March 31, 2004 by s.z.

Manuel Miranda Died For Your Sins WorldNetDaily gives us the latest FileGate news in a piece they call GOP scapegoat now hero to conservatives; it's taken from an interview Miranda gave Insight Magazine (emphasis added): Republican leaders have broken a promise they made to expose the shocking contents of memos exchanged among Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats, says Manuel Miranda, the former GOP aide who is the whistleblower at the center of the so-called Memogate scandal. "Sen. Hatch told me specifically, point blank, that if I resigned he could then talk about the substance of the memos," Miranda tells Insight. "I was told by the Frist office that, if I resigned, the Democrats would basically calm down" and the Republicans could make the memos public. Miranda said the same promises were made to conservative groups that assist the Republicans in gaining support for judicial nominees. At the heart of the scandal, which many believe has been spiked or overlooked by the mainstream press, are thousands of Democratic memos that were viewed and subsequently downloaded from a computer server shared by both Democrats and Republicans on the Judiciary Committee. These memos, which were not password protected, outlined Democratic talking points and strategies for blocking judicial nominees at the behest of special-interest groups.   So, there are "conservative groups that assist the Republicans in gaining support for judicial nominees" and then there are nefarious "special-interest groups" who give advice and suggestions to the Democrats about blocking conservative judicial nominees.  One collection of groups is composed of upstanding American patriots.  The other collection of groups is evil, EEEEVIL!  Or course, when Kerry wins in November, expect these groups to swap their gaining support/blocking roles.  The Democratic ones will remain EEEEVIL, however.  And it's pretty disturbing to learn that Frist and Hatch told scapegoat/hero Manual Miranda that if he resigned, they would leak the Democratic memos, and now they aren't doing it.  I am shocked, SHOCKED, to hear allegations of duplicity regarding the Republican congressional leadership. Anyway, here's a few more portions of the article: The contents of the still unreleased memos have not been made public, but Miranda claims they contain even more incriminating information than those memos already released. He told Insight that, while collusive rather than unlawful, revelation of the contents of those memos would so "corrode public trust" in the judicial system that he would never reveal all that he knows about them. These memos would corrode public trust in the judicial system by showing that Democrats block Republican judicial appointees? Heaven forfend!  And thank God that Miranda has the decency to never reveal what he knows, and instead he just presses the Republican leadership to release the actual memos. "In any other institution, Manuel Miranda would be hailed as a whistleblower. Manuel, as an officer of the court, did his duty and reported a crime. And for his trouble he was shown the door," says Daly [Kay Daly, president of the Coalition for a Fair Judiciary]. Okay, Miranda said that the memos weren't evidence of anything unlawful.  However, he apparently violated federal regulations about misuse of federal computers and theft of information in order to leak them to the media.  And now HE's the one in trouble.  That just doesn't seem fair, when he was just doing his duty as a lawyer and a Republican. 5:51:24 AM

Bush-Cheney Email a Book Recomendation An Insightful Look at the Bush White House From One of the People Who Knows the President Best - His Trusted Counselor Karen Hughes. Karen Hughes will be traveling across the nation throughout April promoting her new book, Ten Minutes from Normal.  She will be visiting the following cities: Austin, Dallas, Houston, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Miami, Kansas City, Chicago, Tampa/St. Petersburg, Atlanta, Santa Barbara, and Greenwich, CT. This is the best scam ever: having a publisher pay a Bush adviser to campaign for Bush.  Anyway, if you're in any of these cities, you can have Karen autograph your copy of Ten I.Q. Points Below Normal.  Or just for fun, have her autograph your copy of Against All Enemies. Her book brings a message of optimism to families all over America. "I hope my work in the White House and my decision to come home say several things: that you can be measured by the quality of your work, not how long the lights stay on in your office; you are not trapped by circumstances and the most important thing you can do in life is to choose your loves and order them very carefully." To me, her decision to quit the White House to go home, and then her decision to quit her home to campaign for George Bush, say just one thing: the most important thing you can do in life is whatever the hell you feel like doing, as long as you can spin it well. Like Julia (the esteemed woman behind Sisyphus Shrugged who is going to be featured on the Janeane Garofalo radio show in the near future) commented: "Whose idea was it to promote this book as the story of a woman who chose between the White House and her family when she worked the entire time and only stayed away a year before she came back to go on the road full time?"  And like Mary (who seems to have the inside track on America's Top Ten Worst Mothers®) wrote: "And now according to Salon she’s going on a 6-week book promotion tour and then going to work fulltime on Bush’s election campaign, thereby becoming a role model for all those mothers who gave up their high-powered careers to stay home with the kids and then found that they couldn’t stand it. So, I can see why Bush-Cheney are recommending the book so highly. P.S.  I also got an email from GOPTeam Leader.com.  It seems that there are now special interest "Outreach Groups" to join!  And you get 10 GOPoints for signing up!  I'm going to assume (because I want to) that this means you get 10 points for each group you join, meaning that if I join them all, I can get that TeamLeader pony I've always wanted. Here are just a portion of the many Outreach Groups available for Team Leaders: Catholic Team Leader                Conservative TL Disability Team Leader               Eastern European TL  Evangelical Team Leader            Farmer & Rancher TL  First Responder Team Leader     Greek American TL  Hispanic Team Leader                Home School TL  Latter-day Saint Team Leader     Law Enforcement TL  Snow Mobiler Team Leader         Sportsman TL  Stock Car Team Leader               Student TL  Veteran Team Leader                  Women TL   I signed up for Evangelical, Home School, High School, Latter-day Saint, Snow Mobiler, Stock Car, and Women.  If I get points for each of them, I'll join some more groups.  In any case, I'll let you know all the Stock Cars For Bush news, as soon as I start receiving it.   5:04:58 AM

