That leaves the Minnesota Republican Party the standing record holder for fraudulent votes cast, as they proved during the five months they fought to keep Coleman from admitting his loss. The reason I say “proved” is that they put a number of people on the witness stand who admitted they submitted absentee ballots with forged signatures, etc. as part of their argument that their votes should be counted in spite of their fraud.

My question this morning is why, once again, there was no evidence of dead people voting, of multiple votes by Dem operatives, millions of illegal aliens voting, and all the other popular myths about voter fraud? It can’t be that there never was widespread voter fraud in the first place, could it?

Nah, it’s got to be the powerful effect of poll watchers planning to go to select precincts, and then those savvy and well-informed fraudulent voters responding by going elsewhere or staying home after being informed by their network of spies. Yeah, that’s it. There must have been leaks in all those small groups of motivated patriots out to protect our election system. They’ll just have to tighten their internal security before the next election, or it could get stolen, too.

Diogenes reply to the above excellent essay:

(Before reading this, please turn off your cerebrum to avoid overheating)

There is a flaw in your reasoning, you want to know what it is:
The people who are doing this voter intimidation work, people who mostly don’t think that is what is is, are delusional. (Duh!)

An individual with the kind of self inflicted brain damage that leads them to think this way, will think that the reason that the GOP took back so many of the seats in The House that the Democrats (led by that 70 year old vote-burglar, Pelosi) stole from them in 2006 and 2008, was the new crew of poll-watchers.

That high level of vote-stealing is the only way to explain why ordinary House districts filled with God-fearing, white-bread and American-cheese eating Americans, voted in 2006 and 2008 for that skinny communist harpy and her evil henchpersons. And that tall African-born hippy with a crewcut.

Likewise, they know that the Democrats stuffed the ballot boxes in Bridgeport, leading to the defeat of that hero of the middle class, Foley, by some guy with an Irish name who isn’t even a Republican. And that there is no vote-stealing by Republicans except in Minnesota, and even then, it is to prevent a Jewish Democrat from defeating their Jewish Republican.

The large number of Tea-Party voter-fraud catchers who cam out last week deterred people like you and me from taking a second trip to the voting booth. And especially, it kept the ten million illegal Mexicans in each state, from taking over and imposing Sharia law. Of course it was too dangerous for the patriots to stand around in Brigeport, that’s why they lost it there.

Diogenes has friend who is an actual Republican who spent most of a week to get the credentials to do this poll watching crap. He lives in NJ, but he did not do this watching in Newark or Irvington, where it might really happen, but near his home. In a district that already has a competent Republican poll inspector.

Do you get it now? (OK to re-engage the brain now unless it is smoking)

Nobody would ever put Diogenes in the position of top management of a big company. As my friend Mark (who does run a company) tells me, I just don’t have the skills. But even a person of moderate intelligence and experience can see, this is a call for help. It is time today for the BP Board of Trustees (or whatever they have in London) to fire Tony Hayward and put the poor bastard out of misery.

It is totally unfair for the Obama administration to portray that the situation is totally the fault of BP.
To be fair to Mr. Obama, BP does deserve over 90% of the blame. When BP says that the US Government told them it is OK to do business the way they do it, that is true. The Government told them it is OK, when Spencer Abraham was Energy Secretary, when Dick Cheney was The Man in energy policy. The Government probably deserves 10% of the blame – and we should be talking about who did it. Diogenes is old enough to remember the Republicans shouting “Who Lost China?” Well, the answer they gave was that Truman lost China, but in reality, Chiang Kai-Shek lost it. Those of us with strong voices should be shouting now, “Who Lost The Gulf?” The answer is, BP did it, and they had as accomplices the Bush Administration and the Republican majorities in the House and the Senate. Some of the credit for this debacle rests with the 41 members of the Senate who are willing to filibuster any effort to control the big oil companies.

Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, Scott Brown, I am talking to you.
Each of you has the ability to help to rectify the situation, and you are not doing it. Mr.Obama has made appointments to Homeland Security that have been filibustered in the Senate.
You three are not there to help. You are exactly as culpable as Mr. Cheney and Mr. McConnell.

