My name is Edward and I was born at 5:17 PM on Thursday, August 9th, 2007. I drink liberally just like my Daddy... Got milk? And does anyone know what that shiny flashy thingie Daddy keeps pointing at me is? It looks yummy!
On Tuesday afternoon, Glenn Murphy Jr. e-mailed media outlets a letter announcing his resignation from both positions, citing an unexpected business opportunity that would prohibit him from holding a partisan political office.
The chairman of the Clark County Republican Party — who last month was elected president of the Young Republican National Federation — has resigned both posts, apparently in the wake of a criminal investigation.Ok... Sounds like Murphy might be thinking about a somnambulic version of Florida state Rep. Bob Allen's business model, BUT without money changing hands.
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However, the Clark County Sheriff’s Department on Friday began investigating Murphy for alleged criminal deviate conduct — potentially a class B felony — after speaking with a 22-year-old man who claimed that on July 31, Murphy performed an unwanted sex act on him while the man slept in a relative’s Jeffersonville home.
Murphy, a 33-year-old Utica resident, has not been arrested nor has he been charged with a crime. A copy of the police report has been posted on an politically focused Internet site and another was provided to a reporter with The Evening News and The Tribune on Tuesday evening.
In 1998, a 21-year-old male filed a similar report with Clarksville police claiming Murphy attempted to perform a sex act on him while he was sleeping. Charges were never filed in that case.
In a shocking police report filed by the Clark Co. Sheriff's office, Murphy is accused of sexually assaulting another man on Saturday, July 28, 2007, while he lay sleeping in his bed. The alleged assault of the 22-year-old man took place in the Jeffersonville, Indiana home of his sister following a Young Republican party in which both Murphy and the 22-year-old man had been in attendance. The victim's sister had urged both men to spend the night at her home because of the amount of alcohol the two had consumed during the party. The victim awoke in the morning to find Murphy performing oral sex on him according to the report. When the victim asked Murphy what he was doing, he responded: "He was holding his dick with one hand and sucking my dick with his mouth." The victim then pushed Murphy away, gathered his personal belongings and left. Murphy was later confronted with the charges by the victim's sister according to the report. The sister says Murphy admitted to her that he performed the sex act on her brother.
Thanks to exmearden for this quote:Leaving little doubt how he originally got the overwhelming support of Young Republicans across the nation... And even less doubt why the Young Republicans are busy scrubbing their sites of the many pictures and references to Murphy they had all over the net...
"I will essentially be the mouthpiece and effective leader for the tens of thousands of Young Republicans, 18 to 40, across the country," said Murphy, who took a vacation following the organization’s convention and returned to Clark County last weekend.
In other news, Romney's Young Republican spawn seems to believe they are above serving the country by actually going to the endless occupation of Iraq they claim support - another republican perversion, this time, of logic - and would prefer to try and doom this nation with another 4 years of whackjob GOP presidential doom:The Young Republicans have quietly and quickly scrubbed any mention of their fallen leader, although the Indiana site hasn't.
Google Cache reveals that the site had Murphy all over it, including a YouTube appeal for GOP presidential contenders to participate in the upcoming YouTube debate. The video has since been removed as well.
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Here is the Google Cache of the now-defunct Team Murphy! campaign website.
Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney on Wednesday defended his five sons' decision not to enlist in the military, saying they're showing their support for the country by "helping me get elected."I think that if these Romney chickenhawks are unwilling to put their lives on the line, and spill their own blood in Iraq's desert sand in an endless occupation that they falsely claim to support, then they suck just as much as their fellow Young Republican, Murphy.
Romney, who did not serve in Vietnam due to his Mormon missionary work and a high draft lottery number, was asked the question by an anti-war activist after a speech in which he called for "a surge of support" for U.S. forces in Iraq.
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The woman who asked the question, Rachel Griffiths, 41, of Milan, Ill., identified herself as a member of Quad City Progressive Action for the Common Good, as well as the sister of an Army major who had served in Iraq.
"Of course not," Griffiths said when asked if she was satisfied with Romney's answer. "He told me the way his son shows support for our military and our nation is to buy a Winnebago and ride across Iowa and help him get elected."
