My family, Sacco & Vanzetti: 80 years ago today

At my grandmothers wake thirteen years ago, I chatted with 87 year-old great uncle Gaetano, imploring him to share childhood stories of his sister that I might include in the next day's eulogy at St. Margaret's Church.

"Uncle Guy" recounted life in Milford, Massachusetts during the fist decades of the 20th century, describing the intimate Italian immigrant community of which his family was part. After a few vignettes about trips to the beach and his father's battle with silicosis from carving tombstones, he said, "my father hung around with the Socialists back then. You know Sacco and Vanzetti? Sacco got married in our house. One time my mother hid Sacco's wife when the police arrested him and were looking for her."  

On last night's NewsHour, US Army Surgeon General Kevin Kiley served-up a banquet of BS to explain the media-exposed mess at Walter Reed that occurred under his command:

But, remember, more than half the rooms were actually perfectly OK. And those that are problems like mold, there were only about seven of them that had that. The mice and cockroach issue was something that, in fact, the command did address last year, and that was due to soldiers leaving food in their rooms. We policed that up, and the rodent problem and cockroach problem has been corrected.

That's accountability from the man in charge of all the Army's hospitals.

It gets worse --much worse-- below the fold.

What the netroots have known for years has been officially confirmed in testimony by Cheney spokesliar Cathie Martin: Timmeh Russert's Meet the Press was the Bush-holes' preferred forum to spread Iraq lies. From today's WaPo:

"Flashed on the courtroom computer screens were her notes from 2004 about how Cheney could respond to allegations that the Bush administration had played fast and loose with evidence of Iraq's nuclear ambitions. Option 1: "MTP-VP," she wrote... I suggested we put the vice president on 'Meet the Press,' which was a tactic we often used," Martin testified. "It's our best format."

More Cheney media psyops below

Assistant Sec. of Defense for Detainee Affairs Charles Stimson suggested blacklisting law firms employing lawyers who provide free legal assistance to Gitmo detainees.

In a Thursday interview he said:

"I think, quite honestly, when corporate C.E.O.’s see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those C.E.O.’s are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms, and I think that is going to have major play in the next few weeks. And we want to watch that play out."

Shockingly, the Wall St. Journal editorialized on the same subject Friday.

And what prompted Stimson to review the firms where these lawyers work? Why a FOIA request from right-wing pundit Monica Crowley, former employee of Tricky Dick Nixon...

More down in the sewer.

In my diary yesterday about Eric Massa's inspirational send-off to volunteer canvassers, I included photos of a racist direct mail piece we discovered in several small towns.

This truly offensive mailer shows a white woman being assaulted from behind by a black man; you simply must see it to believe it.

It's now posted on Ben Smith's blog at The Daily News, as the desperate GOP apparently has sent it to small towns throughout the state.

Details downstairs.

Eric Massa gave us our marching orders today before canvassing the district.

This is people-powered politics at its best, fueled by coffee, doughnuts and an unyielding love of country.

Video and images downstairs.

Investigative reporter Frank Smyth broke the story in August when Rep. Jerry Weller (R-IL), who serves on the House Subcomitte on the Western Hemisphere, became the first member of Congress ever to have a spouse serving in a foreign government (he married the daughter of former Guatemalan dictator Gen. Rios Montt).

In today's Chicago Reader, Smyth reveals that Rep. Weller has been quietly purchasing parcels of land in Nicaragua's Coco Beach area over the past for years. Some of these aquisitions Weller has reported to Congress as required by its rules -- and some he apparently has not.

When contacted, Weller's lawyers and campaign manager refuse to comment...

Many observers have explained Foleygate as Republican hypocrisy, others as hubris. Apologists on The Right claim Foley's is purely an individual defect, anomlous within the Republican Party.

The reality is far more insidious. Foley exemplifies the Right-Wing Conservative Lifestyle: perpetrating an elaborate fraud of moral superiority in which you aggressively attack the morality of others to conceal your own immoral, unethical and criminal behavior.

The Right-Wing Conservative Lifestyle is the lifestyle of the Morality Scam, the confidence game, the family values flim-flam --practiced by the worst kind of sociopath. And not only is it the chosen lifestyle of individual so-called "conservatives," it is the central organizaing principle and defining ethos of today's Republican Party.

For decades, Republicans have successfully mass-marketed a core fallacy: that so-called "liberal" values and government policies are the root cause of America's problems, and that replacing them with so-called "conservative" values and government policies is the cure.

Their strategy influenced millions of swing voters and has sustaining right-wing poltical gains for two decades. With Foleygate, that core assertion has reached a tipping point and triggered a nuclear meltdown.

It finally is being exposed as a nothing more than an insidious cover-up strategy to conceal the corrupt, venal and depraved group of sociopaths who comprise today's right-wing Republican Party. If we do our part, we'll win in November and reclaim American political discourse for a generation.

