Maureen Dowd clearly is in love with Hillary Clinton and fantasizes about having her as her life partner. Think I'm losing my mind with this one? Think again. Dowd has done nothing but savage Mrs. Clinton since she hinted that a presidential run was on the horizon and she continues that attack with a piece in today's New York Times. Rough love is what I call it. In today's piece Dowd questions whether Clinton has shed her feminist past in order to be president, and if so she has become unsuitable to do the job. “The former American first lady, the one who’s supposed to be brimming over with feminist impulses, has ignored and overlooked her husband’s peccadilloes for the greater gain of keeping her marriage intact, as she tries to return to the gilded perch and run the White House.” Dowd presents Clinton as a cold calculating person that is willing to shift her positions (is she dreaming of Hillary in bed) to suit what is coming up ahead of her. Dowd has often taken this route with Clinton and the shtick is getting very old. Yes, Hillary is competitive, she is calculating and she can be steely. What would Dowd like in a president? Would she like stupidity, slacking, and softness. If so she should just endorse Bush for king. So how do I know Dowd is in love with Clinton? As the old adage goes, she protests too much. Today's Times piece is crap over turned and heated up. Dowd again talks about the issue of the Clinton marriage. This issue has been talked about, written about and apparently fantasized about in ridiculous amounts. Yet Dowd continues. She even refers to Clinton as a Dominatrix. More fantasies perhaps? Whatever Dowd says about Clinton as a candidate, wife, mother or president should be viewed as exactly the opposite of its meaning. Dowd is a woman scorned. She loves Hillary but knows she can never have her.

Jon Hurdle, Reuters, October 31, 2007 BALTIMORE (Reuters) - A jury on Wednesday ordered an anti-gay Kansas church to pay $10.9 million in damages to relatives of a U.S. Marine who died in Iraq after church members cheered his death at his funeral. Church members said Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder's death was God's punishment of America for tolerating homosexuality, and they attended his 2006 funeral in Maryland with signs saying "You're going to hell" and "God hates you." The federal jury determined the Westboro Baptist Church, based in Topeka, and three of its principals invaded the privacy of the dead man's family and inflicted emotional distress. Albert Snyder, the Marine's father, testified that his son was not gay, but the church targeted the military as a symbol of America's tolerance of gays. Matthew Snyder died in combat in Iraq in March 2006. The jury awarded Snyder's family $2.9 million in compensatory damages plus $8 million in punitive damages in the first civil suit against the church, which has demonstrated at some 300 military funerals the past two years. The lawsuit said church Web sites vilified U.S. soldiers, accusing them of being indoctrinated by "fag propaganda." Read More Here

John Hill, The Sacramento Bee, October 27, 2007 House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's own party is turning on her, apparently because of a perception among California Democrats that she has not done enough to shake up the status quo in Washington, D.C., according to a Field Poll released Friday. Congress overall is doing even worse with California voters, with an approval rating sagging to 30 percent or below for only the seventh time in the past 15 years, the poll of 1,201 registered voters found. Both Pelosi, the San Francisco Democrat who became speaker this year, and Congress as a whole have fallen short of voter expectations since taking over both houses, poll director Mark DiCamillo said. "I think the reason for her decline and the low ratings Congress is getting is that voters here are not seeing any change," DiCamillo said. Sen. Dianne Feinstein's approval rating of 51 percent is down 10 percentage points since March, but consistent with her average over the years. Sen. Barbara Boxer's rating also has slumped, from 54 percent in March to 44 percent. Both Boxer and Feinstein, however, still enjoy the approval of more voters than disapproval of them. For Pelosi, it was the first time the poll showed more people disapproving than approving of her performance – 40 percent to 35 percent, with 25 percent having no opinion. Other polls since 2003 have shown larger numbers of voters with no opinion, but Pelosi always won more approval than disapproval. As recently as March, California Democrats approved of Pelosi by a 5-to-1 ratio, DiCamillo said. Now it's less than 2-to-1. Nonpartisan voters also have soured on her. Read More Here

For months now we have watched an completely inept group of Republicans attempt to run for president and truthfully it has made for some good comedy. Watching the GOP candidates fall all over themselves during their many debates is often more amusing than a great Three Stooges episode. Looking at the GOP candidates seriously is hard to do but for the safety of the nation must be done.

