BUSH IS TOAST, UNLESS...

The only thing that can stop W going down now is another Republican theft of the election.

As we have noted in recent posts, the conservative press has been pushing polls that overestimate W's support ever since this election cycle began. That is not an accident: the conservative press desperately wants W and his cronies to keep their stranglehold on power, so that unrestrained corporate pillaging and unlimited repression of individual rights can continue. That is how the mega-corporations that own the conservative media make their profits.

Remember, in the run-up to the 2000 election, the conservative media polls had W winning handily. They were all wrong: W lost the popular vote, and would have lost the White House if his brother and his cronies hadn't managed to steal enough Democratic votes in FL to make it look like Gore didn't actually win the state. (Which he did, as was confirmed by the national consortium that studied the 2000.)

As we come down to the wire, the best that these overestimated polls can do for W is put him in a dead heat with John Kerry. That means that W's actual support is probably in the low-40% range. But even if you take the overestimated results as true, W's 47 or 48% is not enough for an incumbent to win.

Here's why:

1. Undecided voters ALWAYS break mostly for the challenger. This has been true over time, even during wartime elections. (Of course, contrary to conservative, self-interested hype, this is NOT a wartime election; but that's another story.) The Republicans imagine that somehow W will escape this curse, but there is no objective reason at all on which to base that dream. Kerry will get at least 55% of the undecided vote, dragging W's 47 or 48% down to 45 or 46%.

2. At least 13 million new voters will go to the polls this coming Tuesday. Some of them were whipped up by the Republicans' fanatical fear-mongering, race-baiting, gay-bashing, and Bible-thumping. But the majority of them signed up because they are enraged at the Republicans' theft of the last election and at the horrendous disasters W has loosed on our once proud nation. This majority will be voting for Kerry, further cutting into W's 45 or 46%.

3. Even the best polling organizations, like Zogby, just cannot reach much of the population that will make the big difference in this election. They do not have enough Spanish-speaking pollsters, they do not have cell-phone numbers, they do not have lists of new voters, and they cannot reach the young voters on college campuses all over the country, who will certainly be turning out in huge numbers for Kerry. (Being the the higher education community, I can attest to the fact that college-age voters are overwhelmingly tilting toward Kerry, and that somewhere in the neighborhood of 93% of them will turn out to vote in this election--a great turn-around from the apathy that reigned on college campuses during the 1990s. This will cut into W's mid-40% even more.

4. Polls of the battleground states have also been juiced-up for W: since the conservative press routinely assumes in every state that more Republicans will vote than Democrats (a fact that MAY have been true at some time in the past, but will certainly NOT be true this year), the state polls by these organizations are just as biased toward W as the national polls are--if not more so, since the samplings are smaller. The story is far different if one looks at polls done by in-state polling organizations. Even without factoring in the massive Democratic turnout that will surge in all states, Kerry will almost certainly take 6 of the 10 battleground states. W loses again.

5. W's gains in support have been almost entirely in RED states--where he already was the favorite. He needed to get support in the BLUE states, and he hasn't done it. (All the traveling to PA, WI, MI, NM this week is just KarlRovian bluster intended to give the impression that W has a chance in those states, in the hope that morons who go into the ballot box wanting to vote for the "winner" will choose W. Also, Republican claims that 18% of the African-American vote will go to W are just wild-eyed lunacy.)

So the picture is clear. There is no way the W can win the election this Tuesday.

At least not fair and square.

Buy, of course, as we have often pointed out here at the Hammer, the Bushites don't give a hoot for fairness and squareness. They want power, and they will get it in any way they can. So we expect that the Bushite junta will brazenly attack this election that they cannot possibly win in a way that will make it possible for them to retain power. Even at this late date, even with the grave risk that their blatant attempt to steal the election will backfire, they will do it because they have nothing to lose.

What will it be? Well, we already know that the RNC has planned the most massive voter-supression drive in Republican history for this Tuesday. The Republican henchmen will be out in force trying to intimidate minorities, the elderly, women, anyone who they think they can scare away from the polls. And they don't actually have to confront millions of people to win with this tactic; all they have to do is gum up the works enough so that millions of people cannot vote. They will stop at nothing to create havoc at the polls.

And if this doesn't work, well, Republicans have made the vast majority of electronic voting machines that will be used on Tuesday, and, as experts have testified, these machines are the most poorly safeguarded devices ever created to tally votes, without any system for recounting. So it is highly likely that unscrupulous Republican voting-machine vendors will change the vote-tallies in W's favor without anyone knowing. The only way the problem could be detected is if the exit polls differ wildly from the machine counts in some sort of consistent way. But the exit polls will be done by a consortium of the major networks and news organizations--yes, that's right, by the conservative media, who have a vested interest in W's reselection.

But even if the consortium is honest enough to report such discrepancies, the Republicans don't have to actually get away with this crime in order for them to succeed in their aims. Wild discrepancies also work to their advantage, because then they can claim voting fraud, and tie up the election outcome in court as they did in 2000, hoping to get the Supreme Court to side with them again.

And if these rotten tactics are not enough, don't forget the KarlRovian strategy to run on the war! Is it an accident that US forces have been gearing up for an assault on Fallujah and Ramadi? A major battle in Iraq on Monday or Tuesday would be an excellent pretext for W and Co. to disrupt elections. Or how about a sudden increase in the terror alert on Monday or Tuesday? We already know that Cheney is presiding over at least three state "terror drills" on election day. What is that about? What insanity (apart from Republican-controlled state governments that will give Cheney whatever he asks for) would lead a state to have such a "drill" on the one day in four years when all state government should be attending to the people's business of voting?

In short, there is no limit to the number of nefarious ways in which the Bushites could try to disrupt, steal, stop, or invalidate Tuesday's elections. Since we have shown time and time again that they are amoral, conscienceless, brazen brutes, we have no doubt that they will try to pull off something outrageous before or on election day. We will be astounded if we are wrong.

We are hoping that the will of the people, which is now clearly to remove the Bushites from power, can be put into operation at the polls this Tuesday. But we are seriously worried that the Bushites will pull off yet another crime against democracy.

