DeLay Indicted!

It's been building for some time, and today it became official. House Majority Leader, Republican Tom DeLay, was indicted for criminal consipiracy related to campaign finance. Of course, we all knew he did it already, but it's good to see that as of yet he hasn't been able to weasle his way out of it.

Will Senate Majority Leader, Republican Bill Frist, be next for insider trading?

I can't wait to see how the Republican spin machine tries to defend their two leaders in the senate and congress facing criminal charges. Will they continue to play the moral values card or the Jesus card? Will it be unpatriotic to question leaders in congress during a time of war? If they both go down will this embolden the terrorists? Will now not be the time to point fingers at either of them? Will we hear that it's not prudent to comment on an ongoing investigation? Will we hear that the Clintons have done worse? Only time will tell what Ken Mehlman, Karl Rove & Co. can come up with. If history is any indication of the future, the only thing we can count on is that it will defy common sense. More to follow...

10/5/05 Update:
Make that TWO indictements for DeLay now. This second indictment came down on Monday by the Texas grand jury. This time the charges are money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Could things get worse for the GOP? Unfortunately for them, the answer is yes. With the way things are going lately it feels like Karl Rove and/or other top White House officials are going to be next for their role in the CIA leak scandal.

I thought I heard It All

I just read something that should be mandatory reading for anyone who follows politics. I don't know how I never heard this story before, and the fact that this isn't common knowledge is disturbing because it shows what people are willing to accept.

Senate Majority Leader, Republican Bill Frist used to kill cats while experimenting on them. Did you know this? Shouldn't this be common knowledge considering the enourmous power that the majority leader of the senate wields. And consider that Frist, by all accounts, is planning to run for president in 2008. This is an accurate story which anyone can find further evidence of by doing a Google search on "Bill Frist Cats".

This did happen decades ago, but this is the kind of sick and devious behavior that should stick with a person for life. I'm not saying he needs to go to jail at this time for animal cruelty, but you don't get to dismiss this as just some youthful indiscretion. There is something deeply wrong with this man, period.

And, there is also no way to justify that the Republicans in the senate have somehow made this kind of immoral freak their leader. How much of a weak minded fool do you have to be to accept that this piece of shit is a moral and religous man as he tries to sell himself? What kind of a pretzel would you have to twist yourself into to rationalize being outraged at Bill Clinton's immoral adultery, but you view this man as somehow morally superior to Clinton because he claims to have "conservative" values?

This is a minor story that has nothing to do with the major issues of the day like Iraq, terrorism, or tax cuts; but it is still very important because it speaks to just how warped and twisted are the minds of the religious conservatives in this country.

What Is President Bush?

President Bush made a decent speech last night about Hurricane Katrina, the response to the disaster, and his ideas for rebuilding the gulf region. The funny thing is the substance of his speech was actually very liberal. It seems Bush is going through a major crisis and doesn't even know who he is. This is an example of poor leadership on an unprecedented scale.

Bush's poll numbers have been at historic lows in the last few weeks - and they were very low even before the hurricane. He bungled the Katrina response and the criticism was pouring in. Some Republicans tried to defend the president, but the whole world knows the truth and stopping the criticism was like trying to stop the flood waters from pouring into New Orleans.

So, Bush in an unusual move for him, actually took responsibility and admitted the federal government did not do its job (so much for those on the right who adamantly claimed the president was not at fault). Then a strange thing happened, and I bet many didn't realize it as it was happening, and I wonder if Bush himself realizes what he's done, but he turned himself into a big government, big spending liberal ala Lyndon Johnson or FDR with broad big government programs and $200 Billion of tax payer money - much of which will go to the poor and to minorities.

It's hard to imagine at this point how anyone could still support this man. He had already lost the Democrats and many Independents a long time ago, and his poor and out of touch response immediately after the hurricane lost the rest of the independents and some moderate Republicans. But, he still had his hard core conservative base that seems to back him regardless of facts and logic. But, if and when these people stop and consider what the president said last night, they are going to realize that he just metamorphasized into a liberal. They just might connect the dots and realize that his disastrous Iraq policies and his incompetent response to the hurricane are not just dangerous to this country’s national security as the Democrats have been claiming, but that his policies are dangerous to their conservative agenda.

In short, Bush is trying to make amends and stop his sinking poll numbers by making grand promises and embracing the ideas of his critics. But, it’s a desperate move on his part. His critics know the man all too well to be fooled by empty rhetoric. They know that his speeches never match the realities on the ground. However, they can use his words to hold him and/or future Republicans to these promises. Meanwhile, some of Bush’s supporters have got to be disgusted that they now have to pay for his mistakes by conceding some of their core conservative beliefs. It's one thing to deny his mistakes while debating a liberal. It's another thing when they figure out that this mistake prone man is in charge of their agenda and he will sell out their core beliefs to cover up his mistakes.

If you’re wondering if Bush is truly that clueless that he might give a speech and not realize the implications of his words, then you haven’t been paying attention. You also wouldn’t think it’s possible for a president to make a prime time speech to the nation about a national disaster and come to the podium in an open collared shirt that was improperly buttoned. It doesn’t seem possible does it? Well, judge for yourself. I learned a long time ago that when it comes to President Bush there is no underestimating his naivety. I first found the below picture on crooksandliars.com, and this is not a case of a photo shop trick. You can check out any news site, newspaper, or rebroadcast of the speech and you’ll see the shirt is uneven. Here’s an MSNBC Link that backs up this picture.

