Bob Ney thinks being subpoenaed is a GOOD thing

Trust a long term Republican politician to put a positive spin on subpoeneas to his staff members. This from Bob Ney:

"Last month, Ney told U.S. News and the Bulletin that he was "in this race till the end.'' Ney is in a tough campaign against Democrat Zack Space. A recent poll conducted for Ney showed him with a slight lead. Aides say that in the end, the Justice Department investigation might actually cause a public backlash that helps keep Ney in office.

"They are now issuing subpoenas [to Ney aides], which they could have done at any point over the last year,'' says a person close to the lawmaker. "This could well influence the election in his favor.''"

This is after five separate individuals who have accepted plea bargains in corruption cases have identified Ney as involved, three top aides have quit in the same week (Normal Congressional staff turnover, says Ney.) and another has been subpoeneaed by the Justice Department Public Integrity Section.

Such confidence!

[Thanks to TPM Muckraker and Paul Kiel.]

This is fun. At numerous levels.

I don't know which is more fun. The basic underlying story or the truly snarky way Josh Marshall refers to it, quoted here in full.

"Coulter investigation heats up; lib schadenfreude epidemic fells thousands."

This, of course, refers to the investigation of coulter for plagiarism.

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If you have to explain the joke, is it as good? OK, OK. A definition of schadenfreude can be found here.

Thus endth the lesson for today. Enjoy.

Republican foreign policy? Ain't none.

Bush is totally cowed by the foreign policy realm. Here is what Kevin Drum writes about it.

"the Bush administration literally seems to have no foreign policy at all anymore. They have no serious plan for Iraq, no plan for Iran, no plan for North Korea, no plan for democracy promotion, no plan for anything. With the neocons on the outs, Condoleezza Rice at the State Department, and Dick Cheney continuing to drift into an alternate universe at the OVP, the Bush administration seems completely at sea. There's virtually no ideological coherency to their foreign policy that I can discern, and no credible followup on what little coherency is left."

That's it. Bush has no clue how to handle North Korea. No clue on Iran. "Stay the course" (whatever that means) on Iraq. No clue on Russia. No clue on the European Union. No clue on South America. No clue on (for Christ's sake) Mexico.

Gee. He is lucky that Canada isn't a big problem. If it were, he couldn't figure out how to handle it, either.

Mexico: Presidential election photo-finish close

According to Bloomberg this is the status of the election for Mexico's President as held Sunday:

"July 6 (Bloomberg) -- Mexican election authorities continued to recount ballots for a second day, with former Energy Minister Felipe Calderon leading rival Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in the nation's closest-ever presidential vote.

Calderon, 43, from incumbent Vicente Fox's National Action Party, had 35.6 percent of the vote and Lopez Obrador, 52, from the Party of the Democratic Revolution, had 35.59 percent, based on 97.7 percent of ballots counted, according to the federal electoral institute.

The recount began amid fraud allegations levied by Lopez Obrador, who trailed Calderon in preliminary results reported the day after the July 2 election. Mexico's stocks, bonds and the currency tumbled yesterday on concern the final tally may show Calderon, who has vowed to maintain Fox's economic policies, lost the election."

An election this close is bad news for both Mexico and for the U.S. Whoever is finally certified as winning will have little legitimacy, and Mexico is not as stable as the U.S. Such an election that does not give the incumbent the legitimacy of a strong win will severely weaken the incumbent, whoever it is.

This will lead to economic uncertainty that will effect the U.S. economy negatively. It will also cause greater immigration by individuals who (very reasonably) want to raise their families in a more stable social and economic environment. This is the same motivation that led to the German, Bohemian, Irish and Italian immigration in the late 19th century. Probably also the Chinese and Japanese immigration on the west coast, but I am less certain of Chinese and Japanese history at that time.

In this case the U.S. border states, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California, will be on the front lines of the problem.

