339 search results for "certification"

Still-President Bush Still Causing Harm

by dday

So the President vetoed the bill stopping cuts to Medicare payments to doctors today, despite the bill receiving more than enough votes to override (in fact, the House has already voted to override it). But this is more than a simple inconvenience for Congress to need to stage an override vote. This will affect people’s lives, as Kagro X explains.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services had issued a temporary delay on physician pay cuts until July 15 to allow lawmakers more time to pass the legislation.

Tomorrow’s date, of course, is July 15. This way, Bush assures either that the bureaucrats have to go through an embarrassing scramble again, or that medical care providers actually get hurt by his veto crayon.

The “grown up” in charge, ladies and gentlemen. They can’t get this asshole out of the White House fast enough.

But this thumb in the eye of doctors and medical providers who dared to oppose his cuts to their paychecks is nothing compared to what his Health and Human Services Department has in store:

The Bush administration wants to require all recipients of aid under federal health programs to certify that they will not refuse to hire nurses and other providers who object to abortion and even certain types of birth control.

Under the draft of a proposed rule, hospitals, clinics, researchers and medical schools would have to sign “written certifications” as a prerequisite to getting money under any program run by the Department of Health and Human Services.

The rule defines “abortion” so broadly that it could also apply to birth control pills and emergency contraception. And because the rule would apply to federal health programs, low-income and uninsured women will be most affected.

This is an extension of the “Landmine Project,” to install both personnel and federal rules requirements that would enshrine radical conservative goals inside of government. Check this out, they’re trying to base their redefining of when life begins on polling information.

Abortion: An abortion is the termination of a pregnancy. There are two commonly held views on the question of when a pregnancy begins. Some consider a pregnancy to begin at conception (that is, the fertilization of the egg by the sperm), while others consider it to begin with implantation (when the embryo implants in the lining of the uterus). A 2001 Zogby International American Values poll revealed that
49% of Americans believe that human life begins at conception. Presumably many who hold this belief think that any action that destroys human life after conception is the termination of a pregnancy, and so would be included in their definition of the term “abortion.” Those who believe pregnancy begins at implantation believe the term
“abortion” only includes the destruction of a human being after it has implanted in the lining of the uterus.

Since Griswold v. Connecticut restricting birth control has been a central project of the radical right. This proposed ruling would give that project the force of law, at least temporarily.

The guy’s still President, everyone, and there’s plenty of damage he can cause in six months.

UPDATE: The Senate overrode Bush’s veto, and so the cuts to Medicare will stop. What is unknown is whether or not the cuts have already begun for July and if doctors will end up getting stiffed.

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What A Poor Excuse For A Political Party

by dday

Conservatism isn’t going anywhere, and I assume the Republican Party will one day get their sea legs again. But the incompetence and mismanagement that has contributed to the country turning violently against the Bush Administration has infected their campaign operations, too. Two stories highlight this.

The GOP has been boasting for months about their dark horse candidate taking on John Kerry in Massachusetts. That they’re targeting the John Kerry seat in one of the nation’s bluest states instead of finding half-decent candidates to run in friendlier states like West Virginia, South Dakota or Iowa is problem number one. Problem number two is that Jim Ogonowski, their white knight, savior of the party, young gun with the stuff to slay the dragon, couldn’t get enough signatures to qualify for the ballot.

When the deadline for certification passed yesterday, Jim Ogonowski, the Republican leadership’s choice to challenge US Senator John F. Kerry, was 82 signatures short of qualifying for the GOP primary ballot, according to the state’s central voter registry.

But Ogonowski’s campaign aides contend there are enough certified signatures at various town offices around the state not filed yet on the computerized registry to put him across the 10,000 threshold […]

Even if Ogonowski does get the 82 signatures he needs, his fight probably is not over.

Election specialists say he will not have the needed cushion of extra signatures to insulate himself from legal challenges.

Ogonowski’s only primary opponent, Jeff Beatty, is expected to challenge the validity of his signatures before the ballot law commission.

How weak is that? This is literally one of the only Senate challengers that the national GOP is talking up and he can’t find enough signatures? George Bush got over a million votes in Massachusetts in 2004. You can’t find 10,000 of them?

The next bit is from a McCain campaign email sent today:

For a donation, you can get a personalized McCain banner for yourself. And the person they use as the example to highlight it is Frank Donatelli. Who’s a big-time corporate lobbyist.

