Can you believe it?

"Um, Chicken Little, . . . the boy who cried wolf, . . . corporate executives, . . . the boy who cried wolf, . . . Rafael Palmeiro, um . . . " Come on, you can get this. Joanne Worley is feeding you great hints, Dick Clark is perched on that horseshoe-shaped railing like the grim reaper, and you're one triangle away from the pyramid. " . . . Um, . . . oh-oh!, . . . . the Bush Administration, . . . Ashlee Simp--." Rush the stage girlfriend, we have a winner. "Things that have lost all credibility" you shout triumphantly. And so it is.

It used to be that their cynical and manipulative handling of the people's business was lauded as a sign of strength and purpose and resolve, but lately the Administration's lies have finally flooded the White House basement and are bubbling out into public view. Enveloped in an ever-thickening cloud of backpedaling damage control, the Administration finds that now even soccer moms, NASCAR dads, and the Main Stream Media (MSM) are starting to pick up on the fact that it is completely full of shit.

On that note, unidentified low-level sources have revealed to Page A-26 that Harriet Miers did not provide a complete work history in her Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire.

Sources indicate that Ms. Miers failed to mention her tenure as a member of the Martindale-Hubbell/Lexis-Nexis Legal Advisory Board.

In and of itself this may or may not be significant,
however, it absolutely is significant in that this
Administration has already proven that it's word
cannot be taken at face value, so Ms. Miers' exclusion
of her work with Martindale-Hubbell/Lexis-Nexis (a key source of information for many researchers and
journalists -- if knowledge is power then having
oversight and control over the distribution of
information is a pretty significant thing) begs the
question: what else isn't she telling us?

Of course, being the lawyer that she is, her answer to the Employment Record question (#7) is capped off by a nice little disclaimer: "I have made my best efforts to include all organizations of which I was a member. However, I may have been a member of other organizations for which I no longer have records." Sing it sister, consider your ass covered.

It is reasonable that she may not be able to recall every detail about every thing she's ever done -- on the other hand, lawyers usually keep pretty detailed records of things, especially things they're getting paid for, soooo . . .

This is of particular interest given that Ms. Miers was able to give the exact dates for obscure and dated gigs such as her many different positions with the Pioneer Bible Translators dating back to 1983 and a three-month law clerkship in 1969, but drew a complete blank on her time with Martindale-Hubbell just five years ago?



Elsewhere in the bowels of her answer to question #7, she remembers the exact address for the computer lab she worked at from 1963 to 1972, but can't quite seem to remember when she served as a board member for Comerica Bank. She provides details for her association with Dallas Legal Services in 1974, but can recall no dates for her membership on the Tyler Cabot Mortgage Securities board.

Is this total recall or selective memory?

Here's where the Bush Administration now has to reapeth what it hath soweth, baby. If not for the five steady years of lies and deception (examples are numerous, but can be summed up in one word: Iraq), it might be OK to let stuff like this slide, but this is the Administration (and the Congress [yeah, including Democrats]) that nominated and confirmed Michael Brown.

A harmless omission or the tip of the iceberg? What other information has she forgotten, or failed to disclose? And why? Somebody, somewhere should be looking into the discrepancies in Ms. Miers' answers before she is rotely confirmed to a lifetime position on the Supreme freakin' Court. This ain't no FEMA directorship that you can toss around like Mardi Gras beads, this is for life.

For example, did Ms. Miers' time with financial institutions Comerica and Tyler Cabot correspond with any scandals at those institutions? Say maybe during the late 1990s at a time when, say, they might have had dealings with now unsavory corporate characters such as Enron or Service Corporation International (SCI).

Maybe she just forgot. Evidence of her time with Martindale-Hubbell is all over the Internet, as is mention of her insignificant Comerica stock ownership, so it's not like this information is impossible to find. It's not necessarily about these specific blips on her questionnaire -- it's about the fact that there are blips, blips that should be aggressively investigated by the press.