DeLay to remain on November ballot

It seems that Tom DeLay outsmarted himself when he ran in the Republican primary for his Congressional seat, then tried to duck out and get the Texas Republican Party to replace him on the ballot with someone else who he approved of. U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks announced today that DeLay must remain on the ballot for the November 7th election.

The Austin-American Statesman (Free signup required) has this as breaking news this morning.

"The Texas Democratic Party sued to keep the indicted Sugar Land Republican on the ballot because party officials believed that their candidate Nick Lampson could more easily defeat DeLay instead of a GOP replacement.

Sparks' order prevents state Republican Chairwoman Tina Benkiser from completing the process of naming a DeLay successor. Although the Republican Party is expected to appeal, Sparks' order keeps the campaigns of possible GOP candidates for congressional District 22 in limbo.

Under state law, a political party cannot replace a nominee who resigns in mid-election. But Benkiser said she could replace DeLay because he had become ineligible to represent the GOP on the ballot when he moved to the Virginia condo he has owned for the past 12 years.

DeLay testified that he planned to live indefinitely in Virginia and had rented an office in Washington, D.C. The court also was presented documents showing DeLay has registered to vote in Virginia and had filed state tax documents.

Lawyers for the Democratic Party, however, argued that DeLay's move was just a ploy to circumvent the state election law. They noted that DeLay testified his wife was still living at their Sugar Land residence and that they subpoenaed him for his court appearance at that house.

The U.S. Constitution says a candidate for the U.S. House of representatives must be 25 years old, an American citizen and an inhabitant of the state 'when elected.'"

Note also that Article I Section 4 of the Constitution gives the States the power to determine "The times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives...." so it is unlikely that the appeal will overturn the Texas law which does not permit a political party to replace a weak candidate with a stronger one after the weak candidate won the party primary.

The Republicans will appeal this decision, of course, but they have no strong candidate to appoint anyway. In addition, there are only four months remaining for the appeal to be decided and, if it allowed the Republicans to appoint a new candidate, for that candidate to campaign for office. Even in the strong Republican district that Tom DeLay has left, this is an almost insurmountable barrier to electing a new Republican candidate.

Considering the Republican US Supreme Court recently upheld most of the Tom DeLay instigated mid-term redistricting last week (except for Congressional District 23) there is more than a little poetic justice in this decision.

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See prior post on this subject Judge thinks Tom DeLay withdrew from election.

Vanity Fair exposes Randy "Duke" Cunningham

Randy "Duke" Cunningham was a big story in 2005. He was, and remains, the poster boy for stupid Republican corruption and criminality (as opposed to Tom DeLay who was a great deal smarter. Now Vanity Fair pulls the many stories together into a single story for people who have not been reading each event in his saga as it occurred.

It's a really good write up, even if you have been following the story. There are things you will have missed that they expose and put into context.

The story is not over. Cunningham is really just the warmup for the Abramoff chronicles and the trials of Tom DeLay. What's really interesting is how they are not separate stories. They bleed into each other at the edges, because they all come out of the same Republican attitude that government has no function except maintaining and using the military and providing sources of money for "entrepreneurs" to exploit.

But for right now, go read the Vanity Fair article By Judy Bachrach. It will help you prepare for the news of domestic politics over the next half decade.

Hand recount of Cal Congressional Dist 50 race to be requested

Raw Story reports that the San Diego County Voters Registrar will be asked to conduct a county-paid hand recount of the votes in the special election to fill the seat vacated when Randy "Duke" Cunningham resigned to go to jail. Numerous organizations question the reliability of the uncertified Dieblod electronic voting machines used in the election, particularly since the Voter Registrar allowed election judged to take the machines home with them for up to two weeks prior to the election.

The Diebold voting machines have been demonstrated to be easliy "hackable" in a way so tbat a single person could overturn an election.

Al Qaeda shopped Zarqawi to Bush in exchange for reducing search for Bin Laden

CNN reports that the Intelligence that fingered Zarqawi and led to his death was part of a deal between al Qaeda and the Bush administration. Al Qaeda reported where Zarqawi was, and the Bush administration agreed to reduce the search for bin Laden.