McCain Tapped Lobbyist Frank Donatelli To Run His Efforts At RNC. McCain tapped lobbyist Frank Donatelli to become deputy chairman of the Republican National Committee. The New York Times reported Donatelli will “act as the main liaison between the committee and the McCain campaign.” Donatelli is a lobbyist at McGuire Woods and previously served as a lobbyist at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld. His clients have included AT&T, Exxon Mobil, PhRMA, Blue Cross Blue Shield and Verizon. [New York Times, 3/7/08; McGuire Woods, accessed 5/12/08; Senate Lobbying Disclosure Records, accessed 5/12/08]

Donatelli Enlisted to Improve Ethiopia’s Relationship with U.S. In a September 2005 letter sent to Ambassador Kassahun Ayele of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, Donatelli set forth his obligations under their contract, namely to provide “government relations and related public communications services to assist and work with Ethiopia in Washington, D.C., in promoting and strengthening Ethiopia’s relations with the United States and, in general, providing such other appropriate advice and assistance as will serve to achieve these purposes.” [FARA Database, accessed 3/18/08, Letter signed by Frank Donatelli on 9/6/05]

• Human Rights Watch: “The Ethiopian Government’s Human Rights Record Remains Poor.” According to Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2008, “The Ethiopian government’s human rights record remains poor, both within the country and in neighboring Somalia, where since early 2007 thousands of Ethiopian troops have been fighting an insurgency alongside the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia. Government forces committed serious human rights violations, including rape, torture, and village burnings, during a campaign against Ethiopian rebels in eastern Somalia Region (Region 5). Abuses took place in other parts of the country, notably in Oromia State where local officials carried out mass arrests, extra-judicial killings and economic sanctions.” [Human Rights Watch, accessed 5/12/08, emphasis added]

Really, it’s like the entire campaign arm of the party all withered up and died. They couldn’t find any random person to pose for a picture except a lobbyist?

The old adage used to be that Republicans didn’t know how to govern, but they knew how to win elections. Maybe that’s still true, but the stories here, repeated seemingly dozens of times ALREADY in this cycle, and more in 2006, aren’t promising. There’s a reason Republican incumbents are already running ads, leaving the Congress in droves, and generally frightened out of their minds about their prospects this fall. It’s the fundamentals, but it’s also the campaign operations. They can’t qualify candidates for the ballot, they can’t help but step around in scandal, their accountants are literally stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from campaign accounts, and they generally can’t manage their way out of a paper bag. Democrats have closed the gap on the traditional operations where they were always behind – microtargeting, low-dollar fundraising, etc. But on the level of simple management, it’s like there’s some kind of Bush disease and all the operatives have caught it. I guess when your governing philosophy demands no oversight and lax regulation, it’s no wonder that the same principle applies in these campaigns. The inmates are truly running the asylum.

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Well That Worked Out Well

by digby

Wiretap Compromise in Works

Parker, who said she hopes the House can take up the compromise legislation as early as this week, said a resolution has been delayed partly by the need for all members of the House Judiciary Committee to gain access to the letters and other relevant documents sent to the phone companies by the administration requesting their assistance. The House Democratic leadership demanded such access before they would contemplate immunity, and the administration granted full access last week. Parker spoke at a breakfast meeting sponsored by the American Bar Association yesterday. Kenneth Wainstein, assistant attorney general for national security, said at the same meeting that key issues surrounding the legislation had been hashed out in a “long and tedious” but “healthy” process, aimed at updating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Yes, this has been a really “healthy” process. Kind of like a colonoscopy.

But this is my favorite part. They are pretending that the administration gave up something they wanted.

“This is not amnesty,” Wainstein said at the meeting. “This is targeted immunity” for companies who meet requirements specified in the Senate bill that include having received an attorney general’s certification that their assistance was determined to be lawful.

Well now, that’s entirely different, isn’t it?
So what happened?

A group of several dozen moderate to conservative House Democrats, known as “Blue Dogs,” has pushed Hoyer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to approve the Senate bill. Some aides on Capitol Hill were discussing the potential for the House passing the Senate version but breaking it into two votes: one on the portion of the bill that deals with revising FISA provisions and a second on the immunity measure. This procedural move would allow many Democrats to vote against immunity but still make its approval all but certain since almost every Republican and some centrist Democrats would vote in favor.

