The moistened lips of victory

Jesus General's newest letter to the Nathan Taylor, Chairman of Young Republicans National Committee is priceless.

Dear Mr. Taylor, I was shocked by the news that dangerous leftists are planning to infiltrate your convention and attack your veterans exhibit. Kudos to you for discovering their despicable plot...read on"

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You have to read Taylor's response to the leftists attacks. "The e-mails label the Convention attendees as “repuglicans” and “Wingnuts” and call upon fellow leftists to focus their protests on “a panel discussion with recently returned Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.”

Notice how Taylor lies and tries to say that the lefties are attacking the panel because our troops are there. Again this is priceless. The Special Ops are working.

US VS. THEM: This is one reason I am proud to be a Democrat:

"ABC News conducted a bipartisan experiment in which producers and volunteers went to rallies for each candidate wearing the other party's T-shirt, and found that each campaign had its own methods of preventing the shirts from being seen.

A second team of ABC News producers waited until entering Space Coast stadium before showing its Kerry-Edwards T-shirts [at a Bush rally], but was still quickly spotted and ordered out by [Lance "Chip"] Borman [a Bush campaign worker and attorney who worked for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq], who identified himself as working for the Republican National Committee.

He said the rally of some 18,000 people was a "private event," and it made no difference that producers Christine Romo and Jessica Wang had tickets and remained silent and respectful.

"But you wore the shirts; you wore the shirts," Borman said. "And honestly, if you would have come without the shirts and sat quietly, you would have had a fun time and enjoyed it, but I mean it's not that kind of event." He then instructed the sheriff's deputies to escort the ABC News team out to the parking lot.

A Kerry staffer at an Oct. 24 Kerry rally in Boca Raton, Fla., told Bush-Cheney T-shirt wearers that the campaign held a permit to rent the site and could remove anyone who made a disturbance.

"We hold the right to remove you, but other than that, enjoy and hopefully at the end of the event you'll want to wear a Kerry T-shirt," he said.

And at Kerry's Boca Raton rally, one of the faithful Democrats could be seen calming a woman upset at the sight of the Bush-Cheney T-shirts.

"Feel proud that we let them in," he said. "That's what democracy is all about, that's what we're fighting for."

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Michael Steele's buffoonery knows no bounds, but I wonder if he's telling the truth this time or just trying to play the race card to save his job.

Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman Michael Steele, who is known for making controversial statements, on Sunday said that white Republicans are afraid of him.

Steele also took aim at some in his own party last week as well, saying that he would "come after" centrist Republicans who support healthcare reform.

The Republican chairman appeared on NewsOne's "Washington Watch" this weekend, a new Sunday political talk show aimed at a black audience. The host, Roland Martin, asked Steele how Republicans could reach out to black voters. Steele responded by talking about issues such as education, small business, jobs and the economy, The rest is in a partial transcript:

MARTIN: But your candidates got to talk to them. One of the criticisms I've always had is Republicans -- white Republicans -- have been scared of black folks.

STEELE: You're absolutely right. I mean I've been in the room and they've been scared of me. I'm like, "I'm on your side" and so I can imagine going out there and talking to someone like you, you know, [say] "I'll listen." And they're like "Well." Let me tell you. You saw in Christie and you saw in McDonnell a door open because they went in and engaged. McDonnell was very deliberate about spending...

MARTIN: Right.

STEELE: I mean, Sheila Johnson was on his team. I mean, that was a big deal. That's because he engaged her and she helped navigate him through that relationship.

Where are the black Congress members?

Michael Steele is saying that because of the color of his skin, his fellow Republicans are afraid of him. He is proving the point that we've been making for a long time. When you look at tea parties, they are predominantly white folks shouting down Obama's race and religion.

If the party Establishment is afraid of Steele, how is there any room for race relations to improve in this country---ever? This poll -- showing that Americans don't think Obama has improved race relations in the country -- first of all makes no sense: How is President Obama supposed to improve race relations when he has white supremacists, birthers, Oathers and militia members filling up the ranks the tea party brigades that are out there in full view of the American people and are smearing non-whites on a consistent basis? How is the president supposed to suddenly ease racial tensions when Republicans and mouthpieces like Fox News are promoting racial division, telling their audiences that the president is a radical black who hates white people? Why isn't Michael Steele using his position in the Republick Party to do something about it himself?

The RNC is crying over the very accurate ad that the DNC is running about John McCain. You remember his 'I'll stay in Iraq for 100 years," statement? Well, they are trying to force MSNBC and CNN to stop running the ad. Marc Ambinder reports this: (his link is broken so I'm posting it)

The Republican National Committee wants CNN and MSNBC to stop airing the DNC's new national television advertisement, calling it "false and defamatory" and illegally coordinated.

"This is a complaint about the facts that are being misrepresented in the ad, and this being a deliberate falsehood, that we are saying, stations have an obligation to protect the public from airing a deliberate falsehood," said Sean Cairncross, an RNC lawyer.

