Josh Marshall has a spot-on review of the resurgence of Clinton-bashing (Bill Clinton, that is) among Republican candidates recently. The short story is that, like Bush did in 2000, Giuliani and Thompson are now blaming all the woes of our military on the Clinton administration. And it is just as bogus a charge now as it was in 2000.

Apparently nobody remembers that Bush Sr. was the one to institute the “Peace Dividend” and established the policy of a smaller military:

The peace dividend is a political slogan popularized by US President George H.W. Bush and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the early 1990s, purporting to describe the economic benefit of a decrease in defense spending. … The term was frequently used at the end of the Cold War, when many Western nations significantly cut military spending.

Clinton merely followed in Bush 41’s footsteps–but Bush 41 was the one who truly “gutted” the military, if that’s what one calls it. Back in July, Mitt Romney also blamed Clinton for cutting the military, and FactCheck.org took him to task for it:

It is not correct to say that the Clinton administration began to cut U.S. military forces. No matter how you measure defense spending, President George H.W. Bush had significantly trimmed it by the time Clinton was sworn in. And it was Bush’s administration, not Clinton’s, that first boasted of a “peace dividend.”

In fact, Bush cut military spending more than Clinton did. Check out this chart:

In constant dollars, Bush 41 cut defense spending by $59 billion per year; Clinton cut defense spending by $43 billion per year. And guess which Bush 41 administration official said this:

[O]verall, since I’ve been secretary, we will have taken the five-year defense program down by well over $300 billion. That’s the peace dividend.… And now we’re adding to that another $50 billion … of so-called peace dividend.

If you guessed “Dick Cheney,” you’d be right.

Now, you might argue that Bush 41 cut the defense budget all that it should have and Clinton went overboard and cut more than he should have. Except that it’s not true. When Bush 41 left office, he left behind guidelines for defense spending through 1997, which called for a further 19% cut in defense spending. Spending under Clinton was cut less than Bush 41 dictated, and then was raised again after 1997. A post-Cold-War report explains:

Not only was the drawdown of the 1990s clearly a bipartisan affair, the best available evidence suggests that Democrats and Republicans are still [in the year 2000] remarkably close in terms of their support for defense spending.

The fact of the matter is, Clinton left George W. Bush a far stronger military than Bush has produced today, despite Bush Jr.’s stratospheric defense spending. Besides which, if the best efforts of Republicans to rebuild the military in a wartime footing have failed miserably, despite having seven years to do the job, isn’t it a bit late to be blaming someone from the previous century?

After all, as you’ll note in the chart above, Bush 43 has ballooned defense spending by $118 billion (in constant 2000 dollars), or by 40%, to levels higher even than the peak of the Reagan years. After pouring all that money into the military, why is it far less healthy today than it was in 2000? Maybe conservatives are right when they say that “simply throwing money at the problem won’t fix it.” Too bad they only say that when it comes to education, and not when it comes to defense.

Despite Dubya’s rantings in 2000, the military was just fine when Clinton gave it to Bush. Clinton did, after all, use it to fight and win two wars, and Clinton’s military performed brilliantly when Bush needed them to go into Afghanistan and later into Iraq. It was Bush’s mismanagement that later wrecked these two missions, and left the military in the mess it suffers today.

Our military is overtaxed today, with soldiers forced to go into combat without sufficient training or equipment, and to serve unreasonably long and numerous tours of duty–which explains why military recruitment is suffering a crisis, and why returning soldiers are suffering from post-traumatic stress, leading to higher suicide rates.

Romney, Giuliani, Thompson and other conservatives can try to blame Clinton as much as they want, it won’t make it true. Unfortunately, conservative politicians today are less about building truth than they are about building myths–and they’re damned good at it.

Republicans are trying to steal elections again. They have proposed that California’s electoral votes, instead of going all to the winner of the state like almost all other states, would be divided according to whomever wins each district.

While this sounds great and is, to a degree, in principle, it is vote-stealing because it is not a call for such democratic vote-distribution nationwide–only in the biggest electoral state in the union, which also happens to vote Democratic every election year nowadays.

If there was a proposal to do this nationwide–for every state to divide their electoral votes–I’d likely vote for it–though a better system would simply be to use the popular vote, a strict numerical proposition.

But that’s not what the proposal is for. If you suggested doing this in the South, especially in Texas, then Republicans would fight it tooth and nail. Nor would they ever propose this in California if it voted conservatively. They don’t want votes to be fairly and evenly counted–they just want to win elections, no matter how crookedly.

Not that this should be any surprise: Republicans tried this same tactic three years ago, and failed. (Though I am surprised that neither the AP writer not Kevin Drum seemed to remember this.) And I’m pretty sure that Californians are not so stupid that they’d let Republicans use Californians to steal yet another election.

Oh, this is too precious: Republican candidates are running scared from the YouTube debate! Yes, that’s right, this is the same party that pilloried the Democratic candidates for being “afraid of journalists” because they did not allow the propaganda arm of the Republican Party to run a debate for them.

It wasn’t enough for them to run scared from black people when all but one of them steered clear of the NAACP debate. Now they apparently are running scared from the actual people of this country, likely because it’s a debate where citizens ask questions without having their Republican credentials assured before they can be allowed in.

But hey, how can you blame them? If you were Rudy Giuliani, would you want to open yourself up to having a NYFD firefighter come on live TV and expose you for being a complete fuckup?

