sucked enough on its own. Didn’t hurt tho.
Poking through the blog world today, I picked up that CNN’s Capital Gang, which no one watches anyway, is also slated for exile. The good news here being these were the two permanent homes of “Douche Bag of Freedom” Bob Novak. As Novak recovered from hip replacement last month, Stewart noted on The Daily Show, “He didn’t break it. It tried to ESCAPE!”
So, good riddance Crossfire. Thankfully, Tucker’s bowtie continues to be adorable.