It was hot. It was muggy. It was the end of a very long day. So what better way to cool down than to dive into the politics of personal destruction? Both freshman King County Councilman Raymond Shaw Reagan Dunn (who Seattle P-I columnist Joel Connelly referred to as "the Dunn Dauphin") and freshman Rep. Dave Reichert provided amusing fodder for our sodden antics.
Joining me and Joel in reasoned, objective political discourse were Mollie, Will, Carl and Daniel. Topics of discussion included Shaw’s Dunn’s self-published King County Guide to Do-It-Yourself Identity Theft, the empty head underneath Reichert’s impressive hair and how that impacts the race for the 8th CD, the impressive cowboy hat atop the equally impressive head of Peter Goldmark and how that could help Democrats win in Eastern Washington… and the need for a Democratic blogger out in Eastern WA to help make that happen.
The show is 55:49, and is available here as a 36.3 MB MP3. Please visit PodcastingLiberally.com for complete archives and RSS feeds.
[Recorded live at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. Special thanks to Confab creators Gavin and Richard for producing the show.]
So Stefan was making money on his voter information page? Disseminating personal information on voters?
The wingnuts are really concerned about ethics and privacy, NOT!
2006 June Arbitron ratings just came out. All the Faux News right wing pundits saw MAJOR hits to their audience. Bill O Really lost more than a tenth of his audience in just one month. The local AA AM1280 saw a big jump in its ratings.
Not only are Bush and the republicans the least popular politicians in America, their underlings, the hate radio chickenhawks are loooooosing steam too.
I just got an e-mail from Barbara Boxer’s Pac for Change looking for donations to Maria Cantwell’s campaign.
I wish Maria would take a look at how popular Boxer has become in California. It wasn’t always so, and she didn’t get there by shining her base on.
But, I’ll throw a few bucks her way.
IS BUSH BANGING CONDI?
Hey, I’m not accusing, only asking. Just curious, you know. Don’t worry, righties, I didn’t get this from the so-called “liberal media.” It comes from a perfectly respectable corporate-whore atlas-shrugged we’re-in-it-for-money “newspaper,” the Globe … you know, the supermarket tabloid. So it must be true. If you’re interested in looking into this further, copies are available at your nearest checkstand.
If I were a human, and married to Laura-killed-a-guy, I might be tempted too.
– The American Journal of Public Health reports more than 1,700 African Americans die each week because they don’t have the same access to health care as other Americans.
– The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports 110 workers die each week in workplace fatalities – many of which could be prevented by better enforcement of basic workplace laws by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (which is being gutted by budget cuts).
– The Pentagon reports roughly 15 American soldiers die each week in Iraq.
– The Institute of Medicine reports 346 Americans die each week because they lack health insurance.
– The Environmental Working Group reports that 192 Americans die each week because of exposure to asbestos.
And what’s top priority today of the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate?
Flag burning.
Now that we have today’s celebrity news out of the way, we can turn to serious matters — the big news from D.C. this morning is the Supreme Court’s decision in the Texas redistricting case.
It sucks.
The bad news is the Republicans who gerrymandered their way to a faux congressional majority in our faux president’s home state will get away with it.
There is a little good news, however: By a 5-4 vote, the court said the GOP’s gerrymandering disenfranchised Hispanic voters, and ordered the Texas legislature to “adjust” district boundaries. This will not, however, threaten any GOP seats.
The racists on the court who didn’t even see a problem with the GOP’s blatantly racist gerrymandering in Texas ought to be impeached — all four of ’em. Shame on them.
6
What do you expect from the Pro-Death Party?
6 (continued)
Given the Bush Inflation and the GOP’s refusal to raise the Minimum Wage, in another year or two, you can add starvation to the list of leading causes of deaths in the U.S.
Yeah, here are some other hot issues on the Republican agenda:
Legislation designed to guarantee members of condominium associations or similar groups the right to display the American flag.
Stripping the Supreme Court and other federal courts of jurisdiction over cases challenging the constitutionality of the Pledge of Allegiance.