Here’s a test for you class. When is a majority not really a majority?

The Democrats believe they can fool the stupid rubes they represent by saying they aren’t culpable in this debacle because they voted against it! Yea! And we’re so stupid we’ll absolve them because we won’t figure out that the whole thing was rigged.

Greenwald says it all, here.

There’s very little point anymore in writing about how the Congressional Democratic leadership is complicit in all of the worst Bush abuses, or about how craven they are. All of that is far too documented and established at this point to be worth spending any time discussing. They were never going to take a stand against warrantless eavesdropping or the destruction of the rule of law via telecom amnesty for one simple reason: many of them don’t actually oppose those things, and many who claim to oppose them don’t actually care about any of it. That’s all a given. But what is somewhat baffling in all of this is just how politically stupid and self-destructive their behavior is.

It’s not all that baffling when you consider that the Democrats don’t have a liberal majority or even a real working majority unless they are willing to play hardball with procedure. Blue Dogs + Republicans makes a much more effective “bi-partisan” majority for Bush in these heady days of reconciliation anyway.

I stopped writing about this a month or so ago because it was just so obvious that this was going to happen and it was frustrating watching it come down. I see no evidence from the presidential campaigns that Bush abuses will be confronted in the next congress either. Indeed, I suspect this was the last gasp of outrage at the constitutional shredding of the Bush administration. Bush and Cheney and their henchmen will be busily covering their tracks and we will all make a fresh start on January 20th, 2009. Until they do it again, of course.

I’m sorry to be so depressing about all this, but I just see no evidence that Democrats care about this very much. The usurpation of democracy and the constitution doesn’t rate very high on their list of priorities, especially when they see the prospect of a Democratic president who they trust not to follow in Bush’s foo0tsteps.

But this was a principle worth fighting for no matter what. No president, Democrat or Republican, should be trusted with this kind of power. And even if you believe that no wonderful Democratic Prez could ever be so bad, what if John McCain wins? Does anyone seriously think he won’t use it?

Update: And yes, as soon as a Democrat becomes president the congress will rediscover its prerogatives.

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It Gets Worse For McCain

by dday

It’s not the sex, it’s the lying.

A sworn deposition that Sen. John McCain gave in a lawsuit more than five years ago appears to contradict one part of a sweeping denial that his campaign issued this week to rebut a New York Times story about his ties to a Washington lobbyist.

On Wednesday night the Times published a story suggesting that McCain might have done legislative favors for the clients of the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, who worked for the firm of Alcalde & Fay. One example it cited were two letters McCain wrote in late 1999 demanding that the Federal Communications Commission act on a long-stalled bid by one of Iseman’s clients, Florida-based Paxson Communications, to purchase a Pittsburgh television station.

Just hours after the Times’s story was posted, the McCain campaign issued a point-by-point response that depicted the letters as routine correspondence handled by his staff–and insisted that McCain had never even spoken with anybody from Paxson or Alcalde & Fay about the matter. “No representative of Paxson or Alcalde & Fay personally asked Senator McCain to send a letter to the FCC,” the campaign said in a statement e-mailed to reporters.

But that flat claim seems to be contradicted by an impeccable source: McCain himself. “I was contacted by Mr. Paxson on this issue,” McCain said in the Sept. 25, 2002, deposition obtained by NEWSWEEK. “He wanted their approval very bad for purposes of his business. I believe that Mr. Paxson had a legitimate complaint.”

While McCain said “I don’t recall” if he ever directly spoke to the firm’s lobbyist about the issue–an apparent reference to Iseman, though she is not named–“I’m sure I spoke to [Paxson].” McCain agreed that his letters on behalf of Paxson, a campaign contributor, could “possibly be an appearance of corruption”–even though McCain denied
doing anything improper.

Is PAX-TV even around anymore? Never mind, that’s besides the point.

This is really, really bad for McCain. He’s now contradicted himself in public. This is the kind of thing the media loves to hammer, and today’s stories prove that this won’t go away. What’s more, the FEC is basically telling McCain that he cannot walk away from the public financing system.

The nation’s top federal election official told Sen. John McCain yesterday that he cannot immediately withdraw from the presidential public financing system as he had requested, a decision that threatens to dramatically restrict his spending until the general election campaign begins in the fall.