Not that a YouTube debate would really help them that much, even if potentially damaging questions were weeded out beforehand. Giuliani is so easily uncovered as a corrupt fraud that he’d be easily beaten by virtually any of the top Democratic candidates. Mitt Romney isn’t far behind, with massive flip-flopping and dissembling. John McCain’s campaign is pretty much a walking corpse (which is probably why is is signing on, in hopes of reversing his fortunes), and even Fred Thompson, once seen as the savior of the GOP in 2008, is now falling apart (due to fundraising woes, his lobbyist past becoming more public, and other credibility issues).

So can you blame them for running like scaredy-cats from any audience that isn’t pre-filtered for Republican bias? Well, actually, yes you can… but you can’t claim any measure of surprise when doing so.

Here are the Democratic candidates at the NAACP presidential forum to discuss civil rights. All of the candidates showed up:

Ricardo Thomas / The Detroit News

And here’s the Republican turnout, just a few hours before:

Carlos Osorio / AP

Notice anything different? Yep, that’s right–Tom Tancredo was the only GOP candidate to appear. He made the best of it, throwing out quips such as, “Do you think we should wait a few minutes to see if these other guys show up?” and “This is my kind of debate. … Do I know something they don’t know?”

The Republicans don’t even have the ability to say it was an unfriendly forum, after conservatives continuously slammed Democrats for not allowing Fox News, a propaganda arm of the Republican Party, to frame, host, moderate, and deliver a debate for them. You can’t have it both ways; either candidates are “afraid” of a forum for not showing up, or they aren’t. And the NAACP is less of a threat to Republicans than Fox is to Democrats; the NAACP is issue-oriented, and would lean to the right if the GOP addressed their concerns better. Fox, on the other hand, is unabashedly anti-left for the sake of being pro-right. And it’s not as if the GOP doesn’t want to attract voters from the minority community, either, nor has the NAACP shown open hostility to visiting conservatives before. Take this 2004 function when GOP head Ken Mehlman spoke to the NAACP; they were not antagonistic, there were no protesters. Hell, the NAACP sees the Democrats as taking them for granted, and would welcome Republicans to the table if for no other reason than to light a fire under the Democrats. The GOP candidates faced a far friendlier challenge with the GOP than the Democrats did with Fox.

Not that the right-wing press hasn’t taken the opportunity to be hypocritical here; take this NewsBusters article, which slams a CNN commentator for saying that the GOP is “scared of black folks”–despite the right wing massively playing up the story that “Democrats are afraid of journalists” because they didn’t agree to the Fox debate.

And this is not the first time their hypocrisy has been shown up, either; Republicans got all antsy when one debate, hosted by MSNBC, with mostly right-leaning journalists, included Keith Olbermann on the commentator front, even though he didn’t even get close to the candidates.

So, is the media playing up this story? The image of Tancredo standing there among nine other empty lecterns is a money shot, to be sure. But instead, the media is apparently all gaga over David Beckham showing up in the U.S., so the story conveniently slides into obscurity.

John McCain showed himself to be pretty damned stupid when he claimed that the streets of Baghdad were safe to stroll through and then, to prove his point, went there with a hundred troops, five helicopters, and a flak jacket. Now that he’s gotten that out of the way, he attended a conference on technology and quickly made an ass of himself there as well.

First of all, he came out against Network Neutrality. You know, the protocol that was probably one of the most responsible for making the Internet successful. The one that has kept the Telecoms from turning the Internet into their private piggy bank, making everyone pay for everything and throwing their weight around worse than Microsoft does.

McCain, a self-described “free trader” and “deregulator” apparently does not understand what the hell “Network Neutrality” is. To be against Network Neutrality is virtually the opposite of free trade on the Internet, allowing a few companies to have constrictive proprietary control over the system. And it’s not “deregulating,” because there’s no tome of regulation or any bureaucracy involved–just a simple rule, that everyone is truly equal and free on the Internet. McCain’s statements were virtually spot-on to the scripts written by the Telecom lobbyists.

But then McCain made an even bigger fool of himself, by saying that he would put Steve Ballmer on his cabinet to advise him on technology issues (apparently unaware that such a cabinet position does not exist), and said he’d consider Ballmer for an ambassadorial position, maybe in China. The latter has been noted as a “joke,” but probably because no one in his or her right mind could believe that a person could be so monumentally stupid as to seriously suggest such a thing. But then, was McCain’s statement about having Ballmer as a technology advisor also a joke? Nobody thinks so, though pretty much everyone sees the idea as ludicrous. Who knows, maybe McCain seriously promoted the idea of Ballmer on his cabinet, then either because of laughter from the audience or an internal realization of how stupid the idea was, then tried to turn it into a joke by mentioning the China spot.

Either way, McCain is poison to technology. The man is dropping like a dead weight–sorry to see after he seemed so enticing in 2000. Either it was a sham then too, or McCain realized that the only way to be taken seriously was to sell out, big time.

The right wing simply can’t stop being enraged by Hollywood! The Hollywood Elite! Actors who try to get involved in politics! Just some of the buzz, all actual quotes: “the ‘Hollywood elite’ are openly hostile to the attitudes, opinions, and values of millions of Americans” … “anti-Americanism and a rejection of traditional morality are positives in the glitter capital of the world” … “The problem with celebrity elitism is not the idiocy of the ideas that are expressed by the stars… but the blindly arrogant expectation that somehow their views deserve to be taken seriously merely because they are famous” … “creators of false images (i.e., movies, TV) live in their heads and their imaginations” … “they can afford, socially and economically, to live like moral reprobates” … “Hollywood should JUST SHUT UP” ….

Wait… Arnold Schwarzenegger could run for president if only we amended the constitution? Fred Thompson is thinking of running now? Really??

