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Here is a link to the infamous Blackwell fundraising letter.  I believe he overstepped the legal line when he used Secretary of State envelopes and letterhead for a blatantly political appeal.  Did he also use State postage as well?

http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/blackwellfundraisingltr.pdf

This man is dangerous and needs to be reigned in by our legal system.  If we can't get him for voter fraud, we should get him for stealing from the taxpayers.

It is interesting that this man is the embodiment of the Grover Norquist "drown the government in a bathtub" theory of government, has had nothing but tax funded jobs for years and years, and aspires to even more government funded jobs.

The analysis of the ruinous impact of his Amendment is outlined on the front page of the Dispatch today.  This is an analysis prepared by other Republicans!

If, as Hillary Clinton suggests, it takes a village to raise a child, then it is equally true that it takes a Bush to destroy that village, and kill that child. And I am not speaking of all those children slaughtered in their beds in Mosul, Fallujah and Baghdad during this President’s murderous invasion and occupation of Iraq.

No, on this occasion I am condemning, in advance, the upcoming invasions of Malaysia, Syria, Yemen, Algeria and Sudan, in addition of course to the first target, Iran, for which extremely detailed plans for strikes and invasion have already been drawn up. The New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh documents in exquisitely painful detail just what the Bush White House has planned as its next steps to extend the American Empire. Anyone who like myself wants to tell the President and his legions, “This far, but no further”, had best write, call, e-mail and visit their representatives in the U.S. House and the Senate and protest strongly against such an obviously criminal and immoral extension of American power.

It takes a nation to stop a Caesar.
Something's got to give.  Another election is just around the corner.  What's it going to be?  Another opportunity to document election "irregularities" and computer “glitches”?  Another chance to analyze mysterious exit polls?  Another exercise in frustration?  Another charade.  

Democrats will need a mighty good reason to go back to the polls.  Many believe that our elections are rigged.  And they have good reason.  Republicans own the voting machine companies that count 80% of the votes.  Congress and the courts are unlikely to change that.  And the Democratic leadership has hardly made it an issue.

So, let's do something different.  We'll go to Plan B.  We'll organize our own “Parallel Elections”.  

In 2004 the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the Inspector Generals (IG) issued reports revealing fraud, mismanagement and corruption. Here is my list of some of the Bush administration's Most Outrageous Scandals. 

1. Halliburton's Corruption. Nine different reports compiled by the GAO, the Coalition Provisional Authority's IG and the Defense Contract Audit Agency faulted Halliburton's performance in Iraq, where it has been awarded more than $10 billion in U.S. contracts. The government investigators cited, among other things, significant cost overruns, the overcharging of the Defense Department (and taxpayers) by $61 million, illegal kickbacks, failure to police subcontractors' billing and unauthorized expenses at the Kuwait Hilton Hotel.

2. Armstrong Williams received payola from US Department of Education to provide propaganda for “No Child Left Behind Program.”

3. CBS yielding to pressure from Bush Administration to discredit Dan Rather for reporting that Bush was AWOL from military when the report was right but the source was questionable,

Bill Clinton lied about his whore,
which was his blasphemy and sin.
George Bush lied on the need for war,
defends it still with Karl Rove’s spin.
Which liar, I ask, has hurt us more,
weighing  the Iraq mess we’re in?

I read the news today about how the AG for Ohio, a Republican partisan, while refusing to release any information regarding the Ohio recount filings which were upheld by the Courts of Ohio, is now filing against the attorneys who demanded a recount legally.  It is American patriotism that lends one to ask 'have all the votes been counted'.  It is patriotism that drives one to ask questions about the second election in 4 years where the Republican Party chairperson for the Bush Cheney campaign is also the person responsible for counting all the votes in a particular state.  If you count Florida, it has happened thrice in 4 years now, twice in the sunshine State with 2 different Secretaries of State.  Simply put, the mere existence of one person functioning in both capacities is a conflict of interest.  Yet now the Ohio AG is filing suit for censor and fines calling the requested recount frivolous.  Petro, the AG and Blackwell, Ohio's Secretary of State are the ones who should be censured.  They not only prevented any recount from happening by refusing to obey court orders to provide a recount but blatantly withheld any and all evidence of the actual vote on November 2nd. 
No, this is not a military-oriented guide to keeping fit.  Yet it has made some people uncomfortable if not downright sore.

It’s about the peace movement and how a U.S. Marine company using downtown Toledo for “urban warfare” training January 7-8, provided an opportunity for activists to think and act beyond normal limits.

With barely a week’s notice, an article in the local paper announced that a weapons company of the 1st Battalion, 24th Marine Reserves would spend a weekend running around our downtown, honing combat skills by firing blanks at imaginary enemies.  The North West Ohio Peace Coalition (NWOPC) and local Veterans for Peace (VFP) designed a response, different from what many in the peace movement had seen or that some were even comfortable with.

That response was:

COLUMBUS -- In a stunning legal attack, Ohio's Republican Attorney General has moved for sanctions against the four attorneys who sued George W. Bush et. al. in an attempt to investigate the Buckeye State's bitterly contested November 2 election.

Robert Fitrakis, Susan Truitt, Cliff Arnebeck and Peter Peckarsky were named by Attorney General James Petro in a filing with the Ohio Supreme Court. Petro charges the November Moss v Bush and Moss v. Moyer filings by the Election Protection legal team were "frivolous." Petro is demanding court sanctions and fines.

"Instead of evidence, contesters offered only theory, conjecture, hypothesis and invective," the Attorney General's January 18th memo about the suit said. "A contest proceeding is not a toy for idle hands. It is not to be used to make a political point, or to be used as a discovery tool, or be used to inconvenience or harass public officials, or to be used as a publicity gimmick."

"Any appearance of a permanent occupation of Iraq by the U.S. will both undermine domestic support here in the United States and play directly into the hands of those in the Middle East who -- however wrongly -- suspect us of imperial design." So spoke former Secretary of State James Baker last week in a speech at Rice University in Houston.

There are few heavier hitters in Bush country than Baker, who was secretary of state when Bush Sr. went to war on Iraq in 1991 and the architect of Bush Jr.'s stolen election in 2000. A few days earlier, Brent Scowcroft, another veteran of Bush Sr.'s administration, raised once more, as he had in 2002, doubts about Bush Jr.'s Iraq strategy.

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