Another Scandalicious Soakfest

Yet more Iraq-related lies and cover-ups, the details of which are conveniently released late Friday? What a surprise:

BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 29 — The State Department agency in charge of $1.4 billion in reconstruction money in Iraq used an accounting shell game to hide ballooning cost overruns on its projects there and knowingly withheld information on schedule delays from Congress, a federal audit released late Friday has found.

The agency hid construction overruns by listing them as overhead or administrative costs, according to the audit, written by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, an independent office that reports to Congress and the Pentagon.

Called the United States Agency for International Development, or A.I.D., the agency administers foreign aid projects around the world. It has been working in Iraq on reconstruction since shortly after the 2003 invasion.

The report by the inspector general’s office does not give a full accounting of all projects financed by the agency’s $1.4 billion budget, but cites several examples.

The findings appeared in an audit of a children’s hospital in Basra, but they referred to the wider reconstruction activities of the development agency in Iraq. American and Iraqi officials reported this week that the State Department planned to drop Bechtel, its contractor on that project, as signs of budget and scheduling problems began to surface.

The United States Embassy in Baghdad referred questions to the State Department in Washington, which declined to comment immediately.

The Bechtel Group is an enormous multinational building, engineering, and project management conglomerate. According to The Center for Public Integrity:

In April 2003, the U.S. Agency for International Development announced that Bechtel won a cost-plus-fixed-fee contract worth up to $680 million to rebuild Iraqi infrastructure such as schools, roads and sewers, as well as perform "institutional capacity building" to maintain the improvements and create "roadmaps for future longer term needs and investments." The contract had been awarded after Bechtel and five other companies, including Fluor, Louis Berger Group, Parsons and Halliburton's Kellogg, Brown & Root, were privately selected by the agency to bid. The contract also allows indemnification of the company against chemical or biological weapons, mines and other perils, according to the contract, obtained by the Center for Public Integrity through the Freedom of Information Act. In September 2003, USAID announced that, due to the poor infrastructure and deteriorating stability in Iraq, Bechtel would receive an additional $350 million on the contract, raising the contract's potential ceiling to $1.03 billion.

USAID was heavily criticized for conducting the contracting process outside of public view. USAID spokesmen said the agency used an exemption from federal contract procurement regulations that allowed it to limit competition for contracts in cases where open bidding would impair foreign aid by slowing down operations.

$1.03 billion of our taxes to fund Bechtel's Iraq contract alone, and things aren't finished yet--not by a long shot. Hmmm...I wonder how those rebuilding efforts in New Orleans are going?

Deconstructing the Blastocyst

In the past couple of weeks, we've seen and heard a great deal of hand-wringing and emotionally charged rhetoric with regard to the issue of embryonic stem cell research.

Opponents, including President Bush, the Catholic Church, and Fundamentalist Christians, maintain that the human blastocyst--a hollow cluster of about 120 cells at the 5-7 day stage--is a human life, thus the separation and cultivation of these cells for other purposes, even the development of potentially lifesaving stem cell lines, is murder (although in the President's case, it depends on who speaks for him), issues of said blastocysts remaining in cryogenic limbo or simply defrosted and discarded at the IVF clinics' discretion notwithstanding.

Supporters of this important research point to the many potentials of embryonic stem cells, namely, the cultivation of healthy, organ-specific tissue for therapeutic use in all manner of life-threatening illnesses, including diabetes, Alzheimer's disease, and Parkinson's disease.

Missing from most of the media reports is a simple, factual description of that which we are debating: the process of creating stem cells, and the blastocyst itself. To that end, I offer this, from the National Institute of Health's stem cell information page (bolds mine):

Embryonic stem cells, as their name suggests, are derived from embryos. Specifically, embryonic stem cells are derived from embryos that develop from eggs that have been fertilized in vitro—in an in vitro fertilization clinic—and then donated for research purposes with informed consent of the donors. They are not derived from eggs fertilized in a woman's body.

Bearing in mind that an actual blastocyst is about the size of a pinhead, look at the following enlarged photograph, from the Advanced Fertility Center of Chicago site.

The developing fetus itself is the area marked as "ICM" (inner cell mass). The blastocoel cavity in the center is marked as "C". The trophectoderm cells that will form the placenta surround the cavity - one is marked with a "T".

