In terms of cojones-to-political-climate-pressure ratio, this ranks slightly behind Truman-MacArthur and way way behind Lincoln-McClellan, but awesome nonetheless. The latter two actually involved dangers to the republic as opposed to an HR incident, but we have to understand that today’s paradigms have also changed.

Wait, why am I rambling on about this? WTG, Obama! Kick some whiny ass republican ass and watch the rightostan blogosphere implode as they try to reconcile praising Rolling Stone and an insubordinate general in a time of war at the same time.

According to the FBI report, which was originally posted online by WikiLeaks, an organization that posts leaked documents, police also found a National Socialist Movement membership application filled out by Cummings. The NSM currently is the largest neo-Nazi organization in the country, with 69 chapters in 30 states.

Amber Cummings reportedly told police that her husband was “very upset” over Barack Obama being elected president, had been in contact with white supremacist groups, and that he’d been mixing chemicals in their kitchen sink while talking about dirty bombs

Imagine if it were a Republican president and Cummings was named Garcia or Sharif.

Oh, wait, I know why… let’s talk about steroids and LiLo’s new lips. Muuuuch more important these days, because everyone knows there’s no such thing as domestic terrorism.

Finding Number One

For the reasons explained in section IV of this report, I find that Governor Sarah Palin abused her power by violating Alaska Statute 39.52.110(a) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act. Alaska Statute 39.52.110(a) provides

The legislature reaffirms that each public officer holds office as a public trust, and any effort to benefit a personal or financial interest through official action is a violation of that trust.

Heckuva choice there, McCain

See this summary for selected (and juicy) details

Though Chryson belongs to a fringe political party, one that advocates the secession of Alaska from the Union, and that organizes with other like-minded secessionist movements from Canada to the Deep South, he is not without peculiar influence in state politics, especially the rise of Sarah Palin. An obscure figure outside of Alaska, Chryson has been a political fixture in the hometown of the Republican vice-presidential nominee for over a decade. During the 1990s, when Chryson directed the AIP, he and another radical right-winger, Steve Stoll, played a quiet but pivotal role in electing Palin as mayor of Wasilla and shaping her political agenda afterward. Both Stoll and Chryson not only contributed to Palin’s campaign financially, they played major behind-the-scenes roles in the Palin camp before, during and after her victory.

Palin backed Chryson as he successfully advanced a host of anti-tax, pro-gun initiatives, including one that altered the state Constitution’s language to better facilitate the formation of anti-government militias. She joined in their vendetta against several local officials they disliked, and listened to their advice about hiring. She attempted to name Stoll, a John Birch Society activist known in the Mat-Su Valley as “Black Helicopter Steve,” to an empty Wasilla City Council seat. “Every time I showed up her door was open,” said Chryson. “And that policy continued when she became governor.”
…
“The AIP is very family-oriented,” Chryson explained. “We’re for the traditional family — daddy, mommy, kids — because we all know that it was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. And we don’t care if Heather has two mommies. That’s not a traditional family.”

Chryson further streamlined the AIP’s platform by softening its secessionist language. Instead of calling for immediate separation from the United States, the platform now demands a vote on independence.

Yet Chryson maintains that his party remains committed to full independence. “The Alaskan Independence Party has got links to almost every independence-minded movement in the world,” Chryson exclaimed. “And Alaska is not the only place that’s about separation. There’s at least 30 different states that are talking about some type of separation from the United States.”

oh, and they still have her ear

Emboldened by his nomination by Mayor Palin, Stoll later demanded she fire Wasilla’s museum director, John Cooper, a personal enemy he longed to sabotage. Palin obliged, eliminating Cooper’s position in short order. “Gotcha, Cooper!” Stoll told the deposed museum director after his termination, as Cooper told a reporter for the New York Times. “And it only cost me a campaign contribution.” Stoll, who donated $1,000 to Palin’s mayoral campaign, did not respond to numerous requests for an interview. Palin has blamed budget concerns for Cooper’s departure.
…
Chryson says the door remains open now that Palin is governor. (Palin’s office did not respond to Salon’s request for an interview.) While Palin has been more circumspect in her dealings with groups like the AIP as she has risen through the political ranks, she has stayed in touch.

