I guess the next time Junior inveighs against 'frivolous' lawsuits, we're going to have to ask him which ones he's talking about: the Democratic kind where people have been hurt? or the Republican kind where profits have been hurt?

On top of the, shall we say, original, argument in the Custer Battles case (see previous post), we can now add a $$$millionaire$$$ developer of luxury condos who's suing the Forest Service under the RICO statute. That's right, kids, he's accusing the US Forest Service of racketeering because they stopped one of his projects before it could decimate a bald eagle habitat. It's as if The Onion has been feeding the Republicans ideas and they don't get the joke.

San Diego businessman Irving Okovita, who filed the suit, alleges that the Eliasons, Zimmerman and Sandy Steers, a local environmental activist, engaged in a criminal conspiracy to block the Marina Point development, a luxury condominium project Okovita wants to develop with an Arizona company in this hamlet on the north shore of Big Bear Lake.

Okovita sued under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, a statute originally passed in 1970 to strengthen the government's arsenal against mobsters and drug lords. As time has passed, the law has been used against a variety of individuals and groups. Legal experts, however, said they believed this was the first time the law had been targeted at Forest Service employees.

The three Forest Service employees and Steers said the charges against them are patently false. The government workers maintain that they were acting in their official capacity as Forest Service employees and have done nothing wrong. Steers said Okovita's suit was brought partly "to intimidate other activists from speaking out. That won't work," she said.

Oh yes it will, you wait and see. In a BushAmerica ruled by fear inside and out, intimidation works just fine. Especially since the US govt isn't a party to the suit--the defendants have had to hire private counsel at their own expense because the Justice Dept won't defend them.

But more than a month after Okovita filed his suit, the U.S. Department of Justice, which routinely represents federal employees accused of wrongdoing, has not moved to defend the three Forest Service employees, even though an attorney from the Forest Service's parent agency, the Department of Agriculture, recommended to Justice that it provide lawyers for the employees, according to sources close to the case.

Now whose decision do you suppose that was?

This kind of hyperbole has been swimming along just under the surface of the hysterical right's characterization of the EPA as 'jackbooted Nazi thugs' and 'stormtroopers' for twenty years. Every time a Republican businessman's plans for quick profits at the public's expense gets stymied by watchdogs doing their job, the GOP starts screaming about how environmentalists are ruining the country by protecting us from them. Here's the Republican Rule:

Nothing living must ever be allowed to stand in the way of the accumulation of dead capital.

Nature is a resource to be exploited, and any animal, bird, vegetable, or human that gets in the way should be run down like a rabbit. No exceptions. Now they're trying to bring this 'legal theory' into the courts.

Okovita's suit accuses both Eliasons of providing false information to government agencies in an effort to halt the development and to help the Forest Service acquire the land cheaply. Moreover, Okovita alleges that by killing the project, the Eliasons sought to increase the value of their nearby residence.

The suit further contends that the Eliasons illegally used their government computers to communicate with opponents of the project, thereby engaging in mail and wire fraud.

Zimmerman, the forest supervisor, "knowingly agreed to facilitate this scheme," the suit said.

Okovita's attorney, S. Wayne Rosenbaum of San Diego, said his client had lost millions of dollars because of delays in the project, which would include 132 condominiums, a 175-slip marina and tennis courts.

The Marina Point development would be on 12.5 acres on Grout Bay on the north shore of Big Bear Lake. Okovita bought the land, once the site of a trailer camp, in 1981.

The plans call for 338 trees to be cut down. For years, the area has been known locally as "Cluster Pines" because of the dense stands of trees. Bald eagles spend winters in the area, perching in pine trees and swooping down to the lake to feed on fish.

Steers' attorney, Jim Wheaton, of the First Amendment Project in Oakland, called the RICO case "a classic SLAPP [Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation] suit. It has been filed to retaliate against people who had the good sense and strength to stand up for what they believe and to punish them for taking advantage of their constitutional rights."

This is practically the definition of a "frivolous lawsuit': one where the law is stretched past the breaking point--waaaay past it--in an attempt to construct some sort of legal rationale, no matter how loopy, to further the cause of the plaintiff. Worse, it's anti-public interest as well as silly. It should be--and probably will be--thrown out of court, but in the meantime the defendants will have to put out thousands of $$ to defend themselves because the Bushies want to see somebody besides corporations and rich developers suffer from being sued. And Bush is willing to help--thus, no DoJ lawyers for them. The Grand Old Oligarchs' Party is on the attack, and we're the targets.

Altogether now: (singing) Here we go loopy GOOP to lie....

Custer Battles, the US security company that is intimately involved with the radical Republican policy of privatizing the military, is in court. It seems that, in the finest tradition of Republican business practices, they've been stealing money. $$$Millions$$$, in fact. (Republicans never bother with the kinds of penny-ante theft that they hound Democrats for perpetrating--as when Dan Rostenkowski was forced from office with an accusation that he had used a few thousand $$ in stamps inappropriately--when they steal, there are a LOT of zeros in the numbers, and they steal all the time.)

By itself, I suppose, this wouldn't be news: 'Republicans defraud govt of $$millions$$' is one of those 'Dog bites man' stories that hardly merits a moment's attention by the American press unless they're offering excuses for why it isn't really theft or it is but it's OK because the Republicans are doing it, not those nasty Dems. But in this case there's a novel twist on the usual story: Custer's lawyers are arguing that American courts have no jurisdiction because the money administered by the CPA--US money appropriated from and by the Bush Admin, tax money, yours and mine--is actually money that belongs to the Iraqis. Ain't that a kick?

