Republicans split with Bush on ports...sm

• Ports - Lurker
  • Yet more confirmation that Georgie is clueless. - see article inside
    • Republicans split with Bush on ports...sm - Democrat
  • When you consider how much these guys - have gotten away with, is it any wonder? - see art
  • How bad does it have to get here? - Disgusted
  • No good American security companies?? - Democrat

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Bush Bashed by Republicans

Republicans are Stuck to Bush

 Now we find out it is 21 ports, not just 6. The other 15 I guess they just,, Scooter-style, forgot about. Also, W forgot that he knew about it a week earlier than he said he did and also forgot who told him, it was Andrew Card, not the media.

I have lived in the UAE. It was not lovely there. They were teeny little islands, all sand and rock. You could buy liquor on one of them at the time. Women were not treated as equals. Granted it was a long time ago but look at the 1950s until now. White people would say the civil rights movement was a roaring success; I doubt many Blacks would feel that way. One cannot legislate emotion, belief systems, prejudice...those all exist still in the US and in the Arab countries. The UAE is 17 miles off the coast of Saudi Arabia, home of the bin Ladens, major oil refineries, home of the extremist Islamic schools or terrorist training schools would be more like it.  On the other side of the Persian/Arabian Gulf we have Iraq and Iran. It is difficult to believe that the UAE which is made up of several separate entities would not have some terrorist sympathizers which could all by itself be dangerous. Corporations are in business for 1 reason - money. Soverign state/corporations are also in business for money but they have other agendas as well as do all soverign nations.  By the way, if any from the other board are reading this, some Republicans are more angry about this than the Democrats. I say we should storm the Bastille. Enough is enough. It is time for this most inept of presidents to go.

which you KNOW I would never do.  But having just completed my tax return, I remember seeing stuff about ensuring 'voluntary compliance' and still I feel very legally compelled to go along with it.  Voluntary compliance means they don't send a goon to each and every taxpayer's house to make them file at gunpoint, but that does not make it a willing compliance. 

Hi, I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you.

Arabs Split Over Saddam

Wednesday, October 19, 2005 PHOTOS VIDEO PHOTO ESSAYS Click image to enlarge Photo Essays: � Iraq's Constitutional Referendum STORIES BACKGROUND LINKS � Saddam Pleads Not Guilty to Murder Charges � Militants Kill 19 Ahead of Trial � Saddam Lawyer Seeks Three-Month Adjournment � Iran: Charge Saddam in Iran-Iraq War � Final Results From Iraq Referendum Delayed � Possible Fraud in Iraqi Referendum � Bush: Way Forward Is Clear for Iraq � Fast Facts: Initial Vote Results � Approval of Iraqi Charter Appears Assured CAIRO, Egypt  � Across the Arab world, some watched intently as Saddam Hussein (search) went on trial Wednesday for crimes against Iraqis but others seemed not to care � a sign the former Iraqi leader still divides this region two years after his fall. The region's influential satellite television networks, Al-Jazeera (search) and Al-Arabiya (search), carried nonstop coverage starting hours before the trial began. Pan-Arab dailies like al-Hayat also splashed the opening day on their front pages. But Saudi Arabia's Arabic language-daily Al-Watan used the headline: Saddam's Trial: No one cares and added: The curtains have opened, the cast is ready and the audience is busy with other issues ... Even if we concede that the majority of Iraqis hate Saddam, they also hate how things have developed. Yet in Kuwait, which Saddam invaded in 1990, feelings in support of the trial ran strong. We have been waiting for this trial for a long time � not only us, but the Iraqi people and Iranian people as well. We say this is the end of every oppressor, said Omar Al-Murad, a 43-year-old architect. Many Palestinians also watched closely, but with the opposite view. Weal Naser, a 42-year-old Palestinian owner of a Gaza vegetable shop, said Palestinians can never forget Saddam's past support for their cause. At the start of the Palestinian uprising against Israel, Saddam paid $15,000 to families of Palestinian suicide bombers, later raising it to $25,000. He supported the martyrs' families and he helped many students in Palestine or during their studies in Iraq, he said. Saddam is paying now the price for being a hero, for saying 'No' to America and to (President) Bush, Naser said. If the world wants justice, as they claim, they should bring Bush and (Israeli Prime Minister Ariel) Sharon to trial before Saddam. Palestinian taxi driver Saed Souror, 32, was more ambivalent about Saddam but equally critical of the trial. I am not a Saddam supporter, but I am against this trial because it came upon American orders, Souror said. If Saddam was a murderer, what can we call the American acts there? Egypt's state-owned press chose to mostly ignore the trial, with a few carrying small stories inside but none putting it on the front page. Jordan's media reported on Saddam's trial but provided no independent commentary or analysis, apparently to avoid stirring public anger already high because of opposition to the U.S. invasion. A columnist in respected pan-Arab newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat said the trial has lost much of its meaning because of the bloody insurgency that now attacks Iraqis daily. Some of the worst terror attacks are blamed on al-Qaida in Iraq, led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. It should have been held when Iraqis' memory was full of images of humiliation and that of tens of thousands of the victims and handicapped of the wars, Lebanese columnist Samir Attallah wrote. Instead, he added: Al-Zarqawi has erased from the minds and hearts all the past horrors. Innocent Iraqis used to die in prison and in their homes, now the occupation resistance is killing the Iraqi innocents and their children in the streets. In Dubai, the Gulf News paper said in an editorial that not just Saddam, but Iraq itself is on trial, to see whether its new government can rise to the occasion and give Saddam a fair hearing. Anything less will be a permanent scar upon Iraq and its future, the paper said.

