More Foley, FBI Lies, Iraq, Education, Little Big Fence, Government Grows, Environment, Economy and Ignoring Al Queda.

Thank goodness, the Foley scandal is about over. The country's falling apart around our ears and one Republican with a craving for young, hard-bodies just doesn't merit all this national attention.

I know it's about over because the Republicans have basically announced victory and are ready to move forward with their plan to sell the country to the highest bidder.

Congress has decided to investigate the the whole thing, not Foley, but the events leading to the Foley lapse of judgment. The GOP has already thrown Foley to the sharks and with the investigation, will exonerate themselves.

The House ethics committee launched a wide-ranging investigation into Congress's
handling of information about a Florida lawmaker and teenage pages yesterday, as
Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) vowed to keep his job, saying, "I haven't
done anything wrong."

And House Republicans are rounding the wagons, a lot of them, around Hastert and backing him to the hilt. Because,

For now, they said, it would be politically disastrous for Republicans to oust
Hastert because it would be viewed as akin to a public admission of guilt in the
scandal, as well as a pre-election victory that would buoy Democrats and help
their turnout efforts.

And Hastert has an ace in the hole, with the two Republicans on the committee are both financially indebted to him.

WASHINGTON — Both Republicans on the House ethics subcommittee investigating the
Mark Foley scandal have financial ties to Speaker Dennis Hastert, whose handling
of the former congressman's lurid Internet messages to House pages is under
scrutiny.

Never admitting guilt or taking resposibility is, like the first commandment of the Republican party. Especially when you already know who's fault this whole mess really is.

When asked about a groundswell of discontent among the GOP's conservative base
over his handling of the issue, Hastert said in the phone interview: "I think
the base has to realize after a while, who knew about it? Who knew what, when?
When the base finds out who's feeding this monster, they're not going to be
happy. The people who want to see this thing blow up are ABC News and a lot of
Democratic operatives, people funded by [liberal activist] George Soros."

And since facts are something the GOP avoids like the plague, everything should work out just fine.

The source who in July gave news media Rep. Mark Foley’s (R-Fla.) suspect
e-mails to a former House page says the documents came to him from a House GOP
aide.
That aide has been a registered Republican since becoming eligible to vote,
said the source, who showed The Hill public records supporting his claim.

The same source, who acted as an intermediary between the
aide-turned-whistleblower and several news outlets, says the person who shared
the documents is no longer employed in the
House.
But the whistleblower was a paid GOP staffer when the documents were first
given to the media.

Plus, when you have the FBI running interference for you, how can you lose the PR game.

The watchdog group that first provided the FBI with suspicious e-mails from
then-Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) said yesterday that FBI and Justice
Department officials are attempting to cover up their inaction in the case by
making false claims about the group.
Law enforcement officials said the
allegations by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) are
without merit, and they stood by allegations that the group had refused to
provide some information to the FBI.

Unfortunately, CREW doesn't seem to be intimidated by the FBI. In fact, CREW says the FBI's lying. The FBI wouldn't lie, would it?

Washington, DC – Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW)
wrote to the Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General’s (I.G.) office today
to ask for an investigation into why the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
has fabricated and disseminated a cover-up story as to why it never investigated
the Foley emails sent to it by CREW.

CBS News has reported that according to the FBI when CREW gave the Bureau the
original set of emails from Rep. Mark Foley to a former House page, they were
“heavily redacted.” The FBI is also claiming that it came back to CREW and asked
for more information so that it could follow up, but that CREW refused to
provide anything further. Reporters from several other news organizations have
repeated this allegation. The FBI is lying.

On Monday, October 2, CREW sent a letter to the DOJ I.G.’s office, attaching
exact copies of the emails CREW had sent to the FBI on July 21, 2006. Both the
former page’s name and the person to whom the page forwarded Rep. Foley’s emails
were clearly visible. Moreover, after CREW sent the emails to the FBI, CREW’s
only subsequent contact with the Bureau was one telephone call from the special
agent to whom CREW had sent the material confirming that the emails were from
Rep. Foley. CREW had no further contact with the FBI.

