The Prissy Patriot: Wanted: A Few Good People

Well, well Dearest Readers. Can you imagine things getting much worse for the GOP?

Remember how they would squint their eyes at you like Daddy Duyba and hiss through clenched teeth, "llllliberallll?" It's difficult not to, Prissy knows. But we must attempt to overlook that as we repair the damage to the liberties of our country, fixing for now with some new leadership in congress.

Wouldn't you rather be called a liberal, than to hear all the variations for GOP (Gross Old Perverts, Gay Only Party, etc.) Those awful 'Chester the molestor' stories all up and down the Hill...

So Prissy will go easy on the few good ones left in that party-whoever they may be.

The media appears to be cramming about five years worth of news into the last 48 hour period. The short version in the NY Times, US News & WR, WaPo, as per Bob Woodward.

Should Prissy end up in DC, oh the stories she will tell. Only she would never treat so casually the lives of her fellow citizens like some media has done. They betrayed the nation's deepest trust.

We turn to them to make sense of what our government was is doing. We depended on them to tell us the truth so we could direct our elected leaders to do the right thing, to the benefit of most people. And now that First Amendment rights have been nearly forsaken, they decide to tell.

Hot Links

Here goes another large crack in the GOP ice...Sierra Times No Arabs on Flight 77: Part II -The Passengers

A word from the Editor & Chief:
The Gentlemen who conducted the research and original report on Flight 77 is a Naval line officer and a psychiatrist in private practice in New Orleans, a Christian and homeschool dad (his words). This article went under heavy review and editing by the Sierra Times staff before publishing to provide as much documented events possible from other news reports and web sites..
As part I of "No Arabs of Flight 77" received wide review, we suspect Part II may do likewise. In these two articles, we try not to jump to conclusions, nor point the finger in any direction for the sake of our own integrity. Only to present evidence from issues that raised questions shortly after 09.11.01.
As the Sierra Times has done in the past, we welcome any government official of authority to give us their side of this story. In the form of a press release, we would print in full. A full accounting from the government, and American Airlines could clear this matter. Dr. Olmsted nor the Sierra Times has yet to obtain that proof.
This is a very serious matter in very serious times. The Sierra Times believes that as we Americans now receive daily reports about our loved ones making 'the ultimate sacrifice' in the middle east and elsewhere, we also have a right to know why.
The Sierra Times has not changed its course. We are Americans. We have always asked for a full accounting of what happened on September 11, 2001 and those responsible and all that support them brought to swift and mighty justice...
...who ever they are.
J.J. Johnson - Sierra Times.com

Welcome back to the fold, brother. Prissy told you it would be 911, which brings them down.

Now, let's demand justice together.

Free market press (Do) PUTS FORECAST OCT. SURPRISE? like they did in Sept 2001?

A faithful reader and commentator, "A. Magnus" writes the following email, posted to FMNN General Feedback:
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Even the Market Vectors Gold Miners has significant puts for October 6th:

Democratic Underground Abramoff Knew US Would Invade Iraq in March, 2002

From: Jack Abramoff To: 'octagon1' Monday, March 18, 2002 8:31 AM Subject: RE: Sunday
I was sitting yesterday with Karl Rove, Bush's top advisor, at the NCAA basketball game, discussing Israel when this email came in. I showed it to him. It seems that the President was very sad to have to come out negatively regarding Israel, but that they needed to mollify the Arabs for the upcoming war on Iraq. That did not seem to work anyway. Bush seems to love Sharon and Israel, and thinks Arabfat , is nothing but a liar. I thought I'd pass that on.

St Louis News Shimkus approached Foley about early e-mails

Shimkus added: "I think based on the information I had, what I did was fine. If I regret something maybe I should have had Dale (Kildee, a Democratic board member and congressmen from Michigan) with me because now it’s going to be a political football.
In the midst of the continuing swirl of the scandal last night, Shimkus and another board member visited the pages and apologized to them. Just a few days earlier, Shimkus had "read them the riot act" about behaving properly while in the program. On Friday, he told them, "I’m embarrassed I’m ashamed. This lecture I gave you I should give to my colleagues."
He urged them to contact him or another adult supervisor if they ever felt uncomfortable or were concerned about the behavior of House members, staff, or others. Shimkkus said he’s not sure what steps, if any, the board could take to prevent this kind of incident again.
"Our responsibility is to make sure the kids are as safe in D.C. as they are at home. And you know what? They are," he said. "These kids are incredibly watched after and monitored, as well as any kids can be monitored."

