The FALSEHOODS of Mr. Bush and his government... FALSEHOODS that Reid, Pelosi, and Democrats DON'T EVEN MENTION, much less confront...

IN our previous post, we reported that the news of Senator Harry Reid and Rep. Nancy Pelosi's "Election plan for 2006" was so weak, anemic, pathetic, and useless, that we couldn't even pick out A SINGLE SENTENCE in the story worth highlighting. (The summation of any such sentence would be, "Sen. Reid and Rep. Nancy Pelosi are pinning their hopes that the issue of MINIMUM WAGE will resonate over ALL OTHER issues in 2006, and inspire Democratic voters and independents across America to turn out in droves on election day 2006.")

As we detailed previously, we most certainly support a raise in the minimum wage, and as well we support the "living wage" battle against Wal-Mart and other big-box stores across the nation for wages and benefits that will allow full time workers from those companies to stay above the poverty line. But we feel that if Senator Reid had made use of the Senate FILIBUSTER powers long before now in support of the minimum wage increase, a tactic or idea he floated recently, we might have ALREADY HAD a minimum wage increase to go along with those FIVE or SIX Congressional pay increases Congress has voted for itself these past dozen years, 4 or 5 or 6 Congressional pay increases with NO such corresponding raise of the minimum wage over that same time period.

Below, this terrific article by Jonathan Schell of The Nation (which we repost from a link at TomDispatch.com) details WHAT EVERYONE in America and the world KNOWS is the REAL substance of Election 2006: THE FALSEHOODS of Mr. Bush's administration and Republican MISRULE in Washington.

*FALSEHOODS* of Mr. Bush, his cabinet, his White House staff, his government officials, and the entire right-of-John-Birch-Society Republican Party.

The FALSEHOODS of a Republican Party which talks about "Moral Values," but forces even rape victims to carry their pregnancies to term, REFUSING TO ALLOW RAPE VICTIMS even access to the "morning after pill."

The FALSEHOODS of a Republican Party which drones on endlessly about "RIGHT TO LIFE," but IGNORES MERCURY RETARDED BABIES in the United States, and depleted uranium babies in Iraq. (And now even American Iraq servicemen are fathering malformed babies.)

The very fact that Rep. Pelosi and Senator Reid are IGNORANT - or PRETEND ignorance by tip-toeing around these serious issues - of these very serious and systematic Republican FALSEHOODS, demonstrates that they are, in our humble opinion, COMPLETELY UNQUALIFIED TO be the LEADERS of the Democratic Party in the House and Senate. Indeed, we here at C-dems.blgspt.com have called for Representative Nancy Pelosi's RESIGNATION in an earlier post.

Ms. Pelosi, Mr. Reid... by REFUSING to CONFRONT those Republican falsehoods so effortlessly listed by Mr. Schell in his commentary, you are effectively SIGNING ON TO THEM... you are COMPLICIT with those falsehoods.

Worse, you are ROBBING Democratic votes of the FIGHT that we need and deserve to start OPPOSING Mr. Bush and his serial FALSEHOODS.

IF the Democrats win control of the House in 2006, it will be DESPITE your "leadership."

IF the Democrats DO NOT regain control of the House or Senate in the 2006, it will be a world disaster, because Mr. Bush and his alcolytes will see it as a mandate to ENLARGE THEIR WARS, not just to the MiddleEast, but to Central Asia as well. That would be the "-stans," including Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrghistan, and other "-stans" which were once part of the Soviet Union, with the US already in Afghanistan. That would be to the doorsteps of Russia and China, who most certainly would supply militias and parties in opposition to American combat troops on their border, meaning that (assuming we get that far) in another 3 or 4 or 5 years from now, Fox 'news,' CNN, the Washington Post, and GE/msnbc (et al) will all be clamoring for a "clearing" invasion, as they are now clamoring for Israel to enter, "cleanse," AND OCCUPY Lebanon.

In 2000, candidate George W. Bush campaigned for president promising a plank of "a MORE HUMBLE foreign policy." It was a swipe (sneer) at President Clinton, who, by Republican lights, had "tied down" American combat troops in Haiti and Bosnia, but in reality it was a sneering scorn for the principle of "PEACEKEEPING," Republicans despising efforts to empower national minorities, especially heaven forbid a tiny Muslim minority in the Balkan European landmass or descendents of slaves Hatian voters.

Seeing as the signers of the PNAC manifesto, including Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and candidate Bush' own brother Jeb Bush, among others, had ALREADY CALLED (in the summer of 2000) for the REMOVAL of Saddam Hussein from Iraq by use of American force of arms, it is 99% probable that this "MORE HUMBLE Foreign Policy" pledge of Mr. Bush's in 2000 WAS ALSO A complete FALSEHOOD.

AND SIX LONG YEARS LATER, the COWERING Democrats STILL DARE NOT EVEN MENTION these policies of aggressive and ever expanding use of US military forces in increasingly far-flung countries.

How sad and pathetic. It looks as if, like Joe Lieberman and Zell Miller before them, Senator Reid and Rep. Pelosi are EMBRACING the neo-con policies of George W. Bush, AGAINST the will of FORTY-EIGHT MILLION AMERICAN DEMOCRATIC VOTERS in the past election, plus those MILLIONS more American citizens who have been electorally, economically, or politically disenfranchised by the autocratic Republican Party, voters who don't even bother to vote anymore, knowing that Deibold, Jeb Bush, Katherine Harris, Ken Blackwell, and the Republican Party are going to ROB their votes anyways.

Speaking of "to rob," THANK YOU, Leader 'Reid' and 'Leader' Pelosi, for ROBBING us Democratic activists of AN EXCITING, COMPELLING, and COURAGEOUS campaign theme this summer, of FAILING to provide those party sanctioned PDF download business cards to hand out to friends and voters "The Falsehoods of George W. Bush ENDANGER America" - doing "WORSE THAN NOTHING" (in the words of the New York Times) to strengthen chemical plants from Bhopalesque sabotage; doing next to nothing to inspect cargo containers, doing ALOT to HELP Dubai/Ports World/UAE private investors (sheiks) buy-out CONTROL OF AMERICAN PORTS, and above all, COMPLETELY FAILING to track down and capture Osama bin Laden, and in so failing (along with launching the UNPROVOKED Iraq war) ENCOURAGING the RECRUITMENT and massive fragmentation/cloning/compartmentalization/METASTASIS of Al Qaida hate-America-terrorism all across the world.

As Randi Rhodes pointed out (on AirAmericaRadio Thursday's show), Al Qaida is MOVING UP IN THE WORLD under George W. Bush's prosecution of the "war on terror." Whle 3 years ago Al Qaida videos were grainy, unprofessional, shot outdoors, and poorly edited, today they issue comuniques from state of the art video studios with FOX like graphics and editing.

In a word, Rep. Pelosi and Senator Reid are SIGNING ON TO leadership that ENDANGERS America with falsehoods to war; Signing ON TO 'leadership' in America that WEAKENS American workers and consumers with policies of gross incompetence and in-your-face corruption at home and abroad.


<< President George W. Bush sent American troops into Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction, but THEY WERE NOT THERE.
He said that Saddam Hussein's regime had given help to Al Qaeda, BUT IT HAD NOT.
He therefore took the nation to war ON THE BASIS OF FALSEHOODS. >>

=========================================

Jonathan Schell, who ended his Nation magazine column, "Letter from Ground Zero," last February, now takes up "The Crisis of the Republic" in what will be a series of periodic, longer essays appearing in the Nation:


Too Late for Empire
By Jonathan Schell
The Nation magazine
http://www.thenation.com/
25 July 2006, as posted at
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=105894


President George W. Bush sent American troops into Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction, but they weren't there.

He said that Saddam Hussein's regime had given help to Al Qaeda, but it had not.

He therefore took the nation to war on the basis of falsehoods.

His administration says that the torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere has been the work of a few bad apples in the military, whereas in fact abuses were sanctioned at the highest levels of the executive branch in secret memos.

His administration lambastes leakers, but its own officials illegally leaked the name of a CIA operative, Valerie Plame, in order to politically discredit her husband.

He flatly stated to the public that all wiretaps of Americans were ordered pursuant to court warrants, whereas in fact he was authorizing and repeatedly reauthorizing warrantless wiretaps.

These wiretaps violated a specific law of Congress forbidding them.

His administration has asserted a right to imprison Americans as well as foreigners indefinitely without the habeas corpus hearings required by law.

Wars of aggression, torture, domestic spying and arbitrary arrest are the hallmarks of dictatorship, yet Congress, run by the President's party, has refused to conduct full investigations into either the false WMD claims, or the abuses and torture, or the warrantless wiretaps, or the imprisonment without habeas corpus.

Reid, Pelosi run out the Gore-Lieberman 2000 template for Campaign 2006.. (sigh)

(sigh) We guess our Democratic "leadership" NEVER GOT THE MEMO: you know, the one that points out that Republicans CONTROL THE ENTIRE US GOVERNMENT - House, White House, Senate, Supreme Court, federal judiciary, Treasury (the power to tax), Department of Defense (the power to spend billions), FEC (the power to overlook election abuses), FEMA and Homeland Security (the power to spend more billions, using these government agencies as SLUSH FUNDS for their corporate contractor donors)...

...Republicans CONTROL the ENTIRE US government, because they have mastered the art and tactics of BASH DEMOCRATS over the past two decades.

So - WHAT is the respone and "PLAN" of Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to this basic, 20-30 year plus political reality..???

answer: FOCUS on... RAISING MINIMUM WAGE!

Now, we here at C-dems.blgspt.com certainly think the minimum wage SHOULD be raised, applaud Senator Reid's threats to FILIBUSTER the next Congressional pay raise if there is no rise in the minimum wage, and can't help but wonder "why didn't Senator Reid think about that before, you know, the past 5 or 6 or 7 times Congress voted itself a pay raise without raising the minimum wage?"

BUT... WHERE IS THE RELENTLESS ATTACK on Republican CORRUPTION, INCOMPETENCE, DEFICITS, and VOTE-FRAUD?

WHY must we Democratic voters spend an eternity in purgatory, listening to the latest Democrat rendition of Al Gore's 2000 drone "Social_Security_Lockbox."

Indeed, what we have here is a fascinating dynamic - EVERYONE in America and the world knows that Reid, Pelosi, and the Democrats ARE AVOIDING the real issues - torture, wars, Iraq war death squads, abject US leadership incompetence in Afghanistan, nuclear proliferation (with the Bush administration and GE *selling* India $5 billion in the latest nuclear processing technology, technology that the US understands will be put to use in India's 15 or 16 "secret" - no inspections - weapons enrichment reactors), the Republican use of FEMA budgets as kickback-corruption-slush fund goody-bags for their closest corporate supporters (for all intents and purposes, Dick Cheney is STILL the Chairman and CEO of Halliburton - DICK CHENEY decides what contracts Halliburton gets, and Cheney IS STILL on the Halliburton payroll, and STILL invested in Halliburton stock).

So, while Reid and Pelosi are reprising Gore-Lieberman in 2000 - IGNORE Texas Gov. Bush's environmental record, IGNORE Bush's inflated and bogus education claims, IGNORE then Gov. Bush's SLASHING of preschool, after-school, and health care programs for poor children, WHILE GIVING TAX CUTS TO Texas' wealthiest corporations and multimillionaires - it is UP TO DEMOCRATIC VOTERS to understand what the election is really about.