Notice that this cluster of cells is not entirely made up of the very early stages of a baby; rather, some cells are designated for the formation of the placenta, an amazing and temporary, task-specific, unique-to-female-mammals organ, the functions of which--should successful implantation occur--include receiving nutrients and oxygen from the mother's blood and passing out waste and carbon dioxide. Further, there is no nervous system, no brain, and no heart--only multipurpose cells that might, at some point in the future, differentiate and become the beginnings of these organs and systems.

And that is why scientists consider the blastocyst's cells to be truly Jack-of-all-trades in nature. Given the right circumstances and time, they can become brain cells, pancreas cells, placental cells, and so on.

Here is another fact that is, more often than not, conveniently left out of all those mainstream media stem cell sound-bites to which we're treated: when a blastocyst develops within a woman's body, there is an approximately 40% chance that it will not successfully implant itself into the uterine wall--at the same 5-7 day point when its petri dish counterpart would be utilized for stem cell cultivation--and will therefore not develop into a fetus, but rather, will simply be expelled and a normal menstrual period will follow a couple of weeks thereafter.

According to the President's logic, then, as many as 40% of all sexually-active menstruating women could be party to murder every month.

After weighing the President's statements and drawing upon my own logical processes, I came up with this:

Utilizing a 5-day-old American blastocyst for stem cell lines = murder

Killing a 5-year-old Iraqi child while waging an illegal and immoral war = collateral damage

At this point, would it be stating the obvious to assert that the inhabitant of America's highest office is being utterly ridiculous?

Finally, I will submit this Put Your Own DNA Where Your Mouth Is hypothetical: supposing a loved one of mine were suffering from a disease that could be helped or cured by tissue resulting from embroynic stem cells; would my husband and I donate our own sperm and eggs for in vitro creation of blastocysts to be used for stem cell cultivation?

In a New York minute or a London heartbeat. Whichever is fastest.

Senate Approves Renewal of Voting Rights Act

The U.S. Senate voted unanimously today to renew the Voting Rights Act:

WASHINGTON - The American Civil Liberties Union applauded the Senate’s swift reauthorization today of the Voting Rights Act, the landmark civil rights law first passed in 1965 to prevent voting discrimination. The legislation passed unanimously without any damaging or weakening amendments on a vote of 98 to 0. The measure now heads to the president for his signature.

“Today’s vote is a victory for all Americans,” said Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “The original Voting Rights Act was a promise our government made, and that promise was reaffirmed today. We must look ahead to make sure the promise is as true and strong as it was in 1965. Malicious attempts by lawmakers to derail reauthorization show the continuing need for this law and its enforcement. President Bush needs to sign this legislation as soon as possible.”

98 to 0. Numbers that virtually anyone can, ah, understand. May the Groper-in-Chief sign this into law without hesitation.

House Passes Voting Rights Act Renewal

Need some good news on this unrelentingly steamy-hot Friday? The subhed of this piece--Southern conservative efforts on amendments fail--sets the happy tone:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The House voted Thursday to renew the 1965 Voting Rights Act, rejecting efforts by Southern conservatives to relax federal oversight of their states in a debate haunted by the ghosts of the civil rights movement.

The 390-33 vote sends the measure to the Senate. The act bans discrimination in voting, including through poll taxes and literacy tests, and requires some states, mostly in the South, to clear proposed changes in voting procedures with the Justice Department.

Southern conservatives had complained that the act punishes their states for racist voting histories they say they've overcome.

"By passing this rewrite of the Voting Rights Act, Congress is declaring from on high that states with voting problems 40 years ago can simply never be forgiven," said Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, a Georgia Republican and one of several lawmakers pressing for changes to the law to ease its requirements on Southern states.

The House overwhelmingly rejected amendments that would have shortened the renewal period from 25 years to a decade and would have struck its requirement that ballots in some states be printed in several languages.

Supporters of the law as written called the amendments "poison pills" designed to kill the renewal because if any were adopted by the full House, the underlying renewal might have failed.

Supporters used stark images and emotional language to make clear that the pain of racial struggle -- and racist voting practices -- still stings.

Please take a few moments to call and/or write to your Senators and let them know you're counting on their support for the renewal of this vital legislation.

