Year: 2007

Polk County Papers Ignoring Vigils for Ryan Skipper

Jon Ponder

Which local papers have reported online on the upcoming vigil for hate crime victim Ryan Skipper?

Fortunately, most people in the county probably read the Orlando Sentinel:

Equality Florida is planning a day of statewide vigils, including one in Polk County, to draw attention to hate crimes.

The vigils are in response to the death of Ryan Keith Skipper, a 25-year-old Polk County man stabbed to death March 14. His body was dumped alongside a road…

Skipper was gay, according to people who knew him, the Sheriff’s Office said. A witness claimed Brown said Skipper had made advances toward him, and that was the reason for the killing, a sheriff’s spokeswoman said.

Authorities have labeled it a hate crime.

Equality Florida, an advocacy organization, is seeking volunteers to assist or hold a vigil Saturday. If interested, contact Russell Patterson at russ@eq fl.org or 1-813-849-3919.

Imus Insulted a Friend of Mine on the Air

Jon Ponder

With me and Don Imus it is personal, and it has been since he trashed my friend Jacqueline Lennon live on MSNBC early one morning in February 2000.

Imus called R&R “cheesy” and trashed one of its staff members on national television because the radio industry trade paper had had the gall to give him a lifetime achievement award.

Jacq is an exceptionally fine R&B singer who also manages events for Radio & Records, the radio industry trade paper. That year, for reasons that must have seemed like a good idea at the time, R&R had decided to honor Imus with its Talk Radio Lifetime Achievement Award at a ceremony in Washington that month.

I only watch Imus when nothing else is on, so there I was at 5:30 in the morning, listening to him railing about R&R, which he called “cheesy,” and the award, which he seemed to think branded him a has-been prematurely. He was also upset that R&R had had the temerity to send him a form letter asking for information about credentials for his guests, I think, which was an affront to his enormous ego. He was particularly pissed off at the person who signed the letter — Jacqueline Lennon, whom he called a “moron” more than once.

I knew he was just using her as a foil for his tantrum — a convenient target for his monkeypoo. But what kind of jerk goes on national television and trashes a well-meaning staff member on an event in his honor over something so trivial?

What’s interesting here is the status of Imus’ coziness within the Gang of 500, many of whom were frequent call-in guests on his show. Today he made things worse by criticizing Brian Williams’ coverage of the story on the NBC Nightly News last night. Sponsors, including Proctor & Gambel, have already pulled ads from his shows.

CA Dem Leader Urges Putting War on Feb. 5 Ballot

Jon Ponder

California Senate leader Don Perata introduced legislation yesterday that would place a nonbinding advisory measure on the Iraq war on the ballot for the super-duper Tuesday primary in February. Now he’s calling on governors in the other 20 primary states to do the same thing:

“I propose we also use this opportunity to tell the current President where we stand on this fundamental issue of the day,” writes Perata. “It’s time for our citizens to be heard.”

In addition to giving voters a voice in the debate, Perata says the campaign for the referendum might bring clarity to the presidential candidates’ positions on the war.

Ifill on Imus: Finally Addresses Personal Insult

Trish

There’s a wonderful piece on the Dom Imus mess in today’s NYT by Gwen Ifill, once called by the insult-happy radio host “a cleaning lady.”

Ifill said she didn’t find out until five years later about the characterization, since Imus isn’t exactly on her radar screen.

I haven’t talked about this much. I’m a big girl. I have a platform. I have a voice.

It took Lars-Erik Nelson, a columnist for The New York Daily News, to finally explain what no one else had wanted to repeat.

“Isn’t The Times wonderful,” Mr. Nelson quoted Mr. Imus as saying on the radio. “It lets the cleaning lady cover the White House.”

I was taken aback but not outraged…

I haven’t talked about this much. I’m a big girl. I have a platform. I have a voice. I’ve been working in journalism long enough that there is little danger that a radio D.J.’s juvenile slap will define or scar me. Yesterday, he began telling people he never actually called me a cleaning lady. Whatever. This is not about me.

