In his acceptance speech last night Sean Penn mentioned the "signs of hatred" he passed on the way into the Academy Awards. He was referring specifically to Shirley Phelps Roper and the rest of her "God Hates Fags" brethren from the Westboro Baptist Church. Since I didn't have a ticket to get into the awards ceremony I spent a bit of time interviewing Shirley Phelps Roper. Note that many of my questions were culled from the comments section of a video I posted last year of Shirley Phelps Roper also from outside of the Academy Awards.
NOTE: There are some really entertaining parts if you can stand to make it through the entire video!
People have often asked me whether I felt even the slightest guilt for my role in John Tanner losing his job as the Voting Section Chief of the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice at the end of 2007. Briefly, I videotaped Tanner making racist and untrue comments about Photo ID laws which led to embarrassing Congressional hearings and his resignation. The Washington Post's Dana Milbank would later tell MSNBC's Dan Abrams that Tanner had to be "cut loose because of [that] one bad line" captured on videotape.
Well, today the DoJ released a report that contained a few nuggets about John Tanner. For example:
In that incident in August 2004, Voting Section Chief John Tanner sent an e-mail to Schlozman asking Schlozman to bring coffee for him to a meeting both were scheduled to attend. Schlozman replied asking Tanner how he liked his coffee. Tanner's response was, "Mary Frances Berry style-- black and bitter."
Berry is an African-American who was the Chairperson of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights from November 1993 until late 2004.
Only in the perverse Bush administration could you have a bunch of racists in charge of civil rights at the DoJ. For much more on the racism at DoJ and the Justice report in general, see Brad's latest post or watch the Olbermann video above. The Tanner racism stuff begins at the 4:00 mark.
BTW, I have never felt even remotely guilty about Tanner's forced resignation.
On Wednesday, famed Charles Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi spoke to a packed and enthusiastic crowd of more than 350 Angelinos about his new book, “The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder.” While Bugliosi’s talk will eventually appear on C-SPAN, you can view it first in its entirety below…
Part 1 (19:45)
In my book, “The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder,” I present evidence that proves beyond all reasonable doubt that George Bush took this nation to war on a lie, under false pretenses, and therefore under the law is guilty of murder for the deaths of over 4,000 young American soldiers who died so far in this war.
Bugliosi began the evening by explaining to the Los Angeles audience that George W. Bush is guilty of murder, according to the law, if he brought the country to war under false pretenses. And Bugliosi emphasized the legal aspect of the case in order to fend off likely attackers:
So although Bush supporters can argue that Bush should not be prosecuted because they don’t think he did anything wrong, they cannot legitimately say that he should not be prosecuted if he has done what I say he did. To say that is to admit that you have no respect for our American system of justice and democracy and that you would prefer that presidents have the same rights as tyrannical dictators like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Saddam Hussein.
Bugliosi had a similar answer for those who simply believe it is impossible to prosecute Bush for murder:
There’s this sense out there among many that prosecuting Bush for murder can’t be done. Which is the equivalent of saying what - that he is above the law. That ordinary laws simply don’t apply to him.
Bugliosi also had some special words for the American Right Wing which has expressed its disapproval with his book:
The third group of people responding to my book is the nation’s right wing. And they of course have contempt for me and my book. But whatever contempt they have for me, I can assure them and I can assure you I have much much much more contempt for them. There are no more repugnant, hypocritical and un-American – and that’s the word I want to emphasize – un-American people in our society today than the right wing.
Bugliosi, however, made clear that this book was not political for him and even said he would have written the same book had Bush been a Democrat. So fair is Bugliosi that he even offers up some mitigating evidence for Bush and his co-conspirators:
And there is one thing that I should probably say in partial defense of these people that goes in mitigation, arguably reduces their moral culpability. And what I’m talking about is that many of these people are incredibly stupid. And they make up for their stupidity by being extremely ignorant. And when you combine stupidity with ignorance that’s a toxic combination.
Finally, Part 1 ends with the law:
If a conspirator, or anyone for that matter, deliberately sets in motion a chain of events which he knows will cause – that’s the key word – cause a third party innocent agent to commit an act, the defendant is criminally responsible for that act. Bush, in invading Iraq, caused Iraqis to kill American soldiers in much the same fashion that a person causes a gun to fire a bullet that kills someone by pulling the trigger.
