A few days ago, while writing about the political action committee Our Country Deserves Better - the money behind the infamous Tea Party Express - I learned a little more about the PAC, the Tea Party Express and the Republicans who don't seem to mind that the bus company they hired to haul teabaggers across the country is bankrupt and has settled lawsuits for millions of dollars after 23 senior citizens were "immolated" while fleeing Hurricane Rita in 2005.

You gotta read this story. It's unbelievable.

My head is spinning. Help make it stop.

Let's have a little fun this morning.

A friend of mine just forwarded to me an email from the Our Country Deserves Better Committee that announces a "big announcement" coming on Monday.

Oooh. Oooh. What could it be?

They gave us a hint, it's below the fold.

This is funny:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s critics are already in full-blown campaign mode 17 months before the 2010 election.

A conservative political action committee known as Our Country Deserves Better PAC launched an attack Monday that quotes Ronald Reagan criticizing the Nevada Democrat back in 1986. The ad, which will run on Nevada radio and TV stations, says Reid is “emblematic of all that’s wrong in Washington.”

I'm no fan of Harry Reid, but seriously, is this the best his opponents can do? A twenty-three year old criticism from a man who's been dead for five years? Republicans really need to stop living in the past (or not).

And on a comical side note, the head of the group running the ad is former California Assemblyman Howard Kaloogian, the moron who in 2006, ran a photo on his campaign website of a busy Baghdad street that proved how "calm" and "stable" Iraq was ... unfortunately for Kaloogian, a Daily Kos user found a picture of the same street, located in Istanbul, Turkey. Kaloogian lost.

    NY-20: Obama/Murphy/Pooties VS Rush/Steele/Tedisco

From the AP:

   "I'm writing to you now because you have the opportunity to make a big impact on my efforts to bring about a lasting economic recovery," Obama said in an e-mail in which he announced his support for Democrat Scott Murphy and tied himself — and the popularity of his economic policies — to the outcome of the March 31 election.

~snip~

    The outcome of the race had already been associated as an early referend(um) on the nascent Obama Administration, but this shows Obama is ready to back up what is being said in the press. Of course, the President wouldn't be doing this if he didn't think Murphy had a shot, and most of the credit for that belongs to Scott Murphy for running an honest and credible campaign against an ethically challenged Albany politician of the worst order.

joshingpolitics.blogspot.com

   
    More below the fold

Oh, some things make my heart sing, and one of them is when being part of this site's institutional memory pays off.

Go read devtob's diary about how wingnuts from San Diego County -- please, leave us Orange Countians out of this one! -- are spending heavily for scurrilous radio ads against Scott Murphy in next week's dead-heat NY-20 special election.

The co-chair of the organization?  Howard Kaloogian.  Yes, our Howard Kaloogian, the one that DKos helped to destroy when he was a candidate in 2006 the 2006 special election to replace Duke Cunningham in CA-50.

Let me tell you a little bit about Howard Kaloogian.

By the time I'm done, maybe you'll want to head to UpstateAlan's diary on NY-20, where you can pick up all the info you need to be the anti-Kaloogian in this race through phonebanking.

The nationally significant 20th Congressional District special election between Democratic candidate Scott Murphy and Republican candidate Assembly Minority Leader Jim Tedisco, has attracted the attention of a wingnut, Democrats-are-traitors outfit from California.

The Our Country Deserves Better PAC has spent some level of six figures on extraordinarily negative TV and radio ads in a little Congressional district 3,000 miles away.

Who these guys are, and what they've been saying, below.

Howard Kaloogian, the far right propagandist who helped to recall Gray Davis in California and who also led the lynch mob against CBS in response to their planned biopic of Reagan, is at it again, lending his strategtic thinking and amassed resources to smear Obama. Their tactic? Yet another attack - using selected, badly decontextualized/chopped up quotes from Obama, who appears to be discussing how religion can be distorted toward right wing and discriminatory ends, so as to suggest that Obama is "mocking the Christian heritage" of the U.S. The smear against Obama here is so disgracefully disengenuous and yet, typical, it seems to me of Republicans. Will McCain renounce this? (I'm not holding my breath for that possibility.)

Howard Kaloogian, who finished a distant third among Republican candidates in the CA-50 primary last week (even though he had the endorsement of James Dobson and Focus on the Family), has announced that he will support Eric Roach if Roach decides to take on Bilbray in the GOP primary on June 6. That is the same day that Bilbray will be facing Democratic nominee Francine Busby in the runoff to fill the remainder of the term of convicted GOP felon Randy "Duke" Cunningham.