Crooks and Liars shows us the problem of having all our attention directed towards the Foley Follies.

While All Eyes Are On Foley, Iraq Is Rapidly Deteriorating

Let's check out some of the other stuff that's not getting much attention.

My son's busting his butt trying to sell suckers to his Mom and me to raise money for his sophomore class. No problem with that, but it does make a somewhat lame segue to No Child Left Behind.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 5 /PRNewswire-US Newswire/ -- Today,
President Bush will
resurrect one of his most well-known policy failures, the No Child Left Behind
Act, during remarks at Woodridge Elementary and Middle School in Washington,
D.C. While the President likes to tout the Act as one his few legislative
successes, the reality is that the White House and Republicans in Congress have
under-funded the law by $40 billion since its passage in 2001. States have even
been forced to sue the Bush Administration to get the necessary funds to
implement the Act. At the same time, the President has made repeated attempts to
cut Even Start, bilingual education and after-school programs.

I believe that I've mentioned the sham that Congress is putting up over illegal immigration. They're certainly not going to attack the problem at it's source, the greedy scumbags that don't want to pay a decent wage. So they put on a show with their 700 mile fence. As long as you think that they're doing something, they're happy.

No sooner did Congress authorize construction of a 700-mile fence on the
U.S.-Mexico border last week than lawmakers rushed to approve separate
legislation that ensures it will never be built, at least not as advertised,
according to Republican lawmakers and immigration experts.

GOP leaders have singled out the
fence as one of the primary accomplishments of the recently completed session.
Many lawmakers plan to highlight their $1.2 billion down payment on its
construction as they campaign in the weeks before the midterm elections.

In this case, it also reflects political calculations by GOP strategists that
voters do not mind the details, and that key players -- including the
administration, local leaders and the Mexican government -- oppose a fence-only
approach, analysts said.

You know that the Republicans have always been the party of small government, unless it involves getting into people's private lives. Guess what?

Light calls the 10.5 million federal contractors and grantees the government's
"hidden workforce" because politicians tend not to mention them when discussing
the size of the federal bureaucracy. Yet such workers absorbed nearly $400
billion in federal contracting funds and $100 billion in federal grants in 2005.
They often performed vital work such as researching new vaccines, running
federal computer systems and making body armor, weapons and meals for the
military.

How's our President doing on the environment? According to federal judges, he's on par with the rest of his accomplishments.

SEATTLE, Oct. 5 -- Using language that suggests they are fed up with the Bush
administration, federal judges across the West have issued a flurry of rulings
in recent weeks, chastising the government for repeated and sometimes willful
failure to enforce laws protecting fish, forests, wildlife and clean air.

The stock market's doing great. So the economy must be doing great, right? It is, in China. More's going out than is coming in. Thanks George.

There is fresh evidence, if any more were needed, that excessive borrowing
during the Bush years will make the nation
poorer.
For most of the past five and a half years, interest rates have been low,
allowing the government to borrow more and more — to cut taxes while fighting
two expensive wars — without having to shoulder higher interest payments.

That’s over now. For the first time during President Bush’s tenure, the
government’s interest bill is expected to rise in 2006, from $184 billion in
2005 to $220 billion this year, up nearly 20 percent. That increase — $36
billion — makes interest the fastest-growing component of federal spending, and
continued brisk growth is likely. According to projections by Congress’s budget
office, the interest bill will grow to $249 billion in 2007, and $270 billion in
2008.
All of that is money the government won’t have available to spend on other
needs and priorities. And much of it won’t even be recycled back into the United
States economy. That’s because borrowing from foreign countries has exploded
during the Bush years. In 2005, the government paid about $77 billion in
interest to foreign creditors in China, Japan and elsewhere.

And just so it don't get lost in the fog of right wing propaganda, what did they know and when did they know it? Well, it turns out that they knew a lot and knew it in time, but chose to ignore it. Understandable, since we were in imminent danger of being wiped off the face of the earth by Iraq.

