Ford Motor Company CEO Alan Mulally and the other "Big Three" auto company CEO's will be meeting with George W. Bush.

From the agenda Mulally has proferred, it looks to me like another in a long line of "help us compete" rhetoric that emanates from Detroit with every administration.  (Its the same because none of these guys have had an original idea since about the time of Lee Iacocca.)

Mr. Mulally, look no further than the reflection in the mirror to see what's wrong with the American auto industy.

Sunday's New York Times is set to send shockwaves through a down-ticket Lt. Governor's primary race featuring Ralph Reed this Tuesday in Georgia, but it could have even wider implications for the 2000 Republican presidential primary.  That's because GOP presidential contender Rudy Giuliani has come out in support of Ralph Reed -- despite apparent corruption by the "boy next door" "Christians for cash" poseur.

Laying just underneath all this is the stench of Jack Abramoff, Grover Norquist, and the rest of the cash for corruption gang that have dragged the money-hungry elements of the GOP into the open sewer of K Street, the once fabled "Gucci Gulch" that has now become the Boulevard of Broken Dreams -- and maybe the pathway to the federal pen.

But why the hell would Rudy Giuliani throw in with that gang?

Karl Rove and his media minions have enjoyed some success in framing the Iraq War as a choice between "Cut n' Run" or "Stay the course".  (And John Kerry, inept as ever, helped that effort considerably just last week.)

But there is a far, far, better framing of the war issue for the Democrats.  One that, in three words, characterizes the incompetence of the Pentagon's civilian leadership; the vast overreach in Rumsfeld's "military transformation"; and Dick Cheney's totally inept reading of the Iraq situation after the fall of Baghdad.

You can challenge Karl Rove's characterizations and that of the other chicken hawks in the conservative media.  You can call the catastrophic mismanagement of the Iraq War for what it is:

Those of you who have followed my posts know that I feel the Republican party abandoned its ideals and its core values long ago in favor of a corporatist aggrandizement of the Bush Family (and its most dimwitted member) and the neoconservative vision of Pax Americana.

But what is more troubling is how the Democratic leadership fails to seize the obvious moment and win victories from obvious failures that the bottom feeders in my party open up to them.

You guys need to learn to play hard ball and to hire some political operatives who aren't just plain stupid.
I mean, I see this immigration thing playing out just as it was explained in one of Grover Norquists regular meetings last Fall.  And you guys are falling for it.  Falling all over yourselves, in fact.

Why not break out and pursue some of the agenda below the fold?  Why not represent the people again?  Or is that like something out of Jerry Maguire?

See the agenda below the fold.

General Motors continue to perpetuate the myth that benefits cost for employees are the reason for the company's precarious financial position.  Tonight on '60 Minutes", the GM propoganda machine continued the lie, saying that $1,400 of the cost of every new car is caused by "benefits paid to employees".  A gullible public, led by the unbelievably gullible mainstream media, simply accept the lie at face value without looking further.

GM's foreign competitors, we are told, "don't have to pay the cost of health care" for their employees because such plans are "covered by the government".  The GM propoganda machine would have you believe, then, that health care for Japanese auto workers is free.  And that's a bald faced lie.

Read the facts below the fold.

Its Friday, and you all know what that means:  bury the bad news where nobody will see it in the Saturday papers.

So, just wondering now, whether this guy would be guilty of "looting" had he been in New Orleans in August?

And it sure doesn't sound like this guy is suffering from kleptomania.  Oh well, at least he didn't SHOOT anybody.

An article from the Yale Center for Globalization (Studies?) highlights, again, the supreme arrogance of the globalization intelligensia: there is nothing to fear, if you would only save more, pay higher taxes, stop opposing global trade agreements and do what we say.

American health care, probably the best in the world, is "too expensive" in the eyes of the Globalization Mafia.  Instead -- we should reduce our standards to reflect that of the global marketplace, they say.  The American savings and tax rate is too low, we are told, and that,they say, is causing declining American wages and our standard of living.We should raise taxes and increase our savings -- even though we are earning less than we used to.

Nonsense.  The cause of America's decline is globalization, if only the pointy-headed academics and their fully-bought minions in Congress would wake up.

What would it take for rabid, anti-immigrant State Senator Bill Morrow, former Senate candidate Howard ("Secure Our Borders") Kaloogian and ex-San Diego congressman Brian ("Federation for American Immigration Reform, FAIR")Bilbray to come out of the closet in support of a Guest Worker Progam?

The "Three Musketeers" of Anti-Hispanic, anti-immigrant rhetoric all changed their tune -- and tone -- at a Farm Bureau forum.

All of a sudden, confronted by the people who actually NEED Hispanics to work the farms and harvest the crops, Kaloogian, Morrow, and Bilbray were ALL singing the praises of guest worker!

Check out this article from the San Diego Union Tribune:

http://www.signonsandiego.com/...

NOW, compare what Kaloogian wrote in his SENATE campaign in 2004:

http://www.howardforsenate.com/...

Too bad we can't get the Republican congressional candidates to speak before an audience of Iraq War widows; maybe then they'd come out against the neo-con war in Iraq.

A few Kossacks seem to have the view that I'm a "Neocon Deep Throat".  I can assure you I'm not a neoconservative; those guys are ruining my party.

