Author: KAMuston

I found the floowing on the Sacremento BEE web site, and thought it might be a nice Christams present for all Democrats and for those Republicans who are unhappy by the vulgarity and lack of morality displayed over the last five years by God’s Own Party. The story indicates how I think the GOP is going down this year.
Kimit
Watchdog report: Closer look at wife’s income
Recent fundraising probes bring scrutiny to Doolittle’s spouse.

By David Whitney — Bee Washington Bureau
Published 2:15 am PST Saturday, December 24, 2005

WASHINGTON – A business operated by the wife of Rep. John Doolittle has pumped more than $136,000 into the family’s finances over the last three years from commissions on fundraising for the Roseville Republican’s federal political action committee.
Julie Doolittle’s company has been paid commissions amounting to about 15 percent of the $905,000 the congressman’s PAC has received in contributions over the last three years, a figure the congressman’s office did not dispute. At that rate, more than $10,000 of her company’s earnings would have come from a handful of large contributors linked to ongoing corruption investigations.

The arrangement between Julie Doolittle’s company, Sierra Dominion Financial Solutions, and her husband’s Superior California Federal Leadership Fund is not illegal. More than a dozen congressional spouses are similarly paid.

But in the aftermath of the resignation of Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, who pleaded guilty in federal court to accepting bribes from defense contractors, and the ongoing investigation of former high-flying Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff, for whom Julie Doolittle’s company also worked, her business is drawing greater scrutiny.

A new group called Californians for a Cleaner Congress, funded by labor and Democratic-leaning groups but officially nonpartisan, is raising questions about Julie Doolittle’s business and the fact that it contributes to the congressman’s income.

San Diego attorney Stanley Zubel, who is heading the organization, said that unless Julie Doolittle has a fundraising background qualifying her for the job and pay, “then what this really is is nepotism that is basically enriching the family, which means the congressman is personally benefiting from people who contribute to his campaigns.”

Over the last three years, Doolittle’s political action committee has accepted $32,000 from Indian tribes and associates of Abramoff. It also has accepted $30,000 from Brent Wilkes, his wife and his company, ADCS; all were implicated in the Cunningham bribery scandal.

Unlike some other members of Congress who accepted contributions from those contributors, Doolittle has no plans to return any of the money, because it was legally given and he has done nothing wrong in receiving it, according to his office.

Neither the congressman nor Julie Doolittle has agreed to take questions directly from reporters, choosing instead to respond through intermediaries.

Richard Robinson, the congressman’s chief of staff who also is active in his re-election campaign, said Julie Doolittle was hired because she’s good at raising money.

“We have tried several other Washington-based PAC fundraisers in the past and none has matched Sierra Dominion Financial’s hard work and effectiveness,” he said. “Julie has significant experience in fundraising and event planning, and has performed similar duties for several clients.”

Sierra Dominion has other clients besides John Doolittle’s political action committee, but Julie Doolittle’s attorney, William Stauffer Jr., declined to say who they are.

But Robinson acknowledged that one such client is the Korea-U.S. Exchange Council created by South Korean industrialist Kim Seung-youn for which Sierra Dominion provides bookkeeping services. In recent years, the group has flown nearly a dozen Democratic and Republican House members to South Korea, John Doolittle among them.

The council was set up with the help of former staffers to Tom DeLay, the Texas Republican who was then the House majority leader and for whom Doolittle has been a loyal lieutenant.

Published reports raised ethical questions in March about some of the congressional travel paid for by the group because it is registered as a foreign agent. But the House Standards of Official Conduct Committee has been in a political deadlock most of the year and has not launched any investigations. Robinson said Sierra Dominion has not been asked to provide any information to anyone regarding the Korean group.

Robinson said both Rep. Doolittle and the Korean group had written the House ethics committee in advance of the trip Doolittle took, and that the panel had approved it. “At no time was the congressman made aware that (the group) was a foreign agent,” he said.

No other member of Congress or political action committee has reported paying Julie Doolittle’s company, although in the last few months she has begun receiving commissions amounting to less than $2,000 for fundraising for the congressman’s re-election committee, the John T. Doolittle for Congress committee.

Between 2002 and March 2004, Sierra Dominion worked for Abramoff, a close friend of the congressman who is now the subject of a federal grand jury investigation into his high-priced work for gambling tribes. Rep. Doolittle also is reportedly being scrutinized in that investigation.

Sierra Dominion’s records were subpoenaed by the grand jury last year. Stauffer said at the time that the grand jury seemed to be focused on Julie Doolittle’s work for Capital Athletic Foundation, which was run by Abramoff, and a particular fundraising event that was never held because of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

John Doolittle also has a state leadership PAC, the Superior California State Leadership Fund, that has received contributions from many of the same donors who have given to his federal PAC. The state PAC has not been active this year, and it has not reported any payments to Sierra Dominion in previous election cycles.

Many House and Senate members employ relatives in their campaigns, sometimes more than one.

According to watchdog groups and the Federal Election Commission, such arrangements are perfectly proper as long as the spouse is doing work for the pay, and the pay is commensurate with what others receive.

“Certainly if relatives have experience in it, and that’s their profession, and they are earning their keep, it is not a problem,” said Robert M. Stern, president of the Center for Governmental Studies and an expert in campaign finance.

It’s not clear what experience Julie Doolittle has in the field, and John Doolittle’s office declined to provide specifics, citing fear of revealing the names of clients, which Robinson said “we are not willing to do out of respect for their privacy.”

According to the congressman’s personal financial reports which are filed annually with the clerk of the House, however, it appears that Julie Doolittle has been working since at least 1997 in the event planning, bookkeeping and fundraising business. That’s when the congressman first reported her receiving an income from a company called Events Plus.

The amount of spousal income does not have to be reported on the House forms.

