Month: May 2005

Great web site to accompany the DeLay article that follows.

indelayspocket.com

You can click on your state and get a dollar-for-dollar breakdown of which of your Congressional representatives gave to the DeLay Legal Fund (ARMPAC), took from the DeLay PAC, and how your person voted vis-à-vis Tommy. The whole thing is summed up into a handy DeLay ranking score.

In Florida, no Democrats gave or received but some voted with Tom more often than others. Some Republicans evidently tried to stay clean, giving or taking only $20 or so, while Rep. Clay “Gimme Gimme” Shaw helped himself to $30,020.

From the Public Campaign Action Fund, top 10 reasons Tom DeLay should be kicked out of Congress:

1. Tom DeLay violates ethics rules at will, making him a national embarrassment. Indeed, he has earned four formal ethics violations, a truly rare achievement, as only five Members of Congress have been chastised by the committee in the last six years..

• In May 1999, the House Ethics Committee issued a rare private rebuke to DeLay, for “badgering a lobbying organization over its hiring of a Democrat as its president.” DeLay had complained to the Electronic Industries Alliance and the GOP House leadership the October before about its hiring of a former Democratic congressman from Oklahoma, Dave McCurdy. After DeLay voiced his complaint, House leaders showed their displeasure with the group by postponing votes on an international treaty that the association wanted. (The New York Times, 5/14/99)

• In October 2004, the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct admonished DeLay, saying he had gone too far, and violated rules on three separate occasions: “The promise of political support for a relative of a member goes beyond the boundaries of maintaining party discipline, and should not be used as the basis of a bargain for members to achieve their respective goals,” the House Ethics committee wrote in its report. The Committee also admonished him for using federal resources, the FAA, for political purposes and for the appearance of conflict of interest by raising money at a golf tournament from Westar while considering legislation that would impact the energy company. (House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct; The New York Times, 10/1/04)

2. Tom DeLay embodies the worst of pay-to-play politics – he puts big donors like Enron ahead of the rest of us.

• DeLay’s rise in politics was fueled by Enron. The rogue company hosted the first fundraiser for his leadership PAC, raising $280,000 for him at the event. And DeLay fought hard for the company’s agenda of regulatory relief. Not only did Enron reward Delay with $32,700 over his years in Congress (making him its #8 top beneficiary overall), it gave two of his top aides a $750,000 consulting contract to do a “grassroots” campaign for the deregulation of energy markets, and paid his wife Christine $40,000 for a no-show job.

[…]

Talk about Republicans eating their own. On Tuesday, Mike Gin won election as mayor of Redondo Beach, CA, in a landslide despite an attempt by an outside GOP extremist group to throw the election to his opponent, another Republican.

Gin, a two-term city Redondo Beach councilman and member of the Log Cabin Republicans, received 61 percent of the vote among voters in the beach town of 65,000 south of Los Angeles.

An Orange County based wingnut organization calling itself the California Republican Assembly sent a mailer to voters in the Los Angeles County city noting that Gin took donations from a national gay group and accusing him of having a stealth agenda of promoting gay marriage.

News of the contents of the mailer late last week apparently turned tide in the election toward Gin. His opponent, another Republican city councilman, Gerard Bisignano, tried to disavow himself from the hate-filled Republican mailer.

“I’m extremely disappointed that CRA would do an anti-Mike Gin mailer that by inference would be pro-Gerard Bisignano,” he said. “I was frankly disgusted with it.”

Leaving aside our puzzlement that anyone – gay or straight – would want to be a member of group that despised them, we can rack this one up as another defeat for the Talibani’s attempts at hand-to-hand combat in the political battles here in California.

AVN News:

Porn star and former gubernatorial candidate Mary Carey will be joining her boss, Kick Ass Pictures president Mark Kulkis, in attending a dinner with President Bush in Washington, D.C. on June 14.

Kulkis was invited to attend the event by the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), which is organizing the event. Over a two-day course of NRCC events preceding the dinner, Carey and Kulkis will be attending a meeting with presidential advisor Karl Rove, giving their recommendations on important national issues.