It is about the Rutgers Scarlet Knights. That game had to be the biggest moment of their lives, and the outcome the biggest disappointment. They are not old enough, or established enough, to have built up the sort of carapace many women I know — black women in particular — develop to guard themselves against casual insult…

To his credit, Mr. Imus told the Rev. Al Sharpton yesterday he realizes that, this time, he went way too far.

Yes, he did. Every time a young black girl shyly approaches me for an autograph or writes or calls or stops me on the street to ask how she can become a journalist, I feel an enormous responsibility. It’s more than simply being a role model. I know I have to be a voice for them as well.

So here’s what this voice has to say for people who cannot grasp the notion of picking on people their own size: This country will only flourish once we consistently learn to applaud and encourage the young people who have to work harder just to achieve balance on the unequal playing field.

Let’s see if we can manage to build them up and reward them, rather than opting for the cheapest, easiest, most despicable shots.

States Put at Risk from Bush Rip-off

Trish

How is the Bush government providing equipment for its operations in Iraq and Afghanistan? Why, stealing it from the states of course.

What I want to know is where the billions of dollars of emergency appropriations for “the troops” have gone.

Florida has about 600 to 700 soldiers in Iraq. Members were sent overseas with their equipment, but when they come back, the gear often stays in the war zones.

The Florida Guard was down 500 Humvees and 600 trucks, short 4,000 pairs of night vision goggle and needed 30 more wreckers, spokesman Lt. Col. Ron Tittle said…

The Florida National Guard has only 53 percent of the dual-use equipment it once had for responding to a storm or domestic disturbance, a recent analysis by the Government Accountability Office found. Texas, California and Louisiana also have about half of their dual-use equipment available to non-deployed Army National Guard forces.

In light of the pilfering, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) is worried about the Guard’s ability to respond to stateside disasters.

“Problems from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have stretched the Florida National Guard further than ever before, leaving it without all the resources it should have for responding to a domestic crisis,” Nelson said. “Hurricane season is coming fast and we need to make sure the Guard has what it needs.”

The Guard is being a good soldier and saying it will be O.K.

…Tittle said sufficient manpower and equipment remained to respond to a major hurricane, and additional supplies could be borrowed from other states or rented if needed.

Rented? In the devastation, flooding, power outages, and chaos of a major storm, we’ll just trot off to the nearest open Rent-All and come back with a generator or a backhoe? I’m not seeing it.

What I want to know is where the billions of dollars of emergency appropriations for “the troops” have gone. I would not be surprised to hear that government equipment ended up in the hands of the private contractors in Iraq, or that fistfuls of that emergency money went there too.

DeLay: My Ouster Was ‘Same Process’ as Hitler Killing 6 Million Jews

Jon Ponder

Tom DeLay has a book out in which his ghost writer compared liberals to Hitler, He elucidated this point on David Goodman’s radio show yesterday:

DELAY: I am so outraged by this whole criminalization of politics. It’s not good enough to defeat somebody politically. It’s not even good enough to vilify somebody publicly. They have to carpet bomb you with lies and made up scandals and false charges and indicting you on laws that don’t exist. … It’s the same thing as I say in my book, that the Nazis used. When you use the big lie in order to gain and maintain power, it is immoral and it is outrageous…

It’s the same process. It’s the same criminalization of politics. it’s the same oppression of people. It’s the same destroy people in order to gain power. It may be six million Jews. it may be indicting somebody on laws that don’t exist. But, it’s the same philosophy and it’s the same world view.

Abu in Trouble: Gonzales Failing Prep for Testimony

Jon Ponder

“He’s not ready,” Tasia Scolinos, Gonzales’s public-affairs chief.

Last week, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales cleared his calendar for nearly two weeks in order to memorize answers to questions he might be asked under oath when he testifies before Congress on April 17.

