Defense Department counterintelligence investigators suspected that Iranian exiles who provided dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran to a small group of Pentagon officials might have "been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service ... to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government," a Senate Intelligence Committee report said Thursday.

A top aide to then-secretary of defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, however, shut down the 2003 investigation into the Pentagon officials' activities after only a month, and the Defense Department's top brass never followed up on the investigators' recommendation for a more thorough investigation, the Senate report said.

The revelation raises questions about whether Iran may have used a small cabal of officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney's office to feed bogus intelligence on Iraq and Iran to senior policymakers in the Bush administration who were eager to oust the Iraqi dictator.

Iran, which was a mortal enemy of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and fought a bloody eight-year war with Iraq during his reign, has been the primary beneficiary of U.S. policy in Iraq, where Iranian-backed groups now run much of the government and the security forces.

The aborted counterintelligence investigation probed some Pentagon officials' contacts with Iranian exile Manucher Ghorbanifar, whom the CIA had labeled a "fabricator" in 1984. Those contacts were brokered by an American civilian, Michael Ledeen, a former Pentagon and National Security Council consultant and a leading advocate of invading Iraq and overthrowing Iran's Islamic regime.

According to the Senate report, the Pentagon's Counterintelligence Field Activity unit concluded in 2003 that Ledeen "was likely unwitting of any counterintelligence issues related to his relationship with Mr. Ghorbanifar."

The counterintelligence unit said, however, that Ledeen's association with Ghorbanifar "was widely known, and therefore it should be presumed other foreign intelligence services, including those of Iran, would know."

Stephen Cambone, then the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, shut down the counterintelligence investigation after only a month, the Senate report said.

The Senate report said that Pentagon officials never followed up on the investigators' recommendation for a comprehensive analysis of whether Ghorbanifar or his associates tried "to directly or indirectly influence or access U.S. government officials."

The counterintelligence investigators recommended that U.S. officials attempt "to map Ghorbanifar's relationship within Iranian elite social networks and, if possible, his contacts with other governments and/or intelligence organizations," but that effort was never undertaken.

The Senate committee also found that Pentagon officials concealed the contacts with Ghorbanifar from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the State Department. Pentagon officials also provided Senate investigators with an inaccurate account of events and, with support from two unnamed officials in Cheney's office, continued meeting with Ghorbanifar after contact with him was officially ordered to stop.

Labels: Bush Administration, corruption, Iran

The Republicans are great at framing issues and labelling candidates. And the new buzzword for Obama is radical. Right-wing radio host Sean Hannity has even re-named his show the "Stop Radical Obama express." On his program Thursday he literally said "radical" about every fourth word. Radical, radical, radical. Get ready, Democrats. We're gonna hear that word more in the next five months than we've heard in a lifetime.

Listening to Hannity's program makes you wonder if he and his kool-aid-drunken listeners are not part of some twisted, brainwashed cult. They greet each other with "you're a great American" and depart with "God bless you." The level of ignorance that flows freely on this program is astounding. Hannity's mission is clearly to poison anyone who comes within earshot of him with lies and deception about the Obamas. Here's a few of his shameless rants from Thursday:

"I am telling you, Barack Obama will move this country in a direction that is so radical that it will shock your senses."

"He (Obama) has views that would probably shock the average American."

"He's a Radical left winger, to the left of George McGovern."

And on 1960's terrorist William Ayers, embattled Chicago developer Tony Rezko and the Reverends Jeremiah Wright and Michael Pfleger: Obama is "a phony. A friend of all these people, and who will associate with anyone who can help him politically."

Throughout his program Hannity hammered home the term "radical associations" to describe these controversial relationships. It's abundantly clear that Hannity's goal for the next five months is to scare the hell out of his regular audience, and anyone else who might be listening for that matter.

