Apparently not happy with just creating their own facts, the brain trust that brought us Conservapedia is now launching a new project: rewriting the Bible without that annoying liberal bias:

The eager young men at Conservapedia are p.o.'d that the Bible might be seen as too liberal. So they've come up with the Wiki-style Conservative Bible Project, to make sure the Lord doesn't go all wobbly on us. Excerpt:

As of 2009, there is no fully conservative translation of the Bible which satisfies the following ten guidelines:[1]

• Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias
• Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, "gender inclusive" language, and other modern emasculation of Christianity
• Not Dumbed Down: not dumbing down the reading level, or diluting the intellectual force and logic of Christianity; the NIV is written at only the 7th grade level[2]
• Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms as they develop;[3] defective translations use the word "comrade" three times as often as "volunteer"; similarly, updating words which have a change in meaning, such as "word", "peace", and "miracle"
• Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction by using modern terms for it, such as "gamble" rather than "cast lots";[4] using modern political terms, such as "register" rather than "enroll" for the census
• Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil.
• Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning
• Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story
• Credit Open-Mindedness of Disciples: crediting open-mindedness, often found in youngsters like the eyewitnesses Mark and John, the authors of two of the Gospels
• Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities

[..]

"The liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio"? Hoo-wee! Elitists like to use words, and lots of 'em! "Unnecessary ambiguities"? But how are you going to abide by the conservative mandate to avoid "dumbing down" Holy Writ while at the same time avoiding big words liberals use? More seriously, the insane hubris of this really staggers the mind. These right-wing ideologues know better than the early church councils that canonized Scripture? They really think it's wise to force the word of God to conform to a 21st-century American idea of what constitutes conservatism? These jokers don't worship God. They worship ideology.

The Bible without all that liberal bias? I thought the Bible was the inviolate Word of God? Wouldn't taking out any liberal teachings violate the inviolate? How much of Jesus's teachings will actually make it into the book? How will these boneheads re-write these statements (courtesy of Jesus is a Liberal)?:

• Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God. [Matthew 5:9]
• Resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. [Matthew 5:39]
• I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despite-fully use you, and persecute you; [Matthew 5:44]
• If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to cast a stone at her. [John 8:7]
• Do not judge, lest you too be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. [Matthew 7:1 & 2.]
• Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy [Matthew 5:7]
• But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. [Matthew 6:15]
• Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions. [Luke 12.15.] Truly, I say unto you, it will be hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. [Matthew 19:23]
• You cannot serve both God and Money. [Matthew 6:24.]
• Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's. [Matthew 22:21]
• Love your neighbor as yourself. .[Matthew 22:39]
• So in everything, do to others as you would have them do to you. [Matthew 7:12.]
• If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. [Matthew 19:21]
• But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just. [Luke 14:13&14.]

Oh yeah, this is gonna be a HUGE success in publishing.

Raw Story: Senior official in Bush domestic propaganda program remains Obama's Pentagon spokesman

The Political Carnival: Generals: Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney are scaremongering

The Existentialist Cowboy: Huge corporations and foreign nations take a proprietary interest in the government of the United States because they own it.

Dusty Trice: Why did the MN GOP have a change of heart on Ron Paul? The good doctor says: "They want my money."

Billablog: A threat to all we hold dear

Mad Kane’s Political Madness: Newt's bilingual newspeak

From The Colbert Report:

Tom DeLay looked so happy on the floor of "Dancing With the Stars" you'd think he'd just been arrested on charges of corruption.

I wonder what the voters in Ross' district are going to think as this news comes out. From The Politico's Propublica: Mike Ross raises eyebrows with healthy haul:

Arkansas Rep. Mike Ross — a Blue Dog Democrat playing a key role in the health care debate — sold a piece of commercial property in 2007 for substantially more than a county assessment and an independent appraisal say it was worth.

The buyer: an Arkansas-based pharmacy chain with a keen interest in how the debate plays out.

Ross sold Holly’s Health Mart in Prescott, Ark., to USA Drug for $420,000 — an eye-popping price for real estate in a tiny train and lumber town about 100 miles southwest of Little Rock.

“You can buy half the town for $420,000,” said Adam Guthrie, chairman of the county Board of Equalization and the only licensed real estate appraiser in Prescott.

But the $420,000 that USA Drug paid for the pharmacy’s building and land was just the beginning of what Ross and his wife, Holly, made from the sale of Holly’s Health Mart. USA Drug owner Stephen L. LaFrance Sr. also paid the Rosses $500,000 to $1 million for the pharmacy’s assets and paid Holly Ross an additional $100,000 to $250,000 for signing a noncompete agreement. Those numbers, which Mike Ross listed on the financial disclosure reports he files as a member of Congress, bring the total value of the transaction to between $1 million and $1.67 million.