This is a report of the deal:

"Meanwhile, al-Zarqawi's wife told an Italian newspaper that al Qaeda leaders sold him out to the United States in exchange for a promise to let up in the search for Osama bin Laden.

The woman, identified by La Repubblica as al-Zarqawi's first wife, said al Qaeda's top leadership reached a deal with U.S. intelligence because al Zarqawi had become too powerful.

She claimed Sunni tribes and Jordanian secret services mediated the deal.

"My husband has been sold to the Americans," the woman said in an interview published Sunday. "He had become too powerful, too troublesome."

The deal wasn't hard to accept. The Bush administration had already closed down the special CIA CounterTerrorist unit that was set up a decade ago under Bill Clinton to get bin Laden. See this New York Times report:

"The Central Intelligence Agency has closed a unit that for a decade had the mission of hunting Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, intelligence officials confirmed Monday.

The unit, known as Alec Station, was disbanded late last year and its analysts reassigned within the C.I.A. Counterterrorist Center, the officials said.

The decision is a milestone for the agency, which formed the unit before Osama bin Laden became a household name and bolstered its ranks after the Sept. 11 attacks, when President Bush pledged to bring Mr. bin Laden to justice "dead or alive."

In a bureauracy you can determine what the priorities of the top people are by how the organization is structured. This move makes it perfectly clear that bin Laden is worth more to Bush somewhere in a cave in Pakistan than he is caught or killed.

Closing the CIA unit focused on catching or killing bin Laden also provides support to the idea that Bush intentionally failed to provide the troops needed at Tora Bora to catch bin Laden, and he was probably fully aware of the emergency airlift getting top al Qaeda members out before Tora Bora fell.

See also

Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al Qaeda: A Personal Account by the CIA's Key Field Commander

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Meteor Blades at The Next Hurrah provides an excellent discussion of the bin Laden - al-Zarkawi relationship. It was never good.

Tom DeLay's final legal defense fund report.

Tom DeLay has raised $330,000 for his legal defense fund since January 1 and has nearly $1,000,000 in unpaid legal bills at this time according to his final financial disclosure for his legal defense fund. He also has $1,400,000 in his campaign fund which can be used to pay legal bills. He still faces trial in Austin, TX on charges of money-laundering to influence the vote for the Texas House of Representatives for the 2002 election.

This is from the Houston Chronicle.

I wonder if he'll have to start selling assets to pay lawyers.

Lieberman confirms that if he loses Dem Primary he'll bolt party and run as independent

Joe Lieberman has read the handrwriting on the wall. He has confirmed the rumors that he will collect signatures and run as an independent. Of course, if the Democrats nominate him in the contested primary August 8, he'll run as a Democrat. U.S. News & World Report has the story.

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Christy Hardin at FireDogLake has a really good question. "Anyone know of a three-term Senator that has ever had to make such a WATB sore loser threat to petition for independent status on the ballot if they lost their party’s primary?"

This story is also being carried by

1. the Hartford Courant,
2. the AP and
3. Kos at dKos

Thanks to Christy at FireDogLake for the first two links.

Fed Court gives both sides until July 14 to propose changes to Cong. Districts.

From the Detroit Free Press June 30, 2006

"U.S. District Judge T. John Ward said proposed changes to the map are due by July 14. Oral arguments were scheduled for Aug. 3 in Austin."

Looks to me like they are trying to get the 23rd Congressional District and those surrounding it adjusted in time for the November election.

Ann Coulter is a serial plagairist - Wolcott

It seems that Ann Coulter has been plagarizing some of her material. Wolcott has the good on her.

"COPYCATTY COULTER PILFERS PROSE: PRO

"by Philip Recchia

"John Barrie, the creator of a leading plagiarism-recognition system, claimed he found at least three instances of what he calls textbook plagiarism in the leggy blond pundit's Godless: the Church of Liberalism" after he ran the book's text through the company's digital iThenticate program.

