Mega Republican Post

More Antics from the Right

Or is it Reich? Either way.

Republican Ex-Rep Turns Terror Lobbyist?
For what it's worth, the Feds are accusing another Islamic charity of being a front for terror groups to launder money. A lot of these accusations are petty hand-wringing -- if you donate money to the legally elected government of, say, Palestine, then you're aiding terrorists, because that happens to be Hamas; similarly, if you give money to the only competent government, and legal participant in the Lebanese parliament, Hezbollah, you're supporting terrorists.

On the other hand, if you give Israel money to buy a giant caterpillar bulldozer that they use to run innocent people over as they demolish Palestinian housing, why, that's charity.

*rolls eyes*
At any rate, this case sounds like it might have a bit more meat, since the money was supposedly being laundered to Iraq through Jordan, not to one of those legitimate governments I mentioned before, as well as to some religious nut in Pakistan. This sounds more credible.

The really interesting bit though is that they hired as a lobbyist, to try and get themselves off the terror list, and hence their assets unfrozen, a former Republican congressman.... and paid him with stolen money meant to aid needy people in the third world as well.

Siljander founded the Washington-area consulting group Global Strategies Inc. after leaving the government.

The indictment says Siljander was hired by IARA in March 2004 to lobby the Senate Finance Committee in an effort to remove the charity from the panel's list of suspected terror fundraisers.

For his work, IARA paid Siljander with money that was part of U.S. government funding awarded to the charity years earlier for relief work it promised to perform in Africa, the indictment says. Under the grant agreement, IARA was supposed to return any unused funds after the relief project was wrapped up in 1999.

Instead, Siljander and three IARA officers agreed to cover up the money's origins and use it on the lobbying effort, the indictment charges.

Oops. Needless to say, the right wing media is going to work very studiously at looking the other way at this (former?) Republican's current legal situation. Ignoring Republican legal problems is a very well honed skill for them by this point.

Source: Raw Story

Count 9/11 Strikes Again
Rudy Giuliani has just released an ad claiming that he, and he alone, didn't wet himself in fear when the WTC went down in flames.

Rudy Giuliani's new ad, running in the West Palm Beach area, uses actual video footage from 9/11 to promote Rudy's candidacy -- and includes this surprising line about the terror attacks:

"When the world wavered, and history hesitated, Rudy never did."

I'll say he didn't; he was too busy plotting how to ghoulishly profit from the carnage and death he was complicit in causing through his ineptitude and focus on banging his mistress rather than building a functional emergency command system for the city.

It takes a lot of work to be this big a sleaze.

Source: TPM Election Central

South Carolina Primary Again Ugly for McCain
In 2000, a group tied to Bush ran a push-poll in South Carolina suggesting McCain had an illegitimate black child, in order to derail his campaign (which worked beautifully, FYI). This time around, someone is distributing flyers accusing him of being a collaborator with his North Vietnamese captors in the Vietnam War

This is ugly even by South Carolina standards: John McCain is being targeted by a nasty flyer that lampoons McCain's POW captivity in Vietnam. The flyer, which was sent to local newspaper editors, depicts a manacled McCain in a cell with the phrase "POW for President," and "elect me" scrawled on the walls, suggesting that McCain is trying to ride his POW status into the White House.

The mailer also accuses McCain of collaborating with his captors and betraying his fellow POWs.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the South is not really part of America. They have never earned the privilege they forfeited in the Civil War.

Source: TPM Election Central

White Power Huckster Hour
So it turns out that Huckabee gave a speech to one of the most infamous White Supremacist groups in the South (and that's really saying something):

Making coded appeals to white racism is nothing new for Huckabee. Indeed, well before he was a nationally known political star, Huckabee nurtured a relationship with America's largest white supremacist group, the Council of Conservative Citizens. The extent of Huckabee's interaction with the racist group is unclear, but this much is known: he accepted an invitation to speak at the group's annual conference in 1993 and ultimately delivered a videotaped address that was "extremely well received by the audience."

