Harry Reid: Daschle Redux?
Tom Bevan Mon May 22, 9:13 AM ET

Sherman Frederick, the publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, writes that Harry Reid's kowtowing to the Pelosi wing of the Democratic party has made him unelectable in Nevada:
And finally, Harry Reid has never been a thoroughbred racehorse on the track of Nevada politics. He's been more like a stubborn mule who never gives up, never gives in. And, in the heat of past races, he's been known to kick a few opponents in the head.
"Landslide Harry" is used to close races. Races that can be decided by a few thousand, and even a few hundred votes. But those were races before Harry became the top Democratic dog in the U.S. Senate. Before he disappeared as a conservative Democrat from Nevada. Before he started eyeing Nancy Pelosi's wardrobe.
Nevadans elected the Harry I've hiked the desert with in blue jeans and dusty work boots. But on national TV they see a guy in a capri and sandals.
Not pretty.....More

Storms and Blair on the attack

No love was lost between Hillsborough's school leaders and County Commissioners Brian Blair and Ronda Storms during Wednesday's debate over raising assessments on new homes to pay for schools.Storms and Blair, on the losing end of a 4-2 vote to raise impact fees from $196 to $4,000 over the next two years, fired off scathing shots at school officials."I have no faith in any of its numbers or any of its spending habits," Blair said......More

"Immigration is the big issue right now. Earlier today, the Senate voted to build a 370-mile fence along the Mexican border. ... Experts say a 370-mile fence is the perfect way to protect a border that is 1,900 miles long." ..........Conan O'Brien

Day of Action: Tampa, Florida
Debbe Kelley is one of the organizers of DFA Tampa Bay.

The Tampa DFA Team got lots of support for two great candidates who will be on the ballot here in November. Charlie Justice is a Democrat currently serving in the Florida House and running to represent us in the heavily Republican Florida Senate. We're counting on Charlie take this open seat away from them.

Mary Mulhern, also a Democrat, is running for an open seat on the Hillsborough County Commission. This group of local law-makers has made the national news lately for its track record of intolerance and Mary is just the person to represent the enlightened voters of Hillsborough.

There are many of us here and we were out in force Saturday morning! We collected signatures to get Charlie and Mary on the ballot, registered several new voters and celebrated to hear from the many Republicans and Independents who said "It's time for a change" and "Enough is enough!" We had such a great time that we're having another event this Saturday. Can't wait to get back out there!

—Debbe Kelley

Human Rights member quits over governor's veto of bill

BURLINGTON, Vt. -- The last member of the Vermont Human Rights Commission appointed by former Gov. Howard Dean has resigned over the veto by Gov. James Douglas of a bill that would have outlawed discrimination against people based on their gender identity of expression.
In a letter to the governor, Charles Kletecka said he resigned to protest the veto.
"Vermont has a long and proud tradition of protecting the rights of those among us who are most vulnerable to discrimination," Kletecka wrote......More

Ned vs. Joe

We’ve always understood the amount of grassroots support this campaign has in Connecticut and across the country, but tonight’s results displayed an impressive amount of institutional firepower backing that up. This is how a movement changes the direction of our country.....Ned Lamont

Ned Lamont: 505
Joe Lieberman: 1004
Total Needed for Ballot: 15%
Ned Receives: 505 (33.4%)

......More

Democratic Activists Seek to Punish Their Own for Backing Bush

Democratic activist groups that mounted an aggressive campaign against President George W. Bush in the 2004 election have a new target: Democrats who support his policies.
A loose network of organizations, ranging from women's groups to Internet bloggers, is pressuring incumbents such as Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and Representatives Jane Harman of California and Melissa Bean of Illinois, in some cases by backing insurgent candidates in primary elections.
The groups charge that these and other Democrats have been too supportive of Bush on issues like Iraq and trade, and say they're trying to energize voters disillusioned with a party that has failed to draw clear distinctions with Republicans.....More

Brave Soul In Dunedin Fl.