"He also says he discovered verbatim lifts in Coulter's weekly column, which is syndicated to more than 100 newspapers, including the Fort Lauderdale (Fla.) Sun-Sentinel and Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle.

"Barrie, CEO of iParadigms, told The Post that one 25-word passage from the Godless chapter titled 'The Holiest Sacrament: Abortion' appears to have been lifted nearly word for word from Planned Parenthood literature published at least 18 months before Coulter's 281-page book was released.

"A separate, 24-word string from the chapter 'The Creation Myth' appeared about a year earlier in the San Francisco Chronicle with just one word change - 'stacked' was changed to 'piled.'

[snip]

"Meanwhile, many of the 344 citations Coulter includes in Godless 'are very misleading,' said Barrie, who holds a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, where he specialized in pattern recognition.

"'They're used purely to try and give the book a higher level of credibility - as if it's an academic work. But her sloppiness in failing to properly attribute many other passages strips it of nearly all its academic merits,' he told The Post.

"Barrie says he also ran Coulter's Universal Press columns from the past 12 months through iThenticate and found similar patterns of cribbing."

Demonstrating that Coulter does not differentiate between a fact and a lie, prefering the lies when they have greater impact, does not reduce her ability to express the desires of the lower class less educated right-wing Fascist wannabees she writes and talks for. But demonstrating her intellectual dishonesty and theft of intellectual propery might limit her effect on the somewhat educated middle class right-wingers who really pay for what she writes.

Coulter is intellectually the equivalent of a right-wing Tammy Faye Baker at Tammy Baker's height of popularity. I can't be sure that Baker was lying, but in Coulter's case she knows she is lying. She is also stealing what she writes. As long as the money rolls in she'll keep it up.

Exposing her as a seriel plagarist should slow down the money flow a bit.

Bring Iraq to an early and honorable end!

This is what Jim Webb is reported in the Richmond Times-Dispatch as saying about the war in Iraq:

"Rather than weighing these suggestions fairly as Americans, this administration constantly chooses to play politics, dismissing well-intentioned concern with such trivial phrases as 'cut and run,'" Webb said.

He continued, "We need to bring the Iraq war to an early and honorable end. We need to begin bringing our troops home soon, as the first step toward a complete military pullout from that country.

"We must do this in order to free up our dedicated military people to fight the war we need to win -- the war against international terrorism -- and so that we have the mobility to confront the other strategic challenges, such as the threat of an emerging China."

So how do we get an administration who places the needs of America and the American troops above their own obsessive needs to gouge the American people in corruption to enrich themselves and to extend their power?

It's time for the Republicans to go.

Neo-Conservatism as defined by Benito Mussolini

I found this over at Booman. It is really accurate, in my opinion.

"Neo-Conservatism is an extreme right-wing ideology which embraces nationalism as the transcendent value of society. The rise of Neo-Conservatism relies upon the manipulation of populist sentiment in times of national crisis. Based on fundamentalist revolutionary ideas, Neo-Conservatism defines itself through intense xenophobia, militarism, and supremacist ideals. Although secular in nature, Neo-Conservatism's emphasis on mythic beliefs such as divine mandates, racial imperatives, and violent struggle places highly concentrated power in the hands of a self-selected elite from whom all authority flows to lesser elites, such as law enforcement, intellectuals, and the media."

Why do I say that Mussolini describes Neo-Conservatism when it didn't exist in 1922? This is his definition of Fascism, with the term Fascism replaced by Neo-Conservatism. No other change.

Go read the rest of what mrboma wrote.

Navy Lawyer who won Hamaden case passed over for promotion.

According to Digby Lt Commander Swift, the navy lawyer who took the Hamden case to the Supreme Court and won, has been passed over for promotion to Commander by the Navy. He had a choice. He could do what the Navy wanted or he could do what the law demanded. He chose the Rule of Law, and the Navy is angry.

