A face only a mother could love.

Vito Fossella is one of those politicians many an activist loves to not so much to hate but smack around. ">If you go to our archives, you're going to find our peeps here at the TDG have been working hard to help Steve Harrison smack Fossella down come November and it looks that the congressman is giving them plenty to work with these days.

Here's a list that'll put you up to date on the face of NYC's GOP :

Roy Moskowitz's Letter to the editor

Michael Bouldin's Baghdad Vito Freaks Out and Harrison, Steinem, and the GOP's Catholic problem

In a city in which it is not a crime to shoot Sean Bell fifty times or Amadou Diallo 41 times, where black and Hispanic young men are stopped and frisked vastly in excess of their proportion of the population, it should not be a surprise that blacks & Hispanics are arrested for marijuana possession vastly more than whites (even though marijuana use is equal across ethnic groups). The surprise, as I see it, is that decent people don’t spit at Mayor Bloomberg and his police Commissioner. How often will NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Public Misinformation, Paul Browne, say things like the NYPD doesn’t engage in racial profiling without his nose growing from Police Plaza to City Hall? (I hate it when Mayor Bloomberg’s race policies make me write as though I were Al Sharpton.)

Rocco Parascandola of Newsday reports on a study released by the New York Civil Liberties Union:

The NYPD arrested more than 350,000 people for misdemeanor marijuana possession over the past decade -- a tenfold increase achieved by systematically targeting young black and Hispanic men and stopping them without cause, a report released Tuesday charges NYCLU,

The NYCLU press release, is here

One of the greater political mysteries to me in NYS has been the degree to which progressive reform of our criminial justice system has been elusive. Other than a very modest improvement in the bizzarre Rockefeller Drug laws (which mandate very long incarceration terms for narcotics offenders) Criminal Justice reform in NYS has been a political non-starter.

I listened, therefore with great interest to the remarks made by Dallas (Texas) District Attornery Craig Watkins, Monday morning. He laid out his progressive law enforcement agenda to a packed Drum Major Institute forum. Those proposals had gotten him elected in red-state Texas over a knee-jerk tough on crime GOP candidate. He advocates and thinks he's making progress on issues like proper evidence gathering and preservation, trials that are fair for defendants, review of past cases to correct wrongful or wrong convictions. (DMI has posted an account of that meeting at their DMI Blog . My post is not a full account of that interesting event. If you want to know more, go there.) If Watkins can do this in Dallas, why are we not doing similar work in NY?

As you might expect, the conservative noise machine barely paused to catch its breath before beginning its effort to spin the horrible events at Virginia Tech into political gold. Instapundit was among the first out of the gate, as this DKos diary noted. The New York Sun, to nobody's surprise, takes up the same talking points, couching them on a fluffy layer of righteous talk about how America caught "a glimpse of evil" yesterday. There's a certain kind of conservative who loves nothing more than an opportunity to crow about Evil.* It allows him to trumpet his own Moral Clarity, the primary purpose of which is to aid in the process of simplifying and personalizing some difficult issue, and demonizing all those who point out that, by simplifying and personalizing it, the conservative has guaranteed that he will never do anything effectively to resolve it. Talking about "Evil," for this kind of conservative, is a ticket to a cartoon universe whose bright colors and vivid characters might just be enough to distract folks from noticing that such conservatives tend to be disastrously incompetent at dealing with problems in the real world. As for that Moral Clarity, count on it to be discarded the first time it becomes the least bit inconvenient.

But I digress. The Sun shines its dim light on the shootings in hopes of illuminating its argument about the actions of New York's own Mayor Bloomberg, who has continued Rudy Giuliani's strategy of cracking down on illegal guns. It's a strategy that has helped make New York the safest big city in America, but the balls-to-the-wall gun crowd, of course, don't care about that. The NRA has been demonizing Bloomberg for a while now, and the Sun's editors eagerly use the Va. Tech shootings as an opportunity to pile on:

The shooting erupted as a little noticed legal war was gathering between Virginia and New York over our city's legal maneuvering to stem the sale of what Mayor Bloomberg calls illegal guns. The smell of cordite hadn't cleared from the Virginia Tech campus when the declared candidates for president began addressing the shooting, ending, as Mr. Hope put it, "what had been seen as an unwillingness to fully address gun issues so far in the campaign."