Reid and Pelosi, IGNORING the vitally important issues of the day.

Democratic voters - must show up at the polls in droves, to LEAD America out of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld neo-con nightmare mess.

That makes Pelosi and Reid FOLLOWERS, not leaders.

Worse, like Joe Lieberman on the VP ticket in 2000, or sitting in the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee chair when Senator Lieberman CRUSHED the Senate ENRON investigation in 2002, ROBBING Democrats of their best midterm issue, today, Reid and Pelosi are SHORT-SHEETING a more aggressive, confrontational campaign against the Bush admin. in '06.

THANKS, Senator Reid and Senator Pelosi, for ROBBING US of a good, FIGHTING campaign program in '06.

(talk about a BLAND press release! We can't even find one sentence worth picking out.)



Democrats Map Out Election Plan
AP release
Published: July 26, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Democrats.html?_r=1&oref=slogin



WASHINGTON (AP) -- Democrats plan to press for a minimum wage increase and ''tough, smart'' national security in their final push to wrest power from the Republicans in the November elections.

House and Senate Democrats will hold a joint meeting on Thursday to discuss events planned for the 100 days leading up to midterm congressional elections and lay out their party agenda, called ''A New Direction for America.''

It's a compilation of positions the party has staked out over the past few months on income, national security, energy, education, health care and retirement accounts.

''We're going across the country to make our case,'' Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada said. ''We're going to reject the divisive politics of the last six years, and unite America behind an agenda that works for all.''

His counterpart in the House, Nancy Pelosi of California, said Democrats offer change. ''Americans know the country is going in the wrong direction,'' she said.

Republicans control Congress but the Iraq war, inflated gas prices and a soaring federal deficit have soured the political environment for the GOP. Polls show the public favors a Democratic takeover, and Democrats hope to make their closing pitches in a series of campaign events focused on issues including college affordability and Medicare prescription drugs.

Danny Diaz, a Republican National Committee spokesman, said: ''It is both ironic and amusing that Democrats believe they are making a final argument to the American people, while being incapable of deciding how much to raise taxes on working families or how quickly to retreat from Iraq.''

On Saturday, exactly 100 days before the Nov. 7 election, the Democratic National Committee will reach out to voters through more than 800 picnics, pig roasts, phone banks and neighborhood canvasses.

In early August, House and Senate Democrats plan to hold at least 200 town hall meetings, press conferences and speeches in states and congressional districts. Larger events also will be staged in some of the most competitive states. In New Jersey, for instance, Reid will join Sen. Bob Menendez, who is in a tight race, to outline port security problems and solutions.

Democrats also will press for a minimum wage raise on Labor Day and hold an event about Hurricane Katrina recovery in Louisiana in late August, a year after the deadly storm.

Very Courageous! Congressional Dems FINALLY find their voice- to blast Iraq PM for criticizing Israel BOMBINGS in Lebanon??!

In our previous post, we wrote that ALL you need realize to understand how completely the Democratic Party has CRASHED on SO MANY ISSUES, issues at the very core of 100 years of Democratic/progressive/liberal progress (voting rights, union rights, health care, government openness vs. secrecy, inequity vs. economic fairness, pollution, environmental protections, foreign aid and reproductive rights... THE ENTIRE RAFT of dem/progressive/liberal agenda issues)...

....ALL you need realize to understand the CRASH of the Democrat Party on these and 1,000 other important issues, is to understand that the entire top strata of the Democrat Party is NOW COMPLETELY IN THRALL to the neo-con agenda.

That is, the Leo Straussian University of Chicago "neo-conservative" agenda, AKA "The voters are ignorant peons who don't know what is best for them, and it is the duty of political leadership to fool the public into following policies that will mean the greater national good."

For all its academic sounding principles, the Straussian neo-con agenda is no more and no less than warmed over hyper-nationalism. If "fascism" and "the Nazis" is too much of an over-the-top comparison, how about pre-WWII Japan, where, once the Imperial Japanese Army got rolling with its Manchuria and Korea conquests, to stand up and oppose the militarist, imperialists, expansionists warmongers in Japan was an absolute, surefire, no-option invitation to an assassin's bullet.

And so it is today that Iraq's tame Prime Minister (the one who greeted Mr. Bush on moment's notice when the US president flew in to the sovereign nation of Iraq, unannounced) came to the US capitol and White House, in defiance of "the Arab Street" in Iraq and elsewhere, an "Arab street" outraged over US support for Israel's bombing of entire blocks of apartment buildings in downtown urban districts of Lebanon. Mr. Malik goes where his master's leash pulls him and, just to pour infamy on scorn, along come our brave Congressional Democrats.

You know, the ones who CAN'T or WON'T SPEAK UP as the FEMA director orders hundred-dollar dinners in a 5-star Baton Rouge restaurant as New Orleans flooding victims are dying, under clear skies, days after Hurricane Katrina left the area.

You know, the Congressional Democrats who can't find their voice when it is reported that $90 BILLION - - - that is, NINETY-BILLION DOLLARS - is MISSING from Iraqi reconstruction funds.

You know, the Congressional Democrats who can't seem to find a lick of national TV media exposure as Secretary of War Rumsfeld (and Vice President Dick Cheney and President George W. Bush, the "Commander in Chief") run KANGAROO-COURT MILITARY TRIBUNALS to RAILROAD female volunteers for FOLLOWING ORDERS in the systematic "ABUSE," sadism, and degradation of captured Iraqi prisoners, as if scapegoating two female privates and their immediate noncom superiors absolves the United States of all responsibility for TORTURE carried out in US prisons (and by US-hired surrogates in the Arab world and in FORMER STALIN PRISONS in Eastern Europe).

You know, the courageous Congressional Democrats who would rather CHOKE than mention "Diebold."

(Much less, heaven forbid, "stolen elections.")

You know, the Congressional Democrats who join Dick Cheney and George W. Bush in thinking it is some terrific joke as the number of US MERCURY RETARDED BABIES goes up, a statistical certainty what with relaxed environmental mercury regulations. (Not to mention all those Depleted Uranium Iraqi babies.. AND American babies... born of Iraq-tour-of-duty veterans exposed to the omnipresent dust from DU ammunition fire in Iraq.)

You know, the brave Congressional Democrats who (as the previous post mentioned) would rather HIBERNATE than CONFRONT the RADICAL, REACTIONARY RIGHT-WING jihad against public education, birth-control, the morning-after-pill, or even the teaching of evolution. (We won't even include the word "abortion" in the previous sentence, because we wouldn't want our brave-heart Dems to accidentally foul themselves.)

No, on these and ONE THOUSAND OTHER ISSUES, the Congressional Democrats and Senate Democrats are AWOL, AS QUIET AS A CHURCH MOUSE scurrying for its church-mouse mouse-hole.

BUT, when Iraqi PM Maliki (someone who knows a thing or two about bombs and 'counter-terror' bombing missions) DARES to mention that it is AMERICAN-made BOMBS and missiles falling on Lebanon.... ALL OF A SUDDEN THOSE COWERING DEMOCRATS FIND THEIR VOICE, to criticize Maliki for "WORK[ing] AGAINST THE INTERESTS OF THE UNITED STATES" !!

HALLELUJAH!

PRAISE THE LORD! and make some more ammunition.. Congress LOVES NOTHING BETTER than giving Israel BILLIONS of US tax dollars to purchase billions in US arms and weaponry, so to keep American defense contractors, their factories, and the supporting American industry rolling. Forever. Amen.

Or, as Slim Pickens would say, "YEE-HAW!"

Quick! Let's mint some congressional medals, and PIN THEM ON THE CHESTS OF THOSE BRAVE, COURAGEOUS DEMOCRATS!

. << House Democrats are demanding that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki not be allowed to address a joint session of Congress on Wednesday unless he apologizes for condemning "Israeli aggression" in Lebanon.

In a letter being circulated among their colleagues, party leaders including Rahm Emanuel and Jan Schakowsky say, "We are unaware of any prior instance where a world leader who actively worked against the interests of the United States was afforded such an honor." >>

======================================
bonus citation: over at AlterNet.org, the post the video of David Sirota capturing New York Times NEO-CON "free trade" shill THOMAS FRIEDMAN explaining that HE HAS NO IDEA of the conditions within the CAFTA Caribbean Free Trade Agreement, "You know, I just wrote a column supporting the CAFTA Caribbean Free Trade Agreement, I DIDN'T EVEN KNOW WHAT WAS IN IT, I just knew two-words, 'FREE TRADE.""
http://alternet.org/blogs/video/39421/
Thomas Friedman is the textbook or iconic example of a formerly "liberal" leaning New York Times writer now completely, wholeheartedly, unabashedly EMBRACING the neo-con agenda as it pertains to unrestrained corporatism under the moniker "Free Trade." (Like "Free Enterprise," "free trade" isn't "FREE" if you can't compete against sweatshop labor with NO enviromental, labor, or financial regulations in poverty-stricken non-industrialized nations. Go see "American Patriots rebel against East India Co. 'free enterprise' Royal trade license (monopoly), aka "the Boston Tea Party.") In the early 1990's - the era of the Bush1 recession in which Right-Wing militias were planning to take on the ZOG (zionist occupatioin government), Timmy McVeigh started planning his federal building bombing mission, and uber-Right-Wing talk show host G. Gordon Liddy was instructing would be militia 'freedom/patriot' resistance fighters to "AIM AT THE HEAD OF JACK-BOOTED FEDERAL AGENTS - well, back in the early 1990's Tom Friedman wrote an oped column actually TOUTING THE BENEFITS of big government (made possible by taxation and government spending). Friedman wrote on the anarchy and daily mass-murder in the Liberian capital, of warlords and their hoped-up, terrifying child armies. That was then. Now, American big business couldn't find a better "FREE TRADE" shill, if GE engineers got together and designed one from scratch.) And for all of his "big business, free-trade" bonafides, Friedman isn't nearly as hawkish as his fellow neo-con chickenhawks, although that comparison isn't saying much.)

===================================

Maliki's Testy Visit: Is This What Our Troops Are Dying For?
Arianna Huffington
07.25.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/malikis-testy-visit-is-_b_25790.html


House Democrats are demanding that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki not be allowed to address a joint session of Congress on Wednesday unless he apologizes for condemning "Israeli aggression" in Lebanon.

In a letter being circulated among their colleagues, party leaders including Rahm Emanuel and Jan Schakowsky say, "We are unaware of any prior instance where a world leader who actively worked against the interests of the United States was afforded such an honor."


That's all well and good, but it kind of misses the larger point, don't you think? Forget about standing on ceremony and whether Maliki is worthy of the "high honor" of standing at the Speaker's podium; I want to know how Congress can justify having our soldiers continue to die for a government that, as is becoming increasingly clear, doesn't want us there.
Instead of holding a press conference demanding an apology, how about holding one demanding that we take our troops out of harm's way as soon as we can?

During his visit to the White House today, Maliki is expected to push for an end to legal immunity for U.S. troops and broader amnesty for Iraqi insurgents -- both legitimate claims for a sovereign government ("Let freedom reign!").