John Boese, an attorney for the security firm, Custer Battles, asked a judge to dismiss the case as "fatally defective."

Boese argued that the act did not apply to his clients because the CPA, not the U.S. government, was the alleged victim.

"The funds that were used were Iraqi funds, not U.S. funds," said Boese, adding later, "If there was any false claims here, the entity that was cheated was the Coalition Provisional Authority."

Custer Battles has denied any fraud, attributing the allegations to disgruntled former employees who have since emerged as competitors to the firm.

Those employees are now suing Custer Battles under the False Claims Act, which allows citizens to sue U.S. contractors on behalf of the federal government to seek damages for fraud.

If successful, the citizens get a share of the money that the contractor is forced to pay back to the U.S. government. In effect, the act creates a potential army of informants among contractor employees with the incentive to report fraud.

In 2003, the act led to $2.1 billion in fraud recovery — with $319 million going to the whistle-blowers, according to Department of Justice statistics.

Custer Battles was one of the first U.S. contractors on the ground in the chaotic days after the fall of President Saddam Hussein last year.

The company's two founders, Scott Custer and Mike Battles, are former special operations forces soldiers who opened for business with almost no money and little experience.

Nonetheless, the company won at least four contracts in Iraq worth millions of dollars, including a deal to provide security at Baghdad's international airport and another to help Iraqis swap their old currency for new dinars minted by the CPA.

Those contracts came under scrutiny after several former employees stepped forward and accused Custer Battles of creating a series of shell companies that were used to bilk the CPA out of millions of dollars.

Company officials are accused of submitting false invoices and billing for work done by other firms.

This year, the Defense Department suspended Custer Battles' eligibility for future contracts with the U.S. government, believed to be the first time a company doing business in Iraq had faced such a judgment.

What, is that all? They're in court over a little thing like that while Halliburton--which has played exactly the same game only with $$$BILLIONS$$$ instead of $millions$--is signing new contracts? Don't hardly seem fair, does it?

Oh, excuse me. I forgot we were talking about Republicans.

It's an...interesting...defense, you've got to admit. It's based on the notion that because about a quarter of the $80Bil the CPA disbursed was money from the sale of Iraqi oil and from assets 'liberated' from the Hussein regime, the theft should be prosecuted in an Iraqi court. Uh-huh. Now that's one of those legal theories that's either genius or pure desperation. It is, after all, a favorite tactic of corporations caught with their hand in the till to claim that the court trying them doesn't have the jurisdiction or the authority. It doesn't usually work but when you've got nothing else....

It should be fascinating to watch this play out. Basically, if Custer's argument is accepted by the court, they get to keep the $50Mil$ they stole, no harm/no foul.

What a country we live in now. Canada, anyone?

The thing you have to remember as they trumpet the 'victory' of Fallujah (soon to be a film starring Harrison Ford) is that all the people in the Bush Admin who were wrong about everything are still there and everybody who was right is leaving or has already left. Everyone who fucked up is being given a promotion and/or a medal and everyone who didn't is being fired. Bob Herbert characterizes what's happening this way:

The White House seems to have slipped the bonds of simple denial and escaped into the disturbing realm of utter delusion.

Well, yes, but he's missing the point.

In the Bush Cult, competence is less important--hardly important at all, really--than loyalty, blind obedience, and stroking Dear Leader's ego. The medals were given for those reasons, not for success. Obviously. And the lesson has not been lost on the legions of BA sychophants and neocon fantasists. Even as we speak, the same folks who brought you the Iraq debacle are salivating over their plans to invade Damascus and/or Teheran. As Jack Paar used to say, 'I kid you not.' The Echo Chamber is already warming up.

WASHINGTON - Just when it appeared that Syria was complying in earnest with US demands to secure its border with Iraq, and even making unprecedented peace overtures to Israel, key neo-conservative opinion shapers are calling on President George W Bush to take stronger measures against Damascus, possibly including military action.

The media campaign was launched last week when three analysts associated with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a neo-conservative group that generally backs positions of Israel's right-wing Likud Party, published an article in the Washington Times titled "Syria's murderous role: Assad aides [sic] Iraq's terrorist insurgency".

Then William Kristol, the influential chairman of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and editor of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard, devoted his lead editorial, "Getting serious about Syria", to the same subject, concluding that, despite the stresses on the US military in Iraq, "real options exist" for dealing with Damascu".

"We could bomb Syrian military facilities; we could go across the border in force to stop infiltration; we could occupy the town of Abu Kamal in eastern Syria, a few miles from the border, which seems to be the planning and organizing center for Syrian activities in Iraq; we could covertly help or overtly support the Syrian opposition ... "

On Wednesday the Wall Street Journal followed up in its lead editorial - always a reliable indicator of neo-con opinion on the Middle East - charging, "Syria is providing material support to terrorist groups killing American soldiers in Iraq while openly calling on Iraqis to join the 'resistance'."

The editorial, "Serious About Syria?" accused the Bush administration of responding to these provocations with "mixed political signals and weak gestures", and urged it to at least threaten military action, much as Turkey "mobilized for war against Syria" in 1998 over Damascus' support for Kurdish rebels.

Within hours, President George W Bush himself was talking tough on Damascus. Asked during a White House photo-op with visiting Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi about accusations by Iraq's defense minister of alleged Syrian and Iranian support for the Sunni insurgency, the president warned the two countries that "meddling in the internal affairs of Iraq is not in their interest".

Don't you love the way Bush takes his cue like a champ from Rupert Murdoch? Billy Kristol writes it in the Standard and a few hous later, out of the mouth of the Emperor it comes, dripping with the same kind of threats we heard before he started the Second Gulf War. One would be entitled to ask who was running this show if one didn't already know.