In whining that the Government let them act as they did, BP forget to mention that they certified under penalty of perjury, that they had a disaster plan, a well thought out program just in case a very bad thing happened. BP did not have such a plan. When they said everything is under control, they knew it was not. When they said the oil spill was minimal, they knew it was not. Stephen Chu, the Energy Secretary, says that he offered to bring a team to meet with BP about the spill. BP told him it’s too complicated you would not understand. Dr. Chu says that he told them that he won the Nobel Prize for his work in Plasma Physics, and oil drilling is probably not more complicated than Plasma Phsyics.

The Republican critics of Mr. Obama, who say this is Obama’s Kristina, are wrong on the facts.
They don’t know about why the spill occurred. They are not willing to let the Government look in to see about remediation. They are only willing to howl and to pretend that the BP Oil Spill was caused by Presuidenty Obama, because it happened on his watch. The Oil Spill is Bush’s Kristina. Yes, the BP spill as also Bush’s Kristina.

John Boehner, the same. Life is not about fear – unless you are a Republican.
It is about making choices, most of which are weighed as Better or Worse Sometimes if we get lucky, Better or Less Better. Under curent conditions, Worse or Less Worse (that’s Worser or Worserer to one well known Republican).

The people who are now talking about needing to be afraid, are the same people who created the conditions they claim to be afraid of.
Where were the Republicans in 1993, when the Democrats balanced the budget? Hint : Al Gore had to cast the deciding vote, as VP.
Where were the Republicans in 2001, when the budget was in surplus, and they decided to give you and me a $600 refund, and gave the wealthiest people in America, a billion dollars each. And threw the federal budget into a ditch. Mitch McConnell was not worried then about the deficit. No Republican was worried about the deficit. After a while they ran the economy into the same ditch. Then when the Democrats came to power, these GOP lying assholes started whining that every solution to getting the economy back on the road, is going to cost our grandchildren a million dollars each. The Bush era deficits did not cost anything. The war in Iraq – which was not in the budget – did not cost anything. Only the spending made by Democrats is going to impoverish the grandchildren..

If you think the Democrat who is furthest to the left is as far from the center as the Republican who is furthest to the right, you have to show who is a Democrat who is as crazy as Sarah Palin (who is very likely the GOP Presidential candidate in 2012) and Michelle Bachmann. And Marco Rubio. The danger of these characters is that all the Republicans are supporting them. Rudy Giuliani (that asshole) is campaigning for Marco Rubio. Mitt Romney – who supported gay marriage, and who pushed through a universal health care law when he was Governor of Massachusetts – is also campaigning for Rubio. Romney says Charlie Crist is a socialist.

The end of the Estate Tax was a gift to the people Kemp championed. He described them as hard working engines of prosperity. Diogenes thinks they are the least productive people in the world, the heirs of large family fortunes. The fact is that the majority of the wealth in the world is owned by a small percentage of the people. This wealth puts rich people on boards of companies, where they make the stupidest decisions. It is boards of directors who decided that all IT work done for big money firms should be done in India. The board of directors made the decisions that led to the bankruptcy of GM and Lehman, the loss of Bear and Merrill as stand-alone companies. The Real Estate and derivatives bubbles were not created by the Government, not matter what the Republicans say about it..They were created to cater to the idle very rich.