What more, Maliki wants to "maintain strong ties to Iran," has sided with Hezbollah in the current hostilities with Israel, and has pledged $35 million in aid to Lebanon (where is that money coming from?). And then we have the speaker of the Iraqi Parliament saying "I personally think whoever kills an American soldier in defense of his country would, have a statue built for him in that country. The parties that we cannot conciliate with are those who deliberately killed an Iraqi citizen."

So this is what over 2,500 American have died for, what over 18,500 Americans have been wounded for, what the American people have spent over $320 billion helping create: a government that makes nice with Iran, backs Hezbollah, and some of whose members think the killers of American soldiers deserve a statue? We can't bring back those lives, heal those wounds, or recoup that money, but we can say enough is enough.

In Fiasco, his damning new book about the Bush administration's tragic bungling of Iraq, Thomas Ricks quotes a colonel assigned to the Coalition Provisional Authority unforgettably describing his team's mission as "pasting feathers together, hoping for a duck." Just how many more Americans have to die in the vain attempt to turn feathers into a duck? Especially a duck that wants to waddle side by side with Hezbollah and Iran.

Election year 2006, Cowardly Democrats SHY AWAY from GROSS IGNORANCE and BULLYING of the radical-right and their neo-con allies....

Sen. Jim Inhofe
He is on record as saying that manmade global warming is ‘‘the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."


To understand what has happened to the Democrat Party, you simply must understand that the *neo-con* wing of the Democratic Party is now 100% allied with the boorish, insufferable, ignorant, tyrannical, mouth-breathing Radical Right. The sort of people who look at David Koresh and don't see a young-girl raping tyrant and demagogue who worshipped guns (and, thereby, the DEATH that guns cause), but as a "freedom to bear arms" martyr and red-blooded American.

Isn't it the least bit curious how some leadership and political groups can come out, not only for the criminalization of abortion, but even for the criminalization and SUPPRESSION of - birth control education; the morning-after-pill; a sneering scorn for the principle of separation of church and state; a practically Roman embrace of torture and executions; and even an attempt by the Radical Right to criminalize (OUTLAW, PROHIBIT) the teaching of EVOLUTION in public schools?

DOESN'T ANYONE in America wonder how it is that the Radical Right can not only push such absurdities (and, in the case of abortion and reproductive rights, tinge their agenda with a heavy threat of violence and intimidation) - but that, AT EACH AND EVERY NEW CASE, the COWERING DEMOCRATS and PRESSTITUTE MEDIA always finds new ways to BACK DOWN and AVOID CONFRONTATION with those radical right distortions and intimidations?

Well, there are many factors playing into the above, including a huge one, the complete subjugation of the CORPORATE MEDIA to the corporate economic agenda (massive media conglomerations bordering on monopolies, which in turn push huge corporate and high-income TAX CUTS; massive military defense spending; constant hype for war on terror; a corporate reluctance to confront the crimes and follies of the Bush administration; etc. etc. etc. ad infinitum)

But, sad to say, there is another factor that is even more important as to why the lunatic talking points of the Radical Right are now so prominent in America's political and 'news' discourse.

That MAIN FACTOR in America's quiescent response to Radical Right absurdities and political monstrosities is that the NEO-CON wing of the Democratic Party is now SO CLOSELY ALLIED with the BushCo agenda, that neo-con Democrats constantly, continually, and relentlessly SUBVERT the message of the Democratic agenda.

Thus it is that former President Bill Clinton, on behalf of his wife Hillary, is out there stumping for neo-con hawk Senator Joe Lieberman, while neither Hillary nor her husband can waste an ounce of breath trying to publicize DEMOCRATIC ISSUES such as, oh, maybe, STOLEN ELECTIONS, the DIEBOLDIZATION ("privatization" aka "the planter lord owns everything as far as his eye can see") of AMERICA'S voting process; the treatment of US combat veterans as expendable serfs; or the treatment of US taxpayer's taxes and the US treasury as a kickback, bribery, and SLUSH FUND kitty for George W. Bush, Halliburton, and the Republican Party.

Or how about the institution of TORTURE in Dick Cheney'/George W. Bush's revitalized JOSEPH STALIN "disappeared" GULAG?

Or how about the KANGAROO TRIALS for PRIVATES, peacetime civilian National Guard VOLUNTEERS Lynddie England and Sabrina Samson? OK, maybe we are being a little SEXIST here at C-dems.blgspt.com.... you know, we think that American women, the fairer sex, SHOULD BE PROTECTED from THE GROSS ABUSES of the US military and high command? That maybe if England and Sampson WERE PUT IN A SITUATION where they would later be accused of "ABUSING" prisoners... that MAYBE SOME OF THEIR SUPERIOR OFFICERS should be held RESPONSIBLE? (And, no, we are not talking about the non-commissioned officers bearing the batons and smug grins as they force ****-smeared prisoners to walk naked down the prison hallway... we are talking THE OFFICERS who are SUPPOSED TO BE RESPONSIBLE for the men and women under their commands.)

Or how about Jim Inhofe, the most pasty-faced ignoramus Rethuglican big-oil SENATOR of them all, who has now declared that those who are concerned about GLOBAL WARMING are using the "BIG LIE" techniques of the "Third Reich", i.e. Nazi Germany.
http://thinkprogress.org/2006/07/24/inhofe-third-reich/

As commenter yaneluh writes (5th comment on above Inhofe-third-reich webpage)
"WHEN DID OUR COUNTRYMEN BECOME BLITHERING IDIOTS?"

The short answer to this question is "when the neo-cons and big-biz Democrats in the Democratic Party, and major/corporate media, started aligning with the RADICAL RIGHT WING agenda." Specifically in the "Get Clinton!" era of the 1990's; when trashing Bill Clinton (even on entirely made-up 'scandals' such as "Travelgate!" and "Lincoln Bedroom!" and "White House trashing!") become both fun and profitable, and when Congressional and Senate Democrats couldn't or wouldn't speak out in defense of the Clinton White House. Since the end of the Clinton admin. the Republican Radical Right merely beefed up their Karl Rove SMEAR SQUADS, and they have used slim majorities, stolen elections, voter and economic disenfranchisement, and above all, political INTIMIDATION and the "War on Terra!" to "dumb-down" the discourse in America.

Which reminds us: speaking of a nation of "BLITHERING IDIOTS," has anyone noticed how STUPID some of our commercials are? This process, of course, has been going on for ages, with slapstick comedians being popular movie fare from the earliest days of "moving pictures" a century ago. But if the 1980s and '90s saw a plethora of "stupid macho guy beer commercials" that were popular, we recently saw a TV advertisement that takes the cake for sheer stupidity. At a football stadium "tailgate party," a guy and his friends are grilling burgers on a charcoal grill. The guy spills a drop of steak sauce on the grill.... and with an audience looking on, sticks his tongue on the hot grill to get that drop of steak sauce! Viewers don't see the moment of contact, but the next shot opens on our fearless hero sitting on the back of an ambulance, tongue bandaged up, declaring to his friends (in a tongue-bandaged mumble) "It was worth it!"

Wow! The new ideal of America, as personified in our TV ads, is big-gutted beer-swilling idiots who live only to attend football games and stick their tongues on red-hot charcoal grills.

The pride and glory of America once was being the first nation to put a man on the moon, an object so remote we can only gaze in awe. The orbital calculations for inserting a spaceship into lunar orbit presuppose Newtonian mechanics that indicate other stars and galaxies are thousands, or even millions, of light-years away from our solar system.

Yet Mr. Inhofe and his merry band of Radical Right-Wing Rethuglicans are happy to try to sell the nation the notion that THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE is NO MORE THAN 6,000 YEARS OLD, because that is what they claim the Bible says, and they claim the bible is an indisputable source of universal truth. (The many contradictions within the Bible notwithstanding.)

We are APPALLED that a state that suffered the terrorist bombing of Radical Right Wing reactionary TERRORIST Timmy McVeigh, would give us an equally Radical Right-Wing senator in Mr. James Inhofe.

AND WE ARE APPALLED that, SIX YEARS into a new millennium, a full 35 years after an American astronaut first stepped on the moon, our Democratic Party has NO ANSWER, NO RESPONSE, NO CONFRONTATION to the APPEAL TO IGNORANCE, INSULARITY, INTIMIDATION, and plain old bullying THUGGERY of such right-wing "leaders" as Mr. Inhofe.

FOR SHAME!

===============================================

Just in, to confirm that we here at C-dems.blgspt.com are usually "on target," a report that ANN COULTER is once again reprising her role as "joking terrorist" against the New York Times. In this case, according to reporter Jacob Bernstein, Coulter 'jokingly' sent him an e-mail stating:
<< "Memo Pad" sent an e-mail to Coulter's AOL account and according to Bernstein, received a reply claiming that she was the sender of the mysterious powder.
. "'So glad to hear that The New York Times got my letter and that your friend at the Times thinks I'm funny,' she wrote back. 'Good luck in journalism and please send me your home address so we can stay in touch, too. >>
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ep/20060724/en_bpiep/coulterjokestoreporteraboutmailingwhitepowdertonytimes

It is hard to discern which is the worse sin, crime, or folly here: #1.) that Ann Coulter thinks she has a right to "joke" about sending Anthrax letters in a nation that spends BILLION$ for the "war on terror" and where postal workers and one journalist have already died from such deadly terrorist letters; #2. that Coulter can so brazenly try to reinforce the canard that the New York Times "AIDED THE ENEMY" by publishing a report that didn't even tell the American public anything 'new' about massive, illegal government spying on American bank accounts (i.e. the Bush administration's wholesale copying all of the S.W.I.F.T financial cooperative's massive financial transaction databanks); or, #3. that FIVE YEARS after Democratic Senators Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle WERE TARGETTED by deadly Anthrax terrorist letters, THE COWARDLY Democrats STILL have NO RESPONSE, NO RESPONSE, NO RESPONSE, NO RESPONSE, to Ann Coulter's implied (or stated!) terroristic threats.

==============================================

Heat wave has senator sticking to beliefs
By JIM MYERS World Washington Bureau
7/22/2006
http://www.tulsaworld.com/NewsStory.asp?ID=060722_Ne_A1_Heatw72040

Sen. Jim Inhofe
He is on record as saying that manmade global warming is ‘‘the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."

WASHINGTON -- First came the Al Gore movie, and then there was the Tom Brokaw television documentary.

Now, a heat wave with triple-digit temperatures is gripping much of the nation.

Is U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe, who believes that manmade global warming is "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people," losing the public relations battle on that issue?

The Oklahoma Republican and chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee concedes that those on the other side of the global warming debate have dominated the air waves lately, but he remains confident that his side will be proved right in the end.

Indeed, Inhofe insists that he feels even stronger about taking on what he sees as the current hysteria about global warming than he did several years ago when he first uttered that now-famous hoax statement.

In an interview, he heaped criticism on what he saw as the strategy used by those on the other side of the debate and offered a historical comparison.

"It kind of reminds . . . I could use the Third Reich, the big lie," Inhofe said.

"You say something over and over and over and over again, and people will believe it, and that's their strategy."