The only thing that could stop them is a clear, decided win for Kerry--a win that can't be spun.

And the only way we get that is if every last one of us decent people, who know how evil the Bushite junta is, get out to the polls and record our intention to take W down.

So please, for the sake of our poor nation, our democracy, our children, and their children, get out on Tuesday and vote for Kerry.

Only then might we be able to put this sad era of American history behind us and go forward to overturn the conservatism that is sucking America dry and turning her into a heartless, soulless, greedy, selfish zombie.

P.S.

The following message is bouncing around the internet. It is a good summary of the sort of person who goes in for conservative "values."

Joe gets up at 6 a.m. and fills his coffeepot with water to prepare his morning coffee. The water is clean and good because some tree-hugging liberal fought for minimum water-quality standards.

With his first swallow of coffee, he takes his daily medication. His medications are safe to take because some stupid commie liberal fought to insure their safety and that they work as advertised.

All but $10 of Joe's medications are paid for by his employer's medical plan because some liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance - now Joe gets it too. He prepares his morning breakfast, bacon and eggs. Joe's bacon is
safe to eat because some girly-man liberal fought for laws to regulate the meat packing industry.

In the morning shower, Joe reaches for his shampoo. His bottle is properly labeled with each ingredient and its amount in the total contents because some crybaby liberal fought for his right to know what he was putting on his body and how much it contained.

Joe dresses, walks outside and takes a deep breath. The air he breathes is clean because some environmentalist wacko liberal fought for laws to stop industries from polluting our air.

He walks to the subway station for his government-subsidized ride to work. It saves him considerable money in parking and transportation fees because some fancy-pants liberal fought for affordable public  transportation, which gives everyone the opportunity to be a contributor.

Joe begins his work day. He has a good job with excellent pay, medical benefits, retirement, paid holidays and vacation because some lazy liberal union members fought and died for these working standards. Joe's employer pays these standards because Joe's employer doesn't want his employees to call the union.

If Joe is hurt on the job or becomes unemployed, he'll get a worker compensation or unemployment check because some stupid liberal didn't think he should lose his home because of his temporary misfortune.

Its noontime and Joe needs to make a bank deposit so he can pay some bills. Joe's deposit is federally insured by the FSLIC because some godless liberal wanted to protect Joe's money from unscrupulous bankers who ruined the banking system before the Great Depression.

Joe has to pay his Fannie Mae-underwritten mortgage and his below-market federal student loan because some elitist liberal decided that Joe and the government would be better off if he was educated and earned more money over his lifetime.

After work this evening, Joe plans to visit his father at his farm home in the country. He gets in his car  for the drive. His car is among the safest in the world because some America-hating liberal fought for car safety standards.

He arrives at his boyhood home. His was the third generation to live in the house financed by Farmers' Home Administration because bankers didn't want to make rural loans. The house didn't have electricity until some big-government liberal stuck his nose where it didn't belong and demanded rural electrification.

Joe is happy to see his father, who is now retired and lives on Social Security and a union pension because some wine-drinking, cheese-eating liberal made sure he could take care of himself so Joe wouldn't have to.

Joe gets back in his car for the ride home, and turns on a radio talk show. The radio host keeps saying that liberals are bad and conservatives are good.  He doesn't mention that the beloved Republicans have fought against every protection and benefit Joe enjoys throughout his day.

Joe agrees: "We don't need those big-government liberals ruining our lives! After all, I'm a self-made man who believes everyone should take care of themselves, just like I have."

BUSH: WE ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR HIS HORRORS

As much as the decent people of this nation resent the administration of W and his handlers, we must admit that we are in part responsible for the devastation they have wreaked on the world.

We here at the Hammer have long complained that, terrible as W and his cadre are, the real fault for their holding the reins of power in this nation lies with the American people. As a whole, we have allowed our selfish, self-absorbed, ignorant, knuckle-dragging minority to have much more of a say in the direction of the nation than is prudent.

The consequences are that a moron like W, propped up by Cheney and innumerable other behind-the-scenes puppetmasters, could get into office in the first place, and could be anywhere near holding on to that office after the unremitting series of disasters he has caused. Only a voting population that is about half morons could create this result.

Since the actual population of this country couldn't possibly be more than 25% morons, it's clear that morons have been much overrepresented at the polls. Moron vociferousness has been stoked for almost 30 years by cynical conservative media, part of the tons of money poured into moron-inciting by the mega-corporations and plutocrats, who have learned that keeping the morons screaming about "culture wars" and "class warfare" is extremely useful to them: while the morons fight in the streets, the plutocrats keep cutting the morons pay, benefits, and health care. Great deal for the plutocrats. Bad deal for everyone else.

Anyway, here is a piece by one of the nation's greatest living historians, published recently in the New York Review of Books:

NYRB: Edmund S. Morgan (you have to scroll down the page)

In the wake of the many scandals that have disgraced our government in the last four years, who is accountable? Will the secretary of defense be dismissed because of what happened at Abu Ghraib? Will the attorney general be dismissed for what is happening at Guantánamo Bay? Will the secretary of the interior be dismissed for handing national treasures to corporate looters? Will the secretary of state bear responsibility for refusal to participate in efforts of the rest of the world to keep the planet inhabitable? Will the President of the United States disavow what his handpicked agents have done on his watch?

We all know the answers. But in the eyes of the world the ultimate accountability lies not with the President or his men. In the end it lies with the sovereign people of the United States. The government is our government, resting on our choices and supported in all its activities by our taxes. We may claim with some reason that the last election was stolen, but we have had to accept the result. In the last analysis people get the government they deserve, and ours, more directly than most, is the product of our choice. We have been credited, rightly, for what it has done in the past, for standing up, however belatedly, to the Nazis, for assisting the recovery of Europe under the Marshall Plan, for containing the threat of imperial communism. We cannot now escape credit for what our government has so shamefully done. We began as a people with "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind," and we won admiration for it. We have now lost the good opinion of mankind and with it the self-respect of decent Americans.

