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

Abbott rocked by scandals

The Austin American-Statesman finally reports on Greg Abbott's misuse of state resources with an appropriately misleading headline. They manage to get the story right, however (bold emphasis mine throughout):

It looks like a scene from TV's "Cops."

Instead, the arrest video highlighted in a campaign commercial for Attorney General Greg Abbott was shot by a state employee at taxpayer expense. In fact, video of everything from Abbott's news conferences to the latest bust of suspected child predators can be found on his campaign and official state Web sites — all shot by his $70,000-a-year state-paid videographer.

In essence, candidate Abbott filed an open records request to Attorney General Abbott for the videos produced by the state. ...

As legal rationale, (Abbott campaign staffer Daniel) Hodge cited one line from a Texas Ethics Commission advisory opinion: "Any candidate may use publicly available government information for campaign purposes and an inherent advantage of incumbency is knowledge of what kind of government information is available to the public."

But the opinion continued, "The lawful advantages of incumbency do not, however, extend to the use of work time of government employees or other government resources to gather or otherwise prepare information for campaign purposes."

The legal fine line would be intent: Was the video shot to inform the public or further Abbott's political career?

The attorney general's office has a communications department with six employees, including videographer Neftali Gonzalez. It spends more than $500,000 a year informing the public about the office's activities. ...

Wow. Is this sort of thing ... unusual?

Bill Burns, a retired state employee who was a videographer for four attorneys general, including Abbott, said the job changed when Abbott took over four years ago. It became more about promoting Abbott, he said, as opposed to doing the legal, internal work.

"There is nothing more important to the Abbott administration than his name identification," Burns said. "It's all about him."

No, I mean, do other Republican incumbents do this?

Representatives of Gov. Rick Perry, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn said Monday that they have not mingled video paid for by taxpayers with their campaign work.

OK. So what exactly is going on here?

"It's stealing the taxpayers' money," said David Van Os, Abbott's Democratic opponent. "Greg Abbott is so sure of his entitlement to public office, he thinks he has a special privilege to steal public equipment and resources to promote himself."

So with the millions of dollars Abbott has raised --and spent on TV -- in contributions from "Swift Boat" Bob Perry and the state's largest corporations, with the apparent violation of the Texas Penal Code regarding abuse of office, this is the article's moneyshot:

He said it's inexplicable why Abbott, who has a $7 million campaign bank account, would rely on state video for his campaigns. ...

Last week, as his commercial aired, Abbott wrote his supporters, complaining about the high cost of campaigning and urging them to donate more.

All-righty then.

Why is Greg Abbott so worried? What is so worrisome about his name recognition as an incumbent that he has to spend millions of his own money -- as well hundreds of thousands of the taxpayers' dollars -- on television commercials showing his armed agents busting into a house and arresting someone? Or surrounding himself with laughing children?

Another question: why isn't Abbott's wheelchair visible in any of his commercials?

And a third question: Have you seen any polling in the election for Attorney General? Considering what a publicity whore he is, do you think that if the polling were favorable to Abbott you would have heard about it in the media by now?

Fund-raising and electoral troubles aside, we're not even close to the end of Abbott's legal woes. From The Lone Star Project:

Judge Blocks AG Abbott's Vote Suppression Scheme

A short while ago, US District Court Judge T. John Ward granted a preliminary injunction stopping Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott and Texas Secretary of State Roger Williams from enforcing a Texas Law that makes it a crime to simply mail or posses a sealed ballot. This year, Abbott has aggressively prosecuted at least 13 individuals, most of whom had done nothing more then help senior citizens vote by mail. Virtually all of those prosecuted are minority senior citizens and all are Democrats. Judge Ward's order says:

For the reasons set forth in the court's findings of fact and conclusions of law, the court orders Defendants, Greg Abbott, in his official capacity as the Attorney General for the State of Texas and Roger Williams, in his official capacity as Secretary of State for the State of Texas, their employees, agents, representatives, attorneys, and servants, and all other persons acting in concert, privity, or participation with the defendants, immediately to:

1. cease enforcing, pending a trial on the merits, Tex. Elec. Code § 86.006(f) under circumstances in which a person, other than the voter, has merely possessed the official ballot or official carrier envelope and such possession is with the actual consent of the voter"
(Source: Preliminary Injunction, Willie Ray v Texas)

Read the Preliminary Injunction Here
Read the Findings of Fact Here

Over the past several months, the Lone Star Project has issued a series of investigative reports highlighting Greg Abbott's abuse of the flawed statute. Read the reports here. The Lone Star Project called for legal action against Abbott's efforts and has supported the legal challenge mounted by the six citizen plaintiffs and the Texas Democratic Party.

The Lone Star Project Director Matt Angle said, "Greg Abbott was not only improperly enforcing a flawed statute, but creating an atmosphere of intimidation and fear. Abbott has acted in a shameless manor, and Judge Ward's order is welcome protection for voters in Texas."

And from Boyd Richie:

The Texas Democratic Party has won a preliminary injunction stopping Attorney General Greg Abbott and Secretary of State Roger Williams from prosecuting voters who are trying to help seniors exercise their right to vote. Texas Republicans know that they would lose fair and free elections. That’s why they’ve done everything they can to stack the deck … even if it means willfully ignoring the law and abusing the power of their office. The examples of Republican misdeeds are numerous:

· Republicans blatantly broke the law when they pushed through an illegal redistricting plan that disenfranchised thousands of Hispanic and African American voters.