JIDDA, Saudi Arabia, Oct. 2 — A review of White House records has determined
that George
J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, did brief Condoleezza
Rice and other top officials on July 10, 2001, about the looming threat from Al
Qaeda, a State Department spokesman said Monday.

Officials now agree that on July 10, 2001, Mr. Tenet and his counterterrorism
deputy, J. Cofer Black, were so alarmed about an impending Al Qaeda attack that
they demanded an emergency meeting at the White House with Ms. Rice and her National
Security Council staff.

According to two former intelligence officials, Mr. Tenet told those
assembled at the White House about the growing body of intelligence the Central
Intelligence Agency had collected pointing to an impending Al Qaeda attack.
But both current and former officials took issue with Mr. Woodward’s account
that Mr. Tenet and his aides left the meeting in frustration, feeling as if Ms.
Rice had ignored them.

The dispute that has played out in recent days gives further evidence of an
escalating battle between the White House and Mr. Tenet over who should take the
blame for such mistakes as the failure to stop the Sept. 11 attacks and
assertions by Bush administration officials that Saddam
Hussein was stockpiling chemical and biological weapons and cultivating ties
to Al
Qaeda.
Mr. Tenet resigned as director of central intelligence in the summer of 2004
and was honored that December with a Presidential Medal of Freedom during a
White House ceremony. Since leaving the C.I.A., Mr. Tenet has stayed out of the
public eye, largely declining to defend his record at the C.I.A. even after
several government investigations have assailed the faulty intelligence that
helped build the case for the Iraq war.

It's Friday, put this crap out of you mind and enjoy your weekend. If you're not a member of Congress or the Bush Administration, you've earned it.

Foley, GOP SEX, Limbaugh, FoxNews, Clueless Bush, Killer Comma, Bush vs Constitution, Torture Boy, Workers Screwed and Condi.

It seems to be all Foley all the time. Since it's so much easier for the mainstream media to do sensationalism than substance, it's going to be the headlines for quite awhile. The upside is that the folks that really don't pay attention, will get to see what a bunch of lying, hypocritical, avaricious, lowlifes the Republicans actually are. And in the interest of fairness, there are too many Democrats that are right down there with them.

Not to lessen the gravity of the claims against Foley or the trauma he's caused his victims, the great news in all this is that we are starting to see just how serious that the party of the flag-wavers and Bible-thumpers really are in their convictions.

It's going to be hard to claim moral superiority, now that we're finding out that the Republican leadership has known about this for years.

A longtime chief of staff to disgraced former representative Mark Foley (R-Fla.)
approached House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert's office three years ago, repeatedly
imploring senior Republicans to help stop Foley's advances toward teenage male
pages, the staff member said yesterday.

The
account by Kirk Fordham, who resigned yesterday from his job with another senior
lawmaker, pushed back to 2003 or earlier the time when Hastert's staff
reportedly became aware of Foley's questionable behavior concerning teenagers
working on Capitol Hill.

If it was just Foley, you could just blow this off as an aberration, but it seems that there's something of a pattern here. Maybe it's the strain of having to live the illusion of a pristine, God-fearing lifestyle that's required by their religious right base.

Take the case of Pennsylvania Republican Congerssman Don Sherwood, married, father of three, respectable and no doubt a pillar of his church. He's 64.

But
last year, Cynthia Ore, 29, sued Sherwood. It seems Sherwood had been
keeping her as his Washington mistress. Ms. Ore says that Sherwood "repeatedly
struck her in the face, neck, chest and back, ‘violently yanking’ her hair and
repeatedly tried to choke or strangle her. Afterward he would tell her he would
never beat her again, then beg her not to leave him."

"After news accounts of the incident and police report were published, Mr.
Sherwood issued a statement apologizing for the ‘pain and embarrassment’ he
caused his supporters and family. He has declined to talk in detail about his
relationship with Ms. Ore."

Eventually, Sherwood made a confidential financial settlement with Ms. Ore,
thus keeping the case from being aired in a courtroom. He admitted to the
adulterous affair with a woman half his age, but denied that he physically
abused her.

And guess who's busting their butts to keep Sherwood in office?