It may take many years to recover what we have lost. We cannot restore the lives lost in Iraq, the lives of our soldiers, none of whom deserved to die for us, and the many more lives of the people we have professed to liberate in a war fought under false pretenses. But we can dismiss the people responsible for the other horrors committed in our name. Our self-respect, and the respect of the rest of the world for us as a people, hang on the next election. The damage now being done can be stopped. Some of it can be reversed. But the longer it goes on the less reversible it becomes. Seldom has our future as a people been in greater jeopardy. If we continue the heedless destruction of everything the United States has stood for in the past, we will rightly be held accountable, not only by the rest of the world but by our own grandchildren and their grandchildren for generations to come.

That says it all. We are all to blame for W. Even though he stole the election, even though his arrogance and his ignorance are primarily to blame for the damage, we are all responsible because we let things get so out of hand in this country that a complete cipher like W could come anywhere within striking distance of the White House. Even all of us decent people, who saw the danger in advance and fought like hell to prevent W's ascent, are still to blame. We did not fight hard enough, long enough. We let the conservative juggernaut keep gaining steam all through the eighties and nineties. We should have done more.

One line from Morgan's piece holds out hope. "We have now lost the good opinion of mankind and with it the self-respect of decent Americans." The hope is that decent Americans will become incensed that W has made them lose their self-respect. The hope is that decent Americans will be so angry at W for making them less than they ought to be that they turn out in droves next week to silence the 25% moron contingent with an avalanche of votes against their moron "leader."

Perhaps then America can begin to find its way back from the calamitous misadventure of its nearly fatal dalliance with conservative ideology. Perhaps then decent Americans will begin to stand up to the conservative juggernaut, and reestablish the moderate progressivism that made it great.

Perhaps then, after coming tragically close to self-destruction, we will finally find the means to cure, to prevent, and ultimately to eridicate the deadly virus of conservatism.

BUSH: BUBBLE-BOY GETS OTHERS KILLED

Before we get to today's topic, we recommend that you check out this website

No Fooling

for a hard-hitting, anti-W, 30-second spot. If you like it, recommend it to all your e-contacts.

Now to the issue at hand:

W's messianic lunacy has shocked all decent people since before the 2000 election: the way he treated Texas like his personal theocracy (reminiscent of all the Ayotollahs in history) was more than enough to demonstrate his unsoundness to rational observers.

Now we have another piece of evidence that W is seriously unhinged. And it comes--believe it or not--from God's own mouthpiece, Pat Robertson.

Check out this story from CNN. You won't believe it!

CNN: Bush Was Confident There Would be No Casualties in Iraq

And here is an excerpt:

Pat Robertson, an ardent Bush supporter, said he had that conversation with the president in Nashville, Tennessee, before the March 2003 invasion U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. He described Bush in the meeting as "the most self-assured man I've ever met in my life."

"You remember Mark Twain said, 'He looks like a contented Christian with four aces.' I mean he was just sitting there like, 'I'm on top of the world,' " Robertson said on the CNN show, "Paula Zahn Now."

"And I warned him about this war. I had deep misgivings about this war, deep misgivings. And I was trying to say, 'Mr. President, you had better prepare the American people for casualties.' "

Robertson said the president then told him, "Oh, no, we're not going to have any casualties."...

More than 1,100 U.S. troops have died in Iraq and another 8,000 troops have been wounded in the ongoing campaign, with the casualty toll significantly increasing in the last six months as the insurgency there has deepened....

Even as Robertson criticized Bush for downplaying the potential dangers of the Iraq war, he heaped praise on Bush, saying he believes the president will win the election and that "the blessing of heaven is on Bush."

"Even if he stumbles and messes up -- and he's had his share of stumbles and gaffes -- I just think God's blessing is on him," Robertson said.

Here we have TWO lunatics! W was certain that we'd take Iraq without casualties! No wonder he pushed so hard for war! He thought he could just invade another nation without any consequences. Why did he believe this? Because his handlers told him so? Because he's an idiot who won't study anything or even look at a newspaper? Because God told him so?

And Robertson, another religious zealot of the moron denomination, believes that "God's blessing" is on W, a creature that has so little concern for others that he will send them to their deaths without a second thought. Yeah, God really likes to "bless" such inhuman monsters.

Using God as an excuse for self-aggrandizing imperialism is nothing new in history. But that it could happen in the nation that made democracy into a viable form of government is an historical irony of the first rank. And it could only happen because so many Americans, W among them, are so profoundly ignorant, so self-importantly zealous about religion, and so self-absorbed as to not care at all for anything or anyone that doesn't agree with them. These are the "bubble people" unique to America.

As usual, Harold Meyerson has a very perceptive piece on W's bubbleheadedness in today's Washington Post. Here is the link:

Meyerson: One Guy in a Bubble

And here is the piece:

"I have no outside advice" in the war on terrorism, President Bush told Bob Woodward in December of 2001. In an interview that Woodward revealed to Nicholas Lemann in last week's issue of the New Yorker, Bush insisted that, "Anybody who says they're an outside adviser of this Administration on this particular matter is not telling the truth. First of all, in the initial phase of the war, I never left the compound. Nor did anybody come in the compound. I was, you talk about one guy in a bubble."

Indeed. By every available indication, George W. Bush's is the most inside-the-bubble presidency in modern American history. It's not just that his campaign operatives exclude all but the true believers from his rallies, or that Bush, by the evidence of his debate performances, has grown utterly unaccustomed to criticism.

With each passing day, we learn that once Bush has decided on a course of action, he will not be swayed by mere intelligence estimates, military appraisals or facts on the ground. We already knew that when Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki told Congress during the run-up to the war that occupying Iraq would require hundreds of thousands of troops, he sealed his ticket to an early retirement. We've recently learned that Paul Bremer had told the president we needed more troops to secure postwar Iraq and the safety of our troops already there, and that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez had pleaded for more armored vehicles to better shield our soldiers.