When Palin ran for governor in 2006, marketing herself as a fresh-faced reformer determined to crush the GOP’s ossified power structure, she made certain to appear at the AIP’s state convention. To burnish her maverick image, she also tapped one-time AIP member and born-again Republican Walter Hickel as her campaign co-chair. Hickel barnstormed the state for Palin, hailing her support for an “all-Alaska” liquefied gas pipeline, a project first promoted in 2002 by an AIP gubernatorial candidate named Nels Anderson. When Palin delivered her victory speech on election night, Hickel stood beaming by her side. “I made her governor,” he boasted afterward. Two years later, Hickel has endorsed Palin’s bid for vice president.

Help keep this crazy unamerican hick yahoo Talibanistafrom get ahold or near the reins of power

The Alaska Supreme Court refused to halt an investigation into Governor Sarah Palin’s firing of the state police chief, paving the way for tomorrow’s planned release of the findings.

The Supreme Court dismissed the case brought by five state Republican lawmakers who sought to stop the probe, claiming it was unconstitutional and tainted by partisan politics. The investigation, known as Troopergate, took on national importance after Republican presidential nominee John McCain picked Palin as his running mate.

The Alaska Legislative Council, a bipartisan committee of 14 lawmakers that conducts business when the Legislature isn’t in session, voted unanimously on July 31 to investigate Palin’s July 11 firing of Alaska Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan. The commissioner said he was dismissed for refusing to fire state trooper Mike Wooten, who was involved in a divorce and custody battle with Palin’s sister.

I like that Obama’s taken the Chicago way to heart

Eight years ago, complaints about charging rape victims for medical exams in Wasilla prompted the Alaska Legislature to pass a bill — signed into law by Knowles — that banned the practice statewide.

“There was one town in Alaska that was charging victims for this, and that was Wasilla,” Knowles said

A May 23, 2000, article in Wasilla’s newspaper, The Frontiersman, noted that Alaska State Troopers and most municipal police agencies regularly pay for such exams, which cost between $300 and $1,200 apiece.

“(But) the Wasilla police department does charge the victims of sexual assault for the tests,” the newspaper reported.

It also quoted Wasilla Police Chief Charlie Fannon objecting to the law. Fannon was appointed to his position by Palin after her dismissal of the previous police chief. He said it would cost Wasilla $5,000 to $14,000 a year if the city had to foot the bill for rape exams.

“In the past we’ve charged the cost of exams to the victims’ insurance company when possible,” Fannon told the newspaper. “I just don’t want to see any more burden put on the taxpayer.”

The bundle of $2,300 and $4,600 checks that poured into Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign on March 12 came from an unlikely group of California donors: a mechanic from D&D Auto Repair in Whittier, the manager of Rite Aid Pharmacy No. 5727, the 30-something owners of the Twilight Hookah Lounge in Fullerton.

But the man who gathered checks from them is no stranger to McCain — he shuttled the Republican on his private plane and held a fundraising event for the candidate at his house in Delray Beach, Fla.

In case you weren’t aware, “maverick” McCain is dirty, dirty, dirty. And he knows it.

Hillary Clinton spent the night in the White House on the day her husband had oral sex with Monica Lewinsky, and may have actually been in the White House when it happened, according to records of her schedule released today by the National Archives.

Excuse me? Relevance? Is there a single iota of meaning or worth behind this story? Does it serve any purpose at all? This is taking the recent attack-on-the-Democratic-(but not St. Johnny McCain’s!!!)-surrogates ridiculousness to a whole new level. Apparently, you don’t even need to be a sentient being any longer in order for the corporate media to whip your existence into something for which one of the Dem candidates must “repudiate” or “reject.”

Ladies and gents, your “liberal” media at work.

Have you no sense of decency ABC? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

Many saw the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as the symbols of a global American imperialism; in fact, they were signs of imperial overstretch. Every expenditure has weakened America’s armed forces, and each assertion of power has awakened resistance in the form of terrorist networks, insurgent groups and “asymmetric” weapons like suicide bombers. America’s unipolar moment has inspired diplomatic and financial countermovements to block American bullying and construct an alternate world order. That new global order has arrived, and there is precious little Clinton or McCain or Obama could do to resist its growth.

[Colbert]Bow before me for I am mighty![/Colbert]

The White House has acknowledged recycling its backup computer tapes of e-mail before October 2003, raising the possibility that many electronic messages — including those pertaining to the CIA leak case — have been taped over and are gone forever.

The disclosure came minutes before midnight Tuesday under a court-ordered deadline that forced the White House to reveal information it has previously refused to provide.

Among the e-mails that could be lost are messages swapped by any White House officials involved in discussions about leaking a CIA officer’s identity to reporters.