The prospect of being financially hamstrung by the very fundraising system he helped create is the latest in a series of bitter challenges for the presumed GOP nominee, who still faces a fractured conservative coalition as he assumes the mantle of party leadership […]

The implications of that could be dramatic. Last year, when McCain’s campaign was starved for cash, he applied to join the financing system to gain access to millions of dollars in federal matching money. He was also permitted to use his FEC certification to bypass the time-consuming process of gathering signatures to get his name on the ballot in several states, including Ohio.

By signing up for matching money, McCain agreed to adhere to strict state-by-state spending limits and an overall limit on spending of $54 million for the primary season, which lasts until the party’s nominating convention in September. The general election has a separate public financing arrangement.

But after McCain won a series of early contests and the campaign found its financial footing, his lawyer wrote to the FEC requesting to back out of the program — which is permitted for candidates who have not yet received any federal money and who have not used the promise of federal funding as collateral for borrowing money.

The main reason McCain can’t back out is that he received a loan using the public financing as collateral. But the most interesting part of this is that the FEC would have to vote to let McCain out of the public system. But they don’t have a quorum right now, with the nomination of four members held up in the Senate because Bush won’t withdraw the odious Hans von Spakovsky from the position. The other three would easily pass the Senate, but the Republicans have made it an all-or-nothing deal. Who led the fight on the Democratic side to keep von Spakovsky off the FEC? Barack Obama.

What would be hilarious would be McCain going to the White House, hat in hand, pleading with Bush to drop his demands and ditch von Spakovsky so that he can get off the public system that he built.

McCain can deny the sex part of this, and wage war with the New York Times, and get all the wingnuts behind him. But he’s been caught in a web of lies, he has lobbyists populating his entire staff, a member of his leadership team just got indicted, his image as a reformer is being buried, and he might not have a dime to spend for the next SEVEN MONTHS.

Oof.

UPDATE: The signature quote in the Newsweek story, from McCain himself:

“As I said before, I believe that there could possibly be an appearance of corruption because this system has tainted all of us.”

UPDATE II: Any Democrat going on media to talk about this story needs to follow the template of Howard Dean’s comments to the National Journal. They’re brilliant. A taste:

Dean: I have no idea whether the affair story is true or not, and I don’t care. What I do care about is John McCain — and this has been well-documented — is talking all the time about being a reformer and a maverick, and in fact, he has taken thousands of dollars from corporations, ridden on their corporate jets, and then turned around and tried to do favors for them and get projects approved. He has tons of lobbyists on his staff. This is a guy who is very close to the lobbyist community, a guy who has been documented again and again by taking contributions and then doing favors for it. This is not a guy who is a reformer. This is a guy who has been in Washington for 25 years and wants to give us four more years of the same, and I don’t think we need that.

I broke down the interview here.

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Banana Republic

by digby

What’s with all the military spying inside the US? Maybe the Pentagon ought to spend more time gathering intelligence in Iraq and Afghanistan and leave the spying on US citizens to the FBI, DHS, INS, DEA, ATF and state and local police agencies. I think they can handle the illegal wiretapping, mailreading and bank account tracking all by themselves.

Here’s another troubling sign:

Deep into an updated Army manual, the deletion of 10 words has left some national security experts wondering whether government lawyers are again asserting the executive branch’s right to wiretap Americans without a court warrant.

The manual, described by the Army as a “major revision” to intelligence-gathering guidelines, addresses policies and procedures for wiretapping Americans, among other issues.

The original guidelines, from 1984, said the Army could seek to wiretap people inside the United States on an emergency basis by going to the secret court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA, or by obtaining certification from the attorney general “issued under the authority of section 102(a) of the Act.”

That last phrase is missing from the latest manual, which says simply that the Army can seek emergency wiretapping authority pursuant to an order issued by the FISA court “or upon attorney general authorization.” It makes no mention of the attorney general doing so under FISA.

Bush administration officials said that the wording change was insignificant, adding that the Army would follow FISA requirements if it sought to wiretap an American.

But the manual’s language worries some national security experts. “The administration does not get to make up its own rules,” said Steven Aftergood, who runs a project on government secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists.

