Month: November 2007

Huckabee’s Record: Freed a Rapist Who Became a Killer, Destroyed Gov’t Hard Drives, Misappropriated Funds, Raised Taxes

Jon Ponder

Recent polls show that Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas and Baptist preacher, is rising in popularity in Iowa, where he is cutting into Mitt Romney’s lead. (Romney has 28 percent, Huckabee has 24 percent in the ABC news survey; Romney is at 27 percent and Huckabee’s at 18 percent in the local KCCI-TV poll.) He’s also moving up in in Florida, where he’s running second to Rudolph Giuliani, 26 percent to 17 percent — leaving good ol’ boy actor Fred Thompson in fifth place with 9 percent.

With Thompson’s campaign fading, Huckabee becomes the last best hope for the GOP’s Christian nationalist base. Unlike Thompson, Huckabee is authentically one of them. He believes in the inerrancy of the Bible and says he does not believe in evolution. He wants to amend the Constitution to outlaw abortion, and he is the only candidate who has smeared a gay person in the debates, so far.

But Mike Huckabee comes with some serious baggage, and with his rise in the polls comes new scrutiny of his record as governor Arkansas, both in the media and by his opponents, who are quickly finding his record in Little Rock to be what opposition researchers might call a “target-rich environment.”

The scandals associated with the Huckabee administration in Arkansas include:

  • A rapist released at Huckabee’s behest who went on to murder his next victim
  • Accusations that Huckabee and his family misappropriated tax-payer funds for personal use
  • The charge that at the end of his term, Huckabee ordered the destruction of government computers worth over $300,000, apparently to obstruct possible future investigations
  • While he was governor, the state of Arkansas raised taxes by hundreds of millions of dollars

Details follow:

[…]

In Case You Missed It

Trish

Today’s Shocker from Borowitz:

In a stunning development that has confounded medical experts around the world, doctors examining Vice President Dick Cheney said today that they have detected signs of a heart…

“We had been operating under the assumption that he didn’t have one,” said chief of staff David Addington, who said that Mr. Cheney also has not had a soul since 1995, when it was purchased by the Halliburton Company…

At the White House, spokesperson Dana Perino said that the sudden appearance of a heart in Dick Cheney’s chest had motivated President Bush to schedule an MRI of his head.

Maybe I Will Get to Vote for Kucinich After All

Buck Banks

As a registered Independent in Florida, I don’t get to vote in either the Democratic or Republican primaries — not that it would mean anything if I could. But if I could it would mean that I would at least have the opportunity of voting for Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich before his campaign gets ground to dust by the Clinton-Obama-Edwards juggernaut. Not that I necessarily would, but I might could, as they say up in North Carolina.

But even if Kucinich gets the snot kicked out of him in the primary, I might still get to vote for him in a third-party bid. National Journal columnist Craig Crawford sees a potentially potent third-party ticket of Kucinich and Republican presidential candidate Texas Rep. Ron Paul. Crawford even gins up some hints from the candidates themselves:

Kucinich is not a fierce partisan for the Democratic Party: ‘I don’t buy into that stuff.’

“I hear that a lot, but I haven’t really thought about it,” the Ohio congressman said of talk about running with his House colleague from Texas. “I like Ron Paul. He’s a real patriot. He and I will be working together in a lot of circumstances.”

Kucinich added that he is not a fierce partisan for the Democratic Party. “I don’t buy into that stuff,” he said. And he noted that in many lopsided House votes he and Paul often stand together against their parties — sometimes by themselves. “Kucinich-Paul. You’ll find that on more than a few roll calls.”

Both men are party outsiders — Paul ran on the Libertarian ticket in 1988 — but they also have significant differences in beliefs, Crawford notes:

While Kucinich’s pro-government philosophy and Paul’s libertarian credo might not mix at all levels, they are both passionately against the war in Iraq and dedicated to restoring congressional power under the Constitution.

But what adds some credibility to the possibility is Crawford’s conclusion about the two scrappy outsiders:

Running together in an independent effort would garner a lot more attention than continuing their party bids long after others have locked up the nominations.

Larry Flynt Confirms That Trent Lott ‘Has Been a Target’

Jon Ponder

Here’s an interesting development in the increasingly heated speculation about what led Sen. Trent Lott to announce his resignation from the Senate yesterday.

On Larry Flynt’s website, Flynt has posted an excerpt from PageOneQ, a Washington-based website that has a record of accurately identifying closeted Republican politicians:

“Once upon a time,” writes Big Head DC [another Washington-based website], “there was a twentysomething boy-next-door type with reddish blond hair and a brillantly white smile.”

This boy-next-door is male escort Benjamin Nicholas, whose blog, 15 Minutes, helped him make some connections in business and politics.

One of these connections is rumored to be [Trent Lott, who is] rumored to have planned a resignation by the end of this year to avoid being scandalized by Hustler publisher Larry Flynt. Flynt had, back in June, offered cash rewards for substantiated accounts of sexual liaisons with elected officials.

To which Larry Flynt responds:

HUSTLER Magazine has received numerous inquiries regarding the involvement of Larry Flynt and HUSTLER in the resignation of Trent Lott. Senator Lott has been the target of an ongoing HUSTLER investigation for some time now, due to confidential information that we have received.

Meanwhile, at Huffington Post, the idea that Lott had any sort of relationship with Benjamin Nicholas is “put to bed” by none other than Nicholas himself:

[…]

Red Cross Fires CEO, a Former Bush Official, Over ‘Improper’ Relationship

Jon Ponder

The American Red Cross announced it has fired its president and CEO, Mark Everson, because he conducted an improper “personal relationship” with a subordinate employee.