UPDATE: You can check out how your Congresspersons voted here. Were they among those 33 who, incredibly, said NAY to The Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, and Coretta Scott King Voting Rights Act Reauthorization and Amendments Act? It's worth a click to find out.
(Hat-tip to David)

On Heading Off Life's Stressful Moments

When it comes to anger management, Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

(Consider this fairly work-safe, unless of course one is an employee of Chanel, Air France, or Moët et Chandon.)

Bellissimo!

An amazingly tight match, a nailbiting shoot-out, and in the end it's Italy.

Won, won.

It's Friday: Let There Be Pussies

Unwed teenage mother Maisy is blissed out as her babies--with Marley in the middle--nurse for the tenth time that morning (from July '05)

Casa Azzuri: Everything but the Blues

You can take the footballer out of Italy, but you'll never, ever be able to separate the Italian from his beloved cuisine and culture:

DUISBURG, Germany - They packed all the important stuff when they traveled to the World Cup: pasta, prosciutto and parmesan.

Italy might be hungry for its first World Cup title in 24 years, but the Azzurri aren’t lacking the comfort food they’re familiar with. As they prepare to face France on Sunday, they have everything they’re used to — drama, delirium and distraction.

[.....]

MSV Arena, the home of MSV Duisburg, has been renamed Casa Azzurri. There are red, white and green banners everywhere, with a gold star in each color — where will they put the fourth star if they win their fourth title?

The salamis hanging are Italian. So is the coffee. Even the beer.

Nearby is the team hotel, Landhaus Milser. It’s co-run by a native of Calabria, and many of the employees are Italian. Apparently to minimize distractions, female waitresses were sent on vacation.

Female waitresses were sent on vacation? Surely the boys in blue are far too focused on winning the World Cup to notice a few pretty girls. And besides, aren't most of them engaged or married?

(Hat-tip to Lisa in Baltimore)

And Now, Fencegate

What a tangled mess of second-rate barbed wire the whole Minutemen Project / Build it And They Will Turn Back border fence endeavor is turning into. John Amato of Crooks and Liars lays out the story:

Glenn Spencer (head of Tanton’s American Patrol) turns on Chris Simcox.

And from the above-linked website:

Chris Simcox is collecting massive amounts of money and not routing it out to the Minuteman Projects. Our only question is why are folks that mean well and want to contribute STILL sending money (lots of money!) to Chris Simcox when there have been many indications in the past of improper distribution of donations submitted to MCDC. Improper as in they get as far as Chris Simcox and promptly vanish.

Apparently, Mr. Simcox solicited donations from passionate devotees of North American isolationism (a.k.a. border-state Republicans) by promoting his plan as an Israeli-style fence when it's actually just a five-strand barbed wire livestock fence--hardly a deterrent to the desperate, hungry, and jobless people who for years have taken far greater risks to enter the United States.

And all those donations? Well, you know what they say: foolish, minute men and their money will soon be parted.

Italy, Finally

From the afternoon fireworks on the field in Dortmund, Germany, a few thousand miles away, to the spectacular nighttime ones that lit up the dark and humid skies over downtown St. Petersburg, Florida, the Fourth of July was an explosively exciting day indeed.

When the thrilling Italy vs. Germany World Cup semi-final went into overtime, we bit our lips and crossed our fingers, knowing all too well that a tight game can literally be kicked out from under you, as it was on Saturday when England lost to Portugal in a heartbreaking shoot-out. Neither England nor Portugal had scored a goal after an entire match, plus two fifteen-minute overtime periods, and the teams had to face off in a dreaded roulette-like finale that ultimately left Britons drained and depressed. A weeping Beckham would resign from his post as captain the following day.

We didn't want to see another shoot-out like that. So when yesterday's first overtime period began, we held our breath and willed the Forza Azzuri to get that bloody ball into the net. And I think we might have shouted, too. Just a little.

Fabio Grosso heard us just in time, scoring a spectacular and twisty goal thanks to a clever assist by teammate Andrea Pirlo. At the 119 minute mark. Then Alessandro Del Piero scored again, as if to show the world that this was no fluke, that Italy was the champion team here.

Point final.

Marley and His Siblings

Clockwise, from top left: Marley, Helena, Lance, Michael, Shaniqua (hiding under Michael's paws) and White Socks
Last fall, my hard drive crashed (probably due to my Powerbook's battery overheating, which was recalled shortly thereafter). With it went a lot of precious photographs, to my endless horror, many of which I was able to recover from Roberto's computer. Not the above shot, though. This morning, my friend Lisa in Baltimore reminded me that she still had the kitties-on-the-condo picture in her email files, and she was kind enough to send it. I thought readers might enjoy seeing Marley and his brothers and sisters as babies.

