Back in 2004, the rightwing bloggers came up with the idea of google bombing the name John Kerry so that negative articles came up first on the search page when people googled his name. it worked.
Chris Bowers decided we should do the same thing with our wonderful GOP opponents this time and has come up with a handy list of links to make this easy.
So, while you are on hold on the phone today or sitting in a boring meeting or simply looking to kill a couple of minutes, click on the links below and help us bring the truth about these Republicans to the top of the Google search pages.
Update: Never mind. You don’t have to click on the links (although you might learn more about why you hate these candidates.) Just post the links on whatever site on which you have posting privileges or on your own blog. Mr. Google will do the rest.
Here’s the link to the code you can post on your blog.
I knew the Republicans would react like animals if they ever found themselves on the losing end of an election. I knew they would engage in rampant lying, race baiting and sexist stereotyping. I was a tiny bit surprised that they would support 52-year-old-man on teenager sex, but it didn’t shock me.
But I honestly didn’t think they’d go after the physically disabled. First Tammy Duckworth’s opponent accuses the multi amputee Iraq veteran of “cutting and running.” Then Rush takes a shot at Michael J. Fox. Now the GOP congresswoman who holds Dick Cheney’s old seat says to her opponent, a wheelchair bound MS sufferer, “If you weren’t sitting in that chair, I’d slap you across the face.”
I shouldn’t be shocked, now that I think about it. They had no problem questioning severely wounded war hero Max Cleland’s courage back in 2002. (In 2004, the ever so lovely Ann Coulter even claimed he had wounded himself in combat.)
These guys engage in gutter politics even when they don’t have to so it’s not surprising that they would turn into barbaric political terrorists in the face of serious losses. We’ll see if they can stroke the nation’s id and eke out a victory in these close races one more time.
Senior Bush administration officials wanted North Korea to test a nuclear weapon because it would prove their point that the regime must be overthrown.
This astonishing revelation was buried in the middle of a Washington Post story published yesterday…
One of these officials may have been Rice herself, Kessler hints. Rice, he reports, “has come close to saying the test was a net plus for the United States.” Rice has been trying to counter the prevailing view that the test was a failure of the Bush administration’s policy..
821 days left, people.
The least we can do is elect Democrats on November 7 who have pledged to investigate and apply the brakes.
According to the General, during last nights debate, Sen. Lieberman, noting Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus, declared, “We’re in another time like that.”
That’s delusional BS. We’re in another time like this:
Weldon at BTC News is asking for reader submitted questions to the White House press Office:
If you’ve ever watched a White House press briefing, you’ve probably felt the sensation of drowning in tepid gruel. It can be an extremely frustrating experience and it led me to try, in the wake of the Guckert/Gannon scandal, to place my own unfettered correspondent in the briefing room. In early 2005, I managed to pester the White House press office into providing BTC News contributor — now BTC News White House correspondent — Eric Brewer with semi-regular access to the White House press briefings held by then-press secretary Scott McClellan.
Eric has done a great job under difficult circumstances (you can read his dispatches from the press room here) with both McClellan and Tony Snow, but he’s only one guy, he has a real job and he can’t be there every day. So I asked our press office contact, who is now an official spokesman, if he would field questions submitted by our readers. He agreed to do that on the record, and I’m here to ask you to ask the White House the questions institutional reporters should ask but don’t.
Drop over and leave a question in the comment section.
Nice to read, but it’s at least two, if not four, Friedman Units too late. Most interesting quote:
Americans, Iraqis and the rest of the world need clear, public signs of progress.
Mr. Bush can make the first one by firing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. There is no chance of switching strategy as long as he is in control of the Pentagon.
Sigh. Everyone still colludes with the Junior Prophet From Crawford in passing the buck to someone else. Not that Rumsfeld is competent and shouldn’t be fired. Of course he should, and then tarred and feathered. But Rumsfeld or no, the strategy Rumsfeld is pursuing is the strategy of George W. Bush. And “there is no chance of switching strategy as long as he is in control of the” White House.