Adding insult to injury these rich people are able to use untaxed money to pay off politicians to give them further tax advantages. Take a look at the case of Joe Lieberman. He claims now that he has taken on the Insurance industry, and that is true if you look back pretty far. The managers of the health insurance companies claim not to be the villains, they have to do what The Market tells them to do, referring to the big shareholders. The insurance companies have to take a gross profit of 30% of premiums, or The Market will punish them. The managers who have to take these orders, are actually doing quite well, taking in hundreds of millions in income each, but they cannot allow the insured to get an even break, because the company could not survive that. Diogenes thinks this is all lies.
Diogenes suggests a solution: The Estate Tax is now permanently tarnished with that other name. And in any case, it is inefficient to collect a tax only at time of death. It was done that way in the past because of the difficulty in accounting for assets, which is most often done at death when estate is probated. A more effective means would be to replace the estate tax with a wealth tax, or as Diogenes would call it, a Fair Share for America Tax. Every person (including corporations) would pay a tax of one per cent of his/its wealth to the US Treasury. Every asset in this country or held by a US resident would be listed on a form, sent in to IRS, and taxed at one per cent per year. No exemptions for poor people, everybody should have to pay their fair share. A really poor person might have a thousand dollars in assets, and would have to chip in ten bucks. A middle class person might have half a million in assets, and would send in $5000. Mayor Bloomberg, whose fortune might be $3 Billion, would have to cough up $30 Million. It’s OK, he can afford it. Likewise the very rich who are using their money to finance the astroturf Tea Bags.
Assets not listed, but found by IRS, would be taxed at a higher rate, say 5 per cent, going back some number of years. And assets that are the result of criminal activity would be taxed at a higher rate, say 10% per year. Diogenes would like to see a Catch-22: Any asset that is hidden in such a way as to make it look like it is not an asset, would be taxed at a very high rate, maybe 50%, to discourage cheaters. The law could be written in one page that everyone could understand.
In the past, the level of information density would have been too great for the government to deal with. But now we should be able to handle this. We live in an age, for the last 8 years, where every phone call and every e-mail message is screened by a secret government agency, and there is no public outcry, so surely the right-wing cannot complain about intrusiveness of a one per cent tax.
Diogenes is sure that nobody has even the slightest clue as to how much money such a tax would bring in. If some economist or science fiction writer thinks there is a way to estimate the amount ofmoney that the Fair Share for America tax could produce, we will want to hear about it.
We suggest that we can use the proceeds, which in general terms is one helluva lot of money, to pay down the debt. The actual amount that actually comes in does not matter very much. Diogenes would like to think of details, like paying a bounty to turn in the one-per-cent tax cheaters. Also, Diogenes suggests that the taxpayers be, as they are now, protected by secrecy. But cheaters, they should be publicized. Diogenes would like to see what happens to organized crime figures who hide a billion dollars in cash in a warehouse, when Channel 7 broadcasts the location of the money.

A powerful message, and it would have been more powerful if it did not include the false statement: The school curriculum in the UK is not changed because of the large number of Pakistani immigrants.  Still the same.  It is a lie, an un-truth.  It’s just so much crap.
We have seen it before, and spent some time looking it up.  As Mark Twain observed, a lie is halfway around the world before Truth gets her shoes on.

The writer of the Powerpoint knew it was not true, and put it in anyway. A lie is a way of winning an argument without having the facts on your side. The lie shows lack of respect for the audience.
One would expect this message to be passed around among Jews, so it was designed to show disrespect to Jews.  The writer is not someone who loves Jews, quite the opposite.

The object of the lie is to get Jews to hate Muslims (for the reasons given in the powerpoint text).  For sure it is bad that the Egyptians deny any history before the coming of Mohammed, around 750 CE.  It is very bad that the Palestinians lie in their public statements and in their school curriculum.  It is extremely bad that the President of Iran says Israel should be erased from the map.

Turning Jews, the people who practically invented truthful historicity, and who are commanded to show respect for people even if they hate us, into the same kind of hateful liars as the Jew haters, that would be the worst.  There are people who claim to love the Jews, but who want to create a war that will destroy the Middle East, and leave all the Jews dead except the ones who accept the Christian Savior.  Right-wing Jews accept the help of these people, (look up Pastor Hagee) who are dedicated to destruction of Jews and Judaism altogether.

Now, most people work. Families with two income earners who are both a little above average get to pay the Alternative Minimum Tax that was designed for millionaires, back in the 1960’s. The AMT taxes these families – ordinary middle class people – so they pay more than 50% of their income in taxes of one kind or another.

Hedge Fund managers, who are more clever than the rest of us, pay 15% on their incomes, which are sometimes in the hundreds of millions per year. Many investors (the very wealthy) pay nothing at all, as is the case for more than 20% of large US Corporations.

The Supreme Court ruled in Buckley v Valeo that money is free speech, and it must be protected as a person. Diogenes has always thought that money is not exactly the same as a person, but maybe that reasoning was just wrong.

There is no reason to limit taxes to individuals and corporations. The Commonwealth of Virginia has an idea that everything owned by a person is taxable. If you live in Richmond, the piano in your living room is taxable. So are the big-screen TV’s. The courts have never ruled that personal property of every kind is not taxable.