We have two cats at the nursery/farm (Ally and Giulia) as well as Maisy here in St. Pete, plus several big dogs; it wasn't possible to keep all six kittens indefinitely. Still, it was very, very hard to part with these beauties. Today, they're all healthy and happy--renamed and well-loved--and they're getting the personal attention that cats so adore.

Bon Weekend!

Happy Birthday Marley!

He's Marley, he's Marley,
He's awesome and he's gnarly!
He's black and white and cute;
He wears a furry birthday suit.
He's Marley!

One year ago, our lovely new foundling, an unwed mother-to-be that Son Three named Maisy, ducked into my closet and gave birth to these precious little wet pom-pons. She'd been so quiet about it, and when my friend Jade and I opened the door, she had just delivered the last and was turning around in circles, completely disoriented. One marmalade kitten was curled behind a flip-flop; others were scattered around the fallen hangers and shoeboxes; a tiny black one had landed in one of my gigantic fuzzy slippers: Marley.

Jade and I promptly searched the area and counted six. We retrieved the cat bed from the boys' closet, in which Maisy had expressed interest the previous day, and placed the incredibly small babies along her abdomen. We checked on her an hour later and were amazed to find a spotlessly clean mother with six fluffy and well-groomed kittens enjoying their first meal.

Robert and I found good homes for five of the offspring. All were gorgeous, and though Marley was not the prettiest by any definition--until recently, his disproportionately big ears made him look like a fruit bat (shhhh!)--we knew almost right away that he would be our Special Boy and then some. A cat who knows when you need a friend; a cat with piercing eyes that look straight into your soul. A cat who thinks nothing of clearing a desk of each and every project and piece of paperwork, leaving footprints on your laptop just to let you know he was there.

Marley has no problem stretching out in (and shedding all over) a basket of warm white towels fresh from the dryer or helping himself to the yogurt you just opened. If I set out a full bowl of chow for Maisy and him because I am going to be out for the day, he considers it an invitation to start pounding every bit of food right then and there; thus, we've recently started giving him Iams Weight Control in a lame human attempt to stave off the middle-age-spread that's already taken hold of his barely-out-of-kittenhood frame.

All our animal companions wind up getting theme songs. The melody of Marley's (lyrics above) is something like that of Rain, Rain, Go Away, in case you felt like singing it.

Cheers to Marley, warm and ever-purring contributor of yet more testosterone to our overflowing Boys' Club.

Luca il Magnifico

Luca Toni adds two amazing goals to Gianluca Zambrotta's early one and secures Italy's place in the semi-final

Viva Italia! The Azzuri have been called all sorts of nasty names; they've been accused of being defensive players that can't score goals.

All I can say is: 3-0, Tomasi nel dubbio.

On Defending Italy

Alessandro Nesta promises to be back for the World Cup semi-final
Bravo Alessandro, and well said:

(ANSA) - Duisburg, June 28 - Injured Italy stopper Alessandro Nesta hit back Wednesday at offensive jibes a German weekly published following the Azzurri's last-gasp World Cup win over Australia .

On Tuesday the online version of Der Spiegel featured a supposedly humorous opinion piece that described Italian men as "greasy", "parasitic", "cheats" and "mummy's boys" .

"We are a people of hard-workers," responded Nesta .

"Italians have taken their fashion and food all over the world. They criticize us for the way we are, but then they want to dress and eat like us".

[.....]

The AC Milan star, considered the world's best defender by many, also rejected criticism of the way Italy are performing in Germany 2006 .

"If everyone attacks us, it means they fear us," the 30-year-old continued. "We are indifferent to these things; the words are carried away by the wind. It has become fashionable to attack Italian soccer, but we are playing more offensively at this World Cup than usual". Nesta confirmed that a groin injury which flared up during Italy's 2-0 group-phase win over the Czech Republic will keep him out of Friday's quarter-final with the Ukraine of former club-mate Andriy Shevchenko .

"You have to be 100% to contain him," he explained. "You have to make the least possible number of mistakes. "He has no weak spots and you can't let him go for the whole 90 minutes" .