[…]

Like several other national security experts, Mr. Aftergood said the revised guidelines could suggest that Army lawyers had adopted the legal claim that the executive branch had authority outside the courts to conduct wiretaps.

But Thomas A. Gandy, a senior Army counterintelligence official who helped develop the guidelines, said the new wording did not suggest a policy change. The guidelines were intended to give Army intelligence personnel more explicit and, in some cases, more restrictive guidance than the 1984 regulations, partly to help them respond to new threats like computer hackers.

“This is all about doing right and following the rules and protecting the civil liberties of folks,” Mr. Gandy said. “It seeks to keep people out of trouble.”

And up is down and black is white.

This is bureaucratic buck passing that keeps the military perpetrators out of trouble by leaving the full responsibility with the Attorney General who they consider to be the unitary law enforcement officer of the unitary executive who claims unlimited power to wiretap without any kind of oversight. That would be how “doing right” is defined in our brave new world.

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Anyone Got Info On Dr. Eric Keroack?

by tristero

In a comment to my earlier post on the Borat clone Dr. Eric Keroack, Entlord wrote:

Amazing that there is so little biographical information on the gentleman. The AMA Find a Doctor site doesn’t recognize him and a Google search only turns up that he is an OB/GYN and has been one for 20 years. No information on his CV, his education, his training or anything else except for an unpublished “study” cited in Christianity Today proving showing teenaged girls sonograms of the fetus prevents abortions.

That’s just about all I’ve found, too, except more ugly quotes and incredibly stupid slide shows. And while doing that googling, I noticed several posts from doctors and biologists who are so astounded at the stupidity of his unpublished paper on oxytocin they can’t belief this guy is a doctor.

Sooooo…. is he? Anyone know his background? Where he went to med school? Where he got his certifications, etc. etc?

UPDATE: Thanks to commenter NotThatMo, we now have the following info. Other commenters have begun to find out other things about his affiliations and professional qualifications.

License Status: Active
License Issue Date: 8/5/1987
Accepting New Patients: Yes
Accepts Medicaid: Yes
Primary Work Setting: Private Office
Business Address: REMOVED
Phone: REMOVED
Insurance Plans Accepted: None Reported
Hospital Affiliations: North Shore Medical Center – Salem Hospital (Courtesy)
Union Hospital (Active)

Medical School: Tufts University School of Medicine
Graduation Date: 1986
Post Graduate Training: NEWTON-WELLESLEY HOSPITAL (1/1/1986-1/1/1987)
BAYSTATE MEDICAL CENTER (1/1/1989-1/1/1993)

Will He Certify That It Is Accurate

Reader W sent in this interesting observation by one of Mark Kleiman’s readers:

Did you notice that our esteemed President essentially committed securities fraud in representing that private investment accounts WILL perform better than anything the present system could do? Certainly, no one can honestly make that statement and any stockbroker making such a statement would be violating Rule 10b 5 of the Securities Act of 1934.

To which Kleiman added:

Which reminds me of my favorite snarky policy suggestion: How about applying the Sarbanes-Oxley certification process to budget submissions and other communications from the Executive to Congress or the public? Someone ought to be prepared to say about each submission, “Yes, I understand what’s in this document, and certify that it is accurate.”

This is another good line of argument. I think it hits a certain common sense chord to say that the president is overselling the market, especially right now. People just went through a very thorough retrenchment with their 401k’s and are very well aware that the market does not always go up. We should force the Republicans to explain why people should feel confident that they are guaranteed to make more money in the market as Bush says they will. And after they sputter their bromides about the long term gains in the last 70 years, blah,blah,blah, perhaps the Democratic spokesperson or legislator ought to turn around and say “everyone knows past performance is no guarantor of future returns. It’s the most basic and essential disclaimer given by anyone who works with stocks and bonds.”

Since we are talking about exposing millions of retirees to the stock market, shouldn’t the president be willing to apply the same rules to himself and certify his proposal with the standard Oxley-Sarbanes disclaimer: “Yes, I understand what’s in this document, and certify that it is accurate.”

It would be an interesting television moment anyway.

Two Extra Memos

I’m no expert on the arcana of the Killian documents, but I hadn’t been aware until a reader alerted me that there are six memos rather than the four reported by CBS linked on the USA Today site. Maybe everyone already knows about these other two, but they were news to me.