The problem is, DOJ lawyers have forbidden Gonzales to have any contact with other witnesses, and since everyone close to him is on the witness list, he’s having a hard time getting his story straight.

The challenge facing Abu, one of Pres. George Bush’s most loyal flying monkeys, of course, is that he can’t tell the truth under oath without either perjuring himself or implicating flying monkeys higher up in the food chain, including Karl Rove and Bush’s former secretary, Harriet Miers, and maybe the president himself, in the scandal around the firing of U.S. attorneys late last year:

[Even] his own closest advisers are nervous about whether he is up to the task. At a recent “prep” for a prospective Sunday talk-show interview, Gonzales’s performance was so poor that top aides scrapped any live appearances. During the March 23 session in the A.G.’s conference room, Gonzales was grilled by a team of top aides and [GOP bigwigs] about what he knew about the plan to fire seven U.S. attorneys last fall. But Gonzales kept contradicting himself and “getting his timeline confused,” said one participant … His advisers finally got “exasperated” with him, the source added. “He’s not ready,” Tasia Scolinos, Gonzales’s public-affairs chief, told the A.G.’s top aides after the session was over…

The problem is, DOJ lawyers have forbidden Gonzales to have any contact with other witnesses, and since everyone close to him is on the witness list, he’s having a hard time getting his story straight.

While the attorney general studies his lines 24/7, and his underlings are all legally constrained from talking with him or each other (presumably) the Dept. of Justice is leaderless and rudderless.

Imus and the Media Whores

Jon Ponder

Digby:

I hear his disgusting show and hear them on it, kissing up to him like he’s some sort of oracle instead of a spoiled, petulant bully with an incoherent worldview. And I also listen to their complaints about the vituperation on the internet, how the bloggers — especially the “angry left” — are horrible people who treat them disrespectfully. And I have to laugh because I know that Don Imus can call them and their colleagues twits and pussies in Vanity Fair and they come back licking his boots, begging for more. And we know why.

They have earned their reputation — even some of the good ones, the ones who write things I like. When you sell your personal integrity for money to a racist scumbag like Don Imus, you have to expect that people are not going to treat you with a lot of respect.

Don Imus has been behaving badly and apologizing for it for many, many years. I expect he will continue to do so once he’s finished with his two week vacation. And all of these writers will once again make pilgrimages to his show and pledge fealty to him in order to sell books. Because, unlike those great basketball players he maligned so casually — they really are whores.

Don Imus is an Okie from Riverside, Calif.

Waxman Going after Rove’s Rogue Email System

Jon Ponder

As soon as the Bushies installed themselves in the White House in 2001, the Republican Party set up a second tier of electronic communications out of the political office run by Karl Rove.

While the White House may find it more difficult to claim executive privilege in preventing Congress from reviewing emails on the RNC system, Republicans aren’t too worried: the RNC purges emails from its servers after 30 days.

On its surface, the new email domains were legal. In fact, their stated purpose was to avoid the criticism that they were doing GOP politics on the public dime — a charge Republicans had made against the Clinton White House without ever offering proof of it, of course.

According to the Presidential Records Act, a government “sunshine law,” all communication involving a member of the president’s staff are required to be preserved for scrutiny. If we learned nothing else over the six years when the GOP ran all three branches of government, conservatives view laws as only applying to “the little people” — meaning, of course, Democrats. It is only natural, therefore, that Rove and his network of operatives in the federal bureaucracy began using the alternative email servers to subvert the Act and conceal improper political operations inside the government.

Amid the thousands of documents dumped by the Dept. of Justice in response to congressional demands in the U.S. Attorney purge, investigators found emails to and fron Rove’s White House and DOJ political flunkies using the alternative email domains (including gwb43.com and rnchhq.com), apparently in an effort to circumvent the oversight and the sunshine law.

