Minnesota Republican Watch today has a post detailing the few lines of computer code used to change Mark Kennedy’s website to express his phony outrage at Amy Klobuchar.
It’s funny how pathetic Kennedy and his people are, and how easy it is to puncture their lies.
When is the Strib going to cover this, btw?
How you can tell Kennedy’s lying–his website is down.
We were informed last evening of a serious security breach of sensitive Kennedy campaign information by a senior member of Amy Klobuchar’s campaign.
This was the first sentence on the new front page of Mark Kennedy’s website today, as he tries to exploit his own vendor’s stupidity to Amy Klobuchar’s detriment. He claims he disabled the website because of the “security breach,” which, by the way, was not even a breach of his site, but the site of his advertising agency, and were not done by Klobuchar’s staff, but by an independent blogger.
Isn’t there a law about lying about a political opponent?
At least Kennedy’s consistent though. You may remember him as the guy who pictured Patty Wetterling with Osama Bin Laden when he ran against Wetterling for Congress.
According to the Washington Post today, the U.S. Marine officer in charge of military intelligence in Iraq thinks we’ve already lost a substantial chunk of the country.
Think about why we’d “stay the course” when the course is a path to defeat.
It’s not called Cut and Run. It’s called Cut Your Losses.
“You mean the Post tortured that guy before we did? That must be how they get their info ahead of the CIA.”
As the New Republic points out today, Bush’s speech yesterday justifying torture was another in a long series of lies.
According to Bush, “[After being tortured] Zubaydah identified one of KSM’s accomplices in the 9/11 attacks–a terrorist named Ramzi bin al Shibh.”
Turns out, Zubaydah could have avoided the thumb screws if Bush could just be persuaded to read the newspaper. The Washington Post, between 9/11 and the time Zubaydah was captured, had mentioned Ramzi bin al Shibh 26 times.
The other howler, of course, in Bush’s statement was this one: “The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful.” For those keeping score, that’s the same Justice Deparment currently being run by Alberto Gonzales. You may remember him as the guy who wrote the legal justification for torture when he was White House counsel. He’s also the guy who thinks its ok to spy on Americans without a warrant.
All I can say is, when I get in trouble, I want Gonzo for my lawyer, because I won’t have to worry about whether or not I did the crime. He’ll just declare whatever I did not to be a crime.
Just pointing out that today is the 67th anniversary of the beginning of World War II in Europe. Tomorrow is the 61st anniversary of the surrender of Japan.
Ten days from now is the fifth anniversary of 9/11/2001.
World War II in Europe lasted 2076 days. America’s involvement in WW II lasted 1365 days.
It’s now 1816 days since 9/11/2001.
And now for the good news you’re paying for…
The Pentagon is letting a bid for $20 million to hire a public relations firm to help it improve the coverage of our performance in the Iraq War.
For some reason, they don’t seem to like what the independent press has been saying about what’s going on there.
I could tell them how to get some better press for free. Admit your mistake and get out of Iraq. But that would involve telling the truth and nobody could charge so much for that.
Never mind Osama, here’s Neville
When I was in eighth grade, there was a question on my American History final exam that read, “Who was the person most responsible for starting World War II?” The answer the teacher was looking for was, of course, Adolf Hitler. I wrote Neville Chamberlain.
If Don Rumsfeld had been grading it instead of Mr. Peters, I’d have got it right.
In Salt Lake City yesterday, Rumsfeld called all of us who oppose the war in Iraq, in effect, “Chamberlains”.
If that’s right, I guess Rummy must think of himself as Winston Churchill, who did, after all, have it completely right about Hitler while Chamberlain was acquiesing while Germany took over Czechoslovakia in 1938.
Of course, when Churchill did come to power, he didn’t advocate starting a war with, say, Equador, to name one country which had nothing to do with attacking Czechoslovakia or Poland.
Franklin Roosevelt, on December 8, 1941, didn’t call for a declaration of war against Mexico after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
It’s as if Rummy got the same question I did: “Who was the person most responsible for starting the current war?” and he got it totally wrong, too.
I was asked once to reveal some “universal truth” I’d learned. When I couldn’t dredge up the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus from my faded memories, I settled for, “Things are usually more complicated than they seem.” I give the same answer when asked why I live in Minneapolis.
Each day here is an exercise in ambiguity. My commute to our Warehouse District office is short. I can follow one route that never leaves city streets. That path passes the three cathedrals that reach up to God from their plots on Lowry Hill, then curves behind the Christian mission. There the sidewalk is lined by shopping carts full of scrap and their custodians, who sit on a low concrete wall, smoke cigarettes, and wait for their next meal.
