The Progressive Blog Alliance HQ

I know I am but what are you.

It’s a playground classic. Accuse your adversary of the very thing you are guilty of.

Fascism is fascism is fascism no matter where it comes from or how it is wrapped. The unbounded greed of corporate America, invading the world one economy at a time. The Christian fundamentalist breaking down the separation of church and state. The Islamic jihadist blowing themselves and others up for Allah. They all want the same thing.

Power.

The power to control the lives and resources of others for their own benefit.

In America we have called it:

Indian Reservations. Slavery. Immanent Domain. Spreading democracy. National Security. The War on Terror. Foreign policy.

Crossposted from the Republic of T.
If you're a regular reader of my blog, or just happened by from another link, I have a favor to ask of you. I need you to make a phone call for me. The number is 202-224-3121, and the phone call actually isn't just for me. It's for my family, and for thousands of families like mine.

You see, the phone number above is for calling your Senator. Tomorrow (Monday) the Senate will start debating the Federal Marriage Amendment. The amendment would effectively make families like mine second class citizens by constitutionally denying even the possibility of accessing right's and protections that you and your family probably take for granted. Here's a brief rundown from an email sent by the Family Pride Coalition.

(Crossposted at Pushing Rope)

For the past four years, Mary Brandenburg has introduced legislation that would require members of the Florida House and Senate to take the FCAT and make their scores public. Her reasoning is that if grown adults can't pass the tests then children shouldn't be expected to. Legislators even have the option of taking the third grade FCAT test. Bradenburg's proposal has died four years running. Howard Goodman reports that fellow House members told Brandenburg they are intimidated by geometry and algebra.

Crossposted from the Republic of T.

What did Florida Voters do for Supreme Courts to have it in for them? In 2000 it was the U.S. Suprme Court. Now the Florida Supreme Court rules for keeping redistricting in the hands of incumbent politicians, or at least doesn't rule against it.

The Florida Supreme Court today tossed out an effort by grassroots groups to strip redistricting power from entrenched politicians in Tallahassee. The court found the proposed amendment violated the single-subject requirement for citizen attempts to amend the state constitution: it created a new commission to oversee redistricting while also changing the requirements for drawing political boundaries. "We will not address the merits or wisdom of the proposed amendment," the court wrote, but "we agree with the opponents that the proposed amendment does indeed encompass two separate subjects."

The Times does its second hit piece on the Donald this time by Paul Eaton a retired Major General who was in charge of training Iraqi troops:

Mr. Rumsfeld has put the Pentagon at the mercy of his ego, his cold warrior's view of the world and his unrealistic confidence in technology to replace manpower. As a result, the Army finds itself severely undermanned — cut to 10 active divisions but asked by the administration to support a foreign policy that requires at least 12 or 14.

Roy Edroso pointed out that Peggy Noonan hurled the worst possible insult she can at Shrub:

"This week's column is a question, a brief one addressed with honest curiosity to Republicans. It is: When George W. Bush first came on the scene in 2000, did you understand him to be a liberal in terms of spending?"

Wash your mouth out with soap Crazy Jesus Lady. This is the classic move Digby describes (sorry don't have the link) where the conservatives lavish praise on their leaders' conservative principles, until those leaders clearly shit the bed, then they call them liberals. So we have had the loons over at the Corner start to jump ship about the Iraq war and now CJL from the WSJ is bailing on the economic policy. I said back in December that it felt like the elite powers were starting to turn on Bush the lesser. Now we are seeing a steady stream of the conservative noise makers stating that this or that aspect of the president is problematic. We will see a continued increase in this noise as they start paint GW as the monkey he is (should be easy as they don't acually have to make anything up, the truth will suffice), and they will start to groom the white knight to replace him (McCain, Clinton?). Whoever it is, one thing you can be certain of, s/he will be no friend of anyone but the corporations.