Part 2 (17:54)
Part 2 begins with Bugliosi explaining the only way Bush might be innocent of murder:
Bush can only wash his hands of culpability if he did not take this nation to war under false pretenses. If he did, which the evidence overwhelmingly shows, he is criminally responsible for the deaths of all those American soldiers who have died fighting his war in Iraq.
The main issue would be whether or not George Bush went to war, as he always claimed, in self-defense – the so-called pre-emptive strike. Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, alleged as so, therefore he was an imminent threat to the security of this country so Bush had to strike first in self-defense. If the war was not in self-defense but one that the prosecutor can prove Bush took us to under false pretenses than all of the killings of American soldiers in Iraq become unlawful killings and therefore murder.
While Bugliosi's animus was mostly reserved for Bush and his co-conspirators, he did find time to also criticize Ken Starr, The New York Times and the Supreme Court:
I seem to be getting more angry and acerbic and caustic and that’s because I am always in a state of rage. How can I help but be -- the monstrous, grotesque, obscene Ken Starr almost destroyed the Clinton presidency over absolutely nothing while being totally and completely supported and funded by the federal government. They funded his seven year, seventy million dollar effort, the federal government. And the so-called liberal media, The New York Times savaged Clinton on a day to day basis, supported this monstrous, grotesque, obscene figure – one of the most reprehensible figures in American history – Ken Starr.
The US Supreme Court 2000, stopping the recount in Florida which was specifically authorized by Florida law, taking the election away from the American people and appointing George Bush president, one of the biggest crimes in American history.
The heart of Part 2, however, is reserved for Bugliosi's evidence against George W. Bush. And first on the list was Bush's lies to the country that were contrary to the National Intelligence Estimate:
In George Bush’s first speech to the nation on Hussein and Iraq, October 7, 2002 in Cincinnati, Ohio, Bush told Americans that Saddam Hussein was a great danger to this nation either by his attacking us with the so-called weapons of mass destruction or by giving these weapons to a terrorist group to attack us. And Bush said that this attack could happen, ‘on any given day,’ meaning what, that the threat was imminent.
The only big problem for George Bush is that on October the first, six days earlier, the CIA sent Bush its 2002 National Intelligence Estimate – a classified top secret report that represented the consensus opinion of all 16 US federal intelligence agencies on the issue of whether or not Hussein was an imminent threat to the security of this country and on page 8 of that 91 page report it clearly and unequivocally says – and by the way what I’m about to tell you to my knowledge has never been said or never been written or never appeared in any major newspaper or magazine in America – page 8 clearly says that Hussein was not an imminent threat to the security of this country. That he would only be a threat if he feared we were about to attack him.
So we know then, not think but know, that when George Bush told the nation on the evening of October 7th, Cincinnati, Ohio, that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat to the security of this country, he was telling millions of unsuspecting Americans the exact opposite of what his own CIA was telling him. Now if we had nothing else at all, and there is so much more, that alone shows what, that George Bush took this nation to war on a terrible terrible lie. Therefore all the killings in Iraq became unlawful killings and murder.
But it gets worse! In fact, it gets evil, perverse, sick and criminal:
But it gets worse. It gets worse. October 4th, three days later, Bush and his people had the CIA release an unclassified summary version of the October 1st classified report so that this October 4th unclassified version could be released to the American public and to Congress. This unclassified version came to be known as the White Paper. And in this White Paper that was shown to the American people and to Congress, in which contained the opinion of 16 US intelligence agencies that Hussein was not an imminent threat to the security of this country, that conclusion was completely deleted, completely eliminated. Every single one of these all important words, the most important conclusion in that classified document, was completely deleted from the White Paper. And the question I have of you, is how evil, how perverse, how sick, how criminal can George Bush and his people be?
The next piece of ever damning evidence, according to Bugliosi, is the January 31, 2003, Manning Memo written by Tony Blair's chief foreign policy advisor after a top level meeting in the Oval Office less than two months before the invasion.