We in Connecticut know the founder of the Kos was a strong supporter of Lamont in his bid to unseat Senator Lieberman. Most of us also know the Kos is generally speaking shall we say, left leaning.
The traffic on reddit.com has gotten silly and boring with the constant calls for impeachment of Bush, Cheney, and the horse they rode in on.
Constitutional scholar Marty Lederman points out a little-noticed provision of the law that shouldn't surprise any of us:
That's right. Dubya and Attorney General Gonzales didn't get a six-month window in which to spy on everyone and everything—the PAA gives them 18 months.Although section 6(c) provides that the operative provisions of the Act "shall cease to have effect 180 days after the date of the enactment of this Act," i.e., on February 1, 2008, there is an express exception in section 6(d), which reads as follows:
AUTHORIZATIONS IN EFFECT.—Authorizations for the acquisition of foreign intelligence information pursuant to the amendments made by this Act, and directives issued pursuant to such authorizations, shall remain in effect until their expiration. Such acquisitions shall be governed by the applicable provisions of such amendments and shall not be deemed to constitute electronic surveillance as that term is defined in section 101(f) of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1801(f)).
Thus, "acquisitions" authorized by Attorney General Gonzales will be permissible for one year, even if that period extends beyond the ostensible February 1, 2008 sunset date. I think it's fair to assume that the Attorney General will authorize a system of such acquisitions on or close to February 1, 2008, which will mean that the warrantless surveillance can continue until . . . February 1, 2009, or twelve days after the next President is sworn in.
Picture two teams pitted against each other: Ashcroft, Mueller and Comey on one side; Gonzales, Cheney, Bush and Andy Card (and Rove?) on the other. Somewhere in the middle is the MAEP.You all remember the rumors of the bushy campaign supposedly spying on Kerry. Questions still remain about testimony that left everyone in the Blogosphere scrastching their heads and asking if there was more than just the one illegal spying operation going on that everyone already knew about from the whistleblower Or just how much bigger it was than just simply spying on the real terrorists?
Cheney felt that the decision could not be put off until Ashcroft got out of the hospital. The hospital incident took place on March 10, 2004.The crisis in March 2004 stemmed from a review of the program by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, which raised "concerns as to our ability to certify its legality," according to Comey's testimony. Ashcroft was briefed on the findings on March 4 and agreed that changes needed to be made, Comey said.Then came Ashcroft's illness and, on March 10, the mad rush to the hospital room, as Alberto Gonzales and Andy Card tried to get the gravely ill non-acting A.G. to sign off on the program. Robert Mueller called up the security guys protecting Ashcroft and told them that no matter what Gonzales or Card did or said, Comey was not to be kept out that room. Ultimately, Ashcroft told Cheney's henchmen that Comey was the acting AG and that he, Ashcroft could do nothing. (In this case, I think we can presume that "could" means "would.")
Ashcroft left office, for reasons still not fully understood, in February of 2005. You-know-who replaced him.
So what made the NSA program a matter of such dire concern on the might of March 10-11?
In the past, I've offered the opinion that the Mother of All Eavesdropping Programs was being used to spy on political opponents. I still have strong suspicions along those lines. However:The next day, as terrorist bombs killed more than 200 commuters on rail lines in Madrid, the White House approved the executive order without any signature from the Justice Department certifying its legality. Comey responded by drafting his letter of resignation, effective the next day, March 12.Comey was persuaded to stay after Bush promised unspecified changes to the law.
Could the race to the hospital have had any connection to the Madrid bombings? Did the Bush administration have advance warning of the plot?
One would have thought that, after Risen's article came out, the Bushies would have used Madrid as a propaganda point: "We could have prevented tragedy in Spain," that sort of thing. But they never made any real attempt to sound that note, although Gonzales did make a brief en passant mention of Madrid during his testimony.
On the other hand, if the Bushies were (say) spying on John Kerry, Comey probably would have so testified -- if, in fact, Comey knew. It may be that Comey had suspicions but did not know.
We have known for a long time that the FBI has been spying on "peace activists", and groups that oppose the Iraq invasion - You know? The liberal-peacenik, Quaker and Gold Star Mom Types - BUT...Unfortunately for Gonzales, not even he has been able to keep the distinction between the Terrorist Surveillance Program and Program X straight. During a June 5th press conference this year, he said that Comey's dispute “related to a highly classified program which the president confirmed to the American people sometime ago” – precisely the opposite of what he’d testified before. By way of explanation, Gonzales testified Tuesday that his spokesman had subsequently contacted the reporter who’d asked the question, Dan Eggen of The Washington Post, to retract that statement.