Now, he is behind in his race in a normally "safe Republican" seat, so Hastert,
Boehner, Bush and Cheney are going to bat for him to try and keep the
district in the GOP column. They are all holding
fundraisers for him and endorsing his "leadership."

Thanks BuzzFlash, be sure to check them out on the right side of this page. Real news, always up to date.

I never heard any satisfactory explainations of why male prositute, Jeff Gannon, was allowed unlimited access to the White House, but here's a little story of a big time Republican and Christian conservative activist.

Things have been looking up for accused child molester Jeffrey Ray Nielsen,
the 36-year-old Christian conservative activist and lawyer with close ties to
Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher and Scott Baugh, head of the Orange
County Republican Party. Police say Nielsen took a 14-year-old Westminster boy
as his sex partner in 2003 and maintained a huge cache of man-boy
pornography.

“Jeff called it ‘our thing,’ and one time we were near Tyson’s Corner
[Virginia], he stopped at a gas station so we could have sex in the bathroom,”
the man said. “A guy walked in and caught me with my pants down and Jeff on his
knees. We made some excuse about an injured knee or something. The guy said,
‘Oh!’ and quickly left.”

And you know the Right is up in arms over the sexual exploits of it's members, because if you keep up with things, whatever happens is the fault of liberal Democrats.

From the number one blowhard in the right wing propaganda machine, the draft dodging, drug-addicted, can't keep a female, lying, sack of chickenshit, Rush Limbaugh. Being from Oklahoma, I get to hear a lot of Limbaugh quotes. Yeah, he's right up there with Bush and Jesus.

LIMBAUGH: I'm just thinking out loud here. What if somebody got to the page
and said, you know, we want you to set Foley up. We need to do a little
titillating thing here. Keep it and save it and so forth. How would you get a
kid to do that? Yeah, who knows? You threaten him or pay him. There's any number
of ways given the kind of people that we're dealing with and talking about here.

Now, folks, I don't want to be misunderstood here. I'm not trying to mount
any kind of a defense. That's a bad word. I'm not trying to get into a defense
of what Mark Foley did. Please don't misunderstand. I'm just telling you that
the -- the -- the orgy and the orgasm that has been taking place in the media
since Friday and with the Democrats is -- it's all coordinated, and it's all --
it's all oriented toward the election. There's no concern about the kid -- no
concern about the children.

There is -- there is -- there's not even any real problem with what Foley
did, as we've discussed. In their hearts and minds and their crotches, they
don't have any problem with what Foley did. They've defended it over the -- over
the years.

Now there are going to be people who really believe that liberals back pedophilia. Jerk. BTW, when was the last time you were able to see your crotch?

Speaking of jerks, Fox News led people to believe that Foley is a Democrat.

Never mind the content of either segment for now. Incredibly, during a total
of three different cutaways to video footage of Foley, he was labelled at the
bottom of the screen eachtime as "(D-FL)" !

Three different times. In two different segements. Each cutaway about 15
seconds or more. Showing Foley as a DEMOCRAT. Amazing.

The Progress Report has all the latest on the GOP's strange search for love right here.

Now that the obligatory Foley and Republican sexual hijinks stories are out of the way, we can get to the stuff that really effects you.

Bush is showing us why he imagines himself to be a "War President", it's because he's completely clueless about war. 24 dead Americans since Saturday and bombings, like the stock market, are at record levels.

BAGHDAD, Oct. 4 -- Thirteen U.S. soldiers have been killed in Baghdad since
Monday, the American military reported, registering the highest three-day death
toll for U.S. forces in the capital since the start of the war.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Bomb attacks in Baghdad have hit an all-time high, the
U.S. military said on Wednesday, as one of the capital's frontline police units
was pulled off the streets on suspicion of involvement with sectarian death
squads.

But don't let any of this bother you, because according President Bush the whole Iraq thing will just be a comma in history. We all know that Bush knows Jack about history. It's just fantastic, the Iraq War has been downgraded from "Noble Cause" to "Comma".

