Archive: February 2004
Sunday, February 15, 2004
A cynical and scathing review of developments thus far in the tired fraud of a government that is BushCo, with David Kay’s conclusive finding of no WMDs in Iraq coinciding with a plunge in Bush’s poll numbers: End Game
The Bushists have only ever had two methods of masking the truth of their extremist ideology: sham and blood. Now that the sham is unraveling, their only choice is war.
Chris Floyd, The Moscow Times, February 13–19, 2004
Well, that’s it then. The show is over. The scales have fallen. The monstrous gears of the dark satanic mills that spewed their poison fog across the land have ground to a halt at last.
George W. Bush’s performance in his nationally televised interview this week was so abysmal, so completely divorced from the waking reality of the rest of the world, that even his faithful spear-carriers in the far-right horde—not to mention the power-worshipping poltroons of the mainstream media—reacted as if they'd been slapped upside the head with a particularly dank and smelly mackerel. They’re shocked—shocked!—to find incompetence in this establishment!
As the delusion and dissembling tumbled from Bush’s nervously pursed lips, his stalwarts at the National Review and the Wall Street Journal bemoaned his “bumbling,” his strange “disconnection,” and the “patently dishonest” answers he offered to questions about the larcenous boondoggle he calls a budget. The great gray goose of The New York Times—which had notoriously stovepiped the lurid WMD fantasies of would-be Iraqi strongman Ahmed Chalabi and his Pentagon paymasters directly into the public discourse, fanning the fever for war—reeled in disbelief at the president's “fuzziness and inconsistency” on Iraq and his frightening inability “to distinguish real threats from false alarms.”
From hard right to soft center, the collective lament arose: “What's happened to our hero?” . . .
[With Kay’s announcement, t]he public, long swaddled in Bushist propaganda, suddenly heard some hard, true, simple facts: There were no WMDs. There were no WMD programs. There was nothing for Saddam to threaten America with, nothing for him to pass on to al-Qaida. The case for war was based on nothing.
From this, the public drew the only possible conclusion: Their president was either a murderous liar or a dangerous fool. . . .
The Regime has already announced a “major spring offensive” in Afghanistan, with military brass and Bushist operatives in Congress “guaranteeing” the capture of Osama bin Laden, the AP reports. It shouldn't be hard to do: His hiding place in the mountains of Pakistan has been well-known for more than two years. In fact, one might have rousted him out before now, if one hadn’t been too busy stuffing one—s cronies with boodle from Babylon. Of course, the breathtaking stupidity of announcing the attack months beforehand will give bin Laden plenty of time to prepare; the likely result will be the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of U.S. soldiers—and thousands of local civilians—in a cynical ploy to goose Bush’s poll numbers before the election.
But an “Osama bounce” could prove as fleeting as the “Saddam spike.” So there's more mischief afoot. The U.S. military is now engaged in its largest troop rotation since World War II. Bush has also forcibly extended the service terms of thousands of reserves and National Guard forces—a stealth draft to feed fresh meat into the Iraqi maw. The upshot, as analyst James Conachy notes, is that, by late summer, Bush will have 120,000 battle-hardened troops back in the Homeland, ready for new adventures.
The road to Damascus? Code Red and martial law? The possibilities are endless—for this gang of grifters will certainly not go gentle into that electoral good night.  “What should matter—to a candidate for the highest office in the most powerful country in the world—is the quality of his life, work and character.
”—Glynn Wilson
Saturday, February 7, 2004
 
I have previously pointed out why Costco is far superior to Wal-Mart, which should be boycotted, and now it turns out that Costco chairman Jeffrey Brotman and CEO James Sinegal each donated $95,000 in December to defeat Bush. Sinegal listed his reasons as “the loss of 2 million jobs during the Bush administration, the decision to invade Iraq, and cuts in social programs.”
I got curious about the Joint Victory Campaign 2004 Fund, mentioned as the organization where Sinegal and Brotman donated their money, and found The Center for Public Integrity’s research on Silent Partners: How political non-profits work the system. The article points out that the idea that the Republicans alone have big corporate dollars, so-called special interests, behind them is not entirely true:
Democrats and their allies funneled hundreds of millions of dollars through backdoor committees designed to influence key elections. In the 2002 race, the Democratic Party’s silent partners spent more than $185 million—more than double the money spent by Republican organizations.
The Center’s report shows that the Democrats and Democratic-leaning organizations made great use of a special type of political committee that can raise unlimited amounts of money to influence elections. These committees, known as 527 organizations after the part of the Internal Revenue Code that defines their tax status, can claim tax-exempt status as political committees while at the same time avoiding regulation by state or federal election authorities. In fact, 527s may raise unlimited amounts of money from virtually any source and can spend those funds on just about any election-related activity except contributing directly to federal candidates. Since a law mandating disclosure passed in 2000, such groups accounted for just under $450 million in spending. Committees run by Democratic parties and candidates, along with their labor, environmental, abortion rights and trial lawyer allies, have spent nearly two-thirds of that total. . . .
See this chart of 2003 527 activity for details on the individual committees. Each committee name is linked to details on specific contributors. I was surprised to find, for example, that BellSouth gave $30,000 to America Coming Together, the coalition of Democratic allies seed-moneyed with $5,000,000 from billionaire philanthropist George Soros. An extremely valuable piece of research.
While we might cheer at the idea of large contributions being funneled into Democratic candidate campaigns, way back in June 2000 Larry Makinson, at the time executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, noted in TomPaine.common sense that
if Saddam Hussein wanted to plunk $100 million into a barrage of TV ads the final week before we pick our next president, he could do it. He could also fly under the radar with direct mail pieces, or pre-recorded phone messages, to every mailbox and telephone in America.
So could the American Trial Lawyers Association, the Teamsters Union, Philip Morris, the National Rifle Association, the Sierra Club, or Microsoft—all without anybody knowing where the money came from, or how much was even spent.
Indeed, though contributions to Democratic campaigns have been generous, narrow interests have used the 527 loophole to their advantage—one example, from Silent Partners:
The Ave Maria List, funded mainly by Domino's Pizza founder Thomas Monaghan, helped pay for print advertisements charging that Democratic objections to Alabama Attorney General William Pryor's nomination to a seat on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals were based on anti-Catholic views.
See OpenSecrets.org, “Your Guide to the Money in U.S. Elections,” the website of the Center for Responsive Politics mentioned just above, for comprehensive information on donors and recipients of political contributions, arranged by industry and then broken down to detailed listings by name and election cycle. This is a very useful tool for conscious consumerism: for example, continuing with the example of BellSouth: although the company gave 30K to America Coming Together, it has so far in the 2004 cycle given a total of $339,850 to both parties, with 41% to Democrats and 59% to Republicans, mostly through PACs. I have long hated BellSouth just on general principle: they have monopolized the phone service down here in Florida for some time now and used to badger me mercilessly with telemarketing pitches for more expensive and unnecessary services. A couple of weeks ago I jumped at the chance to switch to VarTec Telecom for local as well as long distance service, to bid adieu to the corporate meanie BellSouth. VarTec does not show up in the campaign money database, but it turns out the company’s president/CEO and his wife each contributed $1,000 to Dubya in 1999. Not surprising since the company is Texas based. But I wonder how Joe and Connie feel now about their candidate?
I have neglected to mention increasing fallout surrounding two-faced Dick Cheney and his secret doings. Here is a good summary: As Democrats take aim, Cheney is next in line, by Wayne Washington, International Herald Tribune, February 7, 2004
 Bob the Angry Flower
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