The first is dated 02 February, 1972 and says simply

Subject: Flight Qualifications

Harris,

Update me as soon as possible on flight certifications, specifically Bath and Bush.

The other is dated 24 June, 1973 and says:

Subject: Bush, George W. 1st Lt.32447544FG

Sir,

1. I got a call from your staff concerning the evaluation of 1st Lt Bush due this month. His rater is Lt. Colonel Harris.

2. Neither Lt Colonel Harris or I feel we can rate 1st Lt. Bush since he was not training with 111 F.I.S since April 1972. His recent activity is outside the rating period.

3. Advise how we are supposed to handle this.

Like I said, I’m not an expert and don’t want to become one, but these two docs were news to me. The note concerning Bush and Bath from February 1972 is particularly intriguing.

Here’s the USA Today pdf link.

If I’m not just misinformed here, I think it’s a bit odd that USA today has two documents that CBS never reported. They don’t mention it in their article. Where did they come from?

UPDATE: Apparently DU has been on this all day and has lots of intrigue. I’m not all that engaged in the details on this so if you want to get the latest go over there and check it out. In case anybody doesn’t know the illustrious history of Bush and Bath, here’s a handy site.

UPDATE II: Kevin Drum talked to the USA Today reporters who say that they received the memos from their own sources. One does wonder why they published them but didn’t mention that they had their own sources or that there were two more memos. Very strange.

Deadlines Schmeadlines

Republicans are very, very strict about following the law to the letter, even when it doesn’t make sense. And they are even more strict about adhering to arbitrary deadlines, regardless of the principle that underlies the issue at hand. In fact, Republicans believe that arbitrary deadlines in election contests are the very lifesblood of democracy. Where would we be if you can just change the rules as you go along?

Or, at least they did during the Florida recount in 2000. The initial issue, if you recall, was the fact that while Gore was following the process laid out by the legislature (and which had been used without controversy in past statewide races) by requesting recounts in certain districts, the deadline for the recount to be submitted to Kathryn Harris’ office was physically impossible to meet. The legal issue was whether or not the statute, under the state’s constitutional requirement to determine the will of the voters, required Harris to extend the certification deadline.

The Republicans argued vociferously that hand counts were unreliable in the first place, but more importantly arbitrary deadlines were the very foundation upon which our legal system rested and for the courts to change them under some constitutional flim flam like “every vote must be counted” was judicial activism at its worst. Deadlines are sacrosanct or the rule of law is nothing but toilet paper.

I guess its toilet paper.

What was once a fundamental threat to our system of government is now a “glitch.”

For want of a small change to the Illinois election law, President Bush’s name is not supposed to be on the state’s November ballot, but officials said one way or another, it will be there.

The glitch arose because the Illinois legislature adjourned earlier this week without extending the Aug. 30 deadline for presidential candidates to be certified by the state elections board and qualify for the Nov. 2 ballot.

The relatively late dates of this year’s Republican Party convention, running Aug. 30 to Sept. 2, mean that Bush will not be the official nominee until after the deadline set in state law. Eight other states had the same problem but fixed the date. As a result Illinois, is the only state where Bush could be left off the ballot.

But Gov. Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat, indicated the problem must be fixed somehow. “President Bush has to be on the ballot,” he said.

Illinois’ Democratic-majority legislature is expected to hold an overtime session soon that will require a three-fifths majority to enact any legislation — including a change in the ballot rule.

“We’re confident he is going to be on the ballot,” said Illinois Republican Party spokesman Jason Gerwig. “There are plenty of options out there to ensure that he is. This isn’t a last-ditch effort.”

Gerwig said that if the legislature fails to act, the party is prepared to appeal to the elections board, the state attorney general and, finally, the federal courts.

If anyone has the kind of free time that allows for it, they should go back and read the Republican oral arguments to the Florida Supreme Court on the necessity of strict deadlines, respect for the legislative process and the need to set standards. It’s a great reminder of just how full of shit they were then and still are today. By their own measure there is no way that Bush should be allowed on that ballot. I would love to see the Democrats make them argue for why he should be. You can bet that if the shoe were on the other foot, Kerry would be forced to take it all the way to the Supreme Court.

Update: No surprise here, but Florida voting is still amazingly screwed up. I hope that the DNC is planning to have many, many precinct watchers present with cell phones and digital cameras (and security guards…)

Thanks Donkey