Labels: Fox News, liars, Tony Snow

Labels: House Judiciary Committee, Karl Rove

Republicans see a different Obama. The National Journal rated him the most liberal member of the Senate last year. His advisers say the rating system is faulty, but McCain and other Republicans say it is an accurate reflection of Obama's political philosophy.

Peter Wehner, a former Bush administration official who is now at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, considers Obama someone who can move his party to new places on race and religion. But on policy, he sees him as conventionally liberal. "The Democratic Party today is quite liberal, and Obama, if anything, will deepen the roots of its liberalism," he said.

Labels: Barack Obama, cynicism

Labels: Michelle Obama

President George Bush signed off with a defiant farewell over his refusal to accept global climate change targets at his last G8 summit.

As he prepared to fly out from Japan, he told his fellow leaders: "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter."

President Bush made the private joke in the summit's closing session, senior sources said yesterday. His remarks were taken as a two-fingered salute from the President from Texas who is wedded to the oil industry. He had given some ground at the summit by saying he would "seriously consider" a 50 per cent cut in carbon emissions by 2050.

Labels: assholes, George W. Bush

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A top U.S. Democratic senator said in a newspaper interview published Wednesday that he would consider supporting opening up new areas for offshore oil and gas drilling.

"I'm open to drilling and responsible production," Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin told The Wall Street Journal, adding that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid could also support the move.

Labels: Better Democrats, spinelessness

Labels: cynicism, fascism, hopelessness, spinelessness

Two conservation groups filed a lawsuit on Tuesday challenging the Bush administration's decision to let oil companies unintentionally harass or harm polar bears and walruses off the northwestern Alaska coast.

The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Anchorage claims that federal officials violated laws designed to protect the animals and their sensitive habitat in the Arctic waters of the Chukchi Sea.

"These regulations set the parameters for how oil exploration will be done in the next five years," said Brendan Cummings, oceans program director at the Center for Biological Diversity, which filed the suit along with Pacific Environment. "The Chukchi Sea is critical habitat for those animals. For them to survive in the face of global warming, we simply cannot allow oil development there."

Last month, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided to grant legal protection to seven oil companies in the Chukchi over the next five years should they accidentally harm "small numbers" of polar bears or Pacific walruses while drilling or during other exploratory activities. The agency is named as a defendant in the suit, along with Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne.

Fish and Wildlife Service officials said oil and gas exploration will have a negligible effect on the bear and walrus populations. Global warming is most likely to cause the animals' numbers to dwindle, the agency said.

Labels: Bush Administration, global warming, just another outrage, polar bears

For more than one year, the Oversight Committee has been seeking documents from the Department of Justice relevant to our investigation into the leak of Ms. Wilson’s identity. Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald has cooperated with the Committee’s investigation, providing documents directly to the Committee and releasing others to you for production to the Committee. Two of the documents that Mr. Fitzgerald has provided to you for production to the Committee are the reports of the FBI interviews of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Despite the Committee’s repeated requests, you have consistently refused to provide these reports to the Committee or unredacted versions of the reports of FBI interviews with White House staff. In response to the Committee’s June 16 subpoena, you wrote: “we are not prepared to provide or make available any reports of interviews with the President or Vice President from the leak investigation” because of “core Executive Branch confidentiality interests and fundamental separation of powers principles.”

In deference to your concerns and in a further attempt at accommodation, the Committee will not seek access to the report of the FBI interview of President Bush at this time. The report of the FBI interview with Vice President Cheney needs to be produced, however. The Vice President’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, told the FBI that it is “possible” that the Vice President instructed him to disseminate to the press information about the identity of Ms. Wilson. The Committee cannot complete its inquiry into this serious matter without the report of the Vice President’s FBI interview.

The arguments you have raised for withholding the interview report are not tenable. When the FBI interview with the Vice President was conducted, the Vice President knew that the information in the interview could be made public in a criminal trial and that there were no restrictions on Special Counsel Fitzgerald’s use of the interview. Mr. Fitzgerald clarified this key point last week, writing to the Committee that “there were no agreements, conditions, and understandings between the Office of Special Counsel or the Federal Bureau of Investigation and either the President or Vice President regarding the conduct and use of the interview or interviews.”

Vice President Cheney’s attorneys have consistently maintained that he is not an “entity within the executive branch.” Whether this unusual claim is accurate or not, I am aware of no freestanding vice presidential communications privilege, let alone one that covers voluntary and unrestricted conversations with a special counsel investigating wrongdoing. There certainly was no such understanding when our Committee sought the FBI interview report of an interview with Vice President Gore. The Justice Department produced the interview to the Committee despite the fact that it contained discussion of official White House business.

In his closing remarks in the criminal trial of Mr. Libby, Special Counsel Fitzgerald stated: “There is a cloud over what the Vice President did that week.” Your cooperation in this matter could go a long way to dispelling this notion or perhaps confirming Mr. Fitzgerald’s fears. Either way, this Committee and the American people are entitled to know what happened. For similar reasons, you should also produce the unredacted versions of the interviews with White House staff that the Committee has subpoenaed.