He says that George Bush was so worried about the failure of the UN inspectors to find weapons of mass destruction that Bush started to talk about three ways to ‘provoke a confrontation’ with Saddam Hussein. One of which he said was to fly U2 reconnaissance aircraft over Iraq falsely painted in United Nations colors and he said if Saddam fires on those planes it would be a violation of UN resolutions and therefore justify our going to war. So here is George Bush telling Americans, telling the world, that Hussein is an imminent threat to the security of this country, but behind closed doors this very small human being was talking about how to provoke Hussein into a war.
Part 3 (15:50)
Part 3 begins with another piece of evidence against Bush. Mainly, how Bush responded to the ever positive testimony of chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix on March 7, 2003, by throwing him and his team out of the country and quickly invading Iraq. Blix had told the UN Security Counsel that the inspectors were getting proactive cooperation from Saddam Hussein and that their investigation would be completed in a few months:
Blix and his people became Bush’s biggest adversaries because if Blix and his people confirm that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that would rob Bush of his main argument for war – a war that he wanted to fight at all costs.
The bulk of Part 3, however, does not concentrate on evidence of Bush's guilt but rather Bush's state of mind. Bugliosi takes great offense to the fact that Bush has often described his days as perfect and that he proclaims himself to be so happy:
Even if George Bush was only guilty of making an innocent mistake in taking this nation to war in Iraq, not murder as I firmly believe, with all of the death, horror and suffering he has caused, what type of a monstrous individual is it who could be happy with his life? What type of a human monster is George Bush?
If I ever killed one person in my life, even accidentally – a car accident – I’d never have another perfect day as long as I lived. George Bush is responsible for the horrible deaths of thousands of human beings and he is talking about having a perfect day. Bush’s plans to have a perfect day right in the middle of all the death and horror in Iraq goes so far beyond acceptable human conduct that no moral telescope can discern its shape, form and nature.
Bugliosi concludes by telling the audience that he will not rest or be satisfied until George W. Bush is prosecuted for first degree murder:
I don’t like to see anyone get away with murder, even one murder. [O.J.] Simpson got away with two murders and I got so angry that I wrote a book - Outrage, the Five Reasons O.J. Simpson got away with murder. If I can get so angry about someone getting away with one or two murders you can imagine how I feel about George Bush who has gotten away with over 100,000 murders and has been smiling and enjoying himself throughout the whole period. It may sound presumptuous of me but I can tell you that while I may not succeed, I’m not going to be satisfied until I see George Bush in an American courtroom being prosecuted for first degree murder.
The first degree murder of over 4,000 American soldiers:
If justice means anything at all in America, if we are not going to forget about those 4,000 young American soldiers who came back from Bush’s war in a box, I say we have no choice but to bring murder charges against the son of privilege from Crawford, Texas.
WOW! Let's take a quick looksie at Senator Big Bad John Cornyn (R-TX). First, did he open up government as the vid claims? Please. Here are some typical Big John votes:
Voted YES on allowing some lobbyist gifts to Congress. (Mar 2006)
Voted NO on establishing the Senate Office of Public Integrity. (Mar 2006)
Big Bad John also opposed an Arlen Specter (R-PA) bill that would get presidential signing statements declared unconstitutional. Said Big Bad John, "I don’t see what the problem is."
What about the second major claim in the vid? Does Big Bad John really support our troops?
Cornyn was one of only 22 Senators to vote against the 2008 GI Bill that would expand the educational benefits for soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan
Voted NO on limiting soldiers' deployment to 12 months
Voted NO on redeploying non-essential US troops out of Iraq in 9 months. (Dec 2007)
Voted NO on investigating contract awards in Iraq & Afghanistan. (Nov 2005)
Voted NO on requiring on-budget funding for Iraq, not emergency funding. (Apr 2005)
Oh, and I would be remiss if I didn't mention that Big Bad John was also the subject matter of a few emails sent between religious right huckster Ralph Reed and imprisoned lobbyist extraordinaire, Jack Abramoff:
On November 12, 2001, Reed sent Abramoff an e-mail message stating, "get me details so I can alert cornyn and let him know what we are doing to help him" [sic]. Similarly, on November 13, 2001, Reed wrote "I strongly suggest we start doing patch-throughs to perry and cornyn [sic]. We're getting killed on the phone." Also, on January 7, 2002, Reed sent Abramoff an e-mail stating "I think we should budget for an ataboy for cornyn" [sic].
