Top Ten Reasons to Vote Republican

... but only if you're an idiot, of course:

10. Vote Republican if you think it's a good idea to post detailed nuclear bomb-making instructions -- in Arabic -- on the Internet.

9. Vote Republican if you want to stay the course in Iraq.

8. Vote Republican if you think the President should get advice on gay-bashing from a fundamentalist pastor who secretly bangs gay prostitutes.

7. Vote Republican if you think the best way to deal with a child predator is to cover your own ass.

6. Vote Republican if you hate the military.

5. Vote Republican if you like people who will literally say anything to get elected.

4. Vote Republican if you think the best way to answer a tough question is to have your questioner beaten up.

3. Vote Republican if you think laws are for other people -- particularly brown, Democratic people.

2. Vote Republican if you think it's cool for Congressmen to pay their mistresses to keep quiet until after Election Day.

and 1. Vote Republican if you think this bunch is NOT the most corrupt, hypocritical, worthless bunch of asshats you have ever seen in your life.

In the past six years Republicans have had total control of the US and state government. They have held onto that power by literally terrorizing their constituents, fooling them into believing that if the GOP isn't running the show then Uncle Sam will be blown up by terrorists, buggered by a homosexual and lose his job to a Mexican.

The politics of fear have allowed Republicans in Washington and Austin to wipe themselves with the Constitution, redistrict themselves into semi-permanent majorities, take away rights that human beings have relied on for centuries, devastate our children's healthcare and education, abandon their responsibility to check the power of the presidency, enrich themselves and their corporate clients while assaulting the middle class, and ruin the lives of countless thousands of people from Baghdad to New Orleans and East Texas. They've done all this by following a strict doctrine of "divide and conquer," turning American against American and Texan against Texan while their cronies sit back, laugh, and rake in the cash.

If you have friends, family, neighbors, or co-workers who are as disgusted by the modern Republican party as I am, make sure you get them to the polls on the day after tomorrow. The GOP has spent the last six years telling us what cannot be done. There remains a long road ahead, but many Democratic victories on Tuesday can be the first step toward repairing the damage these idiots have done, and making the USA -- and Texas -- great again.

God's Own Party: Screw the poor

During the early voting period just completed, the city of Houston offered free flu shots to people at selected locations. This was challenged by the Harris County Republican Party, which claimed through their chairman Jared Woodfill that it was a "scheme" to get Democrats to the polls. Mayor Bill White promptly ceased the program.

One of our vile local conservative blogs -- this is the only hint I'm giving -- quoted Jesus out of context from Matthew 26:11: "the poor be with ye always".

This rankles me on several levels:

1. I could simply note that the Harris County branch of US Hezbollah, also known as the Republican Party, is as sorry as Satan regarding this matter and leave it at that, but I won't.

2. Bill White is a bigger coward than John Kerry for rolling over on this. I hereby declare my support for whomever happens to be White's Democratic primary opponent when he runs for higher office.

3. The biblical quotation is not only out of context but incomplete as well. Anyone with a passing familiarity with the Holy Scriptures -- that barely describes me, incidentally -- can easily figure out that Jesus wasn't contradicting his many statements about the poor being blessed, the meek inheriting the Earth, that people should not covet earthly possessions and in fact should sell them, that the moneychangers were sinful, that the wealthy have almost no chance of entering heaven, and so on. Michael Dawson does a much better job of dissembling this atrocious rationale.

As previously noted many times in this space: I don't go to church, I hardly even believe in a higher authority, but I sure know an Elmer Gantry when I hear him.

What the Harris County Republican Party managed to pull off this week is absolutely NOT what Jesus would have done. But that won't stop them from wallowing happily in the stench of their hypocrisy like pigs in shit.

Support the Troops: Vote Democratic

-- "Donald Rumsfeld must go". That's the subject of an editorial which will appear in Monday's Army Times, Air Force Times, Marine Corps Times, and Navy Times, the military service's newspapers of record.

I'm careful wishing for this: he will likely be replaced by Joe Lieberman, who will resign the Senate seat he is probably going to be re-elected to, which means that the Republican governor of Connecticut will appoint a Republican to replace him. Then again, what really is the difference between Lieberman and any another shit-eating conservative?

-- November is off to a bloody start in Iraq. And I do mean bloody.

Republicans are chanting "taxes, taxes, John Kerry, taxes, what's their plan, taxes, taxes, taxes", but the truth about what issue Tuesday's vote turns on is flowing down that Baghdad street.

-- Tammy Duckworth, the Democratic candidate for Illinois' 6th congressional district who lost both legs in Iraq when her helicopter was shot down, was passed over for endorsement by the VFW. They instead picked the Republican who has had no military service. Why? Because a member of the national board lives in the district. He's a right-wing freak, of course.

