Fred Thompson is a conservative. He is in second place behind Rudy. I don't believe anyone has accused Rudy of being conservative. Everyone thinks ol Fred is stupid, i say, ask Ray Blanton how stupid Fred is. This race has just started. I think the republicians are saving up hillarys baggage for just before the election next fall. She has plenty to talk about.

I understand Fred made a million lobbying, how many millions did Hillary get for her reveal all book that revealed nothing.

I guess we all know what happens when we DISARM them all! And I guess we know how good the rules that prohibit them are when applied to crazy people who could care less about your rules. Good luck feeling safe about your college kid being disarmed AND not protected. Because that's how it is. Really... it is!

How do you think they CAN be protected? You think the college is going to assign each of them body guard? Do you think you can just make a rule or law and everyone then will obey it and you be safe? Has that worked ANYWHERE?

One day, some of you will realize that YOU are in charge of your own protection and it will be a sobering moment. I hope it comes soon enough for all of you. And what will you do then? Will you then want to be restricted of the means to accomplish it? Will you then find out criminals don't care about laws? And don't obey laws? And that all your well intentioned laws only restricted YOU from being able to protect yourself? Because only YOU obey laws and criminals do not.So make all your rules and trust Colleges to make your kids safe using them if you wish. But... they can't.

You can exaggerate and scoff and huff and puff all you want... your in denial. There is no safety in this world but the safety net that you make for yourself and your family. Wise up and start learning how to do it.

Fred IS the best candidate. What is he too late for? You voted already? Is this not the traditional time to announce? Seems to me it always was. Is everyone else just wasting time and too early? Seems to me they are. He announced when he wanted too. And saved a lot of money waiting. Whats wrong with that? Makes perfect sense to me.

Fred Thompson an "authentic conservative"? I don't think so. In fact, if one discounts Ron Paul (who's really a Libertarian), there's hardly been an authentic conservative voice in the Republican party since Barry Goldwater.

"Savior of the GOP"? If Republicans are looking for Thompson to lead them out of the Bush wilderness and into the promised land, they'll probably be wandering for a much longer time than they imagine.

JD--You should like Orson Scott Card's essay about what would happen if all illegal aliens were removed. I will see if I can find a link although Unca Google will probably be happy to help you in the meanwhile.

Thompson was kind of interesting at first, but then he waited around like a fox in the henhouse, all coy and coquettish. Now he just seems like flirty southern belle. I'm going to vote for someone with the cojones to run for president, not some foolish oaf acting like a diva...

I forgot to add that, having a teenager myself, I am absolutely horrified by the idea of arming college kids. The fact that anycandidate for president seriously mentions this is an alarming indicator of how insane the so-called conservatives have made this country.

In no other country in the world would a comment like be taken seriously, and would probably lose the canddiate any and all support.

'On the other hand, FT made that gratuitous suggestion that all the students at VaTech should have been armed - imagine the crossfire from untrained 19 year olds; it rivals imagining Seamus' terror on the top of the vehicle slicing through the Canadian winter wind at 65 mph.'

Thanks for the laugh, Mark.

I wasn't clear about FT. what i meant was that I thought he was a little too enthsused about giving american jobs to foreigners.

I think FT's delay hurts him because it gave Huckabee the opening. It's up to Huckabee to decide what to do with it. If it weren't for the fact that we're on opposite poles social policy-wise, I might support him. I'm still watching him in spite of it though (and McCain).

I'm also intrigued by Obama and kind of like Richardson. I'll just have to watch and see what transpires.

My problem is that the Dem candidates are too far to my left fiscally and the GOP candidates are to far to my right socially.

Bob,
If you're still here, I'm curious about your opinions of the 4th Amendment. You only specifically mentioned the 2nd.

Cassandra,
If I remember correctly Huckabee plays the BASS, which is even better (me too). That's a big plus in his column. :)

Huckabee is generating a lot of buzz among the pro-life conservative crowd. I don't think it's too late for Thompson, but he needless created work for himself by putting off getting into the race. (The standard price paid by the lazy and unmotivated.) But for Brownback's poor campaign tactics,
he would have been occupying the spot Huckabee is in now. Although he will not get the nomination, he is in a prime position to get a VP nod, which up until Cheney was the holding position for the next presidential candidate.

Also, behold the fruits of running a negative, "I'm more righteous than all y'all" campaign.

http://news.yahoo.com/photo/070904/480/5ca0cf5624ad4cb59c18a7e2ebe0f469

"A lot of Republicans seem uncomfortable with Romney and Giuliani.'

not so according to Rasmussen. rudy is acceptable even to the evangs. and he can and will beat the evil ones, foreign and domestic.

I agree with those who say Thompson made a tactical blunder by dithering. I still think he could possibly make it up because he might sell very well in South Carolina and that would provide momentum. A lot of Republicans seem uncomfortable with Romney and Giuliani. Had Thompson entered in May, he might have consolidated his standing among those looking for an alternative.

Much will depend on how well Huckabee can capitalize on his Iowa straw poll showing. If he can raise money and build a decent organization, I believe he will gather a lot of support that would probably have gone to Fred Thompson.

I have maintained for quite some time that the longer there are 3 or more major candidates in the race, the better Giuliani's chances are.

I agree with Mark in Austin that Thompson's advocacy of arming the Virginia Tech students was a singularly stupid statement.

I like Biden and am intrigued by Obama and Huckabee (although the evolution disbelief bothers me).

"Jason, so far there's been only one straw poll, which was skewed by the rules and money a candidate had.

I give Huckabee credit for doing well in Iowa, but so far there's been absolutely no objective test for any candidate, Republican or Democrat."
-Posted by: NonP | September 5, 2007 02:09 PM
Huckabee didn't spend much money per vote in Iowa and, though the straw poll was not a perfect indicator of anything, it propelled Huckabee into a national spotlight. I think primary voters are going to see a "good" conservative in Huckabee and a late comer in Thompson that they no longer need. Huckabee probably has a better chance with I's than Thompson, too. I'd almost vote for Huckabee and I'm a staunch Dem.

