Via dKossack lupin, an account of government officials being removed and replaced by hand-picked Party loyalists already. What is particularly chilling, at least if you remember Nixon's actions, or have a historical awareness of that era, or just recognize the importance of having rule-of-law and separation of powers, is that they are moving on ( Read more... )

The overreaching and grabbing of large hunks of power by the current administration in ways formerly not allowed or never before excercised in such a manner, all ostensibly to "protect America from Terror", goes on at such a pace that it's hard to keep up with it all - heck, it's hard to keep up with the parts of it that those few remaining ( Read more... )

This is why it isn't enough to just "elect more Democrats" as if that's magically going to fix everything. It isn't all bottled up in the dragons, and anyone who thinks so - or worse yet, that it's okay so long as they're "on our side" - is part of the problem.

Personally, I'm not sure which is worse - that they're all for sale, that they're for ( Read more... )

Okay, I finally read the old bestseller, The Pelican Brief from 1992 ( Read more... )

You have a bunch of civil public servants who are getting paid more than 90% of the rest of their fellow citizens in one of the richest countries of the world as they like to brag. IOW, we're not talking about some poor SOB of a cop or a bureaucrat in the former SSSR or Africa or Latin America who hasn't seen a paycheck in six weeks (if that) and ( Read more... )

[N.I.A. Base - "Area 51", Nevada]PRESIDENT ( Read more... )

There was commentary on this, but the beast locked up this morning. There will be later, but the story itself stands w/o mediation I think:

Around this time [Feb/Mar 1973], Woodward went to visit a well-placed CRP official. The man seemed disaffected, disgusted with the White House and the tactics that had been used to re-elect the President. "If ( Read more... )

via Laura Rozen

--A graph of Abramoff donation recipients from the ambivalent WaPo (are we watercarriers for the Establishment or Fourth Estate rebels? Decisions, decisions!) which lends credence to the TPM argument that the reason for the "Ethics Truce" between Democratic and Republican congresscritters has been mutual shared guilt, a Mexican ( Read more... )

Via dKossack Sherlock Google, a rundown of Virtue Party patronage scandals getting too big to squelch, with an Action Alert of websites to scour and save down or screenshot against memoryholing.

It was just last week that I wrote about this right here ("The Mafia does it all the time."In between I started researching and working on a post ( Read more... )

Just noticed via Laura Rosen today that Abramoff had serious ties to the Apartheid regime in South Africa. I knew Cheney had supported them, and opposed any opposition to them, and that there was some kind of money involved for him, and that Buckley had been a cheerleader for apartheid here and there in National Review back in the day, but I didn't ( Read more... )