“I’m hoping to run as Lieutenant Governor of California next year,” Carey said. “Since Arnold {Schwarzenegger} is a Republican, I thought this dinner would be a great networking opportunity for me.”

“I’m honored to be invited to this event,” Kulkis said. “Republicans bill themselves as the pro-business party. Well, you won’t find a group of people more pro-business than pornographers. We contributed over $10 billion to the national economy last year.”

“I’m especially looking forward to meeting Karl Rove,” Carey added. “Smart men like him are so sexy. I know that he’s against gay marriage, but I think I can convince him that a little girl-on-girl action now and then isn’t so bad!”

Kulkis serves as an Honorary Chairman on the NRCC’s Business Advisory Council, a group of business people who advocate a progressive, pro-business agenda. His company produces hardcore adult videos with a guarantee of “No Fake Boobs & No Condoms.” Carey ran for Governor in the 2003 California Recall Election, while Kulkis served as her campaign manager.

(Via AmericaBlog.)

Media Bistro:

Last night on The O’Reilly Factor, Bill replayed Terry Moran’s question for WH press secretary Scott McClellan:

With respect, who made you the editor of “Newsweek”? Do you think it’s appropriate for you at that podium speaking with the authority of the president of the United States, to tell an American magazine what they should print?

O’Reilly responded: “Now that was an ABC News correspondent. I would have slapped him. If I were McClellan, I would have went down and whacked him. All right? Don’t use that tone with me. O’Reilly says the elite media are “lashing out” because they are “rapidly losing power and influence.” “They’re rallying around a common theme — the Bush administration’s bad for America.”

> Update: 3:48pm: An e-mailer says: “If O’Reilly were a real journalist — which he’s not — he, too, would take umbrage on beating on Newsweek like a straw horse. but, of course, he’s not: he’s blindly defensive and in the pocket of the administration.”

And if O’Reilly could speak English, he would have said, “I would have gone down there…” Not “I would have went down there…”

On the floor of the Senate today, Sen. Rick Sanatorum compared the Democrats’ filibustering of judicial nominees to the Nazi occupation of Paris. Via Raw Story:

Some are suggesting we’re trying to change the law, we’re trying to break the rules. Remarkable. Remarkable hubris. I mean, imagine, the rule has been in place for 214 years that this is the way we confirm judges. Broken by the other side two years ago, and the audacity of some members to stand up and say, how dare you break this rule. It’s the equivalent of Adolf Hitler in 1942 “I’m in Paris. How dare you invade me. How dare you bomb my city? It’s mine.”

TAPPED:

I seem to remember a little criticism of MoveOn for briefly hosting an ad that compared a George W. Bush speech to a Hitler speech, and Robert Byrd receiving a little criticism for comparing Republican consolidation of power to 1930s Nazi consolidation of power. So what is going to happen to a leading Republican senator (and probably a presidential candidate) who compares Democrats to Hitler in the middle of World War II? Anybody want to bet against absolutely nothing?

And let’s not forget the outrage when an official of the German government compared Bush to Hitler during the run up to the Iraq war.

They got us again, kids.

We’re debating “women in combat” while the Bush administration pulls the wool over our eyes and tight around our necks.

First of all, women will continue to be in combat until war changes, which won’t be in our lifetimes. “Insurgents,” “war lords” – and whatever other GOP-speak terms that avoid acknowledging we are fighting in a couple of civil wars – don’t stick to battle fronts, all neat and tidy like in World War II movies. They attack supply vehicles and kill soldiers like Lori Piestewa, who are allegedly safe from so-called “combat” positions.

Second, there are roles only women can fill in the current wars, such as body-searching Iraqi or Afghan women.

So unless we restrict women, ala Frank Capra, to the home front and hospitals across the border, and announce that the military now offers a glass ceiling so low you’ll bump your head if you stand up, we are wasting time debating an option that doesn’t really exist.