For even if the strategy was somehow changed, there is no chance in hell it will change for the better. For as incompetent as Donald Rumsfeld surely is, his boss is far worse. Therefore, until January, 2009, no matter what happens, the Iraqis and the American military in Iraq will suffer horribly, needlessly, and monumentally. And the security of the US will be further eroded. It is awful, sickening, and infuriating, but it is also a fact.
A different country, with a more involved population, would demand Bush and his cabinet immediately resign. Ain’t gonna happen. A different country, one which held its leaders accountable for its safety, would have impeached Bush by September 19, 2001. But the United States in 2006 is not that kind of country. Barring anything unforeseen, like Bush getting a brain transplant or converting to Islam – both far more probable than he will change direction and that he will do so in such a way that things will get better in Iraq – there’s at least 821 days filled with unspeakable tragedy ahead for Iraq, and the US.
Contrary to what the lunatic, man-on-dog right says, I don’t like saying so, I don’t want it to happen, and I certainly hope I’m wrong. But some six years of nearly total disaster and mismanagement by the Bush administration says I’m right.
And yes, dear friends, the “nearly” in the previous paragraph was pro forma only.
Eight hundred and twenty-one more days of George W. Bush. God help us.
From John Amato I see that Rush Limbaugh, with his usual lack of any form of human decency, questioned Michael J. Fox’s sincerity in his ad for Claire McCaskill. Accoring to Rush, Fox was being dishonest by not taking his meds and allowing the full ravages of his disease to show — or he was acting. Limbaugh felt it was “exploitive.”
As it turns out, Fox’s affect was caused by his medication, not his lack of it. From an interview with an expert on Parkinson’s by Jonathan Cohn at the Plank:
What you are seeing on the video is side effects of the medication. He has to take that medication to sit there and talk to you like that. … He’s not over-dramatizing. … [Limbaugh] is revealing his ignorance of Parkinson’s disease, because people with Parkinson’s don’t look like that at all when they’re not taking their medication. They look stiff, and frozen, and don’t move at all. … People with Parkinson’s, when they’ve had the disease for awhile, are in this bind, where if they don’t take any medication, they can be stiff and hardly able to talk. And if they do take their medication, so they can talk, they get all of this movement, like what you see in the ad.
I took a lot of grief for a snarky post I did about Rush’s little trip to the Dominican in which I implied he might have been there seeking the company of underage locals. I have absolutely no regret about it. The man is a cretinous bag of rotting pig meat and he deserves anything that’s dished out at him.
Evidently after the debate Lieberman walked up to Ned and said “You goddamn sonovabitch,” and something to the effect of “how dare you run those direct mail pieces accusing me of voting for the energy bill in 2005 because of campaign contributions from the oil companies.” Joe’s losing it.
I wonder what it would be like if he ever turned some of that on a Republican? Even when they stole the presidency right out from under him he couldn’t have been more gracious. When he debated Dick Cheney you would have thought they were a couple of old friends spending the afternoon shootin’ the shit at the old fishin’ hole. A Democrat criticizes his record and he turns into a rabid dog.
He’s sounding more and more like his crooked mentor every day, isn’t he? But then Nixon hated Democrats too.
Here’s a neat analysis of the Nixon tapes that might be useful as we examine the very religious, moral and upright public Lieberman vs his slush funded, phony anti-war posture and private conversation:
A search of the Internet produced a number of transcripts of Nixon tapes. Naturally these focus on the evidence of crimes or intent to commit crimes, the cover-up of the Watergate burglary, and the specific events that led to the Watergate hearings, impeachment motions and the resignation of President Nixon. These tapes evidence Nixon’s crimes. The public image Nixon presented to the American people and his denials of illegal activities are well known. Therefore such are not presented herein. Several of the conversations evidencing illegal conduct are. There are more available, but only several are sufficient to demonstrate that Nixon’s private persona is vastly different than his public image. This is not a statistical question.
[…]
Analysis of the conversations in the Appendix also evidence another disparity between Nixon’s public and private images. One of every sixty words Nixon uttered was a profanity. Nixon’s profanities included damn, Goddam or Goddamit, son of a bitch, son of a bitching, hell, asshole, crap and several deleted expletives, all words inappropriate in public political speeches.
