hijinks in Florida, or America chooses a leader

As Florida's presidential recount raged in December 2000, a newly created political group spent $150,000 attacking three pro-Democratic state Supreme Court justices who threatened George W. Bush's hopes for victory.

The Florida Elections Commission now says the "Committee to Take Back Our Judiciary" was a front group for unidentified donors trying to ensure Bush's election. The panel is weighing a possible $450,000 fine against the committee's chairwoman, Republican Mary McCarty, a Palm Beach County commissioner.

But the committee's real organizer, the election commission said, was veteran GOP political consultant Roger Stone, who has been involved in major campaigns dating to Richard M. Nixon's administration. The election commission wanted to question Stone, who owns a home in Florida, but it couldn't locate him to serve a subpoena.

In a recent report on the matter, the commission says Stone persuaded McCarty to head the committee and that he supplied $150,000 from undisclosed sources. The group mailed letters to 350,000 Republican voters asking for money to send "a clear message to the Florida Supreme Court that we will not tolerate their efforts to highjack the presidential election for Al Gore."

The Florida Elections Commission concluded that McCarty violated several state election laws, including accepting contributions exceeding the $500 state limit and filing an inaccurate disclosure report. McCarty has sued in federal court, seeking to block the commission proceedings. She told the Associated Press: "I didn't do any of this except sign my name. . . . This was basically some sort of a scam that was set up that I was used in. I was duped."


Shame she didn't look into it. I mean, I happen to know she knows the Election Commissioner and the former chair of the Palm Beach Republican Party.

Oh, wait, she is the Election Commissioner and the former chair of the Palm Beach Republican Party.

Probably couldn't get herself on the phone.

*blink*

Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson has accused President George W. Bush of "undermining a Christian, Baptist president to bring in Muslim rebels" by asking Liberian President Charles Taylor, recently indicted for war crimes, to step down.

"How dare the president of the United States say to the duly elected president of another country, 'You've got to step down'?" Robertson said Monday on "The 700 Club," broadcast from his Christian Broadcasting Network.

Robertson, a Bush supporter who has financial interests in Liberia, said he believes the State Department has "mismanaged the situation in nation after nation after nation" in Africa...

sigh

This is about that disabled little girl whose foster mother threw her body in the garbage.

( Only for the strong of stomach. )

the AP breaks ranks

He's known as the anti-war candidate whose appeal is to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, and some Republicans say if Howard Dean gets the nomination, President Bush will be a sure bet to win a second term.

Not so fast, say some moderate congressional Democrats who would be affected if Dean is at the top of the ticket. He also supports gun rights, the death penalty and a balanced budget.

Republicans and even some moderate Democrats have portrayed Dean as the next George McGovern, who won the 1972 Democratic nomination by appealing to anti-war liberals only to get trounced by a sitting Republican president, Richard Nixon. But behind Dean's liberal image is his record as Vermont governor of reforming welfare, slashing state spending and cutting taxes for businesses.

Moderate Democratic Rep. Cal Dooley of California says Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman is the best Democrat to take on Bush next year. He says Democrats in moderate districts wouldn't want to see Dean on the top of the ticket right now, but that could change if Dean changes his rhetoric and starts talking about his record.

"He's not nearly as liberal people perceive him," Dooley said...

our free trade president

Gaborone, Botswana - President George W. Bush acknowledged yesterday that African farmers get a raw deal from Western nations that subsidize their own farmers, but added the United States won't stop the practice until other rich nations do the same.

After meeting Botswana's president on the third day of his five-day African tour, Bush addressed African leaders' concerns that agricultural subsidies undermine their capacity to become self-sufficient in food.

"I told them the reality of the situation, that we have proposed a very strong reduction in agricultural subsidies," Bush said. "However, in order to make that come to be, there needs to be reciprocation from Europe and Japan in order to make the policy effective."

The United States and the European Union spend a combined $150 billion a year on agricultural subsidies, which keep prices artificially low and place small farmers in poor countries at a huge disadvantage, according to various studies. While the United States has proposed reductions during trade talks, it has not acted on the proposal. Last year, in fact, the president signed a $180-billion farm bill that raised subsidies over several years for grains and cotton, among other crops...