Which is exactly what the Bush folks were counting on.

The House bill that offers this so-called protecting of women from combat also includes $442 billion in military spending NOT COUNTING IRAQ OR AFGHANISTAN. Hello? Did you hear that?

CNN:

President Bush requested $442 billion for defense for the budget year that begins October 1, excluding money to pay for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But what catches our eye? The bright, shiny object in Karl Rove’s other hand, as usual.

In a nearly 15-hourlong committee hearing, the most contentious issue was the role of women in combat.

At least a couple of Democrats weren’t distracted.

Added Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri, the committee’s leading Democrat: “There seems to be a solution in search of a problem.”

…Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-Georgia, cast the lone dissenting vote on the overall bill.

Afghanistan – where, thanks to our side trip into Irrelevant Iraq, things are going south – was where we should have been from the start. How much more money – and how many more men and women – will we put through the shredder that is Iraq?

Dear Friends,

Newsweek finds itself at the center of a firestorm after publishing, defending, apologizing for, and finally retracting their story about interrogators at Guantanamo Bay disposing of the Koran as an intimidation technique. If the truth be told, the Newsweek scandal is just the latest in a long history of the press simply being exceedingly careless with their facts. What most don’t realize is just how long that history really is.

Because conservatives don’t riot and people don’t die when the establishment press gets our stories wrong, very few know how we’ve been libeled for so long. For the over forty years I’ve been in national politics, I’ve come to know that the completely accurate news story is the rare exception, not the rule. My experience is that over 95% of the stories I’ve been involved in – with personal knowledge of the facts and circumstances – have one or more significant errors.

Even worse is the reliance of lazy and/or opinionated journalists on the infamous “Anonymous Source,” making falsehoods and distortions even more difficult to expose and correct. Most of these anonymous sources are people with an agenda and an axe to grind but without the courage to be upfront. Unfortunately far too many journalists know that they don’t need to check their facts because they just don’t have to.

When they get their facts wrong, they know the truth will almost never see the light of day. While news executives bemoan their shrinking market share and establishment journalists sneer at the freewheeling, unregulated blogs – it all comes down to trust, and the mainstream media is fast losing ground.

Americans are demanding more from their news sources, and they have hundreds more options now than they did 40 years ago when conservatives began building an alternative media in this country (direct mail, talk radio, cable TV, and now the internet).

Best, Richard Viguerie

Richard Viguerie is the co-author of America’s Right Turn: How Conservatives Used New & Alternative Media to Take Power (2004, Bonus Books)

Juan Cole, writing in Salon.com:

When Newsweek’s source admitted that he had misidentified the government document in which he had seen an account of Quran desecration at Guantánamo prison, Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita exploded, “People are dead because of what this son of a bitch said. How could he be credible now?”

Di Rita could have said the same things about his bosses in the Bush administration.

Tens of thousands of people are dead in Iraq, including more than 1,600 U.S. soldiers and Marines, because of false allegations made by President George W. Bush and Di Rita’s more immediate boss, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, about Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and equally imaginary active nuclear weapons program. Bush, Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice repeatedly made unfounded allegations that led to the continuing disaster in Iraq, much of which is now an economic and military no man’s land beset by bombings, assassinations, kidnappings and political gridlock.

And we now know, thanks to a leaked British memo concerning the head of British intelligence, that the Bush administration — contrary to its explicit denials — had already made up its mind to attack Iraq and “fixed” those bogus allegations to support its decision. In short, Bush and his top officials lied about Iraq.

Going to war is the most serious decision a president can make. It should never be approached in a cavalier fashion. American lives, the prestige and influence of the country, international relations, the health of its defenses, and the future of the next generation are at stake. Yet every single piece of evidence we now have confirms that George W. Bush, who was obsessed with unseating Saddam Hussein even before 9/11, recklessly used the opportunity presented by the terror attacks to march the country to war, fixing the intelligence to justify his decision, and lying to the American people about the reasons for the war. In other times, this might have been an impeachable offense.