George Felix Allen's campaign staffers beat up a constituent for asking a question. Later: The WaPo:
A Democratic activist who verbally confronted U.S. Sen. George Allen at a campaign rally in Charlottesville yesterday was shoved, put into a headlock and thrown against a window by three men wearing Allen stickers, according to a widely disseminated video of the incident.
"Bob Casey has invested Pennsylvania pension funds in companies with ties to terrorist-sponsoring states and states that engage in genocide," Santorum said. "Bob Casey is aiding and abetting terrorism and genocide."
The current administration strategy — praying for a miracle — is not an option. The current panacea favored by anxious Republican Congressional candidates — firing Donald Rumsfeld — is too little, too late.
The vice president was asked on Tuesday by a conservative radio host from Fargo, North Dakota: "Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?" "Well, it's a no-brainer for me," replied Cheney as part of a campaign by Republicans to keep national security on the minds of voters ahead of November 7 congressional elections. Returning from a day trip to Missouri and South Carolina on Friday, Cheney told reporters on board his plane no one used the term "water boarding" in the radio interview and he had not been discussing any specific technique. "I don't talk about techniques. I wouldn't. I have said that the interrogation program for a select number of detainees is very important. It has been I think one of the most valuable intelligence programs that we have," Cheney said. "I believe it has allowed us to prevent terrorist attacks against the United States. I did not talk about specific techniques and won't." He added: "I didn't say anything about water boarding, those were all his (radio host) comments. He didn't even use that phrase."
And virtually indecipherable, Benton Courier, unless you follow Saline County politics. Phil Mask is the sheriff. Maybe Ms. Romeo already had paid her attorney a giant retainer or something. Anyway, here's the blog they want to shut down.
Josh and a bunch of other people have been trying to find out what's hidden in George Allen's sealed divorce papers. Taegan Goddard thinks he may have found a clue: a story that had been "making the rounds" about a 2008 presidential contender who "once spit on his wife." Which reminds us of this Swing State Project post. Seems like he can't keep his saliva to himself.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Former Bush administration official David Safavian was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison Friday for concealing his relationship with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Everyone in this administration should be in prison.
This unseemly circus and its clowns in Congress can't go away fast enough and with enough dishonor and disgrace to suit the circumstances. Their place in America's history is secure: They will go down as the worst administration and the worst Congress we've ever had. Period.
How anybody ever mistook George W. Bush for a tough guy escapes me. But that’s beside the point. What’s important here is something I’ve been predicting to outraged Bush cultists for months: the U.S. retreat from this strategically incoherent, incompetently conducted war has begun. Next comes finding a scapegoat. Needless to say, the Limbaugh-Coulter-Hannity axis will blame the press, left-wing college professors, and Barbra Streisand. Saner individuals will focus on the triumvirate of Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld -- along with their political enablers in both parties.
Fear of a humiliating electoral defeat has now revealed the confusion and incoherence long hidden behind the bluster of Republican war rhetoric. As the White House and its Congressional allies face an angry America, the disturbing truth can no longer be concealed. Waving the flag and questioning the patriotism of critics doesn’t distract the public from their failures in military strategy, diplomacy and planning.
According to publicly available reports, Rick Santorum is now 100% dark in Pennsylvania, having paid for no campaign ads today. Santorum has spent more than $9 million on ads so far, but his latest media buy ended last night. Since national Republicans aren't airing independent ads in Pennsylvania, that means nobody will be on the air on Santorum's behalf until Santorum himself pays to go back on. So far, Santorum has yet to reserve ad time for the final two weeks of the campaign.
"We're on the verge of chaos, and the current plan is not working," Graham, R-S.C., said in an Associated Press interview. U.S. and Iraqi officials should be held accountable for the lack of progress, said Graham, a Republican who is a frequent critic of the administration's policies. Asked who in particular should be held accountable -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, perhaps, or the generals leading the war -- Graham said: "All of them. It's their job to come up with a game plan" to end the violence.
The headline on that AP story: "Bush Admin. Won't Shift Iraq Strategy."
In 1968, a friend's dad took us to Game 1 at Busch Stadium. This is what we saw:
1968 was the Year of the Pitcher, and two shining examples pitched for World Series teams. The St. Louis ace was Bob Gibson, who went 22-9 with a microscopic 1.12 ERA in the regular season. The Tiger staff was led by Denny McLain, who at 31-6, became the first 30-game winner in Major League Baseball since Dizzy Dean won 30 games for St. Louis back in 1934. Game 1 in St. Louis matched Gibson and McLain, but there was no contest, as Gibson set a World Series record with 17 strikeouts and beat McLain, 4-0.
Cepeda, Flood, Brock, McCarver, Kaline, Northrup. Unfortunately, the Tigers came back from down 3-1 to win in seven. Payback, please.
Josh wonders how Weldon's still in Congress. He won't be much longer. But how does someone like that get elected in the first place? He's clearly unhinged.
The latest Quinnipiac poll has Lieberman up 52/35 on Lamont. Kos and Matt Stoller aren't buying it. But if Joe wins on Nov. 7, he'll probably reward all those Republicans who voted for him, and not by caucusing with the Democrats.