Sure sounds like some representatives are monitoring pages by Instant Messenger off the job...or looking the other way when they saw it happen.

NY News Daily Blogs Reynolds Knew, But Gave?

Reynolds's personal PAC, TOMPAC, wrote Foley a check for $5,000 on May 10, 2006. (You can see the filing here.)
According to the AP, Reynolds was told of the allegations against Foley "sometime this spring."
I put in a request to NRCC spokesman Carl Forti for a more precise date.
UPDATE: Also: On July 27, 2006, the NRCC, which Reynolds chairs, accepted an unusually large contribution of $100,000 from Foley. Hard to imagine something of that size just slipping past the chairman.

WaPo FBI Worries About al-Qaida Ties to Mob

The mob's potential interest in helping a terrorist has nothing to do with ideology or sympathy but with greed, said Matt Heron, head of New York FBI's organized crime unit.
"They will deal with anybody, if they can make a buck," Heron said. "They will sell to a terrorist just as easily as they would sell to an order of Franciscan monks. It's a business relationship to them."
Police cordoned off the Georgian Embassy in Moscow and arrested a group of protesters. (Mikhail Metzel -- Associated Press)
In Today's A Section"If the mob has explosives and a terrorist wants them and they have the money, they could become instant friends," he said.
Pat D'Amuro, a retired senior FBI official and now chief executive of Giuliani Security, said a Mafia boss once acknowledged that the mob would help terrorists.

Criminals AKA "terrorists" deal with anybody to make a buck? Ya don't say.

CNN Under-fire Rumsfeld says he won't resign

Asked by reporters if he had recently considered resigning, Rumsfeld said, No."
President Bush retains the "fullest confidence" in Rumsfeld, a top White House official said Sunday.
"The president has all the confidence in Secretary Rumsfeld, believes he's the right man to do the job, as he is doing," White House Counselor Dan Bartlett told CNN.
In the new book "State of Denial," Washington Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward writes that former White House chief of staff Andrew Card twice sought to persuade Bush to fire Rumsfeld.

Reuters Rifts emerge in Iraq govt after "bomb plot" foiled

"I tell him 'Your days are numbered'," Rubaie said, adding that security forces were closing in. "We are very close." A man resembling Masri was seen unrolling wire inside a car.
Khalilzad said al Qaeda had diminished in importance: "The importance of the sectarian violence has increased. While the insurgency ... the al Qaida terrorists are weakened."
However, with President George W. Bush's Republicans under pressure in congressional elections next month, he warned against a hasty withdrawal of the 140,000 U.S. troops.
Just west of Baghdad, in the Sunni stronghold of Falluja, a car bomb killed four people in a vegetable market. In the same region, two U.S. soldiers were shot dead on Saturday.

Lycos News FBI Investigating Foley E-Mail to Teens

FBI spokesman Richard Kolko said the FBI is "conducting an assessment to see if there's been a violation of federal law." He had no further comment.
House Speaker Dennis Hastert requested Sunday that the Justice Department conduct an investigation into Foley's electronic messages to teenage boys - a lurid scandal that has put House Republicans in political peril.
"As Speaker of the House, I hereby request that the Department of Justice conduct an investigation of Mr. Foley's conduct with current and former House pages to determine to what extent any of his actions violated federal law," Hastert, R-Ill., wrote in a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
The White House and Democratic leaders in Congress also called Sunday for a criminal probe. White House counselor Dan Bartlett called the allegations against Foley shocking, but said President Bush hadn't learned of Foley's inappropriate e-mails to a 16-year-old boy and instant messages to other boys before the news broke last week.

CNET News HP, red-faced but still selling

If HP undergoes the same sort of metamorphosis and becomes shorthand for illicit snooping, you might be telling your friends that a stalking ex-boyfriend is "so HP" or that your office mate, who snoops through the stuff on your desk and listens a little too closely to your calls, has "gone HP."
But the prospect of children hurtling the epithet "HPer at parents who monitor their Web surfing is just one of the minor worries for HP, which, as the world's largest technology company, has its brand name on millions of computers, printers, ink cartridges and corporate data servers. Revelations that the company's detectives and lawyers planned and supervised an extensive investigation of some of its directors, journalists who covered the company, a few employees and others have blemished its reputation.
The question is whether the scandal will more seriously damage one of the most storied names in corporate America. Mark Hurd, the chairman and chief executive, is the person shouldering the responsibility for managing the scandal's fallout and, for the time being, it appears that he has guided HP through the crisis with the same skill he has been using to turn around this once-stumbling technology giant.