But Nesta promised that he "will do everything to be in the semi-final", if Italy go through.

Supreme Court: Bush Went Too Far at Gitmo

BREAKING

The Supreme Court has just ruled that President Bush went too far in creating war tribunals and denying so-called detainees access to the U.S. courts (bolds mine):

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that President Bush overstepped his authority in creating military war crimes trials for Guantanamo Bay detainees, a rebuke to the administration and its aggressive anti-terror policies.

Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the opinion, which said the proposed trials were illegal under U.S. law and the Geneva Convention.

The case, one of the most significant involving presidential war powers cases since World War II, was brought by Guantanamo prisoner Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who was a driver for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush established special war crimes tribunals for trying prisoners held at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

Of about 450 prisoners at Guantanamo, only Hamdan and nine others face charges before a tribunal. Human rights groups have criticized the tribunals, formally called military commissions, for being fundamentally unfair.

The Big Gavel falls, and the pendulum of politics begins its swing away from the far reaches of absurdity where it has hovered for too many years. May it never revisit those frightening places.

Bravo Totti!

Such a beautiful...penalty kick.
When it comes to football, one might say the boys of Casa Litbrit are un poco pazzi. Crazy. And today's Italy-Australia match had Mama gnawing at her nails: the score would not budge from 0:0 and it went right down to the wire. It would be up to Francesco Totti, he of the recently-healed Bionic leg. Unlike many athletes who find themselves in the vice-grip of such pressure, Totti barely paused for a millisecond before delivering a heart-stopping penalty kick into the goal, securing Italy's place in the World Cup quarterfinals.

As for my three Italo-brits, an interesting conundrum--a conflict of DNA, if you will--may befall them should England and Italy face each other in the final. For whom will they cheer? Or will it be an authentic case of win-win?

Imagine: Beckham...Totti. Ah, it's all good.

Clean Air, Bush's Voluntary Compliance Policy, and The Supremes

STOP! In the name of Law...
Today, the highest court in the land announced it will begin debating the legality of the Bush Administration's decision to allow self-policing and voluntary compliance with federal clean air laws.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court agreed Monday to consider whether the Bush administration must regulate carbon dioxide to combat global warming, setting up what could be one of the court's most important decisions on the environment.

The decision means the court will address whether the administration's decision to rely on voluntary measures to combat climate change are legal under federal clean air laws.

"This is the whole ball of wax. This will determine whether the Environmental Protection Agency is to regulate greenhouse gases from cars and whether EPA can regulate carbon dioxide from power plants," said David Bookbinder, an attorney for the Sierra Club.

Of course, this is meeting with plenty of resistance from the usual suspects:

"Fundamentally, we don't think carbon dioxide is a pollutant, and so we don't think these attempts are a good idea," said John Felmy, chief economist of the American Petroleum Institute, a trade group representing oil and gas producers.

Yeah, yeah, we know. You call it life.

Palast in Tampa: "America Has Vote-Counting Apartheid", and More

Greg Palast signs books after an inspiring speech at the University of Tampa, June 24, 2006.
This Saturday evening, Roberto and I braved steam heat and a relentless summer downpour and headed to the University of Tampa's Fletcher Lounge for Greg Palast's final U.S. speaking engagement promoting his new book, Armed Madhouse. The event was sponsored by our local community radio station, the venerable (and wonderful) WMNF.

Introducing Mr. Palast was a famous Floridian whom many have called a true American hero: Ion Sancho, the Leon County, Florida elections supervisor who helped expose Diebold & DRE voting machine flaws. Sancho has been an outspoken proponent of verified voting; Saturday night he drew raucous applause with this statement:

We are born, and we're given a certificate to prove we exist. When we graduate, when we get married, when we buy a house or a car--there is a piece of paper that legally confirms these things. When we go to the grocery store and buy our lettuce and tomatoes and beef, we get a receipt that states what we purchased and how much it cost. Yet when we perform the most important duty as citizens--when we cast our votes--we do not have any way of knowing if our vote was recorded correctly or if it will be counted...ladies and gentlemen, I submit that our vote is more important than our lettuce and tomatoes.

