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Archive for May 2005
YABL
Posted by Clif on 05/31/05 at 8:27 am
Category: White House
There is no occasion too sacred or too solemn that George Bush won’t lie at it. During Bush’s speech at yesterday’s Memorial Day service at the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington Cemetary, Bush continued in his recent, persistent and false claim that the war in Iraq is part of the war on terror.
In response to this and other Bush lies on the war in Iraq, a number of progressive bloggers (including this one) have formed the Big Brass Alliance. The particular focus of this alliance is the Downing Street Memorandum which suggests that Bush had determined to invade Iraq prior to 9/11 and was intent on fabricating a justification for the invasion. Our goal is to keep the Downing Street Memorandum in the news and to support AfterDowningStreet.org, an alliance of veterans groups and political activists which just launched “a campaign to urge the U.S. Congress to begin a formal investigation into whether President Bush has committed impeachable offenses in connection with the Iraq war.”
You can help this effort by signing the letter from Rep. John Conyers seeking further information on the truth of the allegations in the Downing Street Memorandum. Click here to read and sign the letter.
Memorial Day
Posted by Clif on 05/30/05 at 8:12 am Category: Miscellaneous
No posting today. See you tomorrow.
You can see a gallery of my photos of the WWII Memorial here.
One DeWine is One Too Many
Posted by Clif on 05/29/05 at 10:29 am Category: Lying Republicans
Pat DeWine, whose major accomplishment is being the son of Senator Mike DeWine, appears to be one of the front runners in the special election to fill the congressional seat of Rob Portman. Pat should probably appeal to Cincinnati area Republicans because he is both a hypocrite and liar.
Hypocrite: Pat speaks often about family values as he did here in the speech announcing his candidacy for Congress:
And, finally, no one will have to remind this proven conservative that the people of this district, like most Americans, cherish their bedrock traditions like family, faith and community. They do not want marriage redefined by distant, liberal judges and neither do I.
Listening to that pious pap you would never know that Pat divorced his wife and left his children to take up with Betty Hull, a woman with whom he had been having an extramarital affair. Betty is now mentioned as Pat’s “girlfriend” on his campaign web site.
Liar: On Thursday, Pat issued a press release saying he had been endorsed by Gregg Hartmann, the Hamilton County Clerk of Courts. Here is what Hartmann has to say about that endorsement:
I was a little disappointed to see my name on the list. I had two explicit conversations with Pat. Pat was ticked off at me, but he knew I was not endorsing him and he did it anyway. I don’t think there was any misunderstanding. I haven’t endorsed him and he knew it.
On Friday a campaign spokesman Tony Condia claimed it was his own “screwup.” As of today, the bogus endorsement is still on DeWine’s web site in two places — here and here.
Sex, Lies and Pizza Slices
Posted by Clif on 05/28/05 at 2:40 pm Category: Lying Republicans
Tom Coburn M.D. (R.-Okla.) used pizza slices last week to lure unsuspecting Hill staffers into his annual crap-a-palooza on STDs. Frankly it would take more than a slice of Domino’s and a can of Diet Coke to get me to listen to Tom talk about sex and show disgusting slides of diseased genitalia, but I suppose you can’t blame underpaid Hill staffers, who will do just about anything, apparently, for a free lunch.
Tom, good Republican that he is, started his presentation with a lie:
I’m going to try not to give you my opinion. I’m just going to give you scientific facts.
Uh-huh. And just seconds later the Senator lets fly another whopper. According to Dr. Tom, condoms are only 69 percent effective in preventing the transmission of HIV. Let’s do the math. A 69 percent failure rate, if true, would mean that 90 percent of people who had protected sex six times with someone with HIV would become seropositive, which, of course, is utter crap. A number of studies show that condom use will consistently prevent HIV transmission.
Dr. Tom lies about condoms as part of his evangelical crusade to promote abstinence outside marriage. He’s been doing this since 1999. Of course, as should be apparent to everyone who’ll get their head out the Christian right’s ass long enough to look around, none of this stops teens (or anyone else) from having sex. It just stops them from having safe sex.
Compassionate Conservatism
Posted by Clif on 05/28/05 at 10:30 am Category: Gay Issues, Loathsome RepublicansColorado Governor Bill Owens vetoed yesterday a bill that would prohibit private employers from firing gay employees. He did not, however, veto legislation also on his desk that added sexual orientation to the state’s hate crimes law.