And that’s not counting the $2,300 campaign contribution Ross received from LaFrance two weeks after the sale closed.

Holly Ross remains the pharmacist at Holly’s Health Mart under USA Drug. Neither she nor her husband agreed to speak with ProPublica for this story.

Continue reading...

Mike Ross declined to be interviewed by both The Politico and The Rachel Maddow Show. He did however issue this response to The Politico:

Continue reading »

From the L.A. Times--Former Interior Secretary Gale Norton is focus of corruption probe:

The Justice Department investigation centers on a 2006 decision to award oil shale leases in Colorado to a Royal Dutch Shell subsidiary. Months later, the oil giant hired Norton as a legal counsel.

Reporting from Washington - The Justice Department is investigating whether former Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton illegally used her position to benefit Royal Dutch Shell PLC, the company that later hired her, according to officials in federal law enforcement and the Interior Department.

Could we finally see the Justice Department coming down on a member of Bush administration?

Maddow: Ken Salazar inherited responsibility for about 500 million acres of the Earth when President Obama appointed him secretary of the interior. Yesterday, as we reported, he announced that he would shut down the Interior Department office known during the Bush administration as the place where department staffers snorted meth off of toaster ovens.

The inspector general reported that in addition to the toaster oven meth-snorting, employees of one middle management office had sex with, did drugs with, and took embarrassingly small bribes from people in the oil and gas industry they were supposed to be regulating.

Now, the secretary of the interior during the time of the toaster oven, meth-snorting, what‘s known as the department‘s orgy era, was a person named Gale Norton. During the orgy era at her department, Gale—at her department—Gale Norton awarded Shell Oil a bunch of extremely lucrative leases to squeeze some oil out of federal lands.

Two months after the big present for Shell Oil was announced, Gale Norton quit the Department of the Interior. Where did she go to work after that? You guessed it. Shell Oil.

Dear Miss Norton, thank you for submitting your resume.

If then-Interior Secretary Gale Norton discussed her future employment with Shell while she was making the decision to award the company those lucrative leases, she will have broken the law. An internal investigation was launched of this while George W. Bush was still in office.

And “The Los Angeles Times” reports today that it has now been turned over to the Justice Department in a formal criminal referral. That makes Gale Norton the first Bush cabinet secretary to be the subject of a formal corruption investigation. She, of course, is also the first to have multiple results show up when you goggle her name along with the words meth, toaster oven and snorting.

We're working on a project on C&L and we need your help. I'd love for you guys to make short videos about any problems you've had with your health care providers and send them to us at C&L. We'd like to put together a montage for Congress so they can see first hand how totally screwed up it is trying to pay for care even if you have health care in America. How many stories have you seen on TV that show us the problems Americans have with health care even when they have insurance and what they do to keep it. You won't find many at all. They think it's better for their ratings to show the infighting of the policy debate rather than show what this fight is actually about.

You can use Flip cam videos, laptops, computer web cams, cell phones or any other device you have available. We keep hearing from the conservative party of no that we have the best health care in the world and if we change anything it'll put the government between you and your doctor. It's just stupid right wing talking points to muddy up the waters to average American families, but the media doesn't investigate; they regurgitate.

The truth is that even if you and your family have health care, it's the insurance companies who stand between you and your doctor and they make it as difficult as possible if you have to deal with any other medical problem outside of a runny nose. We need health care reform badly in this country, but we need your help to expose what's really going on. How many specials have you seen on the networks that actually do in depth reporting on the relationship between you, your doctors and the health insurance companies? Only Michael Moore spent the time to put them under the magnifying glass and it terrified the Health Industrial Complex because they wanted their corruption to be kept in the dark.

Please send all videos to this email address:

crooksandliarsvideos@gmail.com

If we get enough of them we'll be able to shed some light on the problems of actually being covered, but not getting the service you paid for or the service that has quadrupled in price the last few years...

In a yet another completely tone-deaf move hailed by GOP sycophants as cagey, Sarah Palin complained about the mean ol' bloggers chasing after her and sic'ed her lawyer after them, threatening lawsuits. Palin's lawyer, in point of fact, put out a four page letter (.pdf) outlining the "defamatory" charges against his client that would embarrass a first semester law student.

One of those in Palin's crosshairs is blogger Shannyn Moore. Shannyn has one message for Palin: Bring it on.

On the Fourth of July, when Americans everywhere were celebrating our most sacred national holiday with parades and barbeques, Governor Sarah Palin was busy having me, Shannyn Moore, declared an Enemy of the State.