While one can only imagine why these two scum-bags would want to "budget for an ataboy for cornyn" it is a pretty safe assumption that it wasn't for anything good.
The truth is that John Cornyn represents everything that is wrong with our government. He has served corporate America at the expense of his constituents at every turn. And he thus has nothing to run on other than trying to dumb down his Senate race to the pure issueless propaganda seen in the video above. One can only hope that Texans are smart enough to see through the b.s.
BTW, Rick Noriega, a military veteran who really would support our troops, is Big Bad John's opponent. Check out his campaign website.
Dr. William F. Pepper is an internationally acclaimed lawyer who defended James Earl Ray in a 1999 civil trial (supported by Martin Luther King's family) where the jury found Ray not responsible for the MLK assassination. Now Pepper is defending Sirhan Sirhan for the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, a case he says is “an easier one than the assassination of Martin King and the innocence of James Earl Ray”.
Last Wednesday Pepper spoke about all of his projects, including 9/11 truth and prosecuting the Bush administration for war crimes, to a packed celebrity filled house in Los Angeles. Among those in attendance were Ed Asner, Gina Belafonte, Judd Nelson and 9/11 author Professor David Ray Griffin. Videos of his talk follow below...
Part 1 (6:21) - Introduction
In Part 1 Pepper talks about his background, childhood and motivation. He also speaks about the time he spent in Cuba playing baseball where he got to know Fidel Castro. According to Pepper, Castro foresaw much of what is happening in the United States today:
“When, in that massive country to the north, the masses of the people ever understand what it is that their ruling class has done to them and is doing to them, there will be such a torrent of opposition. They will rise like never before and then there will be the world’s greatest social revolution, the American second revolution.”
The video concludes with Pepper explaining how he came to work for Robert F. Kennedy and Martin King:
Part 2 (5:36) - Martin Luther King, Jr. Assassination/James Earl Ray Innocence
“Took me ten years to convince myself that [James Earl Ray] was an absolute patsy” - Dr. William Pepper
In Part 2 Pepper begins with the Martin King assassination and explains how he became involved with James Earl Ray's defense some nine years later. He also goes into detail about the 30 day civil trial against Loyd Jowers, et al, where a jury found Ray not responsible for King's assassination after listening to 70 witnesses under oath.
Pepper believes that Ray's civil trial should serve as a template for getting out the truth in a wide range of cover-ups including the Robert F. Kennedy assassination and 9/11. He thinks using the courts is an effective way to get the truth into the public record despite the efforts by the mainstream media to prevent its dissemination to the public.
Part 3 (9:56) - Robert F. Kennedy Assassination/Sirhan Sirhan Innocence
“I found from just a preliminary examination of the record that [the Sirhan Sirhan case] on the law, on the facts of the case, was an easier one than the assassination of Martin King and the innocence of James Earl Ray” - Dr. William Pepper
In the first half of Part 3 Pepper details the startling evidence that necessitates a second shooter in the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. For starters the medical examiner states that Kennedy was shot four times from the rear including one shot about an inch behind his right ear which conflicts with all the witness testimony that Sirhan was always three to five feet in front of the likely Democratic presidential nominee.
Secondly, the analysis of audio recordings from the assassination with formerly unavailable new technology has led to the determination that 13 shots were fired at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Sirhan's gun only held 8 bullets. In other words:
“There had to be a second shooter there” - Dr. William Pepper
In the second half of Part 3 Pepper details the efforts taken by the prison and the Department of Corrections to prevent his legal team from psychoanalyzing Sirhan Sirhan.