When it comes to Bush, it seems no amount of incompetence is impossible. Ladies and gentlemen…Our President:

Kerry Was A Fool

President Bush continues his downward spiral in the polls. Today the newest Zogby poll released showed Bush's approval ratings at another all time low. However, interestingly enough the poll also showed that in an election Bush would lose to every recent president, but still not to John Kerry, whom he would narrowly edge out. Zogby himself wondered how this could be.

The answer is quite simply that Kerry, whom I voted for by default, was a weak and pathetic candidate. Even today Kerry has slipped back into relative obscurity (the only reason he isn't totally obscure is because he is a national figure who just ran for president). He has not even stepped up into a leadership role within his own party since the election.

The Democrats made a poor choice in nominating Kerry, but one that is understandable considering there wasn't a whole lot to choose from. This country was ready to replace Bush whom most knew was not doing a good job, but Kerry could not close the deal. Even today as a clear majority of Americans think the Iraq War was a mistake, that majority still wouldn't support Kerry because he never made a strong case against the war. The Democrats are starving for someone to step up and take a leadership role and show some backbone, and unfortunately they're going to have to do better than Cindy Sheehan.

Had there been a Democrat out there that could speak with conviction and toughness and take the fight to the Republicans they would have won in a landslide. The below link shows an example of the kind of conviction and backbone that Kerry did not posess. That is why he lost the election, and why today - even with Bush tripping all over himself - the majority of Americans still have no confidence in Kerry.

This is a video clip from last May when George Galloway, a member of British Parliament, was testifying in Washington during our senate investigation into the U.N. Oil For Food Program with Iraq. It's just too bad that he's a British politician and therefore has little chance of running for office here in America. Galloway did not back down and he made Republican Senator Norm Coleman look like a chump. This is not taken out of context. All reports from this hearing say that Coleman was beaten badly in this exchange. Now Compare this tough anti-war stance with Kerry's cautious political waffling. Consider Kerry's statement before the election when he said that knowing everything he knows now that he still would have voted to authorize Bush to go to war, and no one need wonder why Americans didn't embrace Kerry then, and why they still wouldn't today.

(the link to the video is about 3/4 the way down on the page)

We Knew It

There are many of us out there that have known for some time now of the dangerous incompetence of President Bush and his administration. This knowledge pre-dates Hurricane Katrina by a long time. And now, In the aftermath of Katrina there is rightful outrage by more and more Americans because so many of us have known all along that Bush should not be president – that we cannot trust this administration to be honest with the American people and that they’re not up to the job of making sound decisions in the most difficult of times.

The infamous 7 minute My Pet Goat delay now seems like a split-second decision compared to the day’s long delay in sending the cavalry down to the Katrina disaster area. It’s been said that those were cheap shots launched at Bush in Fahrenheit 9/11 and by others; and that Bush wouldn’t have saved any more lives or prevented any more of the disaster on Sept 11 had he got up right away after being told our country was under attack. That may be true, but those people never understood what the rest of us did and what we’ve been saying all along. Those 7 minutes were a warning of a man not up to the job.

Today, the Bush critics are becoming more vocal in their attacks, and they’re now bringing up any and all of his other mistakes because they are all related. They all speak to a man and an administration that has mismanaged and bungled one thing after another and of whom we have no confidence in. We knew that his incompetence has always been dangerous, and now we saw another example of it playing out over several days on national TV. We’ve seen evidence of it prior – in the streets of Iraq, but this time the consequences of these inept decisions are playing out in the streets of America, so it’s really starting to hit home to a lot of people.

This is the reason that there is so much outrage against Bush, some of which may even be unfair to him. In reality, he is not at fault for everything that has gone wrong in the Gulf Coast region, but for most of us he doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. He hasn’t earned the benefit of the doubt. He has mismanaged so many important aspects of his presidency thus far, including the war in Iraq, the failure to pursue Bin Laden, and the squandering of the post 9/11 good will we had as a country, that now all of his mismanagements become magnified. Likewise, the administration’s less than truthful rhetoric has been so overwhelming (“we know where the WMD’s are”, “mission accomplished”, “the insurgency is in its last throes”, “anyone involved in a leak will be fired”, etc…) that when we see Americans dying in our own streets - and once again the administrations rhetoric is so obviously disconnected from the realities on the ground -then most Americans are not willing to accept this empty rhetoric any longer.

Many of us haven’t been willing to accept it from the beginning, but haven’t been able to effectively convince enough Americans, along with enough in the media, how severe of a problem it is to let this great nation remain unchallenged in the hands of this crop of neo conservatives. What is happening now is that the frustrations we’ve had all along have reached a boiling point because we’ve known how incompetent this administration was, and we knew that those incompetencies would come back to haunt all of us once again. This time the result was a national embarrassment.

News Coverage Rips Bush

Here are some worthwhile reads about the government's failure to respond adequately to Hurricane Katrina. The Bush defenders, and they are dwindling quickly, have only one talking point to cling to these days: "Now is not the time for partisan politics."

That is true. However, the criticisms coming in are not partisan politics as usual - they are questions that need to be asked and deserve to be answered. And, they are not partisan because both Democrats and Republicans alike are fed up and embarassed by the way our government has responded to this catastrophe.

Conservative Editorials Rip Bush
Bush's Rhetoric Doesn't Match Reality