What is very clear from watching the GOP debates and various appearances by the candidates is that they are clearly unsure who is currently president of the United States. Over a 90 minute debate you rarely every hear the candidates mention the name George W. Bush. Given that Bush is the incumbent president and leader of the GOP it is surprising that he is not mentioned. Oh, wait a minute. I know why they never mention old George, its because he has royally fucked up the country and the GOP.

Instead of discussing Bush and his seven long years of destroying the Constitution and everything that is good about this country they have chosen to focus on Democratic candidate and perceived front runner Hillary Clinton. From the tone of people like Rudi Guiliani you would think it is Clinton that has been president all this time while the country has gone to shit. Each and every day we here Guiliani or Romney or McCain etc. taking shots at the Clinton presidency that never was. This may seem like a good idea to the candidates but what it really does is reinforce the fact that Bush and the GOP are the ones that have destroyed our nation. Someone should really remind these GOP bozos that its not the 1990s when a Clinton was in the White House during peace and prosperity but the 2000s of Bush's war and economic decline.

Excelent Review of History until the end where you begin to doubt everything you just read. Power Faith and Fantasy is a scholarly text over 600 pages of small type. It is well written, well researched for the most part and a good reference text for any person trying to understand the US relationship with middle east. I did have one quibble with the book on page 525 where the Liberty Incident is mentioned and is just written off in one sentence,"...Israeli jets and missile boats on June 8 mistakenly fired on an American spy ship, the USS Liberty, killing thirty-four sailors and wounding 171..." One problem, Only the Israeli's said it was a mistake and it was never investigated. All crew members on board that fateful day all said it was no accident, the United States flag had been flying high, it was a clear day and they had been under Israeli reconnaissance flights for hours before the attack. But I kept reading, now questioning the integrity of everything I just read. On or about page 585 the author reveals himself for what he truly is, an ideologue with an agenda and brings everything in the book into question. Among the most outrageous claims: Hans Blix thought that there were WMDs in Iraq. Patently false. Mentions Chalabi as an MIT graduate but not as a convicted crook with outstanding warrants in Jordan. Says there were positive outcomes of the Iraqi invasion, mainly democratic movements in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, but they were squelched. Never mentions the democratic movements were by the same people that assassinated Anwar Sadat and are listed as a terrorist organization. Also mentions,"Libya gave up its nuclear program, but Iran initiated one that was far larger, better defended, and vastly more threatening to the region." The threat of Iran's nuclear program, if there is one, has not been proven by anybody. Compares GWB to Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt, OK if you say so. Does not claim, but does not dispute and in fact obfuscates, that Saddam and Al Queida had a relationship. Something that was proven false. Gives the Impression that Saddam Hussein was a Islamic religious leader when in fact he was secular and that is why Al Queida would not have dealt with him. GWB "piloting a Viking jet" descended unto the Abraham Lincoln. Does anybody have any proof GWB can pilot a Viking Jet and never mind land on an aircraft carrier? But this is truly the kicker, again under benefits of the invasion: "The Iraqis had united under a national constitution and leadership, but the country soon succumbed to sectarian bloodshed..." If that is not a contradictory statement I don't know what is. I started this book with an open mind and desire to learn. At the end I doubted everything I had read and wondered if I wasted many hours.

I don't know if anyone's noticed, but George W. Bush is being disappeared from the presidential campaign and everyone's running against incumbent Hillary Clinton. Subtly, but relentlessly, the public psyche is being prepared to deny Junior ever existed. And it could work. For many different reasons, most Americans want nothing more than to forget George W. Bush was ever president. So, we see a very odd subliminal narrative taking shape in which the blame for the nation's failures of the last seven years is being shifted to Clinton (and the "do-nothing" Democratic congress) as if the Codpiece hasn't been running things since 2000. (Not that the radical wingnuts haven't always blamed the Clenis for everything, but the disappearing of Bush is a new element.) I certainly don't blame the Republicans for trying to do it. It makes sense, since their boy is an epic failure and the original Clinton is still very present in people's minds. It will be quite a trick to pull off, but I can see the press already helping them do it. (Naturally.) It's an interesting phenomenon and one for which I hope the Democratic strategists are prepared. Their underlying theme seems to be, "If you want change, vote Republican!"