But these and other such assessments and pleas ran counter to the idea of the war that Bush, Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had lodged in their heads. This would be our lightning war, and after Saddam Hussein was deposed, resistance would cease and U.S. forces could pack up and go home. A report in Tuesday's New York Times documents a Defense Department plan to shrink the number of U.S. forces in Iraq by 50,000 within 90 days of the taking of Baghdad. There were estimates aplenty from the State Department, the CIA and the Army suggesting that we'd need more forces for the occupation than for the war, but they were all blithely ignored.

It wasn't as if the administration couldn't calculate the number of troops it would need to secure Iraq. If troops were required at the same ratio that they were deployed in Kosovo, then 480,000 troops would be needed in Iraq, according to James F. Dobbins, who'd served as the Bush administration's special envoy for Afghanistan and who was a former ambassador at large to Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti and Somalia. If we wanted to deploy troops at the same ratio we had in Bosnia, we would have needed 364,000 soldiers patrolling Iraq.

However, Dobbins told the Times, the administration "preferred to find a model for nation building that was not associated with the previous administration."

But the Clinton administration and its allies did not deploy troops in the former Yugoslavia for the sheer fun of it. They calculated the number of forces required to keep the ethnic and political hatreds that suffused the area from erupting into violence, and assigned forces accordingly.

Every remotely sober assessment of Iraq after Saddam Hussein turned up a picture with disquieting resemblances to Yugoslavia -- a mélange of separate peoples united only by force, with scant indigenous traditions of democracy and pluralism. But large-scale deployment of forces was nation-building in the mode of Bill Clinton, and thus to be shunned. It was empiricism in the manner of Clinton -- or perhaps just empiricism itself was indictment enough -- and thus to be shunned.

Generals, though, shun empiricism at their own peril -- and their troops'. The Times reports that Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander of coalition forces, requested right after the fall of Baghdad that the army's First Cavalry Division be sent to Iraq to bolster our forces there, but that his request was denied. "Rumsfeld just ground Franks down," said Thomas White, then-secretary of the Army.

In the debates, Bush insisted that he'd never turned down a request from his military commanders in Iraq. His denial didn't extend to Rumsfeld, and now we know why.

With the presidential race coming down to its final two weeks, the Bush campaign has all but made a virtue of the bubble in which Bush resides and presides. This presidency is a triumph of the will, of resolve. Facts are for flip-floppers; data, for girlie-men. Kerry commands the facts and it breeds vacillation. The force is with Bush, and that is all he, and the nation, need. Bush has fused anti-empiricism and cultural resentment -- and that, should he ride it to victory, will truly be a catastrophic success.

Every passing day provides more and more overwhelming information that just verifies--as if any verification were still needed--the depth of the ignorance and the profundity of evil that infects the Bushite junta.

The decent people of America has one more chance to stop these vicious, inhumane monsters--on November 2. True, the power structure put in place by the Bushites and their conservative corporate ringleaders is ranged against us. They own the media, who put out daily polls weighted heavily toward Republicans in order to convince the populace that W is "ahead" in the horserace. (Remember that Gallup had W up by 13 or so points at this point in the 2000 cycle--and that turned out to be completely inflated!) They make the electronic voting machines whose insides they keep secret, and whose tallies cannot be verified except by using their own "experts." They hold Secretary of State positions in all the battleground states, and they will use every means at hand to depresss turnout among Democrats, minorities, and workers. And they will do anything illegal, if necessary--as Tom Delay has proved again and again--to get their way, believing that they can always beat the rap--as they mostly have.

But as things stand right now, we have one more chance--perhaps the last--to take the power away from the corporazis.

For the sake of the whole world...let's use it!

BUSH: DOUBTLESS, THOUGHTLESS, CLUELESS

W, our so-called President and horror of the age, is surrounded by Neitzschean "supermen" who think that they can remake reality to suit their will, do whatever they want, and get away with it.

The deep evilness of the Bushites has been apparent to all decent people since the 2000 election campaign, in which they drilled to ever new lows in the annals of campaigning. But that's not hard for them, since they are not encumbered by any sense of decency or morality other than the fake kind they put on for the rubes who support them.

But their overconfidence in beginning to get the better of their secrecy. When people get away with evil long enough, they begin to think they can even admit it openly and still get away with it. "After all," they begin to think to themselves, "the rubes have been conned this long! If they start to balk at our evilness, we'll just deny eveything again, blame someone else, and they'll never know the difference!"

Are you a rube? Do you still bend over backwards to give W and his handlers the benefit of the doubt that all rational people long ago clearly saw they did not deserve? Do you still cling to the delusion that W et al have more "integrity" than other people? Do you still fail to see any of their Machivellian, Nietzschean actions as the corrupt, debased, power-mongering antics of completely cretinous pigs?

Maybe this excerpt from Ron Suskind's recent piece will begin to clear up your vision. Here is the link:

Suskind: Without a Doubt

And here is the excerpt:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Yes, W and his handlers have "made history" all right. And when the historians come to write the story of the beginning of the twenty-first century in America, when they chronicle the high misdeeds of the Bush-Cheney administration, they will have to say that it was our nation's darkest age--a time when the United States, the beacon of democracy for over two hundred years, came within a hair's breath of destroying itself in a destructive spiral of fear, plutocratic greed, maniacal religious zeal, and barely suppressed fascism.

W must be stopped.

BUSH: ETHICALLY CHALLENGED, LIKE ALL CONSERVATIVES

W has been caught a second time creating lying, self-serving propaganda with taxpayer money.

During the fake Medicare reform debacle earlier this year, W used a fake "news report" with an actress posing as a reporter to create the impression that the horrendous, corporate-friendly Medicare bill was actually good for average people.

(This, of course, was absolutely untrue; it is an axiom of Republican politics that all legislation is for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful. It is only necessary to keep the people in the dark about what they are doing.)

Here is a link to the story about the new despicable "news report" (it may be a subscription site):

Bush's Fake News

A government video seems to be journalism
By Ben Feller
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration has promoted its education law with a video that comes across as a news story but does not make clear that the reporter involved was paid with taxpayer money.