This is nothing new, of course. Rummy let it slip during an early press conference in March '01 that invasions of Iraq, Iran, Syria, North Korea and the Phillippines were in the neocon Pipeline of Dreams. Right after the invasion of Iraq, during the short span of time the neocons' childish belief in an easy victory still looked possible, they made the same noises again.

[I]n March 2003...Washington was seen as an irresistible force in the region, and neo-conservatives and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld appeared to be spoiling for a fight with Syria, which, they charged, was harboring senior members of the formerly ruling Ba'ath Party and Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction.

But, as the insurgency grew more potent in the fall of 2003, Bush's chief political aide, Karl Rove, ordered the hawks to stand down, lest a new military adventure cost the president his re-election. Now that Bush has won a second term, they need not worry about the possible political consequences.

So they're off and running. The one thing you can say about these guys is that total failures never cause them a single second thought, and no matter how many people have died because they were wrong, they're always ready to sacrifice more lives on the altar of their egos. This is either callous arrogance or blazing stoopidity, take your pick. Not that it matters much which it is; the results are the same.

In any case, the important thing to remember is that NOTHING HAS CHANGED--not the players, not the targets, not the beliefs that have proved so disastrously wrong-headed. The Neocon Wonder Boys are still lovingly in thrall to Laurie Mylroie's dazzlingly simple explanation of terrorism as a state-sponsored, state-funded phenomenon. If it wasn't Saddam who was doing the sponsoring, then it must be another state. Like Syria.

In contrast to the charges that were made against Damascus 16 months ago, the new campaign appears to be based primarily on alleged statements by unidentified US military and intelligence officials cited in the Washington Times op-ed and a subsequent Washington Post news article, to the effect that the Sunni insurgency in Iraq is being organized, funded and even managed by, as the Post put it, "a handful of Iraqi Ba'athists operating in Syria".

One supposedly critical piece of evidence much cited by the hawks was the reported discovery of a global positioning signal receiver in a bomb factory in the Iraqi insurgents' stronghold of Fallujah, which "contained waypoints originating in western Syria".

Uh-huh. Haven't we heard all this before? The 'meeting' in Prague between representaves of AQ and Saddam that 'proved' they were in cahoots--until Czech Intelligence demonstrated that the supposed AQ rep was in America at the time the meeting was taking place. The WMD's that were spirited out of Iraq by Saddam in the dead of night by trucks invisible to either radar, satellites, or any other terrestrial, non-occult mechanism. Except they weren't because, as we now know, they never existed. The photos of trailers that 'proved' Saddam had a program to produce chemical weapons, only he didn't and they turned out to be just...trailers. The balsa wood planes that 'proved' Saddam planned to bomb American cities, except that they didn't because their range was about a hundred miles and they would have dumped into the Mediterranean long before they reached NYC.

This game is getting awfully old, Billy K. Haven't you learned anything yet? Does the word 'skepticism' mean anything to you? Given that the same people have been telling you things that turned out not to be true for three solid years, maybe it's time you cracked a dictionary and looked it up. It won't be as much fun as playing war monger, but it may help you stop making a fool of yourself swallowing their fairy tales like a kid scarfs Halloween candy.

What you have to remember as you digest the inescapable and almost unfathomable fact that one disaster isn't enough for Rocco's Gang (their motto is: 'Enough is NEVER enough.') and they're spoiling for another is that NOTHING HAS CHANGED, not their minds or their greed or their arrogance or their denial of reality. Iraq Is A Victory. 'Please, sir, may I have another?' 'Certainly, son. Would you like fries with that?'

Get used to it. Our future is more of the same, and Rocco's Gang has the next phase all planned out. Are we excited yet?

Oh dear.

it's understandable that a bunch of lame, wimpy liberals with no stomach for the tough decisions--like going to war to get control of Iraq's oil fields protect the US from possible attack by balsa-wood planes save the Iraqi people from a dictator--would object to a toady hack patriot like Albert Gonzales taking over at Justice. We expected that. Those whiny liberals would object if we exhumed the body of Brandeis so Dear Leader could appoint a flaming left-wing fruitcake, just because Liberals Hate Bush and anything he does is automatically Stoopid as far as they're concerned. Their ilk can be safely ignored, so we do. But now a bunch of military lawyers are upset about it, saying unpatriotic stuff like that Albert approves of torture, as if that's a bad thing.

Rear Adm. John D. Hutson, who served as the Navy's judge advocate general from 1997 to 2000 before he retired, said that while Mr. Gonzales might be a lawyer of some stature, "I think the role that he played in the one thing that I am familiar with is tremendously shortsighted."

Mr. Gonzales, as White House counsel, oversaw the drafting of several confidential legal memorandums that critics said sanctioned the torture of terrorism suspects in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and opened the door to abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

A memorandum prepared under Mr. Gonzales's supervision by a legal task force concluded that Mr. Bush was not bound either by an international treaty prohibiting torture or by a federal antitorture law because he had the authority as commander in chief to approve any technique needed to protect the nation.

The memorandum also said that executive branch officials, including those in the military, could be immune from domestic and international prohibitions against torture for a variety of reasons, including a belief by interrogators that they were acting on orders from superiors "except where the conduct goes so far as to be patently unlawful." Another memorandum said the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the conflict in Afghanistan.

Mr. Hutson, who is dean and president of the Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord, N.H., said that Mr. Gonzales "was not thinking about the impact of his behavior on U.S. troops in this war and others to come."

"He was not thinking about the United States' history in abiding by international law, especially in the wartime context," he said. "For that reason, some of us think he is a poor choice to be attorney general."