And the energy simply grew from there. When Palast walked to the lecturn, wearing a bright tie and his signature fedora, the cheers and applause went on for minutes. Palast is well-known for his tenacious reporting and groundbreaking exposés, but he's also a man who embodies the spirit and ethos of the old-school reporter--beholden to no-one and nothing but the Truth; indeed, he was described by Sancho as "...fearless; a pitbull...the only reporter to show up in my office after the election and continually call me to follow up on stories."

Palast began by holding up a piece of paper with simple pie charts depicting the results of CNN's exit polls in Ohio, compiled at 1:05 am November 3rd 2004, just after voting ended. There were two black and white circles, one for male and one for female voters. Palast noted that if 51% of males voted for Kerry, and 47% of females didn't vote for Kerry (meaning 53% did), "...what was this Third Sex that put George W. Bush in the White House again?"

From there, Palast launched into a detailed analysis of the dirty and astonishing tricks the RNC pulled in 2004, including the unprecedented challenge of more than three million voters which resulted in them having to cast provisional ballots because they were guilty of a "crime": Voting While Black. A million of these provisional ballots were never counted, and the vast majority of these were ballots cast by people of color. He pointed to statistics showing the chance that an African American's vote will be "spoiled"--not counted--is 900% higher than that of a white person's vote. The rate of spoilage is even higher for votes cast by Native Americans.

Shifting gears from outraged to instructive, Palast then discussed the realities behind the Iraq war, starting with some historical perspective. He talked about the origins of the oil-rich area that the politicians outlined and began calling Iraq in the late 1920's and the subsequent sale of its oil monopoly to British Petroleum and Exxon; then, he discussed how members of the Big Oil cartel controlled prices by capping or manipulating the supply of oil throughout the twentieth century; finally, he discussed George W. Bush's problem with addiction--not to drugs, but to Petrodollars, and explained how the ongoing suppression of Iraq's oil production was intended to keep prices in the stratosphere. From Palast's book, Armed Madhouse:

Iraq has 74 known fields and only 15 in production; 526 known "structures" (oil-speak for "pools of oil"), only 125 drilled. And they won't be drilled, not unless Iraq says "Mother, may I?" to Saudi Arabia, or, as the Baker (Bush crony and Saudi Arabia's attorney James Baker)/CFR paper says, "Saudi Arabia may punish Iraq." And believe me, Iraq wouldn't want that.

The decision to expand production has, for now, been kept out of Iraq's hands by the latest method of suppressing Iraq's oil flow--the 2003 invasion and resistance to invasion.

[snip]

Whether by design or happenstance, this decline in output has resulted in tripling the profits of the five U.S. oil majors to $89 billion for a single year, 2005, compared to pre-invasion 2002.

That suggests an interesting arithmetic equation. Big Oil's profits are up $89 billion a year in the same period the oil industry boosted contributions to Mr. Bush's reelection campaign to roughly $40 million.

And there was more: Palast talked about Venezuela's vast oil reserves and the country's spread-the-wealth leader--Hugo Chavez--who is ever poised to throw a monkey wrench into Big Oil's works and whom BushCo dearly wishes would go away permanently (so much so, one of their favorite "spiritual advisors" actually called for this. No, really.)

Palast concluded by telling us how we could take arms against this oil-clotted and seemingly insurmountable sea of troubles: by voting. That's right. He wants us to not only get out and vote, but bring along as many new voters as we can, saying "If they're going to steal 5 million votes in the 2008 election, well, we'll just have to counter that with six million more votes. And to those who say But they're just going to steal my vote anyway, I say this: Make them. Let's make them steal your vote."

Finally, BBC's star American reporter said two things that were breathtaking in their originality, brilliance, and capacity to stir the collective soul of his audience. First, he held up a copy of Armed Madhouse and told us "I have not copyrighted this. I want you to take it all, reprint whatever you want--just get it out there." Then he left us with this, a quote from--of all people--George W. Bush:

"Do not fight for a dying regime. It is not worth your life."

GOP Launches Yet More Assaults on Minority (read: Democratic) Voters

Empty vessels ring deep, and empty and/or degraded seventeen-year-old mustard gas canisters make for some ear-splitting noise when a Republican on the way down decides it's time to Santorum.

[Santorum v.i. & t., i.e. to Santorum, Use national media to spew untrue, button-pushing and fearmongering assertions about WMD's in order to detract attention from the lousy job one is doing, from one's plummeting poll numbers, or both.]