Rep. Henry Waxman, who chairs the House committee that investigates government operations, is demanding to see the GOP’s official emails sent to and from the White House related several investigatiosn – the prosecutor purge, the corrupt GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Rove’s use of the Government Services Administration (GSA) for political purposes:

White House staff arranging for the GSA briefing by a Rove deputy, Scott Jennings, used the gwb43.com e-mail domain name. That caught the attention of Waxman’s investigators, who had previously examined e-mails from Abramoff to Rove’s executive assistant, Susan B. Ralston, to object to an impending Interior Department decision. The decision, he wrote, was “anathema to all our supporters it’s important if possible to get some quiet message from the WH [White House] that this is absurd.”

Ralston used outside accounts — including at rnchq.org — to communicate with Abramoff and his partners. One e-mail from an Abramoff associate said that White House personnel had warned “it is better to not put this stuff in writing in [the White House] … e-mail system because it might actually limit what they can do to help us, especially since there could be lawsuits, etc.”

Abramoff’s response, according to a copy of his e-mail released by Waxman’s committee, was: “Dammit. It was sent to Susan on her rnc pager and was not supposed to go into the WH system.” Ralston later resigned in connection with the lobbying scandal…

In the U.S. attorney case, Rove deputy Jennings used the RNC e-mail system to write to D. Kyle Sampson, then Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales’ chief of staff, in August 2006 about replacing Arkansas U.S. Atty. H.E. “Bud” Cummins III with former Rove protege Tim Griffin.

“We’re a go for the U.S. atty plan. WH leg, political and communications have signed off and acknowledged that we have to be committed to following through once the pressure comes,” Jennings wrote in an e-mail from the gwb43.com domain name. Sampson noted in a related e-mail that “getting him appointed was important to” Rove, then-White House Counsel Harriet E. Miers and other officials.

While the White House may find it more difficult to claim executive privilege in preventing Congress from reviewing emails on the RNC system, Republicans aren’t too worried: the RNC purges emails from its servers after 30 days.

Flunky Flying Monkeys: DOJ Has Been Katrina-ized

Jon Ponder

The incompetence that rots the Bush administration from the head down was revealed at its starkest in its abysmal response to Hurricane Katrina. It has manifested itself since then in Iraq, Walter Reed, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Pentagon, Homeland Security, the FBI and now the Dept. of Justice.

Why does Alberto Gonzales need to prep for two weeks for testimony about the policies and practices of the department he supposedly oversees?

The scenario at Justice is familiar and similar to what happened to FEMA before Katrina: At DOJ, Bush installed a trusted flying monkey, Alberto Gonzales, as the head of a huge bureaucracy. Gonzales stocked the ranks with meagerly credentialed and woefully over-matched flunkies whose only real qualification was loyalty to the Bush cabal inside the GOP.

The flunkies quickly subverted the department’s true mission, redeploying its apparatus in pursuit of Bush’s political goals. They ran roughshod over senior staffers, pushing aside anyone who was competent or non-aligned with Bush.

In this sort of system, sooner or later, corruption and chaos will ensue.

The revelation of the Katrina-ization at Justice that was exposed in the bungled firing of eight U.S. attorneys in December continued to ratchet up last week:

  • Gonzales canceled his vacation in order to crib for his congressional testimony, which is scheduled for April 16. The prompted Keith Olbermann to ask why an official would need to prep for two weeks on testimony about the inner workings of the department he supposedly runs.
  • Monica Goodling, a high ranking DOJ Bushie, resigned rather than becoming the first Justice official to plead the Fifth in the history of the republic. Her attorney says she is refusing to testify out of fear she might perjure herself. Goodling is one of 150 DOJ employees who graduated from a law school operated by the Christian nationalist TV preacher Pat Robertson.
  • In the Minneapolis U.S. Attorney’s office, four top staff members of the new federal prosecutor, Rachel Paulose, a Gonzales flunky, voluntarily demoted themselves in protest over the incompetence of their boss. Paulose, 33, was a special assistant to Gonzales, worked as a senior counsel for deputy attorney general Paul McNulty and is reportedly best friends with Monica Goodling.

A normal president would be so humiliated that he would have cleaned house long ago.