Make no mistake: the constant regurgitation of the word "radical" is meant to conjure up all sorts of fear, anger and racial prejudice. Think "radical Muslim." Think "angry black man." Think Willie Horton. This sort of pandering to the racist dumbasses of America is beyond despicable, but it's what the GOP does best. It's pure propaganda. And like all good propaganda, if you say it enough it sticks.

The demonizing of Obama was also evident on the Mark Levin radio program Thursday, where the nominee was accused of just about everything short of eating babies. Here's a snippet of Levin's lies and deception: "Barack Obama has been hostile to Jews and to the state of Israel for years." Oh really Mark? Perhaps you'd like to back that up with some actual facts? Ooops, sorry. There's nothing about facts in the Rovian playbook.

Labels: 2008 election, wingnuttia

“We have seen this before. There is dirt and lies that are circulated in e-mails and they pump them out long enough until finally you, a mainstream reporter, asks me about it,” Obama said to the McClatchy reporter during a press conference aboard his campaign plane. “That gives legs to the story. If somebody has evidence that myself or Michelle or anybody has said something inappropriate, let them do it.”

Labels: Barack Obama, Democrats with balls

Labels: cat blogging, Marc Maron

• New York Daily News: "Barack and Michelle Obama's 'fist bump of hope' shows them silly in love"
  
• The Globe and Mail: "A small gesture that spoke volumes"
  
• The Seattle Times: "Obamas seal the deal with "dap"; knocking of knuckles epitomizes historic moment"
  
• Washington Post: "The Fist Couple: Giving a Big Bump to Authenticity"
  
• Slate.com: "Pounds"
  

Labels: Barack Obama, hack journalism, Michelle Obama, racism

• The New York Times: "Bush Overstated Evidence on Iraq, Senators Report"
  
• San Francisco Chronicle: "White House scolded on prewar claims"
  
• Detroit Free Press: "Officials' Iraq claims unsupported, report says"
  
• Washington Post: "Bush Inflated Threat From Iraq's Banned Weapons, Report Says"
  
• Bloomberg: "Bush Oversimplified Iraq Intelligence, Report Says"
  
• Reuters: "Bush misused Iraq intelligence - US Senate report"
  

“Representing to the American people that the two had an operational partnership and posed a single, indistinguishable threat was fundamentally misleading and led the nation to war on false premises,”

Labels: George W. Bush, lies, The War in Iraq

Are we supposed to be scared of Democrats as big spenders? The Bush administration and congressional Republicans topped Democratic spending on every front. Even excluding the “War on Terror,” Republicans have busted the budget.

The Democrats are going to raise our taxes? No doubt they will, but, because of the Republicans’ massive deficits, our children and grandchildren are going to be crushed by tax hikes or hyperinflation.

The Democrats are corrupt miscreants? Compared to the Bridge to Nowhere-planning, bribe-taking, page-trolling Republicans?

How about, as Bob Dole once put it, the threat of sending our youth off to “Democrat Wars”?

Never mind.

As it becomes more and more clear that the Republicans have nothing to run on, the campaign will get nastier and more personal, centered on Obama. As the real Halloween approaches, it will get worse and then continue until Election Day.

[snip]

To be sure, Obama has to define himself in positive tones before the Republicans succeed in defining him as a secret Muslim agent who’s going to sell us to terrorists. But he has by far the best campaign organization I’ve seen this year, and if, with much of the media in his pocket, they can’t get his message out, they deserve to lose.

Negative campaigning is not the culprit. The job in any campaign, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, is to stress your positives and just as strongly stress your opponent’s negatives. We’ve had negative campaigning in America since Colonial days, and it works. That’s why it doesn’t go away despite the sermons from the “good government” crowd.

No, the culprit is not negative campaigning, but rather, campaigning without ideas that are arguably better than your opponent’s, and relying instead on bogeyman portrayals.

McCain has been the victim of bogeyman campaigning himself, and I know him to be an honorable man who doesn’t want to win that way. The problem is that McCain doesn’t have a coherent set of ideas with which he can simultaneously fire up the conservative base and attract independents. He’s a part-time liberal in conservative clothing. Conservatives aren’t fooled by that, and liberals aren’t going to vote for a part-time liberal when they have a very persuasive full-time liberal to vote for.

