Excellent recommendations for the 2006 California Ballot Propositions

Here's an excellent website by Pete Stahl with thorough reviews and recommendations for the confusing 2006 California ballot initiatives. His explanations are clear, and arguments persuasive. Even if I don't agree with everything he says, his reasoning is very helpful in making up your own mind. If you're confused by the propositions, give this site a try.

Time for some investigatin'

Here's a great reason to elect a Democratic House and/or Senate: some exciting federal investigations have been much overdue lately. This is by far not a complete list, but here's a good start on all the issues that the Republicans have been getting a free ride on:

• Iraq: who lied about the WMD pretext for war? Who's to blame for the atrocious post-war non-policy? How are we ever going to get out?
  
  
• What's the connection between Dick Cheney and Enron? Was he involved in the scandal? Did he have knowledge of it beforehand? What role did he play in the Valerie Plame scandal?
  
  
• The Foley scandal: What did Hastert and the rest of the Republics know, and when did they know it?
  
  
• Was the 2004 election stolen? If so, by whom? -- see this previous article in this space.
  
  
• The Abramoff corruption scandal -- exactly who took money from this scoundrel, when, and how much, and what did they give his customers in return?
  
  

Remember all the hot air and energy wasted on the Clinton-era phoney scandals such as "Travelgate" by the Republican congress who couldn't stand the fact that a Democrat was in power? Not to mention the impeachment for consenting sex between adults. I think it's high time Republicans got a taste of the power of Congressional investigations.

Was the 2004 Election Stolen???

You read that right: not 2000, but was the 2004 election stolen?! That's the question asked in a Rolling Stone article written by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

"...what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004(12) -- more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.(13)"

But as the article details, the problems weren't limited to Ohio alone -- many more states that ultimately went to Bush had the same kind of problems. This kind of cheating would be compounded by the use of virtually non-traceable, non-recountable electronic voting machines, as I wrote about in this space earlier. But there's more:

"... one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And that doesn’t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House."

Bush knew about impending bin Laden attack 2 months before 9/11!

According to this Washington Post article by Bob Woodward, Condi Rice was warned by CIA director Tenet 2 months before 9/11 happened, but failed to do anything about it! From the article, the CIA director:

...did not know when, where or how, but Tenet felt there was too much noise in the intelligence systems. Two weeks earlier, he had told Richard A. Clarke, the National Security Council's counterterrorism director: "It's my sixth sense, but I feel it coming. This is going to be the big one."

But instead of acting on this information, the Bush administration was trying to push the anti-ballistic missile defense, and planning a strategy for going into Iraq. And now, Rice has the gall to say to people who accuse her and Bush of dragging their feet on Al Qaeda before 9/11 that "what we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding years."