Over the last week or so, a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has been attacking me. Of course, this group isn't interested in the truth — and they're not telling the truth. They didn't even exist until I won the nomination for president.Those scumbags still embracing Kerry's utterly reprehsible critics might want to check out the Washington Post, which features a front page article that sinks the Smear Boats in a volley of fact-checking.But here's what you really need to know about them. They're funded by hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Republican contributor out of Texas. They're a front for the Bush campaign. And the fact that the president won't denounce what they're up to tells you everything you need to know — he wants them to do his dirty work.
Thirty years ago, official Navy reports documented my service in Vietnam and awarded me the Silver Star, the Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts. Thirty years ago, this was the plain truth. It still is. And I still carry the shrapnel in my leg from a wound in Vietnam.
As firefighters you risk your lives every day. You know what it's like to see the truth in the moment. You're proud of what you've done — and so am I.
Of course, the president keeps telling people he would never question my service to our country. Instead, he watches as a Republican-funded attack group does just that. Well, if he wants to have a debate about our service in Vietnam, here is my answer: “Bring it on.”
I'm not going to let anyone question my commitment to defending America — then, now, or ever. And I'm not going to let anyone attack the sacrifice and courage of the men who saw battle with me.
And let me make this commitment today: their lies about my record will not stop me from fighting for jobs, health care, and our security — the issues that really matter to the American people.
I know this is going to be all over the news (except Fox), but I just like reading it.
Bush is going to get so creamed in the election.
A small victory for the few of us who still read the 1st Amendment as separating Church and State ...
A Florida law that lets students from failing public schools attend private religious schools at taxpayers' expense is unconstitutional, a state appeals court ruled Monday.The 2-1 decision by the 1st District Court of Appeal upholds an August 2002 ruling by a trial judge, who said the law violates the separation of church and state and a provision of the state constitution that bans the use of tax dollars for religious schools.
The state has been allowed to issue vouchers during its appeal and that will likely remain true until the Florida Supreme Court ultimately decides the case.
Under the 1999 law, the centerpiece of Gov. Jeb Bush's education policies, students attending public schools that earn failing grades two years out of four are eligible for vouchers to attend private schools.
Vouchers are purely and utterly un-constitutional. There is no way to reconcile the very honorable desire to improve education for the poor with this craven attempt to bridge the Church/State gap.
Fred LaRue, the "bag man" for Nixon's White House "Plumbers" died today. If he was "Deep Throat", the man who gave Woodward and Bernstein the clues needed to break the story and bring Nixon down, we should hear soon from the Washington Post reporters as they have promised to reveal their source after his death.
LaRue discounted rumors that he was Deep Throat, saying the mysterious source for Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein on the Watergate story was probably a combination of several people.Woodward says Deep Throat was an individual and not a composite, and promised to reveal his identity only after the source is dead. A request for comment from Woodward left with the newspaper Wednesday was not immediately returned.
Among the other people who have been cited as possible Deep Throats are Earl J. Silbert, an original Watergate prosecutor; Alexander Haig, who was Nixon's chief of staff and Ronald Reagan's secretary of state; L. Patrick Gray, the acting FBI director who lived four blocks from Woodward; and deputy White House counsel Fred Fielding. All have denied it.
Hats off to Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson for defying her GOP masters and voting against Shrub's pick for the U.S. Circuit Court. He nominated a man who is quoted saying that rapes lead to pregnancy as often as Miami gets snow, and who was the head of the anti-abortion Movement in Arkansas. In other words, a fucking lunatic who thinks women should follow the Bible and literally be subservient to their husbands. What a fantastic judge he'll make: he passed the Senate on a 51-46 vote with five GOP Senators voting against him ( which Dem. Senators -- Zell "I'm A Democrat" Miller aside -- voted for this dickhead?).
CNN has a profile of Bev Harris, an opponent of electronic voting in California, one of the states destined to have an election crisis this fall thanks to Diebold and other high-tech, Windows-based voting scams.
Ambushing registrars and tracking down executives at their homes and offices, Harris, 52, has uncovered conflicts of interests and security flaws inside the companies that make electronic ballot machines.Searching the Web and poring over newspaper clippings, Harris has unearthed obscure arrest records, ties to conservative political groups and other embarrassing secrets of senior executives at voting companies.
Her conclusion: there will be so many problems with the more than 100,000 paperless voting terminals to be used in the November presidential election that the fiasco will dwarf Florida's hanging chad debacle of 2000.
"We have a train wreck that's definitely going to happen," Harris said. "We have conflict of interest, we've taken the checks and balances away, and we know the votes are already being miscounted fairly frequently. This is going to be huge."
Joe Bob sez check her out.
Salon reports that Fahrenheit 9/11 now has a distributor, and will be in the theaters on June 25th. I predict the GOP will stage highly coordinated protests, possibly violent (like anti-abortion protests), at the theaters.
On the TV news crawl in Toronto today is this little gem:
George Bush says he has "total disdain for Michael Moore"
High praise indeed.
The sacred Locnar was used to summon the dark powers of the Lovecraftian god, Oolatec, in an arcane ceremony at the Houston Center facilities in downtown Houston yesterday.
Better known to the public as the "Haliburton Shareholders Meeting," it was really a pretty incremental incident in the cornucopia of evil belching swill onto America these days.
I wouldn't mention it at all, except that the event also served as an occasion for an anti-Bush protest. At the left is a protester from a digital photo I took myself. I stopped by this inspirational example of American freedom in action, and chatted with the folks a bit. Nice people, especially the guy in the "Buck Fush" T-Shirt.
I'll tell ya, there's no better way to start your day than to have a spirited dialog with fellow American citizens about getting Prince Regent Chimpy out of office this November — if for no better reason than to get the world's most vile corporate parasite off the American tax-dollar-teat.
Anyway, back at the Haliburton meeting, some excutive was quoted as saying, "You die, the girl dies, everybody dies."
Sounded reasonable to me.
Or is that from a movie?
Who didn't love Jello Biafra's oddly high, nasal vocals gushing smugly ironic lyrics about how Ronald Reagan was destroying freedom in America and the world. Now, it seems so naive. The Dead Kennedys' song, Chemical Warfare, which is about stealing chemical munitions from a local National Guard Armory and deploying them on a golf course would probably land them in Gitmo these day.
Well, Jello's still at it. Join the fun at http://www.punkvoter.com.
Today's Krugman column focuses on why the Bush Administration is so obsessed with secrecy. He delves into the secret records of the energy task force that Cheney is defending, and suggests that it's not the content that Cheney is defending but the overall principle that the public doesn't have the right to know what the government is doing.
What Mr. Cheney is defending, in other words, is a doctrine that makes the United States a sort of elected dictatorship: a system in which the president, once in office, can do whatever he likes, and isn't obliged to consult or inform either Congress or the public.
This pattern is consistent across the entire Administration, but I think it reflects the management style of Cheney himself. Further, this shows that when it comes to identifying who is really in charge, the answer isn't GWB; as one might expect from a patriarchial society -- the Dick rules the Bush.