What's the matter with Hutson and those other guys, anyway? Are they Traitors to America? Don't they understand that the USAG's purpose is to justify legally any decision Dear Leader makes, no matter how illegal it is? That as a candidate Gonzales was chosen on the basis of his willingness to twist the Constitution into a pretzel or even discard it altogether when it gets in Dear Leader's way? Don't they understand that The Emperor is above the law? That he is the law?

Brig. Gen. James Cullen, retired from the Army, said on Wednesday that he believed that in supervising the memorandums, Mr. Gonzales had purposely ignored the advice of lawyers whose views did not accord with the conclusions he sought, which was that there was some legal justification for illegal behavior.

"He went forum-shopping," General Cullen said, saying Mr. Gonzales had ignored the advice of military lawyers adamantly opposed to some of the legal strategies adopted, including narrowly defining torture so as to make it difficult to prove it occurred. "When you create these kinds of policies that can eventually be used against your own soldiers, when we say 'only follow the Geneva Conventions as much as it suits us,' when we take steps that the common man would understand is torture, this undermines what we are supposed to be, and many of us find it appalling," he said.

General Cullen, a lawyer in New York City, said the group of former military lawyers who oppose the nomination hoped to decide soon what specific action to take.

Oh, they're former military lawyers. Well, that's different. They're probably leftovers from the Lost Years of Clinton and consequently can be attacked for being 'soft on terrorism'. Jeez, we were worried there for a second.

Gary Webb in Eugene, OR - 1999

Last Friday, Gary Webb blew his brains out. Who is Gary Webb? The reason investigative reporting is all but dead in America. Eight years ago Gary Webb, then a reporter for the San Jose Mercury-News, wrote a series of articles detailing the way the Reagan Administration was protecting drug traffikers as part of its support for the Contras, traffikers who were financing ex-Somoza thugs masquerading as 'Freedom Fighters' by selling drugs and guns to black and Hispanic street gangs in California. Almost everything Webb wrote has since been verified and confirmed, but writing it meant the destruction of his career.

He was vilified by the mainstream press, and his boss at the Mercury-News, no Ben Bradlee he, caved in to pressure and threw his own reporter to the sharks. It was an ugly episode in so-called American journalism, one of those eye-opening events in which one man turns over a rock he wasn't supposed to and finds all the poisonous snakes the powerful are trying to hide.

DeDurkheim at Rising Hegemon, who brings this to our attention, writes:

The major news media did not rally to Webb's defense, as they should have. Instead the media themselves played an active role in attacking and destroying Webb's career in the 1990s when he tried to break through the maze of cover-up of this horrible scandal. The bitter disgusting irony is that even when the CIA and the government admitted its institutional guilt in drug smuggling by the Nicaraguan contras, the nation's leading commentators, newspapers, and media continued an insistent attack on Webb. The issuing of denials or blaming low level CIA operatives took the place of serious consideration of Webb and his reporting.

Gary Webb was the reason I learned how far gone the American media was. For a while it looked like his series was going to finally put paid to the phony Reagan 'legacy' and lace the increasingly flaccid spine of US press with some new backbone. Then the reaction set in. Robert Parry, who broke the story for the AP 11 years before Webb's series, writes on Consortiumnews how the counterattack began with the Moonie Washington Times but was quickly taken up by the WaPo and the rest of the mainstream media.

When black leaders began demanding a full investigation of these charges, the Washington media joined the political Establishment in circling the wagons. It fell to Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s right-wing Washington Times to begin the counterattack against Webb’s series. The Washington Times turned to some former CIA officials, who participated in the contra war, to refute the drug charges.

But – in a pattern that would repeat itself on other issues in the following years – the Washington Post and other mainstream newspapers quickly lined up behind the conservative news media. On Oct. 4, 1996, the Washington Post published a front-page article knocking down Webb’s story.

The Post’s approach was twofold: first, it presented the contra-cocaine allegations as old news – “even CIA personnel testified to Congress they knew that those covert operations involved drug traffickers,” the Post reported – and second, the Post minimized the importance of the one contra smuggling channel that Webb had highlighted – that it had not “played a major role in the emergence of crack.” A Post side-bar story dismissed African-Americans as prone to “conspiracy fears.”

Soon, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times joined in the piling on of Gary Webb. The big newspapers made much of the CIA’s internal reviews in 1987 and 1988 that supposedly cleared the spy agency of a role in contra-cocaine smuggling.

But the CIA's decade-old cover-up began to crack on Oct. 24, 1996, when CIA Inspector General Hitz conceded before the Senate Intelligence Committee that the first CIA probe had lasted only 12 days, the second only three days. He promised a more thorough review.

It is, as Parry points out, a now familiar story. We've seen them follow exactly the same pattern in the lead-up to the iraq war, in the Saudi connection to 9/11, in the matter of Bush's desertion of his TANG responsibilities, and, indeed, in the way they stonewalled or dismissed or ignored Bush's whole history as a failed businessman constantly being bailed out by Poppy's friends and getting rich in the process. In these and dozens and dozens of similar stories, the mainstream press has been more than complicit in hiding the truth, they've actively tried to destroy the careers of any investigative reporter anywhere who challenged their chosen narrative.

But Parry, I think, is wrong about their motivation. They weren't trying to protect the CIA, they were trying to protect a) Grandpa Reagan's precious reputation, and b) the reputation of the whole conservative movement, which had been hip deep in Iran-Contra. Gary Webb was threatening to expose to the world the willingness of ultra-conservative wackos to turn crack and automatic weapons loose on American streets in order to support the extreme right-wing Somozan exiles' attempt to get 'their' country back from the people who had thrown them out.