Japan?

More Pataki joy

Gov. George Pataki said he has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold a state compact that allows casino gambling on the Mohawk Indian reservation.

Pataki's lawyers have asked the state's top court, the Court of Appeals, to stay its June 12 ruling that invalidated the Mohawks' casino deal while he seeks an appeal to the nation's highest court.

...

The lawyer arguing against the 1993 compact, Cornelius Murray, who represents an anti-casino coalition including the president of the Saratoga County Chamber of Commerce and several state legislators, said the Court of Appeals' ruling was "purely" about state law, not federal law.

"I think it is highly unlikely that the U.S. Supreme Court would presume to overrule a state's highest court on the issue of what powers a governor has under that state's own constitution," Murray said...


A little back story here.

Pataki is a supporter of a proposal to allow casino gambling in Sullivan County, the county north of Orange (which is at the northern end of the NYC bedroom community limits, about an hour and a half away from Manhattan on the other side of the Hudson River).

Much of Sullivan County is fighting this, as the current proposal to put a casino and a condo complex on the land of a failed Catskills resort doesn't require any improvement of the local infrastructure or roads and endangers the local ecology (there's a large federal wildlife sanctuary sharing the same water the project would be expelling wastes into).

The folks who have money in Atlantic City don't like it much either.

His current plan involves a land swap with the St. Regis Mohawk tribe, who have a development deal with Park Place Casinos of Vegas, so that the Catskill land would become, legally, native american land and eligible for casino gambling.

At the same time, he's settled a lawsuit against the state by the St. Regis Mohawk tribe in which the state would pay them $100 million dollars and hand over state lands to them, as well as allowing them to continue to run their current casino as well as increase the number of slot machines as a settlement. (NYS stole quite a bit of the tribes' lands).

He had shown very little interest in settling this lawsuit up to this point.

hmmmm

The Talking Dog has a very interesting idea...

Anyway, on to my tinfoil hat idea: a taxpayer standing suit. While courts have played a cutesy game and found that Gitmo is beyond the jurisdiction of American courts (it being in Cuba and all), and playing further games to deny that Messrs. Rumsfeld or Bush are within their jurisdiction even though they are and they are running a gulag under an American flag, I'll bet you that there is no funding authorization for either the gulag or the coming kangaroo courts...

That's right: I don't recall a Congressional vote authorizing funding for this wing ding. I think its Dubya doing all this shit per executive order. Well, executive order can't PAY FOR THINGS, unless there is already a standing funding authorization. I suppose that Dubya and minions would argue "national security"-- but there is nothing about FUNDING the gulag and kangaroo courts and firing squad that can't be done in camera by Congress. I think there may be a taxpayer suit available-- in other words, a taxpayer may sue the Government on the theory that the Government is spending tax money without legal authority to do so...

3...2...1...lawsuit

A New Jersey student who sued successfully to be the sole valedictorian of her high school has been disinvited from attending Harvard University for plagiarism, according to a published report.

Citing an unnamed source involved with the decision, The Harvard Crimson reported for Friday's edition that the Ivy League school decided not to welcome Blair Hornstine into its class of 2007.

Harvard spokesman Robert Mitchell said the university would not comment on any application to the school.

A source familiar with the admissions process told the Crimson that it would be unusual for Harvard not to rescind the admission of a student caught plagiarizing...


edit: sorry, via MetaFilter, which has quite the comments thread going on.

from Eleanor Clift in Newsweek

No Mistakes Were Made
Haunted by his father’s defeat and the accidental nature of his own presidency, Bush won’t ever concede missteps on Iraq

HOW CAN BUSH fix the mess in Iraq if he denies any missteps? This administration’s unwillingness to ever admit a mistake makes it unlikely it will expand the force size in Iraq, take responsibility for the phony intelligence Bush touted as a prelude to war or eat enough humble pie to get military and financial help from other nations. The White House won’t acknowledge anything that might chip away at Bush’s commander-in-chief image. That’s the nature of the reelection machine that Karl Rove has constructed in his role as Bush’s consigliere. To admit flaws risks losing the luster of the wartime president.