In 1999, Julie Doolittle took on what Robinson said was a bookkeeping job with Impact Strategies, a small Washington-area lobbying company run by Jeff Fedorchak, who has been the lobbyist for the Placer County Water Agency.

By 2002, Julie Doolittle’s only reported source of income was from Sierra Dominion. Virginia corporation records show she formed the company in 2001 out of the couple’s suburban Virginia home and is listed as the president.

The Bee reviewed records for 14 spouses employed to work on the committees of their husbands or wives.

Julie Doolittle’s business is different from others. She is the only one who is paid a commission; the rest receive salaries, sometimes with bonuses, or a “fee.”

Stern said that while commissions are typical in the professional fundraising business, they might present special complications for spouses working for House or Senate members because the spouses could end up being paid for contributions they didn’t bring in.

“Lots of fundraisers work on commission, so that’s not unusual,” he said. “But of course (Rep. Doolittle) is raising money, too, and he’s sort of getting a commission on the money he is raising. I’d think it would be better if she were just paid a straight salary.”

But Robinson said that Julie Doolittle’s company is paid a commission because that seems cleaner.

“Sierra Dominion Financial’s compensation is based entirely upon performance in that it receives a percentage of what it is directly involved in raising,” he said.

“This arrangement is not only consistent with that of other fundraisers, but is designed to avoid the appearance that Sierra Dominion Financial is compensated for anything other than its tireless and effective work,” Robinson said. “Any suggestion otherwise is completely without merit.”

Leadership PACs such as Doolittle’s are used to curry favor with other House and Senate members. During the 2003-2004 elections cycle, for example, Doolittle’s PAC raised nearly $497,000 on which his wife earned commissions. He contributed about $225,000 of the fund to Republican candidates and causes.

Doolittle is secretary of the House Republican caucus and aspires to higher leadership posts.

Julie Doolittle is not the highest-paid congressional spouse who is working for a husband or wife’s fundraising committee.

During the 2003-2004 election cycle, for example, the campaign of Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, paid more than $122,000 to a company in which her husband, John Collins, is involved. And DeLay’s wife, Christine DeLay, was paid fees of $92,096 for her work for the congressman’s leadership PAC.

During that election cycle, according to the review by The Bee, Julie Doolittle’s work for her husband’s PAC came in third, at $77,929.

This year, Sierra Dominion is at the top of the pay scale for spouse-connected fundraising.

So far, it has been paid $58,221 in commissions, topping the runner-up, Jane Filner, wife of Rep. Bob Filner, D-San Diego, who is paid a flat salary of $4,000 a month.

About the writer:
The Bee’s David Whitney can be reached at (202) 383-0004 or dwhitney@mcclatchydc.com.

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This is an old column of mine that I stumbled across while googling myself out of morbid couriosity – and since it’s almost Christmas and since I have fond memories of a wayward squab I parented named Walter the Pigeon. I offer it here as a Christmas present to my much revered readers. Thank you for reading. Without you, I am not whole.
I am a fan of common pigeons, not the fancy domestic breeds. Domestic birds are nice but I am in awe of the urban pigeons, the rock doves who swoop and soar independent above our heads. Originally nesting in cliffs these close cousins to mourning doves have shared our homes since we’ve started building homes. They have not only survived contact with humans they have thrived upon it.

Curiously their success has earned our contempt. They were once offered to Gods as proof of devotion, their nesting in the eves of temples was a sign of God’s favor because the priests found their squab a source of meat even in the dead of winter. But today we mock and abuse them and rather than clean up our trash that feeds their numbers we even poison them. Why do we hate what we once revered? After years of research (well, weeks) I may have stumbled upon part of the answer; it’s all a question of language.

Once upon a time there were a happy-go-lucky set of blond heads known as the Saxons who farmed the rocky northern coasts of Europe. Their general word for bird was “duffla-dopa”, meaning a creature which dives from the sky.

Each year after the spring planting the Saxons would vacation in exotic places like England where they slaughtered the native Angles (Angle-land, get it?) burned their villages and stole everything that wasn’t nailed down. Eventually the Saxons took such a liking to England they decided to steal the entire country.

Mixed with the local language “duffla-dopa” was slowly shortened to “duffla”, and then hardened to “duva” and within a few centuries was being pronounced as “dove”. But it now referred to only that family of avians with big chests and little heads, natives to both the Saxon homeland and England as well.

And then just when the Saxons had gotten England fixed up just the way they liked it who should arrive uninvited but William The Conqueror, who brought with him the feudal system and a big chunk of French-ified Latin.

Now the Romans, who invented Latin, also invented arches and concrete and office parties, lots of stuff so practical that their Latin names have often survived with little alteration; like the word “pipio”, which was a hollow tube that carried water. A Roman “pipio” is our “pipe”.

Take a length of pipio, poke some holes in it and blow on one end and you have a musical instrument the Romans also called a pipio,(a piccolo), which produces a chirping sound similar to that made by the baby birds found in nests in Roman temples and civic buildings, so the Romans called the birds in those urban nests “pipio” as well.

Then the Roman Empire collapsed and Latin went down the pipio. Europe dissolved into a babble of tongues until the year 800 when Charlemagne had his bureaucrats translate the old Latin red tape into French red tape for his new empire. It was then that the feathered “pipio” acquired the new snooty pronunciation “pijon”. And it was this name that the Normans carried across the channel in 1066 where the Anglo-Saxon hard mouths mis-pronounced it, “pidge-on”.

So in England there were now two words for one family of birds: The Norman pigeon and the Anglo-Saxon dove. This was not the only example of pairing pronouns that developed from the class and language division in the new England; there were Saxon “swine” on the farm that became Norman “pork” when they got to the table; the peasants tended Saxon “sheep” but the nobility ate French “mutton”.