The government used a similar approach this year in promoting the new Medicare law, drawing a rebuke from the investigative arm of Congress, which found that the videos amounted to propaganda in violation of federal law.

The Education Department has also paid for rankings of newspaper coverage of the No Child Left Behind law, a centerpiece of the president's domestic agenda. Points are awarded for, among other factors, stories that say President Bush and the Republican Party are strong on education.

The news ratings also rank reporters on how they cover the law, based on the point system set up by Ketchum, a public-relations firm hired by the government.

The video and documents emerged through a Freedom of Information Act request by People for the American Way, a civil liberties group that says the department is spending public money on a political agenda. The group sought details on a $700,000 contract that Ketchum received in 2003 from the Education Department.

The company provided, for example, a video news release geared for TV stations and including a news story featuring Education Secretary Rod Paige and promoting tutoring offered under law.

The story ends with a woman's voice saying, "In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting."

It does not identify the government as the source of the report or make clear that the person purporting to be a reporter was hired for the video.

Those are the same features, including the voice of Karen Ryan, prominent in videos that the Health and Human Services Department used to promote the Medicare law and that were judged covert propaganda by the Government Accountability Office in May.

The Education Department's video uses "the same exact mode of operation," said Nancy Keenan, education policy director at People for the American Way.

"It's basically propaganda, not general information about a program," she said. "And it's portraying to the American public, via a video news release, that it's news."

The Education Department says the video was clearly marked as being a product of the agency when it was given to TV stations. Still, since the GAO report came out, the department has stopped using the narration-style video news releases, spokeswoman Susan Aspey said.

Government press offices play a key role in sharing information and pitching story ideas, but sending out videos featuring "pretend" news reports is wrong, said Al Tompkins, who teaches broadcast reporting at the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists.

The GAO declined to comment on the Education Department's video and its similarities to the Medicare video.

What is it that conservatives don't understand about ethics, about honesty, and about cheating. Is it just this simple: that they only care about winning? The history of Republican politics (and conservative activism generally) certainly supports this contention. And recent years have shown more and more shamelessness and audacity among Republicans and conservatives; they have pushed the limits of decency well into the territory of indecency.

Case in point: Tom Delay, aka "The Hammer," who stomps, bullys, intimidates, bribes, and extorts votes for W. Last week, the House ethics committee issues a rebuke to Delay for his grossly unethical behavior.

This is a link to the letter:

Delay Rebuke

And here is an excerpt:

October 6, 2004
 
The Honorable Tom DeLay
Majority Leader
U.S. House of Representatives
Suite H-107, The Capitol
Washington, D.C. 20515

Dear Colleague:

As you are aware, the Committee has made a number of decisions regarding the allegations made in the complaint that was filed against you by Representative Bell on June 15, 2004.  This letter implements determinations made by the Committee that you be admonished for your conduct in two respects:

­ your participation in and facilitation of an energy company golf fundraiser at The Homestead resort for your leadership PACs on June 2-3, 2002.  Those actions were objectionable under House standards of conduct because, at a minimum, they created an appearance that donors were being provided special access to you regarding the then-pending energy legislation.

­ your intervention in a partisan conflict in the Texas House of Representatives using the resources of a Federal agency, the Federal Aviation Administration.  This action raises serious concerns under House standards of conduct that preclude use of governmental resources for a political undertaking....

We note that your response to the Committee’s decision of last week included the statement, “During my entire career I have worked to advance my party’s legislative agenda.”  Your actions that are addressed in this letter, as well as those addressed in the Committee’s decision of last week and in prior Committee actions, are all ones that, in a broad sense, were directed to the advancement of your legislative agenda.  Those actions are also ones that your peers who sit on this Committee determined, after careful consideration, went beyond the bounds of acceptable conduct. 

As you are aware, it does not suffice for any House Member to assert that his or her actions violated no law, or violated no specific prohibition or requirement of the House Rules.  The House Code of Official Conduct broadly requires that every House Member, officer and employee “conduct himself at all times in a manner that shall reflect creditably on the House.”  It is particularly important that members of the House leadership, who are the most publicly visible Members, adhere to this requirement scrupulously.  The fact that a violation results from the overaggressive pursuit of one’s legislative agenda simply does not constitute a mitigating factor.

In addition, a state criminal investigation of the 2002 election activities of the Texans for a Republican Majority PAC, with which you were involved during the period in question, is underway.  While Committee action on Count II of the complaint regarding those activities has been deferred pending further action in the state cases and investigation, the Committee will act on the underlying allegations at an appropriate time. 

In view of the number of instances to date in which the Committee has found it necessary to comment on conduct in which you have engaged, it is clearly necessary for you to temper your future actions to assure that you are in full compliance at all times with the applicable House Rules and standards of conduct.  We remind you that the House Code of Official Conduct provides the Committee with authority “to deal with any given act or accumulation of acts which, in the judgment of the committee, are severe enough to reflect discredit on the Congress.”

But this is typical conservative behavior. Winning is everything; unfairness, illegality, viciousness is all fine if you win in the end. (and get away with it, of course).

Conservatism is a virus that sickens its victims, corrupts their consciences and morals, and wreaks untold havoc on those who have to suffer the outrages of the infected.

The furture looks bleak unless we can achieve two ends.

First, we must remove W and his handlers from the reins of power and stop their immoral conversion of democracy into oligarchy.

Second, we must fight an all-out war against conservatism itself, until it is anathema in decent society, and is embraced only the most shameless, conscienceless, asocial throwbacks in society.

If we fail, we are doomed to live out a descending spiral of social degradation, environmental destruction, and spiritual devastation.

We must win. The very survival of the world depends on it.

BUSH: LEADING CRETINOUS CONSERVATIVES

The debased state of the American ethical conscience has become all too apparent to the rest of the world.

After the ludicrous conservative-driven mania to impeach Bill Clinton over a sexual indiscretion--a worldwide joke highlighting American hypocritical moralism run amok--the same cretinous cabal of conservative hypocrites refuses to even entertain the idea that their Fuehrer W may have committed a moral outrage on a scale that dwarfs Clinton's personal failings.

