Evil GOP Bastards

Did the GOP steal
the 2004 elections?
Up until 11pm Eastern time on election night, exit polls showed John Kerry comfortably leading George Bush in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Mexico, giving him a clear victory in the Electoral College, and a projected national margin of some 1.5 million votes. These same exit polls had just served as the basis for overturning an election in Ukraine, and are viewed worldwide as a bedrock of reliability. But after midnight the vote count mysterious-
ly turns, and by morning George W. Bush is declared the victor.

There is far far more...enough, indeed, to result in massive court filings, unprecedented Congres-
sional action and a library full of documents leading to bitter contro-
versy over the 2004 election, especially in Ohio. MORE

The real reason Bush
invaded Iraq
"Bush was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and Houston Chronicle journalist Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said, 'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, 'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He went on, 'If I have a chance to invade�, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency. MORE

Memo: US lacked full
postwar Iraq plan
A briefing paper prepared for British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top advisers eight months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq con-
cluded that the U.S. military was not preparing adequately for what the British memo predicted would be a "protracted and costly" post-
war occupation of that country.

The eight-page memo, written in advance of a July 23, 2002, Downing Street meeting on Iraq, provides new insights into how senior British officials saw a Bush administration decision to go to war as inevitable, and realized more clearly than their American counterparts the potential for the post-invasion instability that continues to plague Iraq. MORE

From Downing Street
to Capitol Hill
The memos were first obtained by Michael Smith, a London-based reporter who previously wrote for The Daily Telegraph and now works for the Sunday Times of London. Smith told NEWSWEEK he ob-
tained a first batch of six docu-
ments last summer when he still worked for the Telegraph from a source inside the British govern-
ment who he could not otherwise identify. On the advice of the Telegraph's lawyers, the paper had a secretary retype the documents verbatim on separate paper-then returned the originals to his source. Smith received another three doc-
uments when he went to work for the Sunday Times. Some of the retyped documents have recently begun to appear on Web sites such as Raw Story, a liberal site that is critical of the Bush administration. Smith told NEWSWEEK that nobody in the British government has disputed their authenticity, and he was even threatened last year with criminal investigation for violating Britain's Official Secrets Act. "I'm struggling to understand why they would threaten to investigate the leak of official secrets if these were not official secrets," he said. MORE

Full texts of the Downing Street memos
Read the controversial documents that prove Saddam's Iraq was no threat, and that Bush and Blair took us to war based on lies. MORE

An uncensored look at life in occupied Iraq: Baghdad blogger Water has been a big problem in many areas all over Baghdad. Houses without electric water pumps don't always have access
to water. Today it was the same situation in most of the areas. They say the water came for a couple of hours and then disappeared again. We're filling up plastic containers and pots just to be on the safe side. It is not a good idea to be caught without water in the June heat in Iraq. MORE

Ivins refutes Rove's "straw man"
Setting up a straw man, calling it liberal and then knocking it down has become a favorite form of "argument" for those on the right. Make some ridiculous claim about what "liberals" think, and then demonstrate how silly it is. Lim-
baugh, Bill O'Reilly and many other right-wing ravers never seem to get tired of this old game. If I had a nickel for every idiotic thing I've
ever heard those on the right claim "liberals" believe, I'd be richer than Bill Gates. MORE

Cox in charge of Wall Street? Dumb.
In the wake of the Enron, WorldCom, Citigroup, Global Crossing and Tyco scandals, you'd think that a president worried about economic stability would be looking for safe - dare we say conservative - regulation of Wall Street. Yet Pres-
ident Bush would have us believe that Newport Beach Congressman Christopher Cox, an Ayn Rand devotee, is the ideal man to head the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Cox is an extremist. He believes that what's best for America's corporate bigwigs is best for America. In the early 1990s, the congressman managed to do the seemingly impossible: He alien-
ated even some Newt Gingrich-era Republicans with his drive to create new loopholes for businessmen accused of screwing investors, relax corporate disclosure and soften accounting rules.

It's an unambiguous record: In 2001, he voted for $25 billion in rebates to companies such as Enron as well as to give a $6.5 billion tax break to U.S. financial corporations moving their
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operations overseas. In 2002, he voted to give Homeland Security contracts to US companies that had moved overseas to dodge paying US taxes. In 2004, he supported a plan to give federal loans to U.S. companies that move overseas and voted to allow certain companies to raid $80 billion during a two-year period from employee pension plans. MORE

GOP apparatchiks kidnap Big Bird
Mr. Tomlinson has maintained that his goal at CPB is to strengthen public broadcasting by restoring "balance" and stamping out "liberal bias." But Mr. Moyers left "Now" six months ago. Mr. Tomlinson's real, not-so-hidden agenda is to enforce a conservative bias or, more specifically, a Bush bias. To this end, he has not only turned CPB into a full-service employment program for apparatchiks but also helped initiate "The Journal Editorial Report," the only public broadcasting show ever devoted to a single newspaper's editorial page, that of the zealously pro-Bush Wall Street Journal. Unlike Mr. Moyers's "Now" - which routinely balanced its host's liberalism with conservative guests like Ralph Reed, Grover Norquist, Paul Gigot and Cal Thomas - The Journal's program does not include liberals of comparable stature. MORE

How Jack Abramoff and Ralph Reed
exploited Christians
Lobbyist Jack Abramoff used money from a Mississippi tribal client to set up bogus Christian anti-gambling groups and to fund pet projects including gear for a "sniper school" in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, according to documents released by Senate investigators. MORE

Are Americans working too hard?
The corporate world has certainly been successful in indoctrinating North Americans in the mentality of full-blown capitalism, convincing us to accept its harsh divide between rich and poor.

But Europeans have traditionally been smarter. They've taken control of the marketplace and subordinated it to the needs of the population, creating a more egalitarian society with benefits for all.

Their political culture reflects this. They pay higher taxes but in return receive more social benefits: generous pen-
sions, subsidized tuition, national child-care programs, ext-
ensive unemployment insurance, five-week holidays and lots of other stuff that we rarely hear about over here. MORE

The fall of the House of Bush
The Bush administration is confidently marching toward disaster, and we are all unwilling passengers on this fool's journey. Bush's folly, if not diverted, will certainly lead to economic collapse, international isolation, and dreadful terrorist revenge. Herbert Stein's law reigns supreme: "That which can not go on forever, won't." The ingredients of this witch's brew of mischief are many - the federal deficit and national debt, growing income disparity, the dissolution of civil liberties and civil rights, foreign wars, stolen elections, corporate corruption, theocracy and the assault on science and scholarship, official secrecy and lies. MORE

On American militarism
Nationalism addresses a profound existential fear that many people seem to feel in the face of the seemingly meaningless and insignificant lives they lead within a vast and indifferent universe. Like religion, though less challen-
ged during the period of modernity by contradictory scien-
tific findings, nationalism allows its subscribers to feel that they are part of a larger and more significant story, one with a grand historical arc leading to a rendezvous with destiny, and one which brings to their lives otherwise absent meaning and purpose. MORE

Evolution, denial and "intelligent design"
The Evolution-Creationism controversy is back in the news, with Kansas yet again at the epicenter of the continuing aftershocks left over from the earthquake originally triggered in 1859 with the publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species. At stake for science is that the single most powerful overarching theory of the biological sciences will not be taught in public schools. At stake for religion is that the creation myth of yore must step aside for a theory of origins that has the benefit of evidence on its side. But if there is so much evidence in favor of the theory of evolution, why do so many people not accept it? MORE