At the risk of offending some of my television news colleagues and competitors, I think we blew it. Here’s the headline: there is not now, nor was there yesterday, any credible threat against the National Football League or any of seven stadiums hosting games this Sunday. Period. So, we should stop the breathless, breaking and live coverage updates of a non-event.
CNN is all about sensationalism and alarmism these days.
Moving quickly to implement the bill signed by President Bush this week that authorizes military trials of enemy combatants, the administration has formally notified the U.S. District Court here that it no longer has jurisdiction to consider hundreds of habeas corpus petitions filed by inmates at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba. In a notice dated Wednesday, the Justice Department listed 196 pending habeas cases, some of which cover groups of detainees. The new Military Commissions Act (MCA), it said, provides that "no court, justice, or judge" can consider those petitions or other actions related to treatment or imprisonment filed by anyone designated as an enemy combatant, now or in the future.
It will eventually be declared unconstitutional, but in the meantime ...
These past six years were more than just the most shameful, corrupt and incompetent period in the history of the American legislative branch. These were the years when the U.S. parliament became a historical punch line, a political obscenity on par with the court of Nero or Caligula -- a stable of thieves and perverts who committed crimes rolling out of bed in the morning and did their very best to turn the mighty American empire into a debt-laden, despotic backwater, a Burkina Faso with cable.
This oughta be worth at least a transfer back to Purgatory:
HOUSTON (AP) -- A federal judge Tuesday vacated the conviction of Enron's late founder Kenneth Lay, wiping out a jury's verdict that he committed fraud and conspiracy in one of the biggest corporate scandals in U.S. history. ... U.S. District Judge Sim Lake, in a ruling Tuesday, agreed with Lay's lawyers that his death required that his conviction be erased and his indictment dismissed.
I don't want to begrudge the Nobel Peace Prize won last week by the Grameen Bank and its founder, Muhammad Yunus. They deserve it. The Grameen Bank has done more than the World Bank to help the poor, and Yunus has done more than Jimmy Carter or Bono or any philanthropist. But has he done more good than someone who never got the prize: Sam Walton? Has any organization in the world lifted more people out of poverty than Wal-Mart?
Presumably, the Times columnist knows that you cannot win the prize posthumously (unless you die after the announcement). So is he suggesting that the Nobel committee award it to Wal-Mart? Yes, he is. Go figure.
James Baker, on "The Charlie Rose Show" the other day:
"If we are able to promote representative, representative government, not necessarily democracy, in a number of nations in the Middle East and bring more freedom to the people of that part of the world, it will have been a success."
Couldn't find a transcript the next day, but he's quoted in this NY Sun story headlined "Baker's Panel Rules Out Iraq Victory." W will rue the day he created the Iraq Study Group.
A gasoline spill at a Rogers-area pipeline terminal, originally reported as 1,000 gallons, was off by a bit. The state's asking neighbors to report anything in their water. A state spokeswoman says:
"We’re not going door to door because we don’t have the manpower to do that. We don’t want to scare people, we just want them to be aware."
So those people going door to door will be from the, um, private sector.
More than five years after President Bush created the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, the former second-in-command of that office is going public with an insider's tell-all account that portrays an office used almost exclusively to win political points with both evangelical Christians and traditionally Democratic minorities. The office's primary mission, providing financial support to charities that serve the poor, never got the presidential support it needed to succeed, according to the book. ... He says some of the nation's most prominent evangelical leaders were known in the office of presidential political strategist Karl Rove as "the nuts." "National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs and described as 'ridiculous,' 'out of control,' and just plain 'goofy,'" Kuo writes.
These evil SOBs are less religious than we are. At least we have souls. These people worship power and money. There's an old saying ...
Most Profound Man in Iraq — an unidentified farmer in a fairly remote area who, after being asked by Reconnaissance Marines if he had seen any foreign fighters in the area replied "Yes, you."
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) - For the past five years, Sen. George Allen has failed to tell Congress about stock options he got for his work as a director of a high-tech company. The Virginia Republican also asked the Army to help another business that gave him similar options.
The mood among conservative voters in America reminds me of the atmosphere among British Conservatives in 1997 shortly before Tony Blair became prime minister. The level of incompetence and mismanagement by the Republican leadership has been so bad it would take an act of God to regain their momentum.
Tucked away in fine print in the military spending bill for this past year was a lump sum of $20 million to pay for a celebration in the nation’s capital "for commemoration of success" in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, the money was not spent.
Just before KNWA abruptly cut to church with 10 minutes left in "Meet The Press":
One-third of Abramoff's money went to Democrats.
They desperately want some of this GOP scandal to be bipartisan. Abramoff gave zero to Democrats. His tribal clients gave about a third of their donations to Democrats after they hired Abramoff, reversing their previous pattern of giving. Accepting donations from Indian tribes is not scandalous. For example:
The Saginaw Chippewas gave $500,500 to Republicans between 2001 and 2004 and $277,210 to Democrats, according to a review of data compiled by Dwight L. Morris & Associates, a Bristow, Virginia-based company that tracks campaign-finance reports. Between 1997 and 2000, the tribe gave just $158,000 to Republicans and $279,000 to Democrats.