Webb paid for that with his job, his marriage, and finally his life. It was a warning to any journalist who might be thinking about exposing the anti-democratic activities of conservatives, and the message was read loud and clear: 'Don't be a hero. Go along to get along. Depart from the accepted fairy tales and we'll destroy you.'

On May 11, 1997, when Mercury-News editor Jerry Ceppos caved in to the pressure and wrote an editorial distancing himself from both his reporter and the series, denying that Webb had any proof for his allegations--which wasn't true--investigative journalism in America died.

Now Gary, too, is gone.

(You can read Gary's own version of events in the transcript of a speech he gave in 1999.)

Republicans have stolen yet another election, this one for mayor of San Diego.

SAN DIEGO — The hotly disputed race for mayor here took a sharp turn Tuesday as a review of disputed ballots showed that Councilwoman Donna Frye would have beaten incumbent Mayor Dick Murphy if all votes had been counted.

Tuesday's review looked at ballots that had not been counted in the official tally. It was conducted at the request of The Times, four other news organizations and two pro-Frye voters.

The results threw the politics of the state's second-largest city into confusion more than a month after the Nov. 2 election. The disputed election comes at a high-stakes time for San Diego. Whoever is mayor will face a deep financial crisis and a federal investigation of city officials. Both stem from the city's failure to properly fund its employee pension plans.

As the candidates and their lawyers and advisors plotted their next moves, Republican and Democratic political consultants and activists said the ballot review had severely weakened Murphy's position.

Just a week ago, Murphy, a Republican, was sworn in after being certified as the winner with a margin of 2,108 votes over Frye, a Democrat who was a write-in candidate.

The ballot review Tuesday uncovered at least 4,854 additional, uncounted votes for Frye. That total will probably grow today as thousands more absentee ballots are surveyed. In all, 455,694 votes were cast.

"Dick Murphy is now the phony mayor," said Scott Barnett, former executive director of the San Diego County Taxpayers Assn. and a Republican. "He already had only about a third of the vote; now there's an incredible cloud over him."

What happened was real simple--no complicated butterfly ballots here. The Republican election commissioner simply used a legal technicality to throw out any ballot for the Democrat that wasn't perfect.

Frye entered the race only a month before the election, so she had to run as a write-in candidate. The ballot contained a line for her name to be written, but next to it was an empy oval. That oval was supposed to be filled in. In thousands of ballots, voters wrote Frye's name but neglected to fill in that stupid little oval. The Republican commissioner threw all of those ballots out despite the fact that writing the name clearly signified voter intent. We're not talking about the meaning of a hanging chad here--the voters wrote her name. Throwing those ballots out seems a pretty clear violation of the voting rights act that was passed after the 2000 election. But that isn't worrying The Dick.

"To me it's clear. I'm the legitimate mayor," he added. "The state Legislature passed the law that says you must fill in the oval …. That's the way it works in America. We are a society that follows the rule of law."

Yeah, well, we're all familiar with that argument. That's the one where if the letter of the law favors Republicans we're supposed to be strict and if it doesn't we're supposed to be 'flexible' and let it go. Bullshit.

Election law experts, however, say the law is far less clear. The question of whether to count the empty-oval ballots pits two principles of election law against each other: honoring the intent of voters versus requiring compliance with rules.

"The question is how much knowledge of the process can you require on the part of voters?" said Rick Hasen, an election law expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. "Are you going to disenfranchise people who didn't follow the rules?"

We know the answer to that one, too: if they vote Republican, No; if they vote Democratic, Yes. This is just another of the Republicans' sleazy tactics to maintain their obviously tentative hold on power no matter what. Let's face it: a Democratic challenger who entered the race only a month before the election with a write-in campaign beat the pants off a Publican incumbent with every advantage. That has to be scaring the Pubs--San Diego is one of the most conservative cities in California, almost as conservative as ultra-conservative Orange County. That a maverick Dem with no organization behind her mounting a write-in campaign for a mere month could whip their boy like mashed potatoes can't be a good sign.

Frye and her legal advisors haven't decided what to do about this yet but if they don't decide to challenge the outcome in court, they'll be letting everybody in the country down who still has hopes that the Pubs can be stopped from rigging the system, and Frye will be telling us that she's just another spineless Dem who deserves to lose.

From the absurd, moronic pandering of a Dan Balz to the legitimate investigative reporting of Douglas Jehl.

An internal CIA memo from Aug, '03 orders Company agents to stay away from 'Special Forces' (military intelligence) interrogations.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 13 - Concerns about harsh techniques used by Special Operations forces prompted the Central Intelligence Agency last year to bar its officers in Iraq from taking part in military interrogations where prisoners were subjected to duress, intelligence officials said.

A classified directive issued by the agency's headquarters on Aug. 8, 2003, to all its personnel in Iraq advised that "if the military employed any type of techniques beyond questions and answers, we should not participate and should not be present," according to an account provided by a senior intelligence official.

In telling C.I.A. personnel to keep away from interrogations where military personnel were using harsh techniques, the directive was more restrictive than was previously known. Officials first disclosed the agency's order last September, saying that it had barred C.I.A. officers from interviewing the military's prisoners unless military officials were present.

The new disclosure is the latest sign of longstanding unease in intelligence circles about the military's interrogation techniques in Iraq. Complaints by the Defense Intelligence Agency about the rough treatment of prisoners by the same Special Operations units were made public last week in a document disclosed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

MI is the entity that everybody involved in the abuses has been pointing their fingers at since the investigations began, from Gen Janet Karpinski to the poor dogfaces who are taking the rap for them in military court-marshals, yet NO MI personnel have been in the dock or under public scrutiny like the troops they ordered around.