The VFW overlooked sending a questionnaire to Duckworth -- as they typically do all candidates considered for endorsement -- and relied solely on the word of Ray Soden, said freak.

This is, as you might be guessing, backfiring on both the VFW and the Republican.

-- In this Vanity Fair interview with Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, David Frum and others, author David Rose reveals that even the hearts of neoconservative darkness have turned against the Bushies for their failures in Iraq.

Who's had enough?

Even more GOP scandals erupt

How could Karl Rove let all this happen so close to Election Day?

-- the Bush administration posted online the guidelines for constructing a nuclear weapon, and left it up for several months. In Arabic. When the New York Times asked them about it, they took it down.

Do you feel safer?

-- someone from the campaign of state representative John "Dufus" Davis flushed grease from a fish fry down a commode in the community center where the event was held. It clogged a lift station, which is how it got traced back to Davis. (Two questions I don't really want answered: what is a lift station, and how does one 'trace grease'.)

You simply cannot make this shit up. Go see Bay Area Houston and Musings (for the Fox26 video).

-- Pastor Ted Haggard, the president of the National Association of Evangelicals -- a group that claims thirty million members -- resigned yesterday after a male prostitute alleged that the minister had paid him for sex for three years and used drugs with him.

-- Don Sherwood, R-Allentown Pa., paid an ex-mistress nearly $500,000 to keep the affair quiet until after Election Day. Oops.

And this man wants to invest your Social Security money. Pshaw.

-- the mad-dog Republicans in Fort Bend County, led by Commissioner Andy Meyers, are terrorizing their neighbors with signs and direct mail. Since scaring them regarding terrorist attacks isn't working, they have resorted to scaring them about brown people in general. I wonder if the conservatives in Fort Bend are stupid enough to fall for this ...

-- Greg Abbott got chastised by the Austin American-Statesman editorial board, and made fun of by John Kelso for his videotaping crimes, but that's all. Damned liberal media.

I'm sure I missed some of yesterday's news, since I have been busy working get-out-the-vote efforts in my precinct. Would you please add the ones I've overlooked in the comments? The myriad electronic voting-machine irregularities, for example...

Power to the people

About a dozen supporters of striking Houston janitors blocked the intersection of Westheimer and Post Oak, in the Galleria, this afternoon. They sat down in the middle of the road and handcuffed themselves to trash cans in order to call attention to the strike by the recently organized SEIU janitors for better wages and benefits.

WFAA continues the beatdown on Abbott

Byron Harris of News8 Investigates piles on:

Last week, we revealed Attorney General Greg Abbott is using video shot at taxpayers' expense in his commercials.

Tonight we report that the video is evidence of a sweeping change in the way his communications office is run.

Wearing jackets labeled 'Texas Attorney General,' armed law enforcement officers sweep into an apartment house. The video, shot by an attorney general videographer at taxpayers' expense, now shows up in Abbott's television commercial.

One critic says it blurs public service and self promotion.

“It's disgusting. And that's why I took early retirement. It's just blatant misuse of state funds to promote Greg Abbott's name recognition,” said Bill Barnes, who worked for 18 years in the video departments of four Texas attorney generals, both Republican and Democrat.

He retired after Abbott took office. He says he saw the video department change from supporting the attorney general to promoting him.

“To increase general Abbott’s name recognition, there was nothing more important to the press office than that. That was what they were going to do,” Barnes said.

Salaries of press office staff increased to what amounts to more than $380,000 a year. A videographer was hired at $70,000 a year, just $22,000 less than the attorney general himself made at the time. Videos, such as one depicting busts being made by the attorney general's staff, were produced. Burns says he recognizes the videotape now being used in the attorney general's commercials.

The attorney general also built himself a TV studio. He says the world has changed with the internet and his beefed up operation is just trying to keep up.

Press secretary Jerry Strickland showed us the studio known as "the bat cave," which used to be a storage room. He says the attorney general did spend money for equipment here, but he doesn't know exactly how much. He says the studio produces videos on open government which are distributed to state officials.

The office also produces edited versions of the attorney general's press conferences and legal activities, which are distributed to television stations. We checked with attorney general offices in New York and California. Neither have a department like the one in Texas.

The attorney general's videos are edited for content. How is that not propaganda?

“It is a way for us to convey what people need to know in the state of Texas. We are providing information to the taxpayers and if the taxpayers would like more information we can provide that as well,” Strickland explained.

Strickland says unedited video shot by his office can be obtained by any citizen by filing a public information request. That's where all this material now on the website run by Abbott's political campaign came from. And how the campaign got the video now used in Abbott's commercial. The campaign says it's all totally legal.

The Abbott campaign is wrong. But -- as I asked previously -- who will charge the Attorney General with this felony?

Bush's latest strategery for victory in Iraq