Backfence of the Damned Well, I registered with the Minneapolis Star-Tribune (using fake info, of course) so I could read James Lileks' Backfence column.  This week's is entitled "Out of the Mouth of Babes," so I knew it would be about Gnat.  What I didn't know is how horrifying it would be ... But in a good way, this time.  Anyway, it all starts out as a typical Lileks piece: how do Easter rabbits lay eggs?  What would an alien think of Easter if he went shopping at Target and saw those Oreos with the seasonal fillings?  Screw the aliens: in Minnesota we don't care what they think! Then Lileks contemplates the sad and unfulfilling Easters of his childhood, and that's when things started to get dark: Spring seemed very far away. All we had for consolation was ham, and I never liked ham. Pink and tender, it was like eating mildly salted Lutheran. And I always wondered where it came from. Not the middle part of the pig; that was mostly innards, right? Not the front. Not the head. I always suspected I was eating, well, pig butt. Now forget everything I've written so far except for "pig butt," because we're switching subjects. Let me explain. After I wrote the previous paragraphs, I headed downstairs, and heard Toddler™ laughing her head off. She looks at me, and as the Russell Stover Hollow Bunny is my witness, she says: PIG BUTT. Friends, I'm dead serious: I think this child can read minds. This isn't the first time she's given voice to something we've thought. Toddler™, eh?  It sounds like somebody is jealous of America's Worst Mother™, and is trying to cut into Tbogg's territory -- and I got there first, bub! Anyway, I warned Lilleks about Gnat's eerie powers back in January when she ganged up with her cousins to flout adult authority and scan people until their heads exploded.  He didn't want to hear about it then, but now that his pwecious widdle insect has wished Mommy, Gramma, and the entire pre-school into the cornfield, he's starting to see what I was talking about.  I had suggested tinfoil hats (or at least thought about suggesting them), but Lileks always said they weren't the solution, since he needs to save the tinfoil to protect the family against those nuclear attacks which al Qaeda is always launching on the Minnesota suburbs. But foil-lined hats aren't the solution, as I've often said. We'll have to get her into a Mutant School like they have in the X-Men movies. But where does one find such a thing? You'd have to bring it up somehow while you talk to the admissions officer. "Does your school cater to, ah, differently gifted children?" "We accommodate all manner of needs, sir; what sort of situation did you mean?" "Kid's a mutant." "You mean she cannot speak?" "Not a mute, a mutant. A freak of nature. She can read minds. And maybe control them, as well -- we don't know. She looks at the dog and he gets up on his hind legs and barks his name in Morse code. Could be coincidence. So do you handle this sort of thing?" The admissions officer thought Lileks was crazy, of course.  Gnat made him think that.  She did the same thing when Lileks tried to tell the police, the Army, and the world's leading scientists about his freak of a child -- and so nobody would help him.  Now it will just be daddy and daughter, alone together forever, just the way he wanted it.  Or so he thought.  Only now that Gnat has realized that she has The Power, expect to see a lot less adoring mockery of the way she talks.   And somebody is going to pay for calling her "goatish." 3:11:47 AM

Wall Street Journal Recommends Thugs Stalk Karl Rove's Kid From the Wall Street Journal featured article Stark Rove-ing Mad: Meet the "pro-immigrant" thugs at National People's Action [N]ine busloads of activists "stormed" (the Washington Post's word) Mr. Rove's yard, blocking the street, surrounding both sides of the house and pounding on the windows at a time when he was inside with his 15-year-old son and his son's friend.  [snip]  It's hard to know which is more outrageous here: the thuggery or the stupidity. The thuggery we've mentioned. But let's not discount the stupidity. Mr. Rove serves a President who has proved himself willing to buck a significant part of his own coalition by pushing a forward-looking, pro-immigration plan. To put it another way, what we had on Sunday was the spectacle of immigration "leaders" directing their ire at the most pro-immigration Administration in recent memory. Had they done their homework, moreover, they might have learned that the boy who was inside the Rove house with Mr. Rove's young son on Sunday is himself an immigrant from India and the son of an immigrant attorney--Shakun Drew--who specializes in immigration law. Exactly what kind of "homework" does the WSJ suggest that the group might have done to learn whom the Rove kid was playing with that day?  Stake out the Rove home and get I.D's on all foriegn-looking people who enter?  Interrogate the neighbors? Or just follow around Rove Jr., in case he has any immigrant friends?  Yeah, let's not discount the stupidity. 2:52:26 AM