As for anyone trying to use the current heat wave to bolster the case, he said even those on the other side of the debate concede that no one should link a single weather event to climate change.

"A hot summer has nothing to do with global warming," Inhofe said. "Let's keep in mind it was just three weeks ago that people were saying, 'Wait a minute; it is unusually cool."'

He blames the media for handing over an unfair amount of air time and coverage to the side that pushes the claim that links man to climate change.

"I have asked several of them," Inhofe said: 'Name one time when an hour has been given to the other side of the issue.' "

While declining to watch either the Gore movie or the Brokaw documentary, the senator said he armed himself with the statements used in both.

"I know the text, and I know they are using old stuff that has been totally discredited," Inhofe said. "Everything on which they based their story, in terms of the facts, has been refuted scientifically."

He offered his point-by-point response to both.

They include such claims as that polar bear populations are shrinking along with their food supplies, and the glaciers in Glacier National Park are disappearing.

Inhofe insists that the number of polar bears is not dropping and that some of the glaciers in the national park are actually getting bigger.

As for the Kilimanjaro glacier, which reportedly is disappearing, Inhofe said the loss can be blamed on the cutting of trees, which once held the moisture.

"One by one, you can refute everything they are saying," Inhofe said.

He includes in that claim the warnings by some that the planet is closing in on a tipping point or a point of no return when it comes to climate change.

Inhofe recalls the warnings a few decades ago that another ice age was coming.

He dismisses even the suggestions that Americans could help by giving up big cars or using more energy-efficient light bulbs.

"It is not going to make any difference," the senator said.

"But if it makes them feel good, they can do it."

Former President Bill Clinton CONTINUES to BETRAY American voters... Campaigns for "tail-gunner Joe" Lieberman.

This is a difficult post to write, because the worst 5 minutes of the administration of President William Jefferson Clinton was so much better than even the best 5 minutes of the Bush administration. (This "wild statement," of course, is no exaggeration, when one dispassionately aknowledges that THE BEST thing that every happened to George W. Bush's administration (and neo-con/neo-confederate agenda) was the attack by 20 terrorist hijackers on 9-11, which has allowed the Bush admin. to use secrecy, huge government contracts as corporate bribes, and the "war on terra" to steamroll all political opposition.)

And, because it is tough to write about Clinton's role in the Right-Wing junta's TAKEOVER of EVERY branch of the US government and 4th estate, without going over "WHO's TO BLAME?!" ground.

But as everyone with a pulse knows, the RADICAL RIGHT WING *is* in charge of every branch of the federal government - the House, the Senate, the White House, the treasury, the US Supreme Court, federal judiciary, department of defense and intel agencies, FEMA, Homeland Security, dozens of other vital agencies, and even the "4th estate," the press-media. At one time the press-media in America had an informative function. But today, the ENTIRE "major media" has gone corporate, and their SOLE BUSINESS is to sell distraction and distortion INFOTAINMENT - "who won the American Idol voting?" as "news," while IGNORING the issues of torture, fraudulent contracts, secrecy and spying, massive deficits, etc., ad naseum.

For example, look at CNN "news" today, the organization tht bills itself as "the most trusted news in America."

For CNN, "reporting" on the war in Lebanon involves not much more than endless loops of Hezbollah militia men launching unguided 5" 'Katyusha" rockets, one of the more effective weapons in the Red army's arsenal against Germany in WWII, and A.) a similar loop of Israeli bombs and missiles impacting targets in Lebanon; and B.) lots of breathless coverage of futuristic laser and high-energy counter-missile weaponry. CNN's "reporting" was what you might expect a high-school war enthusiast would come up with if he had access to the videos and a good editing studio.

This routine - endless discussions of missiles and counter-missile defenses - is what passes for "reporting" at CNN. The fact that the Republican Party in America has launched a JIHAD against the NUCLEAR NON-PROLIFERATION TREATY and regime - is a VERBOTTEN subject in America's captive, prostitute media.

The THOUSAND PLUS Lebanese and Hezbollah militia men HELD CAPTIVE by Israel, with no trials, Red Cross access, or POW rights - is a VERBOTTEN SUBJECT of American reporting. Israel's HUGE NUCLEAR ARSENAL - a VERBOTTEN subject in America's captive press.

All those UN resolutions condemning Israel for sponsoring SETTLERS in Palestinian territory - VERBOTTEN SUBJECT in US media.

And it is PRECISELY this "VERBOTTEN!" agenda that former President William Jefferson Clinton signs on to.

He WILL campaign in Connecticut on behalf of Joe Lieberman, the ultimate expression of the AIPAC/neo-con agenda in the Democratic Party. And, of course, over the past 6 years the neo-conservative ("neo-con") agenda is SYNONYMOUS with the administration of George W. Bush, from neo-con warhawks like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle and Douglas Feith (inside the Bush govt.) to neo-con warhawks like William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, and William Safire outside the administration, securely 'embedded' at the very highest levels of the US press-media.

Indeed, we here at C-dems.blgspt.com have long maintained that ARTHUR SULZBERGER, as owner and publisher of the New York Times, is FAR MORE OF A NEO-CON HAWK than a "liberal bias lefty media elite" publisher, and as a result, the NEW YORK TIMES has, for over a decade now, BEEN ALLIED with, to the point of being SYNONYMOUS WITH, the neo-con, Bush administration agenda.

Which is exactly our complaint against President Clinton. Bill Clinton WELL KNOWS that the Right-Wing press & media were "OUT TO GET HIM." And Bill Clinton WELL KNOWS that the NEW YORK TIMES and WASHINGTON POST, at the very pinacle of American media/reporting, JOINED THAT "get Clinton!" smear-mob.

At every turn, not only did President Clinton EMPOWER his own critics, but he NEVER CONFRONTED the New York Times or Washington Post about their serial publication of LIES. As we here at C-dems.blgspt.com have mentioned before, the lies, innuendoes, and distortions of the "get Clinton!" mob are detailed and chronicled in Gene Lyons and Joe Conason's book, "The Hunting of the President." But Bill Clinton does not come off as a very sympathetic leader in this book, ALLOWING the farcical GOP witch-hunt to procede at every stage, even when Ken Lay's "independent counsel" investigation veered from a financial investigation ("Whitewater" routine real-estate flop) into a relentless INTERROGATION of EVERY WOMAN who had ANY contact with the President.

This was an appalling miscarriage of American justice - eg the Ken Starr jihad against Julie Hiatt Steele and Susan McDougal - that Bill Clinton NEVER CONFRONTED. Not only did Clinton FAIL to CONFRONT Starr's grotesque abuse of powers to achive a political end (by going on a ruthless vendetta against Clinton's friends and associates, Republicans hoped to run the democratically elected president out of the White House), but, in allowing the Ken Starr Republicans to prosecute and practically torture Jim McDougal, Bill Clinton EMPOWERED REPUBLICANS and their media allies to BURY, WHITEWASH, STONEWALL, FORGET the huge S&L scandal story of the late 1980's and early 1990's, the scandal that had thrown America into a recession by 1992.

It was that recession, brought on by Republican policies, that empowered Democrats to boost a candidate to within striking range of President George H.W. Bush's 1992 campaign - Bush Sr. had defeated Saddam Hussein's Iraq and expelled the Iraqi army from Kuwait, and received stratospheric 80%+ approval ratings just over a year before the 1992 election.

Bill Clinton did indeed help Americans recover from the Republican recession of 1991-1992 (the Bush Recession brought on by S&L billions in losses made up for by taxpayers; the "peace dividend" misused to SLASH defense contracts and military bases WITH NO SOFT LETDOWN; the continuing Republican Jihad on unions and working Americans, as evidenced by the PATCO strike of Reagan and the EASTERN bankruptcy under Bush supporter Frank Lorenzo, etc.) - BUT HE, President Clinton, *ALLOWED* the Republicans to win the PROPAGANDA WAR.

By the time Al Gore campaigned to succeed Clinton in 2000, the US press/media couldn't give two hoots about the S&L debacle or 1991 recession - they had found that "SMEAR DEMOCRATS!" was easy money, and the press/media lulled millions of American voters into thinking that the new technology economy was bullet-proof.

And the "SMEAR DEMOCRATS!" gang WAS EMPOWERED by Bill Clinton.

For example, as Vice President Gore was cranking up his 2000 campaign, Bill Clinton allowed Vanity Fair magazine to publish a cover-photo of Clinton sitting on a chair, legs akimbo, photo taken from a low vantage point. The only thing missing from that picture was a "joint" (marijuana cigarette) offerred by the sitting president to the viewer. In that same summer, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times couldn't find anything more substantial to write about in her influential column than A.) Al Gore's earth-tones wardrobe; and B.) Bill Clinton's "LEGACY." If we heard it once, we heard it a thousand times, "LEGACY!" "LEGACY!" "LEGACY!" in a very influential op-ed column written by one of the most widely read female news personalities of the day - Maureen Dowd on a virtual VENDETTA against Bill Clinton's presumed "search for a LEGACY!"

For Jimmy's sake - couldn't President Clinton have invited Dowd to the White House, to show her how obtaining PEACE in the Middleeast is just a little more important than any one leader's "LEGACY"? President Clinton did, after all, INVITE William Safire TO THE WHITE HOUSE, within the week of Safire and his NEW YORK TIMES editors and publisher publishing Safire's infamous "HILLARY IS A CONGENITAL LIAR!" column. Headlined with exactly that sentence!

Back in the 1950s, another self-made Democratic president, Harry S. Truman, vowed to PUNCH IN THE NOSE (and elsewhere) a Washington Post music critic who had written a disparaging critique of President Truman's daughter. At the time, Truman was derided all over Washington (and in the national press) as a rube and a country bumpkin for his comments, but today his bellicosity in defense of his family seems charming. (He never made good on the threat.) WOULD THAT PRESIDENT CLINTON had 1/10th of Truman's 'STAND UP TO THE BULLIES AND GIVE 'EM HELL!" determination.

Instead, as we have tried to make the case, above, President Clinton RELENTLESSLY ROLLS OVER FOR, and EMPOWERS, the Right-Wing white-collar LYNCH MOB. Disgraced by his own "Monica" scandal and other foibles, Clinton could offer only meek, pathetic resistance to the Bush White House efforts to SMEAR departing Clinton-Gore staffers with the "WHITE HOUSE TRASHING" story, a story published on the front pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, and other major 'news' providers - FOR WEEKS, WITHOUT a SINGLE PHOTOGRAPH of proof.

That "scandal' was a masterpiece, iconic (textbook) Karl Rove smear-job, and a political home-run: it effectively ran the WINNER of the 2000 election POPULAR VOTE COUNT (that would be Al Gore, who won the POPULAR VOTE NATIONWIDE in 2000 by well over 500,000 votes) OUT OF TOWN on a rail, TARRED AND FEATHERED. That psuedo (fake) "SCANDAL" ALLOWED President George W. Bush to RENEGE on his "new, more bipartisan tone in Washington" rhetoric, Bush and his team slamming the most fiercely partisan nominees he could find down the throats of the Democratic Senate confirmation process.

In short, the fake "WHITE HOUSE TRASHING SCANDAL" smeared Clinton-Gore staffers and EMPOWERED the Bush-Republican administration, and Bill Clinton was POWERLESS to do anything about it.