HP, its a good thing Prissy already bought an HP. Does my printer spy on me too?

TruthOut Campaign Cash Mirrors a High Court's Rulings

But there is an exception to this strict rule: campaign contributions. Very few judges in the states that elect the members of their highest court view contributions as a reason for disqualification when those contributors appear before them.
Many judges said contributions were so common that recusal would wreak havoc on the system. The standard in the Ohio Supreme Court, its chief justice, Thomas J. Moyer, said, is to recuse only if "sitting on the case is going to be perceived as just totally unfair."
Duane J. Adams, a plaintiff in one of the class-action suits heard by Justice O'Donnell, concerning defective cars, said he questioned the impartiality of the justices who ruled against him. Mr. Adams had sued DaimlerChrysler under the state's lemon law, and he grew angry when told that the company's political action committee had given money to justices in the majority.
"At the very least, it's a conflict of interest," Mr. Adams said. "These gentlemen, they should be prosecuted for what I consider is taking a bribe." He and the other plaintiffs did not contribute, but their lawyers gave to the campaigns of five of the justices.

Time Magazine The G.O.P.'s Secret Weapon You think the Republicans are sure to lose big in November? They aren't. Here's why things don't look so bad to them

The polls keep suggesting that Republicans could be in for a historic drubbing. And their usual advantage--competence on national security--is constantly being challenged by new revelations about bungling in Iraq. But top Republican officials maintain an eerie, Zen-like calm. They insist that the prospects for their congressional candidates in November's midterms have never been as bad as advertised and are getting better by the day. Those are party operatives and political savants whose job it is to anticipate trouble. But much of the time they seem so placid, you wonder whether they know something.
They do. What they know is that just six days after George W. Bush won re-election in 2004, his political machine launched a sophisticated, expensive and largely unnoticed campaign aimed at maintaining G.O.P. majorities in the House and Senate. If that campaign succeeds, it would defy history and political gravity, both of which ordain that midterm elections are bad news for a lame-duck President's party, especially when the lame duck has low approval ratings. As always, a key part of the campaign involves money--the national Republican Party is dumping at least three times as much into key states as its Democratic counterpart is--but money is only the start. "Panic results when you're surprised," says Republican National Committee (R.N.C.) chairman Ken Mehlman. "We've been preparing for the toughest election in at least a decade."
Thanks to aggressive redistricting in the 1990s and early 2000s, fewer than three dozen House seats are seriously in contention this election cycle, compared with more than 100 in 1994, the year Republicans swept to power with a 54-seat pickup in the House. Then there's what political pros call the ground game. For most of the 20th century, turning out voters on Election Day was the Democrats' strength. They had labor unions to supply workers for campaigns, make sure their voters had time off from their jobs to go to the polls and provide rides to get them there.

Ah yes, that was before the Foley incident, Bob's new book...there are some things even dirty money won't buy-democracy, for instance.

Gulf View , the one in the Middle East editorial Democracy's foot soldiers in Iraq stumble by Fawaz Turki in Washington, D.C.

On the eve of war, as a case in point highlighted in the Frontline documentary The Dark Side, released last June, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld appointed loyalists in key government agencies created separate "intel fiefdoms" in the Pentagon to bypass the CIA, leaked selective information to the media and advanced the now discredited Ahmad Chalabi and others from the Iraqi National Congress (INC) as reliable sources.
These sources included the notorious "Curveball", a man later shown to have been both a liar and mentally unstable, but whose tall tales about "mobile biological labs on trucks" improbably found their way into Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech at the UN Security Council in late January 2003.
There was, in addition to that, the assertion that not only did Saddam Hussain possess those infamous stockpiles of deadly weapons, but that he was buying large quantities of "enriched uranium from Niger", an assertion that, equally improbably, found its way into Bush's State of the Union address.
It was all humbug. What the US has wrought in Iraq was not just unwarranted, it was unspeakable and unpardonable.

WaPo Federal Courthouse Emptied While Building Is Searched

Defense attorneys and prosecutors in the CIA leak case were gathering for a key pretrial hearing when the building was evacuated about 9:40 a.m., pushing Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the lead prosecutor, and the defendant, Vice President Cheney'.

Alrighty, just so happens to be the day Fitz is there, just like the "bomb scare" under the building where he was also in meeting with a Grand Jury in Chicago. This would appear to be a pattern and lest this be attempted again, a fair warning. Neorepublicans, you don't want this pack of Junkyard Justice bloggers on your trail...