HOO-ray for HOL-LYwood!!!!

Crooks and Liars has a take on this so good that I almost didn’t make this into a blog post, as it would be superfluous. However, I thought that the quote by Giuliani is more than worth commenting on. Here’s the source quote:

In a potential preview of next fall’s presidential contest, Mr. Giuliani, who is seen as the front-runner for the Republican nomination, directly attacked the leading Democratic candidate, Mrs. Clinton, over a speech she gave Tuesday in New Hampshire bemoaning the return of “robber barons” and promising to pursue “shared prosperity” by increasing taxes on Americans making more than $200,000 a year.

“This would be an astounding, staggering tax increase,” Mr. Giuliani told reporters yesterday after a visit to a restaurant on the edge of California’s Silicon Valley. “She wants to go back to the 1990s…. It would hurt our economy. It would hurt this area dramatically. That kind of tax increase would see a decline in your venture capital. It would see a decline in your ability to focus on new technology.”

As C&L rightly points out, this is the kind of tax increase that Bill Clinton executed near the start of his presidency… and we experienced a technology boom, even “irrational exuberance” from investors, which was so successful that we erased the federal budget deficit altogether, a task unthinkable before Clinton. Furthermore, the more level playing field saw to it that the rising tide raised all boats–unlike Reagan’s boom, or Bush’s anemic upswing–and most certainly it did nothing to discourage people from pouring money into research & development of new technologies. According to our experience, we have seen that the kind of tax hike that Hillary is touting is not only not destructive, it is perhaps even essential, as it boosts federal revenue in the least painful way, thus creating the most healthy form of market confidence.

The problem is, Giuliani might have the upper hand with the voters. Even the most constructive tax hike, even when only applied to the richest of the rich, is easily attacked in a way that makes it look like you’re going to raise everyone’s taxes. A corollary to this rule is that you can similarly make everyone believe that a tax cut aimed 99% or even 100% at the rich is something that everybody wants and needs, which is where Bush went and Giuliani will likely follow. It’s the same appeal to fear that the NRA uses when they turn even the most reasonable gun control into a “gun ban.” I hate to say it, but the American people are so easily duped by this kind of scare appeal that it is ludicrously sad.

What Hillary needs to do is follow her husband’s example: don’t say you’re going to raise taxes at all, even on the rich… then do it after you’re elected. I remember in 1992, my conservative landlord in San Francisco (I was an SFSU student then) said that he didn’t like Bill Clinton because he felt Clinton would raise his taxes after he got elected… but later voted for Clinton anyway because he felt that it was the right thing to do, and that a tax hike would help the economy. And he was right.

Sam Brownback, one of the Republican contenders for president in 2008, has an op-ed in the New York Times on the topic of evolution. Perhaps he wants to clarify his stand on the issue because he was one of the three Republican candidates who raised his hand when the question “who does not believe in evolution?” was asked. In the op-ed, he says this:

The question of evolution goes to the heart of this issue. If belief in evolution means simply assenting to microevolution, small changes over time within a species, I am happy to say, as I have in the past, that I believe it to be true. If, on the other hand, it means assenting to an exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the world that holds no place for a guiding intelligence, then I reject it.

The nod to “microevolution” is creationists’ way of getting past a strong argument in favor of evolution. Creationists sometimes argue that if evolution is real, why don’t we see it happening now? Well, that’s exactly what “microevolution” is. So creationists will dodge, saying, oh, those are small changes. Why haven’t we seen a horse change into an elephant in recorded history?

So they accept “microevolution” as a given, so long as it doesn’t mean that they have to concede that life was formed via evolution. And that shows in the latter half of Brownback’s paragraph, when he says that he accepts evolution only so long as it does not contradict his theology. Of course, he and many others ignore the view held by many religious people that evolution is God’s way of creating life and it did not all have to happen within a six-day time span. That would satisfy Brownback’s “place for a guiding intelligence,” but it’s pretty clear that Brownback is lying here and his real judge is either the six-day myth, or it is his right-wing Christian voter base that he feels it necessary to please. Either way, Brownback is guilty of an either-or fallacy here in rejecting what I suppose he would call “macroevolution.”

But the distinction between “micro” and “macro” evolution is in itself no more than a disingenuous method of denying facts in evidence. Both “types” of evolution are in fact the same thing; one happens over small periods of time, the other over long periods. The distinction, however, allows creationists to dismiss the process as it happens before their eyes by claiming that it’s not real because they don’t see the process as it happens over millions of years. It’s kind of like seeing a watermelon fall past your 30th-story window, then getting up and looking out the window to see it scattered over the sidewalk–and then postulating that the watermelon did not traverse the lower 29 floors, instead that god willed it into and out of existence just long enough to pass by your window, and then god magically created a squashed watermelon on the street below. When a person then shows you the video of the watermelon falling the intervening 29 floors (e.g., fossilized evidence of transitionary life forms), you claim that because the video consists of 1/30th-second frames and does not show every nanosecond of the fall, it is not valid evidence.

The reasonable middle ground in the fight between what the Bible literally says and what the world literally shows us is to believe that God created the universe, that the Bible tells us this in mythical terms, and that science reveals the technical details of god’s achievement which were too complex and intricate to be chronicled in an ancient text written by a scientifically primitive people. But we can’t have that crazy nonsense in our churches, now, can we?

But Brownback doesn’t stop there:

There is no one single theory of evolution, as proponents of punctuated equilibrium and classical Darwinism continue to feud today. Many questions raised by evolutionary theory — like whether man has a unique place in the world or is merely the chance product of random mutations — go beyond empirical science and are better addressed in the realm of philosophy or theology.