According to the Associated Press, “the Red Cross asked for and received Everson’s resignation, effective immediately, after learning of the relationship.”

Everson and his wife, Nanette, have two children. The employee was not identified by the Red Cross or in early media reports but is presumed to be female.

Everson served in the George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan administrations:

In 2003, he was nominated by George Bush to be commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service. He was confirmed by the GOP-controlled Senate in May of that year. Prior to that he served as deputy director of Bush’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB). He also served as chairman of the President’s Management Council. During the Clinton years, Everson worked in the private sector, but in the 1980s, he served in the Reagan administration. As deputy commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, he oversaw Reagan’s program of granting amnesty to illegal immigrants.

Another example of good ol’ family values, Republican style.

Is Cheney’s Latest Heart Ailment Real – Or Could It Be a Pretext for His Resignation?

Jon Ponder

Cable newsers are ga-ga over breaking news that Dick Cheney’s doctors discovered that he had an irregular heartbeat today:

“During examination he was incidentally found to have an irregular heartbeat, which on further testing was determined to be atrial fibrillation, an abnormal rhythm involving the upper chambers of the heart,” said spokeswoman Megan Mitchell.

She said Cheney would go to the hospital later Monday for further evaluation. She said that if necessary, he would be receive cardioversion, a procedure that involves the delivery of an electric impulse to the heart.

Under normal circumstances, it wouldn’t seem odd that a vice president’s health problem might be discovered “incidentally” — or that his spokeswoman is, well, speaking about it. But this is Dick Cheney. And it brings us to a question: Is this story real, or could it be a fabrication meant to set the stage for Cheney’s resignation?

Before you dismiss the latter as speculation from a conspiracy nut whose tin-foil hat is on too tight, consider this:

  • Cheney and Bush created an incredibly elaborate and entirely false pretext for taking the country to war — a massive misinformation campaign that completely snookered the corporate media and a majority of the public and that has yet to be sussed out. Faking news of an irregular heartbeat in order to shuffle Cheney off the stage quietly is child’s play by comparison.
  • It’s a damn good excuse. The standard remedy for heart ailments like atrial fibrillation is to reduce stress. The only practicable way for a sitting vice president to reduce stress is to resign.
  • With Cheney out of the way, a new vice president could run for president with all the campaign advantages of the incumbency, especially including the ability to manufacture events and control the flow of news.

And the motivations for moving Cheney out under false pretenses are manifold:

[…]

Fox Anchor: Traitor Who Betrayed US Anti-Terror Secrets Deserves a Medal

Jon Ponder

In 1999, former Pres. George Bush famously said, “I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors.”

John Gibson, the Fox News anchor, takes an opposite view. He says he wants to “give a medal” to the Bush officials who deliberately jeopardized a top-secret, well-established CIA program that tracked the sales of weapons of mass destruction in black markets worldwide.

Why would a rightwinger like Gibby want to pin a medal on these traitors? Because the traitors are Republicans — a cabal led by Dick Cheney and that included Karl Rove and Scooter Libby — while the covert agent in charge of the CIA’s top secret WMD tracking program, Valerie Plame Wilson, made a campaign donation to Al Gore in 1999.

In her 20 years as a spy for the United States, Agent Wilson worked for a front business, an oil industry consulting firm called Brewster Jennings and Associates. She frequently traveled overseas where she developed a network of secret “assets” — foreign nationals who provided her with inside knowledge on the movement of chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons and materials in the worldwide terrorist black market.

The CIA will not say, of course, how many of these foreign assets were compromised, killed, wounded or kidnapped and tortured as a result of Cheney’s treasonous conspiracy to forfeit them by exposing Agent Wilson’s covert identity.

And only time will tell how many weapons of mass destruction were transported undetected because Agent Wilson’s network was compromised — and whether one or more of these weapons will be used to attack the United States.

But none of that matters to Republicans like John Gibson and his cohorts at Fox News and in the Bush White House, whose patriotism is a fake as the made-in-China American flags pinned to their lapels. Gibson’s remarkable statement advocating giving a medal to Rove, Cheney and Libby — the “most insidious of traitors” who betrayed vital national secrets — exposes him for what he is: an ideologue who puts his party ahead of his country even at the risk of national security.

Sen. Trent Lott To Announce Retirement Effective At the End of December

Jon Ponder

Trent Lott, the man who is probably best remembered for saying that the United States would have been a better place if Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina racist, had been elected president in 1948, is retiring from the Senate:

Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi, the Senate’s No. 2 Republican, plans to resign his seat before the end of the year, congressional and White House officials said Monday.

Lott, 66, scheduled two news conferences in his home state later in the day to reveal his plans. According to congressional and White House officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of the announcement, Lott intends to resign effective the end of the year.

No good news here, however. Lott’s replacement will be appointed by the governor of Mississippi, Haley Barbour, the former GOP lobbyist and RNC head, who is undoubtedly scouring the state right now to find the most ardent rightwing racist troglodyte available to fill Lott’s seat.

In fact, Gov. Barbour will be hard pressed to find someone who fits that description better than himself, and if the governor hadn’t just been reelected in a landslide in November, he’d probably put his own name at the top of the list of appointees.

The AP says Lott’s health is not an issue in his retirement, and the fact that no reason has been given for his abrupt departure — not even the standby “desire to spend more time with his family” — suggests he plans to cash in on his four decades as a Washington insider and power broker by becoming a lobbyist.

Lott, who made his comments about Thurmond at the late senator’s 100th birthday party, is the sixth Senate Republican who has announced retirement this year, according to the AP.