Read what he had to say to Chris Matthews:

"MATTHEWS: What about the charge made recently, just a couple minutes ago by Kate O‘Beirne of the “National Review,” that people who fight us who are not in uniform, who do not represent countries who are party to the Geneva Convention shouldn‘t be free riders? They shouldn‘t get Geneva Convention treatment. They should be treated like thugs.

SWIFT: Well, you know, if you‘re looking at it from that way, we have a lot of criminals here in this country. And to prejudge anyone that we capture outside the country as a thug, why are we having a trial in the first place? We‘ve already decided they were guilty.

What the Supreme Court said is you have the trial first, you use the procedures that are set up under international law, and then you decide whether they‘re a thug. You don‘t make the thug determination going in."

It's sort of strange that the conservatives only remember that you have to have the trial first when it is a conservative like Rep. Jerry Lewis being charged with a crime, and ignore it for anyone they don't like and want to smear. The lesson of Gitmo is that for their enemies, the trial not only doesn't come FIRST, their enemies get charged and found guilty without a trial at all.

Oh, and don't ask for an effective defense lawyer. Conservatives HATE defense lawyers! Especially effective ones like Lt. Commander Swift. But the Rule of Law requires them.

Rule of Law & the genius of American Democracy

Michael Signer discusses the Rule of Law and the genius of American Democracy as demonstrated in the Supreme Court's Hamden decision yesterday. Here is a sample:

"American liberal democracy is different [from totalitarianism]. The burdens are heavy. Rawls' theory demands thoughtful and constant commitment to key principles of equality and justice, and constantly considering the gifts you did not earn that give you advantages over others. Arendt goes even farther -- we have the ability to introduce new things into the world just by being human. Our capacity to create -- in the beginning, what she calls our "natality," and then our ability to say something unpredictable, to bear children, to create new ideas -- is also our unique political ability, and the responsibility."

It is over at Democracy Arsenal. Go read it.

Computer with vets data found Wednesday

The laptop computer with the data on veterans was located Wednesdat according to a report on MSNBC today. The FBI says that forensic tests indicate that the critical data was not accesses.

It takes only one person to steal a states election

The Cybersecurity experts have weighed in on the ease of stealing an election that uses electronic voting. This from the Washington Post:

"The experts thought about all the ways to do it. And they concluded in a report issued yesterday that it would take only one person, with a sophisticated technical knowledge and timely access to the software that runs the voting machines, to change the outcome. {Snip]

The report concluded that the three major electronic voting systems in use have significant security and reliability vulnerabilities. But it added that most of these vulnerabilities can be overcome by auditing printed voting records to spot irregularities. And while 26 states require paper records of votes, fewer than half of those require regular audits.

"With electronic voting systems, there are certain attacks that can reach enough voting machines . . . that you could affect the outcome of the statewide election," said Lawrence D. Norden, associate counsel of the Brennan Center. [Snip]

Voting machine vendors have dismissed many of the concerns, saying they are theoretical and do not reflect the real-life experience of running elections, such as how machines are kept in a secure environment.

"It just isn't the piece of equipment," said David Bear, a spokesman for Diebold Election Systems, one of the country's largest vendors. "It's all the elements of an election environment that make for a secure election."

"This report is based on speculation rather than an examination of the record. To date, voting systems have not been successfully attacked in a live election," said Bob Cohen, a spokesman for the Election Technology Council, a voting machine vendors' trade group. "The purported vulnerabilities presented in this study, while interesting in theory, would be extremely difficult to exploit."

The guys who are defending the current machines are the same ones who are selling those machines and have a large invested stake in seeing them used as is.

There are ways to make sure the vote totals are accurate, but they depend on the honesty of a few people who are directly responsible for the machines. Such people are vulnerable to influence of various types.

Does anyone really think that Katherine Harris in Florida was concerned about Al Gore getting a fair count? I mean she was Florida Secretary of State at the same time she was the Co-chairperson of the Bush for President organization in Florida. The Florida Governor, Jeb Bush, was George Bush's brother. And the election was stolen.