I've said it before, I'll say it again: Lindy England--and the others on trial--did NOT invent the torture techniques used at Abu Ghraib. Those techniques were developed by the Israeli Army for use on Palestinian detainees and passed along to Army MI, probably at the School for the Americas where they've been training their interrogators for almost 40 years. The techniques were designed specifically to humiliate men of Arab descent and have been used by the Israelis for twenty years or so.

Torture is neither a new idea nor an innovative practice for MI interrogators. Since the mid-60's, MI interrogation specialists have been involved in training foreign police and intelligence services in all these techniques. It was Army MI, not CIA, who trained the torturers in Guatemala's Guardia Civil, Pinochet's Chilean Army, Somoza's Death Squads, and even the South African Special Police during apartheid after the Church Committee revelations forced the Company out of the business of torture in the mid-70's. Indeed, it may well have been the memory of that embarassment that caused the memo to be written--nobody in the CIA wants to go through that again when the pendulum shifts back to sanity, as it will eventually. MI only escaped the same scrutiny because the Church Committee inquiry was restricted to investigating the civilian intelligence agencies.

What is new is that MI is no longer just training the police of right-wing authoritarian states to apply torture but applying it themselves, thanks to directives from Donald Rumsfeld and Bush himself that OK the use of 'harsh questioning'.

Legal rulings by the Bush administration have granted the C.I.A. greater flexibility in conducting interrogations of suspected terrorists, including the use of harsh methods. The C.I.A. issued its directive on the military's prisoners in Iraq shortly after the agency's station in Baghdad complained in a July 16, 2003, cable about the use of noise, bright light and other techniques by Special Operations forces who were working in joint teams with C.I.A. personnel.

The agency also barred its employees last year from entering a secret interrogation facility in Baghdad used by Special Operations forces. The restrictive C.I.A. guidelines remain in effect, intelligence officials have said.

Army documents first obtained by The Denver Post show that an Iraqi prisoner was found dead in June 2003 at the classified interrogation facility used by Special Operations forces in Baghdad after being restrained in a chair for questioning and subjected to physical and psychological stress. An autopsy determined that the prisoner died of a "hard, fast blow" to the head, the newspaper reported last spring.

Whether that particular death caused by MI officers--or any of the others we now know about--contributed to the CIA memo, nobody is saying, but it would be reasonable to assume a connection: If MI's going to go that far, they must have said to themselves thinking of the debacle of the Church Committee, we don't want to be there when they do. 'Harsh questioning' of Al Qaeda members is one thing; using the same techniques on Iraqi civilians en masse, civilians who may be entirely innocent of either terrorist activity or knowledge of any, is something else.

The Aug. 8, 2003, cable from the C.I.A.'s headquarters noted that all prisoners in Iraq were the responsibility of the military, and that while the C.I.A. might have an interest in questioning them, it should recognize that "we do not own, control or have custody of them," one intelligence official said.

Abu Ghraib near Baghdad, the site of the worst known prisoner abuses in Iraq, is run by American military forces.

The cable said that the C.I.A. should not suggest, condone or concur in any interrogation techniques beyond questions and answers with prisoners in military custody in Iraq, the intelligence official said.

The cable might have-and should have--ordered Company personnel to report abuses they saw, but that's probably too much to ask.

Here's one you may have missed. The Bush White House has a Thinker.

I capitalize it because, believe it or not, that's his job. Peter Wehner is head of the grandly-named Office of Strategic Initiatives. A former assistant speechwriter, Wehner is now in charge of 'analyzing and explaining' the Bush presidency. It's a tough job but somebody, I guess, has to do it. Not surprisingly perhaps, the OSI was Karl Rove's idea, and once you know that, the quality of Wehner's 'thinking' won't surprise you. First the job description.

The office, tucked away on the fourth floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, conducts research on the presidency -- looking for historical patterns or analogies to guide the administration's strategic thinking. A current folder on Wehner's desk is labeled: "2d Term/Analysis." It is a compendium of how other presidents often went wrong in their second terms, history Bush hopes not to repeat.

But Wehner also takes Rove's words literally, peppering Rove and other White House officials with e-mails and memos analyzing current trends, highlighting issues that may be ripening or framing arguments to advance the president's policies. Recent works include an analysis of the 2004 election and a memo reflecting on British Prime Minister Tony Blair's comments about freedom, democracy and the Middle East.

Golly. Sounds serious, don't it? All that 'analyzing' important stuff like Tony Blair's fawning speech? But not to worry. There's nothing daunting about Wehner's analysis. Why, you could almost call it, well, common.

Wehner also examined why the 43rd president of the United States has become such a polarizing political figure, after having arrived in Washington with a promise to unite the country and change the tone in Washington. "My view, as I read history, is that almost all consequential figures -- political figures -- are polarizing figures," he said, because they are bold and tackle significant issues.

There you go, all explained. Bush polarizes America because he's a Great Man. Like, you know, other Great Men.

He ticks off other political figures he says were polarizing, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to Ronald Reagan to Margaret Thatcher. After 2000, Bush's opponents expected a milquetoast president, Wehner said, but instead they got someone who liked to swing for the fences.

Let the astounding comparison of Emperor Jr to Martin Luther King linger in your brainpan a little while--but not too long, lest the cognitive dissonance it sets up fry your medula oblangata, or whatever. Then ask yourself if it might be possible that the American people thought they were getting 'a milquetoast president' because Karl did everything in his power give us a false picture of Junior's radical, extremist views and beliefs. Yes? That was NOT, oddly enough, part of Wehner's in-depth 'analysis'. Go figure. But it can't be because he didn't think of it because Wehner is fully trained as a Thinker. He even went to school for it. By mail.