As he heads out on the campaign trail, haunted by an unpopular war, President
Bush has begun reassuring audiences that this traumatic period in Iraq will be
seen as "just a comma" in the history books. By that, aides say, he means to
reinforce his message of resolve in the long struggle for Iraqi democracy.

And just so you'll know that I'm not the only one who thinks that Bush is a buttwipe when it comes to war, let's hear from an expert.

One of the highest-ranking generals in the U.S. military yesterday stood by
views attributed to him in a controversial new book about the Bush
administration's handling of the war in Iraq but said it was important to
understand the context in which those views were expressed.

Marine Gen. James L. Jones, the U.S. commander for Europe, is quoted in
"State of Denial," by The Washington Post's Bob Woodward, as believing that the
war in Iraq is a "debacle" and that "The Joint Chiefs have been systematically
emasculated by Rumsfeld." As Marine commandant, the post he held before moving
to Europe, Jones was a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

If Bush was anywhere near as good at war as he is at subverting the Constitution, Iraq would be clamoring for statehood right now. A court of appeals will continue to let the Bush Administration spy on you. And this is after a lame Congress let Bush do away with due process for us all. Are you an enemy combatant ? Only the Bush Administration knows.

CINCINNATI, Oct. 4 -- The Bush administration can continue its warrantless
surveillance program while it appeals a judge's ruling that the program is
unconstitutional, a federal appeals court panel ruled Wednesday.

The president has said the program is needed to fight terrorism. Opponents
argue that it oversteps constitutional boundaries on free speech, privacy and
executive powers.

And just what is the flaw in the evil little turd's psyche, that makes him get off at the thought of torturing another human being? Congress is trying to cover for him.

Key senators say Congress has outlawed one of the most notorious detainee
interrogation techniques -- "waterboarding," in which a prisoner feels near
drowning. But the White House will not go that far, saying it would be wrong to
tell terrorists which practices they might face.

Twenty-one years earlier, in 1947, the United States charged a Japanese
officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for carrying out another form of
waterboarding on a U.S. civilian. The subject was strapped on a stretcher that
was tilted so that his feet were in the air and head near the floor, and small
amounts of water were poured over his face, leaving him gasping for air until he
agreed to talk.

"Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor," Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) told his colleagues last Thursday
during the debate on military commissions legislation. "We punished people with
15 years of hard labor when waterboarding was used against Americans in World
War II," he said.

I think a little hard labor would be a good thing for Bush. It would certainly be a first.

And while we're on hard labor, the Republicans love it, as long as they're not involved. So workers, here's a big FU from the GOP.

In a decision condemned by unions but praised by business, the National
Labor Relations Board issued a ruling yesterday that will exempt registered
nurses — and many other workers — from union membership if they have certain
kinds of supervisory duties.

In the majority decision, the three Republicans
on the board adopted a broad definition of supervisor, saying it included
workers who assigned others to a location, shift or significant tasks, like a
nurse overseeing a shift who might assign another nurse to a particular patient.

If you don't like it, tough. American business no longer needs you. They have China, who understands the business/worker relationship. Wal-Mart's hiring.

America doesn't need to try harder. China needs to stop using slave labor. If
you see things any other way, you've probably got a factory in the Suzhou
industrial park. Or you're taking money from someone who does.

And finally, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is pretending that she has a human side by showing concern for the Palestinians.

RAMALLAH, West Bank, Oct. 4 -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pledged
Wednesday to "redouble" U.S. efforts to alleviate the economic plight of
Palestinians facing escalating tensions and the threat of a humanitarian crisis.
But U.S. officials cautioned not to expect any significant breakthroughs as
prospects for a renewed Arab-Israeli peace process seem further away than ever.

Too bad she didn't show any concern for the American people back in July of 2001.

WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and former Attorney General
John Ashcroft received the same CIA briefing about an imminent al-Qaida strike
on an American target that was given to the White House two months before the
Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The State Department's disclosure Monday that the pair was briefed within a
week after then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was told about the
threat on July 10, 2001, raised new questions about what the Bush administration
did in response, and about why so many officials have claimed they never
received or don't remember the warning.

It's Thursday, we're screwed, so make the best of it.