(Quote after the flip.)

Polls just closed here in California, so now we sit and wait to see how Busby does.  Low 40s?  47% like SurveyUSA says?  Or that magical 50.0001%?

We shall see.  Check here for an updated tally.

For the record, my guess is an impressive 46% -- still leaving the 6/6/06 (devilish, I know) primary a true toss-up.

Update [2006-4-11 20:19:11 by AnthonySF]: With 0.9% of the precincts in, Busby has 42.23% to Bilbray's 14.15% and Roach's 13.92%. Loogy is not worth an update.

Update 2 [2006-4-11 23:16:16 by AnthonySF]: With 7.4% of the precincts in, Busby has 42.19% to Bilbray's 14.59% and Roach's 14.02%.

Update 3 [2006-4-11 23:35:10 by AnthonySF]: With 22.2% of the precincts in, Busby has 42.88% to Bilbray's 15.18% and Roach's 13.93%.

Update 4 [2006-4-11 23:59:00 by AnthonySF]: The results are coming in at turtle speed so I'm heading off to bed (11pm PST). I'll update in the morning, but from here we're looking at the expected Busby-Bilbray June run-off.

More follows...

First, simultaneous polls (internal and independent) indicated that Francine Busby (D) was the top candidate in the field of 14+, by a 3-1 margin over her closest Republican opponent.  Both pegged her support in the high 30s.  Not enough to win the seat without a June 6 runoff, but definitely respectable.  

Next came the excellent poll results from SUSA, the most accurate pollster of the 2004 elections, which indicated that Busby's support stands at about 45% of likely voters.  Then, in what should not have even been a surprise, we were blessed with Kaloogiangate--the fake Iraq photos that (I hope and pray) may have brought just enough exposure to this race to increase Busby's support to 50%+.  

I'll try to put the DKos community in a good light!  (Of course, speaking only for myself.)

Howie K. is perhaps one of the best "GOP poster boys" one could hope for, the gift that just keeps on giving and giving.

First of all he posts pictures on his website of Turkey and calls them "downtown Baghdad," then he blames the mistake on his webmaster (of course he is just following the leadership of the rest of the GOP which is "the buck never stops here"), and then we find out that liars like Howie just can't seem to ever be truthful.

Seems Howie has pissed of some CA GOPers because, well Howie just couldn't find the truth if it bit him in the ass.

The rest of the story below the fold....

On Kaloogian's campaign website is a photo of him posing with President George Bush, in a rotating "Flash" slideshow.

According to Kaloogian, as a direct result of our investigation into his fake photo "In the past 24 hours my campaign website has been bombarded with our
largest inflow of support in the form of campaign contributions that we have experienced the entire campaign."

Is that so Mr. Kaloogian?  I'm not sure I believe anything you say!  more from his mindboggling letter to "supporters", under the fold:

The pictures of Baghdad Mr. Kaloogian should have posted on his web site are the ones he refused to take:

On July 11

Ten unidentified men suffocated at Al-Nisour Square police station, Baghdad

Ten Sunni Muslim tribesmen died after American-trained Iraqi police commandos kept them in an airtight container for more than six hours in 115-degree heat, outraged Sunni clerics and politicians alleged link

Sgt. Timothy J. Sutton, 22, of Springfield, Missouri dead in Baghdad, after his HMMWV struck a land mine (Sutton was assigned to the Army's 3rd Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, Fort Carson, Colorado) link

But he was there! He has thousands of pictures to choose from! So which one does he choose to replace the hoax picture?

So, um, are we supposed to be impressed that there are no plumes of smoke rising from burnt out buildings? Because this looks like it was taken from the window of the plane as it was about to land. Not exactly the sort of thing that cries "evidence of happy Iraqis!"

-----

Also, Newsweek and the NY Times covered the story. I know the SF Chronicle is working on a piece as well.

Update: The picture was taken from the Rashid Hotel in the Green Zone. All safe and cozy. Too bad Kaloogian couldn't get out to where real people lived to snap his pictures of happy and safe Iraqis.

This picture was apparently taken last year, and one of the buildings in that picture has been bombed to pieces.

Update: An emailer pulled out the image's meta data and we know that it was taken by a Minolta camera, cropped/edited with Photoshop Elements, and, most importantly, that the picture was taken on July 13, 2005.

This is an old picture.

Here's the link to the New York Times' Story, which inaccurately credits Joshua M. Marshall's TalkingPointsMemo blog as breaking this story.  I think we all know that the story started here!

Link to the NYT story:

http://www.nytimes.com/...