Blocking the payment of attorney fees in challenges to the display of the Ten Commandments in public areas and other, similar church-state lawsuits.
Requiring that some women seeking to end their pregnancies be informed the procedure “will cause the unborn child pain” and they have the option of receiving drugs to reduce or eliminate it.
House Republicans also said they would hold a vote on legislation to apply gambling laws to the Internet. Wasn’t somebody here complaining about the Washington Internet gambling law?
Frist-y-pants says it’s CNNs fault that Republican poll numbers are low:
CNN host Miles O’Brien asked Frist why recent polls show that show 54% of Americans will vote for Democrats in the upcoming elections while only 38% planned to vote for Republicans. Frist explained that the people’s concerns were being addressed by the Republican Senate but told O’Brein those were the sort of issues “you may not cover and others may not cover.”
It has nothing to do with accusing the Democrats of “cut and run” two days before General Casey announces basically the same plan from withdrawal from Iraq as that of the Democratic leadership. And now they have turned to the tripe listed above.
plan for withdrawal…
Pentagon Screws Combat Widows Out of Benefits
The rightwing incompetents who fucked up Katrina relief are doing no better in taking care of the widows and orphans created by their fucked up military adventure in Iraq — why should we be surprised?
“Military Fails Some Widows Over Benefits
“By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
“Published: June 27, 2006
“As Holly Wren coped with her 6-month-old son and the sorrow of losing her husband in Iraq last November, she assumed that the military’s sense of structure and order would apply in death as it had in life. Instead she encountered numerous hurdles in trying to collect survivor benefits.
“She received only half the amount owed her for housing because her husband … was listed as single, childless and living in Florida — wrong on every count. Lt. Col. Thomas Wren was married, with five children, and living in Northern Virginia.
“She waited months for her husband’s retirement money …. Mrs. Wren went to court to become her son’s legal guardian because no one had told her husband that a minor cannot be a beneficiary. …
“For military widows, many of them young, stay-at-home mothers, the shock of losing a husband is often followed by the confounding task of untangling a collection of benefits from assorted bureaucracies … legislators and advocates working with widows say the problems are often systemic …. The consequences are hard felt: they run up credit card bills, move in with relatives to save money, pull their children from private schools, spend money on lawyers or dedicate countless frustrating hours to unraveling the mix-ups.
“‘We have had more of these cases than I wish to know,’ said Ann G. Knowles, president of the National Association of County Veterans Service Officers, which helps veterans and widows with their claims.
“Just days after her husband was killed in Iraq by a roadside bomb, Laura Youngblood, who was pregnant with their second child, got another piece of sobering news from the Navy: Her mother-in-law, who had been estranged from the family for several years, would be receiving half of her husband’s $400,000 life insurance payment. Nearly a year later, Mrs. Youngblood, 27, is still trying to persuade the Navy that the military’s accounting department lost her husband’s 2004 insurance form naming her and her son as co-beneficiaries, along with the rest of his pre-deployment paperwork. The only forms the Navy can find are from 2003, listing an old address for her husband, Travis, an incorrect rank and no dependents.
… ”
For complete story and copyright info, see: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06.....ref=slogin
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Oh wait! That story was in the New York Times, so it must be all a lie, right?!!
14
But the “Globe” (see #4 above) surely must be reliable journalism …
ROGER RABBIT NEWS QUIZ
If only one of the following stories is true, and I tell you that one was reported by the “liberal media” and the other was reported by the corporate we’re-in-it-for-money media, which of these stories is true?
[ ] 1. The Pentagon and V.A. are screwing over the widows and orphans of soldiers killed in Iraq.
[ ] 2. Bush is banging Condi.
Wow…a blissful absence of wingnuts spouting their BS today! I wonder if the Wingnuts have finally given up, whether they are boycotting HA, or whether they are in “retraining” and continuing “education” courses for the day.
Either that or a container-load of cocaine just made it into town…
No, dumb jerk, we are busy attending to things that matter. MoonBatAss doesn’t qualify.
Observer @ 18
Awwww…someone is pissed off because he didn’t get invited to the wingnut pow wow?