Republicans on the Hill have no message of what they are for, what their principles are or how they would govern. They can’t even agree to oppose big-government spending through earmarks.

“The lesser of two evils” is not a governing philosophy. Yet Republicans repeatedly try to seduce conservatives with it. That strategy didn’t work in 1948, 1960, 1974, 1976, 1992 or 2006 — and it won’t work in 2008.

Obama isn’t a goblin, nor Pelosi a witch, but the Republican majority of the ‘90s and 2000s is Humpty Dumpty, prostrate and shattered.

Labels: conservatism

Beyond Christian's deplorable reference to Obama as an "inadequate black male" was a wail worth hearing. She also said, "I'm proud to be an older American woman!" I can feel her pain. Reading the sexist attacks on Clinton and her white female supporters, as well as on female journalists and bloggers who've occasionally tried to defend her or critique Obama, has been, well, consciousness-raising. Prejudice against older women, apparently, is one of the last non-taboo biases. I've been stunned by the extent to which trashing Clinton supporters as washed up old white women is acceptable. A writer whose work I respect submitted a piece addressed to "old white feminists," telling them to get out of Obama's way. I've found my own writing often dismissed not on its merits (or lack thereof) but because as a woman who will turn 50 in September, I'm supposed to be Clinton's demographic. Salon's letters pages, as well as the comments sections around the blogosphere, are studded with dismissive, derisive references to bitter old white women.

Mainly I think he has to reach out to women the old-fashioned way: individually, warmly and respectfully. He needs to schedule meetings with Clinton's top female supporters. (It's probably too much to ask, but I'd love to see a lunch with Geraldine Ferraro. Ask for her thoughts on winning women and Reagan Democrats. Explain that being the first serious black presidential candidate is a little harder than maybe it looked.) It's still too early for me to be certain what Obama should do with his vice-presidential pick, except I know he needs to quite publicly take a Clinton candidacy seriously. I'm not sure picking another woman would cut it. It would look like a form of tokenism, and it wouldn't necessarily do the trick: It's one particular woman, not just any woman, who earned 18 million votes that he will need in November.

Labels: feminism

The AVC Advantage requires no specialist knowledge to operate
or maintain. It performs a self-diagnosis at every power-up, and
its error messages display in plain, easy-to-understand language
for quick and simple trouble-shooting. Plus its modular-component
design allows easy in-field part replacement or system upgrade.

As a fairly well-known Election Integrity journalist who has personally covered, for years, the myriad election woes of thousands (if not millions) of voters around the country who have tried to bring seemingly endless stories of votes flipped on e-voting systems to the attention of officials, these stories always continue to be remarkable to me, even if not to many others in the rest of the mainstream media.

It's even more troubling when one realizes that so little ever seems to be done in light of so many of these horror stories, as those very same failed systems are still deployed across the nation, with little or no modification to correct the mountains of documented problems even now, as we head towards an election likely to be of historic proportions this November.

What follows is yet another one of those stories, where a voter had vote selections flipped by the electronic voting system, such that candidates were chosen other than the ones intended to be selected by the voter, though no fault of his own.

But this time, the voter is me.

Though I've covered so many of these stories, it was nonetheless remarkable to see it happen before ones very eyes, as occurred yesterday when I voted here in Los Angeles during our very low turnout California state Primary election.

The ES&S electronic voting system that I used to try to vote on yesterday, ended up flipping a total of 4 out of the 12 contests and initiatives for which I had attempted to vote.

Right before my very eyes, the computer-printed ballot produced by the voting system I was using, incorrectly filled in bubbles for four of the races I was voting in. Had I not been incredibly careful, after the ballot was printed out, to painstakingly compare what was printed to what I actually voted for, I'd have never known my votes were being given to candidates I did not vote for.