Stephen Crockett posted this twice (at least) on the Conservative Board, in response to an old quote of his being used out of context and distorted by the usual suspects there.  Each time he posted it, it was deleted from the board.  It's certainly easy to understand why they don't want anyone to see this. 

Please read quickly.  They think they should control our board, as well as their own, so it probably won't last very long here, either.

African-American Voters Scrubbed by Secret GOP Hit List

Published by Greg Palast June 16th, 2006 in Articles
Massacre of the Buffalo Soldiers
by Greg Palast
As reported for Democracy Now!

Palast, who first reported this story for BBC Television Newsnight (UK) and
Democracy Now! (USA), is author of the New York Times bestseller, Armed
Madhouse.

The Republican National Committee has a special offer for African-American soldiers: Go to Baghdad, lose your vote.

A confidential campaign directed by GOP party chiefs in October 2004 sought to challenge the ballots of tens of thousands of voters in the last presidential election, virtually all of them cast by residents of Black-majority
precincts.  Files from the secret vote-blocking campaign were obtained by BBC Television Newsnight, London. They were attached to emails accidentally sent by
Republican operatives to a non-party website.

One group of voters wrongly identified by the Republicans as registering to vote from false addresses: servicemen and women sent overseas.

*******
For Greg Palast��s discussion with broadcaster Amy Goodman on the Black soldier purge of 2004, go to
http://gregpalast.com/armedmadhouse/palastDN6-14-06.mp3

*******

Here��s how the scheme worked: The RNC mailed these voters letters in envelopes marked, Do not forward, to be returned to the sender. These letters were mailed to servicemen and women, some stationed overseas, to their US home addresses. The letters then returned to the Bush-Cheney campaign as undeliverable.

The lists of soldiers of undeliverable letters were transmitted from state headquarters, in this case Florida, to the RNC in Washington. The party could then challenge the voters�� registration and thereby prevent their absentee ballots being counted.

One target list was comprised exclusively of voters registered at the Jacksonville, Florida, Naval Air Station. Jacksonville is third largest naval installation in the US, best known as home of the Blue Angels fighting squandron.

[See this scrub sheet at http://flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=160156893&context=set-72157594155273706&size=o

Our team contacted the homes of several on the caging list, such as Randall Prausa, a serviceman, whose wife said he had been ordered overseas.

A soldier returning home in time to vote in November 2004 could also be challenged on the basis of the returned envelope. Soldiers challenged would be
required to vote by provisional ballot.