The late announcement is going to make Thompson the subject of all the talk shows but it would be naive to think he won't now draw comparisons to Huckabee rather than just eliminating him like I thought Thompson might earlier in the summer.

I agree. The war was just a way to create a cash cow for defense and other mega-contractors. The depth and scope of the fraud is unbelievable, from Blackwater mercenaries staying in 5-star hotels to brand new Chevy Suburbans abandoned because of a flat tire. Doesn't seem like a war in the classic sense. Seems like a run for the money.

Fred Thompson is the person we want as President. Someone who says what he means and meas what he says. If he didn't mean it, he would not have said it. He looks very Presidential, sounds Presidential and commands respect when he speaks. When he talks, people listen. He can command the respect from congress and get eveyone on the same page. He understands we need to fix thhings in our own backyards before getting involved in others. He understands the importance of protecting our borders and strengthing our economy. He can command the respect from foreign countries. He is the one to whip us all back into shape. America needs Fred Thompson!

hey Mitty, if I get my guily plea reversed, will your campaign take me back?

"I think Thompson would have been just fine, maybe even better than the opposition, declaring so late if it had not been for Huckabee's success lately." - JasonL

Jason, so far there's been only one straw poll, which was skewed by the rules and money a candidate had.

I give Huckabee credit for doing well in Iowa, but so far there's been absolutely no objective test for any candidate, Republican or Democrat.

I waded through the mire and found these gems to which I must respond:

bsimon and proud, thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

bhoomes, I nnever saw your take on FT hurting MH, but JasonL shares my "intuition" on this.

Thompson supporter and drindl - I thought Thompson had supported farm worker visas in the 90s which made me suggest he may be no Tancredo.
----------------------------------------
My random thoughts follow:
On the other hand, FT made that gratuitous suggestion that all the students at VaTech should have been armed - imagine the crossfire from untrained 19 year olds; it rivals imagining Seamus' terror on the top of the vehicle slicing through the Canadian winter wind at 65 mph.

If I cannot have John McCain as the R candidate, I am still searching for a credible alternative. MH seems like a possibility, but like RG, Mitt, and FT, he has no foreign policy experience at all. So I still send money to the "old" pilot.

I also still send money to JB and think he is clearly the best of the Ds. I like Dodd. I am intrigued by Obama.

I am personally inclined to view process above ideology; character and integrity above perceived electability. McCain, Biden, and Dodd have long histories of working across party lines to make the process successful. Obama has the right skills. HRC has done more along this line then I would have thought, but her campaign rhetoric is based on divisiveness. MH talks the right talk for me about process.
There was a time when I thought FT could be among the group I consider process oriented, but for me his campaign has fallen flat.

I still think he will play well in Texas.

OK, back on topic here, I don't think Fred brings anything to the table other than one more candidate trying to prove his bona fides to the east-of-right wing of the party. He doesn't seem to stand for anything other than what he's expected to stand for as an alleged conservative, his career in Congress was certainly nothing noteworthy, and just because he's been a Hollywood star doesn't make him qualified to lead the country.

Most importantly, having dithered as long as he did before tossing his hat in the ring (while avoiding the debate) doesn't strike me as the kind of decisive leader we need, and his pandering to the right tells me that he's not likely to be a President for ALL THE PEOPLE, just the most vocal, wealthy and powerful conservative branch. We've already had 7 years of that and it hasn't worked out too swell for most Americans.

Now comes a new study undermining yet another belief of the global panic sect, the doctrine of "consensus." Liberal activists use the assertion of an overwhelming scientific consensus as a way to end any climate-science debate - particularly when they're losing.

Ellen Goodman, columnist for the Boston Globe-Democrat says global-warming skeptics are "on par with Holocaust deniers," only more dangerous.

Ellen, meet Dr. Klaus-Martin Schulte.

Schulte analyzed all peer-reviewed scientific papers available on global warming from 2004 to February 2007, 528 studies in all. Far from a consensus, only 38 of the papers (7 percent) explicitly endorsed the global warming thesis. Almost as many, 32, presented facts in direct contrast. The vast majority of the papers either gave only an implicit endorsement to global warming (45 percent) or were entirely neutral (48 percent).

In other words, the best case for the Goodman argument ("Shut up!," she explained) is that 52 percent of current research tends to support the global warming thesis.

That's not a consensus. Indeed, given the irrationality of the climate-change cultists, I'm not sure it's even a fair fight.

If Goodman and the Gore-ons were content to believe that Mother Gaia is going to smother us all to death in retribution for inventing air conditioning, they'd merely be a nuisance.

Alas, they want more. John Edwards wants to get rid of SUVs. SUV passengers are twice as likely to survive a car wreck than Prius drivers. Edwards may not have noticed, but I'm far less likely to show up for a "No War For Oil" rally if they're scraping my brain pan off the Tobin Bridge.

During the past year, several defense contractors hired to help rebuild Iraq have come under federal investigation or faced litigation for allegedly defrauding the government. Government officials estimate that $10 billion in Iraq-related contracts are unaccounted for and may have been lost to fraud or other misconduct.

Currently, about 80 federal investigations looking into contract fraud are under way, and more than 20 cases have been referred to the Department of Justice for prosecution, according to congressional testimony offered by federal auditors. During the last three years, contract fraud investigations have yielded 10 arrests, five indictments, five convictions and two imprisonments.

tO THE GOP THOUGHT POLICE. iN CAS EYOU DON'T KNOW. tHE MOR EYOU WHINE, THE MORE YOU COMPALIN. tHE MORE YOU TRY AND FORCE THE CONVERSATION TO FOLLOW ALONG YOUR LINES. tHE MORE I WILL DO WHA TYOU HATE.