Cross posted at Really Small Fish

One of the problems with politically progressive people is that, themselves being decent people, they often misinterpret the real meaning of what the other side says, because they are unable to comprehend just how indecent and structurally corrupt the other side is. Hence progressives naively tend to give credit to the other side where credit is not due, because they cannot see that what looks and sounds good is not necessarily good in reality. In brief, they often fail to perceive the actual quality of what is right in front of their eyes. By the way, by “the other side” I don’t just mean conservatives. To me, most “moderate” liberals are also an integral part of "the other" camp -- they are the "good cops" to the conservatives' "bad cops," so to speak.

To be sure, the Abramoff affair tears at the very fabric of our republic, but I want to bring to your attention an even bigger scandal: A Couture of Corruption.

Let's face it, our founding fathers were snappy dressers. George Washington? Alexander Hamilton? Veritable fashion plates. But in comparison, Abramoff's corrupt conspirators are schlubs; red-staters unfit for the red-carpet.

Read all the lurid details at Blognonymous.

Blognonymous has obtained an advance copy of the President's State of the Union address:

My fellow Americans, tonight I'd like report to you on the state of our glorious union, but frankly many of you don't seem to feel that things are going well, and so I'm takin' steps to correct that.

World-wide, we're fighting the unending battles of the War on T'rrorism. The t'rrorists are on the run, but of course I can't talk about that because...well...because most of it's classified. Now I know that some Americans think that the situation in Iraq isn't too great. So just to make sure that our media doesn't give any aid or comfort to the enemy, I'm hereby classifying all news from the Middle East...

So, the Disillusioned kid points up another of Dubya's (oxy)moronicisms:

"I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace."

This whilst addressing the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, check it. Orwellian certainly, but i'm no longer surprised by the neo-cons contempt for the possibility of accountability.

What never ceases to amaze me though is how he gets away with spouting such utterly transparent rhetoric. This time he even refered to how it's done: education. As if his meaning of indoctrination wasn't plain enough, he then told us clearly how it will be reinforced: "faith groups" "educating" poor Americans about home ownership.

Liberals may well accuse McCain of having served as a useful tool for the Bushites on the torture issue, in that, by diverting the public's attention away from the real problem — the US Administration’s preposterous definition of torture — he has made it impossible to discuss the issue that really should be discussed. But that is only one part of the story. Yes, it is true that Bush can now simply claim that the US "does not torture," skirting completely around the question of what he means by the word "torture." The Bushites have manipulated the definition of torture so as to make it meaningless. And it is true that, meanwhile, activities that any rational person would consider to be torture will continue as before.  (read more at http://alse.blogspot.com )

The Grindstaff Chronicles

Summary:
John McCain won an anti-torture battle yesterday, and immediately, the administration started to scuttle it. When George Bush and the guy who browns his nose, Dick Cheney, said they wanted to keep torture, they meant it, and they haven't stopped this insane war with John McCain. They are already adding a secret addendum to the Army Filed Manual. Nice people, those Bush people. Whew, if we could just have them on the ranch for one day they'd be singing a very different song.

Starting your first conservative blog? Well good for you! We need all the conservatives we can get here in the blogsphere because, let's face it, you can't drown out the liberals unless you make a BIG NOISE! So to help you out, we here at Blognonymous have compiled some helpful hints to make your blogging as pleasant as possible.

Yes indeed. Just follow these simple rules, and were sure that you'll be on your way to becoming a "Large, taloned, red-blooded, meat-eating predator," in the Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem in no time.

Click to check out Blognonymous' helpful hints for conservative bloggers.

Grindstaff Chronicles
Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered Am I
Fully satiated after a day of intemperate wining and dining, with a few days off to recover and walk it off, life on the farms and ranches out here is returning to normal. We discovered that we really are quite lucky to live way out here: nobody was tempted to find the nearest big town to do what most of the country seems to enjoy: going shopping like lunatics the day after Thanksgiving. No ma'am, it just isn't interesting when you consider it's a four and a half hour round trip excursion. Now, for food and our wine, well, then it's worth it, but to get squished to death like a worm, no sir. Thanks, we'll pass.