Wehner came to Washington in 1983 as an intern from the University of Washington and never left, lured into the world of ideas and think tanks. He eventually finished his degree by correspondence courses.

Well, I'm convinced. But if any of y'all still have doubts, why, this encomium from his ex-boss, speechwriter Michael Gerson, ought to set them to rest.

"Pete really believes in the power of ideas in American politics," Gerson said. "It's the reason he takes such care to make arguments. There are plenty of people at the White House who write talking points. There are very few who make sustained arguments. He doesn't overstate, and his arguments have a lot of integrity."
(emphasis added, needless to say)

In other words, Wehner is one of the few in the WH capable of stringing more than a few stock phrases. He actually constructs whole sentences. In the Bush WH, that practically makes him a pointy-headed intellectual, and he has high hopes of making his brilliance a regular part of the WH day.

Wehner said he hopes that one legacy of the OSI will be the inculcation of "intellectual seriousness" in the White House.

"I'm not sure you can leave that for another [administration], but this should be an office that engages ideas in a serious way, that approaches criticisms in an intellectually honest way," he said.

By now, you're probably hungering to know what kind of brilliant insights of 'intellectual seriousness' Wehner is going to bring to the table.

Yeah, that's what I thought. Dig:

Wehner was asked whether he finds it ironic or is infuriated that Bush is stereotyped, fairly or not, as a president who is not interested in ideas and is not intellectually curious. "I'm not," he said, "because in the end, the truth wills out."

'The truth wills out'? OK, so grammar ain't his strong suit. That much of a pointy-headed intellectual he ain't, but get the depth, the clarity, the sheer genius of such a penetrating insight. And Wehner is full of stuff like that.

Bush is changing the political and intellectual landscape, Wehner argued, ticking off the president's education policy that has asserted a strong federal role from a conservative perspective, as well as the concept of compassionate conservatism. Personal savings accounts for Social Security represent another break with conventional thinking.

On foreign policy, he cited Bush's controversial doctrine of preemption -- noting that, during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, Kennedy articulated a similar doctrine. Wehner said Bush's determination to spread democracy to the Middle East represents a break with decades of thinking about that region.

"You can't judge those things in real time," Wehner said. "You have to wait and let history make its judgment -- and reality take hold." He argued that Reagan was judged harshly during his presidency but since has been treated more favorably -- and he believes the same will hold for Bush. Wehner said: "I think he's on the right side of history and is on the right side of the important debates of our time, and he's comfortable in that."

Wow! What 'intellectual seriousness'! George W Bush is really John Fitzgerald Kennedy come back from the dead! Who knew?

OK OK, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that a lot of this sounds, well, ordinary, like any Rove-minion spouting automatic praise for the Emperor, what with comparing him to Martin and Jack and St Augustine and Alexander the Great and all. But you're missing the point. Wehner isn't just another of Karl's Legion of PR Hacks; he's a intellectual, a Thinker, and he carefully analyzed the situation in exhaustive detail, looking at all the relevant data, and he still reached the conclusion that The Emperor Is A Genius and A Great Man, and by gawd, that's good enough for me.

This 'article' was written by WaPo staff reporter Dan Balz, and just goes to show why the state of the American Press is what it is. Only a moron could so totally fail to notice how moronic everything Wehner said was. Or a coward. So which did you leave at home in order to write this propaganda, Dan? Your balls or your brain?

(Thanks to Noam Scheiber of &c.)

The parlous state of diplomacy in the Bush Admin is showing up in the discussions flying around about Iran's nuclear capability. Whether or not it's a threat remains an open question, but it's becoming clear that if you take the military option away from BushCo, they don't know what to do.

Pentagon war planners, reviewing available options, say there are no good options for Mr. Bush - or for Israel, which has expressed even greater alarm about a nuclear-armed Iran if negotiations fail.

Almost unanimously, these planners and Pentagon analysts say there are no effective military ways to wipe out a nuclear program that has been well hidden and broadly dispersed across the country, including in crowded cities. Confronted with intelligence evidence, Iran admitted to inspectors last year that it had hidden critical aspects of its civilian program for 18 years, and even today there are questions about whether all of its nuclear-related sites are known.

The Bush administration has talked about the possibility of going to the United Nations to seek sanctions against Iran if a recent accord with the Europeans falls apart, as a similar agreement did last year. But the Iranians themselves are aware of the whispers about military strikes, many of them fueled by Israeli officials who view the threat as much more urgent than the Europeans do.

Even so, such talk may amount to little more than bluffing in a high-stakes diplomatic game that the deputy secretary of state, Richard L. Armitage, recently described as "kind of a good-cop, bad-cop arrangement," with Washington playing the bad cop.

That the question of Iranian nukes is being handled by Defense rather than State is already a bad sign. It means that Bush, true to the form we've come to expect from him, doesn't have a clue how to handle a touchy situation without a military option to lean on. Bushie's neocon advisors don't believe in diplomacy. Or rather, the only 'diplomacy' they believe in happens when they've got a gun pointed at the head of the opposition and it's their way or the highway. Take the gun, and they're at a total loss.

[T]he military options range from the bad to the unimaginable.

None guarantee success, military planners say. Many risk causing not only casualties but a political crisis in the Middle East. The planners, many of them involved in the war against Iraq, argue vehemently that Iran presents a growing proliferation problem better approached through diplomatic channels than by airstrikes, Special Operations missions or an all-out invasion.