Since then, the Republicans have INSTITUTIONALIZED vote-switching fraud in the form of DIEBOLD, ES&S, and SEQUOIA *PROPRIETARY* vote-counting computer software, software THAT DOES NOT ALLOW DEMOCRATIC VOTERS to *KNOW* that their votes have been COUNTED CORRECTLY.

Given that we have not heard A PEEP from Mr. Clinton about the Diboldization of the US voting process, we can say that Mr. Clinton has, over the years, EMPOWERED the "get Democrats" smear mob, the Repubican theft of election 2000 (and 2002 and 2004), and the wholescale SUBSERVIENCE of the US press/media to the Republican corporate, tax-cuts, and NEO-CON agenda.

And today, Mr. Clinton, on behalf of his wife Hillary, WANTS TO SUPPORT *THE* most outspokenly neo-con senator of them all, Joe Lieberman, who not only BETRAYED African-American voters by not signing on to their "Investigate Vote Fraud in Florida in 2000!" petition in Congress, but also threw a short-sheet WET BLANKET on the Democratic Senate ENRON investigation of 2002, thereby HANDING the BEST ISSUE the Democrats had in that mid-term election over to the Republicans on a silver platter (that is, the Democrats should have campaigned in 2002 by RELENTLESSLY LINKING Enron fraud to the Bush White House), thereby (by ROBBING the party of its very best midterm issue) HANDING THE DEMOCRATIC SENATE OVER TO REPUBLICANS in that 2002 midterm. THANK YOUR FOR THE REPUBLICAN SENATE MAJORITY, Joe Lieberman.

Bill Clinton and Senator Joe Lieberman - EMPOWERING REPUBLICANS and their "DISENFRANCHISE AMERICAN VOTERS" agenda at every turn.

FOR SHAME! Mr. Clinton.

You and Hillary are WILLING TO SPEAK OUT for Joe Lieberman, but you most certainly ARE NOT WILLING TO SPEAK OUT for those who oppose the Bush administration's lies to war; links to ENRON; sponsorship of CORRUPTION in Iraq and FEMA and New Orleans contracts; nor are you willing to SPEAK OUT against the DIEBOLDIZATION of the US voting process, aka "round up the slaves, and bring 'em back to the plantation."

<< Clinton also said he thought it was wrong for Democrats to challenge one of their own. >>


=================================================

Former president to campaign for Lieberman
WHDH New England TV news
http://www3.whdh.com:80/news/articles/local/BO23132/

HARTFORD, Conn. -- One of the Democratic Party's biggest guns, former President Bill Clinton, is coming to Connecticut to campaign for Senator Joe Lieberman.


Clinton's visit, planned for July 24 in Waterbury, comes as a new Quinnpiac Poll shows Lieberman and his Democratic primary challenger, businessman Ned Lamont, in a statistical dead heat.


Lieberman's campaign has not yet revealed details of the planned visit.


The two politicians have known each other since Clinton worked on Lieberman's first campaign for state Senate in 1970.


Clinton was a student at Yale University at the time. Clinton recently defended Lieberman's position on the war in Iraq, saying he agreed with Lieberman that the US should not set a strict timetable for withdrawing soldiers.


Clinton also said he thought it was wrong for Democrats to challenge one of their own.


(Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

Democrats PLAN TO LOSE in 2006 - the cowardly, craven FIX is in....

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-foster-altschul/why-the-democrats-arent-_b_25469.html



Well, it's beginning to look a lot like an election year - which means the Republicans are busy smearing and bullying and sharpening their knives, and the Democrats are busy whimpering and retreating and straightening their hair. With just over three months until the mid-terms - and the last chance for voters to provide some kind of counterbalance to the criminal and disastrous Bush Administration - it's remarkable how much this year already looks like 2004.


And 2002. And 2000.
Despite the howls of voters for more aggressive and cohesive policy initiatives, for more muscular critiques of the administration and the Republican-controlled congress, one is hard pressed to find a pulse in the Democratic Party, which apparently has not yet addressed its addiction to focus groups, play-it-safe political consultants, and apologize-and-retreat campaign strategies. As in election years past, they are relaxing on the 9th hole, or at the beach, certain that voters will choose Democrats simply because they aren't Republicans. The incumbents are so vulnerable, this reasoning goes, so damaged by scandal and failure and rebukes from the Supreme Court and indictments from grand juries, that no sane, intelligent person will vote for them. Why turn voters off, then, by being partisan or nasty or taking positions which some might not agree with? Why not provide a friendlier alternative, something that goes down smooth, the political equivalent of a wine cooler?

Aside from this being a patently spineless strategy, it's also a proven failure. It's the strategy that for six years has enabled the systematic dismantling of civil rights in this country, the rapid upward redistribution of wealth and downward redistribution of debt, and the ongoing conduct of a pathetic foreign policy which has killed over 2,000 Americans, maimed tens of thousands more, and created a gravely dangerous situation in the Middle East. And they've done it all out in the open, daring Democrats - and voters - to do something about it. So far, they're pitching a shutout.

I'm tired of blaming Republicans for everything. We have a two-party system. When is the other party going to suit up?

Last week, I thought I saw a glimmer of hope. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, headed by Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, posted an Internet ad which linked images of gross pollution, skyrocketing gas prices, Tom DeLay's mugshot, and flag-draped coffins of Americans killed in Iraq, with a critique of Bush policies. A fairly mild ad, as full-contact politics goes, it nevertheless prompted immediate howls and denunciations from Republicans, who objected to the use of the coffin images for political advantage.

Let's forget, for a moment, that it is only in the past three years that displaying flag-draped coffins has been considered a no-no. (Past Presidents have considered it a way to honor the dead; but then again, past Presidents have bothered to attend the military funerals of the soldiers who have died defending their policies.) And let's even forget the shameless, relentless way in which Republicans have inundated voters with images of the World Trade Center tragedy in every campaign season since 2001. The question remains: What is the problem? Is there something dishonest here? No, soldiers have really died in Iraq. Lots of them. Is it irrelevant to politics? No, Bush began this war, and has stupidly insisted on "staying the course," despite pleas from Democrats, allies, and the entire world community. For three years he has mocked, smeared, and ignored everyone who has suggested any other approach - why on earth should the tragic results of his errors be off-limits in a political campaign?

Finally, I thought, the Democrats were ready to get in the game. Finally they were going to tell it like it is, to hold the administration's feet to the fire, to get rough and loud and show enough confidence in their own views to actually convince people they are worth voting for.

Well, guess what happened? If you guessed that the Democrats pulled the ad, of course you're right. Cowed by the bluster from the right, terrified of offending anyone, of appearing insensitive, they took the ad off their website. "We're moving to another major effort that we're highlighting on our Web site," said a DCCC spokesman.

Ten bucks says that "major effort" is an ad showing scenes from Bambi and The Sound of Music.

Here's the kicker - though only Emanuel, John Kerry, or Harry Reid could be surprised: Not three days later, Ohio Senator Mike DeWine started running an ad that showed the Twin Towers burning and questioned the commitment of his Democratic challenger, Sherrod Brown, to defending the country. And it gets better: The image was digitally altered. It was a lie.

But what should Democrats expect? They've allowed Bush and the Republicans to repeatedly and blatantly lie to Americans for five years. Now DeWine and the Republicans are having a good laugh about how easy it was to get the DCCC to back down from the strongest statement they've made in years. The immediate release of DeWine's ad was nothing less than a calculated "in-your-face," an announcement to the country: "We've taken these wimps before and we'll do it again." It was a pre-game psych-out, a thumb in the eye. They think they're going to walk all over Democrats in November, no matter what the polls say.

And I think they're right. While approval percentages for Congressional Republicans are down in the 20s, approval of Democrats is only in the 30s - hardly a ringing endorsement. And, while many more voters say they want Democrats to control Congress than Republicans, when asked whether they are satisfied with their own, local representative, over half still say they are. And voters don't get to vote for who controls Congress. They only get to vote for their local representative.

So, while Republicans are spending the summer trying to get their mojo back, reminding Americans what they stand for - discrimination against homosexuals, bribery, theft, criminal war, the repealing of the Bill of Rights, whistling while terrorists acquire nuclear weapons, etc. - Democrats are looking at wallpaper samples for the new offices they think they're going to win. No worries, say the Dems, voters will see through this. Voters don't like pandering, or "wedge issues." They want to be united. They want to feel good. In their hearts, they know Democrats are more honest, more intelligent, more competent, and better dressed. That's why November's a lock.

I got an email from the Democratic Party yesterday announcing a "Democratic Reunion" on July 29. That'll show 'em!

This party has learned nothing. Their failure to stand on principle - for anything - has not only damaged their credibility but had had horrific, long-lasting consequences for the world. How many people are dead - in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Israel and Lebanon, in India, Spain, London, and New York - how many millions of people at tremendous risk from North Korea and Iran, all thanks to Bush's failures and lack of meaningful opposition? How much damage has been done to America's reputation, because no one has held the President responsible? The fact of the matter is, Bush, Cheney, DeLay, Rumsfeld et. al. couldn't have gotten away with half of the crimes they've committed if the Democrats - who after all control 45% of congress - had not abdicated their responsibilities as policymakers and statesmen, if they hadn't passed up countless opportunities to present an opposition. And the irony is, they've been so docile for fear of losing elections.

Republicans consider this latest debacle regarding the dueling campaign ads to be a tremendous victory, showing Americans yet again that Democrats lack resolve and commitment, lack confidence in their own views and policies - and therefore cannot be trusted to run the country in such dangerous times.

They have almost convinced me - and that should be a real wake-up call for the DCCC.

"Repentence of a Bush voter." This WOULD BE a Dem. declaration for Campaign '06- IF they had ANY GUTS or street-savvy!

Cenk Uygur posts a DOUBLE "Repentence of Republicans" column, he was a Republican voter before 2000, and he posts the "Apology from a Bush voter" by a Righty talk-radio host almost in full in his today's HuffingtonPost.com column.

Almost EVERY single item listed in McIntyre's confessional is an item the Democrats SHOULD be pounding away at, relentlessly, on talk shows every day of the week, and thrice on Sundays.

Instead, as usual, we have an election season where the Democrats are NOT acting as young lions, but as LAME DUCKS.

One can almost hear the Democrats reprise comic Dana Carvey's impression of President Bush41 (Sr.) in the White House: "WOULDN'T BE PRUDENT!" was Senior's comment made famous by Carvey. For his restrained, usually reserved demeanor President Bush (senior) was mocked as "WIMP" by Washington mega-pundit George Will, an "it takes one to know one" wimp if ever the pot-called-the-kettle-black. (We won't delve into whether or not Bush Sr. deserved Will's "Wimp!" label, but as Senior was the task-master of CIA death squads in South America during the Iran-Contra debacle; was a former taskmaster of Manuel Noriega who (Bush Sr.) then started a war to capture Noriega in Panama; and Bush had been a former paymaster (as CIA director, Vice President, and President) for Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war years, who went on to beat Iraq in the '91 Gulf War; whether or not Bush deserved the "wimp" label, he was certainly a man who could carry a grudge and get the forces of the United States military to back it up.)