PENNSYLVANIA: PROBLEMS FOR THE GOP?

Analysts looking at Tuesday's shocking primary -- a day in which an astounding 15 state legislative incumbents lost their primaries (nearly all Republicans) -- could be a bad omen in the state for Republicans in November. The vote was largely a backlash by GOP primary voters against GOP incumbents who backed unpopular, hefty payraises for themselves. Senate President Pro Tempore Robert Jubelirer (R), who lost his primary, called Tuesday "a dramatic earthquake in Pennsylvania." Club for Growth President Pat Toomey (R-PA), a former Congressman, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that the "message you have to take away is that rank-and-file Republican voters are very angry with incumbents. It's a mistake to conclude this was all about the pay raise. This has been brewing for some time and it's about dissatisfaction with elected Republicans who have abandoned a commitment to limited government." Toomey went on to explain to the New York Times that angry Republicans were free to express their disgust with Republican incumbents in the primary by voting for challengers -- but that he expected many of these angry Republicans to simply stay home in November because they don't want to vote for Democrats. Toomey also added that many Republicans serving in Congress had "lost their way" by backing "a fiscal culture of deficits and pork barrel spending." In another interesting development, it appears over 21,000 Republicans who voted on Tuesday skipped the top of the ballot by declining to vote for US Senator Rick Santorum (R) in his unopposed primary -- although these same voters cast ballots for Lynn Swann for Governor in his unopposed primary.......More

Mayor Pam Iorio’s Riverwalk

project is in full swing and after ballparking anticipated expenditures, officials have slapped on a price tag of about $40 million. Although intimidating at first glance, the investment could yield immense profit for downtown Tampa, but who will carry the cost?.....more

I4 And 21th st. Ybor City

Tampa Bay's Independent Streak

New voter registration statistics are burnishing the Tampa Bay region's reputation as the home of swing voters, the persuadables who are independent-minded and not tethered to either party.

Since Feb. 26, when the state state kicked off an aggressive effort to register voters, more than 19,000 people have signed up in the five-county region that includes Pinellas, Pasco, Hillsborough, Hernando and Citrus counties. In all, new Democrats outnumber new Republicans by 7,106 to 6,844, but the total number of voters who registered as NPAs, or no party affiliation, is 5,781, far above the statewide NPA average of about 20 percent......More

This Guy Love's Bush So Much He Had To Tell Everyone. Apparently His Neighbor Does Not Feel The Same Way.

Dangerous Liaison
by Robert Kuttner

Shame on Hillary Rodham Clinton. Rupert Murdoch, the right-wing publishing mogul, is hosting a fund-raiser in July for her Senate reelection campaign. Her explanation is that Murdoch, based in New York, is an important constituent: ''I'm very gratified that he thinks I'm doing a good job."
Murdoch runs Fox television, home of Bill O'Reilly and company. No far-right media enterprise has been more relentlessly dishonest in its efforts to destroy American liberalism in general and the Clintons in particular. Fox was prime cheerleader for the bogus Whitewater investigation and the impeachment campaign against Bill Clinton. Fox exists to oppose every liberal principle that Senator Clinton is accused, perhaps falsely, of standing for.
Murdoch also publishes the tawdry, viciously anti-Clinton New York Post and the more sober ideological print organ the Weekly Standard. You can't imagine the opposite kind of deal happening in American politics, because a left-wing Murdoch doesn't exist. That's why the man is so powerful, and such a nemesis to principled liberals.
Politics may make strange bedfellows, but for sheer cynicism and mutual expediency it's hard to beat this alliance. Maybe the Hitler-Stalin pact.
What's in it for Hillary? First, obviously, the money. By raising mountains of campaign cash, she hopes to make herself the inevitable 2008 nominee........More