Colorado House Speaker Andrew Romanoff expressed my sentiments exactly:
He seems to be saying that it’s OK to fire them but not to kill them.
Compassionate conservatism indeed.
BamBam Goes To Washington
Posted by Clif on 05/27/05 at 5:10 pm Category: White House
President Susilo Bambang “BamBam” Yudhoyono of Indonesia was invited by the White House to meet with Bush this week. During that meeting “BamBam” assured Bush that Indonesia would do everything it could on counterterrorism.
That apparently means sentencing an Australian to 20 years in jail on a questionable marijuana charge while only days before sentencing three men to three to four years in jail for involvement in the 2003 terrorist bombing of the Jakarta Marriott. Now that’s what I call a robust counterterrorism initiative.
Why Does the GOP Hate Our Troops?
Posted by Clif on 05/27/05 at 12:52 pm Category: Loathsome Republicans
Republicans on the Hill are always screaming bloody murder at the slightest mention of flushed Korans or other perceived slights of our troops. Why is it then that when it comes time to putting their money where their fat mouths are and doing something that might actually benefit the troops, all those “patriotic” Republicans go AWOL?
Consider this little vignette from Wednesday:
Republicans turned back, by a 223-194 margin, an attempt by Wisconsin Rep. David Obey, the senior Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, to add $2.6 billion for veterans health care. He would have paid for it by increasing taxes on the wealthy.Obey complained that while Congress gives a virtual blank check for military costs in Iraq and Afghanistan, it comes up short when caring for soldiers upon their return.
The next day the Republicans continued to bash soldiers and veterans. By a 214 to 213 vote Republicans defeated a Democratic proposal to allocate some of the savings from base closures to pay increased benefits to survivors of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and to set up veteran’s health accounts.
One faithful Party member who voted against veterans health care and voted against increased survivor benefits was Spencer Bachus, the moronic redneck from Alabama who tried to catapault himself from obscurity to fame by accusing comedian Bill Maher of treason for mentioning on his HBO show that the Army wasn’t meeting its recruiting goals. Maybe if people like Bachus weren’t treating soldiers like scum once they become veterans, those recruiting goals might have been easier to meet. So who’s the one committing treason here?
Help Out The American Street
Posted by Clif on 05/26/05 at 10:56 am Category: MiscellaneousKevin Hayden, who runs The American Street, is being eaten up by bandwidth charges and has posted an appeal for financial contributions. You can also help him out by clicking on the ads at his site.
Kevin’s site features a number of first-rate progressive writers as well as a section called States-Writes, the bar-none, hands-down best index of progressive blogs arranged by state or colony (i.e., the District of Columbia, where I reside). I’d say that about State’s Writes even if Outside the Tent weren’t listed there. So he deserves any support you can offer. I’ve clicked on ads and sent money so I hope you can help out too. Thanks!
FactDistort Strikes Again
Posted by Clif on 05/26/05 at 8:34 am Category: FactDistort.org
The crypto-Republicans at FactDistort, er, FactCheck are at it again, apparently having decided that in order to get in practice for 2008 they need to take a completely false swipe at Hillary. It starts with the email they sent out yesterday that claimed this:
Abortions rising under Bush? Not true. How that false claim came to be — and lives on.
The email then links you to this page on the FactDistort site which starts by saying:
Politicians from Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Howard Dean have recently contended that abortions have increased since George W. Bush took office in 2001. This claim is false.
FactDistort then cites a study from the Alan Guttmacher Institute that says that abortions continued to decline after Bush took office. No doubt most of The Party faithful will only make it this far and will go off, harumphing with satisfaction that this was just more proof that Hillary is a lying sack of s**t. If they read further they’ll find this:
In a speech to family-planning providers in New York on January 24, 2005 , Sen. Hillary Clinton recounted decreases in the abortion rate that occurred in her husband’s administration, then lamented that the situation had changed.
This, of course, will provoke more muttering from members of The Party about how Hillary will say anything. But what did Hillary actually say? After all the charges by FactDistort that Hillary is lying, they finally cite her offending statement (emphasis mine):
Clinton: But unfortunately, in the last few years, while we are engaged in an ideological debate instead of one that uses facts and evidence and common sense, the rate of abortion is on the rise in some states. In the three years since President Bush took office, 8 states saw an increase in abortion rates (14.6% average increase), and four saw a decrease (4.3% average), so we have a lot of work still ahead of us.