Now I am not one to criticize anyone who uses profanity. But I do criticize religious moralizers who pretend that they are above this sort of thing and lecture bloggers and grassroots activists for their incivility. Nixon had a similar smarmy, bathetic public voice — lecturing, hectoring and eye-rollingly “moral” on the outside while being crude and ruthless in private.
Ever since I saw the Nixon angle on Lieberman, I realized why it is I’ve always had such a visceral mistrust of the man. That phony-baloney piety always made me sick when I saw Tricky Dick and it makes me similarly sick when I see Joe Lieberman.
But I have to give Nixon credit in one way. When he lost elections he didn’t cozy up the ones who stole it and pretend to be their best friends. He had enough pride to come back and win his party’s nomination fair and square and take on the political opposition that had bested him. Tricky Joe is just trying to save his seat so he can join the enemy. That’s lower than Nixon would have ever gone.
I think it’s clear that the nation should want to keep the party in power that is responsible for this:
I keep seeing his face. He appears to be in his mid-20s, bespectacled, slightly bearded, and somehow his smile conveys a sense of prosperity to come. Perhaps he is set to marry, or enroll in graduate school, or launch a business — all of these flights of ambition seem possible.
In the next few images he is encased in plastic: His face is frozen in a ghoulish grimace. Blackened lesions blemish his neck.
“Drill holes,” says Col. Khaled Rasheed, an Iraqi commander who is showing me the set of photographs.
He preserves the snapshots in a drawer, the image of the young man brimming with expectations always on top. There is no name, no identification, just a series of photos that documents the transformation of some mother’s son into a slab of meat on a bloody table in a morgue.
“Please, please, I must show these photographs to President Bush,” Rasheed pleads in desperation, as we sit in a bombed-out palace along the Tigris, once the elegant domain of Saddam Hussein’s wife, now the command center for an Iraqi army battalion. “President Bush must know what is happening in Baghdad!”
He doesn’t care what is happening in Bagdad and neither does the Dark Lord Cheney. They think people getting literally drilled in the head is an Iraqi tactic to deny them a Republican majority.
On Oct. 17, Cheney told Limbaugh: ‘I was reading something today that a writer — I don`t remember who — was speculating on increased terrorist attacks in Iraq attempting to demoralize the American people as we get up to the election. And when I read that, it made sense to me. And I interpreted this as that the terrorists are actually involved and want to involve themselves in our electoral process, which must mean they want a change.
[…]
[The]show was not the first time Cheney has suggested terrorists have picked favorites in the upcoming election.
In August, Cheney told wire service reporters that ‘al-Qaida types’ were looking to break the will of the American people to stay and fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. He linked that al-Qaida effort to the Connecticut Democratic primary rejection of Iraq war supporter Sen. Joe Lieberman.
It’s all about them, you see.
That article linked above, called “Into The Abyss Of Baghdad,” shows just how much the Iraqis care about maintaining that majority in congress:
Every day the corpses pile up in the capital like discarded furniture — at curbside, in lots, in waterways and sewer lines; every day the executioners return. A city in which it was long taboo to ask, “Are you Sunni or Shiite?” has abruptly become defined by these very characteristics.
Once-harmonious neighborhoods with mixed populations have become communal killing grounds. Residents of one sect or the other must clear out or face the whim of fanatics with power drills.
[…]
People are here one day, gone the next. Those who do go out often venture no farther than familiar streets. In the sinister evenings, when death squads roam, people block off their lanes with barbed wire, logs, bricks to ward off the killers.
Many residents remain in their homes — paralyzed, going slowly crazy.
“My children are imprisoned at home,” says a cook, Daniel, a Christian whom I knew from better times, now planning to join the exodus from Iraq. “They are nervous and sad all the time. Baghdad is a big prison, and their home is a small one. I forced my son to leave school. It’s more important that he be alive than educated.”