Diogenes proposes a new Democrat Flat Tax.: a tax of one half of one per cent of the value of everything of value in the United States. In the early days of the Republic, it would not have been possible to make a list of every asset in the whole country. But we now have Government computers that have recorded every telephone conversation and every e-mail message in the United States, for the last six years. Evidently, it is perfectly lawful for the Government to make a note of every communication to every citizen and every resident in the whole country, and quite a few who are not in the country. By comparison, a list of every asset should be a piece of cake.

Diogenes suggests that the Democrat Flat Tax be applied on strictly free-market principles, including total transparency.

Each year, every piece of property in the United States would be taxed at one half of one per cent, that would be paid by the person or corporation that claims ownership of that property. To encourage people to file a tax return, Diogenes suggests that any piece of property that is not reported, be considered unclaimed, subject to being claimed by the Government and auctioned off to bidders for the benefit of the national treasury.
Likewise, to encourage people to correctly value their property, every item of property listed with a value, and taxed according to that value, would be listed on a Government authorized website. Anybody who had an interest in such a property, and who thought the property was valued incorrectly, could buy it by offering two or more times the value listed. This system works for race-horses, in claiming races. Diogenes suggests that President Bush’s friend Michael Brown might be consulted about setting up this kind of tax, as he has the background in equine bloodstock.

The genius of the free market can be unleashed to help to get us out of the financial hole the Bush administration has dug us into. Greed is good, after all, and if a lot of smart and well educated people who cannot get a job because nothing is actually made in the United States any more, happen to notice that some people have things that they are not paying taxes on, they ought to be able to do a patriotic act, and benefit from it. The way Halliburton has been doing, but on a smaller scale.

Like the Bush tax cuts to the wealthy that were enacted in 2001, nobody has any idea how much this wealth tax – uh – Democrat Flat Tax would bring in. So we don’t have to budget for it. Whatever comes in will go directly to reducing the deficit, and when that is paid off, the excess can go to the Social Security Trust Fund so the people who were born when Ronald Reagan was President, might actually be able to retire some day.

If the committees of the House and Senate do not get to the actual truth about the way the Republicans have destroyed the Justice Department, that show of GOP Senators anger and sadness will all be so much ca-ca. 

Mr. Gonzales did exactly what the White House sent him out to do… Gonzales says now that the decision to fire the US Attorneys was entirely his to make, and that he made it.  It is a lie, of course, but the Republicans are pushing it very, very hard.  Arlen Specter, whose comments at the Gonzales hearing were very harsh indeed, said last Friday on PBS Newshour that he thinks there is nothing going on hee except incompetence.  There is no evidence that the Bush White House has made any serious politcal mistakes. On the contrary, they have been able to sacrifice some individuals to keep the conspiracy mostly under wraps and in operation. 

Everything they do that blows up, blows up at someone else’s expense.  Iraq war:  Big win for the White House team, it allowed them to run the nation with a GOP majority in each House of Congress. 

Iraq:  The White House fired Donald Rumsfeld, as if he had the total responsibility for the failure there. And without changing any policy regarding the war and the occupation. 

Hurricane Katrina:  Embarassing for the FEMA direcor, who had to step down, but his boss the Secretary, who said on TV that there was no flooding in New Orleans when it was evident that there was flooding.  And Mr. Bush got to make a speech in Jackson Square. 

The Valerie Plame mater:  US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald made Scooter Libby the focus of the matter.  Libby was the number one assistant to the Vice President, but the investigation went no further because Mr. Fizgerald was in complete charge of the investigation.  Fitzgerald did a very workmanlike job of changing the subject. When he started the question was responsibility for poisoning the work of the CIA and in the process killing the career of Plame and probably some of her network as well.  When Fitzgerald was done, Libby was found guilty by a jury, but he will never have to serve a jail term… he will get a pardon exactly like Caspar Weinberger got a pardon from Mr Bush 41. 

The firings of the eight US Attorneys is not really about the firings, no matter what the Republicans say.  It is really about keeping the other 85 US Attorneys who did everything they could to prosecute Democrats, and who did everything they could to not prosecute Republicans.  Gonzales is in the conspiract up to his bellybutton, but firing him will not expose the conspiracy, and will not end it. 