These statements fall into the category of disingenuous wordplay, exercises in dishonest semantics. The grandaddy of this category is the claim that evolution is “only a theory,” therefore it hasn’t been proven yet. Which is baloney because evolution is a “theory” in the same way that gravity is a “theory.” We know they both exist, the theories are about how they work. Brownback’s argument here is simply a variation, dismissing evolution because the details haven’t been worked out yet. Well, there are different theories of gravity as well, but I don’t see Brownback flying off the ground yet.

Meanwhile, his statement about “whether man has a unique place in the world or is merely the chance product of random mutations” is the same either-or fallacy I demonstrated in the prior paragraph, little more than code for “whether man was created by god or not.” Brownback also is either confused or lying here when he suggests that empirical science is posing the question. It is not. Science is not saying “god did or did not do this.” Science is only saying, “this is what we see and here is how it could have worked in specific mechanical terms.” It makes absolutely no statement about whether or not the observed processes were designed or simply came into being out of nowhere.

I could go on and on dissecting every statement in the piece, but I don’t have time, so let me end with this choice quote:

Ultimately, on the question of the origins of the universe, I am happy to let the facts speak for themselves. There are aspects of evolutionary biology that reveal a great deal about the nature of the world, like the small changes that take place within a species. Yet I believe, as do many biologists and people of faith, that the process of creation — and indeed life today — is sustained by the hand of God in a manner known fully only to him.

Read that again, this time noting how Brownback transitions from letting “the facts speak for themselves” on how the universe was created, to saying that the universe and life are “sustained by the hand of God in a manner known fully only to him.” And then explain to me how the “facts can speak for themselves” when they are known only to god? And, of course, what “empirical” facts support the existence of god in the first place? Exactly what facts are being spoken here?

In any case, Brownback is a bible-thumping creationist who, like most in that category, defies observation and reason, instead preferring to obfuscate enough so that a confused audience will settle down comfortably. In short, a strong Republican candidate.

Texas Governor George W. Bush, June 23, 2000, blaming the Clinton administration for high gas prices because they were in office for seven years and gas prices were rising:

There seems to be an effort out of Washington to blame me for rising energy prices. And the American people don’t buy that. It’s the — Clinton-Gore administration’s been there for seven years, we’re more dependent now than ever before on energy from foreign sources. And I am amazed that they’re trying to shift the blame away from the people that are holding the office. And I resent that kind of politics, and so will the American people. … And this is typical of an administration that refuses to accept responsibility. This is amazing. They’ve been in office for seven years, the price of gasoline has gone up during their period of time.

The price of gas that very week: $1.68 per gallon.

Now, the Bush administration has been in office for six and a half years. Prices at the pump have almost doubled since Bush blamed Clinton and Gore, reaching $3.10 a gallon (hitting over $4 in some areas). Well, under Bush 2000’s logic, the president is to blame. Think that Bush 2007 would agree to that evaluation now? Think he would be willing to “accept responsibility”?

And it’s not as if he’s really been trying or anything, as if he’s been on the case since day one. Only in the past year or so has Bush even made sounds about acting on high gas prices, and so far virtually nothing has materialized. Bush’s biggest policy proposal, called “20-in-10,” suggests that we cut fuel consumption by 20% over the next ten years. No relief for today or anytime within the remaining year and a half of this administration. Although refinery capacity was identified (PDF) from the start of the Bush administration as one of the biggest culprits of rising fuel prices, Bush has done absolutely nothing to remedy the problem, and today, the refinery shortage is worse than ever.

Bush 2007 says:

Our dependence on oil creates a risk for our economy, because a supply disruption anywhere in the world could drive up American gas prices to even more painful levels.

Boy, it’s too bad that Bush didn’t think about lessening dependency on foreign sources of crude oil back in 2000. Bush 2000, don’t you agree?

I think we ought to make sure that we become less dependent on foreign sources of crude oil. I’ll have an energy policy.

Oopsie! Too bad you let Cheney get the heads of the oil companies to write that policy!

You might expect that conservatives would argue that, after all, being in office for any amount of time does not equal culpability. But then, who expects conservatives to do anything but blame Democrats?

Fox News Headline: “Pain at the Pump: Gas Prices Rise on Democrats’ Watch.” Yes, apparently those damn Democrats have had a 51% majority in Congress for four months and gas prices have shot up during that time! Damn those Democrats! It’s all their fault!

There is a certain level of schizophrenia involved in conservative views about race, especially in light of the candidacy of Barack Obama. While he is delighting massive crowds of liberals and independents–and even some conservatives–the far right wing is going apoplectic over the whole affair. Wingnuts scramble to find racism in liberals’ appreciation of Obama, at the same time that they strain to see disapproval from the mainstream African-American community.

For the Far Right, everything about Obama is about race. The same voices that claim they envision a color-blind society (by essentially ignoring the racism that exists and allowing it to run unchecked) are the same ones who see nothing but race where Obama is involved–but in classic projection, they claim that it’s the liberals who are obsessed with race. Obama isn’t white enough, he’s not black enough, he’s a way for liberals to assuage their racial guilt; apparently, Obama’s popular only because he biracial, but at the same time, liberals don’t like him because he’s biracial. It’s a confusing barrage of half-baked excuses to make Obama be all about race, while in the background, the standard-bearer for the Far Right, Rush Limbaugh, continues the “color blind” drumbeat by playing and re-playing the racist melody, “Barack the Magic Negro.”

