Texas GOP Promises To Stop Committing Crimes

The Texas Republican Party has struck what might be the sweetest deal in the criminal justice system since Al Capone went to jail for income tax evasion:

The Republican Party of Texas avoided prosecution Thursday by agreeing to stop using corporate money in several ways being investigated by Travis County Attorney David Escamilla.

Escamilla's investigation, which is similar to allegations being pursued by Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle against U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay and the Texas Association of Business, is put on hold through March 31, 2007. In return, the Republican Party agrees to stop using corporate money the way it did during the 2002 election. The party's administrative expenses spiked five-fold to about $5.6 million that year.

State law generally prohibits corporate money being spent in connection with campaigns. The law allows political parities to spend corporate money to run their conventions and on administrative overhead. Escamilla had studied some 27,000 GOP documents, but his investigation in the end focused on three instances of using corporate money. [Austin American Statesman

Here's how this works: If the Republicans promise to stop breaking the laws they broke in 2002, the DA won't prosecute them for the 2002 infractions until after the 2006 elections.
By Lindsay Beyerstein of

Corporations Have Higher Profits During Liberal Presidencies Liberal Truths

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2003 the years where a Republican President was in office show that Corporations have lower Profits Before Tax than when a Democratic President was in office.

Republican President George Herbert Walker Bush:
In 1990 Corporate Profits Before Tax was $236,000,000,000.

Democratic President William Jefferson Clinton:
Started his Presidency in 1993 with Corporate Profits Before Tax increasing to $305,000,000,000.
Ended his Presidency in 2000 with Corporate Profits Before Tax further increasing to $436,000,000,000.

Republican President George Walker Bush:
Started his Presidency in 2001 with Corporate Profits Before Tax reducing to $327,000,000,000.
By the end of 2002 Corporate Profits Before Tax were further reduced to $316,000,000,000.

The highest rate of Corporate Profits Before Tax between 1990 and 2002 was in 1997 with $494,000,000,000 when William Jefferson Clinton was President.

Source: 15-business.pdf No. 737

Suburban Guerrilla

Rolling Stone interviews Krugman on Social Security:

In selling the idea that there's a crisis, Bush has a lot of powerful words on his side: "choice," "freedom," "ownership society." What words do you have to counter his sales job?

Scam. Three-card monte. I've been thinking a lot about flying pigs. The privateers are claiming that you can have something for nothing. They're basically saying, "Let's assume that pigs can fly." And when you say, "You know, it's not good to assume that pigs can fly," they respond by saying, "What's wrong with you? Don't you understand the enormous advantage of flying pigs?"

The only reason they talk about how wonderful an ownership society would be is because we managed to win the battle over the word privatization. The Cato Institute -- which is the intellectual headquarters for all this stuff -- founded something in 1995 called the Project on Social Security Privatization. But focus groups don't like that word, so in 2002 they changed the name to the Project on Social Security Choice. They didn't announce a name change -- they just went back and scrubbed their Web site, so there's no indication that it was ever called "privatization."

If there's no crisis in Social Security, why aren't the Democrats saying that more clearly and forcefully?

There's a lot of timidity. They're desperately afraid of seeming like "Oh, well -- we have our heads in the sand, and we're not active." I would like to see them step up to the plate and say that these claims that we're going to have a crisis sometime in the next fifteen years is just garbage. Bush is handing them an opportunity by making this the centerpiece of his agenda. Democrats should treat privatizing Social Security the way Republicans treated Clinton's health-care plan -- they should say, "This is a disaster, and we will stand against it." Social Security is simply not the biggest problem facing the government today.

City of Chicago uses Ebay!

Chicago to auction Windy City 'experiences'

CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- City officials hope there are people willing to pay plenty of money to own a vintage Playboy Bunny costume, toss green dye into the Chicago River or throw a dinner party prepared by Oprah Winfrey's chef.

The Chicago-related items and experiences -- Playboy Enterprises and Winfrey's show are both based in the city, and turning the Chicago River green for St. Patrick's Day is a hallowed city tradition -- will be up for sale December 2-16 on eBay.

The Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, which is sponsoring the auction, has seen its budget from federal, state and city sources decline from $11.8 million in 2002 to a projected $8.8 million next year, said department spokeswoman Anne Dattulo.

Hmmm...I guess Dick Cheney was right!

TwinCities.com:

A two-day prostitution sting in St. Paul netted 35 men, including a longtime Republican operator in Minnesota politics.

Peter Hong, 41, of Minneapolis, was one of 19 men picked up Wednesday afternoon after police say he responded to an ad for sex put out in newspapers and online by the St. Paul Police Department's vice squad.