It was reported in a New Mexico newspaper that Gonzales actually protected David Iglesias for several years.  Perhaps, this situation is like Al Smith, who was told by his Tammy Hall boss that he was to do a very good job as Governor, regardless of what was good for The Party, because Boss McManus wanted everybody in the country to see an Irish politician doing a very good job as Governor.  It will be a wonderful historical irony if Gonzales is tripped up by the firing of Iglesias, because Gonzales did not allow that name on the list until he got a personal call from President Bush.  We need fo find a way to get Gonzales to talk about that phone call, in public. 

This has always been about changing the subject, getting someone to take responsibility as if he had actually done the dirty work himself, and getting rid of the designated party.

If the trail gets cold after Alberto Gonzales leaves office, shame on all of us.

The Bush White House do not want House and Senate investigators to read those e-mails, which will prove that Rove and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers participated in firing the eight US Attorneys.  It is the contention of the Republicans that all of the political machinations about the perversion of justice during the Bush years, all took place in secret meetings at the Department of Justice, but without the knowledge of the Attorney General.  They contend that the selection of which US Attorneys to keep, and which to fire, did not depend on whether those individuals followed orders from the political people.  It is only a coincidence, they are saying, that the US Attorneys who prosecuted weak cases against Democrats in election years, would keep their jobs, and that US Attorneys who followed up real cases of corruption among the friends of George W Bush.

Preserving the evidence is very important to President Bush 43.  He preserved the papers relating to his term of office as Governor of Texas, for example.  He has them locked up with the papers of his father, President Bush 41, in such a way that no one can look at those papers for 25 years.  President Bush has been very careful not to preserve evidence in the manner of President Nixon, whose papers are open for inspection, and whose foolish maintenance of recordings led to impeachment proceedings and resignation. 

Robert Ruskin’s announcement today that Karl Rove did not intend to destroy the e-mail messages is reminiscent of the famous 18 minute gap of the Nixon years.  In that case, there was a Dictaphone belt – an ancient recording technology that was already obsolete in 1973, when Nixon used it – that had a long conversation about criminal acts.  If it had been common knowledge that Nixon had that conversation, it would have been the end of his Presidency, so Nixon personally destroyed the evidence, himself. 

In covering this up, Nixon had his secretary, Rose Mary Woods, pose for a photograph showing how she could have made the erasure.  The photo is available on many websites, it is one of the best-known photos of the 1970’s.  In order to have made the erasure, Woods would have needed to have one foot on the pedal that controlled the Dictaphone belt’s movement, and at the same time, she would have needed to have one hand on the “record” button on the actual machine, about eight feet away.  And Woods would have needed to stay in that stretched-out position for eighteen and a half minutes. 

We are eagerly awaiting the White House photo of Karl Rove stretched out with his finger on the “delete” key.

Of course, 2007 is not a normal year. There is a limitation in the President’s ability to fire a US Attorney: The firing can be done at any time and for any reason, except it cannot be done to stop or impede a criminal investigation. In brief, if a President is sufficiently careful, he might be able to pick 93 people to be US Attorneys, who are entirely loyal, entirely without morals, people with no professional self respect and no patriotic loyalty to the United States. But if he screws up and hires one US Attorney who is doing a good job, and causes some unhappiness among Republicans for doing a competent job, that individual cannot be fired while working on that case.

The fact is that when Bill Clinton took office, he fired 92 US Attorneys, which is normal. He kept on one Bush 41 appointee, in New Jersey, who was working on an important case.

For the last six years, Mr. Bush and his people have consistently made mistakes that were to the detriment of the United States. But they have been very successful in all of the things they attempted, that were good personally for the President and his cronies. This time, however, Mr. Bush seems to have screwed up on a matter that will be important to him. Because if he makes a mistake with US Attorneys, and ten per cent of the appointees have some kind of integrity, he cannot just fire them, he must keep them until they finish their work. And that work might include putting some of Mr. Bush’s friends in serious trouble.

The Gonzales 93 issue is going to be more troublesome to Mr. Bush than the Valerie Plame matter, in the next two years. There are eight people who were let go. None of those people seems to be pleased about it, and now that all the names are in the public domain, they each are going to be asked questions. Unlike Valerie Plame and her husband, they cannot be attacked as Democrats.