Over one million provisional ballots cast in the 2004 race were never counted; over half a million absentee ballots were also rejected. The extraordinary rise in the number of rejected ballots was the result of the widespread
multi-state voter challenge campaign by the Republican Party. The operation, of which the purge of Black soldiers was a small part, was the first mass challenge to voting America had seen in two decades.

The BBC obtained several dozen confidential emails sent by the Republican��s national Research Director and Deputy Communications chief, Tim Griffin to GOP
Florida campaign chairman Brett Doster and other party leaders. Attached were spreadsheets marked, Caging.xls. Each of these contained several hundred
to a few thousand voters and their addresses.

A check of the demographics of the addresses on the caging lists, as the GOP leaders called them indicated that most were in African-American majority zip codes.

Ion Sanco, the non-partisan elections supervisor of Leon County (Tallahassee) when shown the lists by this reporter said: The only thing I can think of - African American voters listed like this - these might be individuals that
will be challenged if they attempted to vote on Election Day.

These GOP caging lists were obtained by the same BBC team that first exposed the wrongful purge of African-American felon voters in 2000 by then-Secretary of State Katherine Harris. Eliminating the voting rights of those voters �� 94,000 were targeted �� likely caused Al Gore��s defeat in that race.

The Republican National Committee in Washington refused our several requests to respond to the BBC discovery. However, in Tallahassee, the Florida Bush
campaign��s spokespeople offered several explanations for the list.

Joseph Agostini, speaking for the GOP, suggested the lists were of potential donors to the Bush campaign. Oddly, the supposed donor list included residents of the Sulzbacher Center a shelter for homeless families.

Another spokesperson for the Bush campaign, Mindy Tucker Fletcher, ultimately changed the official response, acknowledging that these were voters, we mailed to, where the letter came back - bad addresses.

The party has refused to say why it would mark soldiers as having bad addresses subject to challenge when they had been assigned abroad.

The apparent challenge campaign was not inexpensive. The GOP mailed the letters first class, at a total cost likely exceeding millions of dollars, so that the addresses would be returned to cage workers.

This is not a challenge list, insisted the Republican spokesmistress. However, she modified that assertion by adding, That��s not what it��s set up to be.

Setting up such a challenge list would be a crime under federal law. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlaws mass challenges of voters where race is a factor in choosing the targeted group.

While the party insisted the lists were not created for the purpose to challenge Black voters, the GOP ultimately offered no other explanation for the mailings. However, Tucker Fletcher asserted Republicans could still employ the list to deny ballots to those they considered suspect voters. When asked if Republicans would use the list to block voters, Tucker Fletcher replied, Where it��s stated in the law, yeah.

It is not possible at this time to determine how many on the potential blacklist were ultimately challenged and lost their vote. Soldiers sending in their ballot from abroad would not know their vote was lost because of a
challenge.

__________________________________

For the full story of caging lists and voter purges of 2004, plus the documents, read Greg Palast��s New York Times bestseller, ARMED MADHOUSE: Who��s Afraid of Osama Wolf?, Armed Madhouse: Who��s Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal ��08, No Child��s Behind Left and other
Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War.

http://www.gregpalast.com/massacre-of-the-buffalo-soldiers

1.  My research on the black liberation movement of which Obama's church is a part tells me all I need to know about whether or not I want to see him in office.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_liberation_theology

2.  If McCain is elected I believe we will face a great depression which will make the depression of the 30s look like a Sunday School picnic.  People already losing homes, jobs, exploding deficit (and the piper will be paid sooner or later), cost-of-living getting so people can hardly afford to live.  McCain's judgement is questionable in his choice of a  running mate.  Totally reckless to name someone he has only met once but then there's oil in Alaska.

I will not support or vote for either of them as were doomed either way.

Not only did Joe Lieberman speak, there were signs "Democrats for McCain," and they didn't get beaten or threatened, like the Michelle Malkins out there.

For all the Bush-bashing (I give no one a free pass), when did he openly get credit for Colin Powell, Condi Rice, etc.? 

Funny thing about facts that way.  Pesky little things, aren't they?