Words were the weapons in this linguistic gorilla warfare between the invader and the occupied. And since no self respecting nobleman would stoop to learn a skill such as writing, it fell to the brightest Saxon sons of England to record and define the English language at its birth. And that is why pigeons came out of the Norman invasion with such bad Saxon press.

Dove was a Saxon word so the birds that lived in the forests where the Saxon peasants toiled. So anytime a literary bird needed a translation to imply devotion, gentleness and love, the bird in question became a dove.

Pigeon was a Norman word and was attached to birds who lived in the cities and atop castles where the Norman overlords resided. Whenever a Saxon scribe came across a literary bird used to symbolize stupidity, waste, foolishness and disease that bird became a pigeon.

There is no logic in this. A pigeon is no less devoted to its mate than a dove and makes no less a loving parent. Pigeons and doves are both suprisingly bright birds and lovely flyers. Still, tell people you are having doves killed and you will be assaulted. Call the victims pigeons and everyone sympathizes with your problem.

And that is the damage language can do when it’s words are used as weapons…against birds or people.

I came across an alleged case of road rage in yesterday’s Dallas Morning News which seems to confirm my long held contention that human beings are just plain nuts. Now, what I am proposing is not that some people are nuts all of the time or that all people are nuts some of the time but that all humans are nuts all of the time; right now, right this moment and you and me too.
The human conundrum is that “nuts’ is an altered state and logically if all humans are always living in altered states then no humans are qualified to judge Ms. Kimberly Al Homsi’s alleged actions on Tuesday afternoon somewhere along the LBJ Expressway in Richardson, Texas. And yet…

The allegation is that shortly before 5pm Ms. Homsi displayed a hand grenade to another driver, pulled the pin and made a motion as if to throw it at him. The other driver perceived her actions as a threat and he called the police. The police followed (WFAA-TV calls it a “chase”) Ms. Homsi’s white four door Toyota sedan into the neighboring community of Garland, to near the intersection of East Belt Line Road and North Shiloh Road, just west of the George Bush Turnpike.  Ms. Homsi then turned North onto Medical Plaza Drive and pulled into the parking lot at 3145, The Brighter Horizons Academy, an Islamic private school for pre-schoolers through grade 12. Ms. Homsi then picked up her teenage daughter and as she returned to Medical Plaza Drive the police pulled her over. As they approached her car they spotted “a couple” of hand grenades lying in the back seat.

The bomb squad’s remotely controlled robot removed three hand grenades from that back seat. They also found what they call “ammunition” in the car and pulled a rifle and a pistol and more ammo from the trunk. If this had occurred any place but Texas, all that firepower would have resulted in an immediate call to Homeland Security. But the best the Richardson police could come up at the time was to charge Ms. al Homsi with making a “bomb hoax, “since the grenades were real but lacked explosives. They locked her up for the night in the Richardson city jail. She was released on bond Tuesday morning.

By the next day police had realized that without explosives in the hand grenades the additional “ammunition” in the car had become more significant – it might have been used to “load” the grenades. The local press mentioned the possibility of looking into Ms. al Homsi’s mental condition. By this morning, Friday, the police were considering upgrading the charges against her to include making a terrorists threat.

A whole list of unanswered questions still surrounds this case. The police say they don’t know why Ms. al Homsi had the grenades or where she got them from.  I could find no word if her car and other “legal personal items” such as the rifle and hand gun and ammo from the trunk were returned to her upon her own release, or if the cops held them as possible evidence.

But the police must have been terrified when this “crazy” lady in a Toyota with a hand grenade pulled into the parking lot of an Islamic school.   Images of the Jewish school in Los Angeles at the mercy of the “nut” with the assault rifle must have flashed through their minds. There are about 100,000 Muslims in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, and that’s enough to be noticed and hated. Or perhaps by that time the police had run the license plate and found the car’s owner was named al Homsi. That might explain why the police decided not to intervene until Ms. al Homsi was leaving the school grounds.  If so it was an interesting gamble on their part.

It is also interesting that no one seems to have any difficulty in identifying Ms. al Homsi’s actions as “bizarre”, “curious”, or even “intriguing”, all polite synonyms for “nuts”. But it is even more interesting that if we are being honest many of us who think what Ms. al Homsi did was “nuts” have ourselves while on L.A’s  405 or on the Van Wyck into Chicago, or the perimeter 285 around Atlanta wished that we had a hand grenade just to teach that stupid jackass preventing us from making an appointment on time or reaching our family members who might need us a real driving lesson.

Could it be that we know Ms. al Hamsi’s actions are “nuts” not because the rest of us are sane but because we are far to familiar with “nuts” ourselves?
I think so. I think the only people qualified to identify true nutty actions are people who know the territory, who can navigate the terrain because they actually live in nut country. Jesus Christ described the situation perfectly; “Judge not yest ye be judged” he said.  

Or, to put it our freeway vernacular, you don’t want to know who is driving the car in the lane next to yours. It could be a guy who just got fired or who ought to fired. It could be a guy who just found out his wife is cheating on him or a wife who just found out her husband is gay. It could a sixteen year old Goth-girl with a death wish or a twenty-something steroid addict you cut off yesterday. Or worse, it could be somebody just as nuts as you are.

That may not be a relaxing thought at sixty miles an hour in the middle of a traffic jam, but it should suggest that you should always drive defensively – if you’ve got hand grenades or not.