We have a problem, and not a problem right here in River City, but across our land. Its a problem of miss-labeling. And we conservatives, you and I, are losing the fight. What are we doing letting other people label us and at the same time marginalizing us? Its time to put our collective foot down and let this idiocy end. How will we ever win an ideological argument if we let other people label us and say what we stand for? Never, it will never happen. Stop FOOLS, think!!! We are conservatives. We have values. We stand for a proud tradition that founded this great nation. Do not let anybody take that away from you. Today’s conservatives are false conservatives. They do not defend our nation, our values or tradition, or Constitution. They would be the willing allies of the redcoats if this was 1776. We stand and tower above them. So why are we cowling? I do not know when or why, (I am not a historian, let somebody else explain it), but at one point we became liberals. We were proud, we were bold, we were hip and we created fear in every American president from Dwight D. Eisenhower on. We had arrived. We were proud, a force that had to be appeased. We ended the Vietnam War, liberated women and taught the world that negroes were people too. We had some victories, scars and medals we could celebrate. Man, we were hip and proud, being a liberal was so grooby man... I can hardly believe today how proudly we stood and won. They had to sic Archie Bunker on us, if only to celebrate us. At one point, there were tiny little churches in the South, the North, and in many other places in America that taught of the true meaning of the Bible. They were the first to break through the racism of slavery. The shame and inhumanity towards our fellow man. They taught love, compassion, understanding and many other things that are in the Bible that today’s Christian Churches skip over, and just go straight to Revelations. Before Honest Abe, or FDR came along to enlighten us, we had great leaders that are buried in our third grade history books. Yes, the writers and founders of what we knew in January 2001 to be a great nation. Don’t be fooled, that nation is long gone and it may never return. These individuals were visionary, created a new system of government with justice and liberty for all. OK, I will not go into all the details, if you need a refresher course ask your third grader. They were radical, some people could say paranoid. They were afraid of the overreaching power of government which we saw all too often in the 21st century. They were afraid the church could be corrupted by the power or the purse of the Federal Government. Anybody hear of the office of Faith Based Initiatives in Mr. Bush’s White House? Some were Atheists. OMG NO!!!! We were founded by a bunch of Atheists??? Sorry Mary Ellen and John Boy, yes you were. Today’s Republicans try to confuse the citizenry by claiming that we were founded in religious principles, but the truth is only one of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence was an active clergyman, and that was John Witherspoon. Witherspoon was a Presbyterian minister and president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). As Steven Weinberg said,” With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. ” That is correct, anybody remember reading of the Inquisition, Muslim suicide bombers, abortion clinics being blown up, Drs. Shot through windows in their own home, Terry Schiavo? Atheists are not a threat to humanity, but religion is. OH No, you don’t believe it because Jesus is so good and who could not love Jesus? Because first of all, the idea of Jesus is in the interpretation, but most importantly second, not all religions believe in Jesus or are based on Jesus, such as: Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, and many others I too numerous to list. And then you get into sects within the same religion. Religion does not unite us, it separates us, that is why it belongs at home and places of worship, not in the public sphere. Is there any wonder these incredibly brave, nude (Ben Franklyn was a naturalist, hey he had fun, who are you to judge?) and intelligent men thought that “in order to create a more perfect union”, religion should be totally separate from the state.* So, my point? We were named Liberals at one point and we accepted it because it was hip. Then Liberal became a dirty word and we let people re-brand us as progressives. You know what?? Go F*** yourself if you think you are progressive. Hell, at least Liberal meant something, what the F does progressive mean? Pu**y for right wing a**holes. That is right, Nancy Pelosi, (total failure) is progressive, Harry Reid, (total Failure) is a progressive. Do these people stand for anything? I love Liberals. They are my people. I understand them, think with them, admire them. It is an amazing experience to be in a room where people can hold and evaluate different ideas at the same time. Ever been to a republican party? One guy is thinking, “ I hope they do not send me to Iraq” the other guy is thinking, “That guy is cute…” and the other guy is thinking “If only I could convince Bush that I am worthy” and all the pretty white women are in the other room living their Mandingo fantasy. OK, I confess, I have been there. We are different, we evaluate, we think, and do not discard ideas without merit until they are seriously scrutinized. OMG!!! We are such pussies. Get a backbone people. We are right. We are the heirs and defenders of our constitution. No wiretapping. No torture. No rendition. No secret government. These so called conservatives today are radical extremists, OK, fascists. Let’s take our country back. Let’s take our proud tradition back, defend our constitution. Let’s rename ourselves conservatives, because that is what we really are, and in the process confuse our intellectually challenged opposition. Let’s take America back, it does belong to us. * I am aware the Declaration of Independence and The Philadelphia Constitutional Convention were two separate events, and my writing may seem a little muddled, but in large number the participants were the same.