Descended from the White Citizens Councils that battled integration in the Jim Crow South, including at Arkansas' Little Rock High School, the Council (or CofCC) has been designated a "hate group" by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

In its "Statement of Principles," the CofCC declares, "We also oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankind, to promote non-white races over the European-American people through so-called "affirmative action" and similar measures, to destroy or denigrate the European-American heritage, including the heritage of the Southern people, and to force the integration of the races."

Charming, I know.

Cooking squirrels is one thing, but I guess living in the same dorm with a darkie would have been too much, eh, Huckabee?

Source: Raw Story

Ron Paul Speaks at Bob Jones U
This should help further cement his white power street cred -- a speaking gig at pro-segregation, anti-miscegenation Bob Jones U!

Why Paul, who said just a month ago that fascism will come to this country wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross, and who is still mired in a major controversy with his newsletters containing racist garbage he claims he didn't write, would make a stop at a fundamentalist madrasah that didn't open its doors to students of all races until 1975, and banned interracial dating and marriage all the way through 2000 (after George W. Bush appeared there), is beyond comprehension.

Well, that's an easy mystery to solve: he's a race-baiting hypocrite, and the more attention he gets, the more moolah he rakes in. Duh.

Interestingly, Bob Jones won't be publicly endorsing him, because the university leadership already has another horse in the race:

Ken Herman at the Austin American-Statesman writes that he got an earlier press release from the Paul camp that said, curiously, "It should also subtly be conveyed that Dr. Ron Paul will be the only Presidential Candidate to speak at Bob Jones University (although this fact does not translate into an endorsement in any way, shape, or form)." That's probably so because Bob Jones U.'s president previously endorsed Mitt Romney, who (despite what the Paul release says) had already made a stop at the college.

The choice of Romney is odd as well, since BJU has a history of hostility towards Mormons. A former BJU president said in 2000 that Mormonism, along with Catholicism, are "cults which call themselves Christian."

So really, the hypocrisy more than goes around, on the Republican side of the aisle.

Source: Jazz From Hell

Great History of Jonah Goldberg
So Jonah, aka Doughy Pantload, makes the specious argument that the real racists, evildoers, even FASCISTS in America come from the left side of the aisle, especially those eeevil progressives. Republicans/Conservatives are free of all sin, and in fact have always been racially neutral, believing in the purity of the market-based meritocracy.

Jonah writes, if you can call it that, for the National Review, an infamous right-wing screed. Sadly, No! has called him out on being part of a magazine with such a colorful racist history while he lambasts progressive historical figures for not being as PC as he might like:

Okay, so Jonah, a contributing editor of National Review, fer chrissakes, is throwing an accusation of racism against progressives and the left. That doesn’t just take the cake, it takes the fucking cake platter, the table under the cake platter, the whole fucking dining room, the house too, and the block on which the house is located, and the city, state, nation, planet, galaxy and universe. At its inception, the whole point of the National Review, the magazine that pays for Jonah’s triple bacon cheeseburgers, was the virulent racism of William F. Buckley and his cohorts, all of whom spilled truckloads of ink over the virtues of segregation.

If you don’t believe me, let’s take on instructive trip down memory lane and read stuff that was printed in the National Review in its halcyon days. Here’s what NR had to say about the Birmingham church bombings after they occurred:

Let us gently say the fiend who set off the bomb does not have the sympathy of the white population in the South; in fact, he set back the cause of the white people there so dramatically as to raise the question whether in fact the explosion was the act of a provocateur — of a Communist, or of a crazed Negro.

And let it be said that the convulsions that go on, and are bound to continue, have resulted from revolutionary assaults on the status quo, and a contempt for the law, which are traceable to the Supreme Court’s manifest contempt for the settled traditions of Constitutional practice. Certainly it now appears that Birmingham’s Negroes will never be content so long as the white population is free to be free.