Labels: Congress, Nancy Pelosi, spinelessness

Labels: health care, insurance industry, John McCain

Labels: blogging

Labels: bloggers, tinfoil

Labels: hypocrisy, John McCain

When you combine McCain's individual war chest with his party's bankroll, it turns out the Republican nominee has about $90 million currently burning a hole in his pocket, while Obama and the DNC weigh in at a relatively paltry $47 million, or half as much. And even though McCain has agreed to an $84.1 spending limit by accepting public funds--a decision he likes to portray as a principled stand against the corrupting influence of money on politics--at least double that sum will be dropped on his behalf before Election Day thanks to loopholes in the law that allow outside groups to effectively skirt such limits with largely unregulated "soft money" contributions.

[snip]

Well, that's no longer a theoretical proposition. Starting last weekend, McCain finally saw the first tangible benefits of his joint fundraising account with the RNC--just as moneyed interests unable to donate directly to the senator's taxpayer-sponsored campaign began to reveal how they plan to circumvent spending limits and play an outsized part in the election.


First up: the RNC. On Sunday, OnMessage Inc., a Virginia-based company with Republican ties, rolled out a series of pro-McCain, anti-Obama television ads in the battleground states of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The energy-centric campaign--a $3 million RNC buy set to air over 10 days--is a perfect example of how, when it comes to spending, the distinction between McCain and the RNC is pretty much irrelevant. While McCain is "pushing his own party to face climate change," says the ad's announcer, "Barack Obama... just says no to lower gas taxes... no to nuclear... and no to more production." This is exactly the same (misleading) message McCain's campaign delivered in a spot released online late last month. But because McCain "had nothing do with the [new] ads," and the RNC merely funded the spots--it apparently didn't consult on content--they're subject to neither the candidate's $84.1 million spending limit nor the $20 million cap on what the party can spend in coordination with the campaign. In other words, the RNC can invest unlimited sums of money in commercials like this. Given that GOP donors can each contribute $28,500 to the national party--or about $25,000 more than Dems can give directly to Obama--expect to see plenty more On Message-style spots before Election Day. After all, it's not like they're going to sound any different from the ads McCain would air if he could afford to.

Meanwhile, McCain campaign is stepping around federal spending limits by funneling cash through the state and national party machinery--and potentially benefiting from donations to a non-RNC organization that could boost his chances in key states.

Labels: hypocrisy, John McCain

Labels: idiocy, inability to handle more than one idea at a time, media

A senior government official with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has expressed great interest in a so-called safety bracelet that would serve as a stun device, similar to that of a police Taser®. According to this promotional video found at the Lamperd Less Lethal website, the bracelet would be worn by all airline passengers.

This bracelet would:

• take the place of an airline boarding pass

• contain personal information about the traveler

• be able to monitor the whereabouts of each passenger and his/her luggage

• shock the wearer on command, completely immobilizing him/her for several minutes
 
The Electronic ID Bracelet, as it’s referred to as, would be worn by every traveler “until they disembark the flight at their destination.”  Yes, you read that correctly. Every airline passenger would be tracked by a government-funded GPS, containing personal, private and confidential information, and that it would shock the customer worse than an electronic dog collar if he/she got out of line?

Clearly the Electronic ID Bracelet is an euphuism for the EMD Safety Bracelet, or at least it has a nefarious hidden ability, thus the term ID Bracelet is ambiguous at best. EMD stands for Electro-Musclar Disruption. Again, according to the promotional video the bracelet can completely immobilize the wearer for several minutes.

So is the government really that interested in this bracelet? Yes!

According to a letter from DHS official, Paul S. Ruwaldt of the Science and Technology Directorate, office of Research and Development, to the inventor whom he had previously met with, he wrote, “To make it clear, we [the federal government] are interested in…the immobilizing security bracelet, and look forward to receiving a written proposal.” The letterhead, in case you were wondering, came from the DHS office at the William J. Hughes Technical Center at the Atlantic City International Airport, or the Federal Aviation Administration headquarters.

Labels: Department of Homeland Security, fascism, insanity

The action was a stunning blow to Fiorina, 50, one of the most powerful women in business, and a repudiation of her leading of H-P's controversial 2002 acquisition of Compaq Computer

Fiorina pushed through the $19 billion merger as part of a bold plan to remake the Silicon Valley icon into a computing and services giant that could challenge IBM. Yet the merger never produced the results promised, and as Fiorina worked to integrate the two huge companies, Dell Inc. leapfrogged past H-P to become the leading seller of PCs.

And H-P shares lost more than half their value during Fiorina's tenure, underperforming Dell's by a wide margin and also lagging IBM's stock performance.

[snip]

Investors rallied behind H-P's stock after learning of Fiorina's departure. The shares climbed $1.39, or almost 7 percent, to close at $21.53. The Dow component was the most heavily traded issue on the New York Stock Exchange, with volume of more than 102 million shares.