The RNC provided no evidence to support their change that the communication was illegally coordinated, aside for a few newspaper articles pointing out that some Democrats work for both a candidate and the committee, like pollster Cornell Belcher. DNC chairman Howard Dean said this morning that neither campaign saw or heard the ad before the put it out.

The RNC is ginning up the threat of legal action to give weight to their criticism of the ad's content. Cairncross would not say whether the party will sue CNN or MSNBC, the two cable networks airing the ad, if they refuse to kill it.

I noticed that FOX News wasn't included in Marc's story so my question to Howard Dean was if the DNC had already submitted the ad to FOX News and if so---did they approve or decline to run the ad?

The DNC said they did send it to FOX News, but so far have not been given a response on it. Maybe they are waiting for the RNC's blessing. Either way, no answer is an answer.

But not the kind the Republican party was probably hoping for, especially since it doesn't embarrass Democratic candidate Barack Obama, but reveals that Illinois Republican National Committee member Bob Kjellander and Denny Hastert were trying to get Patrick Fitzgerald fired during that U.S. Attorneys shake up, but his work on the Plame investigation protected him.

The Village Voice would have you believe that it paves the way for some sort of international tribunal. I'm just hoping it doesn't go down the memory hole unnoticed...

While the Democratic Congress has yet to begin a serious investigation into what many European legislators already know about American war crimes, a particularly telling report by the International Committee of the Red Cross has been leaked that would surely figure prominently in such a potential Nuremberg trial. The Red Cross itself is bound to public silence concerning the results of its human-rights probes of prisons around the world-or else governments wouldn't let them in.

But The New Yorker's Jane Mayer has sources who have seen accounts of the Red Cross interviews with inmates formerly held in CIA secret prisons. In "The Black Sites" (August 13, The New Yorker), Mayer also reveals the effect on our torturers of what they do-on the orders of the president-to "protect American values." Read on...

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is marking the International Day of the Disappeared on 30 August by calling on the international community to renew its commitment to addressing the plight of missing persons and their families.

The ICRC report includes personal accounts and narratives conveying the agony and great sense of loss that bereaved families endure over many years. “Even if there’s nothing but a skeleton, I don’t care – I just want my son back,” said Guliko Ekizashvili, a Georgian woman whose son is still missing 14 years after he disappeared during the armed conflict between Georgia and the breakaway region of Abkhazia.

[Pierre Krähenbühl, the ICRC’s director of operations] emphasized that “there are concrete measures that States and others can take to prevent such a tragedy from occurring in the first place. Often, what is lacking is the political will to tackle the problem.” He also welcomed the adoption in December 2006 of the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, a legally binding document that prohibits enforced disappearance. “The ICRC urges States to sign, ratify and implement this important treaty as soon as possible,” he declared.

When a government or army engages in "forced disappearances," it is a war crime. Is anyone here surprised that the Bush Administration has refused to sign this treaty on the grounds that it "did not meet our expectations'?

Via TPM Muckraker:

What 83 year-old William Sidwell of Queen City, Missouri found in his mailbox last week scared him. It was a letter from the Republican National Committee, but it seemed to bear grave news: "Our records show that you registered as a member of our Party in Schuyler County, MO," the letter said. "But a recent audit of your Party affiliation turned up some irregularities."

Audit? Irregularities? Was he in trouble? Were they threatening him? Sidwell went immediately to his ask his son, Dennis, a licensed public accountant, for advice. You can see the letter, and the accompanying "Voter Registration Verification and Audit Form," right here. Particularly puzzling to the both of them, Dennis told me, is that his father is a life-long Democrat.

The letter, it turns out, is just a misleading pitch for a contribution to the RNC -- one of the "irregularities" cited in the letter is that "I cannot find a record of you taking a single action in support of the Republican Party -- not locally, not nationally!" A contribution, the letter suggests, would help set the record straight.

The letter is signed by Bill Steiner, the director of the RNC's Office of Strategic Information, a title Steiner assumed at the end of July. His responsibilities "include managing the RNC’s national voter file and Voter Vault, the committee’s highly touted micro-targeting operation," Roll Call reported last month. And indeed, the voter "audit" requests detailed information about the voter's voting history and current opinions on the 2008 presidential race. Read more...

Read the entire letter here.

Raw Story:

Faced with significantly declining contributions from grassroots donors, the Republican National Committee has fired its entire team of telephone solicitors, according to a report in Friday's Washington Times.

"Faced with an estimated 40 percent falloff in small-donor contributions and aging phone-bank equipment that the RNC said would cost too much to update, Anne Hathaway, the committee's chief of staff, summoned the solicitations staff and told them they were out of work, effective immediately, fired staff members told The Times," Ralph Z. Hallow wrote in the paper. Read more...

Awww...couldn't happen to a more deserving party. The formerly well-oiled machine that was the RNC is reduced to laying people off and unable to afford new equipment for their phone banks. The Moonie Times not unexpectedly cites Bush's stance on immigration as the cause, but it's obvious to anyone who has paid attention that the Republican Party is experiencing death by a thousand cuts and immigration is not the major problem.