Bush’s insecurities are at the heart of it. Haunted by his father’s defeat and the accidental nature of his own presidency, Bush never wants to hand his enemies ammunition. He can’t let cracks appear or the whole edifice could crumble. The moment Bush landed on the USS Lincoln, he was caught in his own net of hubris. The juvenile taunt - ”Bring ‘em on” - diminishes the seriousness of sending men and women into an urban guerilla battle that nobody prepared them for. American soldiers in Iraq are going on the record with reporters to say how unhappy they are, and how vulnerable they feel. You don’t do that in the military unless the conditions are dire.

How different it would have been if instead on May 1 Bush had delivered a sober speech from the Oval Office saying we have succeeded in the first phase of the war, followed by a candid assessment of what lay ahead. How different the tone and the context would be today. Instead we have Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld flippantly dismissing America’s European allies. NATO hasn’t been consulted about helping with security and reconstruction in Iraq since December, three months before the war began. Secretary of State Colin Powell testified about the Coalition of the Willing, boasting about assistance from Eastern European countries. “I’m not interested in three Latvians in bio-chem suits,” says California Democrat Ellen Tauscher. “I’m interested in a Coalition of the Capable: countries with real skill sets, real burden-sharing and real checkbooks.”

Administration officials have been strong-arming countries, so far without much success. The contributions have been largely ceremonial. There are foreign commitments for an additional 8,000 troops, a miniscule number compared to what’s needed. The American taxpayers are paying the price for the way Bush went into Iraq, arrogant and alone...

as greasy bubbles rise again in the murky harbor waters, media conglomerates (they're run by CEOs to

Take, for instance, MSNBC, until recently home of Michael Savage:

The familiar drip, drip, drip of a brewing political scandal echoes through the power centers of Washington and London these days as the Bush administration and the government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair are pelted daily with increasingly pointed questions about the case they made for going to war against Iraq. The admission that the president made an apparently false allegation against Iraq in his State of the Union address was supposed to help put the issue to rest. Instead, it reopened fissures inside the administration and in Blair’s government over the validity of their case for war.

THE FAILURE to turn up chemical or biological weapons in Iraq Ñ initially dismissed as a “sour grapes” issue by Bush insiders Ñ is growing into a genuine political problem, dogging the British and U.S. leaders at every public appearance and sparking various agencies that had a hand in Iraq policy to begin plotting a course through the gathering storm.

Throughout the president’s Africa trip this week, for instance, Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell were peppered with questions on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, and particularly on the president’s Jan. 28 claim that Iraq sought to purchase uranium from African countries that mine it.

The image of African leaders standing mutely by as their news conferences were transformed into debates on Iraq could not fail to recall similarly uncomfortable moments during Bill Clinton’s scandal-plagued administration.

But the comparisons end there. Clinton’s troubles were domestic, in the strictest sense, and largely dismissed as unimportant in the rest of the world. Today, with U.S. troops dying in Iraq at a rate even the White House sees as politically unsustainable, there is a palpable desire to lay to rest any questions about the war’s real motives and stem any further damage to U.S. and British credibility.

“They have to get by this, and they have to do that very soon,” says a source close to the Bush family, who requested anonymity. “The GOP can bottle up inquiries in Congress, but they can’t bottle up public opinion.”

...

avoid repetitive stress

Sponsor MB, from Wampum, for the blogathon.

She's posting on behalf of autism research.

Save yourself a third post on this subject from me. You're busy people.

words to live by

from [Bad username or site: wordweaver's @ livejournal.com] list of quotes by EB White, who would have been 104 today.

It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.

You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this tr

The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a war.

Americans are willing to go to enormous trouble and expense defending their principles with arms, very little trouble and expense advocating them with words. Temperamentally we are ready to die for certain principles (or, in the case of overripe adults, send youngsters to die), but we show little inclination to advertise the reasons for dying.

I can only assume that your editorial writer tripped over the First Amendment and thought it was the office cat.

The so-called science of poll-taking is not a science at all but mere necromancy. People are unpredictable by nature, and although you can take a nation's pulse, you can't be sure that the nation hasn't just run up a flight of stairs.