I said you would have problems with the Marines CPL Matt Sanchez

I just never thought it would be this much trouble...

Just a little refresher on CPL Matt Sanchez from an earlier post of mine for those of you that don't remember:

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What's the problem CPL Matt Sanchez?

"Wow, who knew a little award and a couple of pictures would get me all this attention? Death threats, hate mail and plenty of people who want to be my "friend"--and it's not even 4 pm!!!" - CPL Matt Sanchez, CPAC honoree

What is the problem?

Is it Matt's service in the Marines?




Nope. He can still be proud of that, regardless of what the right wing will now say about him (and until the military gives him the boot, AND THEY WILL. Even from the Reserves.)(ed note: I told ya so...CM1)

Is it because both Hannity and O'Reilly championed Matt's cause at Columbia Universtiy?




Nope. But this is partly why CPAC made him a TOP honoree last week.

Is it Matt's association with GOP candidates?




Nope. GOP politicians love guys like Matt. Lots of guys like Matt...

Is it because of Matt's short-lived enamoured support from radical right wing pundit-wannabees like Malkin?




Well, not really...

Is it Matt's show of support from noted gay-basher and all-around-hater Ann Coulter?




UMMMM? Ya, that and the fact that Matt is a gay porn star known as Rod Majors:




And... Matt is a male escort as well. <<<(WARNING!!! Nudity in that link.) The Jeff Gannon story all over again.

Michelle Malkin is on top of the story after learning the truth about her former hero, and even answers her own question before asking it:

It's only a matter of time before the MSM goes nuts with the story. Report on the everyday progress in Iraq? Forget it. Sex, homosexuals, and the GOP? Get ready for wall-to-wall coverage a la Foley, Gannon, and Haggard.

Should CPAC organizers be embarrassed if the rumors about his alleged porn star past are true? Well, yes. Next time, they should do more extensive background research before handing out an honor with Jeane Kirkpatrick's name on it.

snip

I guess we'll see who the real bigots--on both sides of the aisle--are now.
(You can find the link for the bigot Malkin here...)

Here is the problem Matt Sanchez:
It doesn't take her more than a few paragraphs to say something really, really stupid and hypocritical. Malkin has Matt going from hero to zero, and all because Malkin and most of her, and Coulter's, CPAC ilk are bigots.

As for Malkin's reports on progress in Iraq?

Here it is: More bombs are going off, more bullets are flying, and more Americans and Iraqis are needlessly dying today because of what semi-epsilon-moron-minuses like Malkin call progress.

H/T to Matt Browner-Hamlin at Emboldened.

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But that is just the begining of the tale as the Marine Corps is investigating charges that CPL Matt Sanchez “solicited more than $12,000 from private organizations by asking them to fund a deployment to Iraq he never made.”

Ann Coulter’s favorite ex-gay porn performer may be in big trouble.

From Marine Corps Times:

The Corps on Friday was slated to wrap up an investigation into allegations that a corporal in the Individual Ready Reserve who appeared in gay porn films before enlisting solicited more than $12,000 from private organizations by asking them to fund a deployment to Iraq he never made, according to e-mails from the investigating officer forwarded to Marine Corps Times.

Reserve Col. Charles Jones, a staff judge advocate called to Marine Corps Mobilization Command in Kansas City, Mo., on temporary orders that expire Saturday, informed Reserve Cpl. Matt Sanchez of the allegations against him in a March 22 e-mail that advised Sanchez of his rights.

Jones wrote that Sanchez’s participation in porn films was part of the investigation, but that two of the three allegations against him involved lying “to various people, including but not limited to, representatives of the New York City United War Veterans Council and U-Haul Corporation” about deploying to Iraq at the commandant’s request.

CPAC sure is an interesting group when you consider bigots like Malkin, noted vote fraudster and hatemonger Ann Coulter, as well as "male escorts/gay porn stars" and (possibly) con men like Matt Sanchez.

Not like I didn't warn you the Marines would have a problem with you Matt. I suppose CPAC, and their ilk, could chalk this up to the famous Liberal Media Bias that the Marine Corps Times is well known to exhibit. If by "Liberal" you mean they report the facts?

White House Provides 3 Good Reasons to Discredit Dowd

Think Progress notes the White House's counteroffensive reaction to criticism concerning bush's continued failures in Iraq:

Dowd “said he hoped in part that by coming forward he would be able to get a message through to a presidential inner sanctum that he views as increasingly isolated.” This morning on CBS, White House Counselor Dan Bartlett crushed any such hopes that Bush’s inner circle would heed the advice of a once-trusted aide. Instead, as it has done frequently in the past, the White House engaged in a counteroffensive, assailing the character of the person sounding the alarms.