More after the break.

I wrote about this yesterday, but I am revisiting it with the smoking gun letter uploaded rather than just linking as a PDF. I want to emphasize that this is a scan of the letter sent by the company that makes the voting machines Sarasota County used warning of a glitch. This warning was ignored by Kathy Dent, the Sarasota County Supervisor of Elections. The result was an election with an unprecedented, and HIGHLY suspicious, 18,000 vote undercount for Congress and that undercount is believed by election experts to have changed the outcome of the election, essentially stealing the election from Democrat Christine Jennings. Here's the letter:

This letter suggests a specific action...which the Sarasota election board NEVER ACTED UPON. Furthermore, posters were sent by the company that were meant to be posted at each polling place to warn voters of the delay. The posters were never posted. Finally, and probably criminally, Kathy Dent never released this letter when Christine Jennings' legal team filed a letter of discovery. That essentially is a cover up.

We all saw with horror as yet another Florida election was mired in uncertainty and missing votes. A whopping 18,000 votes for Congress in the FL-13 Congressional race disappeared, mostly from Democratic districts. This is an almost unprecedented undervote that raises red flags that SOMETHING went seriously wrong with that election. This is further evidence that touchscreen voting machines are just too unreliable. And many elections experts agree that the results of the election were affected by this undervote and, had those votes been properly recorded, the Democratic candidate, Christine Jennings, would have won.

But...it looks like the Florida election board had full warning there was a problem and were even offered a patch but IGNORED IT. Then they tried covering it up.

According to a letter dated August 15th (PDF from the Christine Jennings campaign) from the company that made the machines used in FL-13 to the Florida elections board, a problem had been identified that gave a slow response time on the computer, slower than what a voter would expect. The letter claims that this would not affect the integrity of the vote (covering their asses) but it is likely that this kind of delay could lead to a voter being out of sync with the computer and would be exactly the kind of thing that could lead to an unrecorded vote. If the computer takes too long to respond, and the voter has moved on, then a vote will go unrecorded. It warrants further investigation to see if the delay is the cause of the undervote.

Looks like yet another in a long line of Halliburton Republicans is guilty of crimes. Scooter Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, has been found guilty by a jury. From Salon.com:

Eleven jurors -- the 12th was dismissed after being exposed to press reports about the case -- found Libby guilty of 1) obstructing justice by lying to the grand jury about how he learned and whom he told about Plame; 2) making a false statement by lying to the FBI about a conversation he said he had about Plame with NBC's Tim Russert; 3) committing perjury by lying to the grand jury about his conversation with Russert; and 4) committing perjury by lying about his conversation with Cooper and other reporters.

What was left off that list of charges was treason. Libby was part of a conspiracy that revealed the identity of a covert agent who was involved in the War against terrorism. Revealing that identity compromised our defense against terrorism and constitutes treason. That is the real charge that should have been leveled against Libby.

Now, what was Dick Cheney's role in all of this? Was his underling acting alone or under direction?

I recently wrote about Japan's Prime Minister Abe espousing an irresponsible and cowardly revisionism, denying that there was evidence that Japan exploited Asian women as "Comfort Women," a Japanese euphamism which basically means forced rape of women.

Well, I want to challenge Abe-san to face his accusers, who also are living evidence of what Japan did in WW II. And I challenge him to be a real man and admit the atrocities Japan did to these women and to do the right thing.

Abe-san, face these women:

To learn more, please read this from the Seuol Times, or here, or this wikipedia article.