If you don't want cut and pastes or post after post after post, tehn you have an option. Post your posts. Stop telling others how to blog. Stop telling others who to listen to and who to ignore.

If you want the cut and paste, continue to cry and complain. That won't get you what you want though. If you want dialogue. Post, respond to other posts.

Try and tell others who to listen to and how to blog, I will show who you haven't seen nothign yet. It's up to you gop. Just please stop your whining and crying. You got a proble, go elsewhere.

Just know. The more the thoguht police try and lock the site down, the more inclined I am to free it up.

PEace

'USA Today did some analysis of the per-candidate spending, (H/T to Rich Galen):

• Third-place finisher Sam Brownback says he spent about $325,000 to win his 2,192 votes. That's $148.27 for each vote.
• Second-place finisher Mike Huckabee spent about $150,000 and received 2,587 votes. That's $57.98 per vote.
• Winner Mitt Romney has not said how much he spent. The reporting in this Washington Post article suggests at least $2 million and possibly more than twice that much. Assuming $2 million for 4,516 votes, that's $442.87 per vote. But it could top $1,000.'

I agree that Huckabee has been surprisingly strong... surprising since he's an unknown. But he's young and energetic, and kind of cool [plays guitar in a band, not bad] and Thompson comes across mainly as old and indecisive, in addition to being a flipflopper/ panderer.

Fred is way too late.

Unless he wants to admit the coverage of his originally underage wife will turn out the Grand Old Pervert vote ...

Good lord. There has hardly been a productive post since 9am. This cut and paste crap is getting ridiculous.

On topic: I think Thompson would have been just fine, maybe even better than the opposition, declaring so late if it had not been for Huckabee's success lately. Rather than being the conservative alternative, Thompson's only the Huckabee alternative and I'm not sure how many people NEED and alternative to Huckabee.

Off topic: Anyone from OH have an idea what Paul Gillmor's death might do to his house seat in '08?

Sam--Have you ever worked for the federal government? In terms of people doing nothing, it makes the private sector look like a sweat shop. You could honestly eliminate over half of the positions on the Hill, and they would still have less to do than any private company that I have worked for.

Did Craig turn to the Right when he made his About Face, or did he turn to the Left?

It's important for us to know that he did what the Founders would have done.

Thanks for putting that out there martin. Everybody should watch that video. And see how these propogandists are trying to silence military men. Like me. People HERE trying to say I was never in the military. Like I was never a army infantry soldier 11B. Why? Becasue I don't parrot rush and hannity. How does that work. A soldier, who actually served his country, taking orders from draft doggers and war cheerleader cowards. I don't think so. not me.

I'm glad stoltz is standing up for us. Standing up for soldiers, like aLL the generals, who are being silecned by the right-wing attack machine. You had you chance gop. YOu wasted it. Now get back in the closet.

'There is a lot of waste in the private sector as well (see me reading this site during my lunch break), but it is small potatoes compared to what goes on in the government.'

Don't make me laugh. I've worked in the corporate sector for 20 years, and most of the execs spend their time playing golf or getting 'manicures' [privately, in their offices.

As for Mitty, making fun of a state which you used to 'govern' is particularly nasty and cheap, but then he will say anything to get elected.

Keep up the great work Rufus. You've got 'em now.

Bokonon see last post

"Soltz to Senor: 'You can't spin me a third time.'
Last night on Hannity and Colmes, Iraq war vet and VoteVets founder Jon Soltz debated Dan Senor, former senior adviser to Paul Bremer in Iraq. When Senor told Soltz "you got to admit" progress is being made in Iraq, Soltz responded:"

That was on point last night, wasn't it. Get em' stoltz. I can't figure out why that doesn't happen everyday all day. Why isn't fox sued for slander EVERYDAY. Stoltz got them last night. Worse than I've ever seen on Fox. that should be happening everyday.

I pirticularly like when he told that guy he wasn't about to be lectured by a lying propogating fascsit. He also said where was he when we needed real vaild news? HE was propogating lies, that's where? All day everyday

I figure that Thompson can get into the race as late as 45 days or so before the first primary. A few more will have been winnowed out of the pack by then, which means he gets that much more face time.

To do it though, he will have to show some substance or have lucky timing and catch the "lightning in a bottle" which those without substance need.

I wish that more of the candidates would have waited like Thompson has. Instead they've pushed us further down the slope to making this a four-year campaign process.

'We aren't leaving Iraq. It doesn't matter what the Democrats want or what the American people want. Unless Congress has a super majority and can override a veto the troops are staying. Period'

From a new book about bush 'dead certain'...

As far as Romney goes I agree he is not a perfect candidate (like the rest of the candidates). A couple of your knocks on Romney though are a little forced. First, why is having more government experience a good thing? Having previously worked for the government, I can tell you that 90% of government employees waste 90% of their time. There is a lot of waste in the private sector as well (see me reading this site during my lunch break), but it is small potatoes compared to what goes on in the government. It's good for a candidate to have some experience in government, but at a certain point, more is less. Also, sure Romney makes fun of Massachusetts. Massachusetts is what it is. So is Idaho. So is California. So are lots of other states. You seem to be taking his jokes about Massachusetts a little too personally.

"The previous low for any president was in 1995, when Bill Clinton won just 26 percent of the time during the first year after Republicans took control of the House."

Right. And clinton's numbers were so low and the r's took control why? Bj and adultry. The "religous" right got all high and mighty and clinton was "Dirty nasty boy".

