Jackson Thoreau is a Washington, D.C., writer. He contributed to Big Bush Lies [RiverWood Books, Ashland, Ore., 2004]. His latest is "Born to Cheat: How Bush, Cheney, Rove & Co. Broke the Rules, From the Sandlot to the White House."
Dick Cheney helped force George W. Bush to finally agree to dump top aide Karl Rove, sources say.
Cheney and Rove have engaged in a mostly behind-the-scenes feud since the indictment of Cheney's top aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, in 2005.
Rove was included as "Official A" in the indictment who also leaked information to key media members to try to discredit Iraqi war critic Joseph Wilson.
I'm a longtime Kos member and thought I'd give a shameless plug for my new book here. The book on the lifelong deceit of Bush, Cheney and Rove will debut at the annual Take Back America conference, coordinated by the Campaign for Ameica's Future, June 18-20 at the Washington [D.C.] Hilton Hotel, 1919 Connecticut Ave. NW.
It seems a lot of people have addressed the Virginia Tech shootings with some interesting posts and diaries. But I haven't seen this question posed: Do you think people should have to take a mental health screening before being able to own a gun?
It seems a lot of gun shootings are done in a rage by people who have hidden, or maybe not so hidden, mental health/anger management issues that suddenly pop up when something that really makes them mad occurs.
On Friday the 13th, April 2007, the Brattleboro Reformer, the third largest newspaper in Vermont that dates to 1876, joined the chorus of people calling Bush the worst president in U.S. history and for his impeachment .
As the newspaper says,
When the story of our time is written by future historians, there will be but one question asked: When confronted with the malevolence and mendacity of the Bush administration, how did the people in positions to do something about it react? Does Vermont want to go down in the history books as standing up to the worst president ever? We, the people of Vermont, have the chance to affect the outcome of this story. We must seize this opportunity.
In a relatively recent column in The Washington Post, Columbia University presidential scholar and historian Eric Foner called Bush the worst president in U.S. history. Foner even said Bush was worse than Nixon and comparable to James Polk, who led the U.S. into the unprovoked invasion of Mexico by lying about an "alleged Mexican incursion into the United States."
As many suspect, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, the group that is smearing Al Gore for supposedly flying in jets and living in big homes as he educates people about the perils of global warming, doesn't mind telling a few lies.
After almost six years of flipping through news channels to watch Comedy Central, sports or a movie so I wouldn't become repulsed at the sight of Bush or some other arrogant republican gloating about their latest divisive, hypocritical tactic, I spent much of the wee hours on Wednesday morning glued to the tube.
I couldn't stop watching right-wing media types like Scarborough openly admit the Republicans got drunk with power after 1994 and botched their shot to retain the House. I laughed as other less honest commentators tried to spin it by saying the Dems elected were conservatives or the Dems needed to all of a sudden "work" with Bush.
I'm trying to be optimistic about Tuesday's elections, but I'm not holding my breath, based on the last two Congressional elections.
In both 2002 and 2004, some election-day polls showed Democrats gaining certain seats, but that didn't happen due largely to Republican electoral cheating.
Predictions that Democrats will win back the Senate or House or both are premature. The all-or-nothing attitude sets the party up for many to consider this election a failure for Dems, which is likely the goal of some right-wing media types.
It's official: The Republican Party of today runs the dirtiest campaigns in history.
You can read it in none other than the Washington Post - a newspaper so mainstream and afraid to attack the Grand Ol' Puds that it supported the failed Iraqi invasion and endorses mostly Republicans for major offices.
In Friday's Post is a front-page story on how the dirty campaigns have intensified in recent years. The story here lays most of the blame on the Grand Ol' Puds.
In 1968, a 14-year-old Texas girl attended the HemisFair, an international festival in San Antonio. I remember attending that same festival with my family when I was nine and riding up to the top of the 750-foot Tower of the Americas, thinking how cool that was.
Meanwhile, during one of those days of the HemisFair, this then teen-aged girl bumped into none other than George W. Bush. He was a never-do-well 22-year-old who had just come out of Yale. There, he had branded fraternity pledges with lit cigarettes, gotten arrested for stealing a Christmas decoration from a store display, and bragged about being let off by police who stopped him for drunk driving by simply telling them his father's name.
A relatively new Republican group called the National Black Republican Association is going around claiming that Democrats started and built the Klan, Republicans are civil rights champions, and Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican.
Like the large majority of Republicans, leaders of this group are little more than paid hacks, con artists, and liars. I wouldn't doubt that Rove and the Swift Boaters had something to do with this group, at least in helping to fund it.
I'm in the final stages of finishing a book tracing Bush-Rove-Cheney's history of cheating, breaking laws and political dirty tricks. Many books have pointed out for the historical record the accomplished liars these officials are; I'm taking it a step farther by showing what accomplished cheaters they are.
I'm going all the way back to how Bush cheated at sandlot baseball games as a kid, how Rove cheated during high school political debates and how Cheney cheated in college at Yale by somehow passing tests without attending class.
Bush Jr. would get thrashed by more than a 3-to-1 margin in a theoretical match-up between father and son, according to a Scripps Howard poll. He wouldn't beat Gore or Kerry, which he really didn't do.
The feds have awarded defense giant Lockheed Martin with a $1.7-million, 10-month contract to design a "revolutionary remote-controlled nano air vehicle that will collect military intelligence indoors and outdoors on the urban battlefield," according to a company press release today.
The device will be similar in size and shape to a maple tree seed, about 1.5 inches long and weighing less than an ounce. A chemical rocket in its one-bladed wing will power a sensor module more than 1,100 yards. It will be delivered from a hover craft well away from the target area, and there will be a camera in its wing to make sure it stays on target and monitor the area.
"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious....It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many."
What general said that? Major Gen. Smedley Butler, a decorated WWI general, did so in 1935. His entire essay is here.
Rove is going around telling people he was not involved in the conspiracy to get back at Joseph Wilson by outing his CIA agent wife. But as an AP report showed, that is not what he was telling the FBI before the 2004 election when the White House claimed Rove was not involved.
On Monday, a day before Rove's lawyer sent out the news release saying Fitzgerald had no plans to indict Rove in the Plame case, someone I know observed Rove leaking again.
My source saw Rove in a bathroom at BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport near Baltimore leaking in a urinal. He said Rove seemed really happy about something, and he observed him pleasantly talking to a former congressman after relieving himself. Rove was coming from speaking at a fund-raiser in New Hampshire.
This essay initially appeared at www.opednews.com.
Some say it's better to ignore right-winger Ann Coulter's latest book, which boringly retells her basic premise of lies that she's built her cult-like following on for years - that so-called liberals are Godless traitors. They say we should ignore Coulter and not add fuel to the fire that will make more people want to read her book.
Sorry, I can't. Coulter likes to claim she speaks truth to power, as if liberals have any real power in the United States. Conservatives are in power, controlling the White House, Congress, Supreme Court, talk radio, and much of the rest of what they like to call civilization.
This is my way of speaking truth to power.