In a rambling quasi-legal letter, the most powerful person in this state accused me of defaming her for pointing out the fact that there have been rumors, -rumors- of corruption, rumors that have been around for years.

When Sarah Palin gave her three-weeks notice to the people of Alaska, aborting her term as Governor, a lot of people wondered why she quit. Mid-level managers turn-in their notice, not elected public officials. It didn’t make sense. It still doesn’t. People have been trying to guess why she really quit, and everyone in Alaska has been playing the guessing game. They’re rumors. There are a lot of rumors. And with all the corruption we’ve had here in Alaska, of course we wonder what’s really behind her resignation.

Governors don’t just quit. But Governor Palin did.[..]

Sarah Palin is a coward and a bully. What kind of politician attacks an ordinary American on the Fourth of July for speaking her mind? What’s wrong with her? The First Amendment was designed to protect people like me from the likes of people like her. Our American Revolution got rid of kings. And queens, too. Am I jacked-up? You betcha. Sarah Palin, if you have a problem with me, then sue me.

You gotta love this woman.

Hat tip for this video to Shannyn's fellow Alaska blogger Gryphen at The Immoral Minority, who points out,

"Do you know the difference between a Shannyn Moore press conference and a Sarah Palin press conference? Shannyn's made sense."

It's getting to the point where I don't even want to read Simon Johnson anymore. Yes, he's right. If we reduce oversight safeguards to "trust us," we have a system far too ripe for corruption - in fact, almost asking for it:

Buried in the late wire news on Friday – and therefore barely registering in the newspapers over the weekend – Treasury announced the rules for pricing its option to buy shares in banks that participated in TARP.

The Treasury Department said the banks will make the first offer for the warrants. Treasury will then decide to sell at that price or make a counteroffer. If the government and a bank cannot agree on a fair price for the warrants, the two sides will have the right to use private appraisers.

This is a mistake.

The only sensible way to dispose of these options is for Treasury to set a floor price, and then hold an auction that permits anyone to buy any part – e.g., people could submit sealed bids and the highest price wins.

In Treasury’s scheme, there is significant risk of implicit gift exchange with banks - good jobs/political support/other favors down the road – or even explicit corruption. For sure, there will be accusations that someone at Treasury was too close to this or that bidder. Why would Treasury’s leadership want to be involved in price setting in this fashion?

Treasury apparently sees corruption as an issue about personalities (i.e., WE aren’t ever corrupt) rather than about institutional structure. For example, if you create an arrangement that easily permits corruption, such as through nontransparent decision making or negotiation around warrant pricing, you set up incentives to be corrupt. Either existing people change their behavior, or new people will seek appointment in order to participate in corruption.

This is also a point, by the way, that Treasury has been making for years through its representatives at the International Monetary Fund – including during the Clinton Administration, when the same people were running U.S. economic policy as now. It’s a good point and never easy for countries-with-potential-corruption to hear. It applies as much to the United States as to anywhere else.

Treasury will argue the disposal of warrants is a one-off event, but this is not a plausible line: it is part of a much longer series of nontransparent decisions over finance. The attitude that “we can be nontransparent because we will never be corrupt” creates reputational risk for both Treasury and participating banks. If extraordinary support for the financial sector lasts several years, we will likely have at least one time-consuming and damaging investigation into all the details of these settlements.

(Deja-vu all over again)

An interesting panel discussion between Senators Estes Kefauver (D-Tennessee), Margaret Chase Smith (R-Main), Blair Moody (D-Michigan) and Harry P. Cain (R-Washington) on the subject "How Can We Get Integrity In Government?" in 1952. I'm struck by the civility of everyone for about the first half before it goes slightly south.

Funny, in almost 60 years the argument is the same, so is the hand-wringing and finger pointing. The other side is always the culprit and everything would be solved if there was a new party running things.

Sadly, no.

I hate to sound cynical, but in 60 years the corruption and lobbying has only gotten worse. Certainly the hypocrisy has.

But I just have the feeling our "trusted public servants" in 1952 weren't going MIA for jaunts to Buenos Aires - or maybe they were and they were more discreet.

At least this bunch doing the panel in 1952 pretended to be.

Rachel Maddow notes what the script is for a disgraced GOP Senator returning to the Senate. Apologize, no further comment, and get a round of applause from your fellow Senators.

John Ensign follows the likes of Larry Craig, David Vitter and Ted Stevens with a show of support from his fellow family values Republicans. It's so nice to see the Republicans are at least being consistent with their hypocrisy when it comes to protecting their own.

(The Shoes of Billy Sol Estes - no doubt the Alligator had other plans.)