Please excuse the digression! and just Imagine Dana Carville saying "IT WOULDN'T BE PRUDENT" - and then multiplying that at least 44 times for all the Senate Democrats who, lord help 'em, CAN NOT FIND ANYTHING TO PUBLICLY CHASTISE the President 6 years and two stolen elections into his disastrous administration.

BUT DON'T TAKE IT FROM US here at C-dems.blgspt.com ---Ugyur and McIntyre have all the bloody, dreadful details of Bush's MISLEADERSHIP over the past 6 years, failings and failures the cowering Democrats JUST CAN'T QUITE SEEM TO NOTICE, or bring to public attention.


We Were Right
July 22.2006
Cenk Ugyur
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/we-were-right_b_25615.html
http://www.kabc.com/mcintyre/listingsEntry.asp?ID=432586&PT=McIntyre+in+the+Morning

To my dying day, one of the things I will always be most proud of is that I did not stay with my party, right or wrong. I put the interests of my country above those of my political party. I had enough sense to see the country was headed the wrong way and I tried to make a difference.

I am not alone. And to all of us who were right, we ought to be proud.
We shouldn't be proud because things went poorly, as we feared and suspected. We should be proud that we tried to get people to change direction even when it was most unpopular. We tried to make a difference in even the darkest hour. And for our efforts we received nothing but disdain for so long. But now we're receiving something else - apologies.

Here's an apology from a conservative talk show host that was a long time coming:
***************************************
By Doug McIntyre
Host, McIntyre in the Morning
Talk Radio 790 KABC
http://www.kabc.com/mcintyre/listingsEntry.asp?ID=432586&PT=McIntyre+in+the+Morning


I was wrong to have voted for George W. Bush. In historic terms, I believe George W. Bush is the worst two-term President in the history of the country. Worse than Grant. I also believe a case can be made that he's the worst President, period.

I believed the President when he said we were going to hunt down Bin Laden and all those responsible for the 9-11 murders. I believed President Bush when he said we would go after the terrorists and the nations that harbored them.

I supported the President when he sent our troops into Afghanistan, after all, that's where the Taliban was, that's where al-Qaida trained the killers, that's where Bin Laden was.

And I cheered when we quickly toppled the Taliban government, but winced when we let Bin Laden escape from Tora-Bora.

Then, the talk turned to Iraq and I winced again.

I thought the connection to 9-11 was sketchy at best. But Colin Powell impressed me at the UN, and Tony Blair was in, and after all, he was a Clinton guy, not a Bush guy, so I thought the case had to be strong. I was worried though, because I had read the Wolfowitz paper, "The Project for the New American Century." It's been around since '92, and it raised alarm bells because it was based on a theory, "Democratizing the Middle East" and I prefer pragmatism over theory. I was worried because Iraq was being justified on a radical new basis, "pre-emptive war." Any time we do something without historical precedent I get nervous.

But the President shifted the argument to WMDs and the urgent threat of Iraq getting atomic weapons. The debate turned to Saddam passing nukes on to terror groups. After 9-11, the risk was too great. As the President said, "The next smoking gun might be a mushroom cloud." At least that's what I thought at the time.

But in the months and years since shock and awe I have been shocked repeatedly by a consistent litany of excuses, alibis, double-talk, inaccuracies, bogus predictions, and flat out lies. I have watched as the President and his administration changed the goals, redefined the reasons for going into Iraq, and fumbled the good will of the world and the focus necessary to catch the real killers of September 11th.

I have watched the President say the commanders on the ground will make the battlefield decisions, and the war won't be run from Washington. Yet, politics has consistently determined what the troops can and can't do on the ground and any commander who did not go along with the administration was sacked, and in some cases, maligned.

I watched and tried to justify the looting in Iraq after the fall of Saddam. I watched and tried to justify the dismantling of the entire Iraqi army. I tired to explain the complexities of building a functional new Iraqi army. I urged patience when no WMDs were found. Then the Vice President told us we were in the "waning days of the insurgency." And I started wincing again. The President says we have to stay the course but what if it's the wrong course?

It was the wrong course. All of it was wrong. We are not on the road to victory. We're about to slink home with our tail between our legs, leaving civil war in Iraq and a nuclear armed Iran in our wake. Bali was bombed. Madrid was bombed. London was bombed. And Bin Laden is still making tapes. It's unspeakable. The liberal media didn't create this reality, bad policy did.

After five years of carefully watching George W. Bush I've reached the conclusion he's either grossly incompetent, or a hand puppet for a gaggle of detached theorists with their own private view of how the world works. Or both.

Presidential failures. James Buchanan, Franklin Pierce, Jimmy Carter, Warren Harding--- the competition is fierce for the worst of the worst. Still, the damage this President has done is enormous. It will take decades to undo, and that's assuming we do everything right from now on. His mistakes have global implications, while the other failed Presidents mostly authored domestic embarrassments.

And speaking of domestic embarrassments, let's talk for a minute about President Bush's domestic record. Yes, he cut taxes. But tax cuts combined with reckless spending and borrowing is criminal mismanagement of the public's money. We're drunk at the mall with our great grandchildren's credit cards. Whatever happened to the party of fiscal responsibility?

Bush created a giant new entitlement, the prescription drug plan. He lied to his own party to get it passed. He lied to the country about its true cost. It was written by and for the pharmaceutical industry. It helps nobody except the multinationals that lobbied for it. So much for smaller government. In fact, virtually every tentacle of government has grown exponentially under Bush. Unless, of course, it was an agency to look after the public interest, or environmental protection, and/or worker's rights.

Katrina, Harriet Myers, The Dubai Port Deal, skyrocketing gas prices, shrinking wages for working people, staggering debt, astronomical foreign debt, outsourcing, open borders, contempt for the opinion of the American people, the war on science, media manipulation, faith based initiatives, a cavalier attitude toward fundamental freedoms-- this President has run the most arrogant and out-of-touch administration in my lifetime, perhaps, in any American's lifetime.

It may be decades before we have the full picture of how paranoid and contemptuous this administration has been. And I am open to the possibility that I'm all wet about everything I've just said. But I'm putting it out there, because I have to call it as I see it, and this is how I see it today. I don't say any of this lightly. I've thought about this for months and months. But eventually, the weight of evidence takes on a gravitational force of its own.

I believe that George W. Bush has taken us down a terrible road. I don't believe the Democrats are offering an alternative. That means we're on our own to save this magnificent country. The United States of America is a gift to the world, but it has been badly abused and its rightful owners, We the People, had better step up to the plate and reclaim it before the damage becomes irreparable.

So, accept my apology for allowing partisanship to blind me to an obvious truth; our President is incapable of the tasks he is charged with. I almost feel sorry for him. He is clearly in over his head. Yet, he doesn't generate the sympathy Warren Harding earned. Harding, a spectacular mediocrity, had the self-knowledge to tell any and all he shouldn't be President. George W. Bush continues to act the part, but at this point who is buying the act?

Does this make me a waffler? A flip-flopper? Maybe, although I prefer to call it realism. And, for those of you who never supported Bush, its also fair to accuse me of kicking Bush while he's down. After all, you were kicking him while he was up.

You were right, I was wrong.
Read full apology here.

A lot of credit has to be given to McIntyre because no matter how late, it takes a big man to say he was wrong. I know a very small man in Connecticut who still hasn't be an able to say this. If even the right wing hosts realize what a grave error they've made in supporting this president, isn't it fair to ask that at least all of our Democratic Senators do likewise?

It's not just Lieberman either. I still haven't heard anything this clear or resounding from Hillary Clinton, the theoretical front runner to be the leader of the Democratic Party. That's embarrassing. Will Hannity and Limbaugh beat Hillary and Lieberman to apologies for supporting the president on Iraq?

Charles Barkley has it right. "I was a Republican ... until they lost their minds."

I used to call myself a Rockefeller Republican. Then, when I stopped being a Republican (the day we invaded Iraq), I started calling myself a Jeffords Republican (the Vermont Senator who had the wisdom and the courage to leave the party in 2001). But now I might start calling myself a Barkley Republican - the kind who left the party when they lost their minds.

But pointing out how right the opponents of the war were isn't just an exercise in self-puffery. There are important consequences for future decisions. For example, one of the main reasons we warned against the Iraqi invasion on The Young Turks was because of the precedent we would be setting. Something almost no one talks about to this day.

It was a terrible precedent to set to say that first strikes without a legal basis are acceptable (it was also the exact opposite of George H.W. Bush's New World Order precedent -- which was a bold and brilliant foreign policy effort and one of the reasons I was a Republican in the first place). Following international law is the kind of thing conservatives can deride as asking for a permission slip from the UN. Yes, you neanderthals, we do need approval from the rest of the world, otherwise we become international outlaws - and encourage others do the same.

So, what did Israel learn from our experience? When in doubt, invade. Don't ask for permission. Don't listen to the rest of the world (or common sense), just push the button.

Now, we learn that Turkey is threatening to invade northern Iraq to fight against Kurdish rebels that have killed 15 Turkish security forces in southern Turkey. Now what are we supposed to say to them? All of sudden, preemptive strikes are a bad idea? We don't like it when you do first strikes?

How about if Pakistan decides it too needs a first strike? How about China against Taiwan? North Korea against South Korea?

This is why we need international law -- and order. Instead, we have sown chaos throughout the world and now we reap the whirlwind.

So, now when we say don't let Israel invade Lebanon, will you listen? It will only cause further chaos. Israel will run into the same buzzsaw in southern Lebanon that we ran into Fallujah, Ramadi and Tikrit. It won't help Israel. It will only push Lebanon further towards the extremists. It will do great damage to our reputation, and possibly to our troops in Iraq. And it will cause the world to cycle further towards violence, war and mayhem.

Don't attack Iran. Work towards separating Iraq into three distinct areas, give them all a high degree of independence and provide incentives for them to share the oil revenue. Look to disengage our troops from where the local populations do not support them. Direct our forces towards the actual people who attacked us - Al Qaeda. Fight against the culture of fundamentalism through persuasion, free markets and education. And win the hearts and minds of the Middle East, so we don't have to fight their arms and bombs.

Will they listen now or will we get another apology note in three years? If we do, that one might be written from the front lines of the third world war. And a president will say, "No one could have anticipated this."

I am proud to be among you, who knew better, who did anticipate this, who did sound the warning sirens and who now still fight for a better America and a safer world.

The Young Turks

US *speeds up* supply of bombs for Israel; US soldiers Iraq claim they were ORDERED to kill ALL MILITARY AGE Iraqi men....

Needless to say, both of these policies- tons more bombs for Israel, and "Shoot on sight!" orders in Iraq, are the policies of the Bush administration/Republican Party, which is to say that they meet with the APPROVAL of Senator Lieberman and the AIPAC lobby, which is to say that the receive the UNCONDITIONAL APPROVAL of the entire Democratic senate caucus.

IF letting Republicans STEAL FOUR NATIONAL ELECTIONS IN A ROW is the PRICE that the Democratic Party "leadership" must actually pay to continue their "Support the administration's open-ended wars in the Middle-east and central-Asia at all cost!" agenda, it is a price that Hillary, Kerry, Biden, Lieberman, and even the often courageous (but here conformist) Senators Boxer and Byrd (et al) ARE WILLING TO PAY.