The New York Times noted Dowd’s distancing from Bush came at the same time one of his “premature twin daughters died, he was divorced, and he watched his oldest son prepare for deployment to Iraq.” Bartlett latched onto these difficulties in Dowd’s personal life in an effort to undermine his substantive concerns about Bush’s Iraq policy.

Bartlett said Dowd has been on a “long personal journey…in his private life” and that he had become too emotional over the war. CBS host Bob Schieffer interrupted to ask: “Are you suggesting he’s having some kind of personal problems and this is just what has resulted?” Bartlett denied that’s what he was doing, but then returned to his talking point, suggesting Dowd’s views should be evaluated in light of the fact the he was going through “personal turmoil.”

In reality, the White House does offer a few good arguments for why Dowd might really be concerned:

1. His son is preparing for deployment to Iraq.
2. His son is preparing for deployment to Iraq.
3. His son is preparing for deployment to Iraq.

Of course, there is no legitimate reason to be concerned about those facts, is there?

According to John McCain it is all just a walk in the park anyways. What he doesn't mention is that he needs a Flak vest, about 100 soldiers, 3 Blackhawks, and 2 Apache gunships providing security for him while takes his little hypocritical walk... And if he needed to go outside of “the very, very, very heavily secured Green Zone,” he needed to travel in armored military vehicles under heavy guard.”

No Dowd... You have absolutely no insane reason to be concerned. Not according to those White House talking pointy heads using offensive reasoning to smear you.

More Right Wing Partisan Politics

Remember this extremely hypocritical and partisan post from JimK, a Connecticut Blogger at "far right wingnuts thoughts," last December?

As you listen to JimK talk about Kerry and Dodd's planned visits to the Middle East:

Right Thoughts - Dodd Plans Trip To Middle East:
"I’m far more concerned with the idea of two Senators from an opposing party blatantly and openly undermining the sitting President in matters of foreign policy. This kind of behavior has consequences that go well beyond the next two years of Bush’s term.

It’s time to get past this cheerleading for the Dems or the GOP and start thinking about how this dirty political pool is affecting the way we can govern this nation going forward."

Well JimK, when are you going to get past the partisan political cheerleading? You are real quick to paint Kerry and Dodd as having undermined the president and even suggested they are breaking laws, even though the fact is they have not and will not break any laws on their trips.

But if you were really being honest about the paritsan cheerleading your diary would have mentioned the treacherous and traitorous Republican Specter:

Nelson said he reported the information to embassy officials and will brief his congressional committees on the trip. Also expected to visit Syria is Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., and Arlen Specter, R-Pa..

"We don't think that members of Congress ought to be going there," White House press secretary Tony Snow said, adding that the United States continues to denounce Syria's meddling in Lebanon and its ties to terrorist groups.

It is highly appropriate that Tony Snow starts off the sentence there with "We don't think...",

Well... The little GOP talking pointy head footballs just can't seem to get kicked around enough these days as more Hotair expells from the partisan dung heap side of the Blogosphere:

This makes three prominent Democrats who have gone abroad to undermine our foreign policy in the past three months. Kerry’s done it twice, Dean-o’s boasted of having done it repeatedly, and now, by far and away the most high profile of the lot, Madam Speaker herself’s going to Damascus to meet with the proprietor of the launching pad for 85-90% of the suicide bombers in Iraq, according to the State Department’s estimation.

ABC News has learned Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi plans to visit Syria next week to meet with Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad. The visit will make Pelosi the most senior U.S. official ever to meet with President Assad…

Pelosi’s visit to Syria would come as the United States has severed high-level contacts with Assad’s government…

Traveling with Pelosi will be Congressmen Keith Ellison (D-MN), Nick Rahall (D-WV), Tom Lantos (D-CA), Henry Waxman (D-CA), and David Hobson (R-OH).

Mind you, Assad and his terror apparatus are also the prime suspects in the assassination of Rafiq Hariri, whose pro-western political heirs are currently deadlocked with Hezbollah in Lebanon. If she’s not loyal enough to her own country to refrain from handing one of its biggest enemies a propaganda windfall, you’d think she’d at least be decent enough not to legitimize a suspected killer under UN investigation by doing meet and greets with him.

Repulsive. As usual.

Yep... Repulsive as usual. And as per usual they ignore the fact that the State Department has to OK travel like this. This has become another right wingnut blowhards sudden story of the day BUT where was all of this Hotair when this happened?