Not going to work this time. the people know it was a ploy to STEAL power the the gop so they could go back to war with Iraq and steal their oil. the gop is about to be irrleevant for a generation :)

That puts a smile on my face. Now, let's make it happen

It all sounds so familiar. George Bush is consulting, he is talking to his top people, and most importantly, he is waiting to hear from his commanders on the ground. Then and only then will he be able to judge the success or failure of the "surge" and make a decision on the next step forward in Iraq. It's the same thing we heard last fall when Bush was allegedly contemplating what the new way forward would be, when the escalation of troop levels was a foregone conclusion.

And of course we already know what the report will say: the surge is working, there are measurable gains, and we must give the strategy more time to work. That strategy of an additional 30,000 U.S. troops curbing the unending violence, giving the Maliki government "breathing room," to pass key legislation. But with the newly released GAO report outlining the failure of the Maliki government to make any meaningful progress and with the unending violence, that fairy tale is getting harder to push onto an increasingly skeptical public, so naturally it is time to move the goalposts. Meet Magical April.

April may become the new September when it comes to deciding whether to bring U.S. troops home from Iraq, if President Bush's senior advisers have their way. But Congress might not stand for it. [...]

Republican support likely will hinge on Petraeus' testimony next week. If he can convince lawmakers that the security gains won in recent months are substantial and point toward a bigger trend -- and a promise of major troop reductions soon -- GOP members might be willing to hold out until spring.

And right on cue, David Petraeus weighs in:

The U.S. military commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, has suggested he will recommend a cut in U.S. troop numbers around March when he delivers long-awaited testimony to Congress next week.

Petraeus' comments are the latest sign that U.S. commanders believe U.S. President George W. Bush's decision to send an extra 30,000 soldiers to Iraq earlier this year has improved security enough to warrant a reduction in force levels.

Witness the birth of the new narrative: The surge has brought about such significant gains, gains that "point to a bigger trend," that if Congress will just be patient until April, we will finally be able to start to bring the troops home. Of course the only problem with that is, it's not true. Troop levels in Iraq will be reduced in April and it has nothing to do with those oft cited "conditions on the ground." From Defense Secretary Gates in April of this year:

Q Mr. Secretary, can you tell us how long this measure allows you to sustain the surge now...How long does this allow you to maintain that level in Iraq?

SEC. GATES: Probably at least a year.

Q A year from now, or --

SEC. GATES: A year from now.

And from Gen. Odierno, the Commander of Multinational Forces in Iraq:

Q General Odierno...You used the phrase just now, "withdrawal of forces in early '08" -- are you talking -- my first question -- are you talking about simply withdrawing down to pre-surge levels? Are you considering going further down than that? And then I have my actual question.

GEN. ODIERNO: Okay. Barbara, what I'm talking about is drawing down to the pre-surge levels when I say that.

And from Adm. Michael Mullen, incoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:

....the "surge" effectively will end in April because there are no fresh replacements.

Troops reductions in April will have nothing to do with improved conditions in Iraq, it will be simply because they won't have the troops to sustain the current levels. But the administration will push this, and apparently the media will play along. Will Congress?

And what about that progress that points to "a bigger trend"? According to yesterday's testimony from GAO Comptroller General David Walker:

FEINGOLD: Accordingly, I'd like to ask you: Do you think that the ISF will be able to hold neighborhoods cleared by American forces, and if not, is there any reason to think that any gains that have been made during the recent surge will actually hold in the long run?

WALKER: I think there's a significant question as to whether or not Iraqi security forces will be able to maintain the safety and security in these areas absent direct U.S. troop involvement...

The only thing George Bush's escalation has done is to create pockets of short-term security, while the game of whack-a-mole continues throughout Iraq. Not only has Maliki's government failed to meet any of the key benchmarks promised, his government teeters on the edge of collapse, civilian death rates continue to climb and 730 more U.S. troops have died. But in the coming days we will be told to be patient for just a little bit longer, to wait until April and with all of the progress, we'll finally start to withdraw the troops. The only question left is, will Congress go along with the latest attempt by the administration to run out the clock?

Permalink :: Discuss (78 comments)

Say, back to those heady days of just before Larry Craig pleaded guilty to a widened stance. NPR is reporting that, not only is Craig considering reneging on his resignation, he's also looking into whether he can call for a do-over on his guilty plea. Apparently, his conversation with Arlen Specter has convinced him that he can beat not only the heat to give up his Senate seat, but roll back the crime to which he's already pled. While testing the unidirectionality of time's arrow, Craig has also requested that the Senate ethics committee drop their investigation.

A short course in Jedi mind tricks might be in order if Craig wants America to forget his bathroom antics, but his fighting spirit has to be encouraged. It's not often you see someone willing to simultaneously combat the pressure from his entire party, the legal system, the combined comedians of North America, and Einstein. Go for it, Larry.

A separate analysis of so-called party unity votes, in which a majority of one party votes against a majority of the other, showed the possibility of another historic first for House Democrats. So far this year, Democrats have backed the majority position of their caucus 91 percent of the time on average on such votes. That marks the highest Democratic unity score in 51 years [...]

By comparison, House Democrats supported President Richard Nixon 46 percent of the time in 1974, the year he resigned. Nixon prevailed on votes 68 percent of the time that year, despite the Watergate fallout. And House Republican support for President Lyndon B. Johnson stood at 51 percent in 1968, during the height of the Vietnam War. Johnson succeeded 84 percent of the time on votes that year.

Soltz to Senor: 'You can't spin me a third time.'
Last night on Hannity and Colmes, Iraq war vet and VoteVets founder Jon Soltz debated Dan Senor, former senior adviser to Paul Bremer in Iraq. When Senor told Soltz "you got to admit" progress is being made in Iraq, Soltz responded:

When you were in Iraq, I believed you. I trusted you. Our soldiers needed your leadership. You told us weapons of mass destruction, we've turned the corner in Iraq. So I'm not going to sit here and be lectured by someone like you. I just can't have that. I can be lectured by Gen. Petraeus, I can be lectured by our generals. But you spun me once, you spun me twice, you can't spin me a third time.