Weapons
U.S. Speeds Up Bomb Delivery for the Israelis
By DAVID S. CLOUD and HELENE COOPER
Published: July 22, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/22/world/middleeast/22military.html?_r=1&hp&ex=1153540800&en=3f2d5ce210ea0b64&ei=5094&partner=homepage&oref=slogin

WASHINGTON, July 21 — The Bush administration is rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel, which requested the expedited shipment last week after beginning its air campaign against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, American officials said Friday.
The decision to quickly ship the weapons to Israel was made with relatively little debate within the Bush administration, the officials said. Its disclosure threatens to anger Arab governments and others because of the appearance that the United States is actively aiding the Israeli bombing campaign in a way that could be compared to Iran’s efforts to arm and resupply Hezbollah.

=====================================
Soldiers Say Ordered to Kill Young Men
By ALICIA A. CALDWELL
Jul 21, 4:58 PM
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20060721/D8J0K0F03.html


EL PASO, Texas (AP) - Four U.S. soldiers accused of murdering suspected insurgents during a raid in Iraq said they were under orders to "kill all military age males," according to sworn statements obtained by The Associated Press.
The soldiers first took some of the men into custody because they were using two women and a toddler as human shields. They shot three of the men after the women and child were safe and say the men attacked them.
"The ROE (rule of engagement) was to kill all military age males on Objective Murray," Staff Sgt. Raymond L. Girouard told investigators, referring to the target by its code name.
That target, an island on a canal in the northern Salahuddin province, was believed to be an al-Qaida training camp. The soldiers said officers in their chain of command gave them the order and explained that special forces had tried before to target the island and had come under fire from insurgents.

MORE evidence the COWARDLY Senate Dems are IN ON THE Republican FIX to STEAL election 2006...

Here at C-dems.blgspt.com, we have recently TWICE published the same article by Mark Crispin Miller, documenting the current Republican efforts to put in place the means and methods to STEAL massive numbers of votes in the 2006 mid-term elections. We are not being "redundent" or hype; That Republicans can take so seriously their VOTE FRAUD efforts, while COWARDLY Democrats in the US Senate PRETEND NOTHING IS WRONG, is a MASSIVE BETRAYAL that will go down in history - the FOURTH Republican election theft in a row.

This ELECTION THEFT is ONLY possible because of one reason: THE ABJECT COWARDICE and complicity of the Democrats in the US Senate.

In New Hampshire, a Republican 2002 campaign official was tried in federal court, AND CONVICTED, of felony vote tampering and denial of services. Here is the DNC's own website link describing the Republican DENIAL OF SERVICES effort in the that 2002 election: << The Union Leader reported today that convicted phone-jammer and former New Hampshire Republican Party Executive Director Charles McGee is inviting Republican political operatives to a campaign school that will teach them "all the tools you need to win." For McGee, one of those tools was a criminal conspiracy to block the phone lines at Democratic get-out-the-vote call centers on Election Day in 2002. McGEE, ONE OF THREE PEOPLE SENTENCED TO JAIL TIME FOR THEIR ROLES IN THE SCHEME, served seven months in prison last year AFTER PLEADING GUILTY TO CONSPIRACY CHARGES. >>
http://www.democrats.org/a/2006/05/convicted_phone.php
While searching for the latest on the status (and barely noticable Democratic response) to the FELONY CONSPIRACY Republican voting-dirty-tricks CONVICTIONS, we stumbled on this gem, a UK Guardian story (England) that details the concern of Markos Moulitsas - more famous as the "Kos" of the huge political web 'blog' DailyKos.com - that ELECTION 2004 WILL BE STOLEN. In the Oct. 2004 UKG story, "Kos" details potential problems in Florida, Ohio, Nevada, and Wisconsin, among other states. Sure enough, in ELECTION NIGHT EXIT POLLS, Democratic candidate John Kerry CARRIED THE MAJORITY in all four of these states (as well as Iowa, New Mexico, and Arizona), but when the "official" vote totals came in, dadgumit, Kerry had LOST EVERY SINGLE ONE of those close states.
http://www.exitpollz.org/

What is particularily amazing in all this... is that Moulitsas' comments from 2004 ARE EVERY BIT AS RELEVANT TODAY, in July of 2006, and even with FELONY, FEDERAL CONVICTIONS in the Republican phone-jamming case; Republican Party PICKING UP THE ENTIRE DEFENSE BILL for those New Hampshire Republican "dirty tricksters", AND with even the DNC RECOGNIZING that FELONY VOTE FRAUD has been a huge problem in at least some major elections...

STILL the Democrats of the Senate REFUSE TO NOTICE.

They could CHANGE THIS PROBLEM for the better OVERNIGHT, by GATHERING, the ENTIRE BODY, on the Capitol steps, and broadcasting to America and the world that Republicans and the Bush White House are IN THE MIDST OF ANOTHER EFFORT TO STEAL MILLIONS of votes.

Not only do the Democrats REFUSE to make this effort, but they REFUSE to make ANY comments about the possibility and PROBABILITY for FELONY VOTE FRAUD in the FOURTH NATIONAL ELECTION IN A ROW.

Heard on AirAmerica radio yesterday: in 2002 the Republicans stole, blocked, or trashed well over a million votes. In 2004 that number was well over 2 1/2 million. And in 2006, some activists are fully expecting Republicans to steal OVER FIVE MILLION Democratic votes.

WHAT IS IMPORTANT TO NOTE HERE is, and why no screeching from this site is "too hyper", is that NOT ONE SUBPOENA or felony indictment has been brought on ANY of these huge and tremendous VOTE-THEFT PROBLEMS from the past 4 elections, except in the New Hampshire phone-bank jamming, and Democrats in the Senate IGNORE that one.

This is shapping up to be a MONSTER BETRAYAL of Democratic voters throughout America, with practically the entire Democratic Senate caucus, from MOST LIBERAL member Barbara Boxer to former President Bill Clinton (husband of Senator Hillary Clinton) all STUMPPING FOR JOE LIEBERMAN, the most regressive, reactionary, "DON'T COUNT THE VOTES!" Republicrat senator of them all, in Connecticut.

FOR SHAME! bordering on outright BETRAYAL, 4th major election in a row.

==============================

Ohio's Coming Electoral Meltdown
By Andrew Gumbel, The Nation. Posted July 21, 2006.
http://www.alternet.org/story/39151/


Ohio is once again the most likely candidate for another election debacle in the November general elections.

Anyone wondering where America's next electoral meltdown will take place -- and it can only be a matter of time -- might do well to turn back to the scene of the last one. Ohio was, of course, ground zero of the 2004 presidential election, and now it's the battleground of one of the most hotly contested governor's races in the country.

The Republican candidate this November is none other than Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio's Secretary of State, a man vilified by voting rights activists for a string of baffling and, to all appearances, nakedly partisan rulings in the 2004 presidential race, when he also doubled as co-chair of George Bush's state re-election campaign. Now he's at it again -- issuing draconian guidelines on voter registration that carry the threat of felony prosecutions against grassroots get-out-the-vote groups, especially in Democratic-leaning urban areas, for even the slightest procedural irregularity.

Despite denials from Blackwell's office of any malicious political intent, the guidelines have had an immediate chilling effect on groups like the activist community organization ACORN, which has suspended registration efforts pending urgent consultations with its lawyers. Several leading Democrats have urged Blackwell to step aside from all election-supervising responsibilities, a proposal his staff has greeted with near-derision.

It would be bad enough if Blackwell were acting merely to benefit his party, as he did in 2004. But in this case he's taking advantage of his office to act on behalf of his own ambitions. Unless something changes between now and November, he will remain in charge of counting the votes -- his own and everyone else's. In a pivotal election in a pivotal state, this is far from reassuring. As Peg Rosenfield, an elections specialist with the League of Women Voters of Ohio who spent twelve years working in the secretary of state's office in the pre-Blackwell era, put it, "If you think '04 was a mess, just wait. I anticipate a debacle."

Blackwell and his Democratic challenger, Ted Strickland, are locked in a tough fight over the succession to Bob Taft, the scandal-tainted, widely reviled incumbent governor, whose approval ratings are lower even than Dick Cheney's. Early polls have put Strickland modestly ahead, but Blackwell has several built-in advantages, particularly his ability to lean on an entrenched Republican establishment and tap into its broad fundraising powers. Blackwell has largely escaped the stench of corruption dragging down the rest of the state party, thanks to his reputation as a maverick and a lone operator.

As a social conservative, he appeals to much the same exurban demographic that turned out for George W. Bush to express their disapproval of abortion rights and gay marriage. And, as an African-American, he is bound to peel away at least a percentage of the urban black vote that Strickland might otherwise regard as his for the taking. So it's not inconceivable, as the nation awakes on November 8, that the Ohio governor's race will be too close to call. And if that happens, all hell will break loose.

"If we have a recount, I see no way anyone is going to have any faith in it. It's a poisonous atmosphere," Rosenfield said. Never, she added, has she seen the elections process subject to as much politicization as now. Previous secretaries of state, conscious of their status as partisan elected officials, would have gone out of their way to keep their names off election-related directives that risked being interpreted as attempts to help one party over the other. Blackwell, by contrast, has if anything gone out of his way to be identified with his office's most controversial rules. (In 2004 he happily put his name on a now-notorious directive that late voter-registration applications -- the kind encouraged by Democratic grassroots groups -- be submitted on specially weighted, unwaxed paper, which disqualified applications printed in Ohio newspapers. He also made it unusually hard for voters casting provisional ballots -- again, more likely to be Democrats -- to have their votes accepted and counted.)

On top of that, Rosenfield added, Blackwell's office has shown a wanton disregard for the needs of Ohio's eighty-eight counties as they make the Congressionally mandated transition from punch-card and lever machines to new-generation electronic voting systems. Rather than answer technical questions posed by the counties -- which is how Rosenfield spent much of her time when she worked for the secretary of state's office in the 1980s -- Blackwell's staff has a habit of referring county boards of elections to other local officials not remotely qualified to help.

The technicalities of the voting process were already a huge problem in 2004, when everything from the updating of voter registration lists to the number of voting machines made available in each precinct to the opening hours of polling stations was subject to undue political influence and rank bureaucratic incompetence, prompting an avalanche of complaints. (Blackwell's office rejected every last one of them.) That election, though, was held predominantly with the old machinery, which may have lost an unacceptable number of honestly cast votes but at least had the virtue of familiarity. Now the advent of e-voting has opened up a whole new world of pain for election officials and their woefully undertrained precinct volunteers. The first big test of the new machines, in the May primary election, resulted in a multiplicity of problems, especially in Cuyahoga County in and around Cleveland, where poll workers lost seventy memory cards recording the votes from electronic touch-screen terminals (the votes had to be retrieved through back-up data systems inside the terminals) and more than 15,000 paper absentee ballots had to be counted by hand, delaying the results by six days, because of a system failure in the automated tabulation system. And that was on a turnout rate of only 23 percent.