http://www.arkansasnews.com/archive/2007/10/25/News/343744.html http://www.nwanews.com/adg/News/205841/ As anyone who lives in Arkansas can tell you, illegal immigrants have inundated our state to an extent seen by very few other members of the Union. In a recent speech at the University of Central Arkansas, Governor Mike Beebe said that offering scholarships to potential students in the country illegally "would open the state up to paying moneys that we could never afford" (Link 1).  While many would see that the governor made a valid point, an officer of UCA's Latinos United instead shut down the potential for discussion by opining that the governor "doesn't (care) about Latinos in this state" (Link 1). The number of residents in the country illegally is an issue that is conveniently ignored by many in the state. While most of the police in surrounding states send requests to check immigration status to the Law Enforcement Support Center at a rate of greater than 1 per 200 Hispanic residents, Arkansas averages a request on 1 of every 634 Hispanic residents (Link 2). While many Arkansas residents are aware that many of the immigrants who live in their state are here illegally, this will never be an issue that can be discussed in a public forum as long as representatives of Hispanics point their fingers and shout, "Racists!" It astounds me that the people who are here legally do not take offense to the fact that the people whom they are stridently defending have thumbed their noses at the very process that made their supporters citizens. Perhaps if legal immigrants used the energy that goes towards calling fellow citizens bigots to discourage illegal immigration, Arkansas would see a change in this trend. Until then, citizens of every race and ethnic background watch as our hard-earned tax dollars are given to those who have exhibited blatant disregard for our laws and borders.

BartCop.com Volume 2064 - Tainted x Torture In Today's Tequila Treehouse...

	Blackwater Immunity
	Blackwater criticism
	High Cost of Torture
	$600M Baghdad Bunker
	Pentagon's $1.4B Lie
	HRC looking better
	Delgiorno again
	Rumsfeld flees France
	Oscar winning legs

Are you sick and tired of hearing there are no “good” solutions to the problem of illegal immigration? So am I. See if my “Top Ten” works for you: 1. Stop telling the American public we need “comprehensive immigration reform.” They know it’s amnesty, and they aren’t buying it. Not now, not ever. 2. Stop using the term “undocumented immigrant” when you’re talking about “illegal aliens.” Who do you think you’re kidding? 3. If Americans genuinely “refuse to do the jobs illegal aliens do,” and fruits and vegetables will be left “rotting in the fields,” two immediate solutions come to mind: either able-bodied American welfare recipients or American prisoners can take up the slack. Why should either group continue to be underwritten by the taxpayers for doing nothing? 4. Demand that the Social Security Administration, the IRS, and the Dept. of Homeland Security share data bases. Think the government doesn’t know who’s using phony Social Security numbers to get work? Think again. Privacy issues? Privacy for who, people who snuck into the country illegally? 5. Build the damn wall–all of it! Stop stalling, stop pretending that “virtual fences,” or “high-tech” whatever are viable substitutes for bricks and mortar. And while we’re at it, create an atmosphere where Border Patrol agents–rather than border-busters–get the benefit of the doubt in any altercations. 6. End the “anchor baby” nonsense. Another item that galls the American public, especially when the MSM trots out the sob stories of illegal parents forced to leave their citizen children behind if America gets tough on illegal immigration. 7. Pass federal legislation requiring the states to use picture IDs for voting. The 2000 presidential election hinged on less than a thousand votes. Would you be willing to bet that less than a thousand illegals cast illegal votes nationwide–in ANY recent election? Those against picture IDs for voters–aka liberal Democrats–are revealing their true motive for keeping 12-20 million non-Americans in the country. The issue is currently before the Supreme Court. To say the future of the nation depends on the outcome is no exaggeration. 8. Phase out all benefits for illegals. In-state college tuition, Matricula Consular IDs, drivers licenses, etc. Can’t be done? Welfare reform put a time limit on benefits, and welfare rolls dropped like rocks nationwide. This one also answers the “lament” about how we can’t deport 12 million people all at once. True, but who said anything had to be done all at once? Swinging the pendulum in the right direction is a great place to start. It’s called “attrition.” 9. End sanctuary cities. Quite simply, this is anarchy masquerading as compassion. Federal law is not “optional,” and those who refuse to enforce it should be held to account. 10. Reform the LEGAL immigration process. We’ve made chumps out those immigrants who’ve stood in line, obeyed the law and want to become productive citizens of America the RIGHT way. Streamlining the process has two benefits: one, America gets more of the kind of people who made this country great and; two, it exposes the outright lying of those who say anyone against the illegal alien free-for-all is nativist, xenophobic or racist. Immigration is a make-or-break issue in 2008. Survey after survey shows the Americans public is fed up with the idea that big business, in cahoots with the political elite, can radically alter the nature of our country for their naked self-interest. None of the above is “impossible”–and the public knows it. The elitists can take their “open borders,” “citizens of the world” mentality–and shove it. atahlert@comcast.net ==================== Calling an "illegal alien" an "undocumented resident" is akin to calling a drug pusher an "unlicenced pharmacist." sent in by Mike