Later, Soltz argued that recent ads by Freedom's Watch are "completely misleading" because there was "no connection between 9/11 and Iraq." Those soldiers "have been misled by people like Dan Senor," Soltz said. Watch it:

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/09/05/soltz-to-senor-you-cant-spin-me-a-third-time/

President Bush's success rating in the Democratic-controlled House has fallen this year to a half-century low, and he prevailed on only 14 percent of the 76 roll call votes on which he took a clear position.

The previous low for any president was in 1995, when Bill Clinton won just 26 percent of the time during the first year after Republicans took control of the House. If Bush's score holds through the end of the year, he will have the lowest success rating in either chamber for any president since Congressional Quarterly began analyzing votes in 1953.

A study of House and Senate floor votes, compiled by CQ over the August recess, also showed that House Democrats have backed Bush's legislative positions this year only 6 percent of the time, making for the strongest opposition from either party against a president in the 54 years CQ has kept score.

Keep up your imaginary vicotry JD. Keep making a point of your imagainary victories. Good Job JD. You are cool.

JD 1

Everbody else 0

Good? Feel better about your self.

I'm glad everybody is ignoring JD. Good for you. Pat me on the back.

See JD I can do it to. Doesn't give me any more power or less. The only power you have is the power I give you. And I'm not giving it up. So your post is a joke to me. Who are you trying to convince? What are you trying to accomplish?

Are you trying to get other's to listen to you? What is your goal? What posts do you have yourself? If you were posting anything of substance you wouldn't need to worry about anybody else. YOu can't stop me. Only CC the fascsit can. Only fox off the air can stop me. I don't see it happening.

Good job though JD. YOu are cool. You are the normal one. I am not normal. YOu are. YOu are mainstream also. The national review and FOx are truth tellers. Better?

Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Mikal Watts of San Antonio once tried to pressure a legal opponent into a $60 million personal injury lawsuit settlement by claiming he would have an advantage on appeal because of his firm's "heavy" campaign financial support to an appellate court's justices, "all of whom are good Democrats."

There is no evidence that his firm's support of justices of the 13th Court of Appeals in Corpus Christi ever gained him any undue influence.

But a nine-page letter Watts wrote to opposing counsel in 2001 apparently was intended to make an out-of-state corporation think the donations could sway the court. Watts is running for the Democratic senatorial nomination against Houston state Rep. Rick Noriega.

"This letter seems to confirm what everybody thinks about Texas justice. Very seldom is it this well-articulated," said Craig McDonald of Texans for Public Justice, an organization that advocates for campaign finance reform. "It confirms the fact Texas courts are filled with politics."

you can't fool us JD/zouk. you are the one we will get rid of.

A day after the Government Accountability Office reported that the Iraqis have met just three of 18 benchmarks they had agreed to meet, George W. Bush offered a slightly rosier assessment of the war during his visit to Australia today. Asked by Deputy Prime Minister Mark Vaile to say how things are going in Iraq, the president of the United States declared: "We're kicking a*s."

"We" Mr. AWOL/deserter in a time of war says... moron.

Mr. Baird is so far showing no signs of backing down from his comments. In response to the MoveOn attacks, he said: "I believe I must speak and act based on what I believe is in the best interest of our nation regardless of political advertisements or partisan interests. Based on personal visits to the region, I believe the dynamics on the ground in Iraq are changing for the better and, while there are still multiple and serious challenges, and while the course is uncertain and dangerous, the changes I have seen warrant continued support of current actions through next spring."

Nice to see some political backbone in Washington. Meanwhile, MoveOn and its billionaire donors are out to solidify their ideological control of the Democratic Party, even if that means denying what is actually happening inside Iraq.

Can I just say to all the reasonble people on this blog:

I am very happy to see that everyone is ignoring both the Rufii and the anon poster. They have now resorted to either talking to each other or cutting and pasting random articles, which are very easy to skip over.

Excellent work, let's keep it up. It got rid of Che, and I'm guessing they will eventually tire of being ignored as well.

JD Out.

Police in rural Maryland staged a military stakeout and shot a troubled Army vet. As his family plans to sue, they are asking how a soldier being treated for PTSD could be shipped to Iraq.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/09/05/james_dean/

--and yet, they won't take zouk..

Who will be Fred's VP? George C Scott would be cool. Or maybe John Wayne. Or does it have to be someone LIVING?

"Rep. Paul Gillmor, R-Ohio, found dead in his apartment, GOP aide says"

Duh Duh Duh. Another one bites the dust" BAd year for the gop. Don't get mad at me. It's God's will what's happening to the gop. All the cancer deaths and arrests. God's will. Hate me all day. Hate God all day, you already have shown your hatred gop. God will get his/her's. You cannot stop God's will. Even though you people think you are god's. You not. Your liars. Your propogandists. Many claim christianity but spit on the teachings of the Lord. Did you think this would go unpunished?

With regard to Rep Gillmor (R-OH), I heard it was a heart attack. He was 68 and had served since '89. He was on the Financial Services Committee.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2064157,00.html

"Fascist America, in 10 easy steps

From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all

Tuesday April 24, 2007
The Guardian

Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.

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They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.
As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.

Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens' ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don't learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of "homeland" security - remember who else was keen on the word "homeland" - didn't raise the alarm bells it might have.

It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.

Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy

After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a "war footing"; we were in a "global war" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilisation". There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. "This time," Fein says, "there will be no defined end."

Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the "global conspiracy of world Jewry", on myth.

It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.

2. Create a gulag

Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes place.

At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, "enemies of the people" or "criminals". Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.

This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.

With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA "black site" prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.

Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can't investigate adequately.

But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: "First they came for the Jews." Most Americans don't understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.

By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.

3. Develop a thug caste

When leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.

The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America's security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution

Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration's endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.

Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for "public order" on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station "to restore public order".