It only goes downhill from there. Way, way downhill.

Source: Sadly, No!

CIA Agrees with Bush Ally on Bhutto Death
Big surprise, the CIA has come down on the side of Musharraf, despite copious evidence of his indifference to, if not active compliance in, Benazir Bhutto's death... including her disturbing letter from beyond the grave laying blame at his feet for cutting her security detail.

Of course, the CIA has now dedicated itself to the quest to find the 'real killers'. And who do they blame? Why, Al-Queda, of course!

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The CIA believes extremists associated with a Pakistani tribal leader are responsible for the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, according to a U.S. intelligence official.

The official, who spoke under condition of anonymity, said the agency concluded that Baitullah Mehsud -- the leader of the Pakistani Taliban who has ties to al Qaeda -- was behind the attack.

This is really starting to get sad. Al-Queda might as well be blamed for making kids wet the bed, ice cream melt too fast, and apple pies to burn if left in the oven too long. At this point, we're just a few screens shy of having the Two Minutes Hate.

Source: CNN.com

FEMA FEMA FEMA Chameleon...
So after gutting FEMA and merging it with the equally useless Department of Homeland Security, Bush has been forced to restore most of its power by angry state governments.

About time.

After years of aggressive lobbying by unhappy state governments, the administration chose to restore FEMA's power to coordinate federal disaster operations. That power was undermined in the administration's previous plan -- used just once, after Katrina -- when the secretary of homeland security appointed his own officer to oversee disaster response.

Under the new plan, the head of FEMA will appoint the top coordinating officer, clarifying responsibility and, according to the states, ending confusion that caused critical delays. Congress ordered that change to the plan last year.

Ahh, it's nice to get an early start on fixing the gaping holes in government that the Republicans created. Still so much to do, though.

Source: The Washington Post

Pure As the Driven Snow
I know technically General Tommy Franks supposedly isn't considered a big time Republican (despite endorsing GW Bush in 2004), but he went along with the Rumsfeldian/Neoconservative plan to conquer the World/liberate Iraq eagerly enough, despite it being a fool's errand from any sane person's perspective.

Turns out his opportunism doesn't end there.

"Retired U.S. Army Gen. Tommy Franks, who led the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, was paid $100,000 to endorse a veterans charity that watchdog groups say is ripping off donors and wounded veterans by using only a small portion of the money raised for veterans services, according to testimony in Congress today," ABC News reports.

The article continues, "Gen. Franks' involvement was revealed as members of Congress questioned Roger Chapin, who operates Help Hospitalized Veterans and the Coalition to Salute America's Heroes Foundation, charities that congressional investigators say spend only 25 percent of the money they raise on projects for wounded veterans."

"General Franks was paid $100,000 to lend his name. We understand he developed misgivings and asked that his name be taken off," Congressman Henry Waxman, D- Calif. said.

Of course, it's easy to develop misgivings when the check's been cashed and the donor in question is under Congressional investigation.

Source: Raw Story
Wikipedia on Tommy Franks

The Infamy of Republican Rule
We're here at last; where even our most stalwart allies are forced to admit that yes, under El Presidente, the United States is a nation of torturers.

OTTAWA, Jan 17 (Reuters) - An official Canadian government document has put both the United States and Israel on a watch list of countries where prisoners run the risk of being tortured, CTV television reported on Thursday.

The revelation is likely to embarrass the minority Conservative government, which is a staunch U.S. ally.

The document mentions the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba where a Canadian man is being held.

CTV said the document was part of a course on torture awareness given to Canadian diplomats to help them determine whether prisoners they visited abroad had been mistreated.

It said the document mentioned U.S. interrogation techniques such as "forced nudity, isolation, and sleep deprivation."

God Bless America.

Source: Reuters

(Adding, I like the headline category -- latestCrisis. It seems like we bounce from one to the next and back again under this administration, does it not?)