"We may not always agree,...I don't always agree with myself." -- Rudy "Toot Tooty" Guiliani to the Values Voter Summit, Oct. 20, 2007, as quoted by the AP. -- What is it with these Republicans who "don't always agree" with themselves? Bush Senior said something similar years ago: then he had "strong opinions" with which he didn't "always agree." WTF? It's called knowing your own mind -- a quality you might want to have in a president. This is great leadership? "I don't always agree with myself!" Excuse me, Gen. Patton, but your troops are wandering around in circles. Well, at least this time he avoided the cell phone call from hell with the third spouse: "Hi, Judith -- I'm at the Values Voters thing in Washington. Would you like to explain to these fine folks why, as a good Catholic who started attending mass when I announced I was running for president, I wasn't excommunicated for divorcing my other two wives -- one of them in a freaking press conference?" -- So when does Spud Stud Larry Craig (R-Ozone) release the unauthorized video of him pile-driving Paris Hilton with his two-inches of throbbing steel to prove he's "absolutely, positively, 110 percent not gay"? Okay, by the time it 'comes out' that it was a man dressed up as Hilton (Giuliani?) in the vid, Sen. Super Tuber will no doubt have convinced most of the dizzy GOP base that he's all-American hetero enough to run for president. C'mon, Values Voters, line up for your "Get Straight in '08 with Larry!" 'bumper' stickers, only remember to put them on your car. Maybe he can name Jeff Gannon as his campaign manager -- now there's a man who works really hard, knows how to grab them by the balls, and has had top military experience! Of course, in the next election Larry will be just like all of the other Republican candidates trying to follow 'Bush' into the 'Oval Office' -- hoisted on their own retard. (Rim shot!) Sidenote: Seems yet another man -- that makes four, if you're keeping score -- has admitted to having sex with the old codpiece 20 years ago, and he's not staying anonymous. Read all the greasy details in Wonkette's "I Had Sex with Larry Craig!" -- Large Wooden Mallet, Apply Directly to the Forehead: I'm not saying this is a conspiratorial plot, although it may very well be, but has anyone noticed the rewarding of incredible stupidity in American advertising these days? It used to be the buyer of the advertiser's product was depicted as a smart shopper; now dimwits who do dumb things are heralded. It's not just the beer commercials, etc., aimed at collegiates, where the kid does something really dumb and then regales his pals with the story of what a goofy moron he is over a bottle of piss-water light beer, it's across the board. I just saw a TV commercial for Nationwide Insurance the other night where a woman drives her SUV into a large pothole that was plainly marked with sawhorses and warning lights. Right after she destroys the front end of her baby truck, the friendly Nationwide man immediately shows up at her driver's side window, "It's okay, dumb ass, Nationwide is on your side!" Is this aimed at the yuppie 'multi-taskers' who can't seem to drive anywhere without a cell phone in their ear and a GPS satellite blow-up of their destination on the Northstar navigator screen, while they dump down their second Starbuck's mocha Grande of the morning when they're just headed to the 7/11 for AAA batteries for their Ronco Deluxe nose-and-body hair clipper? -- I almost fell out of my chair laughing when Bush's near-wife Condi Rice tried to slap Russian President Vlad Putin with this three-day old slice of raw flounder: "I think that there is too much concentration of power in the Kremlin. Everybody has doubts about the full independence of the judiciary." Yes, Putin's been acting kind of like a "Unitary Executive" hasn't he, doing business in czar mode and intimidating those who oppose him, and stuffing the courts with judges who are loyal to him and will protect his power. Gee, what other world leader acts like that? Just think, when this dimwit leaves government, she is going to be a) the next "Georgie, you is my man!" Mrs. Junior (unlikely); b) confusing students at Stanford, or c) or writing her own regular column in the WSJ, "Tanker Girl," sponsored by Chevron. -- The long-term costs of the California wildfires are going to be devastating to our already faltering economy. Foods such as nuts, avocados, lettuce, oranges, lemons and grapefruit will soar in price, as will anything else produced in Southern Cal. Exactly what is President Diddle, appearing for his "I care" cameos with curling smoke and burned-down homes in the background, going to do about this? (Okay, I know -- make a speech and nada.) Emperor Nero the Deuce also lied when he said that four USAF C-130 cargo planes were on the runway equipped to fight the fires, ready to take-off at Gov. Schwarzenfluffer's request -- in fact, the aircraft weren't set up to carry and drop flame retardant materials and would have been useless if ordered into action. Of course, our friends in the Big Media (BM) barely mentioned this story; apparently they've entirely lost the capacity of separating White House BS from fact, perhaps because of the sheer volume. It's a shame we can't elect some real journalists in 2008.