The real irony here is that people who like Obama are the actual ones who are color-blind. They’re the ones who have listened to him speak, have appreciated his charisma and the appeal of his personality, the power of his speaking style and strong talent for communication. It’s not because he’s black, any more than it was because Bill Clinton was white. Obama appeals to people because of who he is.

But here’s how bad things have become on the flipside: a major news network has been forced to completely disable comments from site visitors for stories about Barack Obama. The reason: persistent, voluminous racial epithets–so many, that CBS can’t keep up with them and eliminate them on a one-by-one basis.

So, who is posting these comments? His liberal fans? Umm, not too likely. No, it is probably the “color blind” right-wingers, the ones who don’t “see race,” and who accuse the liberals of rampant racism where Obama is involved. The attacks and threats have become so bad that Obama has been given Secret Service protection earlier than any other candidate in history.

Just look at the right wing’s criticisms of Obama. Try to find one that isn’t somehow connected to race, or act in some way to make his race or ethnicity an issue. You’ll have a hard time doing so. This might be because there’s just not that much about Obama that they can attack. But personally, I think it goes deeper than that. It’s more about the far right’s inability to handle the idea of a liberal man of color taking power, so they focus on that–in a similar fashion that they have always responded to Hillary Clinton’s being a woman.

It’s not pretty, but it is what’s there.

Remember how Republicans were all criticizing Democrats for not taking part in a debate hosted by Fox News? Remember how Democrats were supposed to be “afraid of journalists,” and were threatening the freedom of the press itself?

Get a load of this. When MSNBC–a network with a bevy of conservative pundit shows–hosted the Republican debate, and Keith Olbermann, a noted critic of the right wing, quarterbacked the coverage of that debate, it prompted protest from the Republican front-runner as well as other candidates:

The Giuliani campaign privately expressed its concern to NBC News about Olbermann’s role in the days leading up to last Thursday’s debate.

… MSNBC spokesman Jeremy Gaines said a Giuliani campaign representative had called NBC News to complain about Olbermann being part of the debate telecast following his commentary. Olbermann was not told about the protest until after he came off the air Thursday, he said.

Other GOP presidential campaigns have expressed concerns about Olbermann to NBC News, according to a New York political strategist who requested anonymity to protect his clients.

Isn’t that just precious? Here you have the Republicans blasting Democrats for not wanting to have their entire debate, moderators and all, hosted by a rabid right-wing propaganda outfit, but when Republicans have to deal with a debate hosted by a network with someone not even on the debate floor being a left-wing pundit, they all start whining.

Every single ounce of criticism against Dems for not wanting Fox News propagandists in every corner of their own debate just melted into slag. After Republicans protested about a left-winger commenting on their debate, how could they possibly criticize Dems for not wanting something ten times stronger? Maybe that’s why all the complaints made by the Republican campaigns were made privately.

I’d comment on the utter hypocrisy we’re seeing from the right wing here, but since it’s been established that such behavior is the status quo from that crowd, I guess it’d be pretty much redundant to do so.

This is something that I have touched on in the past, but Josh Marshall, as part of his coverage of the US Attorney scandal, has an excellent, must-read post on how rare cases of voter fraud have been exaggerated beyond sanity as a political tool by this Republican administration (you should also read this NY Times article). In essence, “voter fraud” is a non-issue, represented almost entirely by (a) people paid to register voters who fraudulently sign up non-existent people, something which results in zero fraudulent votes, or (b) people who filled out forms in error, most of whom never even attempted to vote.

But Republicans have pretended that it is an epidemic of untold proportions, and have used the now-politicized Justice Department and their US Attorney cronies to “crack down” on it. The real aim: to bring back new versions of Jim Crow laws at the national level, discouraging or preventing minorities and low-income citizens from voting. And as a fringe benefit, they can remove people’s attention from their own widespread election fraud while making Democrats seem guilty.

What happened was that US Attorneys, acting as GOP attack dogs, specifically tried to make cases against Democrats (just as they lopsidedly prosecuted Democratic officials and left Republicans alone), but for all their effort, could only find 86 people to convict over 5 years (of which a third were for local elections, like sheriffs buying votes in small-town campaigns), barely more than one conviction per month nationwide–not enough in total even to swing the razor-sharp Bush-Gore deficit in Florida in 2000, even had all 86 been located there. Compare that to thousands of Democratic voters disenfranchised illegally by bogus “felon” lists, or Republicans signing up Democrats for voter registration and then destroying the forms–acts which, to the best of my knowledge, never ended in indictments or arrests, just like dozens of other well-documented cases of Republican election fraud. Meanwhile, the Republican effort to arrest Democrats for voter fraud wound up with people being deported or imprisoned for what amounted to clerical errors, while acquittals peppered a large number of the indictments.

Maybe they’d find more fraud if they stopped ignoring Republican offenders.

Yet another step towards a Brave New Conservative Country.

Breaking news: on 60 Minutes this week, John McCain will say that it is a “sign of progress” that he only needed three Blackhawk helicopters, two Apache gunships, 100 armed troops and a caravan of armored Humvees so he could go shopping in Baghdad. He calls this “progress” because he claims that they wouldn’t have let him do this at all in times past.

Ironically, there was a time when you could go shopping there, or just strolling, completely unarmed and unprotected. It was when Saddam Hussein ran the place.

Now, that’s irony.

When it gets safe enough to go shopping with only one Apache gunship and a twenty-troop escort, let me know.