Sometimes I vary my route and enter the freeway at the Basilica entrance to skirt downtown for one exit. I usually take a long look at the suburban commuters at a dead stop in the oncoming lanes. They are all angry, I imagine, as they wait for their turn to exit into a high-rise parking ramp and begin their daily visit to purgatory in the city. They don’t see the line behind the mission, but I expect some may be panhandled at lunch time or hear the dreadlocked drummer in front of the Target store on Nicollet Mall.
The suburban tourists sometimes venture downtown at night, too, and lap up Cold Stone ice cream or Applebee’s margaritas on the second floor of Block E. Some grab a burger and beer on First Avenue before a Timberwolves game. You don’t see the same scrubbed faces so much at Café Brenda, though. There you know nearly everyone, at least by face, because they are from the neighborhood. They are the people who have perhaps seen Kevin Garnett going into a dance club in his impeccably fitted five-button suits, but have never seen him in his baggy white basketball shorts.
One suburban tourist was killed this summer on First Avenue, hit in the head by a bullet that wasn’t meant for him. Another man from out of town was shot dead by a robber as he left an Uptown restaurant. Forty others who lived here have been murdered in the city this year. Hundreds have been wounded. The reactions to this vary from resignation to outrage, from mere sadness to fury. My city friend who was robbed at gunpoint last week in Uptown says it was “no big deal. He only got twenty bucks.” My other Golden Valley friend, whose wife and daughter were subjected to some obscene suggestions when he brought them to a Hennepin Avenue musical last year, says he will never come downtown at night again.
The people who live in the city pay a price. The cacophony of the streets assaults us daily. We know nearly every walk through downtown is going to mean, at best, being panhandled at least once, or, worse, being actively menaced. Most busy intersections feature mendicants with cardboard signs containing a “God Bless” and a short plea for a donation. Our City Council members didn’t bother to offer an apology when they told us last week that our property taxes were going up eight percent. Any available additional revenue would be used to hire more police. The amount available is limited, however, by the many bad decisions the city has made in the past. We pay off the purchase of Kevin Garnett’s showcase arena, yet provide scant playgrounds for youth soccer. We finance downtown office towers while most of our branch libraries are open three or four days a week. There was a bullet hole in the second-floor window of the Central Library before it even opened in May.
But this is what we pay for having sidewalks in front of our homes. In my neighborhood, we’re thankful for quirky restaurants like Auriga, which you can walk to for an imaginative pizza and Malbec by the glass after 10:00 p.m. Though the drug dealer next door in a Northeast neighborhood does a brisk business every night, we can still walk to the 331 Club. In Southeast, we can get a three-course Chinese lunch at Shuang Cheng that costs less than six bucks and wasn’t cooked an hour ago.
The tourists who visit the city daily for their wages or nightly for their entertainment don’t sleep here and don’t pay the day-to-day toll exacted from the people who live here. Instead, they take what they come for, retrace their paths home, cluck their tongues at our problems, and only rarely partake of our real treasures.
I came to America so I could be free to read whatever I wanted
Remember Elian Gonzalez?
I remember him mostly for how crazy they are in Miami about the whole Cuba thing…and how any politician who hopes to make it in Florida better keep that in mind.
Today on NPR, there’s a story about the Miami-Dade School Board and their attempt to ban a book called Vamos a Cuba, (Let’s go to Cuba) which is aimed at second graders and somehow neglects to mention to all the second grade students of international relations just how brutal the Castro regime is.
I think the book should be edited before it is put back on the Miami grade school library shelves. I want the book to contain plenty of examples of just how terrible Castro is, including the fact that he probably bans some books that don’t mirror his politics.
That will teach those Miami kids.
Show me the money
Imagine the inner conflict.
You’ve spent the last few months trying to convince Minnesota voters that you aren’t the Bush administration’s lap dog, despite voting with them 97 percent of the time.
You are, despite the overwhelming evidence of the past few years that lying to the voters is a great strategy, still lagging 20 points in the polls to Amy Klobuchar.
You know, if I’m going to get the lies about my record of being Bush’s boy to the maximum number of people, I’m going to need more money.
You decide to cancel your scheduled speech at the University to stand next to Bush when he comes to town to raise money today.
You realize, you’ll have to stand with the guy you are trying to tell the people you don’t always stand with.
You say to yourself, just another day in the life of a politician.