Note that this, in addition to, you know, hiding the crimes, is almost certainly in violation of the Federal Records Act. To be in compliance with the FRA, records may only be destroyed under the authority of a records disposition schedule approved by the Archivist of the United States.

NARA issues a General Records Schedule (GRS) that gives record descriptions of records that are common to most Federal agencies and authorizes record disposals for temporary records. The Department is responsible for developing agency record schedules-with the approval of the Archivist of the United States-that are tailored to our own agency-specific records that are not provided for in the GRS.

Record schedules are mandatory instructions of what to do with records (and nonrecord materials) no longer needed for current Government business. The records schedules indicate how long a document must be kept before it is transferred to a Federal Records Center, destroyed or transferred to NARA for permanent preservation.

Now, gentle Congresscritters, who is going to be the first to query the record schedules to see if these documents were on the list? Who is going to be the first to issue a subpoena? Who is going to be the first to mention “criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice”?

I’m going with “no one,” but they should. Not only did Congress let the administration get away with rampant lawbreaking for 7 years… they’re going to let them destroy the evidence while they sit around and have bullshit investigations about fucking steroids in a sport?!? Jesus fuck that makes me want to find the nearest protruding object and run into it full force with my eyeball.

The sad part is, I remember when this behavior by the Busheviks used to surprise me.

Watch for yourself and decide:


I’ve expressed my lack of preference for Obama before, but this on this one, I can understand what he’s saying. If you were charting a map of where the country was heading, Reagan would definitely be a hard right turn (into a dead end, filled with spikes, toll roads run by the oligopoly, and minorities in press gangs maintaining the shrubs). Clinton was not a strong turn away from the pro-business, mushiness of HW Bush, more like a left bank. Nothing inherently wrong with that.

That said, given his position as a candidate, a speaker for “change” and the people, to not take a moment to express that not all change is good and that Reagan’s change was the wrong direction is unconscionable. Maybe he just forgot a clause in his sentence. Or even an adjective. But these are things he shouldn’t forget.

In addition, next week that tradition of service continues as roughly 2,000 of New York’s citizen soldiers will be shipping out to Afghanistan. On behalf of the State, I will be there to wish them well, share our pride, and offer our prayers for their safe return.

And when they do return, we owe them our gratitude, but also something more – we owe them the chance to enjoy the freedoms and opportunities at home they have so honorably fought for overseas. In the name of all of those who have served on our behalf, I will send you a bill guaranteeing New York’s returning combat veterans a benefit that covers the full cost of SUNY or CUNY tuition, and that can be used at any college or university in New York State.

That’s a fantastic idea and a great, if inadequate to the debt owed, tribute to those who have served this demonspawned administration in their ill begotten war.

Spitzer’s taken on a number of highly powerful, highly funded, anti-we, the People interest groups since his time as an AG. Right on, Elliot.

Thank you for standing up for the Bill of Rights, Chris.

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

…

With one known exception, no formal objections were raised by the lawmakers briefed about the harsh methods during the two years in which waterboarding was employed, from 2002 to 2003, said Democrats and Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter. The lawmakers who held oversight roles during the period included Pelosi and Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and Sens. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) and John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), as well as Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan).

Now you know why impeachment is off the table. All their hands are dirty.

The answer: impeach them all.1

1 Yes, yes, you can’t “impeach” members of the Senate or House. You can, however, expel them.

Each House may determine the rules of its proceedings, punish its members for disorderly behavior, and, with the concurrence of two thirds, expel a member.

In the interests of keeping the end goal clear, language has been used interchangeably in this here post. Deal.

In the biggest news story of the year so far out of Washington, I Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, has just been convicted by a jury for lying about his role in the public outing of a covert CIA officer whose husband, a former diplomat, had strongly challenged the Bush administration’s case for going to war against Iraq.

Now, given the testimony and what we know, it is obviously time to impeach Cheney. Granted, he and Bush should have been impeached long ago, but we have even stronger evidence of his felonious activities now.

Impeach Cheney before that blood clot finally kills the evil bastard.

Credit where credit is due. Bravo, sir.

(I’m at a conference all week, hence the light posting)

They feel they can do this with no Congressional support.
They feel they can do this with no popular support.
They feel they can do this with impunity and at any time they so choose.

Because in their world view – now fully supported by their handpicked regulatory agency heads and their legal lackeys – that the president is accountable to no one in a time of war … and the president is the only one who gets to determine when we are in a state of war or what war is.

Welcome the Bush imperial presidency.