I strongly dislike Bill O’Reilly. His magnanimous announcement that “Happy Holidays” is now permissible again inspired me to e-mail him a little note, ending with, “Once again, thank you, Your Eminence.”  Honestly, this guy has been so full of manure for so long I don’t think he can smell manure anymore, not even if he was T-boned by a manure truck just out side of a manure processing plant with a big red sign on the side of the truck that read, “Fresh Manure”, and then the truck caught fire. Like his pill popping ponderous predecessor Bill seems convinced in his own significance.  But the truth is, this jerk isn’t even original.
Once upon a time there was a guy named Joe Pyne working as a disc jockey at radio station WILM in Wilmington, Delaware. Joe was a war vet with an artificial leg, a big ego, an acerbic mouth with a cigarette hanging out of it and a set of political opinions slightly to the right of Genghis Kahn.  He was also smart enough to notice that when he let go a short political rant to fill some dead air his listeners called the station in droves. By 1949 the records were gone completely and Joe was playing nothing but his mouth and his callers.  Joe Pyne had invented talk radio.

Conservatives called in to be comforted while outraged liberals called in to challenge Joe’s outrageous opinions. Contemporary Ray Brien described Pyne’s technique; “…he would play his caller like a fish, always asking pointed questions, and then when the caller left himself open, he would go in for the kill. He always knew when the caller giving him a hard time was vulnerable.” Where The Big Giant Head shouts “Shut up” at troublesome guests Joe would snarl, “Take a Walk.”  Or he might tell a listener “Go gargle with razor blades,” or “Take your false teeth out, put them in backwards and bit yourself in the neck.”  It sounds adolescent today, almost as adolescent as a Howard Stern show, but there had never been anything like it on radio before and the listeners and the callers both ate it up. Joe once told a long time victim, “Look lady, every time you call this program and open your mouth, nothing falls out but garbage. Get off the line, you creep!” Of course she continued calling in for years.

In 1954 “The Joe Pyne Show” premiered on Channel 12, WDEL- TV. Three years later Pyne was broadcasting out of KTLA in Hollywood, with syndicated radio and television versions on some 800 stations nationwide.  It was that syndicated radio show I grew up being appalled by.

It was part circus geek show, part political debate.  Joe interviewed and humiliated hippies, guests who had seen Big Foot and those who claimed to have been abducted by aliens. But he also humiliated feminists, advocates for the poor and anti-Vietnam war activists. During a radio segment with black activist Ernie Smith, who insisted that all African-Americans including himself should be referred to as slaves, Pyne shouted, “If you’re a slave I ought to be able to sell you.” After the following commercial break Pyne announced, “This is  Joe Pyne taking Ernie Smith out on the sidewalk to see what I can get for him.” And he did, too.  Joe had invented shock radio.  

Life Magazine wrote, “His manner is that of a barroom tough who invites his quarry to pull up a chair and sit down. Five minutes later the poor lummox is apt to feel he has been slapped into a corner with his tie ripped off.’  Joe himself admitted, “I’m not a nice guy, and I don’t want to be. I have no respect for anyone who would come on my show.”  

Well, maybe there was one guest Joe respected, someone smart to beat the inventor at his own game. In a TV interview with Frank Zappa, Pyne delivered the classic 1960’s conservative put down. “I guess your long hair makes you a woman.”   Frank responded, “I guess your wooden leg makes you a table.”  

Without Joe Pyne there would have never been a Rush Limbaugh, an Ann Coulter or a Bill “The Big Giant Head” O’Reilly. All of these boobs are merely following Joe Pyne’s example on how to sell your soul to the lowest common denominator. But without Joe Pyne to prove the entertainment value of race, religion and war there might never have been an Archie Bunker, either. At the height of his popularity Joe had more listeners than Dodger baseball He ended each show with the phrase, “Good night, everybody. Straight ahead.” We can only surmise how he would have trivialized the issue of same sex marriage.

Joe Pyne, professional right wing nut case, died on August 23, 1970 of lung cancer. He was only 44 years old.  He may have been lucky in leaving the stage before his tricks became old hat and he became the butt of public jokes.  Let us hope Mr. O’Reilly, Ms. Coulter and Mr. Limbaugh live long, long lives.

P.S. a piece of trivia…at the height of his popularity Joe was hired by NBC to host a game show called “Showdown”. The show was terrible and quickly cancelled and its replacement was “The Hollywood Squares”.

I have a few questions, eventually.
First, I used to live in New York City. I have empathy and sympathy for those poor folks. But frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn. A bunch of lawyers having to hike to work? What a shame. Five Insurance company drones to a cab? Ahh, too bad.  Six bankers on skate boards collided in Columbus Circle? Ach, the humanity.  Okay, the banker collision would be headlines anywhere, but it didn’t happen.  And still the rest of the nation must suffer through  endless video of pedestrians….walking. And traffic jams on East River Drive, like that never happens every day of the week. I once had hopes when CNN established their base in Atlanta that our news media might finally become less NYC-centralistic but it never happened.  Why not NBC in Chicago, ABC in Denver, and leave CBS in New York?  They need the edge. Why not, I ask, as if anybody was going to answer that question. I’m such an idiot I think the Supreme Court should be based in Kansas City, and the FBI in San Francisco.  

It’s a shame the story bored me so fast because the New York Times has two interesting stories on the front page today. (News so well balanced you could juggle it.)  One says the transit talks broke down over a $20 million item on the pension plan – which is like saying the tire went flat because of one particular nail amongst all the hundreds of nails the car ran over. And the second story explains that the Transit workers’ union in NYC is not being supported by their national.  If that is true I have only one word to say to the transit workers national union; SEIU – the Service Employees International Union, which I pronounce “Sewy”.  These are the California hot heads who started out organizing janitors in L.A., moved to government workers, nurses and hospital workers, and are now in Texas doing the same. These guys take no prisoners, and they win. I happen to believe that most of labor’s problems are the result of “shifting economics”, the global economy, etc. But these guys seem to prove that a substantial portion of those problems are that labor leadership has no balls.  All nationals had better start backing their locals because sewie is going to eat them alive.