What had to be one of the biggest scandals of the 1960's centered around one Billy Sol Estes whose influence and fraud wandered through many high places in Washington, allegedly all the way up to the office of Lyndon Johnson. Estes was the subject of a Senate Sub-committee investigation on political corruption which led to a startling number of discoveries and an even more startling number of "suicides" in the process. Although Estes was convicted of fraud and corruption charges and sentenced to prison, his conviction was overturned by a Supreme Court decision that ruled the massive amount of publicity the investigation garnered made a fair trial impossible.

Still, the allegations were serious enough about LBJ to force Kennedy to consider dropping him as running mate in 1964. And he probably would have, had fate not intervened.

On July 2, 1962, at the height of the investigation, ABC's long-running Sunday talk show Issues and Answers featured a dialogue between Texas Attorney General Will Wilson and Senator Edmund Muskie, who was a member of the Senate Subcommittee investigating the Estes scandal.

(Sen. Sam Irvin (left) - Bill Sol Estes (right))

Senator Dodd just got his first primary opponent yesterday when virtual unknown Merrick Alpert announced his candidacy at his home. Alpert has no prior experience but apparently has the money to burn. A few hours later he would go on Fox News, where his appearance was more important than a White house press briefing going on at the same time. Alpert's talking points in this clip are straight out of the republican handbook. Earlier in the day he called Chris Dodd "Bambi", and that Dodd was part of the "culture of corruption" in Washington.

Dodd also has to contend with two real republican weasels who are vying for his job in the U.S. Senate.

Should be an interesting 18 months until the election. Or as one CT journalist succinctly put it,

"Somewhere, Glenn Beck and Rob Simmons are smiling."

ProPublica: A stockpile of documents about hundreds of Guantanamo Bay detainees, some written by the prisoners themselves, could be destroyed under a little-known provision of a federal court order the Bush administration obtained in 2004.

After Downing Street: Harry Reid says Cheney tortured, but proposes letting him off!  Listen to the audio clip as Christiane Brown interviews the useless Dem leader

Seeing the Forest: More TARP fund corruption rumors

Brad Delong: New Republic Crashed-and-Burned-and-Smoking Watch

Pulp Friction: Michael Steele Crashed-and-Burned-and-Smoking Watch

BlondeSense: Homophobia (still) Trumps National Security

Dan Froomkin has a great post up about the newly released torture memos and he knows this is only the beginning.

The full extent of what was done in our name remains unclear, and there are still big gaps in our understanding of how it all came to pass. Just how many people were detained by the U.S. government in the so-called “war on terror”? How many of them should never have been held in the first place? How many of them were mistreated, and how badly? Did torture and abuse produce valuable information? How much did it embolden our enemies? How many people knew what was going on? Where in the chain of command does the responsibility lie? Why didn’t more people object? How direct was the link between what happened in the offices of the president and vice president and the cells of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib? How willful was the administration’s corruption of the law?


And it’s not just torture and detention. When it comes to warrantless surveillance, for instance, what little we know about the program as it still exists today is still considerably more than we know about the program as it operated before the revolt in Bush’s own Justice Department. What were we doing from 2001 to 2004 such that even John Ashcroft couldn’t bring himself to approve it any longer? How many people have been wiretapped without a warrant? What happened to all the data?


The public overwhelmingly wants some sort of official inquiry. According to a recent USA Today/Gallup Poll, nearly two thirds of Americans support an investigation into the treatment of terror suspects during the Bush administration – although they are split on whether it should be conducted by an independent panel or by federal prosecutors.


Journalists have a special role here. Not only can we keep chipping away at the truth – but we can and should remind members of the public, over and over again, about all the facts that remain hidden from them, including information about acts committed in their name that had -- and continue to have -- profound moral and legal implications. We should also remind Americans that our moral stature on the globe has been -- and will remain -- seriously damaged until or unless there is some sort of process of reckoning and accountability. And while there’s no need for journalists to get involved in partisan battles, when the question at hand is whether the nation will avert its eyes or face up to the truth, it’s entirely appropriate for journalists to take a stand.

NiemanWatchDog is having a series devoted to these questions. Journalists, please do your jobs.

You Tube

Well another Bush admistration official has found themselves behind bars in the Big House. The latest to add to the list is Felipe Sixto who just received 30 months for stealing 579,247 dollars of US Agency for International Development funds from the Center for a Free Cuba, a government-funded non-profit group.

As Rachel reminds us, this is now the eighth member of the Bush administration to find themselves sentenced to prison time. And the hits just keep on coming. Any dibs on just how long this list will get before it's all over?