4. Set up an internal surveillance system

In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.

In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.

In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.

5. Harass citizens' groups

The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.

Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track "potential terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as "terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist" slowly expands to include the opposition.

6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release

This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.

In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.

Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I was on the Terrorist Watch list".

"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee.

"I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution."

"That'll do it," the man said.

Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of the people" tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.

James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.

Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.

It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can't get off.

7. Target key individuals

Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.

Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not "coordinate", in Goebbels' term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically "coordinate" early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.

Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.

Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that "waterboarding is torture" was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.

Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were "coordinated" too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.

8. Control the press

Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened "critical infrastructure" when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.

Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.

Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC's Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.

Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.

You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.

9. Dissent equals treason

Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor". When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times' leaking of classified information "disgraceful", while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the "treason" drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.

Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death", according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.

In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies of the people". National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy "November traitors".

And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an "enemy combatant". He has the power to define what "enemy combatant" means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define "enemy combatant" any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.

Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)

We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. "We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're going to hold you," says a spokeswoman of the CCR.

Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn't real dissent. There just isn't freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.

10. Suspend the rule of law

The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens.

Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears's meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night ... Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other condition'."

Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch's soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias' power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.

Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.

Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.

It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster."

As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are "at war" in a "long war" - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.

That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the "what ifs".

What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.

What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.

Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody's help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.

We need to look at history and face the "what ifs". For if we keep going down this road, the "end of America" could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now.

"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.

· Naomi Wolf's The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot will be published by Chelsea Green in Septemb
"

Dittoheads and cow folk are that "thug catse". Trying to strong arm this country so their will, will be done.I have detailed how each play out to this administration. I'm sure you people are smart enough to do that on your own. The yale plan cannot win. Fear doesnt' exist. YOu cannot combat truth with lies spin and propoganda. The gop has lost already. And the election is over a year away. And they already have been swept, like the 06 election. Play time is over.

'Mitt Romney loves jogging. His most recent ad in Iowa and New Hampshire featured him jogging -- a sign of his energy and hunger for the job, a sign that he's running hard for the Presidency, unlike the lackluster Fred Thompson.

Now he has released a new ad, running in the crucial primary state of South Carolina, entitled "Energy," featuring a short cameo by his wife Ann. And the jogging footage is in this one, too..'

funny... next he'll be windsurfing...

" At some point in time, if I come to the conclusion that he can't be the leader--he's unwilling to lead or he's deceptive--then we'll change course. But I haven't come to that conclusion. As a matter of fact, his recent actions have inspired me."

On olberman last night it was reported bush has admitted to buying time until oct nov. in a new book. He trying to buy the gop candidates political time. he's playing games with our brothers and sisters for political reasons. Get em Keith. Don't let them off the hook.

Check out the video here. www.crooksandliars.com

Although Massachusetts does not suffer alone from its notorious affection for liberalism, it is the incubator for "Massachusetts viruses" that infect the national Democratic Party.

The viruses come in many forms: "addiction to tax revenues and a raging edifice complex couched in disrespect to wage earners; phony identity politics without real results for women and minorities; reflexive anti-Americanism in foreign affairs; vain indulgence in obnoxious political correctness; self-serving featherbedding; NIMBYism; authoritarian distortion of the balance of governmental power, all simmered in a broth of hypocritical paternalism."

One of the things we've been wondering here at Election Central World Headquarters is when one of the GOP Presidential candidates would stop ceding Rudy his alleged national security credentials and point out that he doesn't have any sort of counter-terrorism or foreign policy experience to speak of.

Well, now John McCain has gone and done just that:

And for the first time Mr. McCain, who has a lengthy résumé in the Navy and in Congress, questioned the foreign policy credentials of his main rivals for the Republican presidential nomination: Mr. Giuliani, a former New York City mayor and prosecutor, and Mitt Romney, a former Massachusetts governor and a businessman.

"I think the nation respects the mayor's leadership after 9/11, and I do, too, and I think he displayed leadership at a time that Americans needed some steady hand, and I think that his conduct was laudatory following 9/11," Mr. McCain said, when asked why many voters identify Mr. Giuliani with the issue of terrorism.

But he went on to say: "I don't think it translates into foreign policy or national security expertise. I know of nothing in his background that indicates that he has any experience in it, with him or Romney."

It doesn't matter when he announced because his problem is he is boring and his wife is scary.

President Bush on Iraqi independence and democracy ...

"[Maliki's] learning to be a leader. And one of my jobs as the president and his ally is to help him be that leader without being patronizing. At some point in time, if I come to the conclusion that he can't be the leader--he's unwilling to lead or he's deceptive--then we'll change course. But I haven't come to that conclusion. As a matter of fact, his recent actions have inspired me."

"Summary
You have trudged your way through (I suspect) the most boring chapter in this
book, and are entitled to some sort of reward. I hope you consider this worthy

payment: You now know that the RWA scale is a reliable, a valid, and (as these things go)
a rather powerful instrument for identifying the authoritarian follower personality. That's
worth knowing because most of what follows in the later chapters depends on it. The social
sciences are awash with attitude scales, opinion surveys, and personality tests, and frankly
most of them are not very good imho. But this one appears to be the real deal. A goodly
amount of evidence has piled up showing that scores on the RWA scale really do measure
tendencies toward authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, and conventionalism.
We can therefore use it to try to understand the people who seem, so unwittingly, ready to
cash in democracy, and perhaps the world.
In the next chapter we'll try to figure out why high RWAs are so aggressive. Then
we'll try to understand how nice, ordinary people--like some of your neighbors, some of your
co-workers, and perhaps even some of your relatives--became right-wing authoritarians."

Ordinary people do not think this way. Thsi is not a game. This is not a video game.

Rep. Paul Gilmore, R-Ohio, found dead in his apartment, apparently, but that's all the info I see. CC, anybody know what happened?