So. John McCain (adulterer, divorced & remarried younger heiress) now looks like a fool on Iraq, has flip-flopped on half the issues in an attempt to suck up to the religious right, and is doing dismally at raising funds for his campaign. Oh, and it looks like he approached several Democrats over the years, inquiring about becoming a Democrat.

Rudy Giuliani (adulterer, twice divorced & twice remarried, annulled his marriage to his second cousin, announced second divorce to the press before telling his wife) is getting less and less of a rosy image as people see how tissue-thin his real rep as “America’s 9/11 Mayor” is. His infidelity and dalliances, his associations with Bernard Kerik, his screwups in New York (like putting the emergency response center in the WTC after the WTC bombing), his history of backing the police on outrageously criminal violence cases, and his less-than-hardcore-conservative credentials (he supports public funding for abortions, as one example) are making him less and less appealing to Republicans.

And Newt Gingrich (adulterer, twice divorced & twice remarried, served divorce papers to his former wife when she was in a hospital bed suffering from cancer), aside from having past negatives far in excess of anything Hillary has to fight, is already botching up his chances before he even had had the opportunity to announce his intentions for running. His recent (and very belated) admission that he cheated on his wife and lied about it at the same time that he attacked Clinton for doing the same doesn’t help much, of course. However, more recently, he spoke out against bilingual education, saying that it encouraged “the language of living in a ghetto.” To clean up the mess, Gingrich denied that he meant Spanish (which is the obvious inference which he clearly did mean), and instead said that the word “ghetto” “historically had referred as [sic] a Jewish reference originally.” Well. That’s much better.

So far, Mitt Romney is the best candidate in the quickly-self-destructing GOP field, but his Mormon beliefs will likely keep the Christian right-wing core away from the polls.

But hey, Republicans seem to be forgiving of personal flaws. After all, they elected (kind of) a drug-snorting, drunk-driving, McCain-smearing, draft-dodging, hypocritical, cruel, bloodthirsty, perjuring, silver-spooned, and ultimately corrupt nitwit to the White House, at a time when “character” was supposed to be the most important thing in a president. So maybe there’s hope for the Scarlet Letter candidates after all.

The GOP’s shining hope? Actor Fred Thompson. Swell. Another actor.

After years of election-year crimes under the Jeb Bush administration, the air finally seems to be clearing. The new governor, also a Republican, is talking like a Democrat. He’ll be addressing global climate change, lower property taxes, and better funding of education. But most importantly, he said that he’ll insist on a paper trail for ballots, and will restore voting rights to felons who have served their time, with exceptions for rapists, murderers, and major drug traffickers. Why that pattern? Because most “felons” are minorities who are made felons not by their actions, but by racist disparities in the law. Whites use powder cocaine more (just ask the president), while minorities more often use crack cociane, and:

Current policy generates a 100 to 1 penalty ratio for crack-related offenses. For instance, possession of only 5 grams of crack-cocaine yields a 5 year mandatory minimum sentence, however it takes 500 grams of powder cocaine to prompt the same sentence. Moreover, crack-cocaine is the only drug for which the first offense of simple possession can trigger a federal mandatory minimum sentence. Yet “simple possession of any quantity of any other substance by a first time offender – including powder cocaine – is a misdemeanor offense punishable by a maximum of one year in prison.”

Which means that whites get to keep their right to vote while minorities get deprived of theirs, even if the whites get caught with far more drugs on them. That’s what the reversal of the felon’s voting rights issue really is all about–though you can positively expect that conservative pundits will paint this as a “Democrats love criminals” issue. The irony in that is palpable: the wingnuts want to block cocaine users from voting because of their politics and/or color, but on the pretense of their being “criminals” because they used cocaine–while they are more than happy to elect president someone who used a lot more cocaine.

Florida Republicans are not so enthusiastic about their new governor, however:

The result was an odd tableau in the packed House chamber as Democrats seated in the back recesses rose repeatedly to applaud Crist’s speech as front row Republicans slowly joined them.

“It’s great to have a Democratic governor,” said Rep. Keith Fitzgerald, D-Sarasota. “You could see the standing ovations start in the back row and move forward. You could actually see some of the representatives in the front looking over their shoulders, feeling uncomfortable and then standing up.”

Yes, the return of honest vote-counting and letting minorities vote should be worrisome to Florida Republicans. Who knows, we might even have a major election in Florida where a bogus “felons list” will not be generated so as to disenfranchise tens of thousands of Democratic voters who never committed a crime. Wouldn’t that be something?

Of course, this all depends on Crist keeping to his word, and Florida Republicans not going full-throttle to block it. So, we’ll see.

Breaking news: Newt Gingrich, apparently setting up his 2008 presidential bid, has finally admitted that he was having an extramarital affair with a congressional aide 20 years younger than he was, and that this was going on in 1998, when he was ramming through impeachment hearings on Bill Clinton.

But he says that he should not be considered a hypocrite. Why not? Because Clinton committed the crime of perjury in his extramarital affair.

Conservatives always bring this up to show how their own extramarital affairs are not as bad as Clinton’s, but they always lack the depth of conviction necessary to give them the moral high ground. First off, the tests are very different: Gingrich, for example, was not sued and put under oath and then asked about his sexual dalliances, which, if answered truthfully, could end his career. Had he been in that situation and then answered truthfully in full public view, then he would have the moral high ground. But to press for a president to be impeached for lying about an affair when he was having an affair and lying about it himself is nothing but hypocritical; that Clinton lied under oath about it is not part of the equation because Gingrich never faced the same situation. Moreover, Gingrich had multiple affairs before that aide, one of whom reported that Gingrich preferred getting blow jobs so he could deny “having sex with that woman.”