Despite that embarrassing admission, Gonzales hewed to the same line this Tuesday he’d taken in the hearing the previous February, saying that Comey’s disagreement was “not about the terrorist surveillance program that the president announced to the American people.” He maintained that line under blistering questioning – including the questions of senators, such as Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), who also sit on the Senate intelligence committee and have been briefed on the program.
Following Gonzales' testimony, Democrats' contention that there was only one warrantless surveillance program was bolstered by the release of a May 2006 letter from John Negroponte, then the director of national intelligence, specifying that the March 10, 2004 meeting was, indeed, a TSP meeting. In response, an anonymous DOJ official told the Washington Post that in his testimony on Tuesday Gonzales "did not say that the TSP was not discussed at the meeting" -- underscoring the absurdity of the distinction that the administration is still trying to draw. Similarly, FBI Director Robert Mueller told Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee today that he and Comey had objections to the "much discussed" NSA program, a reference clear in context to the TSP.
In essence, the issue is this: if Gonzales succeeds in convincing the committee that there really is a material distinction between the program as it existed before and after Comey’s intervention, he won't just save himself from perjury. He will perhaps have preserved an administration strategy of concealing the scope of Program X from the public and most of Congress -- making it appear that the program that Bush disclosed in December 2005, incorporating Comey's objections, is the same program that existed since October 2001, long before Comey put the brakes on at least some aspects of it. That may be at the heart of the White House's claim of executive privilege to prevent the Senate Judiciary Committee from seeing documents detailing the genesis of Program X.
We may be about to learn whether a perjury investigation will pierce the obfuscations and begin to explore the extent of Program X -- a program the American public was never supposed to know about.
Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack of the liberal Brookings Institute have been among the harshest critics of the war. But after an eight-day trip to Iraq, they find the political debate in Washington "surreal."
In "A War We Just Might Win" buried in the July 30 New York Times, they say the Surrendercrats gave up and neo-anti-war Republicans defected too soon: "We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. We were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily 'victory' but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.
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"(N)o more whack-a-mole, with insurgents popping back up after the Americans leave."
U.S. forces continue to help to build electricity, drinking-water and sanitation systems for the Iraqis. Sunnis and Shiites are setting aside ancient hatreds and working together, and not just on the soccer field. Streets that saw the worst sectarian combat are "coming back to life" while "the outpouring of popular animus" against al-Qaida is overwhelming. Iraqi soldiers and police are rapidly supplanting U.S. security forces in some northern cities. More must be done, but "the surge cannot go on forever. But there is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008."
Messrs. O'Hanlon and Pollack say war critics "seem unaware of the significant changes taking place" in Iraq. They are too charitable.
Iraq’s political crisis worsened Monday as five more ministers announced a boycott of Cabinet meetings — leaving the embattled prime minister’s unity government with no members affiliated with Sunni political factions.
The US military cannot account for 190,000 AK-47 assault rifles and pistols given to the Iraqi security forces, an official US report says.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) says the Pentagon cannot track about 30% of the weapons distributed in Iraq over the past three years.
Iraq's national power grid is on the brink of collapse, the country's electricity ministry has warned.
Water supplies to Baghdad have also been cut off for days at a time, with summertime pressures on key systems said to be more intense than ever.
Fresh violence in Iraq has left at least 37 people dead with 28 of them killed by a suicide truck bomb in the northern town of Tal Afar, police say.
The blast hit a mainly Shia district of the mixed town and injured about 40, with some feared trapped under rubble.
A curfew was imposed across Tal Afar, which was once held up as a showcase for US-led efforts to pacify Iraq.
In Baghdad, a roadside bomb hit commuters, killing nine and injuring eight, police and hospital sources say.
So rather than demonstrate desperately needed honesty, courage and leadership, they kick the president when he is down and hope to avoid becoming the next Joe Lieberman. They forget Sen. Lieberman won re-election last fall despite the defeatists.