Part 4 (4:59) - Robert F. Kennedy Assassination (Continued)
In Part 4 Pepper continues the RFK assassination discussion and his efforts to clear Sirhan Sirhan whom he says is innocent:
“The problem we face is if we get our client clearly innocent of the killing of Bob Kennedy – which he is, clearly innocent of that killing – he has five other counts of attempted murder” - Dr. William Pepper
In addition to the belief in Sirhan's innocence Pepper believes the case is important because it is representative of a larger problem facing the country:
“Each of the things I’m talking about are symptomatic of a pervasive sickness in this country. This is not the country we were all led to believe it was or should have been. This is what has emerged because we have had a small group of criminals grab power over a period of time following the orders of the people in the shadows who really do dominate life and justice and the injustices that exist in the society.” - Dr. William Pepper
Part 5 (8:36) - 9/11
“The 9/11 matter is, in my lifetime, the most traumatic assault on democracy and the safety of this Republic.” - Dr. William Pepper
Part 5 is dedicated to finding out the truth about 9/11. Pepper supports two different ways for accomplishing this goal. First, he backs an effort to create a new commission to investigate 9/11 by New York state referendum. Volunteers are currently trying to get the necessary 30,000 signatures from registered New York voters to get the measure on the ballot.
The second approach is to once again file a lawsuit in the courts. Pepper is leading this effort on behalf of the Jersey Girls and plans to sue, among others, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who is widely believed to have sent $100,000 to lead 9/11 hijacker, Mohammed Atta.
Part 6 (8:03) - War Crimes
“I’m determined that what I saw in Vietnam and what is happening in Iraq will not go unpunished. Absolutely determined that that’s the case. What that means is this entire gang of war criminals in Washington are going to have to be prosecuted” - Dr. William Pepper
Part 6 covers what Pepper believes is his most important project -- the prosecution of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, David Addington, Doug Feith and Richard Pearl, et al, for war crimes.
Pepper plans to accomplish this monumental task by following the precedent set in the case of Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet. In that case, a Spanish judge issued an international arrest warrant for Pinochet whose charges including 94 counts of torture.
Ultimately Pepper hopes for a conviction in absentia of the American war criminals which would prevent the guilty from ever stepping foot outside of the United States.
NOTE: To order a DVD of the night's entire programming, which includes a lively Q & A session with Dr. William Pepper and a talk by Professor David Ray Griffin on new 9/11 evidence, please contact Kathleen at quantumysticKFR@gmail.com to request a copy.
WASHINGTON — Backed-up plumbing, peeling paint and other corrosive conditions in aging barracks at Fort Bragg prompted U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Dole to propose changing the way maintenance is handled on U.S. Army bases.
The North Carolina Republican said Friday she wants a pilot program that was tested at Fort Hood in Texas to be expanded Army-wide.
Called the First Sergeant's Barracks Initiative, it transfers responsibility for daily maintenance of barracks to a beefed up team dedicated solely to maintenance that would report directly to the base commander.
Now, the units that occupy the barracks must do much of the work themselves, and they often face delays when requesting help from base work crews on more complicated jobs.
Dole introduced a bill late Thursday to expand the pilot program to all Army installations.
“Anything less than safe and clean housing is unacceptable,” Dole said in a phone interview.
Problems at some of the 1950s-era barracks at Fort Bragg in central North Carolina came to light last week when Sgt. Jeff Frawley's father videotaped the conditions and posted them on YouTube.com.
Ed Frawley said he was disgusted that troops with the 82nd Airborne, who had been serving in Afghanistan, came home to such an environment.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday that he'd watched the video and found the conditions “appalling.”
“Soldiers should never have to live in such squalor,” he said, adding that “current needs must not be sacrificed to future capabilities.”
The latest outrage is a father’s video of a U.S. Army barracks at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, the home of the famed 82nd Airborne Division.
It shows the quarters where his soldier son and other soldier sons were sent to live upon their return from combat. Mold and mildew and peeling paint are bad enough, but what about a big barracks bathroom ankle-deep in raw sewage?
Scandals like this latest one and an earlier eruption of public outrage over the miserably maintained quarters where wounded soldiers were warehoused at Walter Reed Army Hospital are an indictment of the core competency of our Army.
If the Army cannot afford to maintain minimally decent standards of housing and feeding our soldiers — and treat them with the best medical care and all the loving attention they deserve when they're wounded in combat — then, by God, the Army doesn’t deserve to have ANY soldiers at all.