Considering the racket that was going on, one could be forgiven for missing this unsavory little development: The Republican Party decided yesterday to delay the renewal of The Voting Rights Act. Writing for British newspaper The Guardian, Greg Palast reports:

This is a strategic stall — meant to de-criminalize the Republican Party’s new game of challenging voters of color by the hundreds of thousands.

In the 2004 Presidential race, the GOP ran a massive multi-state, multi-million-dollar operation to challenge the legitimacy of Black, Hispanic and Native-American voters. The methods used broke the law — the Voting Rights Act. And while the Bush Administration’s Civil Rights Division grinned and looked the other way, civil rights lawyers are circling, preparing to sue to stop the violations of the Act before the 2008 race.

Therefore, Republicans have promised to no longer break the law — not by going legit… but by eliminating the law.

That's right. The party in charge wants to de-criminalize actions they took in 2004, namely, challenging an unprecedented three million-plus voters at the polls by claiming their registrations had been removed or that their addresses were not legitimate, and then requiring these voters to submit "provisional" ballots. Over a million of these provisional ballots were never counted. And over 88% of them were cast by minority--read: Democratic--voters.

This isn’t a number dropped on me from a black helicopter. They come from the raw data of the US Election Assistance Commission in Washington, DC.

At the heart of the GOP’s mass challenge of voters were what the party’s top brass called, “caging lists” — secret files of hundreds of thousands of voters, almost every one from a Black-majority voting precinct.

When our investigations team, working for BBC TV, got our hands on these confidential files in October 2004, the Republicans told us the voters listed were their potential “donors.” Really? The sheets included pages of men from homeless shelters in Florida.

Donor lists, my ass. Every expert told us, these were “challenge lists,” meant to stop these Black voters from casting ballots.

[snip]

Why didn’t the GOP honchos ‘fess up to challenging these allegedly illegal voters? Because targeting voters of color is AGAINST THE LAW. The law in question is the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

[snip]

The Republicans target Black folk not because they don’t like the color of their skin. They don’t like the color of their vote: Democrat. For that reason, the GOP included on its hit list Jewish retirement homes in Florida. Apparently, the GOP was also gunning for the Elderly of Zion.

Again, if we don't have fair, transparent, and voter-verifiable elections, we have no democracy. I urge everyone to contact his Congresspersons and express his outrage. We can't rely on American mainstream media to report on this travesty; MSNBC's Keith Olbermann was the only newsperson who gave substantial airtime to reporting on the "irregularities" surrounding Ohio's part in the 2004 presidential election. It should alarm every single person in this country that the BBC and other European media have paid, and continue to pay, attention to the undermining of American democracy while our own media remain mute, or worse, ridicule anyone who speaks out on this (Robert Kennedy comes immediately to mind) by suggesting he is a tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theorist.

If you need further convincing as to the gravity of the situation, consider this:

Now that the GOP has been caught breaking the Voting Rights law, they have found a way to keep using their expensively obtained “caging” lists: let the law expire next year. If the Voting Rights Act dies in 2007, the 2008 race will be open season on dark-skinned voters. Only the renewal of the Voting Rights Act can prevent the planned racial wrecking of democracy.

UPDATE: Pam has also written an important post about the 17 states in the high-risk category for vote fraud because they use electronic voting machines (DRE's) with no paper trails.

As The Dominoes Fall

This morning brings news of the first Abramoff-related conviction, specifically, four guilty counts for ex-Bush aide David Safavian.

WASHINGTON - A jury Tuesday convicted a former Bush administration official of four counts of lying and obstructing justice in the first trial to be held in connection with the influence-peddling scandal of lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

On the fifth day of deliberations, the jury found David Safavian — a former chief of staff at the General Services Administration — guilty of four of five counts of lying and obstructing justice.

Safavian was charged with lying about his relationship with Abramoff and his knowledge of the lobbyist’s interest in acquiring properties from GSA, the property managing agency for the federal government. He was also charged with obstructing investigators looking into a golf trip he took with Abramoff in 2002.

Please join me in raising your coffee mugs and toasting the fall of the first domino in what will surely be a long and twisted ribbon of tumbling black tiles. For at its knotted end, there stands--for the time being--that mass of powerful and corrupt leaders who have ruled the game for far too long. They are government's shameful gangrene, its heart of darkness.