More thuggery
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.
Tipping point?
Sounds about right
AP:Yet another ad shows Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., saying, "We need to stay the course," followed by an announcer's voice saying, "No, we don't."
Wilson's trailing Attorney General Patricia Madrid in a close race.
Hail Mary
Ricky:"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."
Now that's desperate.via Drum.
Iraq
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.
Bigtime lies
Reuters: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."
Remember "I never said that?"
Stupid
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.
Safavian
Judge made him cry: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.
Clowns
Galloway: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.
We'll know in 12 days.
Losing it
The NYT has a nice roundup of candidates in trouble freaking out.(Blogger hated us today.)
We're not easily offended
But this does it. The transcript was disgusting enough, but the video -- Rusty's truly the high priest of the Cult of the Soulless.
Finding a scapegoat
Gene Lyons: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.
"Stabbed in the Back! " And Joe Conason: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.
Giving up?
DSCC, via Kos: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.
See ya on K Street, Ricky. Oops, belay that.
The buck stops at the Pentagon
Lindsey Graham:"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."
Fall Classic flashback
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.
Crazy Curt
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.
Politics, elections blogs
We go mainly here and here, for what it's worth.
GOP tries to scam gullible media
Joementum
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.
Amen
CBS' Bob Orr: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.
Totalitarianism
WaPo: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 ...
Brazen
That's one way to head off trouble.
Worst Congress ever
Taibbi: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.
Sidebar: 10 worst congressmen.
Get-out-of-hell-free card
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.
Post throes
Bigtime on Iraq:"If you look at the general overall situation, they’re doing remarkably well."
Probably Rusty's listeners will believe that, but does Cheney?
We don't get it
Tierney: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.
Welcome to the blogosphere
De'Longhi time
Early freeze.
'Not necessarily democracy'
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.
67,000 gallons
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.
The greatest hoax ever sold
This ought to do it: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 ...
Irony
Guess who said this:"This is the way North Korea typically negotiates, by threat and intimidation. It's worked for them before. It's not going to work this time."
A dud
Maybe, says Jane's Defence Weekly.
Intermittent Internet
Sometimes the ol' laptop can't find the modem. A virus may be involved.
Letter from Iraq
A Marine writes home: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."
Time left some out. Worth reading the whole thing.via Kevin.
We're tearing our hair out
Felix toast
Racist and corrupt: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.
Damn liberal media.
$20-million lie
Mitch McConnell inserted the "commemoration of success" appropriation into legislation because:"People came home from Vietnam and had to sneak back in and they were spit upon," said Don Stewart, communications director for the senator’s office.
Didn't happen. If the patriotic senator had actually served in the Vietnam-era military he might know that.
'Act of God'
Luntz:The mood among conservative voters i