· They broke a long standing state law when they illegally used corporate money to fund state house elections.

· And, most recently, they tried to override the results of a legally held primary by attempting to remove Tom DeLay from the ballot when he decided to quit, instead of facing certain defeat at the ballot box.

It seems clear that the current Attorney General of Texas has created numerous problems for himself through misapplication of several laws, to put it as kindly as possible.

(Strangely, this message from the TDP chairman trumpeting his efforts never once mentions the Democratic candidate for Texas Attorney General. There could be a posting about whatever this means at a later time.)

Trick or treat?

You have the power.

The incredible shrinking senior senator from Texas

Some initial observations:

--If this is what is happening to her body, imagine what's going on with her brain.

-- Do we really need another preening, fawning harridan in Washington?

-- Most Republicans running for Congress are cutting and running from Bush as fast as they can. Not in Sugar Land, though. They eat this up like a dog eating another dog's vomit.

Three suggestions:

-- Turn off your TV so you won't be subjected to any more of the GOP's incessant attempts to control the minds of the poor fools like those gathered around the people you see in the picture above.

-- Ignore the Houston Chronicle, the Dallas News and the urban daily newspapers throughout the state. They have all veered hard to the right -- through the weeds and into the ditch -- trying to get their Republican friends re-elected. Update (11/1): This is what I'm talkin' about. It's so shameless I almost feel sorry for them, except when I note their plummeting circulation figures. I'm sure they're all sitting together in their respective boardrooms wondering why.

-- Vote.

More postpourri

-- the WaPo has an excellent contest called Midterm Madness utilizing an interactive Flash graphic where you can pick the seats in the Senate and House that you think will flip -- or not -- on November 7. Make your picks and submit for a chance at an AmEx gift certificate.

-- the poor mistreated corporations of America are banding together to fight back against the enormous and unrelenting legal persecution they have endured of late. See also Tom's blog for frequent commentary on this subject, usually focusing on the "harassment" of corporate executives accused of wrongdoing.

This is just about the most miserably obnoxious commentary proffered by conservatives of late (ever since they managed to take immigration nationwide, that is).

-- CNN's 'Broken Government' has been excellent; even the hit piece by Candy "Butterqueen" Crowley on the Democrats wasn't unwatchable, but the other parts of the series were examples of good solid political reporting. And among Houston media, KPRC's political page stands head and shoulders above the Chronicle and the other two broadcast outlets. Their on-demand video and coverage of local and state races is simply the best, by far. I rarely if ever watch their news, but the online resources they have assembled blow away the competition. Yesterday they televised "Straight Talk from the Candidates", where state- and county-wide party representatives were given 2.5 minutes uninterrupted to make their case directly to the voters. (This program will re-air on November 5, and is well worth watching.) Even for a political junkie like me, there are people running for office whom I have not seen nor heard speak, and this was an opportunity to gauge that intangible , emotional response to their face and voice.

Honorable mention goes to the Chronic's opinion and politics pages, and particularly cartoonist Nick Anderson's blog, deserving of special recognition for their interactive ease. The op page regularly links to local blogs, including this one, on topics not necessarily political.

-- the Republican television advertisements here are non-stop and nausea-inducing. Greg Abbott's commercial featuring his misuse of state resources just aired again. According to the Texas Penal Code Section 39.02, the state's top law enforcement officer may have committed at least a second-degree felony.

Who exactly is responsible for arresting, charging, and prosecuting the Attorney General when he commits a crime?

-- and don't miss the double edition of Sunday Funnies: Limbaughtomy and Election Day Countdown.

Postpourri

-- In the "Blind-Hog-Occasionally-Finds-an-Acorn" department, the Houston Chronicle endorsed three of my very favorite people for the Texas Legislature: Chad Khan, Dr. Diane Trautman, and Dot Nelson-Turnier. Still they managed to blow it by endorsing Sherrie Matula's opponent. In fact almost all of the rest of their endorsements were, frankly, ones you should disregard.

-- The following two links are an example of the dichotomy that currently exists in my fair city. While janitors strike for $8.50 an hour and health insurance, the Tony-est restaurants in Houston are packed full of Republicans eating truffles at $300 a plate.

Seventy-dollar-a-barrel oil (even sixty, on its way up and down) and a 12,000 point Dow don't seem to have trickled down very far.

-- Early voting is way up across the state, but e-voting issues in predominantly Democratic Jefferson County remain a source of concern. Update (10/30): Dos Centavos links to this KFDM video detailing the notorious ES&S vote-switching machines, which had problems during the primary earlier this year.

-- Crime in Houston has not increased as much as conservatives would like you to believe. And it is not due to Katrina evacuees, either.

-- Karl Rove is apparently marshaling the goonbats in order to save the GOP from certain defeat. The last mystery left for this cycle -- besides, of course, whether our votes have been counted accurately or not -- is whether he will be successful. Fear just doesn't seem to be as effective a motivation this time.

-- The Saint Louis Cardinals defeated the Detroit Tigers to win the World Series, and the nation yawned. I didn't even see much gloating by Cards fans in the places I usually look.

-- The Houston Rockets could win the NBA champeenship this season. No, really.

-- Vaya con Dios, Joe Niekro and Red Auerbach.