The Carleton grad was a campaign spokesman for Gov. Tim Pawlenty in 2002 and congressional press secretary to Sen. Rod Grams, R-Minn., for much of the 1990s. He also served as the Bush-Cheney Minnesota campaign spokesman in 2004. His most recent political stint was as presidential campaign spokesman for Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

Hong is currently self-employed and "Always Searching for the Next Big Thing!" according to his profile on the business-networking Web site LinkedIn. Read on...

Another loyal Bushie goes down in flames. It appears Mr. Hong has indeed found the next big thing.

The Pew Research Center’s latest report notes, “Trends in the opinions of America’s youngest voters are often a barometer of shifting political winds.” If so, the winds are at Democrats’ backs, and will be for a quite a while. While young people shifted to the Democratic Party a bit in the 1990s, the bottom fell out for the GOP and younger voters during Bush’s presidency.

In 1992, Republicans enjoyed a slight edge in party identification among 18-29 year olds, 47% to 46%. Four years later, Democrats claimed a six-point edge, 50% to 44%. By the time of the 2000 election, Democrats’ lead had expanded slightly to eight points, 49% to 41%.

And voters under the age of 30 have been making a beeline from the Republican Party ever since. In 2004, Democrats’ lead among young voters’ party ID expanded to 11 points, 51% to 40%. And in 2008, the margin became a landslide — Democrats 58%, Republicans 33%.

What’s striking is not just the one-sided nature of young voters’ preferences, but the speed with which the change occurred. As recently as the 2002 midterms, voters aged 18 to 29 split evenly between Democrats and Republicans. In the 2006 midterms, they backed Democrats, 63% to 33%. Between 2004 and 2008, the party ID shift has more than doubled in Dems’ direction.

The change is also broadly based. From the Pew report:

In fact, the Democrats’ advantage among the young is now so broad-based that younger men as well as younger women favor the Democrats over the GOP — making their age category the only one in the electorate in which men are significantly more inclined to self-identify as Democrats rather than as Republicans.

While more women voters in every age group affiliate with the Democratic Party rather than the GOP, the gap is particularly striking among young women voters; more than twice as many women voters under age 30 identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party as favor the Republican Party (63% vs. 28%).

Talk about your emerging Democratic majority.

An oldie (2002) but a goodie from The Onion. Open thread below...

March 13, 2002

So I don't know where he is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him, Kelly, to be honest with you. I'm more worried about making sure that our soldiers are well-supplied; that the strategy is clear; that the coalition is strong; that when we find enemy bunched up like we did in Shahikot Mountains, that the military has all the support it needs to go in and do the job, which they did.

Q But don't you believe that the threat that bin Laden posed won't truly be eliminated until he is found either dead or alive?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, as I say, we haven't heard much from him. And I wouldn't necessarily say he's at the center of any command structure. And, again, I don't know where he is. I -- I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him. I know he is on the run. I was concerned about him, when he had taken over a country. I was concerned about the fact that he was basically running Afghanistan and calling the shots for the Taliban. (h/t Joe)

I've been trying to get some sort of handle on exactly what went on in Somalia. Something about it did not pass the smell test for me. A military expert with whom I consulted expressed some of the same reservations about the story that I had (albeit with far more specific knowledge).

First, the AC-130 is not a precision weapon in any practical term. It is fairly accurate area weapon and can contain it's fire to areas slightly larger than a football pitch (100mx90m). They may have hit "a senior terrorist figure" (who can tell from that altitude) but they hit a lot of other people in the process. Unless there were special forces on the ground calling in the fire it would be haphazard. Talk about back to the future, when every dead Vietnamese was Viet Cong -- the only requirement for identification was an unmoving corpse.

Then, as a follow up, he sent this article from the Guardian UK:

The US air strike on Somalia failed to kill any of the three top al-Qaida members accused of terror attacks in east Africa.

A senior US official said today that Sunday night's attack had killed between eight and 10 "al-Qaida affiliates" near the southern tip of Somalia.

But he said that Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, Abu Taha al-Sudan and Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, all linked to the 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania and the 2002 Mombasa hotel attack, were still on the run. "Fazul is not dead," said the official, contradicting earlier reports. "The three high-value targets are still of interest to us."

I'm not sure what to think about this. Why Somalia now? Is this another case of "Wag the Dog" the Republicans accused Clinton of during the "Monica-gate" scrutiny?

Int'l. Herald Tribune :

Observing President George W. Bush in action lately, we have to wonder if he actually watched the election returns in November, or if he was just rerunning the 2002 vote on his TiVo.
[..]In 2006, the voters sent Bush a powerful message that it was time to rein in his imperial ambitions. But we have yet to see any sign that Bush understands that. Indeed, he seems to have interpreted his party's drubbing as a mandate to keep pursuing his fantasy of victory in Iraq and to press ahead undaunted with his assault on civil liberties and the judicial system. Read full article here