But homes offer only an illusion of safety. Recently, insurgents rented apartments in mostly Shiite east Baghdad, filled the flats with explosives and blew them up after Friday prayers. Dozens perished.
Even gathering the bodies of loved ones is an exercise fraught with hazards. A Shiite Muslim religious party controls the main morgue near downtown; its militiamen guard the entrance, keen to snatch kin of the dead, many of them Sunni Muslim Arabs. Unclaimed Sunni corpses pile up.
[…]
On a recent patrol in Adamiya, one of the capital’s oldest sections, U.S. soldiers went door to door speaking with merchants and residents, trying to earn their confidence. Everyone seemed cordial as people spoke of their terror of Shiite militiamen. Then a shot rang out and a soldier fell 10 yards from where I stood with the platoon captain; a sniper, probably Sunni, had taken aim at this 21-year-old private from Florida ostensibly there to protect Sunnis against Shiite depredations. The GI survived.
Coursing through the deserted cityscape in an Army Humvee after curfew empties the streets is an experience laced with foreboding. U.S. vehicles, among the few on the road, offer an inviting target for an unseen enemy. Piles of long-uncollected trash may conceal laser-guided explosives. Russian roulette is the oft-repeated analogy.
“Everyone’s thinking the same thing,” a tense sergeant tells me. “IEDs,” he adds, using the shorthand for roadside bombs, or improvised explosive devices.
ONE evening, I accompanied a three-Humvee convoy of MPs through largely Shiite east Baghdad. Before leaving the base, the commander performed an unsettling ritual: He anointed the Humvees with clear oil, performing something akin to last rites.
[…]
At this point, anything seems possible here, a descent of any depth into the abyss. Militiamen and residents are already sealing off neighborhoods by sect. Some have suggested district-to-district ID cards. Word broke recently of a plan to build barriers around this metropolis of 6 million and block the city’s entrances with checkpoints. The “terror trench,” as some immediately dubbed it, seemed to have a fundamental flaw: The killers already are in Baghdad.
Sure, it’s a little “untidy” and all, but they should be a lot more grateful to the liberators who freed them and created this wonderful democratic paradise. Interfering with the Republicans’ ability to do more of this good work in their country is drilling through their faces to spite their noses.
So Joe Lieberman is now an anti-war candidate. Isn’t that something? Just like the rest of the Republican pack he’s been running away from his previous support for the war in order to get elected. Sadly, because he used to be a Democrat, he’s getting the benefit of Democratic credibility on that issue when he really isn’t entitled to it.
It’s a lot like the 60’s when Nixon created a faux anti-war message. In fact, Joe sounds remarkably like Tricky Dick on the subject these days:
“I want peace as much as you do.” – Richard Nixon, 11/3/69
“No one wants to end the war in Iraq more than I do.” – Joe Lieberman, 10/18/06
“Many others — I among them — have been strongly critical of the way the war has been conducted.” – Richard Nixon, 11/3/69
“I have been very critical of a lot of the mistakes the Bush administration has made in Iraq.” – Joe Lieberman, 10/18/06
“Many believe that President Johnson’s decision to send American combat forces to South Vietnam was wrong. But the question facing us today is: Now that we are in the war, what is the best way to end it?” – Richard Nixon, 11/3/69
“The question is what do we do now. We are there, no matter what you think of how we got there.” – Joe Lieberman, 10/8/06
“I want to end the war.” – Richard Nixon, 11/3/69
“I want to help end the war in Iraq.” – Joe Lieberman, 8/11/06
“A fixed timetable for our withdrawal would completely remove any incentive for the enemy to negotiate an agreement. They would simply wait until our forces had withdrawn and then move in.” – Richard Nixon, 11/3/69
“If you tell your enemy when you’re going to leave, they’ll wait and create disaster.” – Joe Lieberman, 7/6/06
“I understand why they are concerned, about this war. I respect your idealism. I share your concern for peace.” – Richard Nixon, 1969
“I already know that some of you feel passionately against my position on Iraq. I respect your views.” – Joe Lieberman, 8/7/06
You know, now that I think of it there is a lot about Joe’s smarmy, self-righteousness that reminds me of Dick Nixon.
