Imagine, if you will, the faces on the national press corps if this actually happened! (Posted at Suburban Guerrilla)

http://susiemadrak.com/...

Larisa Alexandrovna of Raw Story has a really depressing piece on Alternet today. Basically, she's saying what the rest of us are thinking: What won't they do to stay in power?

I know all the arguments. God knows, I've been immersed in this stuff for years now. But it's the wrong fucking question.

We should be asking, "What are we willing to do to stop them - and how?"

We already have the power to stop them.

Posted at Suburban Guerrilla, this from Reid's office:

"We entered into a unanimous consent agreement -- the choice was have a cloture vote and lose (we simply did not have the votes) with no amendments allowed or Actually get votes on four dem amendments. Because it was a UC agreement any member could have objected."

Today's Suburban Guerrilla links to a series of stories indicating there may actually be as many as 4,000 soldiers dead in Iraq - and closer to 30,000 wounded.

• Some estimates place 40% of American troops as non-citizens who joined for the promise of becoming citizens.

• Were journalists targeted because they were documenting the burial of "green card" troops in Iraq?

May 17 - The White House's top lawyer warned more than two years ago that U.S. officials could be prosecuted for "war crimes" as a result of new and unorthodox measures used by the Bush administration in the war on terrorism, according to an internal White House memo and interviews with participants in the debate over the issue.

The concern about possible future prosecution for war crimes--and that it might even apply to  Bush adminstration officials themselves-- is contained in a crucial portion of an internal January  25, 2002, memo  by White House counsel Alberto Gonzales obtained by NEWSWEEK. It urges President George Bush declare the  war in Afghanistan, including the detention of Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters, exempt from the provisions of the Geneva Convention.

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One key advantage of declaring that Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters did not have Geneva Convention protections is that it "substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act," Gonzales wrote.

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON Nov 3 2004 -- Did the voting machines trump exit polls? There's a way to find out.

Black Box Voting (.ORG) is conducting the largest Freedom of Information action in history. At 8:30 p.m. Election Night, Black Box Voting blanketed the U.S. with the first in a series of public records requests, to obtain internal computer logs and other documents from 3,000 individual counties and townships. Networks called the election before anyone bothered to perform even the most rudimentary audit.

America: We have permission to say No to this. It is our right.

We call on every candidate not to concede. Don't play along. It is your right.

Two years before the September 11 attacks, presidential candidate George W. Bush was already talking privately about the political benefits of attacking Iraq, according to his former ghost writer, who held many conversations with then-Texas Governor Bush in preparation for a planned autobiography.

"He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said to me: `One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, `My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He said, `If I have a chance to invade....if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency."

http://www.legitgov.org/essay_eastman_bush_fear_of_flying_in_guard_092304.html

According to Linke, a Jacksonville resident and artist, Bush's flying career was permanently disabled by a crippling fear of flying.

Linke's husband was admitted to the Texas Guard in the summer of 1972 to replace Bush. President [sic] Bush has said that he stopped flying fighter jets because the Alabama Guard unit didn't have jets, and he wanted to transfer to Alabama in order to work on a political campaign. But Linke says she heard a different story from her husband and Bush's squad commander, the late Lt. Col. Jerry Killian. Shortly after her husband joined the Texas unit, Linke says, the couple discussed Bush's service with Killian at a social event.

Contrary to some news reports that suggest Killian admired Bush, Linke says the officer didn't have much use for the young Lieutenant. He mentioned that Bush appeared to have a drinking problem, she recalls, but he was most offended by another incapacity: his fear of flying. According to Linke, Killian said Bush was grounded in his fourth year of flying after he became incapable of flying or properly landing a plane.

"He was mucking up bad, Killian told us," Linke says. "He just became afraid to fly."

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But records suggest the extra training sessions didn't help. Logs show that in March and April 1972, Bush twice needed multiple tries to land the F102 fighter. Days later, on April 16, Bush piloted a plane for the Texas Air National Guard for the last time.

"He just couldn't cut it," says Linke. "I was let to believe he was kind of a coward." (Folio Weekly was able to reach two former Bush squadmates in Texas, but both declined to be interviewed.)

Jimmy Breslin interviews Zogby and points out the obvious.

  Beautiful. There are 169 million phones that they didn't even try. This makes the poll nothing more than a fake and a fraud, a shill and a sham. The big pollster doesn't know what he has. The television and newspaper brilliants put it out like it is a baseball score. Except not one person involved can say that they truly know what they are talking about.

"I don't use telephones anymore because there is no easy way to use them," John Zogby was saying yesterday. It was the 20th anniversary of the start of his polling company. He began with what he calls "blue highway polls," sheriffs' races in Onandaga and Jefferson counties in upstate New York.

"The people who are using telephone surveys are in denial," Zogby was saying. "It is similar to the '30s, when they first started polling by telephones and there were people who laughed at that and said you couldn't trust them because not everybody had a home phone. Now they try not to mention cell phones. They don't look or listen. They go ahead with a method that is old and wrong."

by Greg Palast

In 1968, former Congressman George Herbert Walker Bush of Texas, fresh from voting to send other men's sons to Vietnam, enlisted his own son in a very special affirmative action program, the 'champagne' unit of the Texas Air National Guard.  There, Top Gun fighter pilot George Dubya was assigned the dangerous job of protecting Houston from Vietcong air attack.

This week, former Lt. Governor Ben Barnes of Texas 'fessed up to pulling the strings to keep Little George out of the jungle. "I got a young man named George W. Bush into the Texas Air Guard - and I'm ashamed."

THE PAY-OFF

 That's far from the end of the story. In 1994, George W. Bush was elected governor of Texas by a whisker. By that time, Barnes had left office to become a big time corporate lobbyist. To an influence peddler like Barnes, having damning information on a sitting governor is worth its weight in gold - or, more precisely, there's a value in keeping the info secret. 

One of the reporters from a local newspaper contacted Philadelphia bloggers looking for a liberal family to interview during the Democratic convention.