Apparently it's necessary in the BA to first convince the neocons that war is a Bad Idea before you can even talk about diplomatic initiatives. In other words, like everything else in topsy-turvy, Bizarro BushWorld, war is now the first resort and negotiation the last. It's as if the govt was being run by a bunch of the redneck yahoos whose first answer to any international problem is, 'Nuke the bastards.' You know, the kind of guys who sit around drinking beer and bragging about the deer they cut in half with an Uzi the week before the season opened, the guys who couldn't find the Earth on a globe.

The BA has been so focused on Iraq from the beginning of its first term that it has ignored the threat from Iran despite pleading from people like Sandy Berger that they take it seriously. The only plan they had--which Rummy let slip in a press conference in March, 2001, only days after Bush had taken (the right word, in his case, though 'stolen' might be more accurate) office--was the Perle/Libby/Wolfowitz fantasy of sequential invasions: first Iraq, then Iran, then Syria, after which they would mop up Libya and North Korea, ending with the crushing of the Muslim rebellion in the Phillippines. They envisioned all this activity as relatively quick and painless, what with the Soviets being out of the way. How could those junk countries hold out against US firepower wielded this time by a Republican extremist who saw the world exactly as they did: as the newest US acquisition?

Now that it hasn't worked out that way, they're stumped. They didn't have much of a plan to begin with, and no back-up plan at all. They don't believe in negotiation and they don't trust any negotiation they're not controlling. They're sort of p[laying around with the idea of telling the UN to put sanctions in place, but coming from the exact same people who excoriated Clinton for using sanctions instead of flexing military muscle and invading, it's going to sound awful weak and whiny. Not to mention hypocritical. Besides, they don't believe in sanctions, either.

These bimbos have only one arrow in their tiny quiver, and once they've used it, empty bluster and gin-soaked confusion are all they've got left.

PS. I hear they've inspired Jimmy Breslin to start work on a new book called The Gang That Couldn't Think Straight.

Hard on the heels of his last idiotic column, David Brooks would seem to be intent on lowering the pundit bar to the level of questions like 'Who's buried in Grant's tomb?' His latest effort takes on the thorny issue of SocSec reform by concluding that a) it's about the stock market (no shit, Sherlock) and b) that Democrats are hysterical anti-corporate whiners in a conspiracy to defraud the nation of its rightful place at Wall Street's table.

Harry Reid has begun his tenure as Senate minority leader by doing his best imitation of Huey Long: "They are trying to destroy Social Security by giving this money to the fat cats on Wall Street, and I think it's wrong!"

What you hear these days is not liberalism. It's conspiracyism. It's the belief that the Bushite corporate cabal is going to do to domestic programs what the Bushite neocon cabal did in the realm of foreign affairs. It's the belief in malevolent and shadowy forces that will grab everything for their own greedy ends. This is Michael Moore-ism applied to domestic affairs, and it will leave the Democrats only deeper in the hole.

I don't deny that many business and Wall Street types would like to capture the system for their own benefit.

Big of you, Dave, especially considering that you live in NY, the state where AG Eliot Spitzer has had to work 20 hrs a day just to contain the rampant theft by pigs eager to empty the trough now that the farmer's back is turned.

Republicans today place corporate interests ahead of consumer interests. When regulators, such as those in my office, try to call them on their cronyism, they portray our efforts as bureaucratic meddling in free markets. But we did not investigate Wall Street because we were troubled by large institutions making a lot of money; we took action to stop a blatant fraud that was ripping off small investors. We sought to right the wrong, reestablishing the level playing field that is a prerequisite to market competition and ensuring that every investor enjoys the same opportunity to profit that the insiders have.

Similarly, we did not ask the courts to stop predatory mortgage lending because we begrudge lenders an appropriate rate of return. We did so because what was happening to borrowers was illegal and wrong and needed to be stopped so that people could, in fact, have a true ownership stake in society. We didn't investigate mutual-fund companies because of a desire to increase government regulation. We did it to stop a scam that allowed a favored few insiders to benefit at the expense of all other investors.

The Bush administration, in the name of free markets, has allowed business to take advantage of the small investor, victimizing those who want to own a piece of the U.S. economy. The scandals involving Wall Street analysts, banking, and mutual funds all demonstrated the Republicans' failure to protect those Americans who want to play their part in the Ownership Society.

But don't let that sort of thing deter you, Dave. Really, the growing hatred of Wall Street on Main Street is totally out of whack because, as DaBrooks explains simply enough so even he can understand it, 'corruption is the price we pay for economic freedom, and the benefits of that freedom vastly outweigh the costs.'

I shit you not, people. He actually wrote that sentence. Hit the link and see for yourself if you don't believe me. Corruption? Thievery? Eh. NBFD. Get used to it. It's the price of doing business in a free society.

DaBrooks must be a graduate of the Donald Rumsfeld/Dick Cheney School of Ethics. What? They're looting the Baghdad Museum of priceless antiquities while our troops are stationed down the street protecting worthless banker-paper at the Oil Ministry? Tough. Shit happens. That's the price we pay for freedom. Our troops are rooting around in the garbage for armor to put on their vehicles? Too bad. Deal with it. It's the price we pay for freedom. Every time they fuck up or get caught stealing us blind, it's really all good because It's The Price We Pay For Freedom.

Dave Dave Dave. I know you get these directives from the RNC and you're a puppet and you have to say what they tell you to say, but do you have to pick the dumbest and least defensible talking points to support every time? Could you pretend, just once, that your readers are over 12? Or is that beyond you?

If Grover Norquist is a toad--and he is--DaBrooks is the wart on his ass.

Next Time: Can Dave sink any lower?