Democrats Have Opportunity but No Strategy
by David Rossie

There is this television commercial in which a boy standing in a wooden tree hut asks a man playing an exterminator if it's true that termites eat wood. When the exterminator says it is indeed true and describes the little pests' appetites, the kid replies: "We're doomed."
"Not necessarily," the man says, reassuringly, and explains how he can prevent it.
In a case of life imitating art, I was approached by a woman following a talk last week. She began reciting a litany of all the ills that have beset this once proud and respected country since the Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld Gang took it hostage, and concluded by saying: "We're doomed."
Not necessarily," I replied, although not reassuringly, because I'm far less confident than that pretend exterminator.
"But we've got to put up with them for two-and-a-half more years," she protested.
"Not necessarily," I said again, starting to sound like a stuck record......More

Great article on Ceasar Chavez

I hope this is a sign of things to come, even if the dems dont have no backbone.......Click Here

THE SPIES WHO SHAG US
The Times and USA Today have Missed the Bigger Story -- Again
Greg Palast

I know you're shocked -- SHOCKED! -- that George Bush is listening in on all your phone calls. Without a warrant. That's nothing. And it's not news. This is: the snooping into your phone bill is just the snout of the pig of a strange, lucrative link-up between the Administration's Homeland Security spy network and private companies operating beyond the reach of the laws meant to protect us from our government. You can call it the privatization of the FBI -- though it is better described as the creation of a private KGB.
The leader in the field of what is called "data mining," is a company called, "ChoicePoint, Inc," which has sucked up over a billion dollars in national security contracts. Worried about Dick Cheney listening in Sunday on your call to Mom? That ain't nothing. You should be more concerned that they are linking this info to your medical records, your bill purchases and your entire personal profile including, not incidentally, your voting registration. Five years ago, I discovered that ChoicePoint had already gathered 16 billion data files on Americans -- and I know they've expanded their ops at an explosive rate. They are paid to keep an eye on you -- because the FBI can't. For the government to collect this stuff is against the law unless you're suspected of a crime. (The law in question is the Constitution.) But ChoicePoint can collect it for "commercial" purchases -- and under the Bush Administration's suspect reading of the Patriot Act -- our domestic spying apparatchiks can then BUY the info from ChoicePoint. Who ARE these guys selling George Bush a piece of you? ChoicePoint's board has more Republicans than a Palm Beach country club. It was funded, and its board stocked, by such Republican sugar daddies as billionaires Bernie Marcus and Ken Langone -- even after Langone was charged by the Securities Exchange Commission with abuse of inside information. I first ran across these guys in 2000 in Florida when our Guardian/BBC team discovered the list of 94,000 "felons" that Katherine Harris had ordered removed from Florida's voter rolls before the election. Virtually every voter purged was innocent of any crime except, in most cases, Voting While Black. Who came up with this electoral hit list that gave Bush the White House? ChoicePoint, Inc. And worse, they KNEW the racially-tainted list of felons was bogus. And when we caught them, they lied about it. While they've since apologized to the NAACP, ChoicePoint's ethnic cleansing of voter rolls has been amply rewarded by the man the company elected. And now ChoicePoint and George Bush want your blood. Forget your phone bill. ChoicePoint, a sickened executive of the company told us in confidence, "hope[s] to build a database of DNA samples from every person in the United States ...linked to all the other information held by CP [ChoicePoint]" from medical to voting records. And ChoicePoint lied about that too. The company publicly denied they gave DNA to the Feds -- but then told our investigator, pretending to seek work, that ChoicePoint was "the number one" provider of DNA info to the FBI. "And that scares the hell out of me," said the executive (who has since left the company), because ChoicePoint gets it WRONG so often. We are not contracting out our Homeland Security to James Bond here. It's more like Austin Powers, Inc. Besides the 97% error rate in finding Florida "felons," Illinois State Police fired the company after discovering ChoicePoint had produced test "results" on rape case evidence ... that didn't exist. And ChoicePoint just got hit with the largest fine in Federal Trade Commission history for letting identity thieves purchase 145,000 credit card records. But it won't stop, despite Republican senators shedding big crocodile tears about "surveillance" of innocent Americans. That's because FEAR is a lucrative business -- not just for ChoicePoint, but for firms such as Syntech, Sybase and Lockheed-Martin -- each of which has provided lucrative posts or profits to connected Republicans including former Total Information Awareness chief John Poindexter (Syntech), Marvin Bush (Sybase) and Lynn Cheney (Lockheed-Martin). But how can they get Americans to give up our personal files, our phone logs, our DNA and our rights? Easy. Fear sells better than sex -- and they want you to be afraid. Back to today's New York Times, page 28: "Wider Use of DNA Lists is Urged in Fighting Crime." And who is providing the technology? It comes, says the Times, from the work done on using DNA fragments to identity victims of the September 11 attack. And who did that job (for $12 million, no bid)? ChoicePoint, Inc. Which is NOT mentioned by the Times. "Genetic surveillance would thus shift from the individual [the alleged criminal] to the family," says the Times -- which will require, of course, a national DNA database of NON-criminals. It doesn't end there. Turn to the same newspaper, page 23, with a story about a weird new law passed by the state of Georgia to fight illegal immigration. Every single employer and government agency will be required to match citizen or worker data against national databases to affirm citizenship. It won't stop illegal border crossing, but hey, someone's going to make big bucks on selling data. And guess what local boy owns the data mine? ChoicePoint, Inc., of Alpharetta, Georgia. The knuckleheads at the Times don't put the three stories together because the real players aren't in the press releases their reporters re-write. But that's the Fear Industry for you. You aren't safer from terrorists or criminals or "felon" voters. But the national wallet is several billion dollars lighter and the Bill of Rights is a couple amendments shorter. And that's their program. They get the data mine -- and we get the shaft. **********