David Iglesias, the dissed and dismissed US Attorney in New Mexico, wrote a piece in the NY Times. Iglesias was very angry that the Department of Justice described him as less than fully competent. There is no question that Iglesias was up to the job. The question was about his loyalty to the Republican cause. The question was, “Does David Iglesias give more attention to his loyalty to the Republicans than he gives to his oath of office?” That is exactly where David Iglesias failed the President, who clearly has not interest in oath of office.

Mr. Bush fired Carol Lam from her post as US Attorney in San Diego, while Lam was actually pursuing a criminal case against Dusty Foggo, a Bush political appointee to the CIA, who was put there to establish Republican control of that agency. Firing Iglesias for failure to go after Democrats is the worst kind of political hatchet-job, but firing Lam for going after evil-doers high up in the government is a serious crime. It is an impeachable offense.

Firing the eight US Attorneys is very bad. Replacing them with Republican hacks, that might be even worse. Senator Arlen Spector, who was the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, says that he did not slip in the provision of the Patriot Act that permits the President to appoint any US Attorney without Senate confirmation. At the time the deed was done, Arlen Spector was, in fact, undergoing chemotherapy, and certainly looked like he was not up to the job. Spector says he does not know who slipped that provision into the Patriot Act. Diogenes thinks that there are not very many people who could have done this. Diogenes thinks that if it is not a crime to make a serious alteration to a piece of legislation that already had some serious defects, it ought to be a crime. Whether it is or not, we need to have a serious investigation, complete with television lights, about how such a stupidly conceived piece of legislation got passed. By the way, Diogenes always enjoyed watching District Attorney Arthur Branch discuss his conservative political philosophy on Law and Order. DA Branch was always very careful with the letter of the law. Interestingly, Fred Thompson, the actor and real-life lawyer who was a member of the US Senate majority that passed the Patriot Act in a fever, apparently never saw any problems with it at the time, either.

Bad, Bad, Worse!

Diogenes thinks that the most pernicious aspects of the Gonzales 93 affair have not yet been made public. One of the US Attorneys on the original pink-slip list was Patrick Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald is now the hero of many Americans who believe in truth and justice. Diogenes wonders, as the Plame Jury wondered, why was Lewis Libby the only person charged in this matter? The story we understand is that a reporter called Karl Rove one night, and told Rove that Fitzgerald knew that he was lying about some of his Grand Jury testimony. As if by magic, Rove awakened from a trance, and he was able to tell the Grand Jury some things that he did not remember in four previous long days of testimony. Perhaps it was a coincidence that some random reporter wanted to undermine the safety of the nation and give that little weasel a chance to avoid indictment. Diogenes thinks not. Diogenes thinks that someone who knew, had a call made to Rove to tell him.

Diogenes notices that Fizgerald’s name did not stay on the list, and that he is still a US Attorney – and presumably is on the list to become a Federal Judge soon. This is a more serious crime than merely replacing some political appointees. We know that there was a criminal conspiracy in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. We know that conspiracy included Karl Rove. We know that when Libby tried to recruit Ari Fleischer into the conspiracy, Fleischer went to the prosecutor. We do not know who else was a member of the conspiracy, in addition to Cheney.

For that matter, if the list of US Attorneys was drawn up to include Fitzgerald, and if Fitzgerald wanted to stay on the GOP good list, how hard would the fearless investigator have pushed to achieve justice? Fitzgerald would not be the first US attorney to bow to Bush administration pressure. He would not even be the first to show up in the news. Debra Wong Yang, a former US Attorney in California, was investigating a corrupt Republican member of Congress, Jerry Lewis, who was connected by money trail to former House member and current felon Randy Cunningham. Yang was not on the list of eight. When the investigation heated up, Yang was recruited out of her US Attorney job, and into a partnership with Gibson Dunn, a very large, very powerful Los Angeles law firm, whose very rich and very powerful client list includes Congressman Jerry Lewis.

Diogenes thinks that there is plenty for a House or Senate committee to look into in the matter of the eight fired US Attorneys, the 85 who were not fired, and the one with a magical Republican headhunter.

This demonstrates what the Republicans have been doing for the last years. 

Tom DeLay is pleased to tell about what has made him very successful.  His father was a drunk, his mother was an enabler, DeLay says.  He says this has made him a better person.  Formerly a drunk himself, Delay says he was able to quit drinking, cold turkey in a few days, after being born again.  DeLay says he has not had a drop of the hard stuff since that time, but he does drink wine, “because it is good for you.” 