Evidence? We’ve already attacked an Iranian consulate in Iraq. We’ve arrested Iranian diplomats inside Iraq. Condi’s statements this week were full of prevarications when it came to intent with Iran and also threw in language obviously intended to create a fig leaf for causus belli. They administration is on record hoping for a Gulf of Tonkin incident (in Iraq there, but they discussed plans to fabricate an incident if no argument otherwise could be found), and they’ve been goading the Iranians for months. Years, if Sy Hersh is correct… and I think we know that he is.

And now these insane, bloodthirsty, chickenhawks need to slake their thirst in Iran.

Ignore for the moment that such a strike is unwise, illegal, and a violation of everything this country has ever stood for – I will make this plain: an attack on Iran will result in the deaths of thousands of US troops. Sadr runs Iraq, is tight with the Iranians, and has the ability to interdict our troops logistics. If we attack Iran, it is going to make Chosin Reservoir look like a walk in the park. We don’t have the airpower or naval capacity to fully resupply our troops throughout the country and our army will be forced to retreat to a few isolated bases in major ports. Not only will our army be in trouble, but Iran is going to make life for our navy pay and pay heavily. The Gulf is a tiny area, Iran has multitudes of very good, very fast anti ship missiles. Shipping as a whole will come to a halt, but if we don’t lose a good number of ships, I will be surprised (or it will be because they’re not actually in the Gulf and thus are not in full support of the ground). One carrier sinks and the entire endeavor just became a miserable failure.

Now is the time to stand up. Call your congresspersons and tell them to speak out publicly against attacking Iran.

I also think it timely for us to start the articles of impeachment for high crimes and misdemeanors. One would think that the deaths of more than 100,000 people and the destruction of American goodwill and power worldwide ought to be enough to qualify. Then again, there’s no blowjob involved.

Stand up and say no to an insane, illegal, preemptive strike against Iran. Do it now. All we can do is call our representatives, but what they can do is make it a constitutional issue.

What say you, presumptive Dem ’08 nominees? Where’s Hilary? Obama? Edwards (note: he’s not in congress, of course)? More triangulation from the first two and the latter’s focusing on the McCain/Lieberman/Bush escalation AFAIK.

And if anyone needs a top-notch lawyer to draft up the articles of impeachment for you, I’m here for you.

Update: Edwards has come out strongly against escalation, so I’ll consider him anti-Iran as well. Obama is still triangulating (grr). General Clark (still my fav candidate) is also outspoken in opposition to the escalation and exceedingly concerned about Iran. Go Clark!

Though President Bush’s national address Wednesday night was about Iraq, his most provocative comments focused on her neighbor, Iran.

Early in his speech Bush raised the matter of Iran, suggesting that if U.S. efforts to secure Iraq failed, “Iran would be emboldened in its pursuit of nuclear weapons.”

Bush blamed both Syria and Iran in helping radical insurgents within Iraq.

“These two regimes are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq,” he said.

He then singled out Iran, adding that she “is providing material support for attacks on American troops.”

Bush made an implied military threat against both nations: “We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We will interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.”

The President continued in this vein, suggesting a larger U.S. goal of stopping Iran’s nuclear program:

“We are also taking other steps to bolster the security of Iraq and protect American interests in the Middle East. I recently ordered the deployment of an additional carrier strike group to the region. We will expand intelligence sharing — and deploy Patriot air defense systems to reassure our friends and allies.

So you’ve got a 30% approval president pursuing a 12% approval strategy of escalation pumping a sub-5% new attack on a new target that is not threatening us… tell me again how we’re living in a democracy instead of an authoritarian banana republic?

Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India’s part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities.

Eight years ago, as exclusively reported in The Independent on Sunday, the first uninhabited islands – in the Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati – vanished beneath the waves. The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution, but the land still juts above the sea. The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented.

I’d start the LGF-spawned PamAtlas/BoltonGroupie71 suicide watch, but it appears others are already hot on this particular trail.

Goodbye, John. You will not be missed. At all.

Update: call the ShruggyTears hotline, quick! Also bigoted self hater Magalangalong. And the stoptheACLU cheetos-stained humanoid. Good times, good times.

Normally, the Busheviks bury news like this on a Friday. Bush’s temper tantrum/throwing Rove under the bus is already paying dividends.

City-wide union contract will more than double income for more than 5,300 janitors and families, latest victory in national fight for good jobs with health care

And that makes this a very good Thanksgiving for us all. Happy T-day, everyone!