The second circumstance that sheds a different light on the matter is the nature of the legal case against Clinton. Put simply, the entire Paula Jones lawsuit was a sham, a major abuse of the legal system which was instigated for a single purpose: to politically assassinate the President’s character, to attack him using the courts as a bludgeon.

The Paula Jones case began under the flimsiest of pretenses: some obscure, little-read right-wing rag published the initials “PJ” in speaking about one of Clinton’s affairs, and Jones claimed that since she was then outed, she had no choice but to sue Clinton for sexual harassment. From the beginning, Jones’ legal team consisted of and was financed by conservatives; one of the members of her team was none other than Ann Coulter. Right-wing fingerprints are all over the case from start to end.

While Democrats agreeably appoint Republicans to prosecute Republicans so as to maintain a sense of objectivity, Republicans gleefully appoint Republican attack dogs to prosecute cases against Democrats. Kenneth Starr was the worst sort, using all manner of illicit ways and means to take on the Clinton case, from using legal blackmail to elicit false accusations against Clinton (for which Susan McDougal went to prison because she refused to lie) to leaking embarrassing details all over the media in clear violation of legal ethics.

In the end, the incident where Clinton lied under oath was the ultimate “Gotcha” moment, the essence of entrapment. When the prosecution found proof that Clinton had an affair with Lewinski, they did not release it–instead, that proof quietly in hand, they set Clinton up for perjury. Seriously–if there is any sitting politician who is having an affair which they can still deny, where the admission would cause them great harm, is there any possibility that the politician will admit to it, even under oath? One can be certain that Gingrich would have lied about it. And in the entire legal proceedings after 9/11, Bush and Cheney adamantly refused to be put under oath because they knew they could get charged with perjury for the lies they planned to tell. Clinton’s was simply forced to make the lie while under oath in a sham trial, a distinction that is entirely technical in nature, having nothing whatsoever to do with morality. Clinton was wrong for lying, but the mitigating circumstances were about as strong as one could possibly imagine, which is why so many people never saw it as a big deal.

So for Gingrich to admit to his affair a decade after the fact, for him never to have been under the pressure of being under oath, never having faced the choice of committing perjury or losing his career, to say he wasn’t hypocritical… well, it’s pretty damn shameless.

And let’s not forget that that affair was not the only sin committed by this “family values” champion. He married his high school Math teacher, whom he would later ask for a divorce as she lay in a hospital bed with cancer. He had many extramarital affairs, and divorced his second wife by telephoning her on Mother’s Day. And now he wants Christians to like him because he’s an evangelical and should be forgiven his (multitudinous) sins.

In a way, I hope that Gingrich becomes the front-runner and wins the Republican nomination. Any candidate in the Democratic field would wipe the floor with him. And it’s not such an impossibility, either–Gingrich is a favorite of the evangelic crowd, the Republican base; look what they did to McCain in 2000 in order to get their boy Bush in the lead.

It is also incredibly hypocritical for three Republican favorites–McCain, Giuliani, and Gingrich–to be vying for the family-values Christian vote when all three had extramarital affairs and divorces. But then, as we saw with all of the sins and crimes that George Bush committed before running for president, you can sin all you want so long as you praise Jesus and ask for forgiveness when you’re finally caught.

And that’s not hypocritical, is it?

Wow. Very rarely does the media go for actually defending a Democratic candidate rather than joining en masse to repeat the smear. Usually the media just gloms on to a lie like this and then goes silent when the truth is made clear.

This time it is a rumor that Barack Obama attended an Islamic Madrassa school, like those in Pakistan, which teach hardcore Islamic hatred of Christianity and the West. The rumor was released by a right-wing site (owned by the Washington Times), which in a double-whammy claimed that the rumor came directly from Hillary Clinton, despite naming no names and producing no documents to back that up. Fox News immediately jumped all over the story, gleefully broadcasting what amounted to a huge smear on both front-running Democratic candidates, and the deepest right-wing elements of the media and blogosphere began their swarm.

As for the Hillary part of the smear, Insight.com is standing by its story, saying that they had direct contact with “researchers connected to Senator Clinton” who said that:

“Ms. Clinton regards Mr. Obama as her most formidable opponent and the biggest obstacle to the Democratic Party’s 2008 presidential nomination. They said Ms. Clinton has been angered by Mr. Obama’s efforts to tap her supporters for donations.”

When you consider this, it comes across as the biggest load of crap ever heard. One of the things about Clinton is that she is a savvy political operator, and her campaign doesn’t make completely idiotic newbie mistakes. So for her own researchers to go to a right-wing organization, and to say, “hey, tell everyone that Hillary hates Obama and wants to trash him!” is so stupidly and transparently a lie as to be laughable.

This is where organizations like CNN usually chime in with the popular smear, ignoring little details like the one I just mentioned and foregoing things like investigating the truth first. In a turnabout from their usual routine, however, CNN is now savaging the rumor, calling it, accurately for once, a right-wing smear. Wolf Blitzer is even making a big deal about it, saying that “CNN did what any responsible news organization should do,” which is investigate the claim. Yeah, as if that’s what they have always done. Instead, this time, they actually went to Indonesia, discovered that the school was not a madrassa but instead a normal school where Christianity was taught side-by-side with Islam (but only once a week for both), and that there’s nothing subversive or dangerous about anything there–nor was there ever. But CNN didn’t stop there, they also went to lengths to show where the smear was coming from; Blitzer repeatedly mentioned Fox and “right-wing” news organizations and blogs as being responsible for spreading the story, and pointed out the connection between the conservative Washington Times and the web site that began the rumor.