Well, you knew Fred Hiatt & Co. wouldn't sit passively as the Republicans sank themselves with another scandal:

The Redder They Are, The Harder They Fall -
Republicans More Damaged by Scandals

Sex scandals involving politicians are as old as Thomas Jefferson, but the outcome seems to depend on which party you represent. In recent years, for the most part, Democrats have been able to survive their sordid escapades while Republicans have paid with their political lives.

The latest example: Mark Foley...

It only get's worse. More on the flip.

I remember in 1983, back when I was a college student, that it was a huge TV event. ABC was to broadcast The Day After, its highly-anticipated and politically controversial made-for-TV drama portraying the after-effects of a US-USSR nuclear war.

ABC responded to conservative opposition --including from the Reagan administration-- by cutting scenes, publishing viewer guides, set up an 800-number hotline, and broadcasting live debates immediately afterward featuring the likes of William F. Buckley.

The result was a record audience for a made-for-TV movie, nearly 100 million people...  

Today Sen. Barack Obama inexplicably attacked his Democratic colleagues in a contorted speech about religion, accusing them of failing to, "acknowledge the power of faith in the lives of the American people." Portraying his own Democratic party as atheists unwilling to court evangelicals and other churchgoers, he stated:

"It is doubtful that children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance feel oppressed or brainwashed as a consequence of muttering the phrase `under God,"

Senator, what the heck are you talking about? The "under God" court ruling was written by a Republican judge appointed by Nixon.

Democratic voters and elected leaders include former missionaries, ordained ministers, nuns, the first born-again Christian president, orthodox Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Catholics, Quakers, Hindus --and yes-- Evangelicals. The Democratic Party, not the GOP, champions true religious pluralism in America.

Sadly, this once-promising young Senator increasingly appears captive to the DC political culture of pandering and intellectual laziness. In the process, he's damaging Democrats and the religious values he claims to respect.

For the past two weeks Right-Wing Republicans have bashed Democrats who advocate redploying US troops from Iraq. Even though most Americans support redeployment, the Right slandered Democratic redeployment proposals as "surrender," "cut and run," and "retreat" before achieving "victory" in the "war in Iraq."

Surrender? Victory? War in Iraq...?

Today Baghdad was placed under a state of emergency, just as Basra was two weeks ago. How can a government declare a "state of emergency" if they are supposedly in the middle of a "war?"  

They can't. The "war" in Iraq is over --we won it in about three weeks-- and we need to reframe the debate on how to redeploy from what is a post-war occupation.

Yesterday the Senate began debating its Iraq resolution. As with last week's house vote, the Repubican Right is spinning the Democrats into knots with accusations of "retreat," "cut and run," "surrender," "emboldening the terrorists" and being "weak on national security."

Why would the Republicans choose to publicly debate the issue most responsible for their and the Bush administration's unpopularity? How can they get away with attacking Democrats on one of the greatest leadership failures in a century --for which they are overwhelmingly to blame?

Easy: they've successfully framed a post-war occupation as a war we have yet to win.

Wanna know one more reason why so many Generals think Donald Rumbsfeld's departure is long overdue? Wanna know why Muslims in the Middle East and Iraqis in particular have come to distrust and despise the US Government? From Today's WaPo:

Philip H. Bloom admitted his part in a scheme to give more than $2 million in cash and gifts to U.S. officials in exchange for their help in getting reconstruction contracts for his companies...

The court papers unsealed yesterday paint a picture of how Bloom, a businessman with operations in the United States and Romania, used gifts of cash, cars, plane tickets and jewelry to secure lucrative reconstruction contracts from December 2003 to December 2005. Bloom also supplied women to provide sexual favors at his Baghdad villa to the CPA officials who helped ensure that his companies won the contracts he wanted.

There are more indictments coming, and there's more below the fold...

Those of us who live in the Bay State often fret that we can't do more to influence the balance of Congress, since our delegation is already all-Democratic. Join us tomorrow night (Thursday) at a benefit for ERIC MASSA with SEN. MAX CLELAND, because that's all about to change...

The Washington Post chose to bury Breaking Ranks, a charette of the falling-out between Col. Larry Wilkerson and Colin Powell in the wake of the colonel's scathing criticism of the "neocon cabal" responsible for the Iraq disaster. It's chock-full-of ball-breaking quotes from Wilkerson like:

"This is not a Republican administration, not in my view. This is a radical administration."

"As a teacher who's studied every administration since 1945, I think this is probably the worst ineptitude in governance, decision-making and leadership I've seen in 50-plus years."

"None of these [neocon] guys ever heard a bullet go by their ears in combat."

Okay... So how do we defy the WaPo censors and use this to educate the public?

For the past few years I've been researching my family's Polish roots, traveling to Poland and falling in love with its people, culture, and history. The Poles bear the scars of centuries of brutal wars, foreign occupations, and mass-slaughters committed on their soil --especially the Holocaust and Soviet occupation. The friendly, gentle, quietly forward-looking Poles seem like a people that want none of the business they've suffered through the past 50 years.

Which is why I was shocked and saddened to see that Poland was at the heart of the CIA's secret detention network in Europe.