But what really reminds of Dick Nixon is the fact that Joe Lieberman apparently keeps a slush fund in his campaign:
After President Richard Nixon abused campaign finance law through his Committee to Reelect the President (CREEP), laws were passed to force candidates to disclose how they spend campaign funds. But over the weekend, it became clear Senator Joe Lieberman may be ignoring those laws, as the Senator’s FEC reports uncovered $387,000 “petty cash” slush fund that could be called the Committee to Reelect Lieberman (CREEL).
During the 14 days around the August 8th primary, Lieberman’s campaign spent over $387,000 on un-itemized, un-identified, and un-disclosed disbursements. By contrast, Ned Lamont’s campaign spent just $500 on petty cash in the entire reporting period. This slush fund requires answers to questions like: what was this spent on? Who was it spent on? And why weren’t the expenses itemized, as the FEC requires?
Today, the Lamont campaign will be filing a formal complaint with the Federal Election Commission, demanding an investigation into possible wrongdoing.
LIEBERMAN REPORT SHOWS UNPRECEDENTED $387,000 SLUSH FUND: Lieberman’s most recent FEC report shows $387,561 spent on “petty cash” – unaccounted for cash that was not itemized at all. To understand what an abuse this is, consider that FEC rules dictate that all expenditures over $100 must be itemized.
LIEBERMAN SLUSH FUND COMPRISED ONE OUT OF EVERY 12 DOLLARS SPENT: Lieberman’s massive slush fund comprised almost 8 percent of all of his expenditures in the reporting period. That’s almost one out of every $12 that Lieberman is effectively hiding.
LIEBERMAN FUNNELED OUT $32,000 A DAY IN UNACCOUNTED CASH: Lieberman’s campaign disbursed $387,000 in unmarked “petty cash” in just 12 days. That’s $32,000 every single day, with no accounting at all for how it was spent.
OTHER ADMINISTRATIVE COSTS WERE ACCOUNTED FOR: Most mundane expenditures from Lieberman’s campaign such as salaries, printing, food, and other “petty” expenditures were already itemized on Lieberman’s FEC report, begging the question: What did Lieberman do with almost $400,000 in unaccounted for cash in 12 days?
THESE EXPENDITURES APPEAR TO VIOLATE FEC STATUTE: Title 11 C.F.R. §102.11 (2 U.S.C. 432(h)(2)) (Petty Cash Fund) provides: A political committee may maintain a petty cash fund out of which it may make expenditures not in excess of $100 to any person per purchase or transaction. If a petty cash fund is maintained, it shall be the duty of the treasurer of the political committee to keep and maintain a written journal of all disbursements. This written journal shall include the name and address of every person to whom any disbursement is made, as well as the date, amount, and purpose of such disbursement. In addition, if any disbursement is made for a candidate, the journal shall include the name of that candidate and the office (including State and Congressional district) sought by such candidate.
Tricky Joe’s campaign is saying he legitimately spent $387,000 on petty cash in less than two weeks? Come on.
Not one cent of the $387,000 or any other money of that type ever went to me for my personal use. Every penny of it was used to pay for political expenses.
It was not a secret fund. As a matter of fact, when I was on “Meet the Press,” some of you may have seen it last Sunday—Tim Russert came up to me after the program and he said, “Joe, what about this fund we hear about?” And I said, “Well, there’s no secret about it. Go out and see Dana Smith, who was the administrator of the fund.”
And I gave him his address, and I said that you will find that the purpose of the fund simply was to defray political expenses.
One other thing I probably should tell you because if we don’t they’ll probably be saying this about me too, we did get something-a gift-after the election. A man down in Texas heard Hadassah on the radio mention the fact that our kids would like to have a dog. And, believe it or not, the day before we left on this campaign trip we got a message from Fed-ex saying they had a package for us. We went down to get it. You know what it was.
It was a little cocker spaniel dog in a crate that he’d sent all the way from Texas. Black and white spotted. And our little girl, the 26-year old, named it Checkers. And you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog and I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re gonna keep it.