Had I been a blind voter --- as the system I was using is largely intended for use by the disabled --- I would have cast my ballot without having a clue that a full 40% of the votes I'd tried to cast for various California Superior Court judges were flipped to other candidates...


After speaking late last night about the problem to Dean Logan, the current acting Registrar-Recorder for Los Angeles County (the country's largest voting jurisdiction) and officials from the CA Sec. of State's office, I can report the failed e-voting machine in question is now being quarantined for testing to try and determine what happened in this, just the latest in a mounting string of failures by voting systems made by ES&S, the country's largest supplier of voting equipment.

Labels: electronic voting machines

If elected president, Senator John McCain would reserve the right to run his own warrantless wiretapping program against Americans, based on the theory that the president's wartime powers trump federal criminal statutes and court oversight, according to a statement released by his campaign Monday.

McCain's new tack towards the Bush administration's theory of executive power comes some 10 days after a McCain surrogate stated, incorrectly it seems, that the senator wanted hearings into telecom companies' cooperation with President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program, before he'd support giving those companies retroactive legal immunity.

As first reported by Threat Level, Chuck Fish, a full-time lawyer for the McCain campaign, also said McCain wanted stricter rules on how the nation's telecoms work with U.S. spy agencies, and expected those companies to apologize for any lawbreaking before winning amnesty.

But Monday, McCain adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin, speaking for the campaign, disavowed those statements, and for the first time cast McCain's views on warrantless wiretapping as identical to Bush's.

[N]either the Administration nor the telecoms need apologize for actions that most people, except for the ACLU and the trial lawyers, understand were Constitutional and appropriate in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001. [...]

We do not know what lies ahead in our nation’s fight against radical Islamic extremists, but John McCain will do everything he can to protect Americans from such threats, including asking the telecoms for appropriate assistance to collect intelligence against foreign threats to the United States as authorized by Article II of the Constitution.

The Article II citation is key, since it refers to President Bush's longstanding arguments that the president has nearly unlimited powers during a time of war. The administration's analysis went so far as to say the Fourth Amendment did not apply inside the United States in the fight against terrorism, in one legal opinion from 2001.

McCain's new position plainly contradicts statements he made in a December 20, 2007 interview with the Boston Globe where he implicitly criticized Bush's five-year secret  end-run around the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Labels: John McCain

Labels: assholes, delusion, Terry McAuliffe

McCain shared the stage with Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who is frequently mentioned as a potential running mate. Jindal and several others spent the Memorial Day holiday at McCain's compound in Sedona, Ariz.

"A lot of people have been speculating about that," Jindal said as he warmed up a crowd of about 600 people. "I can tell you the secret now: John is a great cook."

In the speech, McCain laid out his core argument, that he has a record of working for reform and offers the kind of change that the country needs, while Obama makes empty promises of a new direction and offers the wrong kind of change.

"No matter who wins this election, the direction of this country is going to change dramatically," McCain said. "But the choice is between the right change and the wrong change; between going forward and going backward."

• Voted "No" on increasing allocations for transit security (7/12/2006)
  
• Voted "No" on increasing access to women's health care services, including those for the purpose of preventing unintended pregnancy (3/7/05)
  
• Voted "No" on allowing those injured by flu vaccines to sue (5/3/2006)
  
• Voted "Yes" on prohibiting federal funding to groups that perform abortions, even if those groups are primary providers of women's health care in a given area. (10/18/07). Interesting side note; The sponsor of this bill was Sen. David Vitter (R-Hookers)
  
• Yesterday's speech was in New Orleans -- a place for which on 11/7/2005, McCain voted "No" on amending the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide tax benefits for areas affected by Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma.
  
• Voted "Yes" on a bill to expand FISA to allow electronic surveillance of foreigners outside the U.S. without a court order and grant immunity to electronic communication surveillance providers
  
• And Mr. Maverick voted "No" on a bill that increases regulations on members of Congress regarding lobbyists and donations.
  

