Salon’s review of Ashcroft’s tenure as AG makes clear his farewell letter’s assertions that we’re somehow safer as a result of his jackbooted tactics are nothing more than wishful thinking:

Being John Ashcroft apparently means never having to say you’re sorry. On Nov. 10, the attorney general congratulated himself in a farewell letter “to the American people” with this assessment: “I am blessed to leave public office in a nation that is safer and stronger than the one I found; a nation in which the flame of freedom illuminates every American and burns a signal fire to a watching world.” In fact, there is little reason to believe Ashcroft’s claim that the nation is safer and stronger; file boxes of evidence to demonstrate that if the “flame of freedom” still burns, it is despite Ashcroft’s efforts, not because of them; and every indication that the “signal fire” America is sending to the “watching world” is not one of freedom.

And, needless to say, Gonzales will almost certainly be no better. At least the Onion got some laughs out of it with its throwaway headline this week: “Ashcroft Loses Job To Mexican”.

Or at least sad for the same reason:

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. — H.L. Mencken, July 26, 1920, in The Evening Sun

Found at Slacktivist.

WASHINGTON (AP) Ñ Moving to protect Majority Leader Tom DeLay, House Republicans want to change party rules to ensure that DeLay retains his post if a Texas grand jury indicts him as it did with three of his political associates. The House Republican Conference, composed of all GOP members in the chamber, was to vote Wednesday to modify a requirement that would force DeLay to step aside if charged with a felony requiring at least a two-year prison term. Party rules require leaders to relinquish their posts after a felony indictment, but the change would eliminate the requirement for non-federal indictments.

More from the Washington Post; Josh Marshall points out the irony over at TPM, which is that this rule is the one the GOP has used over and over against Democrats in the past.

See, it’s okay to lie under oath if it’s about terrorism; just so long as you don’t do it about a blow job.

The scientific community — a segment of the “reality based community” the Bushies are so hostile to — is bracing for another four years of bullshit.

The Bush administration and the scientific community have never had an easy relationship. For the past four years, scientists have accused the Bush White House of ignoring widely accepted scientific studies in favor of fringe theories that support the administration’s political agenda. Meanwhile, government officials say scientists are exploiting research for political purposes. Never was this rift more clear than at an American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in September, when former House Science Committee chairman Bob Walker, speaking on behalf of the Bush re-election campaign, warned scientists that their moaning about the government’s treatment of science could lead to a “push back” from the federal government. More at Wired News

This administration’s tendency to view scientific findings in conflict with ideology as “politically motivated” pops up with alarming frequency, and reminds us that we have right-wing religious nutbirds in charge. Which is, apparently, the way 51% of the electorate wants it. It’s important at this point, we reckon, to note that it’s not so much that our country was founded by those seeking religious liberty; we were founded by people who were too uptight to be British. It’s this legacy that sends us into fits over sex on TV, Janet Jackson’s boob, gay marriage, medical pot, and science that disturbs our ideologies; what this means for the future of our country is left as an exercise for the reader.

We continue to fear fundamentalism of all stripes, and are pretty sure the ones we ought to be watching the most aren’t in the Mideast; it’s the ones in Washington.

He may have resigned, but he’s still the AG. Take a look at what he said to the Federalist Society, the gist of which is, basically, “judges ought not rule against the President.”

Of course, his replacement has famously described the Geneva Conventions as “quaint,” so it’s not like we’re going to be any better off.

So we got pissed off and went on hiatus. But that doesn’t mean you get a free pass; here’s some choice ranting about the state of the Union:

• In case you thought this jackass had a mandate — what with the endless chatter in the media — MediaMatters can set you straight.
• Fafblog has the only response to the phrase “Attorney General Gonzalez” that doesn’t make us want to hurl.
• So you can keep score at home these next four years, here’s 14 Signs of Fascism.
• Of course, creeping fascism isn’t limited to us; maybe Doug Adams was right about these people.
• Also, Kerry voters are smarter.

I’m too disgusted to do this anymore. I leave you with a few choice words, some mine, some from others.

Tom Tomorrow quotes Tbogg in full rant mode, which is angry, sad, and mostly accurate:

Four more years of American soldiers being used as cannon fodder. Four more years of scientific decisions being made by people who believe in a ghost in the clouds. Four more years of debt that our children and grandchildren will have to pay off. Four more years of racists and lunatics for judicial appointments Four more years of looting the treasury and squandering it on corporate cronies. Four more years of making enemies faster than we can kill them. Four more years of fear and darkness and racism and hatred and stupidity and guns and bad country music. I look at the big map and all of the red in flyover country and I feel like I’ve been locked in a room with the slow learners. We have become the country that pulls a dry cleaning bag over its head to play astronaut.

And Lessig quotes one of his commenters:

I’m going to spend time these next few days looking for the America in my heart. It may be a while before I see it anywhere else.