"The High RWA Game
The next night 68 high RWAs showed up for their ride, just as ignorant of how
they had been funneled into this run of the experiment as the low RWA students had
been the night before. The game proceeded as usual. Background material was read,
Elites (all males) nominated themselves, and the Elites were briefed. Then the
"wedgies" started. As soon as the game began, the Elite from the Middle East
announced the price of oil had just doubled. A little later the former Soviet Union
(known as the Confederation of Independent States in 1994) bought a lot of armies
and invaded North America. The latter had insufficient conventional forces to defend
itself, and so retaliated with nuclear weapons. A nuclear holocaust ensued which
killed everyone on earth--7.4 billion people--and almost all other forms of life which
had the misfortune of co-habitating the same planet as a species with nukes.

When this happens in the Global Change Game, the facilitators turn out all the
lights and explain what a nuclear war would produce. Then the players are given a
second chance to determine the future, turning back the clock to two years before the
hounds of war were loosed. The former Soviet Union however rebuilt its armies and
invaded China this time, killing 400 million people. The Middle East Elite then called
for a "United Nations" meeting to discuss handling future crises, but no agreements
were reached.
At this point the ozone-layer crisis occurred but--perhaps because of the recent
failure of the United Nations meeting--no one called for a summit. Only Europe took
steps to reduce its harmful gas emissions, so the crisis got worse. Poverty was
spreading unchecked in the underdeveloped regions, which could not control their
population growth. Instead of dealing with the social and economic problems "back
home," Elites began jockeying among themselves for power and protection, forming
military alliances to confront other budding alliances. Threats raced around the room
and the Confederation of Independent States warned it was ready to start another
nuclear war. Partly because their Elites had used their meager resources to buy into
alliances, Africa and Asia were on the point of collapse. An Elite called for a United
Nations meeting to deal with the crises--take your pick--and nobody came.
By the time forty years had passed the world was divided into armed camps
threatening each other with another nuclear destruction. One billion, seven hundred
thousand people had died of starvation and disease. Throw in the 400 million who
died in the Soviet-China war and casualties reached 2.1 billion. Throw in the 7.4
billion who died in the nuclear holocaust, and the high RWAs managed to kill 9.5
billion people in their world--although we, like some battlefield news releases, are
counting some of the corpses twice.
The authoritarian world ended in disaster for many reasons. One was likely the
character of their Elites, who put more than twice as much money in their own pockets as the low RWA Elites had. (The Middle East Elite ended up the World's Richest
Man; part of his wealth came from money he had conned from Third World Elites as
payment for joining his alliance.) But more importantly, the high RWAs proved
incredibly ethnocentric. There they were, in a big room full of people just like
themselves, and they all turned their backs on each other and paid attention only to
their own group. They too were all reading from the same page, but writ large on their
page was, "Care About Your Own; We Are NOT All In This Together."
The high RWAs also suffered because, while they say on surveys that they care
about the environment, when push comes to shove they usually push and shove for the
bucks. That is, they didn't care much about the long-term environmental consequences
of their economic acts. For example a facilitator told Latin America that converting
much of the region's forests to a single species of tree would make the ecosystem
vulnerable. But the players decided to do it anyway because the tree's lumber was
very profitable just then. And the highs proved quite inflexible when it came to birth
control. Advised that "just letting things go" would cause the populations in
underdeveloped areas to explode, the authoritarians just let things go.
Now the Global Change Game is not the world stage, university students are not
world leaders, and starting a nuclear holocaust in a gymnasium is not the same thing
as launching real missiles from Siberia and North Dakota. So the students' behavior
on those two successive nights in 1994 provides little basis for drawing conclusions
about the future of the planet. But some of what happened in this experiment rang true
to me. I especially thought, "I've seen this show before" as I sat on the sidelines and
watched the high RWAs create their very own October crisis."

Indecisive Fred Thompson. Aw shucks. It is only me coming thru the door. Shut the door. You are late for dinner so u will have to go to Burger King for supper.Fred supports the useless Iraq war which has cost $467 billion, hates Mexicans and has no plan for anything which is typical of Presidents and the wannabees. Liked him once but no longer.

"The Low RWA Game
By carefully organizing sign-up booklets, I was able to get 67 low RWA
students to play the game together on October 18th . (They had no idea they had been
funneled into this run of the experiment according to their RWA scale scores; indeed
they had probably never heard of right-wing authoritarianism.) Seven men and three
women made themselves Elites. As soon as the simulation began, the Pacific Rim
Elite called for a summit on the "Island Paradise of Tasmania." All the Elites attended
and agreed to meet there again whenever big issues arose. A world-wide organization
was thus immediately created by mutual consent.
Regions set to work on their individual problems. Swords were converted to
ploughshares as the number of armies in the world dropped. No wars or threats of
wars occurred during the simulation. [At one point the North American Elite
suggested starting a war to his fellow region-aires (two women and one guy), but they
told him to go fly a kite--or words to that effect.]
An hour into the game the facilitators announced a (scheduled) crisis in the
earth's ozone layer. All the Elites met in Tasmania and contributed enough money to
buy new technology to replenish the ozone layer.
Other examples of international cooperation occurred, but the problems of the
Third World mounted in Africa and India. Europe gave some aid but North America
refused to help. Africa eventually lost 300 million people to starvation and disease,
and India 100 million.
Populations had grown and by the time forty years had passed the earth held 8.7
billion people, but the players were able to provide food, health facilities, and jobs for
almost all of them. They did so by demilitarizing, by making a lot of trades that
benefited both parties, by developing sustainable economic programs, and because the Elites diverted only small amounts of the treasury into their own pockets. (The North
American Elite hoarded the most.)
One cannot blow off four hundred million deaths, but this was actually a highly
successful run of the game, compared to most. No doubt the homogeneity of the
players, in terms of their RWA scores and related attitudes, played a role. Low RWAs
do not typically see the world as "Us versus Them." They are more interested in
cooperation than most people are, and they are often genuinely concerned about the
environment. Within their regional groups, and in the interactions of the Elites, these
first-year students would have usually found themselves "on the same page"--and writ
large on that page was, "Let's Work Together and Clean Up This Mess." The game's
facilitators said they had never seen as much international cooperation in previous
runs of the simulation. With the exception of the richest region, North America, the
lows saw themselves as interdependent and all riding on the same merry-go-round."

