Wow, I almost feel sorry for conservatives these days (almost). I mean, you finally get to enforce your minority, extremist agenda on the country -- something you had to lie for years and years to be able to do -- and what happens? Everything starts falling apart around you. Now we could've told you this because we recognized your philosophy for the corrupt, morally and financially bankrupt thing that it is, but you wouldn't have listened. Oh well, I'll help you recognize what's going on. Here are just the stories in the last few days that should make you shudder, if not cry yourself to sleep at night.
Democrats are
taking over the state legislatures:
Democrats now have a ten-seat advantage over Republicans for state legislative seats nationally controlling 3,662 state legislative seats to 3,652 for Republicans.
"A national effort is underway to fight back against Republicans on the state level in all fifty states, and it is working" added Davies. "The DLCC has been working with state legislative Democrats on this effort and it is clear from this month's critical victories that we have been effective in beating the Republicans' efforts."
Democratic control of state legislatures is crucial to the future of the Democratic Party as 20 of the 36 states in which state legislatures control redistricting are within 4 seats of switching party control. State legislators are the national barometers of the future--57 percent of Members of Congress and 44 percent of Governors once served in state houses.
And we won't even have to wait for redistricting (a precedent you set, by the way) to start taking Congress back, Jim Kolbe is retiring.
The president's little Iraq adventure continues to fall apart, as the Iraqi government basically approves of insurgent attacks on American troops:
In Egypt, the final communique's attempt to define terrorism omitted any reference to attacks against U.S. or Iraqi forces. Delegates from across the political and religious spectrum said the omission was intentional. They spoke anonymously, saying they feared retribution.
"Though resistance is a legitimate right for all people, terrorism does not represent resistance. Therefore, we condemn terrorism and acts of violence, killing and kidnapping targeting Iraqi citizens and humanitarian, civil, government institutions, national resources and houses of worships," the document said.
And more and more of those pesky documents keep popping up. Including one that says:
Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.
The administration has refused to provide the Sept. 21 President's Daily Brief, even on a classified basis, and won't say anything more about it other than to acknowledge that it exists.
The information was provided to Bush on September 21, 2001 during the "President's Daily Brief," a 30- to 45-minute early-morning national security briefing. Information for PDBs has routinely been derived from electronic intercepts, human agents, and reports from foreign intelligence services, as well as more mundane sources such as news reports and public statements by foreign leaders.
One of the more intriguing things that Bush was told during the briefing was that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group. Saddam viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime. At one point, analysts believed, Saddam considered infiltrating the ranks of Al Qaeda with Iraqi nationals or even Iraqi intelligence operatives to learn more about its inner workings, according to records and sources.
And speaking of Texans killing innocent people, it turns out that in their bloodlust to execute people, conservatives executed an innocent teenager:
Texas executed its fifth teenage offender at 22 minutes after midnight on Aug. 24, 1993, after his last request for bubble gum had been refused and his final claim of innocence had been forever silenced.
Ruben Cantu, 17 at the time of his crime, had no previous convictions, but a San Antonio prosecutor had branded him a violent thief, gang member and murderer who ruthlessly shot one victim nine times with a rifle before emptying at least nine more rounds into the only eyewitness -- a man who barely survived to testify.
Four days after a Bexar County jury delivered its verdict, Cantu wrote this letter to the residents of San Antonio: "My name is Ruben M. Cantu and I am only 18 years old. I got to the 9th grade and I have been framed in a capital murder case."
A dozen years after his execution, a Houston Chronicle investigation suggests that Cantu, a former special-ed student who grew up in a tough neighborhood on the south side of San Antonio, was likely telling the truth.
And speaking of the moral bankruptcy of the conservative agenda, it turns out that Samuel Alito was part of a group that advocated keeping women and minorities out of Princeton:
As Chanakya Sethi reported in a November 18 article for the paper, in 1985 Princeton graduate and conservative Republican Alito sought to impress his colleagues in the Reagan Administration, where he was applying to become deputy assistant attorney general, by touting his membership in an organization called Concerned Alumni of Princeton.
Launched in 1972, the year Alito graduated, CAP had an innocuous-sounding name that disguised a less benign agenda, which included preventing women and minorities from entering an institution that had long been a bastion of white male privilege. In a 1973 article in Prospect, a magazine CAP published, Shelby Cullom Davis, one of its founders, harked back to the days when a gathering of Princeton alumni consisted of "a body of men, relatively homogeneous in interests and backgrounds." Lamented Cullom Davis: "I cannot envisage a similar happening in the future with an undergraduate student population of approximately 40% women and minorities, such as the Administration has proposed." Another article published that same year bemoaned the fact that "the makeup of the Princeton student body has changed drastically for the worse" in recent years--Princeton had begun admitting women in 1969--and wondered aloud what might happen if the university adopted a "sex-blind" policy "removing limits on the number of women." In an unsuccessful effort to forestall this frightening development, the executive committee of CAP published a statement in December 1973 that affirmed unequivocally, "Concerned Alumni of Princeton opposes adoption of a sex-blind admission policy."
By the time Alito was readying his 1985 job application with the Reagan Administration, the admission of women and minorities was well established at Nassau Hall, but this did not stop CAP from lamenting the consequences. "People nowadays just don't seem to know their place," fretted a 1983 Prospect essay titled "In Defense of Elitism." "Everywhere one turns blacks and hispanics are demanding jobs simply because they're black and hispanic, the physically handicapped are trying to gain equal representation in professional sports, and homosexuals are demanding that government vouchsafe them the right to bear children." By this point the editor of Prospect was Dinesh D'Souza, who brought to its pages a new level of coarseness aimed at those who did not know their place. "Here at Princeton homosexuals are on the rampage," complained a 1984 news item in Prospect--this after a gay student group had dared to protest being denied permission to hold a dance at a campus club. Another article poked fun at Sally Frank, a Princeton alumna who was suing the university for denying women access to all-male eating clubs. It noted that a Rhode Island woman who'd won a discrimination suit against a mining company had subsequently died in an on-the-job accident. "Sally Frank, take note," it quipped.
And it turns out as many as four Republican members of Congress may be indicted over the Jack Abramoff scandal:
The U.S. Justice Department's probe of Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff is broader than previously thought, examining his dealings with four lawmakers, former and current congressional aides and two former Bush administration officials, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
Prosecutors in the department's public integrity and fraud divisions are looking into Abramoff's dealings with four Republicans -- former House of Representatives Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas, Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio, Rep. John Doolittle of California and Sen. Conrad Burns of Montana, the paper said, citing several people close to the investigation.
And now evidence arises that the balloon that hurt two people in yesterday's parade could've been prevented if FEMA had been better prepared and if Bush hadn't cut funding for parade balloon safety in last year's budget.
Speaking of FEMA, the man in history most associated with a failure to respond properly to a natural disaster, is now starting a company to consult on how to respond to natural disasters.
And Cindy Sheehan is back.
And what's the only story that balances out this kind of scandal and misery that says something bad about a Democrat:
Gov. Bill Richardson is coming clean on his draft record -- the baseball draft, that is, admitting that his claim to have been a pick of the Kansas City A's in 1966 was untrue.
And now Pat Morita has died and you guys can't even learn that "wax on, wax off" thing to defend yourselves. (Thanks for the memories, Pat. R.I.P.). Although, I guess you still have the whole "man who catch fly with chopsticks can do anything" concept to fall back on.
This stuff, which just keeps coming and coming and coming and coming and coming and coming, almost makes me feel sorry for you guys. If it wasn't for your whole philosophy basically being evil, I just might.