The above video (1:09) has 2.5 million views on YouTube in the last month which makes it one of the most popular videos to ever come out of the UK. And while the short ad is ultimately a public service announcement warning drivers to watch out for bicyclists, it evidences important shortcomings in the human brain. Specifically, there is much in life that we miss or get wrong and yet remain convinced of our correctness.
For example, the brain often plays similar tricks on us when it comes to eyewitness identification during crimes and then at criminal trials. Every year an estimated 77,000 people become criminal defendants after being identified by a witness. Further, studies have shown that juries convict at a far greater rate (68%) with eyewitness testimony than without (18%). Legal experts note that next to a smoking gun, “nothing carries as much weight with a jury as the testimony of an actual witness.”
The above numbers are highly problematic when, contrary to conventional wisdom, studies show error rates as high as 50% when people are asked to identify people they saw for a relatively short period of time. Worse, wrongful identification skyrockets (70% in one study) when people are asked to identify a person of a different race.
Scientific experiments involving brain scans have provided some answers to why this occurs. White people, for starters, tend to “look at someone's hair and eye color” which is “not very helpful if they're being asked to distinguish amongst black people or Asians” where “hair color and eye color really don't vary too much”, says one Stanford scientist.
The real world consequences of this are devastating. According to the Innocence Project, 75% of convictions overturned through DNA testing involve eyewitness misidentification. And thousands of innocent people like Julius Earl Ruffin (middle), who spent 21 years in prison for a rape he did not commit, are incarcerated every year because of faulty eyewitness testimony.
So the next time one sits on a jury or, god forbid, witnesses a crime, remember the video above and that things are not always as they seem.
It appears that Hot Potato Mash has more Iraq war coverage than the mainstream media. From today's New York Times:
The three broadcast networks’ nightly newscasts devoted more than 4,100 minutes to Iraq in 2003 and 3,000 in 2004, before leveling off at about 2,000 a year, according to Andrew Tyndall, who monitors the broadcasts and posts detailed breakdowns at tyndallreport.com. And by the last months of 2007, he said, the broadcasts were spending half as much time on Iraq as earlier in the year.
Since the start of last year, the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a part of the nonprofit Pew Research Center, has tracked reporting by several dozen major newspapers, cable stations, broadcast television networks, Web sites and radio programs. Iraq accounted for 18 percent of their prominent news coverage in the first nine months of 2007, but only 9 percent in the following three months, and 3 percent so far this year. (emphasis is mine)
The policy debate in Washington that dominated last year’s Iraq coverage has almost disappeared from the news. And reporting on events in Iraq has fallen by more than two-thirds from a year ago.
Clearly the MSM just doesn't care about our soldiers fighting and dying in Iraq. Soldiers like Tomas Young seen in the two videos below and the soon to be released documentary “Body of War”. For more on Young see my post at Brad Blog.
I got a chance to meet Karl Rove before he spoke at the Gibson Amphitheatre in Los Angeles last night. See the video (33 seconds, below) of my brief encounter:
UPDATE: Transcript of the encounter which reveals one particularly interesting line...
Rove: “Hi, Karl Rove”
Alan: “Alan Breslauer”
Rove: “Hey Alan, nice to meet you”
Alan: “Do you mind holding this with me [inaudible - might be ”while we do this“]
Rove: ”What is this, what is this“
Rove: ”No, no, you can hold that one“
Alan: ”I'll hold it, all right“
Rove: ”You can hold that one, you can hold that one“
Rove: ”I'll look skeptically at it“
Alan: ”Come on, just hold it“
Woman's Voice: ”You don't need to do this. You don't have to do that. No. No“
Alan: ”Sure, sure I do“
Rove: ”Nice to meet you, thanks“
Alan walking away but not in the video: ”Free him“
Why would Karl Rove care one way or the other about Siegelman's freedom if he had nothing to do with the case?
Later, Rove was confronted with a question about the Don Siegelman piece on 60 Minutes. The audio of Rove's answer is available below (2:37) with the transcript following below the video:
Question: It’s basically a widespread belief that when it comes to politics you play it rough. They have accused you of outing CIA agent Valerie Plame, planning the dismissals of US attorneys on political grounds, collusion with Jack Abramoff and most recently plotting the downfall of Don Siegelman. Do you play rough?