As even a not-too-bright ten-year-old could see now, W launched an invasion of another country on false pretenses. His elective war (no doubt launched for purely political purposes) has killed thousands of Americans, hundreds of troops from bribed or coerced foreign nations, and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis. But W's cretinous conservative minions and supporters aren't even moved enough to ENTERTAIN a doubt about whether all this wasn't a mistake.

It is right here--in this callous, inhumane, self-justifying blindness--that conservatism has planted the seed of corruption in the American psyche.

This is nothing new; conservatism has threatened the nation from the very beginning. It was Southern conservatism that got slavery written into the Constitution, long after it was being rejected in other parts of the civilized world. It was conservatism that motivated the anti-federalists to opposed the federal constitution; but, thankfully, the progressives (Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Madison, Hamilton, Jay, Washington) won that battle. It was conservatism that brought on the Civil War, that supported Jim Crow, that created the industrial robber barons of the late 19th century, and that brought the nation to its knees in the Great Depression.

But the difference today is that conservatism has hoodwinked a sizeable portion of the average citizens into thinking that it's on their side. In earlier times, conservatives simply used the power of wealth to oppress the average citizen. Now they have added Orwellian mind-control to their toolkit, and have psychologically captured the support of many of their natural enemies, who they work tirelessly to oppress: women, workers, minorities, the middle class.

Daniel Ruth has written a fine op-ed piece describing the conservative cretinism of the moment. Check it out here:

Ruth: Bush is Strong; Don't Confuse Us with Morality

If it weren't for all the body bags, the lost limbs, the dead civilians, the imploded infrastructure, the civil war, the car bombings and the lost prestige and honor around the globe, George Bush's adventure in Iraq might serve as a dark "M.A.S.H'' meets a poor man's Huey Long-lite satire.

Yep, that march to democracy is going just swimmingly. Maybe it will catch on in this country one of these days.

OK, I apologize for sounding like a broken constitution on this point, but let me see if I have this straight one more time.

The entire nation was brought to a literal standstill for almost two years while a special prosecutor and the U.S. Congress investigated and eventually impeached a sitting president essentially for engaging in the same behavior many, many other occupants of the White House have been guilty of.

Finger Bowls

Yet George W. Bush and his fellow West Wing finger bowls misled, mismanaged and obfuscated their way into a war they weren't prepared to win at a cost of untold lives and treasure - and at least half the population (if the polls are to be believed) doesn't care.

Last week, in an exhaustively detailed dissection of the primary predicate for going to war in Iraq, The New York Times revealed that George Bush and his fellow West Wing vichyssoise distorted and ignored contrary evidence that Saddam Hussein barely had the wherewithal to produce a Roman candle, much less nuclear weapons.

And days later, the chief U.S. weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, officially echoed what one report after another has concluded: that Saddam Hussein harbored no weapons of mass destruction. Nada. Zippo. Bupkes.

What would you call this? The Mother of All Flip-Flops?

Or put another way, Neil Diamond on tour was a greater threat to this country than Iraq.

And at least 50 percent of the population doesn't care, not after all the flag-draped coffins, not after the destroyed lives and not after the rise of terrorism around the globe. They still don't care.

They still don't care. Why should they? They're conservatives. Being conservative means never having to say "I'm a disgusting, self-satisfied, cruel, mean, thuggish creep."

For all their chest-beating moralism, conservatives are actually morally deficient. This comes from their underdeveloped faculty for IMAGINATION, which is the cornerstone on which morality rests. The Golden Rule--"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"--requires imagination in order to work. You have to be able to see others as yourself, or at least to put yourself in others' shoes, in order to carry out that directive.

But conservatives seem to be sorely lacking in the imaginative capacity to do this. They don't "get it" until something actually happens to them or someone close to them. Cheney, believe it or not, does not favor a constitutional amendment against gay marriage. Why? Because he has a gay daughter, whose sufferings have made an impact on him. But the sufferings of millions of his fellow countrymen, hundreds of thousands of soldiers, untold thousands of foreigners who face shattered lives because of his benighted policies doesn't touch him at all. He can't imagine what is must be like to be powerless, opressed, shot at, maimed, killed.

Conservatism, this pathological disease that stunts and withers the imagination, is, and always has been, the curse of humanity. It is a mindless, unimaginative attempt to hold on to wealth, to power, to "values" in a universe where change is the only constant. It is utterly unrealistic, and therefore doomed to failure. It is a truly pernicious disease that twists the sufferer, who then creates suffering for everyone else.

And its most pernicious form is religious conservatism, where the diseased person attributes his diseased mindset to God, and then demands that everyone else submit. This is the root of all religious intolerance, and of the innumerable religious wars that have racked humaninty since time immemorial.

The Founders, in the most progressive movement yet to take place in history, tried to sweep religious conservatism out of government. Their partial success has helped America last more than 200 years. But today's conservatism threatens to undo all that, to replace enlightened, rational self-governance with unenlightened, superstitious power-mongering.

Let us all hope that the decent people left in America, those who really do care, come out to trounce W and his diseased movement at the polls next month.

BONUS:

Check out this 30 second, hard-hitting spot for those who really do care:

Can't Be Fooled Again

If you like it, pass on the URL to everyone you know.

BUSH: PATHETIC LOSER

W is sinking fast. Spoiled brat that he is, he can't control his anger and spite. To anyone but a Bushlover, his desperate agressiveness in last night's "debate" was typical Bushite idiocy: I'm losing, so I'd better pretend to be "tough"--that is, mean.

Except in the right-wing mainstream media, the numerous instant internet polls running around the nation show vast margins in favor of Kerry. In most of these polls, except in real, hardcore red states, Kerry is leading by two- or three-to-one!. (Even in some Texas and Florid polls!) You can check out the data here:

Political Strategy Poll Watch

Since it is a given that both Bush internet cruisers and Kerry supporters are spiking all these polls, it is astounding that Kerry is coming out so far ahead in all of them. It indicates that the support for Bush may have really tanked, and that he may be being propped up by the mainstream media.

