Dismal Rethug 2006 Prospects Delight Countryside

In a WaPo comment on the top 20 close House races, quoth RMill: "The impact of Abramhoff and further developments in Iraq could shift this to a more decisive Democratic year. That remains to be seen."

Yep, those shoes have yet to drop. But.

No way any good news comes out of Abramoff for the Rethugs. Unless it's that there are no collateral indictments of Rethug Congresscritters based on his testimony prior to the elections. (No Dems will be indicted because Abramoff never gave a single Dem a single dollar. Tribes did, he didn't.) Justice Attorneys may be forced into a go-slow mode by delayed or withheld higher-up approvals, but it strains probability to think political interference with the prosecutorial process can wholly succeed in putting off the impact of the lobbying scandal for eight whole months.

And no way there is any actual good news out of Iraq ever again. Their governmentt structure is a shell solely propped up by Administration hot air. Massacres, executions, maimings, roadside bombings of US troops and Iranian sectarians -- you can't defend against that stuff unless you had put in enough troops to begin with.

Either factor alone would be a multiplier for Dem chances that cancels out the House Rethug financing advantage. The one left over then translates into the equivalent of a country-wide financial lead for the House Dems (virtual money a/k/a the tide of history.)

In the Senate, a Rethug defeat is already being forecast by the lobby, which has contributed so heavily to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee that it has outraised its Rethug equivalent for some months, and seems likely to do so for the rest of the campaign cycle as well. The lobby is paid by corporate America to know who's going to win before they actually do so, and to bet accordingly. Those bets are not just trending Dem, they are loudly proclaiming a Dem Senate takeover.

The Lying, Spying, Torture, Corruption and Incompetence Administration and its tame Congress might still survive -- especially if they manage to outlaw sources of Dem money while protecting their own -- though even their fearmongering is growing feeble.

But based on current trends, a Senate switchover and a 5-7 seat Dem House gain look pretty much like a floor, not a ceiling.

Tag:
Congress

Lying, Spying, Torture, Corruption and Incompetence Administration

Holy Kazooties!

The eight states nearest 50% Preznitial approval are:

• a) still below it;
• b) stuck in the f%sk$in' sticks, every single one.

What do AK, ID, NV, WY, NE, OK, LA, and MS have in common?

"The back of beyond" as one of the Slangwhanger-in-Chief's Irish great-grandmothers would have phrased it. "Out where God lost his shoes," as Jean Ann Goldy taught the S-i-C, or "Way past the corner of 99th Street and ploughed ground," as Bob Cage used to say.

Pointed Letter from a Friend

dear all-

the time has come, the walrus said, to kick unconstitutional butt. please handwrite, in pen, to your two senators and ask them to cosponsor S.RES 398 to censure george w. bush.

below is a sample text i prepared for nicky in california. of course, substitute your own senators' names (and kill the california joke at the end unless you are writing to chuck grassley and want to keep it as an iowa joke.)

but this is one time i feel like i must participate in (and even help instigate) a HANDWRITING campaign because the issue is so important.

handwritten letters really do get better attention on capitol hill than email (lowest of the low), fax, or even typed letters.

i have already written mikulski and sarbanes in different terms so any marylanders can steal this and will not be repeating me.

bottom line is: if not us, who? if not now, when?

agitateur du jour,
un ami intime du slangwhanger-en-chef



hon dianne feinstein
us senate
washington dc 20515

dear senator feinstein

please join your colleagues, senators barbara boxer and tom harkin, in co-sponsoring senator russ feingold's S.RES 398 to censure george w. bush.

the administration's pattern and practice of lying, spying, torture and corruption is not only illegal but unconstitutional. in order to assist the public in debating these serious matters, a vehicle such as S.RES 398 is ideal.

that it may never pass is irrelevant. the democratic party must not just stand for, but fight for, a return to constitutional government. this chaotic and mendacious administration is not only incapable of exercising, it is opposed to the very existence of, any limits on presidential powers.

the imperial presidencies of lyndon johnson and richard nixon were low points in the life of the american republic, but they have now been exceeded in arrogance, shamefullness, and ignorance by the incumbent.

not to move to censure bush is to acquiesce in his terms of debate. we must reject his record so powerfully that the american people are in no doubt of the democratic party's tenacity in protecting american rights.

as a california citizen i would be proud to be from the first state to have both senators co-sponsor S.RES 398. please make this happen soon.

faithfully yours,
erasmus illegible
deputy sub-sub scribe
obfuscation section
palimpsest division
department of redundancy department

“I have a long-time ladyfriend, Dame Fortune. I know her under her maiden name. Miss Fortune.” –Orson Welles, The Third Man Radio Show #18, 11/30/1951

Desertions Continue Among the Mangrove Swamps

No Lawyer Left Standing Initiative

Impatience with the slowness of efforts to close the courts to litigants is what drove the Administration to literally fire the first shot in its groundbreaking "No Lawyer Left Standing" initiative.

Everyone remembers that Vice-President Dick "Lying Sack of Excrement" Cheney, hunting on a private lawyer ranch near Kingsville, Texas, bagged an impressive buck (Harry Whittington, UT Law '50).