What stops that kind of action in any state in the Nation?

More on what is wrong with conservatism

Stong conservatives cannot run effective competitive companies. Here is Alan Wolfe's explanation for that:

"Conservatives fail because those who hate government cannot run it very well – the theme of my recent article in the July/August issue of The Washington Monthly. But then there is also what can be called conservative management theory. Conservatives have strong ideas about how organizations ought to be run – and those ideas invariably make them run badly.

One such idea is that no information hostile to those in charge should ever leak out. The result, however, is that no good information ever leaks in. The smaller the number of decision-makers, the less the knowledge on which decisions are based. It is not good to keep a tight ship if the ship always sinks.

Conservatives love to proclaim courage a virtue, and a manly one at that. But loyalty to the man at the top, another conservative management idea, encourages fawning among all those below. If you want to fill an organization from top to bottom with chickens, give medals of freedom to as many people as you can.

Finally, conservatives view organizations in exactly the opposite way they treat markets. The economy, they insist, works most efficiently when spontaneous decisions emerge from the uncoordinated actions of millions of anonymous consumers. But when they run organizations, they insist on formal organization charts, aim to leave nothing to chance, and treat all decisions as authoritative. Their theory of the private sector is borrowed from Adam Smith. Their approach to the public sector owes far too much to state socialism."

This set of beliefs about appropriate leadership also applies to fedual leaders. They focus all power on the leader and resist any review, any checks-and-balances, and any outside news organizations from telling anything negative about the leader or the organization. They will spout a lot about "morale."

The fact is that good organizations work very hard to get both positive and negative information from the lower ranks to the higher ones. Those organizations who do not fail in competitive strategies over long period.

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[See also Conservatism as a philosophy has failed America.]

Supreme Count upholds (most of) Texas' redistricting.

The U.S. Supreme Court essentially upheld the Tom DeLay inspired (and paid for) mid-decade redistricting by the Texas Legislature. Except that the district 23 especially designed to reelect Tony Bonilla (R, TX-23) was declared unconstitutional.

"Here is a key paragraph in Justice Anthony M. Kennedy's plurality opinion in the Texas redistricting case: "In sum, we disagree with appellants' view that a legislature's decision to override a valid, court-drawn plan mid-decade is sufficiently suspect to give shape to a reliable standard for identifying unconstiutitonal political gerrymanders. We conclude that appellants have established no legally iimpermissible use of political classifications. For this reason, they state no claim on which relief may be granted for their statewide challenge."

The District that the Court found legally wanting is a huge Latino-dominated district that the state created in an attempt to salvage the political fortunes of a Latino member of Congress, Republican Henry Bonilla. He had been losing strength among Latino voters, so the state legislature drew a new district by including a largely Anglo, Republican area in central Texas. That, a Court majority found, was the product of a "troubling blend of politics and race -- and the resulting vote dilution of a group that was beginning to achieve [the Voting Rights Act's] goal of overcoming prior electorial discrimination." It "cannot be sustained," the Court concluded.

Whether the state legislature can repair the problem found by the Court in that one District without redrawing the plan statewide is uncertain at this point. The Court majority found no legal flaw in any other part of the plan."

So middecade redistricting as a result of the turnover of a legislature to an opposing party is legal. The total elimination of the District that Martin Frost used to represent in Fort Worth and Arlington by sending tendrils of surrounding Republican districts into East Fort Worth to "sop up" Democratic voters and swamp then with surbaban Republicans is legal. The only thing that wasn't legal was to remove errant Democratic voting Latinos from Henry Bolilla's district 23 and replace them with reliable Republican white voters.

I'm sure the Republican Texas Legislature's computers will make short work of the minor discrepancy in district 23 with a minimum of damage to the otber Republican-dominated districts created in Texas. We can thank Bush, Frist, and Joe Lieberman for Roberts and Alito on the Supreme Counrt which gave us this abortion of a decision.

The actual decision can be found here. The AP wirestory is here.