[snip]

Controversy surrounded Fiorina from the beginning of her H-P tenure, which included laying off thousands of workers in a painful restructuring.
But the most divisive move was her acquisition of Compaq, which she spearheaded despite fierce opposition from board member Walter Hewlett, the son of H-P co-founder William Hewlett.

Hewlett argued that acquiring Compaq, at the time the largest maker of PCs, would dilute H-P's profitable printing business, kill shareholder value and lead to massive layoffs.

The bitter fight prompted a proxy battle that raised questions about H-P's business direction and became a major distraction for the company's management. When the acquisition was completed in 2002, it led to the firing of more than 17,000 employees and the acrimonious departure of Hewlett from the board.

"H-P has been a great company," Hewlett said in an e-mailed statement after Fiorina's departure was announced. "We all look forward to H-P fulfilling its promise." The Hewlett Foundation still owns about 10 million H-P shares.
Missing expectations

In August 2004, Fiorina had to deal with H-P missing its third-quarter estimates. She blamed the results on poor performance in the company's enterprise servers and storage business, and fired three executives from the division.

While Dunn said on the conference call that there was no connection between those results and Fiorina's firing, investors believed Fiorina was to blame for the company's poor results.

"Now the business unit leaders will have the autonomy to run them properly," said Hillman.

At HP, Fiorina developed the reputation of a manager who knocked heads together—or who chopped them off. And there were massive layoffs during her tenure. In 2003, the company announced it would dismiss almost 18,000 people. (That year, the firm posted a $903 million loss on $56.6 billion in revenue.) When the outsourcing of jobs turned into a national political issue, Fiorina became the poster-girl for an industry campaign aimed at blocking any legislation that would restrict a company's ability to can American employees in favor of workers overseas. She and executives from seven other tech companies issued a report that argued that any such measures would hurt the U.S. economy. The best way to increase American competitiveness, they declared, was to improve schools and, yes, reduce taxes. At a Washington press conference, Fiorina said, "There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore. We have to compete for jobs." The remark did not go over well with critics of outsourcing, who have ever since used it as an indicator of corporate insensitivity.

Fiorina's stint at HP was marked by other moments of controversy. In March 2004, after HP shareholders voted 1.21 billion to 925 million to expense stock options, she opposed the move, essentially opting to stick with accounting practices (that were used by other corporations) that did not reveal a company's true value. That same year, Forbes reported that Hewlett-Packard was "among many other U.S. companies that kept offices in Dubai and were linked to Iranian traders there." The article suggested that HP and other countries were skirting export controls to trade with Iran. And in early 2005, Fiorina announced that pop star Gwen Stefani would join the HP design team and work on the company's line of digital cameras.

Fiorina wasn't around long enough to see her Plan Stefani to completion. In February 2005, she was pushed out of HP. The company's board, with which she had been battling for years, had had enough of her. The Compaq merger had not yielded the benefits—improved shareholder returns and greater profits—she had promised. At the time of her dismissal, Hewlett-Packard stock was trading at about the same price as when she first unveiled the Compaq deal. Eighty percent of the company's operating profits were coming from its old-line printing business. She had not succeeded in reviving HP as a computer-selling powerhouse. The day she was dumped, the company's stock price rose 7 percent. That was Wall Street exclaiming, Hooray. As Robert Cihra, an analyst with Fulcrum Global Partners told Money magazine, "The stock is up a bit on the fact that nobody liked Carly's leadership all that much. The Street had lost all faith in her and the market's hope is that anyone will be better."

Labels: Carly Fiorina, economics, John McCain

Labels: stuff

Mr. McCain’s advisers, who bristle at the idea that they are trying to transform the candidate, say that his lack of smoothness merely reinforces his reputation for authenticity.

“Voters are looking for credibility and are wary of polish,” said Mark McKinnon, a former consultant to Mr. McCain’s campaign. “At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter which candidate can more deftly read a teleprompter.”

Indeed, Mr. McCain and his advisers seem to be trying to present him as a kind of anti-Obama whose weaknesses as a political performer underscore his accessibility to regular voters.

“John doesn’t ever want to be something that he is not,” Mr. Salter said, including trying to pass himself off as a larger-than-life figure on stage. “There’s nothing in there about him that wants to be rarefied.”

Mr. McCain and his surrogates appear to be taking a page from the primary campaign of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, which made a point of praising Mr. Obama’s speaking skills both to erase any expectation that she could match them and to imply that Mr. Obama was more of a performer than a leader. Nicolle Wallace, Mr. McCain’s new senior adviser, said the campaign would focus on having the candidate interact face to face with voters, “not from a center stage in the middle of a stadium.”

In an interview on his campaign plane, Mr. McCain said “my strongest environment is clearly the impromptu.” He added, “I don’t mean that in a way that denigrates Senator’s Obama’s speechmaking skills.”

He shrugged when asked whether he is improving as a speaker. “It’s fine, it’s fine,” he said. “It’s coming along.”

“I will continue to make mistakes,” he added.

Labels: John McCain, You can't make this shit up