The point of all this is that I am driven to ask, where is the news about George’s excellent adventures in surveillance land?  Under the fold? Page three? After the first commercial break?  Are the citizens of Denver really more affected by the NYC transit strike than they are by George Bush’s nose being shoved up their telephones?  I think not.

A judge from the FISA court (a Clinton appointee) has resigned in protest and the other judges seem to be a little worked up, too. Congress is displaying some backbone and patriotism for a change, which is a little surprising. Barbra Boxer, California’s little Hispanic super liberal, has even mentioned the word impeachment, which in reference to this administration is starting to have all the impact of the word “fuck” in a Martin Scorsese film.  Barbra (who by the way I think is HOT), says she never thought of the word until John Dean, of  Watergate and Countdown fame, said that this was the first time he ever heard a President admit to an impeachable offense. And yes, I was shocked.  G. Bush never admits to anything. And this is what he chooses to start being honest about?  I think he may have skipped a step in the program. But Barbra says she never realized that warrant-less wiretaps could be an impeachable offense until Dean mentioned it.  If that is true Barbra is as big an idiot as Bush.  

Well, at least Senator Bill Frist has remained true to form – he’s still the biggest putz in Congress. This guy couldn’t organize a dog pack. He’s supposedly angry some Republicans stalled his big push for the Patriot Act extension, which is like a lawyer being ticked off because his motion for a parole hearing was delayed because his client is currently being booked for murdering another prisoner.

The law – as every Democrat now knows and as every Republican chooses to avoid knowing, allows a rubber stamp court to approve a wiretap 72 hours AFTER the wire has been tapped, which destroys the Bush/Cheney justification that time constraints prevented them from obeying the constitution. At no time has Bush/Cheney ever asked Congress to change that law. And at no time has Bush/Cheney ever complained, in public or private – that the FISA court was too slow, too restrictive, too liberal, too anything. The Supreme Court they complain about. Federal judges from Maine to Washington State are a bunch of Godless, child hating, abortion loving scum. (The holy book of Tom Delay, Stupid Acts, chapter three, verse ten.).  But the FISA courts have remained complaint-less.

So my first question is; has this administration continued to seek warrants for wiretaps from the FISA courts? Question two: has this administration continued to seek post tap warrants from the FISA courts?  If the answer to both of these questions is yes, and only our representatives in Congress can tell us if it is- (assuming they have more personal integrity than Senator Rockefeller -“Sorry you’re all slaves – I would have warned you about the coup but it was a secret”.), then what kind of wiretaps would Bush want to hide from such minimal even retroactive oversight?  

The only answer that springs to my mind is that they were taps they damn well knew they couldn’t get a court to approve, even a rubber stamp court, even after collecting evidence for 72 hours. They wanted wiretaps which might make the courts start questioning more closely the wiretaps they did bother to ask for. What kind of wire taps could those have been? I mean, after 9/11 you could have gotten a wiretap for a living room couch if you called it Abdullah. Say, you don’t think these arrogant idiots could have used the N.S.A. the way Tom Delay used the FAA to track down Democrats, do you?

Why, yes. Yes, I do.

Oh, and one more question; Who at the N.S.A. carried out what were clearly illegal orders from the White House, day in and day out,  for the last five years?  Who at that agency gave away our freedom so easily, so agreeably, between their coffee break and lunch?   It would appear we are going to have to clean house at the N.S.A., don’t it?

But has anybody noticed this? Is it on the front page? Lord knows it’s not news that this generation of Republicans have all rushed to defend the constitution with all the passion of a piece of broccoli at a vegetarian restaurant. And you won’t hear any mainline news media suggest Emperor Bush may be as craven a politician as those disorganized Democrats they so enjoy dismissing as disorganized. But at least they’ve got the New York Transit strike to fill their 24 hour news channels until some real news comes along.

See, I think the real news is that political surveillance is the only explanation that makes sense for Bush’s actions.  But then what do I know about news? I thought a White House outing of an undercover CIA agent would have been news, but Bob Woodward obviously knew better. Still, if the extra-constitutional wiretaps had been in any way a real national security matter, then why would Bush not have obeyed such an easy law to obey?  It’s not like anybody was asking him to walk the warrant applications over to the court himself. Now that would have been news even Judith Miller would have recognized.

And if I see one more shot of people hiking down Sixth Avenue, I’m going to piss into the back of my TV until Wolf Blitzer’s eyes turn yellow.  I’m warning you, Wolf.  Stop it.

I have begun wondering why I am a Democrat. Face it, we’re a bunch of losers and we have been since 1968. That’s thirty-two years, almost two generations of losing Democrats. We don’t have an image of losing, we are losers. To watch Gore and Kerry and Nader you could easily believe that we prefer to lose, that we prefer to remain true to our ideals rather than compromise our values and win. But are we helping anyone when we keep losing?
Are the pensions of American workers more secure when Labor chooses to support only those Democrats not too strong on fuel mileage restrictions?  How many plants and animals were pushed closer to extinction after liberals determined to teach moderate Democrats a lesson by voting for Ralph Nader?  How many more hours must women spend looking for a doctor who will consider their health first rather than some pseudo-Christian’s version of morality, now that Democrats are required to be in favor of unlimited Abortions?  How many more children must suffer in under funded schools, with parents struggling below the poverty level, with no hope of college, no hope of a secure future, because all Democrats are required to oppose any limits on affirmative action?  In the last forty years, have we helped anyone by insisting we must help all or none?

Any Democrat is better than these Republicans. And any Democrat who does not recognize that is working for further Republican victories.  It is time for Democratic unity, not in ideals, but in mutual support.  It is time to recognize who the enemy really is. And the enemy is not a Democrat who is not pure enough in thought or deed.  The enemy is a party that calls itself God’s Own Party while abandoning the poor, the sick and the old and the young. The enemy is a party that would see no women with access to unrestricted health care and no children with access to higher education unless they are the wives and children of rich men. The enemy is a party that mortgages our children’s future in the name of favors to those who least need favors. And have least earned those favors they continue to receive. The enemy is a party corrupt in its actions, in its ideals, in its goals. The enemy is a party that lies to win, and wins.  