Pelosi's outreach to a state sponsor of terrorism is a ``really bad idea,'' White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said at a briefing in Washington. ``Someone should take a step back and think about the message that it sends and the message that it sends to our allies.''

Perino's remarks come as a group of Republican lawmakers has embarked on their own trip to Syria. Michael Lowry, a spokesman for Representative Robert Aderholt, said that the Alabama lawmaker will visit Syria as part of a Republican delegation led by Representative Frank Wolf, a Virginia Republican. Wolf is the top Republican on the House appropriations subcommittee that funds the State Department.

Perino wasn't available to comment about that trip.

Another embarrasing chapter in the far-right-wingnut's archive of shameless GOP talking points.

One day partisan right wingnuts might "get past this cheerleading for [...] the GOP and start thinking about how this dirty political pool is affecting the way we can govern this nation going forward." But if that day ever comes listen for a loud POP as they all pull their heads out of their asses.

Republican Cronies Were Scanning OR Reading?

Josh Marshall over at TPM digs this up:

If you're a Cunningham case afficionado, you know that in early 2002 Mitchell Wade was still acting as a cut out for his corruption mentor Brent Wilkes -- who's now awaiting trial in the Cunningham case. And around the same time Wilkes was greasing palms in DC trying to get into the Anthrax mail screening racket himself.

He got some help from Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA) who got money from Wilkes. We pick up that part of the story from the San Diego Union-Tribune from March 19th, 2006 ...

Julie Doolittle was working at Buckham's offices in 2002 when Buckham introduced Brent Wilkes to her husband. Federal contracts for his flagship company, ADCS Inc., were drying up, partly because the Pentagon had been telling Congress it had little need for the company's document-scanning technology. So Wilkes was trying to get funding for two new businesses.

One was tied to the 2002 anthrax scare, when tainted letters were sent to Capitol Hill. Wilkes' idea was to have all Capitol Hill mail rerouted to a site in the Midwest, where ADCS employees wearing protective suits would scan it into computers and then e-mail it back to Washington.

He called his proposed solution MailSafe – similar to the names of several anti-anthrax companies launched at that time – and began vying for federal contracts, even though the company had little to its name other than a rudimentary Web site.

The House Administration Committee, on which Doolittle sat, oversees the congressional mail system. Doolittle told his colleagues about MailSafe and introduced them to Wilkes, but the project never got off the ground.

Note the reference to the House Administration Committee. That was the committee then chaired by another Abramoff buddy -- the now-imprisoned Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH). And Ney, as he'd earlier done for Abramoff associate Adam Kidan, actually read into the House record an encomium to Wilkes.

So it all comes back to the same question. Why did a company like Wade's, which had no track record whatsoever and had only been approved to receive federal government contracts two months earlier, get a contract from the White House to screen the mail of the President of the United States?

Are you sure it was only the Presidents mail they were screening?

Note the Tribune story:

Wilkes' idea was to have all Capitol Hill mail rerouted to a site in the Midwest, where ADCS employees wearing protective suits would scan it into computers and then e-mail it back to Washington.

All Capitol Hill mail? Wouldn't that mean that these Republican cronies were also "scanning" sensitive mail from the Democratic party side of the aisle (and to and from God knows who else inside the Hill?) as well?

To me, this seems to give these Republican cronies the ability to spy on people's mail if they were unethical enough to abuse this contract for their corrupted GOP's advantage... Does anyone think these guys weren't reading what they were scanning? "Oooh, here's a hot one! Send it to Karl..." It's not like the GOP has ever been known to be ethical when given the opportunity.

Joe neocon Lieberman surrounding himself with Republicans

Joe neocon Lieberman knows who he is in bed with, as he surrounds himself with Republicans. Via ctblogger at MLN:

Even those who didn't vote for Lieberman in November have higher expectations for him than this. Pouting about the last election? Proposing a war tax without any plans to pursue it?

Then there's his fixation with seating charts.

As chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, Lieberman should be focusing on the many security issues facing the nation. But this month, the big news from the committee was that Lieberman had rearranged the seating chart.

From now on, he announced, the senators will sit Democrat, Republican, Democrat, Republican, instead of one party on one side of the room and the other party on the other side.

[...]

Instead of focussing on seating charts, instead of proposing a war tax that's dead on arrival, instead of reveling in his hurt feelings, Lieberman should do what he said he would do while running for re-election last year " focus on representing Connecticut, focus on holding the Bush administration accountable for its war policies.

Yep! His biggest boldest action since winning the 2006 election with the support of Republicans' money and the Connecticut Republican vote is to surronund himself with Republicans.