Labels: John McCain, utter horseshit

Labels: Barack Obama

Do you want to vote for a man who sees his wife as an equal, or do you want to vote for a man who sees his wife as a c*nt?

Labels: 2008 election

Labels: music

When the Golden Rule Insurance Company rejected her application for health coverage last year, Peggy Robertson was mystified.

“It made no sense,” said Ms. Robertson, 39, who lives in Centennial, Colo. “I’m in perfect health.”

She was turned down because she had given birth by Caesarean section. Having the operation once increases the odds that it will be performed again, and if she became pregnant and needed another Caesarean, Golden Rule did not want to pay for it. A letter from the company explained that if she had been sterilized after the Caesarean, or if she were over 40 and had given birth two or more years before applying, she might have qualified.

Ms. Robertson had been shopping around for individual health insurance, the kind that people buy on their own. She already had insurance but was looking for a better rate. After being rejected by Golden Rule, she kept her existing coverage.

With individual insurance, unlike the group coverage usually sponsored by employers, insurance companies in many states are free to pick and choose the people and conditions they cover, and base the price on a person’s medical history. Sometimes, a past Caesarean means higher premiums.

Although it is not known how many women are in Ms. Robertson’s situation, the number seems likely to increase, because the pool of people seeking individual health insurance, now about 18 million, has been growing steadily — and so has the Caesarean rate, which is at an all-time high of 31.1 percent. In 2006, more than 1.2 million Caesareans were performed in the United States, and researchers estimate that each year, half a million women giving birth have had previous Caesareans.

“Obstetricians are rendering large numbers of women uninsurable by overusing this surgery,” said Pamela Udy, president of the International Caesarean Awareness Network, a group whose mission is to prevent unnecessary Caesareans.

Although many women who have had a Caesarean can safely have a normal birth later, something that Ms. Udy’s group advocates, in recent years many doctors and hospitals have refused to allow such births, because they carry a small risk of a potentially fatal complication, uterine rupture. Now, Ms. Udy says, insurers are adding insult to injury. Not only are women feeling pressure to have Caesareans that they do not want and may not need, but they may also be denied coverage for the surgery.

“You have women just caught in the middle of this huge triangle of hospitals, insurance companies and doctors pointing the finger at each other,” Ms. Udy said.

Labels: cutting off one's nose to spite one's face, foolishness, sexism

Labels: icepick meet forehead

Some of the nation’s biggest banks have closed their doors to students at community colleges, for-profit universities and other less competitive institutions, even as they continue to extend federally backed loans to students at the nation’s top universities.

Citibank has been among the most aggressive in paring the list of colleges it serves. JPMorgan Chase, PNC and SunTrust say they have not dropped whole categories, but are cutting colleges as well. Some less-selective four-year colleges, like Eastern Oregon University and William Jessup University in Rocklin, Calif., say they have been summarily dropped by some lenders.

The practice suggests that if the credit crisis and the ensuing turmoil in the student loan business persist, some of the nation’s neediest students will be hurt the most. The difficulty borrowing may deter them from attending school or prompt them to take a semester off. When they get student loans, they will wind up with less attractive terms and may run a greater risk of default if they have to switch lenders in the middle of their college years.

Tuition and loan amounts can be quite small at community colleges. But these institutions, which are a stepping stone to other educational programs or to better jobs, often draw students from the lower rungs of the economic ladder. More than 6.2 million of the nation’s 14.8 million undergraduates — over 40 percent — attend community colleges. According to the most recent data from the College Board, about a third of their graduates took out loans, a majority of them federally guaranteed.

“If we put too many hurdles in their way to get a loan, they’ll take a third job or use a credit card,” said Jacqueline K. Bradley, assistant dean for financial aid at Mendocino College in California. “That almost guarantees that they won’t be as successful in their college career.”

Labels: economic death watch

Labels: bloggers, Steve Gilliard

Labels: 2008 election, Hillary Clinton, icepick meet forehead