We are the “Tax and Spend” Democrats, but it is the Republicans who have run up the largest deficit in American history, who have mortgaged our children’s future to pamper the rich, who have abandoned our schools, our health care system in favor of tax cuts for the wealthy. And just how are Democrats helping that next generation by remaining such a bunch of losers?

Early in 1873, after almost a decade out of power in Washington James Gordon Bennett, Jr., editor of the Democratic newspaper The New York Herald sent a reporter to interview the newly re-elected Ulysses S. Grant. Grant had won by a landslide and the Republicans looked as if they were going to be in power for ever. So Bennett’s man had been instructed to ask the President a simple question; did he intend to run for a third term? If Grant said no he would immediately become a lame duck, particularly in those days of the spoils system. But if Grant said yes he would be breaking George Washington’s precedent of two terms only and outrage the public.  So Grant took the middle road, saying “I haven’t given it any thought.”  It was a clever answer, neither a yes nor a no. But Bennett’s paper immediately began to editorialize about the dangers of Caesar- ism in Washington. Other Democratic papers picked up the story line, and then more neutral papers covered the issue because it had become a story because the Democrats kept talking about it.  In the midterm elections of 1874 the “Mugwumps” – Republicans so worried about the issue of an imperial presidency, an issue which had been created and nurtured by Bennett – chose not to go to the polls in silent protest. The Democrats won control of the House.  With the House came the power to subpoena, and that produced investigations and indictments and Grant’s reputation as the most corrupt administration in history. It was perhaps the smartest political move a Democrat ever made.  We could be that smart again.

But first we have to stop being Mugwumps.  

I suppose it is traditional for Democrats to shoot themselves in the foot by shooting their mouths off.  And they’re doing it again. Nancy Pelosi, who is the Minority Leader in the Senate, is seen on TV a lot more often than Party Chairman Governor Howard Dean, and that makes her the national face and voice of the Party. But she is from that bastion of non-moderation, San Francisco. What brings cheers from her constituents doesn’t often fly in front of Blue Dog Democrats or moderates from Ohio or Florida and they don’t really trust her.  When she jumped aboard Representative John Murtha’s bandwagon calling for an early withdrawal from Iraq I think she actually hurt his credibility. And she claims to have support from half the congressional Democratic caucus.
But few Democrats from red states are in that caucus. That means the party currently leans heavily toward liberal positions and ideology. But it is precisely in the moderate and conservative Red States that Democrats must win over voters if they are to wrest control of the House, the Senate and the White House from the Right Wing Fundamentalists who have controlled the Republican Party for over a decade. With its image to the left, the Democratic Party surrenders the middle ground to the right.  

Front page of the Washington Post today is the story on a memo written by Al From, President of the Democratic Leadership Council and Mark Penn, a Democratic pollster. They remind the party leadership that   “…America remains a moderate to conservative country  – particularly on economic and security measures.”  As an example, says the memo, 54% of voters don’t like the Bush war in Iraq, but they don’t favor an early pullout. “Democrats”, they say, “need to capture the vital center and bring an abrupt halt to what voters see as the party’s drift to the left.”

And Governor Dean has been urging Democrats to let gun control slip off the national agenda, and reduce it as a litmus test for support.  His spokesman, Damian LaVera was quoted in yesterday’s Washington Post as saying, “On gun rights we’ve allowed the Republicans to paint us in a way that just doesn’t represent our values” He’s talking about the values of Red state Democrats. As the Post points out, “Democrats’ ability to attract rural voters in the West is the key to their hopes in 2006. In Montana, where Democrats hope to pick up a US Senate seat next year, candidates must be pro-gun to have a chance of winning, said the state’s Democratic governor, Brian Schweitzer, an avid hunter….”I guess I kind of believe in gun control. You control your gun, and I’ll control mine, “Schweitzer said.

Does this mean that Democrats will be abandoning attempts to lesson gun violence? Actually, it may mean a long overdue rethink of the sixty year old Democratic legislative program of regulating guns themselves, an approach which has consistently failed to achieve any of its goals.

There are about 223 million guns in America, legally owned by approximately 44 million citizens. Every hour four citizens are shot and killed by guns – about 20,000 deaths each year. 28% of all assaults involve guns. Some 341,000 guns are stolen every year, but  4,204,800 new guns are made. Guns of all types are used in over 500,000 assaults each year. And yet, the relationship between guns and crime are one of the least studied aspects of American life. All of the statistics in this paragraph came from F.B.I. and A.T.F. studies funded during 1993 – 95 during debate over the Clinton Crime bill, which required more record keeping to support restrictions on the sale of guns to those with felony convictions and those with a history of mental and emotional disturbance. That was also the last time the Democrats controlled the House and shortly before they lost control of the rest of the government.

Those numbers seem to paint a horrible connection between guns and violence in America, at least until you take a closer look. That huge number of stolen guns actually represents thefts from only 0.9% of gun owners. Not a bad safety record. Given the two hundred twenty-three million guns in the public’s hands, less than 0.022% are used in illegal activities in any given year. That means that the vast majority of all guns are never involved in violence.  How does that support further regulation of guns as an effective crime reduction measure?  Even the Clinton crime bill, the last major attempt to regulate gun violence, zeroed in on people who use guns, not the guns themselves.