Kerry is also ahead in the Electoral College Map now. Check it out here:

Electoral College Map

Finally today, Helen Thomas has once again called W's number. Check out her column here:

Terror Fear W's Only Card

And here's an excerpt:

Someday, President George W. Bush may have to explain why he really went to war against Iraq.

But you won't hear it with his re-election at stake and his credibility on the line.

Public opinion polls continue to show a tight presidential race, which suggests to me that voters have devalued the importance of credibility in top government officials.


How else can one make sense of the fact that the president continues to do well in the polls despite the total collapse of his credibility about the reasons for invading Iraq?

This credibility problem was on full display Tuesday night during the spirited debate between Vice President Dick Cheney and Sen. John Edwards, his Democratic rival.

During the 90-minute encounter, Cheney made it eminently clear that the administration has only one card to play in this campaign -- terrorism. By keeping the country scared, the administration hopes to be safely ensconced for another four years.

To his credit, Edwards quickly zeroed in on the administration's dishonest propaganda line that we invaded Iraq because of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

These words that Edwards directed at Cheney should be emblazoned on every wall:

"Mr. Vice President, there is no connection between the attacks of Sept. 11 and Saddam Hussein. The 9/11 commission has said it. Your secretary of state has said it. And you've gone around the country suggesting that there is some connection. There is not."

Amen.

Administration spinners, from Bush on down, have cleverly tried to make that convergence, ever more desperately as the original rationale of Saddam's mythical weapons of mass destruction has gradually disappeared over the horizon.

The final nail in the WMD coffin came Wednesday when yet another White House-ordered weapons search came up empty.

Charles A. Duelfer, appointed in January after David A. Kay found no WMD in Iraq, is the latest weapons hunter to come home skunked. I wonder if Bush will send yet another searcher in hopes of satisfying this administration obsession.

No WMD and no links between Saddam and 9/11 leave Bush and Cheney adrift on an ocean of spin and stubborn insistence that, well, the world is better off with Saddam in jail. It would be funny if it were not so tragic.

Cheney, a hawk nesting nicely in a well-feathered administration, can't let go of his Saddam-9/11 rant even though Bush himself has said there were no links.

To those of us who have watched the Bush administration mush these two themes together, it was refreshing to hear Edwards tell Cheney Tuesday night that he was "not being straight with the American people."

Why can't we just call a liar a liar?

Because conservatives took America through the looking glass 25 years ago, and we haven't been able to excape yet.

Perhaps a Kerry win will begin the long struggle back from this hell of conservative greed, power-madness, and inhumane selfishness.

BUSH: PATHETIC BACKTRACKING

There is not even a deuce left standing in W's house of cards. The only thing that props him up is pathological abuser-worship on the part of his psychologically impaired and deluded followers.

The final report of the team of weapons inspectors in Iraq is finished. It confirms what dozens of earlier investigations and reports have determined: Iraq was not an imminent threat to the United States. There was no reason at all for W's war.

Check out this editorial from the New York Times:

The New York Times : The Verdict Is In

Here is an excerpt:

Sanctions worked. Weapons inspectors worked. That is the bottom line of the long-awaited report on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, written by President Bush's handpicked investigator.

In the 18 months since President Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, justifying the decision by saying that Saddam Hussein was "a gathering threat" to the United States, Americans have come to realize that Iraq had no chemical, nuclear or biological weapons. But the report issued yesterday goes further. It says that Iraq had no factories to produce illicit weapons and that its ability to resume production was growing more feeble every year. While Mr. Hussein retained dreams of someday getting back into the chemical warfare business, his chosen target was Iran, not the United States.

The report shows that the international sanctions that Mr. Bush dismissed and demeaned before the war - and still does - were astonishingly effective. Mr. Hussein hoped to get out from under the sanctions, and the report's author, Charles Duelfer, loyally told Congress yesterday that he thought that could have happened. But his report said the Iraqis lacked even a formal strategy or a plan to reconstitute their weapons programs if it did.

For months, administration officials have tried to deflect charges that they invaded Iraq under false pretenses and have urged critics to wait for Mr. Duelfer's verdict on the weapons search. The authoritative findings of his Iraq Survey Group have now left the administration's rationale for war more tattered than ever. It turns out that Iraq destroyed all stockpiles of illicit weapons more than a decade ago and had no large-scale production facilities left after 1996, seven years before the invasion. This was a matter of choice by Saddam Hussein, who desperately wanted an end to sanctions and feared that any weapons programs, if discovered by inspectors, would only keep them in place.

Not a shred of the original rationale for invading Iraq is left. W and his handlers are reduced to claiming that Saddam intended to get WMDs again. But David Kay, the former chief investigator for WMDs in Iraq, points out the obvious: intention without capability is not an imminent threat.

It couldn't be clearer. The emperor has no clothes; he never has.

And yet, millions of mush-brained minions follow him blindly, thronging around his antics like moths to a flame, gladly allowing him to incinerate them in the heat of his white-hot ignorance. Why?

John Sommers-Flanagan, a clinical psychologist, has provided an explanation to the Detroit Free Times. Here's the link

Sommers-Flanagan: Many blindly follow Bush despite failings

And here is the piece:

I still feel stunned when a woman tells me she's returning to live with a man who recently broke her jaw. With her teeth clenched and mouth wired shut, she says she's going back, "because he loves me and I love him." Pardon me if I'm not bowled over by the magic of love.

I still feel shaken by the boy who tells me, in great detail and with boundless enthusiasm, all about the father who abandoned him when he was 4-years-old. And I am still disturbed by the good soldier who blindly follows his leader's orders and marches into danger -- although his leader has shown, time and again, poor judgment, lack of planning, and disregard for the men who serve him.

As a psychologist, I should know better than to be stunned, shaken or disturbed by these images. After all, I know why humans behave irrationally. I even do it myself.

On Sept. 9, 2001, President George W. Bush's approval rating was 55 percent. Only three days later, after the worst attack on U.S. soil in history, his approval rating was 86 percent.