by CHRISTOPHER HAYES [from The Nation, November 12, 2007 issue] On February 27, 2001, two members of the American Gold Star Mothers, an organization of women who've lost sons or daughters in combat, dropped by the temporary basement offices of the new junior senator from New York, Hillary Clinton. They didn't have an appointment, and the office, which had been up and running for barely a month, was a bit discombobulated. The two women wanted to talk to the senator about a bill pending in the Senate that would provide annuities for the parents of those killed, but they were told that Clinton wasn't in the office and that the relevant staff members were otherwise engaged. The organization later submitted a formal request in writing for a meeting, which Clinton granted, meeting and posing for pictures with four members of the group. But the story doesn't end there. In May of that year, the right-wing website NewsMax, a clearinghouse for innuendo and rumor, ran a short item with the headline "Hillary Snubs Gold Star Mothers." Reporting via hearsay--a comment relayed to someone who then recounted it to the column's author--the article claimed that Clinton and her staff "simply refused" to meet with the Gold Star Mothers, making hers the "only office" in the Senate that snubbed the group. At first the item didn't attract much attention, but it quickly morphed into an e-mail that started ricocheting across the Internet. "Bet this never hits the TV news!" began one version. "According to NewsMax.com there was only one politician in DC who refused to meet with these ladies. Can you guess which politician that might be?... None other than the Queen herself--the Hildebeast, Hillary Clinton." Before long, the Gold Star Mothers and the Clinton office found themselves inundated by inquiries about the "snub," prompting the Gold Star Mothers to post a small item debunking the claim on their website. When that didn't stem the tide, they posted a lengthier notice. "These allegations were not initiated by the Gold Star Mothers.... This is a fabricated report picked up by an individual using the Gold Star Mothers as an instrument to discredit Senator Clinton.... We do not need mischeivous gossip and unfounded lies to promote our organization. Please help stop it now." That plea notwithstanding, the e-mail continues to circulate to this day. Anyone who's been following politics for the past fifteen years won't be surprised to find Hillary Clinton the subject of a false and damning right-wing smear. We've all become familiar with the ways the Republican noise machine transmits lurid bits of misinformation and tendentious attacks from the conservative fringe into the heart of American political discourse, the process by which a slightly misdelivered joke by John Kerry attracts the ire of Rush Limbaugh and ends up on the front page of the New York Times. But in some senses, the kind of under-the-radar attack embodied in the Gold Star e-mail--which never made the jump to Fox or Drudge--is even harder to deal with. "It's a Pandora's box," says Jim Kennedy, who served as Clinton's communications director during her first Senate term. "Once [the charges] are out in the ether, they are very hard to combat. It's very unlike a traditional media, newspaper or TV show, or even a blog, which at least has a fixed point of reference. You know they're traveling far and wide, but there's no way to rebut them with all the people that have seen them." Such is the power of the right-wing smear forward, a vehicle for the dissemination of character assassination that has escaped the scrutiny directed at the Limbaughs and Coulters and O'Reillys but one that is as potent as it is invisible. In 2004 putative firsthand accounts of Kerry's performance in Vietnam traveled through e-mail in right-wing circles, presaging the Swift Boat attacks. Last winter a forward began circulating accusing Barack Obama of being a secret Muslim schooled in a radical madrassa (about which more later). While the story was later fed through familiar right-wing megaphones, even making it onto Fox, it has continued to circulate via e-mail long after being definitively debunked by CNN. In other words, the few weeks the smear spent in the glare of the mainstream media was just a tiny portion of a long life cycle, most of which has been spent darting from inbox to inbox. In that respect, the e-mail forward doesn't fit into our existing model of the right-wing noise machine's structure (hierarchical) or its approach (broadcast). It is, instead, organic and peer-to-peer. If the manufactured outrage over Kerry's botched joke about George Bush's study habits was the equivalent of a Hollywood blockbuster, the Gold Star Mother smear was like one of those goofy viral videos of a dog on a skateboard on YouTube. Of course, some of those videos end up with 25 million page views. And now that large media companies understand their potential, they've