Billmon points us to HST in his prime:

This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. Hunter S. Thompson
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail
November 1972

And this:

The amazing thing to me about this race was that Bush could be as divisive as he wanted to be, but it never penalized him. The most important things in the world were responded to with infantile answers or complete ignorance. Where he stood was clear. Simplicity wins. Oliver Willis

Someone commented, a bit ago, that I should take comfort in it being a democracy, and that he was just as pissed off and certain of doom under Clinton, but see how it worked out?

I wish I could share that optimism, but I just can’t.

As for Clinton, I ask you this: What policies cost thousands of lives under Clinton? The British journal The Lancet estimates 100,000 Iraqi dead now, to say nothing of our own wounded and dead soldiers. What huge debts did he run up, to be paid by our children and grandchildren? What allies did he alienate in a rush to war against a country that wasn’t threatening us? What enemies did he ignore to do so? What CIA operatives did his administration “out” as political payback? When did he claim he could arrest anyone he wanted, declare them an “enemy combatant,” and be free of judicial oversight? When did his party actively campaign to amend the Constitution to LIMIT rights?

Near as I can tell, the worst thing he did was lie about a blow job in the midst of a political witch hunt. He wasn’t a great president, but he wasn’t a disaster like this guy, either.

Bush and his people have lied when the truth would do better for four years, but half the electorate doesn’t seem to care. He campaigned as a “uniter,” but cruised to office on a 5 to 4 vote and proceded to govern from the hard, hard right. His GOP is openly pandering to the nutball religious right and corporate interests, and in doing so is weakening even our last line of defense (the courts). A Bush-packed SCOTUS will be hostile to the vital decisions supporting, among other things, our right to privacy, and I’m kind of attached to it. (Remember, Griswold wasn’t about abortion; it was about the right to buy birth control.)

Add to all this the open hostility to accepted science, his endless saber-rattling while failing utterly to pursue Osama effectively, our growing quagmire in Iraq (which, contrary to Cheney, is getting worse, not better — check the stats), and frankly I don’t see much to be hopeful about. I doubt you can point to a similar list of events attributable to Clinton.

The trouble is, it wouldn’t be much better had Kerry won decisively. Under Clinton — the last president we can say really WON in the traditional sense — you saw how the GOP acted. They pursued him with a vigor and relish that defies belief for no other reason than he beat them in the election. They were gunning for him before he took office, for Christ’s sake, and they didn’t stop until they’d spent nearly a hundred million bucks and caught him in a lie about a blow job — when they were, ostensibly, investigating real estate in Arkansas. The GOP doesn’t want to govern; they want to rule, and their actions since Whitewater make that clear. There is no bipartisanship with Bush. There will be less now. They’re in power, and they’re willing to do anything it takes, pander to any divisive cause, and abandon any nominally American principle to do it. They don’t care what else happens.

Yes, it is a democracy. But you’ll never go broke pandering to the baser desires of the American populace (c.f. Fox). The GOP understands, and therefore appeals to the very worst of the soul of America. And they’re winning.

For now, I’m done. I have to figure out how to live in a country whose apparent values are hostile to tolerance, to complex solutions to complex problems, to truth, to accountability, and to critical thought.

There’s nothing like the realization that, by and large, more than half your countrymen are willing to vote for a party of greed, fear, bigotry, and war despite just having four years of precisely that.

That John Kerry did not win in a walk is disgusting. It sickens me. Bush and his cronies have lied and been caught at it dozens of times, and on issues far more important than a fucking extramarital blow job, but no one cares. He has taken us to war in Iraq for no good reason (though he cited several candidates over time), and now has us stuck in an ever-worsening quagmire while Osama is still at large. He’s presided over the worst jobs record since Hoover. He’s spending us into oblivion. His organization funds and supports groups like Swift Boat Vets, whose members have no compunction about saying whatever they think will hurt Bush’s challenger. His party wants to institutionalize bigotry in the form of an anti-gay marriage amendment, and is openly hostile to the right to privacy enshrined in Griswold and Roe. I could go on and on here. It’s that bad.

And yet, at last count, 58,000,000 people voted for this goatfucker, and I’m not very proud to share a country with them. Frankly, if the GOP keeps moving us in this direction, I think there’s a very good chance that, eventually, I won’t. They’ve made it abundantly clear they will do whatever it takes to win, no matter what that implies. Given how they fought Clinton — for no reason other than he beat them at the polls — can you imagine a gracious loss in this case, should Ohio’s provisional ballots go Kerry’s way? Last time the SCOTUS gave Bush the election; this time he may well have generated enough hate and fear to win in outright (but barely), and that doesn’t bode well for this country.

My home state has joined eight others in approving a gay marriage ban. In Mississippi, the margin was 85%.

Reading this site, you might get the impression that we’re foursquare against the whole notion of electronic voting. That’s not quite right; information technology COULD play a valuable role in the electoral process, and could, if done correctly and carefully, actually lower the margin of error.

