Report: Texas Overpaid Miers in Land Sale

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Texas officials paid Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers’ family more than $100,000 for a small piece of land in 2000 - 10 times the land’s worth - despite the state’s objections to the way the price was determined, Knight Ridder Newspapers reported Saturday.

The three-member committee that determined the price included Peggy Lundy, a friend of Miers, and property-rights activist Cathie Adams, Knight Ridder reported. They were appointed to the panel by state District Judge David Evans, who had received at least $5,000 in campaign contributions from Miers’ law firm.

And did she have a hand in cleaning up Bush’s National Guard records?

Lotto Trouble

The politics of the Harriet Miers nomination are getting stranger as attention turns toward Ms. Miers’s tenure as head of the Texas Lottery Commission. Two key players in last year’s presidential campaign–Jerome Corsi, co-author of the Swift Boat Veterans book “Unfit for Command,” and Ben Barnes, a former Texas lieutenant governor who claimed President Bush got special treatment when he joined the Texas Air National Guard–are involved in the debate.

…Mr. Littwin has alleged that aides to then-Gov. Bush were worried that should GTECH lose its lottery contract, its top lobbyist, Mr. Barnes, would discuss efforts he claimed to have made to push a young George W. Bush to the top of the coveted waiting list for a pilot’s slot in the Texas Air National Guard. (Mr. Barnes went public with those claims last year in an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes.”) Lottery Commission officials, including Ms. Miers, never detailed the reasons for the Littwin firing. Last week, when the Houston Chronicle asked about it, the White House replied, “Harriet Miers has never commented and will not now on what was a personnel matter.”

Getting a bit clearer why Bush might want this unqualified person on the SCOTUS, don’t it?

The Fix Is In

By Chris Floyd

10/20/05 “Moscow Times” — – Having railed at the wanton criminality of the Bush faction for so long, this column naturally partakes of the general glee arising from the looming possibility of genuine, grade-A grand jury indictments for some of the gang’s top thugs.

Of course, we all know that the fix is in: If anyone in the White House is actually indicted and convicted for the high crime of exposing the identity of an undercover agent — in wartime, no less — they will certainly be pardoned when George W. Bush finally limps away from the steaming, stinking, blood-soaked ruin of his presidency. Nobody will do any hard time; in the end, the whole sick crew will simply pass through the golden revolving door into the lifetime gravy train of corporate grease and right-wing lecture-circuit glory.

Enjoy!

Here’s a copy of an email I sent to Neal Boortz, his employers, and advertisers:

To those who employ Neal Boortz:

In Thursday’s (10.20.2005) “Neals Nuze” Neal Boortz had this comment:

“So now the same thing is happening. This time the controversy is
over a news report in Australia that says American soldiers burned the
bodies of two Taliban Islamic terrorists. Those poor Taliban fighters…
just makes your heart ache that their corpses were mishandled, doesn’t it?”

By employing Boortz, you are saying that such statements- statements
that would disgust any rational human being- are fine. More to the
point, you are saying that the desecration of human beings is ok as
long as you earn good ratings, or in the case of your advertisers,
return on your ad dollars. His attempts to rationalize this due to the past
actions of our foes is beside the point. What is wrong for one
party is wrong for all.
(more…)

From Bradblog.com:

CONSERVATIVE GROUP DENOUNCES ANN COULTER!
Anti-Coulter Documentary in Production, Release to Coincide with Rightwing Gadfly’s Next Book!

Good to see someone on the right attempting to distance themselves from that crazy woman/pencil. That whole Time magazine thing still makes me sick.

Did ya hear about the Republican senator from New Hampshire, Judd Gregg, who a few days ago won nearly a million bucks ($853,492 to be exact) in the Powerball lottery?

Now, a few facts about Sen. Gregg. First, he’s a multi-millionaire (before this), as well as being the head of the Senate Budget Committee. (Conicidentally, USA Today states). Now, playing the lottery, even when the payout is $340 mill as it was the other day, is just plain stupid. You won’t win, no matter how much you play. And even if you do, it generally won’t be enough to offset the losses. Now, maybe this guy just bought a ticket on a whim, out with family at the grocery and goes, what the heck, I need another few million, sure. And he gets lucky.

But what if he is actually playing it smart? What if a multi-millionare Senator has decided that his money is better off being used to buy lottery tickets instead of more conventional investments? What if it isn’t conicidence that he’s the Budget Committee head?

Is he saying that the Powerball odds are a better bet than our economy? Yikes!

Our freedoms? Our open society? Our faiths?

Nah, they hate us for SHIT LIKE THIS!

Australian TV shows footage of Taliban burning

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australian television on Wednesday broadcast footage of what it said was U.S. soldiers burning the corpses of two dead Taliban fighters with their bodies laid out facing Mecca and using the images in a propaganda campaign in southern Afghanistan.

The television report said U.S. soldiers burned the bodies for hygienic reasons but then a U.S. psychological operations unit broadcast a propaganda message on loudspeakers to Taliban fighters, taunting them to retrieve their dead and fight.

I wouldn’t want to be the next American serviceman to be captured. This is disgusting.

Go ahead, click here. You’ll like it. Really.

when he’s nearly down:

Cheney ‘cabal’ hijacked US foreign policy

Vice-President Dick Cheney and a handful of others had hijacked the government’s foreign policy apparatus, deciding in secret to carry out policies that had left the US weaker and more isolated in the world, the top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed on Wednesday.

Fire the Special Prosecutor? Shades of Watergate

When the Watergate scandal reached a similar stage in October 1973, President Richard Nixon, ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire the intrepid special prosecutor Archibald Cox. Richardson resigned rather than carry out Nixon’s order; and so did his deputy William Ruckleshaus. So Nixon had to reach farther down into the Justice department where he found Robert Bork, who promptly dismissed Cox in the so-called Saturday Night Massacre.

Could Bush himself be named an un-indicted co-conspirator? If that or something like it happens, we can expect a circling of the wagons and Fitzgerald cashiered.

Interesting perspective from Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst.

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon has reneged on its offer to pay a $15,000 bonus to members of the National Guard and Army Reserve who agree to extend their enlistments by six years, according to Sen. Patty Murray (D-Seattle). The bonuses were offered in January to Active Guard and Reserve and military technician soldiers who were serving overseas. In April, the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs ordered the bonuses stopped, Murray said.

“This is outrageous,” the senator said in a telephone interview. “It makes me angry that this administration has broken another promise to our troops.”

Key word here? ANOTHER. Read more here. I’m no general or president, but it doesn’t seem prudent to me to keep pissing off the guys you armed and then trained how to kill. I’m just sayin’…