reason: I would like a Romney supporter to comment on the facts that 1) Mitt Romney has less experience in government than any other candidate, including Obama, 2)his claims to have balanced the state budget without raising taxes are demonstrably false - he left the state $1.5 billion in the red, 3) he was absent from the state he was elected to govern for almost the entire last year of his 4-year term in office - a year spent mocking the state and its citizens to conservative audiences, 4)he only mentions 'truths' which are convenient for his candidacy, 5)one of his campaign employees has impersonated a police officer - repeatedly, 6)ex-friend of Larry Craig, who couldn't run from him fast enough when the Craig story came out - says something about both Romney's judgment in choosing his friends and his loyalty TO his friends when they come under attack, 7)admitted and unrepentant abuser of man's best friend.

I lived through the Romney governorship of Massachusetts, and I cannot emphasize strongly enough what a BAD idea it would be to elect him president. What do you think?

WASHINGTON (CNN) - Republican White House hopeful John McCain told CNN Tuesday night he was merely trying to be funny when he called a New Hampshire town-hall questioner a "little jerk."

"He was a little jerk," McCain said with a smile, referring to a student questioner on Tuesday who cited McCain's age (71) and asked if the Arizona Republican worried he "might die in office or get Alzheimer's or some other disease that might affect [his] judgment?"

McCain told the questioner that he was not worried about his age and ended the exchange in his quintessential straight talk tongue in cheek style: "Thanks for the question, you little jerk ... you're drafted."

You kids get out of my yard...

"Unauthoritarians and Authoritarians: Worlds of Difference
By now you must be developing a feel for what high RWAs think and do, and
also an impression of low RWAs.23 Do you think you know each group well enough
to predict what they'd do if they ran the world? One night in October, 1994 I let a
group of low RWA university students determine the future of the planet (you didn't
know humble researchers could do this, did you!). Then the next night I gave high
RWAs their kick at the can.
The setting involved a rather sophisticated simulation of the earth's future
called the Global Change Game, which is played on a big map of the world by 50-70
participants who have been split into various regions such as North America, Africa,
India and China. The players are divided up according to current populations, so a lot
more students hunker down in India than in North America. The game was designed
to raise environmental awareness, 24 and before the exercise begins players study up
on their region's resources, prospects, and environmental issues.
Then the facilitators who service the simulation call for some member, any
member of each region, to assume the role of team leader by simply standing up. Once
the "Elites"in the world have risen to the task they are taken aside and given control
of their region's bank account. They can use this to buy factories, hospitals, armies,
and so on from the game bank, and they can travel the world making deals with other
Elites. They also discover they can discretely put some of their region's wealth into
their own pockets, to vie for a prize to be given out at the end of the simulation to the
World's Richest Person. Then the game begins, and the world goes wherever the
players take it for the next forty years which, because time flies in a simulation, takes
about two and a half hours."

'How many pointless cut and pastes can an ignorant coward make and be ignored before he leaves the site? '

that's what we all ask you every day, zouk.

My conclusion? You authoritarians want to be normal, meaning you want the culture to be wrapped around you. But you are unwilling to change with the rest of us. You want to be "normal" but are unwilling to take stands for what "normal" people do.

It's like wanting to be a pilot but being scared of flying. What? Freedom of the individual. That is america. Not freedom of you money. Freedom for you. I know gop. YOu just want to be normal. I know. It's so hard. Only those "like" you understand how hard it really is. "when your strange"

Stop the charade gop. Join humanity. Join the rest of the world. Stop the sabotage. Stop, divide and conquer. Stop the lie spin and discredit

"Which explains another peculiar finding. If I tell a group of former subjects
most of what I've told you in this chapter--which I think raise some questions about
how "Blessed are the authoritarians"--and then ask the sample what they personally
would like their own RWA scale score to be, what do you think happens? The low
RWAs say they'd like to be low RWAs. So do the middles. But the highs usually say
they want to be middles, not lows. I thought this happened because highs often dislike
the people who would score low on the RWA scale, and that may be part of the
explanation.. But I also discovered that if you ask subjects to rank the importance of
various values in life, authoritarian followers place "being normal" substantially
higher than most people do. It's almost as though they want to disappear as
individuals into the vast vat of Ordinaries.
Caution No. 3. Once again, however, I should temper our natural tendency to
overgeneralize. High RWAs would like to be rich as much as the next person would,
they'd like to be smarter than average, and so on. It's "good" to be different in some
ways, it seems. And I found they would not change their opinions about abortion an
inch by showing them how different they were from most others. They are quite
capable of adhering to the beliefs emphasized by their in-groups when these conflict
with what is held by society as a whole. Nevertheless, they do get tugged by what they
think everybody else is saying and doing. For example, their attitudes toward
homosexuals have become markedly more positive recently, just as the rest of
society's attitudes have changed. And thirty years ago the solid majority of high RWA
students in my samples said premarital sexual intercourse was flat-out immoral. Now
most say it is moral if the couple plans to get married."

Big oaf. His strategy is at once mysterious and cowardly. Why doesn't he act like the "man" he is trying to portray (he's an actor), and get into the fracas with the rest of them? Is he being coy and coquettish? Is he sly and cunning? No he's just a big blowhard oaf that thinks he's got the cat in the bag. I don't think he does.