begun trying to create their own. Which prompts the obvious question: if a handful of millionaires and disgruntled Swift Boat Veterans were able to sabotage Kerry's campaign in 2004, what kind of havoc could be wreaked in 2008 by a few political operatives armed with little more than Outlook and a talent for gossip? The smear forward has its roots in two distinct forms of Internet-age communication. First, there's the electronically disseminated urban legend ("Help find this missing child!"; "Bill Gates is going to pay people for every e-mail they send!"), which has been a staple of the Internet since the mid- '90s. Then there's the surreal genre of right-wing e-mail forwards. These range from creepy rage-filled quasi-fascist invocations ("The next time you see an adult talking...during the playing of the National Anthem--kick their ass") to treacly aphorisms of patriotic/religious uplift ("remember only two defining forces have ever offered to die for you, Jesus Christ...and the American Soldier"). For a certain kind of conservative, these e-mails, along with talk-radio, are an informational staple, a means of getting the real stories that the mainstream media ignore. "I get a million of them!" says Gerald DeSimone, a 74-year-old veteran from Ridgewood, New Jersey, who describes his politics as "to the right of Attila the Hun." "If I forwarded every one on, everyone would hate me.... I'm trying to cut back. I try to send no more than two or three a day. I must get thirty or forty a day." Mike D'Asto, a 29-year-old assistant cameraman living in New York, received so many forwards from his conservative father he started a blog called MyRightWingDad.net, where he shares them with other unwitting recipients. "I suddenly have connected to all these people who receive these right-wing forwards from their brothers-in-law," D'Asto told me. "Surprisingly, a very large number of people receive these." And that, of course, is the problem. Rumormongering and whisper campaigns are as old as politics itself (throughout Thomas Jefferson's presidency opposition newspapers and pamphlets spread the word of his affair with Sally Hemings), but never has there been a medium as perfectly suited to the widespread anonymous diffusion of misinformation as e-mail. David Mikkelson, who, along with his wife, Barbara, founded and runs the website Snopes.com, knows this better than anyone. Devoted exclusively to debunking (and occasionally confirming) urban legends and e-mail-circulated apocrypha, Snopes attracts 4-5 million unique visitors a month, making it one of the Internet's most popular sites. In the early days, Mikkelson says, there were hardly any political urban legends, but that changed in 2000. "A lot of the things that were circulating in the world at large, things like ridiculing Al Gore for supposedly inventing the Internet," started to be passed along via e-mail, as well as "a photograph of Gore holding a gun intended to mock him for not holding it safely." From the beginning, the vast majority of these Internet-disseminated rumors have come from the right. (Snopes lists about fifty e-mails about George W. Bush, split evenly between adulatory accounts of him saluting wounded soldiers or witnessing to a wayward teenager, and accounts of real and invented malapropisms. In contrast, every single one of the twenty-two e-mails about John Kerry is negative.) For conservatives, these e-mails neatly reinforce preconceptions, bending the facts of the world in line with their ideological framework: liberals, immigrants, hippies and celebrities are always the enemy; soldiers and conservatives, the besieged heroes. The stories of the former's perfidy and the latter's heroism are, of course, never told by the liberal media. So it's left to the conservative underground to get the truth out. And since the general story and the roles stay the same, often the actual characters are interchangeable. "A lot of the chain letters that were accusing Al Gore of things in 2000 were recycled in 2004 and changed to Kerry," says John Ratliff, who runs a site called BreakTheChain.org, which, like Snopes, devotes itself to debunking chain e-mails. One e-mail falsely described a Senate committee hearing in the 1980s where Oliver North offered an impassioned Cassandra-like warning about the threat of Osama bin Laden, only to be dismissed by a condescending Democratic senator. Originally it was Al Gore who played the role of the senator, but by 2004 it had changed to John Kerry. "You just plug in your political front-runner du jour," Ratliff says. Even if many of the tropes were consistent, the tenor of the e-mails grew more aggressive between 2000 and 2004. "It got really nasty," says Ratliff. "You started seeing things reported as real news that, if you looked into it, you realized was opinion or supposition or someone trying to discredit another candidate through character assassination. You saw a