Got that? She said it increased in some states and decreased in others. Hillary haters will probably never have gotten past the claims by FactCheck that Hillary said abortion was on the rise everywhere.
The kiddie interns understand that the actual quotation provides a slight problem for their smear effort which they try to explain away as follows:
Clinton was careful not to state flatly that abortions were increasing nationally. She spoke only of “some states” in which the rate had increased. However, she omitted any mention of other states where abortions were going down, inviting her listeners to conclude that the national trend to fewer abortions had reversed itself since Bush took office.
You have to wonder whether these people even read the crap that they write. FactDistort says Hillary “omitted any mention of other states where abortions were going down.” Read what Hillary said again. She said the rates in four states were going down. Doesn’t much look like an “omission” to me.
Let’s even suppose for a moment that Hillary left out her mention of those four states and evaluate the claim that she was lying because she simply said the rate was rising in 8 states. This is a variant of the argument that you are lying if you don’t mention every available statistic that might be relevant to an argument. Under that reasoning, the FactDistort people are selling a platter of whoppers by talking about decline in abortion rates without mentioning the steady rise in the United States of abortion’s grisly alternative: infant homicide. The FactDistort people present a graph showing abortion declining between 1979 and 2003. During the same period infant homicide rates increased from 5.9 to 9.3 per 100,000.
But the problem with FactDistort’s swipe at Hillary is even worse. The statistics that they breathlessly present as “fact” are indeed admitted by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, which did the study, to be only “estimates.” Once again, the folks at Annenberg assume that when peddling right-wing crap people won’t click through the links and actually read the study that they are citing. Well, click through and you’ll find what the people who did the study have to say about it here:
Because these abortion estimates are not based on a comprehensive census, they are subject to some limitations and should be considered provisional.
I guess people at Annenberg’s FactDistort, who live off the trust fund of a dead corrupt publisher, don’t really have to worry about losing their job for trying to pass off hooey as fact.
A Lie Repeated Becomes the Truth
Posted by Clif on 05/25/05 at 10:28 pm Category: White HouseThe Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth.
George Orwell, 1984
If you’ve retired, you don’t have anything to worry about — third time I’ve said that. (Laughter.) I’ll probably say it three more times. See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda. (Applause.)
George Bush, May 24, 2005
SpongeDob LiarPants (on Fire)
Posted by Clif on 05/24/05 at 11:18 pm Category: Radical Clerics
Radical cleric and dog beater James Dobson called for a jihad today against all of the infidels involved in the Senate filibuster “compromise.” That, of course, gave Dobson the chance to demonstrate to the faithful that the Ten Commandments, which he wants erected in all public buildings, aren’t really applicable to him. Well, at least the one about not lying.
According to Dobson, “Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Antonin Scalia, and Chief Justice William Rehnquist would never have served on the U. S. Supreme Court if this agreement had been in place during their confirmations.” That jaw-droppingly false statement would only be true if there was no Senate rule permitting a filibuster when the three justices were confirmed (which there was), there were enough votes to filibuster their nominations (which there weren’t), and the “compromise” today changed Senate rules (which it didn’t). For the record, Scalia was confirmed 98-0 and Rehnquist was confirmed 68-26, both filibuster-proof votes even under the old 67-vote cloture rule. Thomas was voted in 52-48 by a Congress with a 56-44 Democratic majority without a hint of filibuster by anyone.
So the claim that the compromise would have kept Scalia, Thomas and Rehnquist off the bench is just more hooey from SpongeDob LiarPants.
Agreeing to Swallow the Bad Medicine
Posted by Clif on 05/24/05 at 8:41 am Category: Politics
My opinion on the filibuster “compromise” is probably not too hard to guess. I agree with Max:
This Senate deal looks like a giant steaming pile of monkey crap. As far as I can tell, we get the three wingnuts that everybody has been talking about — Pryor, Brown, and Owens — and maybe not two other nitwits. There seems to be no bar to squashing any future filibuster effort. Supposedly a filibuster might be permissable under “extraordinary” circumstances. That means not very many times, and there could be quite a few judgeships to fill with the deep bench of loonies on the Right.
Sigh.
I was so depressed by outcome that all I could think of doing last night was giving the blog a facelift. Let me know if you like it - the new look not the “compromise.”
UPDATE: The layout doesn’t look quite right yet in IE, but looks fine in Firefox. That’s why you really should download and use Firefox.