However, that’s unlikely to happen with proprietary systems like Diebold’s. And that’s why we support the Open Voting Consortium, a group dedicated to creating an open source voting system. With open source, it would be easy to verify that the code was good, that the tallying methods were unbiased, and that the best algorithms and practices were used. We’ll never have that with Diebold. OVC is a small group, but it’s a promising idea, and one much more likely to preserve our votes than black boxes from Diebold.

(Thanks, Eric!)

BoingBoing points out the perils of e-voting.

This site documents voter fraud, voter supression, and voter intimidation today. Watch carefully, especially now that the appeals court has said the Ohio thugs can challenge away.

Bev Harris has uncovered evidence that Diebold voting machines may be hacked through their modems during an election.

Josh Marshall details a story from ABC on the whole Kerry-shirts-at-Bush-rallies thing. Basically, they got folks to wear the other guy’s shirts at campaign events, and then documented the results. No surprises here: Dems were polite, but tried to surround the Bush shirts so they wouldn’t be on camera; the GOP threw them out.

Vote.

They’re now pledging allegience to Bush. Billmon over at Whiskey Bar has a bit more.

The GOP’s Justice Department is arguing that only they, not individual voters, may sue to enforce the voting rights portions of the Help American Vote act.

Veteran voting-rights lawyers expressed surprise at the government’s action, saying that closing the courthouse door to aspiring voters would reverse decades of precedent. Since the civil rights era of the 1960s, individuals have gone to federal court to enforce their right to vote, often with the support of groups such as the NAACP, the AFL-CIO, the League of Women Voters or the state parties. And until now, the Justice Department and the Supreme Court had taken the view that individual voters could sue to enforce federal election law.

Remember, if you vote for Bush, you’re voting for shit like this.

Atrios has a bit about bigoted administrators at a Missouri school. Nice.

Either that, or they’re becoming increasingly desperate. A GOP mailout in Pennsylvania includes images of the burning WTC in an attempt, we suppose, to suggest that Kerry won’t protect us.

The degree to which the Bush team “protected” us on 9/11 is left as an exercise to the reader.

Jesus Tapdancing Christ, do these people have no shame whatsoever?

When Catherine Herold received mail from the Ohio Republican Party earlier this year, she refused it. The longtime Barberton Democrat wanted no part of the mailing and figured that by refusing it, the GOP would have to pay the return postage. What she didn’t count on was the returned mail being used to challenge the validity of her voter registration.

The GOP is unapologetic:

The angry voters had the Republicans on the defensive. “Why’d you do it?” one challenged voter shouted out at [Howard] Calhoun [one of the four challengers]. “Who the hell are you?” the man asked. “What the hell do you care?” replied Calhoun, an attorney. After the hearing, Calhoun said he felt the challenges were legitimate.

If you think that reducing voter turnout helps your cause, you’ve got a problem. If you try to quash legitimate voter registrations, you’re just about as far from the ideals this country is supposed to be about as you can be, and I wouldn’t cross the street to piss on you if you were on fire, you evil goatfucking jackasses.

The Economist and American Conservative have both endorsed John Kerry.

The Medium Lobster endorses George Bush:

When it comes to the war on terror, America cannot afford to have the wrong man at the helm. The leader of the free world must understand that this clash of civilizations is, above all things, a war of concepts, and he must have the strength and the purity to embrace the boldest possible vision. Now more than ever, America needs a man of ideas in the Oval Office. George W. Bush is that man. For his administration had not only embraced ideas, it exists, in a sense, only as an idea. It has so rapidly and so readily embraced the boldest of ideas that it has transcended the need for real actions, real plans, real accomplishments, and reality itself. Any leader could have made the war on terror into a tedious, ongoing struggle to unearth and uproot a multi-tentacled terrorist organization while attempting to heal the rifts between the Muslim world and the West. But George Bush didn’t just see the task: he saw the grand idea behind the task, and better still, the vague abstractions behind the grand idea. And he was willing to fight those vague abstractions. Terror, weapons of mass destruction – they may not have been really in Iraq, but the idea of them most certainly was. And that was an idea the world’s only superpower had to confront with real troops.

Giblets, of course, endorses Giblets.

One candidate is taking Giblets – and the threat of Giblets – seriously. One candidate knows that if Giblets’s rivals are elected president he could transform into a pack of ravenous wolves and eat your children. And that candidate is Giblets.

Fafnir, though, endorses a gila monster, but not without real deliberation:

It is a confusin an frightenin time to be America. Because a 9/11 an these Times Of Change. “Oh no!” says America. “I’m so confused who do I voooote for!” You need steady leadership in times a change America. The steady leadership of a big ol dog. Some other candidates say they are steady but are they really? Or are they just suspiciously french an ketchupy? “Sacre bleu, vive le France,” say some other candidates. “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” Well always know where a big ol dog stands on hard issues like terror!” “HRARRGL HRAARRGL GRRRAAARRRGL,” says a big ol dog bitin an spittin an growlin at terror. The dog is also tough on other dogs, postal workers, small children, plants an stuff that looks like plants.