The Dem Diatribe Project

OK, OK. This story is a couple of weeks old. Seems it would have made a little more news. I guess that we have all just accepted the fact that the Bush Administration is so unscrupulous in so many ways that this kind of news does not even raise an eyebrow anymore. According former Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge, during the 2004 Presidential race, the Bush administration periodically put the USA on high alert for terrorist attacks even though there was only flimsy evidence to justify raising the threat level. FEAR: The great motivator. See also . Fabricating intelligence for political gain is a criminal act --specifically in the case of providing a pretext for war or for influencing the outcome of an election.

The police help protect us from criminals and terrorists, but do you want FBI agents and local police spying on environmental, anti-war, political, and faith-based groups? Do you feel safer knowing they might be spying on you? Documents obtained by the ACLU through the Freedom of Information Act prove that the FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Forces are collecting files on peace groups, and intimidating anti-war activists through aggressive questioning. The public deserves to know who is being investigated, who's doing the investigating, and why. Learn more about the Americans already under investigation and find out how you can help the ACLU fight for the privacy of political and religious groups. http://www.aclu.org/spyfiles Are you in an FBI file? Take this short quiz to find out. http://www.aclu.org/Quizzes/QuizIntro.cfm?quizID=12 Collecting files on anti-war and environmental groups has nothing to do with fighting terrorism and will not make us safer. If...

Bush Lied. People Died. A LOT OF PEOPLE DIED. People are STILL dying for Bush's lies. Is there anyone out there who still believes that the U.S. went to war for anything other than oil, U.S. hegemony in the Middle East, and W's obsession with settling a score with Saddam Hussein? The Republicans tried to impeach Clinton over a stained dress. Why is being responsible for almost 2000 Americans' deaths not an impeachable offense? From the Washington Post: By Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, May 22, 2005; Page A26 On Jan. 24, 2003, four days before President Bush delivered his State of the Union address presenting the case for war against Iraq, the National Security Council staff put out a call for new intelligence to bolster claims that Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear, chemical and biological weapons or programs. The person receiving the request, Robert Walpole, then the national intelligence officer for strategic and nuclear programs, wou...

Fafblog! is right on the mark (as usual)! I could never express the hypocrisy of the Bush Administration and those barking heads on the right any more succinctly than Fafblog!: Stop Newsweek... Before It Kills Again! Newsweek must be destroyed - for the sake of national security! Oh, dear readers, you may have believed it to be just an innocent newsweekly with an unnatural preoccupation for health features ("Your Liver: The New Urban Nightmare?"), but through such reliable sources such as the White House and some schmuck with a keyboard you will know the truth: that Newsweek has killed over a dozen Afghans with a toilet and will do it again unless it is stopped. But that's not all. The Great Toilet Stab-in-the-Back of '05 was merely the tip of the iceberg of Newsweek's many crimes against America. The Medium Lobster has learned that while it was spreading lies about Korans at Guantanamo Bay, Newsweek managed to torture hundreds of prisoners at Guantanamo, Abu Ghra...

WASHINGTON - The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee (Pat Roberts, R-Kan.) is working on a bill that would renew the Patriot Act and expand government powers in the name of fighting terrorism, letting the FBI subpoena records without permission from a judge or grand jury. The measure would give the FBI new power to issue administrative subpoenas, which are not reviewed by a judge or grand jury, for quickly obtaining records, electronic data or other evidence in terrorism investigations. More ... THE WAR ON TERROR IS A WAR ON YOUR CIVIL RIGHTS.

The Washington Post reports: Newsweek magazine's now-retracted story that a military guard at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, flushed a copy of the Koran down a toilet has sparked angry denunciations by the White House and the Pentagon, which have linked the article to Muslim riots and deaths abroad. But American and international media have widely reported similar allegations from detainees and others of desecration of the Muslim holy book for more than two years. James Yee, a former Muslim chaplain at the prison who was investigated and cleared of charges of mishandling classified material, has asserted that guards' mishandling and mistreatment of detainees' Korans led the prisoners to launch a hunger strike in March 2002. Detainee lawyers, attributing their information to an interrogator, have said the strike ended only when military leaders issued an apology to the detainees over the camp loudspeaker. But they said mishandling of the Koran persisted. ...

Oh, Hell yes! The hypocrisy just continues to ooze. From ThinkProgress.org: This morning on the floor of the Senate, Sen. Chuck Schumer asked Majority Leader Bill Frist a simple question: SEN. SCHUMER: Isn’t it correct that on March 8, 2000, my colleague [Sen. Frist] voted to uphold the filibuster of Judge Richard Paez? Here was Frist’s response: The president, the um, in response, uh, the Paez nomination - we’ll come back and discuss this further. … Actually I’d like to, and it really brings to what I believe - a point - and it really brings to, oddly, a point, what is the issue. The issue is we have leadership-led partisan filibusters that have, um, obstructed, not one nominee, but two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, in a routine way. So, Frist is arguing that one filibuster is OK. His problem is that several Bush nominees have been filibustered. This position completely undercuts Frist’s argument that judicial filibusters are unconstitutional. (Which is, in turn, t...