In psychology, the enhanced allegiance to a person associated with your abuse is referred to as trauma-bonding. It is a powerful phenomenon. It accounts for why a woman might return to the husband who broke her jaw. It explains why otherwise intelligent people begin worshiping those very people whose behaviors have threatened their safety.

When our world is shaken, we seek safety. And who better to protect us than the big, strong, tough-talking leader who has been in charge all along. The competence or morality of our leader becomes less relevant. We are afraid. Change might make things worse. As Vice President Dick Cheney has so eloquently claimed, we'd better not vote for John Kerry or we may be hit again by terrorists, this time even worse. Never mind that Cheney's former company is a big benefactor from the hit that occurred on his watch.

Bush and his people consistently claim to be results-oriented. That the American people and the press accept this statement is irrational. The facts and results suggest that Bush has repeatedly and sometimes perversely failed the American people.

He claimed to be a uniter, not a divider, but Republicans and Democrats are more divided than ever. He asserted ad nauseam that Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction were an imminent danger to America. But time has shown these assertions to be untrue. Never mind the absence of weapons, he now says, because Saddam Hussein had links to Al Qaeda and was an architect of terror. And although Hussein was very bad, with 1,048 Americans dead, 20,000 Iraqis dead, 27,000 Americans wounded, and Iraq a center of insurgency, there's more terror emanating from Iraq now than before our invasion.

Bush said he was not interested in nation-building, but now we're begging the international community to help us build a new Iraq. He said he was a fiscal conservative but has racked up record budget deficits.

Still, despite the facts and, yes, flip-flops, we follow him. We still approve his performance. In this regard, we're being irrational in the massive and self-deceptive way characteristic only of humans.

The abuser never admits mistakes, never truly apologizes and never shows weakness. The abuser, despite his inconsistent and capricious decisions, insists he has not changed his philosophy. He is determined and resolute. The abuser manipulates us with fear.

Unfortunately, the abuser does not have our best interests at heart. He's interested in oil, money and power. He's interested in control and domination. He will act like he's concerned and compassionate, but when he has regained control, he will turn away from the poor, the weak, the hungry, the women and the children.

The choice is clear: Shall we believe in ourselves, risk his disfavor, and assert our independence, or will we continue to irrationally cling to our failed leader? Shall we boldly vote for change Nov. 2 or will we wire our jaws shut for another four years?

Good question.

Wake up, America, before it's too late.

BUSH: UNFEELING, UNCARING, UNTHINKING

The stupid, mindless unconcern of W. for anything but his own welfare is utterly reprehensible in a public servant. Of course, one comes to expect it in lower level politicos: the history of American politics from city council offices all the way up to seats in Congrees is awash with bribery, back-room deals, viciousness, and self-aggrandizement, and crime.

But we hope that our Presidents can be above that sort of thing. That is why the criminality of Richard Nixon shocked the nation; and it is why Nixon's allies worked so hard to keep his activities from the public--because they knew that, although a criminal member of Congress may be able to beat punishment (cf. Tom Delay, currently trying to beat the rap for only a few of his nefarious activities), a President will not be let off the hook if the people come to learn that he's a common punk.

There is something even worse than criminality, however, and that is inhumanity. And the current resident of the White House, in addition to being by far the stupidest person ever to reside there, is the most inhumane creature ever to sit in the President's office.

The masterful writer E. L. Doctorow has recently written a dead-on description of W's subhuman character. We only wonder why there haven't been thousands of similar characterizations published in the past four years. Why is the whole nation so afraid of calling this ignorant, faux cracker an ignorant faux cracker? Why does everyone scrape and bow before such a pathetic excuse for a human being? Why, when his handlers steadfastly refuse to let him be questioned in open forum about anything, do we continue to treat him with the respect due to the office? Someone who desecrates the office by his presence in it clearly does not deserve such respect.

At any rate, Doctorow's piece can be found here:

Doctorow: The Unfeeling President

Here is an excerpt:

I remember the millions of people here and around the world who marched against the war. It was extraordinary, that spontaneous aroused oversoul of alarm and protest that transcended national borders. Why did it happen? After all, this was not the only war anyone had ever seen coming. There are little wars all over he world most of the time.

But the cry of protest was the appalled understanding of millions of people that America was ceding its role as the last best hope of mankind. It was their perception that the classic archetype of democracy was morphing into a rogue nation. The greatest democratic republic in history was turning its back on the future, using its extraordinary power and standing not to advance the ideal of a concordance of civilizations but to endorse the kind of tribal combat that originated with the Neanderthals, a people, now extinct, who could imagine ensuring their survival by no other means than pre-emptive war.

The president we get is the country we get. With each president the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into and get us into, is his characteristic trouble.

Finally, the media amplify his character into our moral weather report. He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail. How can we sustain ourselves as the United States of America given the stupid and ineffective warmaking, the constitutionally insensitive lawgiving, and the monarchal economics of this president? He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves.

I remember the protestors. I was one of them. And Doctorow is precisely right: we were out in the streets because we understood full well that W was absolutely destroying the promise of America, was transforming it from the greatest example of the power of self-government in history into just another power-mad government that seeks to impose its will, no matter how misguided, on others. The protests were a cry of pain, a howl of grief.

But they fell on deaf ears. The Bushites, and the parts of the nation that support them, have no feelings beyond selfishness, greed, and fear. So they could not comprehend our pain; characteristically, they made fun of us, or slapped us around, or condemned us for "disloyalty" to their despotic leader. And the rest of the nation, blissfully uncaring in their mindless depravity and hedonism (endless fascination with spectacular murder trails, "reality" programming, sports, entertainment, and consumption), has become uncaring out of submission to private pleasures.

So America is getting the government it deserves. W is ruining our nation because not enough of us still care about one another and about the form of government laid down by our founders--who shaped it for people who cared about one another.

If you really care about your fellow Americans, if even for just a moment you can contemplate doing one single good thing for the sake of your fellow citizens, please get to the polls on November 2 and vote W out of office.