Diogenes is not making this up.  Tom DeLay is happy to talk bout how he got his way, and turned the country right around, as a high-functioning drunk.  There are a good many people in this great nation, who have no concept of other people’s feelings.  Some of these people have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, characterized by a complete lack of “conscience” and failure to see the consequences of their actions.  In the interview this morning, Tom DeLay was pleased to say that he had punished Chris Smith, but did not talk about the consequences.  He did not talk about the damage he did, personally, to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of injured veterans of the Iraq war.  He was very proud that he was able to save the money, so that he could give it to the riches Americans in the form of a high-bracket tax break. 

Tom DeLay might have FAS, who knows?   Diogenes is not competent to render a medical opinion.  DeLay’s view of the world, and DeLay’s background of being a very hig-functioning drunk, is familiar.  George W Bush has a similar story.  Mr. Bush did not come from a family of dysfunctional drunks, of course. His father was George H W Bush, the 41^st President.  His mother, Barbara Pierce Bush has always been active in politics, and the story goes that some people in the family consider that she is more astute than her husband.  But like Tom DeLay, George W Bush was a drunk, and he quit his drinking after being born-again.  There have been a number of stories about when these events occurred,. There have been changes in the details (Laura Bush used to take some of the credit), but Mr. Bush hits the main points every time.  Born again, quit drinking, cold turkey.  No need for fancy twelve-step programs. Grace of God, Thank you, Jesus. 

It is frightening that the United States is being led by someone who is so damaged.  The President gave a forgettable speech in New Orleans, then was photographed walking across Jackson Square:  There has been no effort to help the people who were hurt by Hurricane Katrina, only efforts to use the problem as a way to pay off political friends.  By way of example, the huge new pumps intended to pull water out of the low-lying parts of New Orleans, were purchased by the Army Corps of Engineers, using a no-bid contract.  The pumps, we now find, do not work, and cannot be repaired.  The Corps bought the pumps from Jeb Bush.  Diogenes is not making this up. 

Likewise, the war in Iraq.  Everybody knows about Halliburton, that the Defense Department Inspector General says that they took profits in the billions of dollars more than they were entitled under their no-bid contract, which already called for the most enormous profits.  Vice President Cheney, who was formerly Chairman of Halliburton, is still being paid deferred compensation from that company.  Much more than he is paid as Vice President.  Diogenes thinks this is very nice for Mr. Cheney, but less nice for the United States. 

Some years ago, Diogenes and Mrs. Diogenes used to drive their car to a parking lot near a subway station in Brooklyn.  The parking meters requires quarters, of course, so we kept some in the car.  One day, unwisely, Diogenes left three quarters in the car, visible from the outside.  Not a total surprise, some vandal broke into the car for the loose money.  The vandal caused $140 damage to the car in order to get the 75 cents. 

In politics, as in life, there seem to be two kinds of people who steal money.  There are the ones who think they are entitled to get something, that everybody does it; and if you look at it from the right point of view, it isn’t really such a bad thing.  Congressman Randy Cunningham comes to mind at the top of that list, Congressman Jack Murtha maybe toward the bottom.  The kind of stealing that is being carried out by the Bush Brothers, by Mr. Cheney, by Tom DeLay and his henchmen – most of whom are still in the Congress and doing business on K Street, is much worse. 

These people – these vicious vandals – are perfectly willing to hurt many people.  They are willing to destroy a whole American City.  They are willing to consign our wounded war veterans to lives of pain and misery.  They are willing to destroy the security of the United States and the environment of the world, for their seventy-five cents. 

We were fortunate that they over-reached on Social Security.  Make no mistake, they were trying to destroy that as well, and Diogenes thinks they are not finished trying to get that big pot of money.  It is very important for those of us who recognize the harm these vandals are doing.  We need to show even the slowest and most stubbornly resistant among us – our Republican neighbors–exactly what they were voting for. 

Diogenes thinks it would be a very nice thing for Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney to leave office in disgrace.  Cheney would not fight an impeachment trial, he is a very sick and very vain man, and he would not want everybody to see him on TV, looking ill, and looking like the criminal he is, with witnesses he cannot control and a process he cannot control.  Let us all take up the cry: Cheney First!