What few knew until now, however, is that this effort was part of a larger Administration plan.

Under the new program, hunters may take one white shoe in-house lawyer or three outside lawyers daily. The limit has been suspended for trial lawyers.

"We've just got to thin the herd," said the Vice-President. "We've tried tort reform and caps on damages, but people are still suing." Cheney added, "It's easy and fun. In Texas, you can shoot in almost any direction and hit a lawyer."

This was also Cheney's first combat duty.

God: I've Lost Faith in Blair

All the signs are that the Almighty is unhappy about efforts to implicate Him in the attack on Iraq, writes Terry Jones on Wednesday March 8, 2006 in the Guardian.

A high-level leak has revealed that God is "furious" at Tony Blair's attempts to implicate him in the bombing of Iraq. Sources close to the archangel Gabriel report him as describing the Almighty as "hopping mad ... with sanctimonious yet unscrupulous politicians claiming He would condone their bestial activities when He has no way of going public Himself, owing to the MMW agreement" (a reference to the long-established Moving in Mysterious Ways concordat).

Mr Blair went public about God on Michael Parkinson's TV show. "If you have faith about these things," he said, "then you realise that judgment is made by other people. If you believe in God, it's made by God as well." As is customary with Mr Blair's statements, it's rather hard to tease out what he is actually saying; but the gist is clearly that if God didn't actually tell him to bomb Iraq, then the Almighty would certainly agree it was the right thing to do.

"If Tony Blair thinks his friendship with George W Bush is worth rubbing out a couple of hundred thousand Iraqi men, women and children, then that's something he can talk over with me later," said God. "But when he starts publicly claiming that's the way I do the arithmetic too, it's time I put my foot down!" It is well known that God has a very big foot.

A source says Gabriel has spent days trying to dissuade the Almighty from loosing a plague of toads upon the Blair family. Gabriel reminded God that Cherie and the children had nothing to do with Tony's decisions. God's response, it is reliably reported, was: "Blair says the Iraqis are lucky to have got bombed, so how can he complain if his family gets a few toads in the bath?" The archangel is said to be ticked off with God's ability to provide glib answers without even thinking.

[Warning to Americans: Impenetrable British TV joke follows, with attempted American translation in brackets.] What has particularly incensed the Almighty is that Mr Blair made the claim on [Fox] the Parkinson show. "If he'd done it on [CBS] Richard and Judy I could have forgiven a lot," He is reported to have said.

The archangel reported that the Almighty has become increasingly irritated with the vogue for politicians to claim that He is behind their policies - especially if these involve killing large numbers of humans. According to Gabriel, God spake these words: "That George W. Bush once had the nerve to say: 'God told me to go end the tyranny in Iraq, and I did.' Well, let me tell you I did no such thing! If I'd wanted to get rid of Saddam Hussein, I could have given him pneumonia. I didn't need the president of the United States to send in hundreds of heavy bombers and thousands of missiles to destroy Iraq - even though I appreciate that Halliburton needed to fill its order books.

"How do Bush and Blair think it makes me look to all those parents who have lost sons and daughters in this grubby business? Don't they know that the Muslims they're taking out worship the same Me that they do? It's a public relations disaster that ought to set Christianity back hundreds of years. Though knowing the fundamentalists, it'll probably have the reverse effect."

The archangel further revealed that he had been advised by no less a person than [Ken Mehlmann] Alastair Campbell to warn God to keep out of politics. "But it's hard to get God to do anything He doesn't want to," sighed the archangel. "It's all to do with what He calls 'free will', though a lot of us have a problem working that one out, since He's omnipotent and omniscient."

God, the archangel says, is also disturbed by Mr Blair's remark that while religious beliefs might colour his politics, "it's best not to take it too far."

"How would he like it if I went round claiming that he gave me his full backing when I sent the tsunami last year?"

· Terry Jones is a film director, actor and Python. http://www.terry-jones.net/ Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

A Friend Writes

Someone sent a friend of the Slangwhanger-in-Chief's a piece of foultempered Republican propaganda pretending that Starbucks (yes, the other evil empire from Seattle) refused to sell its coffee to GIs in Iraq because it supported neither the war nor the soldiers.

The friend wrote back to the deluded disseminator and all other email addresses visible in the forwarding chain:

This false rumor is more than a year old and has been definitively debunked.

It is disturbingly similar to the lie Chuck Colson started for The Trick, that returning GI's from Vietnam had been spat upon by peaceniks. In both cases, the attempt is to blacken the names of those who oppose the war for good and sufficient public policy reasons, by making it appear that they have contempt for the American soldier.

It was not true about Vietnam, and it is not true about Iraq. The lying Presidents who hid and hide behind the bodies of GIs -- Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Bush I, and Bush Minor -- did and do more disservice to the American soldier than those of us who question why they were and are dying in futile causes which the American people, once fully informed, have now twice rejected.

American politicians are dissed by peace folks all the time. American soldiers, never. That's why the politicians try to hide behind the soliders. Don't help them get away with it.

Should such a canard cross your desk, kindly send its perpetrators to the link above for cleansing of the mental tissues of such filth.