"Our turnout in the fall is bound to be over 50 percent," Rosenfield said. "That'll include a lot of less sophisticated voters struggling with new machines and new rules. The poll workers still won't be trained well enough. The boards won't know how to get the equipment ready.... The secretary of state's office isn't providing resources to the counties -- no money to attend training sessions, no expertise to answer questions or provide technical support. ... We've made this so complex, I'm not sure we're capable of administering it."

The story of Ohio's adoption of new voting technology and the mess it is creating is in many ways typical of the overhasty and shockingly underregulated rush across the country to comply with the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA). But Ohio has also followed its own peculiar trajectory, teaching us above all how difficult it is to prevent the elemental viciousness of two-party politics from compromising the integrity and safety of our voting systems.

Back in 2003 Ohio was admirably skeptical about the lure of computer voting -- even though the parent company of Diebold Election Systems was based in Ohio and its chief executive, Wally O'Dell, was a prominent campaign contributor to the state and national Republican Party. O'Dell notoriously wrote a fundraising letter in August 2003 declaring himself "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." If this was some dark hint that Diebold intended to collude with the Republicans in stealing the 2004 election -- something that, in retrospect, seems a lot more doubtful than many voting rights activists feared at the time -- Ohio's Republican establishment was not especially inclined to play ball. The source code for Diebold's AccuVote-TS touch-screen system had been left lying around on an open Internet site and was scrutinized by a team of top-flight computer scientists from Rice and Johns Hopkins universities, who found it to be riddled with security flaws and basic programming errors. Ken Blackwell decided to order a comprehensive technical review of all touch-screen voting systems and subsequently decided to postpone a major statewide buy of electronic machines until after the 2004 election. The Republican-dominated state legislature, meanwhile, proved remarkably receptive to arguments in favor of fitting the touch screens with a voter-verified paper audit trail so their results could be independently verified in a close or contested election. A state law mandating a paper trail was passed in early 2004.

That cautious, consensus-oriented approach evaporated, however, in the heat of the 2004 campaign season. A state planning committee on HAVA implementation that had met several times was never invited to convene again, despite a barrage of new questions raised across the country about the integrity of electronic touch-screen and tabulation systems being sold by Diebold and its principal rivals, Election Systems and Software (ES&S) and Sequoia. Right after the 2004 election, Governor Taft signed a law increasing the limit on campaign contributions by individuals or political action committees from $2,500 to $10,000 -- a move widely seen as benefiting Republicans more than Democrats. Around the same time, Blackwell compounded the conflict-of-interest issue by buying himself just under $10,000 of Diebold stock. (He later sold, at a loss, after his shareholding became public.) For several months last year and stretching into this, the Republican state legislature expended its energies on mandating an ID requirement at polling stations. At best this was an unnecessary solution to a nonexistent problem, since there was no evidence of significant ballot fraud at the individual voter level; at worst it was another baldly partisan maneuver, because the 12 percent of the adult population without driver's licenses, the most readily available form of government ID, tend to be poor, elderly or both, and thus likely to lean Democrat.

The law that finally enshrined the voter-ID requirement, House Bill 3, contained another couple of nasty surprises: a big jump in the cost of petitioning for a manual recount, from $100 per precinct to $500 per precinct, and the lifting of a previous requirement that counties use the independent paper trail to conduct random audits of their touch-screen machinery after every election. In other words, Ohio -- like many other states -- has now become a recount-hostile environment with greatly diminished accountability all around. Since paperless electronic system votes are almost impossible to verify without recourse to the paper trail, this is a truly chilling development.

What the Republicans have created is, in effect, a system where they have multiple tools to deter their opponents from casting ballots in the first place -- through the voter-ID requirement, the strict rules on provisional balloting and so on -- and then making the vote count itself so opaque as to be beyond redress. The lack of transparency is a matter of bureaucratic convenience as well as political conniving: County boards of elections are generally delighted to be able to spend state and federal dollars on shiny new computer systems that do all the tricky work of vote tabulation by themselves, that don't entail large paper orders or long-term ballot storage requirements and that obviate the pain, inconvenience and extra cost of conducting recounts. Under the HAVA rules counties have the option of purchasing much cheaper, manually recountable paper-based systems, tabulated by optical scanners. Many Ohio counties have shied away from this alternative, however, because they think it is trickier to operate and requires more intensive poll-worker training. HAVA also requires at least one terminal per precinct for the use of disabled voters, which basically means a touch-screen machine. Rather than buy two separate systems, many counties prefer to go with just one.

If counties think that touch screens are somehow the easier option, though, they're kidding themselves. Poll workers may find it easy to show voters how to use the machines when they're working, but if anything goes wrong workers are likely to be several orders of magnitude more clueless about fixing the problem. Computerized systems also entail huge hidden costs, from maintenance to security (even when the terminals are in storage) to software upgrades. Several Ohio counties have been appalled at the budget overruns they are already facing, and there is a naïveté all around, from Congress on down, about the kind of commitment these machines entail. "If the federal government thinks it can give onetime-only grants, it is wrong," said Dan Tokaji, an election law specialist at Ohio State University's Moritz Law School, who is a cautious supporter of electronic systems, at least in principle. "There needs to be ongoing federal attention." Based on the government's behavior so far -- its failure to fund HAVA fully or to meet its own deadline, its failure to establish a federal regulatory body with any teeth, its failure to streamline rules on any aspect of conducting elections, leaving everything up to states and counties -- nobody should hold their breath.

Another reason to regard Ohio as a bellwether of the nation's electoral health is the fact that its political complexion is changing fast -- perhaps faster than any other state's. For twelve years the Republicans have had the run of the place, a length of tenure more or less guaranteed to spawn corruption, regardless of the party in power. The ethical violations, insalubrious associations and compromised integrity of Governor Taft, Representative Bob Ney and others have received widespread attention in the national press. Perhaps less well understood is that, historically speaking, there is no climate more susceptible to electoral malfeasance than one where a single party is in power and in a position to manipulate the rules to its advantage. If a race is also close and the stakes are high, as they were in 2004, then dirty electioneering is more or less a given.

Granted, there are those who have insisted since election day that John Kerry was robbed of Ohio's twenty Electoral College votes, and with them the presidency. That argument, though, is almost certainly a stretch, since Bush's official margin of victory of 120,000-odd votes is just too big to be explained away with any confidence. Certainly, most seasoned election observers in Ohio, as well as veterans of the earnest but disorganized Kerry field campaign, tend to dismiss it. (A 30,000 vote margin, given the multiplicity of the reported problems, might have been a very different story.) The problem, in the end, with many of the stolen-election theories is not that they are wrong to assume that Ohio is corrupt; it is that they have misunderstood the nature of that corruption. Many -- including Robert Kennedy Jr. writing in the June 1 Rolling Stone -- imagine Ken Blackwell as the mastermind of some coordinated Republican Party conspiracy to re-elect Bush, in which the counties fell magically in line with his or the party's directives.

The reality, though, is that Blackwell's influence only went so far, and the counties -- partly because of the lack of support from the secretary of state's office -- acted largely on their own. The county boards of elections were, in turn, stuffed with political appointees from both parties who engaged in struggles of varying degrees of intensity. (The stereotypical image of boards of elections, which may not be that far from the truth, is one where the Democrats are sweet, well-meaning old ladies, and the Republicans are razor-sharp lawyers.) The autonomy and complexity of the counties cannot be overstressed. As Catherine Turcer, legislative director of the anticorruption group Ohio Citizen Action, put it sardonically: "Every county has its own party structure, so you can launder money eighty-eight ways."

In Cuyahoga County -- which has been an election management nightmare for decades -- one of the two Republican members of the board of elections is Bob Bennett, who also happens to be the state party chair. In Lucas County, in and around Toledo, the chair of the board of elections until early 2005 was Bernadette Noe, the head of the county Republican Party and the wife of Tom Noe, the man who invested $50 million of the state workers' comp fund in a rare coin fund with which he was affiliated, and lost $13 million of it. Noe has also pleaded guilty to laundering $45,000 in Bush re-election funds. Bernadette Noe, meanwhile, behaved so egregiously in the November 2004 election that Blackwell's office launched a rare investigation. It charged her with a panoply of offenses involving Republican Party volunteers under her direction who, before the election, were caught tampering with voter confirmation postcards and, on election night itself, tried to barge into the vote-counting area without authorization. Bernadette Noe was forced to resign shortly afterward, one more in a succession of prominent Ohio Republicans to be disgraced, indicted or hounded from office.

The echo of so many recent scandals makes this a fascinating, pivotal moment in Ohio politics. The Republicans risk losing just about every statewide office this November, from the governorship to Mike DeWine's Senate seat. Some reform-minded members of both parties have seen this moment of transition as a unique opportunity to try to talk their colleagues into thinking beyond short-term party interest and considering some key voting rights issues from a more broadly public point of view. The biggest push has been toward redistricting reform: taking the process of drawing legislative and Congressional boundaries out of the hands of the politicians and handing it to a more independent, or at least bipartisan, panel so elections can become more competitive and more reflective of public opinion. Sadly, the vicious logic of the two-party system has made the prospects for such reform well-nigh impossible.

A year ago it was the Democrats, on the thin end of a 60-to-39 party balance in the Ohio house, who were pushing for a fairer way of carving up districts. Then it was the turn of a citizens' group called Reform Ohio Now, which made the redistricting question the centerpiece of a quartet of campaign-related initiatives it sponsored on last November's ballot. Those initiatives went down in flames, largely because of a concerted effort by Republicans to depict them as partisan Democratic maneuvers in disguise. Most recently it has been a handful of Republicans, notably House Speaker Jon Husted and State Representative Kevin DeWine (Mike's second cousin), who have been pushing their own version of redistricting reform. They argue that they are acting from only the noblest motives. (As DeWine told me, "If you're going to make changes, you do it when you don't know who the players might be.")

The Democrats, however, smell a rat. They reckon they will be able to win a majority of the seats on the state apportionment board -- which includes the governor, the secretary of state and the state auditor -- ahead of the next round of redistricting, in 2011, and suspect the initiative to be a Republican attempt to salvage something before the tables are turned against them. The Republican proposal was voted down at the end of May, and now appears to be dead. In the end, partisan rancor is prevailing over any kind of rationality. Ed Jerse, campaign manager of the Reform Ohio Now initiatives and a former Democratic state legislator, summarized the prevailing mood among Ohio Democrats this way: "You stuck it to us for twelve years and now that you are about to lose, you invite us into the room and want to be buddy-buddy? Screw that."

The losers in this whole process are, of course, the voters. Where they don't have reason to fear out-and-out political interference in the electoral vote, they can expect incompetence and chaos. Toledo, for example, may have rid itself of Bernadette Noe, but it still had a major meltdown in last November's off-season elections, which it subsequently blamed on the incompetence, lousy software and missed deadlines of its vendor, Diebold. Across the country, alarm bells have been sounded about major security flaws in electronic voting software -- one such, in Diebold's TSX system, was described by Pennsylvania's leading voting-machine inspector as "the most severe security flaw ever discovered" -- but Ohio appears blissfully unaware of them because of the inattention, bordering on negligence, of its secretary of state's office. Peg Rosenfield, for one, sees things as worse now than at any time in her memory. "It's not that anyone will be out to steal the election necessarily," she remarked. "They don't need to -- we can screw it up all by ourselves."