Case in point. Ms. Miers stated in her questionnaire that she served on the Board of Directors for the Tyler Cabot Mortgage Securities Fund, but she could not provide any dates. A seemingly innocent omission, until you start poking around.

In a tiny sampling of the possiblities, the 1995 Capstead Annual Report provides a timeline for the company's first ten years. Turns out that the Tyler Cabot Mortgage Securities Fund was created under the Capstead umbrella in 1991. The report also notes that Kay Bailey Hutchison, currently U.S. Senator from Texas, was elected Texas State Treasurer while serving on Capstead's Board of Directors in 1991. Conflict of interest? Was Ms. Miers with Tyler Cabot at this time? Did she cross paths with an up-and-coming Hutchison accidentally or was Tyler Cabot/Capstead a front for Republican political interests in the early 90s? What influence did Tyler Cabot/Capstead have on the Texas political process and what, if any, part did Miers have in their political activities.

The point is, leaving out the dates for her tenure with Tyler Cabot, a seemingly innocent omission of some seemingly irrelevant information, could be part of a strategy to obfuscate and deceive. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but this Administration has lost it's benefit of the doubt and everything about it should be filtered through extreme skepticism.

So with Harriet Miers, are we getting the whole truth, or is it Bushiness as usual? Guess that's the $10,000 question, or maybe the $20,000 question, or is it the $25,000 question?

ADDENDUM (October 20, 2005)

"The real costs of the Medicare prescription drug bill, . . . Armstrong Williams' conflict of interest . . . um, the real costs of the Medicare prescription drug bill, . . . um . . . Jeff Gannon's real identi--"

"Administration lies that the American public found out about after the fact!" Ding ding ding.

Turns out that Page A-26 is not the only one dissatisfied with the level of information provided. Senate Judiciary Committee co-chairs Arlen "The Joker" Spector and Patrick "Cheney told me to go fuck myself" Leahy are also a bit tweaked.

Under pressure from Spector, Leahy, and others to be a little more forthcoming, Miers revealed today "that as a result of an administrative oversight, her Texas law license was suspended for 26 days in 1989 because of unpaid dues." On Monday, Miers also "disclosed that her D.C. law license was briefly suspended last year because of unpaid annual dues."

Again, this is not Rationale for War level deception here, but is does indicate that Congress and the American public are not getting the whole story from Ms. Miers and her Republican handlers. The woman that is Bush's work wife, the one that spoon feeds information to him and is responsible for managing Oval Office paper flow can't even keep her law licenses current?

Why didn't she supply this information in her original questionnaire responses? And why was she immediately able to provide it when questioned about the lack of detail in her answers?

What else isn't she telling us? There's no way to know unless somebody starts poring over her questionnaire with a fine-toothed comb and the Senate Judiciary Committee (including all 10 righteous Republicans) does its job and fully investigates the nominee before confirming a lifetime appointment on her.

Is that too much to ask?

A bridge too obvious

"Conspiracy theory" is a term that is used to discourage thinking in unconventional ways, ways that allow for the possibility that prominent politicians and elected officials sometimes involve themselves in illegal and/or amoral activities.

--David Cogswell

Ahhh, the stench of truth. After giving the pols and the MSM a couple of weeks to back up their bullshit posturing vis-a-vis cutting waste, fraud, and abuse in government spending such as the recently passed Energy and Transportation bills, it's left to Page A-26 to point out the pair of soiled underpants in the middle of the room.

Last month, Katrina revealed how bare the cupboards actually are, and there was much huffing and puffing and blowing of hot air all around. The politicians were outraged at their own overspending and the MSM ran the bloody "pork barrel" shirt up the flagpole, punctuating their noble work with particularly aggregious examples of government overspending such as the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere." In fact, considerably more attention and real estate was given to sexy earmarks in the large appropriations bills than was given to the fact that one party controlled the legislative process, that one party dictated the legislative agenda, that one party controlled every committee and sub-committee, that one party had the power to veto anything not in the best interest of the American people, that one party was more responsible.