What we don't pass on though is Schuyler's always delicious cocktails. Today he served Black Russians, made with "handmade" Tito's Vodka and Kahlúa. For those who don't like alcohol, he made Fruit and Ginger Ale, an English mulled drink which he serves chilled. We used his cocktail to welcome back Marie Christine and her husband Jean-Paul, who had been back in France for a couple of years and returned the day after Thanksgiving. They returned to their beautiful horse farm, which had been leased to a couple for these past two years.

Crossposted from the Republic of T.

I have blogged about president Bush's mental state a few times. And I've posted about the speculations that Bush is drinking again. So this weekend when the hubby spotted the cover story of the Globe, about Bush basically having a breakdown and going into therapy after having hit the bottle again, I was intrigued. However, given the source I was a little reluctant to blog about it. That is until I heard from John Aravosis of Americablog that the Washington Times' Insight Magazine also had the story, I thought it might be worth posting.

Grindstaff Chronicles

Rich and poor sitting at the same table? Over their collective dead bodies, say the republicans. The poor deserve an empty table, because it's their own fault for being poor, and the rich deserve to be even richer.

Read the entire Grindstaff Chronicles Newsletter.

Crossposted from The Republic of T.

Today's New York Times has an article that might just give us some idea of what probably drove Sen. Harry Reid to involve “rule 21” last week and shut down the Senate. (And why Republicans were so quick to comply with demands that the investigation into pre-invasion Iraq intelligence be stepped up.)Editor & Publisher previewed the article yesterday.

Tomorrow, in its print edition, The New York Times starts to answer the question, with reporter Douglas Jehl disclosing the contents of a newly declassified memo apparently passed to him by Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee. It shows that an al-Qaeda official held by the Americans was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the basis for its claims that Iraq trained al-Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to this Defense Intelligence Agency document from February 2002. It declared that it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, “was intentionally misleading the debriefers” in making claims about Iraqi support for al-Qaeda's work with illicit weapons, Jehl reports. “The document provides the earliest and strongest indication of doubts voiced by American intelligence agencies about Mr. Libi's credibility,” Jehl writes. “Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi's information as ‘credible’ evidence that Iraq was training Al Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons.

The article itself goes into greater detail, but the scuttlebutt here is that the administration -- which had the memo in 2002 -- knew they were being lied to about the existence and extent of Iraq's fabled WMD program. Steve over at Lean Left has more on just what this could mean for Bush.

What's this I hear about Tom DeLay being arrested and stepping down? I haven't had time to keep track with the news lately, but with that and Rove and Lewis Libby - is the Bush administration somehow falling apart?

It is a relief to see that the law does apply to Republican politicians on occasion. But it's much like the disengagement in Gaza: One gets so accustomed to reading bad news that anything remotely positive immediately sounds fishy. Why is DeLay being effectively removed from the political stage? Is this actually a victory, or is there a bigger purpose behind it? I get paranoid when I'm tired.

Good evening Boys and Girls...

So, This morning I was listening to a radio talk show while I was working. The topic was "Should the F.B.I. relax standards as far as hiring people who've done drugs more than what their previous standards allow"(smoked pot in the last ten years, or more than fifteen times in their lives... and similar, if stronger, rules regarding other, harder drugs) and the callers were giving their opinions.

Evidently it's been a frustration for the F.B.I. since their rules are tougher than other departments within the government, and there have been many occurrences where they wanted to hire certain people, some of whom had had top-secret clearances with organizations like the C.I.A. but they couldn't because the candidates had admitted drug use beyond the F.B.I guidelines.

Thanks to some research by The Kenosha Kid, Operation Yellow Elephant has uncovered exclusive right-wing talking points against the "Chickenhawk" argument. As you may have guessed it, right-wingers consider themselves freedom fighters in the "War Of Ideas", not chickenhawks who voice support for a war in which they refuse to serve. This list comes from Reagan Youth, also known as Young America Foundation:

1. We are engaged in a war of ideas on college campuses that is essential to winning the war on terror. This is also very important since hateful professors are spewing anti-American rhetoric at the students every day and students rarely hear all sides of the argument.