Rove: Ah, you know, in each one of those instances things have proven to be or turned out to be either non-existent or not true. But if there is no evidence for it, Rove is responsible. It’s like the 60 Minutes thing on Don Siegelman…
Question: Did you see it?
Rove: Yeah I did, you know, this woman says that she was a longtime Alabama operative and I asked her to get pictures of Governor Siegelman with - naked pictures of him with his aides - and, ah, that this is a number of requests I’ve made to her.
The fact of the matter is that I never met with this woman. I never made this request of her or anybody else. If she was a political operative she wasn’t involved in any of the campaigns that I was involved in in Alabama. I’ve never met the woman.
And I frankly thought it was really unusual, you know, there was CBS – this woman says she met with me in 2001 – I’m at the White House, where did we meet? You know, she was an opposition researcher, ah, who paid her? When did I start making these requests? I mean, I, I, the woman lied. I don’t think I’ve ever met the woman. I know I’ve never taken a meeting with her.
And yet the CBS – look, I’m a myth I’m not a human being. I may appear to be flesh and blood but I’m a myth.
Election integrity expert and author of Fooled Again, Mark Crispin Miller, made some remarkable comments while speaking to the LA Election Protection Task Force last night. Robert Carillo Cohen, producer of Hacking Democracy, was also a featured speaker at the event.
After covering some preliminary matters, Miller retold the story of his post 2004 election encounter with John Kerry when the Democratic candidate admitted that he believed the presidential election was stolen. This shouldn't surprise anyone since, as Miller states:
And believe me, a cursory study of the evidence makes it abundantly clear that the election was stolen and it wasn't even that close.
Which ultimately leads Miller to conclude that Kerry is in denial:
Because if you really do accept what happened, you realize that it is a catastrophe, it's an emergency. And it's something that a guy like John Kerry or Al Gore is simply not built to deal with, right? Because if you come to terms with what went down, you realize that it is an attack on American democracy. Business as usual can't simply continue. We gotta do something. We gotta hit the barricades.
But resistance to the idea that American democracy is under attack goes far beyond Kerry and Gore. Miller believes the way to break through this resistance is to:
keep publicizing, to keep spreading the word, to keep making clear that it is not just this little thing here or that little thing there, we're talking about a fringe movement that has taken over the Republican party that has been dismantling democracy, that has been destroying the voting system on every conceivable front, not just the machines. They are even messing with the census. They are preventing another census from being taken because if you have census data you can track this stuff more easily.
Finally, Miller concludes by going over a 12-step approach to reforming our elections.
Senator John Edwards took his presidential campaign to Los Angeles yesterday, speaking to a crowd of about 1,000 at the Southern California Public Service Workers' headquarters. While Edwards spent the bulk of his nearly 20 minute speech going after special interests, corporations and lobbyists, he also took a few shots, without naming anyone, at his main Democratic challengers:
“You don't bring about change by shuffling papers, and you don't bring about change by just giving a speech. We have to actually have some guts, some determination and some fight if we want to bring the change that America so desperately needs.”
Edwards also said that he was the “underdog” and challenged the crowd to start a grassroots movement on his behalf that will spread across the country like a “tidal wave of change.”
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair spoke to a Los Angeles audience on Monday about his new role as Middle East envoy on behalf of the United Nations, European Union, United States and Russia. Blair began by illustrating the differences between Israel and its neighboring countries through an anecdote about a waiter spilling soup on then Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. The waiter, according to Blair, was lucky that he spilled the soup in a democratic country where the incident was brushed off rather than in one of other Middle East states where the punishment would likely have been severe. Hence, Blair believes the spread of democracy in the region is key to bringing “peace to the Middle East”:
Actually this isn't simply about Jews and Arabs or people of different religious faiths, it's also about making sure that some values and ideals - which are about democracy and are about democracy not just in terms of your voting system but in terms of attitude, spirit and what's in your mind. That those values are protected in that region so that hopefully one day they can spread in that region.
Why anyone would want to spread our broken democracy is beyond me.