So Page A-26 sat back and waited for a thorough congressional investigation of fraud, excess, and abuse, and for an in-depth, Katrina-aftermath, looking-for-bodies, breaking-news type of outrage and activity from the press. But instead, nobody has really done anything, and just a couple of days ago, the Republicans were back at it with another extended roll call, arm-twisting vote for a bloated energy bill rife with corporate giveaways. Yet again, the Main Stream Media (MSM) has failed in its duty to inform and thereby protect the American people from it's duly elected government.

Of course, this is just one of many, many such episodes in the last five years. In general, and specifically with this Administration (and by that I mean the Republican party, because let's be clear here, Bush is just a handpuppet that stumbled into enough political serendipity to convince his handlers that maybe he could be trusted to drive by himself. Lately, even his handlers have been forced to admit [privately and off the record, of course] that he's an incompetent boob.), there is a grassy knoll, there is a conspiracy behind every event, there is an uber cabal of powerful in this country who set the national agenda and for whose personal agendas we are all just means to an end.

Tom Delay did intentionally subvert campaign finance laws in order to gain political advantage for himself and his party; Bill Frist did take advantage of insider information to unload his HCA stock before it tanked, and he has known of his HCA assets despite blind trust laws prohibiting such knowledge; Karl Rove and Scooter Libby absolutely did illegally out Valerie Plame in political retribution for her husband's public comments about the rationale for war and they did perjure themselves about it when testifying before the grand jury; the Administration's fiscal and political priorities are responsible for the Katrina aftermath debacle. These are not just a series of coincidental incidentals. There is a guiding hand behind it all, and each of these little indiscretions are just the barely visible tips of a much larger underground network of skullduggery, kind of like aspens, which "turn in clusters, because their roots connect them."

If the politicians wanted to clean things up, they could. If the MSM wanted to investigate or report the facts, they could. Instead, politicans want to perpetuate their corrupt relationships with big-money political supporters and the MSM, which is just one more corporate appendage, is impotent in the face of political nefarity.

Take for example, "The Bridge to Nowhere." This simple, $300 million dollar swindle cries out for further review. The MSM has had a grand old time citing the Gravina Bridge as an example of scampish porkbarrel politics, but with many a rueful shake of the head or ironic, insider smirk, MSM anchors, reporters, and commentators consistently missed the point.

The press got caught up in the little stuff -- that this bridge would connect Ketchikan, Alaska (population 14,000) to Gravina Island (population 50). To them it was just a bridge to nowhere. The story was that Congress was so inefficient and mismanaged that they would spend upwards of $300 million to build a bridge that serves no purpose. Time and again the question was asked, "how could they allow this kind of pork to go through in these dire deficit times?" But that is not the question they should have been asking; the right question is "why are they building this bridge?"

To the people behind this bridge con, which is fronted by Representative Don Young (AK), the money appropriated for it in the 2005 Transportation bill is not earmark spending, it's an investment in future profits.

Real information about the Gravina Bridge is hard to come by. Of course, we know the critical stuff, like this bridge will be as long as the Golden Gate bridge and as high as the Brooklyn Bridge. Who cares? How is that relevant? It's not, it's just another example of ninth-grade journalism class reporting. Gee, I wonder how many football fields long the bridge will be? In fact, you can't even find an MSM article that specifically focuses on the bridge, let alone one that provides the entire history of its proposal or identifies the silent partners in this deal.

That's right, silent partners. For every in-your-face Don Young or skulkingly guilty Frank Murkowski, you can be damn sure that there are a host of special interests lurking in the shadows of this bridge rubbing their hands together in anticipation of future riches. This is not an example of porkbarrel spending, this is grand theft infrastructure.