Partly this was because radical attempts to outlaw handguns were simply not likely to pass congress. Even a brilliant idea that cannot become law is just hot air. But one of the other reasons for the shift was a successful Massachusetts law that applied strict sentencing rules for anyone charged with using a gun in a crime – no plea bargains, no probation, no time off for good behavior and no pardons. “You carry a gun, you go to jail.” This law did not result in a reduction in assaults. But it did see a reduction in assaults using guns. It turns out criminals can learn. The Clinton Crime Bill of 1994 reduced assaults using guns by 25%, but it also did not reduce the number of assaults. Could it be that the National Rifle Association had been right all these years, that guns don’t kill people, people do?

But if the emphasis on dealing with gun violence is to shift to the people misusing guns, it should also shift to the people profiting from the misuse of guns. Only 32% of all felons admit to having stolen their last gun – which means most felons buy their guns from dealers who do not follow the law. The Washington D.C. sniper used a Bushmaster rifle he had obtained from a Washington State dealer. He must have stolen it since he had a felony record and the dealer could not have legally sold that gun to him. But the dealer did not report the gun as stolen until after law enforcement, having finally having silenced the gun, traced the serial number back to the dealer.

Knowing that gun had been stolen in Washington State might have led D.C. and Virginia and Maryland police to the suspect weeks earlier, which might have saved lives. But failure to report a stolen gun is not grounds for pulling a dealer’s license, and even after the dealer’s slip shod stock control was revealed, manufacturers continued shipping to him.

Similarly when small suburban dealers sell a large volume of a specific type of gun, profits are clearly being made selling guns to supply street gang arsenals. Gun dealers and manufactures should be our first line of defense against criminals, just as pharmacists and drug stores are our fist line of defense against meth labs. Instead gun dealers and manufacturers of guns are facilitators for the felons who use those guns illegally, and they profit from it.

They should be required to report unusual sales and all thefts promptly.

After all, guns don’t profit from the illegal use of guns, people do.

I found the following AP story on CNN. I’ll bet they don’t run it much on the air. But could this be an indication of how much Bush has lost support within the military for the stupid, stupid way he has degraded the force? And why aren’t Democrats moving in to take advantage of this. Now would seem the politically opportune time to court the military, to remove that part of the G.O.P. arsenal.
DENVER, Colorado (AP) — The Air Force Reserve plans to discharge a lieutenant colonel accused of defacing cars that had pro-Bush bumper stickers, the military said Friday.

Lt. Col. Alexis Fecteau, a pilot with 500 combat hours in the first Persian Gulf war and the Balkans, is charged with criminal mischief for allegedly using paint stripper to write a profanity about President Bush in 18-inch-high letters on cars at Denver International Airport.

The cars had bumper stickers supporting President Bush and conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh.

Jim Miller, a spokesman for the Air Force Reserve Command at Robins Air Force Base in Georgia, said the command plans to begin the process of giving Fecteau an administrative discharge. He said Fecteau does not face any military punishment.

Neither Fecteau nor his lawyer, Patrick Mulligan, immediately returned calls. Mulligan has said Fecteau would plead not guilty.

Fecteau is charged with 13 counts of criminal mischief, five of them felonies because the damage to five vehicles was estimated at more than $500 each.

Police said the vehicles were damaged between January and July and a video camera recorded Fecteau damaging a vehicle.

I think I am losing my memory. That may represent a very personal mental deterioration but I suspect it’s a normal, natural human condition called stupidity. It’s just that, on average, we humans don’t remember much for long- which is why we invented record keeping.  It doesn’t make us smarter, it just reminds us not to do stupid things as often as might otherwise do them.  I remember, during the great drought in Southern California of the late 1990’s a city councilman suggested we build a new freeway atop the empty L.A. river to relieve congestion on the Golden State Freeway. It was seriously considered for awhile, at least until the records reminded folks that the one consistency in Southern California is that first it rains and then it doesn’t. And then it rains again.  
On average, during “normal years” as the local weathermen insist upon saying, L.A. gets less then 12″ of rain; and that in just three months. But the average includes 1936 when Long Beach turned into an island and 1811 when a log jam and a cloudburst in the Verdugo Hills conspired to shift the course of the L.A. in one night. Then there was the decade long drought that wiped out the cattle rancheros of the 1860’s, and the drought of the 1870’s that devastated the replacement sheep industry, leaving Southern California settlers with no choice but to grow naval oranges from Brazil. The phrase  “On Average” has about as much meaning as the phrase “that never happens” – which, after all, is something you say only after “that” happens.  Look, sooner or later everything happens. It’s just that on average it doesn’t.

Sea captains used to point out that on average the ocean is enormous and empty and on average ships are small and maneuverable, which is why ships never hit icebergs.  But of course they did and with disturbing regularity. In July of 1839 the Emily Johnson , bound for Boston. passed masts and rigging drifting beside two bergs.  In July of 1876, the brig Lilly spotted fresh wreckage floating in the lee of another berg. The accounting could go on for hours. The Harvard Injury Research Control Center figures that between 1882 and 1890 14 ships ran into icebergs and sank just in the fog shrouded fishing grounds of Grand Banks, off of Newfoundland. But given all the ways you could die at sea, running into an iceberg seemed the least of your worries.  

Then came the night of April 14th, 1912 when the H.M.S. Titanic ran into a little chunk of a Greenland out for a spring cruise. Two thousand people went into the water and a little over 500 climbed out.  Suddenly 13 nations were willing to shell out money to set up an International Ice Patrol. And since then nobody has died because they ran into an iceberg they weren’t looking for.

Since 1913 we have detailed records of icebergs spotted floating in the North Atlantic South of 48 degrees North Latitude, and by consulting log books the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency  (NOAA – pronounced Noah) has pushed those records back to 1900. The leanest year for Icebergs in the last century was 1966, when none were spotted.  The busiest year was 1984, when 2, 202 were tracked.