Big Brother's Secret Calling Plan

Disclosure of the NSA's illegal database of Americans' telephone records has brought outraged demands for an investigation -- and for legal action against the government.
With the revelations Thursday in U.S.A. Today that the National Security Agency has compiled a vast database of every telephone call made in the U.S., President George W. Bush, who took pains yesterday not to deny the program's existence, is now fighting for his political life. The outraged reaction to the program by members of the U.S. Senate, including from some Republican members, even suggests that impeachment proceedings could be brought against the President should Democrats gain a majority in November.......More

Spying

Two great article's Watching What You Say
Hey, Kids: Spying Is Fun!

FUN WITH SURVEILLANCE.

Turns out the NSA, with the collaboration of every phone company except Qwest, is monitoring all of our calls -- not to listen in to what's being said, but simply to gather data about the calls and draw inferences from that. It's important to link this up to the broader chain. One thing the Bush administration says it can do with this meta-data is to start tapping your calls and listening in, without getting a warrant from anyone. Having listened in on your calls, the administration asserts that if it doesn't like what it hears, it has the authority to detain you indefinitely without trial or charges, torture you until you confess or implicate others, extradite you to a Third World country to be tortured, ship you to a secret prison facility in Eastern Europe, or all of the above. If, having kidnapped and tortured you, the administration determines you were innocent after all, you'll be dumped without papers somewhere in Albania left to fend for yourself. --Matthew Yglesias

It's OK When Republicans Do It

A furor erupted Tuesday over Housing Secretary Alphonso Jackson's recent suggestion that Bush critics should forget about winning government contracts. After Democrats demanded an investigation into violations of federal procurement law and accused the administration of playing favorites, a Jackson spokeswoman said he'd made up a story about a would-be contractor who was rejected after saying he didn't like President Bush."It's not a true story. It's a made-up story," said Jackson spokeswoman Dustee Tucker, adding that he was only trying to make a point about how Washington works.

President Jeb Bush

President Bush suggested Wednesday that he'd like to see his family's White House legacy continue, perhaps with his younger brother Jeb as the chief executive.