But I must tell you that the big money sleaze -- The Abramoff Effect, if you will -- didn't begin when that gang began their takeover of the GOP.  Far from it.

I look around at 12 miners dead in West Virginia -- hard working, professionals who live lives that average college educated White Collar Americans can only imagine -- and I look at Elaine Chou and my stomach turns.  Then, I look at her husband and upset is replaced by outright anger.

So, don't stop at the House, Kossacks.  Don't stop with the Duke Cunninghams and the Tom DeLays -- the big fish are in the Senate.

Right or wrong (and I was among those who drank the WMD Kool-Aide and supported the war), America's position in Iraq is intractable.  We can't go; we can't stay.  We can't even "soldier on" -- because doing so draws us more and more into quagmire.  It's a trap.

Democrats and Republican opponents of Bush (of which I am one) might enjoy watching him twist in the noose that he has woven.  But no American who lived through the evacuation of Saigon wishes again to bear the shame and see the agony in the faces of those we leave behind.

There's a better way out.  Here's the path.

(More below the fold.)

So, we've protected all those "farm families" who were supposedly going to "lose their family farm" if we didn't repeal the Estate..er.."Death" Tax on  America's UberWealthy.  For the most part, the super rich will be free from paying for the costs of the War on Terror.  We'll only tax the daylights out of wages, not wealth.

But what the Bushies and the "(Judith) Miller Lite" media didn't tell America was that while the neocons were lying us into a war and protecting the pocketbooks of The Elite Base from the IRS, they were also putting in place a new kind of "stealh tax" on the working and middle class.  You won't see it coming.  And you won't know what hit you.  But you're gonna get body slammed as soon as Grandma dies.

As everyone falls all over themselves speculating as to who will be indicted, we all seem to overlook three simple inquiries that every criminal investigator always ask when they look at a conspiracy:

Who had the means?

Who had the motive?

And who stood to benefit?

Add those all together and it spells AIPAC.  And the Mossad.  And Patrick Fitzgerald may be on to the biggest espionage operation in American history.

More below the fold...

With George W. Bush planning to add $200 million to the federal debt for hurrican relief, and waging war in Iraq, the time has finally come for Democrats to behave like the GOP once did: as fiscal conservatives.

"Guns n' Butter" was Johnson Administration policy and it drove the inflation of the 70's. Bush is doing the same and proving, once again, that he was never really a Republican or a conservative but a radical corporatist. Now, Democrats have a real chance to be be fiscal patriots --- and to make the Wall Street Wing of the GOP congress run for cover by proposing a Windfall Profits Tax on Big Oil to rebuild the Gulf states after hurricane Katrina.

So, George Bush took the advice of most Republican public relations pros and changed the subject away from Karl Rove's possible felony; that should have been expected.

But there is another subject that will affect your daily life far, far, more than whether a CIA case officer was "outed" and far, far, more than your "right to choose".

Sure, you'll hear the opposite from the NARAL and planned parenthood fund raising gang.  And the DNC will tell you that Valerie Plame's identity was the greatest state secret since the Manhattan Project.  But what neither party is telling you is that you're about to get screwed with your pants on.  And both parties have a hand in it.  If they're lucky, you won't pay any attention.

(More below the fold).

Well, I guess now we'll have to invade Paris.  Then New Zealand prime minister David Lange described the attack as a "a sordid act of international state-backed terrorism".

But this time, the attacks weren't from the Middle East capital.  They were "state sponsored terrorism" directed by Paris.  And they were intended to pursue nuclear weapons.

When does our invasion begin?

More below the fold...

In what could easily become a documented case of a major oil company conspiring to suppress renewable energy -- and a public relations disaster for big oil -- Shell Oil Company pressured the organizers of "Canada Day" to close an exhibit on renewable energy resources.

I used to hear stories about big oil buying off inventors who developed 400HP gasoline engines that got 300 miles per gallon; I always thought they were cranks.  But after reading this, I'm not so sure anymore.

The really weird part is that nobody in the media has asked Shell Oil why they wanted the alternative energy group suppressed.  After all, haven't we all seen those BP ads that end with the tag line, "It's a start"?

Here's the link to the story:
http://ottawa.cbc.ca/regional/servlet/View?filename=ot-ncccorncob20050705

In an effort to protect the export market for beef, Condi Rice's State Department smeared a USDA meat inspector who had alleged that cow brains and spinal cords, the principle carriers for mad cow disease, were entering the food supply.

In a posting on the American Embassy in Japan's website, the State Department alleged that there was a "criminal investigation" of meat inspector Stan Painter when, in fact, no such investigation had been commenced.  The State Department has now removed the offending slander from it's website after it was reported by the UPI.

Link to UPI story below.

With the CAFTA treaty passing the Senate, it's time we all realized what Hary Truman once said: "If you tell a lie often enough and loud enough, people will believe it."  (He was speaking about Joe McCarthy and how his tactics were similar to Adolf Hitler.)

Members of Congress sure do.  They've been brainwashed to believe that low-cost production overseas leads to low-cost goods at home and that trade "benefits consumers".

Well, pick up a pair of sneakers at your local Foot Locker store and learn who really benefits from "free trade" and low cost production.

(More below the fold.)