Frontrunning candidates, the DCCC, prominent journalists, the congressional leadership...none of them know how to control the netroots. The netroots' demands are simple: stop this administration from committing crimes and get our troops out of Iraq. After that, it's all detail. With each capitulation, with each gloss-over and passing of the buck, the Establishment further alienates themselves from the citizen activists that do not need and will not be told what to do or think. We've educated ourselves and passed our verdict. Those that will not convict and sentence are just cogs in an appeasement machine that is chug-chug-chugging over a collective cliff.
There will no successful triangulation of the administration's war, or their crimes. The leader that plausibly makes the case that justice will be done is the candidate that will rise to the top.
If any of the candidates, or the leadership, or the media, thought or think that the Netroots' can be tamed through co-option, they must surely be disabused of that notion by now.
The people of this country...the people that are truly paying attention and participating in the blogosphere...demand justice and an end to this war. And that is not going to change.
"The kicker is that the folks at the barber shop, the guys working on your car, most of the folks in the supermarket aisles know what's going on.
They may not read the blogs or read them much, but [their thoughts align] more with the nutso, "far left" bloggers than it does with the MSM on the war, terrorism and even civil liberties.
I wonder when the democratic candidates and their courtiers will figure that one out?"
My voice and the more powerful and eloquent voices of others with the same message might have been crickets chirping in the wilderness, they could not be heard above the howl of the bitter wind driven by the building stampede.
The great headlong rush was on. The Democrats looked like the riotous crowds of Pamplona in their frenzied dash for campaign funds, for their rightful share of the political plunder that had, for so long, been denied to them. Like the mobs of Pamplona except they were chasing after the bulls, racing madly down the streets of our capitol, through the storied halls of our public monuments, their larcenous rotting hearts exposed, their shameless, greedy, grasping palms outstretched, drooling mouths at the ready, eager to suck at the poisonous teats of public corruption and corporate largess, it was a sight from hell.
The relief of last November is now long forgotten amid in the fear and loathing of July, the wars continue unabated, the so called opposition party has joined in dividing the spoils and trampling the law, the hope is gone and, I belive, it is time for every American who cares for this country, for humankind to face up to the sickening and unavoidable reality of our times.
The government of the United States is thoroughly and completely corrupt. From top to bottom, from one side of the aisle to the other, at all levels, whether we look at the federal system or in our statehouses, our government, our institutions, our military, our courts and schools and regulatory bodies, each and every one, has fallen under the control of criminals. And they are being aided and abetted by the treacherous and treasonous majorities of both of our so called political parties.
We need not travel 12,000 miles and comb the dusty caverns of remote mountain ranges, or the empty blazing deserts of Arabia in a search for terror and evil. All the terror, all the fear, all the evil we could ever desire to discover is centered in the chambers of our government and commerce and the evil hearts and minds of those who control them.
The government of the United States now operates under the careful tutelage, direction and control of enormously powerful international corporate interests which have no respect for the people of this or any other nation, not their laws, not their values nor their common histories and least, their humanity, their very lives.
The only interest of these piratical, plutocratic vermin is to take the labor from our backs, to strip the fruit from our trees and the crops from our fields, to mine the ore and pump the oil from our earth, to discover a way to steal the water from our seas and the very light from our sky and make it their own, to control it all, to control it all in their thirst for profit, in their worship of Mammon, of Moloch.
Look not to the media, the self exalted press, those journalistic guardians of the past, have become the corporate stooges of the present, the once independent protectors of the people no longer exist, they were bought, bought and sold in the same trades as the judges, as the preachers, the pastors, bishops, and the healers, bought as cheaply as the public servants, their souls are owned by the houses of wealth and power. All the saviors have sold us out, there is no one to save us but ourselves.
The US Coast Guard is 217 years old today and they figure they have saved more than 1 Million people in that time....
After reviewing old log books and records dating back nearly to 1790, when Congress created the 10-boat fleet that would eventually become the Coast Guard, the agency concluded that it has saved at least 1,109,310 lives.
"U S Coast Guard VIDEO: Since 1790, The Coast Guard has rescued thousands of mariners in distress. This is the Top Ten Rescue videos of all-time. These videos were rated both on the significance of each particular case, as well as the dramatic footage of the rescues."