Does anyone on the Democratic side of the Senate think this is a good thing?

Short Circuiting Labor

Ever see a great reason for the resurgence of unions? The Hartford Courant shows you one:

courant.com | Circuit City Step Risks Backlash:

"A new plan for layoffs at Circuit City is openly targeting better-paid workers, risking a public backlash by implying that its wages are as subject to discounts as its flat-screen TVs

The electronics retailer, facing larger competitors and falling sales, said Wednesday that it would lay off about 3,400 store workers - immediately - and replace them with lower-paid new hires as soon as possible"

Risking a public Backlash??? They have got to be kidding?

They are kicking 3400 employees to the curb and then replacing them with even lower paid workers.

A nice little extra thought to warm the hearts of those recently unemployed curb dwellers via Vassmer at dKos:

And of course, Circuit City's CEOs' salaries will not be cut for being overpaid:

Circuit City Chief Executive Officer Philip Schoonover was paid $8.52 million in fiscal 2006, including a $975,000 salary. Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson received $3.85 million, including a $1.17 million salary.

Mmmm, what do you expect from a company who donates 90% of its political contributions to Republicans, according to BuyBlue?

Figure the odds? Well... I guess I am not shopping at Circuit City ever again.

This is the epitome of the bush economy. Someone should unionize those workers just to fuck with these unethical bums.

[update]
The Onion does an intersting parody of blaming immigration for these kinds of problems. An issue that republicans will try to push, hopefully with the same laughable results, in the next election cycle:

Immigration: The Human Cost


It is obvious that, in the case of Circuit City's fiscal abuse of employees to continue the enrichment of incompetent Management like their CEO, it has little to do with immigration and everything to do with the deterioration of workers rights in the USA under the Corporate owned Republican party.

The Flip Flop Express

The Flip Flop express flies off the never-ending GOP deepend:

The McCain peace train in 1993 on Somalia:

MCCAIN: …this resolution establishes, in effect, a date certain for a vote on the commitment of United States forces to Somalia…I think we all realize that we have drifted from the use of force to secure humanitarian relief to an open-ended effort at peace enforcement and nation building. …the orderly way to stop it is for the President to present a plan for shaping U.S. withdrawal, set a date for that plan, and have the congress of the United States either endorse or reject such a proposal. [Senate floor speech, 9/9/93]

In that 1993 vote McCain and his other peaceniks - Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Sens. Bennett, Bond, Cochran, Domenici, Hatch, Hutchison, Lugar, Specter, Stevens and Warner — ALL voted in favor of cutting funds and setting a timetable for withdrawal.

The McCain Flip Flop Express today:

MCCAIN: These same provisions were rejected by the Senate two weeks ago by a 48-50 vote. Now here we are debating the same provisions that we have — that have the same serious problems. I hope they’ll be rejected again by the same, if not a larger margin. Supporters of this provision say they want a date certain for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. But what they have offered us is more accurately described as a date certain for surrender — a date certain for surrender — with grave consequences for the future of Iraq, the stability of the Middle East and the security of Americans at home and abroad. And they offer it just as the situation in Iraq, though fraught with difficult challenges, is beginning to improve.

The Flip Flop Express is rolling, and smoking some pretty strong drugs to manage live in these two seperate realities.

What about the Fifth?

Denis Horgan gives you a peek at the latest bush league maneuver:

DenisHorgan.com:

"It is a vital piece of our freedoms. It protects Americans from the goverment:

'No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.'

Neither is it a Get Out of Jail Free card for Bush administration types who rather simply do not choose to have be asked thunderously important questions by the trifling, insignificant legislative branch of the American people's government."

I read the Fifth Amendment and the only thing I can see by Monica Goodling taking the Fifth is precisely what everyone else can see:

Effectively conceding that there is criminal activity involved which could trigger a "criminal case" Monica Goodling turns to the Fifth.

The key here is that you can't take the Fifth (by my layman's reading of it) unless there is criminal activity involved. This not some political ploy to be trifled with.

Either she is admitting there is criminal activity that she knows about and/or is involved in OR she is attempting to abuse a law that doesn't apply to her for political purposes. Either way, it is a telling sign of how the corrupt bush administration and GOP operates.

Iraq Good News Explosion

Lewis Black brings us the good news from Iraq:



I like the new video service The Daily Show is providing but I hope they change it to make the video feeds permanent archives of this shows high quality news and comedy format. Otherwise they will, likely, go the way of the dinosaurs in the wake of the YouTube evolution. Expiring in a month is not good enough for what the Blogs are trying to do.