There is almost no road system at all on Gravina Island and Ketchikan's tiny network of paved roads is not even linked to the mainland. There are no hotels or resorts or industries or available services on Gravina. But there will be as soon as that bridge is built. And that's the point. As soon as that bridge is built, some people are going to make a shitload of money on this deal and those are the people that are making sure that this particular earmark is more important that Medicare funding or fully funding Social Security.

This is greed, not incompetence. The politicians try to mislead the public with blustering about excess, fraud, and abuse, then they turn around and exceed, defraud, and abuse. Think about it, why would they build a bridge to nowhere. Well, the greedy are always looking for their next score. If you are a powerful politician with close ties to the levers of power and industry, and vice-versa, you use your connections to create the future.

Page A-26 has no doubt that while there may be nothing in the Alaskan town at the far end of the proposed bridge right now, you can bet your vastly undervalued dollar that there's going to be something there as soon as that bridge is built. Something like resort hotels (and possibly casinos), seriously upscale summer lodges for the wealthy, new businesses like Fred Meyer, McDonalds, Jiffy Lube, and Exxon gas stations, and lots of lots of suddenly very expensive real estate.

Now if the press had any interest in actually investigating stories instead of just parroting "news," somebody would start researching property records, government road-building contracts, and other development-related materials to see who is going to make off like a CEO on this bridge to nowhere deal. Mark these words: by 2015, most of the primary growth forest will be gone and there will be a thriving, up-scale resort town where a sleepy little village of 50 now stands. And those 50 residents will probably be living in dumpy apartments in the Fourth street neighborhood of Anchorage after they get Eminent Domained right out their homes (right, conservative Supreme Court?)

A quick Google search on the bridge project reveals the silhouettes of some sketchy motivations behind this bridge, sketchy motivations that do not seem to hold up in the light of day.

For example, Youngites like the mayor of Ketchikan cite the need to replace the inefficient ferry system with a much more user-friendly multi-lane superhighway bridge, you know, to handle all that back-and-forth traffic between the bustling bedroom community of Gravina Island and the industrial metropolis of Ketchikan. Turns out that most people without a financial stake in the bridge think that the bridge will actually add time and inconvenience to the commute. Imagine that. A bridge miles out of town that turns a five-minute ferry ride into a 15-mile drive probably isn't going to do much for the 50 or so people who might have a need to move back and forth between Gravina and Ketchikan (most of whom don't have cars anyways because there's no freaking roads on the island), but it sure as hell is going to make it a lot easier for fleets of logging trucks to get all that prime Gravina timber to market.

Even better, supporters say the bridge will revitalize Ketchikan, but local folk think that the ferry is actually a significant draw for the tourist trade. Others complain that the bridge will pose serious navigational hazards and the bridge will detract from the local economy and quality of life (page 9). Never mind the fact that it will go right through a native burial ground.

So remind me again, who is actually going to benefit from this bridge? Who are these special interests? My first stop would be the major donors lists of Represenative Young and the RNC. In addition to real estate, infrastructure, and tourism interests, this new bridge will also open up Gravina Island to cost-effective resource extraction that will negatively impact the environment (page 12). Tiiimmmbeerrrr!



So all the earmarks of Teapot Dome, Tammany Hall-level graft are there, but the one entity capable of bringing the truth to light, the MSM, has already moved on. They are happy to shout "pork" and "pork barrel" and "earmarks" from the highest rooftops when it gets them ratings, but as soon as some smokin' chick lawyer with a face like a thespian mask and legs like hot-buttered Jesus gets nominated for the Supreme Court, the MSM is off whoring around for better ratings and the excess, fraud, and abuse is set aside until it once again becomes ratingsly convenient.

I'm sure the real Gravina Bridge story is a good one, and if the MSM had any interest in serving their public mission, they'd go after this one with Woodward and Bernstein-like zeal and follow the money right back to the levers of power.

Aw fuck it. Have you heard what happened to Taylor Behl?