Well, better late than never.

If Republicans had a field day labeling John Kerry as a “flip-flopper,” then Democrats should have a bonanza with John McCain. After having been smeared by Bush with the assistance of the far right, McCain realized that he’d have to kowtow before the extremists if he wanted to be president, and has been busily prostrating himself before them, abandoning his prior “maverick” status. The Carpetbagger Report lists 15 significant McCain flip-flops over the past few years.

McCain used to support reproductive rights, gay marriage, campaign finance reform, and grassroots lobbying reform; now he’s against all those things. McCain used to be against torture, tax cuts for the rich, and ethanol subsides; now he’s for all of them. McCain used to disapprove of people like Jerry Falwell, Sam and Charles Wyly, Henry Kissenger, and Grover Norquist, but now he’s warming up to them for support. He has also flip-flopped on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday as a holiday, state support for the Confederate flag, and politicians visiting Bob Jones University. And he now claims that he always thought that the Iraq War would probably be “long and hard and tough,” even though he originally said that we would win the conflict easily.

Who knows, there might even be enough video material in there to make a good commercial. But one thing is for certain (and I’ve said this before), McCain is no longer someone who will appeal to Democrats or Independents like he did in 2000. He may now have the support of the far right and the religious extremists, but he has hobbled himself for the rest of us–and 2006 demonstrated that the extremist right is no longer what it used to be.

John McCain ain’t what he used to be. He used to be palatable to most people, an alluring face in the scary crowd of right-wingers. Back when he rode the Straight Talk Express, he was the kind of dream candidate we often imagined–willing to talk for as long as necessary, speaking freely even on controversial issues. Not hiding and creating a plastic facade, like Bush did, not giving the usual practiced political sound-bite double-talk-and-run-off garbage. He was the Republican candidate that most Democrats would have been comfortable with, a true uniter-not-a-divider.

But that John McCain died when Bush smeared him all the way to South Carolina and back, in particular pushing the suggestion that McCain’s adopted daughter (a Bangladeshi girl from Mother Teresa’s orphanage) was his own illegitimate black child. Other rumors spread by Bush and his far-right and fundie allies included that McCain was gay and his wife a drug addict, and that McCain was insane even possibly a traitor.

Since then, John McCain learned a valuable lesson: don’t cross the extremists in the Republican Party. And he has been practicing that wisdom in his ongoing-though-unofficial campaign, no longer allowing for straight talk, and paying obeisance to the religious extremists he once criticized, and has reversed himself on a number of issues he gained political capital for opposing in 2000. The message he is sending is, “I learned my lesson and I’ll be a good boy now.”

Although McCain is hoping to hang on to some of the appeal he gained back in 2000–and indeed, many on the left still feel more comfortable with him because they remember those days–it is about as clear as it can get that McCain has shifted remarkably to the right, chumming up to Bush and the religious right, and backing that up with his voting record, suggesting that he would still stay bought by the right-wing extremists even after he would be elected president. And it certainly doesn’t help with many on the left that McCain is new best buds with Joe Lieberman, with some even saying McCain might even consider Lieberman as a VP candidate.

There is no more Straight Talk Express, no more centrist McCain, just a compromised, politicized shell. Mind you, he would still be ten times better than Bush, and there is still the hope that enough of the old McCain remains to make a difference in office. But the old McCain is gone, and what remains is too Bushified to be all that appealing.

Addenda: then there is also McCain’s latest weasel: McCain was the first to come up with the idea of escalation in Iraq, back in October. At the time, he said that 20,000 troops would be sufficient, though he did say for “long term” deployment. When Bush first came out with the “Surge™” plan, McCain did not object–not for quite some time; even a day ago, he said he was not sure what numbers would do the job.

But now, he is now coming out and distancing himself from the whole idea–saying, in effect, that his idea was for 30,000 troops to be “sustained,” not 20,000 troops for a season or two. This is pretty clearly a weasel, not just because McCain previously said that 20,000 troops would be enough, but because it was clear what Bush has been thinking for a week, maybe two, but McCain only now is saying his plan was different–only after pretty nearly universal opposition to Bush’s plan has made itself evident, with no one believing that it will make a difference, except to possibly escalate the violence. And certainly, McCain has brought forth no evidence as to how an extra ten thousand or so troops for a few more seasons could achieve that would make the difference.

But McCain is still trying to have it both ways: though he has made it clear that “his” surge would need more troops for longer, and therefore if Bush’s surge doesn’t work it’s not a “McCain” surge–he still is supporting Bush’s surge. Probably for the same reason he came out for an escalation in the first place: because he wants to look like Bush wants to look, like he could do the job, but without the responsibility or the liability if the plan doesn’t work.

So it’s hard to see his new stance being anything but a weasel.

Just when you think that Republican lawmakers can’t become any more like whiny, hypocritical, infantile brats than they already are:

The ranking Republicans on two committees complained to the incoming Democratic chairmen Tuesday that the plans for the first 100 hours restrict their ability to participate. Several more Republicans are planning a news conference today to introduce a “minority bill of rights” they say is based directly on a plan that Pelosi proposed in 2004 while Democratic minority leader.

Not only are Republicans, who virtually shut out Democrats from making any laws over the past six years, whining now that they will be shut out for four days, they are demanding that the Democratic leadership pass a “minority bill of rights” which Republicans refused to pass when they were in the majority.

The depths to which they plumb are so breathtaking as to leave me speechless.