The record of icebergs, like the rainfall records in Southern California, is a lesson in the caprice of nature, the meteorological whimsy of climate.  The first decade of this century saw an average of 437 bergs each year in north Atlantic. That number when down to 418 a year in the second decade, but grew to 473 per year during the roaring twenties. It dropped to 410 a year on average during the Great Depression and the dustbowl, then 460 on average per year during the 1940’s,  241 average per year during the 1950’s,  148 per year during the 1960’s. Then the average number of icebergs each year started to rise, to 571 on average during the 1970’s, and an average per year of 667 during the 1980’s. The peak (so far) has been the 1990′ s when on average every year the ice patrol tracked 1,148 icebergs. During the first five years of this century, the ice patrol has had to track only  433 per year – on average – but one big year before the year 2010 could radically change that average for the decade.

We didn’t have a big year, with more than a thousand icebergs spotted until 1909.  There was another in Titanic’s year of 1912, but not another until 1929.  The next wasn’t until 1945,  and there was not another one thousand plus year until 1972, when 1,588 bergs were spotted..  But the 70’s were also the first decade that produced two big years when 1974 saw 1,387 ice bergs tracked.  The nineteen eighties saw three big years back to back to back; in 1983, 1894 and in 1985. The nineteen nineties saw five years with over 1,000 bergs sighted.  Of course it also saw 1999 when only 22 bergs were tracked.

Even if there is an increased trend in iceberg production that is not proof of global warming. Lots of things might influence the 100 glaciers on Greenland’s west coast to “calve” more bergs into Baffin Bay. And a lot more than simple ocean temperature influences how many of those bergs and growlers get carried by the Labrador Current south through the Davis Strait and the Flemish Pass to Iceberg Alley, Southeast of Newfoundland. And even if rising ocean temperature is the likely and logical cause of more bergs making that long journey, that certainly isn’t proof that humans are the cause of global warming.

But then the records on icebergs were not collected to prove or disprove global warming. Like the rainfall records in Southern California, they were collected merely to keep us from doing something stupid, like building a highway in a river bed, or pumping more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.

A year after the L.A.. River Freeway was shelved a cloudburst dropped 2″ of rain in an hour over the Sepulveda Basin. Dozens of people had to be rescued by helicopters from the roofs of their cars. That kind of thing never happens in Southern California, on average.

I am amazed at how often the adjective “dog” has been applied by politicians to other politicians. Obviously this is not because a dog is loyal, but because the word serves as a wonderful handle by which you may grab and manipulate numerous other adjectives. There is “dirty dog”, “low down dog”(often also “low down and dirty dog”)   an “attack dog”, a “currish dog” and the ever popular “Hound Dog”, as applied to Bill Clinton.  And for some reason, the term “Blue” also springs up with amazing continuity in American political history.  We’ve had every thing from the Blue Goose, the bullet proof podium used by Clinton and Gore, to the Blue Slips used by the Senate Judiciary Committee to record their votes for judicial appointments, and the blue sky laws which are designed to protect suckers from con artists.  The laws which make pyramid schemes and three card Monte illegal are blue sky laws.  
During the War of 1812 a Virginia newspaper editor referred to his fellow editors in Connecticut as “Dirty dog Blue Light Federalist”.  The blue part of the insult referred to blue Royal Navy signal lanterns supposedly seen flashing to conspirators ashore just before New London was captured and burned.  British ships were raiding the American coast with impunity the summer of 1814 and the assumption was there must be traitors aiding the enemy.

New England was strongly Federalist territory.  Democratic Republican President  James Madison’s blockade and then “his” war were devastating to North East shipping and banking interests, which were politically largely Federalist.  There was even talk of New England seceding from the union. A convention was held to discuss the issue in Hartford in December 1814, but Jackson’s victory at New Orleans and word of the Peace Settlement signed in Europe cut the legs out of the argument. But even then the convention revealed the secession talk had been the product of a handful of hotheads. The truth was there had been no conspiracy, no matter what Virginia newspaper editors might suspect.  The tiny republic simply didn’t have the resources to defend its enormous coastline against the greatest navy in the world.  

Recent politics has seen the rise of Blue Dog Democrats. They are usually southerners.  They are always economic conservatives if social moderates. In order to increase their influence in the Democratic party and in Congress they formed a loose coalition, meeting regularly to discuss issues and plan strategy, often in the offices of fellow Southern Democrats, many of which are adorned by the paintings of  the Cajun artist George Rodrigues.  A continuing theme of Mr. Rodrigues’ is the Louisiana myth of the Loup-garou – or a werewolf dog.  The Loup-garou appears in many Rodrigues’ paintings of politicians, always in a blue tint to indicate he prowls by night – thus the group’s name – Blue Dog Democrats.  Since Republican dominance of Congress this group has often been the swing votes, although not often credited as such in the news media, which prefers the simplistic Republican image that all Democrats are liberals.

Interestingly, the Blue Dog Democrats were preceded by Yellow Dog Democrats from the New Deal Coalition days of the thirties, forties, and even into the fifties. The term indicated a politician who would even vote for a yellow dog if it were running as a Democrat.  

In the 1880’s and 90’s such Democratic loyalist were also refereed to as Copper collar Democrats.  The style in men’s shirts of the day was high starched collars, and if you weren’t wealthy enough to have your shirt laundered and starched fresh each day you could buy cardboard collars that could be thrown away once they were soiled.  But the cardboard collars were much stiffer than starched cloth ones, and often prevented the wearer from turning his head and seeing anything not directly in front of him.  A copper collar would, of course, have been even stiffer. So a copper collared Democrat wouldn’t or couldn’t consider any other argument or viewpoint except that endorsed by the party leadership.

So perhaps we should be calling Republican loyalist, Karl Rove talking point mouth pieces and Joe Lieberman, as copper collared Republicans.