lot of chain letters that purported to be from members of the Swift Boat group or firsthand accounts of people who supposedly had experience with Kerry in Vietnam. A lot of them didn't check out." Aside from specious allegations about his military service, many of the e-mails attacking Kerry either emphasized his wealth (photos of each of his five residences) or relayed putative firsthand accounts of the senator acting like an imperious prick. Hal Cranmer, a former Air Force pilot, wrote a widely circulated account of his experience flying Kerry around Vietnam and Cambodia in 1991 in which Kerry scarfs pizza meant for the crew, forces the pilots to sit for an hour in an un-air-conditioned plane and boasts that he "never sail[s] on anything less than 135 feet." (Since it's a matter of historical record that Kerry has sailed boats smaller than 135 feet, this quote seems highly dubious.) When I tracked down Cranmer during his lunch break at the aerospace manufacturing firm he works for in Minnesota, I was surprised to hear him ruefully recall his brush with Internet fame. "It gave me a real lesson. My wife says one of the reasons she married me is that I don't talk badly about people," he said with a laugh. "I really didn't mean to do that here." In spring 2004, as John Kerry began to emerge as the probable nominee, Cranmer e-mailed his account to the libertarian website LewRockwell.com, where readers were sharing their personal experiences about meeting Kerry. "I said, OK, I'll put in my two cents.... I thought maybe I'd get one or two e-mails about it and it would just disappear." That was not to be. "All of a sudden I was getting fifty e-mails a day. I had an annual meeting with the Air Force pilots, and a friend said, 'Tell your story about John Kerry,' and everyone in the room was going, 'I got that e-mail! That was you?' I had neighbors walking in and saying, 'Hey, I got an e-mail about you.' I was trying to keep this low-key, not try to ruin an election here. I was just relating an experience that happened to me. People drew all kinds of crazy conclusions from it other than I had a bad experience with him." Added Cranmer, "Maybe he's the nicest guy in the world, and he was in a bad mood going into Vietnam.... I really didn't mean this to be as huge as it was." Cranmer told me he was a libertarian and a big fan of Ron Paul. "I voted for Bush in 2000 and have regretted it ever since. I didn't even vote in 2004." He now wishes he'd kept his impressions to himself. Some anecdote of casual thoughtlessness "shouldn't be what defines the presidency." But of course, that's exactly the kind of thing that did define the last presidential election. Cranmer's e-mail, and those of a similar ilk, were perfectly in line with the broader narrative of the Bush campaign, in which the major knock on Kerry was that he was an elitist, disingenuous jerk--a "bad man," in Lynne Cheney's phrasing. Like the other popular e-mails that circulated in 2004, Cranmer's includes not a single substantive criticism of Kerry's platform or policy preferences, but the unflattering picture it offers has an effect that's immediate and visceral. It lingers in the back of one's head. It was similar gossip that helped spell doom for John McCain during the South Carolina primary in 2000, when a whisper campaign spread rumors that he had a black daughter out of wedlock. "John McCain was done in by leaflets put on cars in church parking lots," says Democratic campaign consultant Chris Lehane. Forwarded e-mails, he says, "are the digital version of this and potentially more pernicious and far-reaching because of the obvious efficiencies of the online world. I would fully expect to see it manifesting in the GOP primary." Sure enough, a few weeks after I spoke to Lehane, Mike Huckabee's Iowa state campaign chair, Bob Vander Plaats, issued a statement denying that he'd written an e-mail that voters had received bearing his name. In that hoax e-mail, someone impersonating Vander Plaats announced that he was dropping Huckabee because of low fundraising numbers and backing Mitt Romney instead and urging others to do the same. Faced with dubious attacks, circulating below the radar, campaigns find themselves in a familiar bind, one that handcuffed Kerry in 2004 when the Swift Boat charges first cropped up in ads, talk-radio and e-mail. If you respond, you run the risk of bringing the original false accusation to a wider audience. This is particularly true when the e-mails don't even have a putative author attached. "For lots of these e-mails, there's never any definable source," says Mikkelson. "They just seem to come out of nowhere." That leads to the $64,000 question: are these anonymous attacks organic emanations of the diffuse political consciousness, or are they deliberately seeded by professional political operators? Mikkelson is skeptical that anyone could intentionally write the kind of e-mail that would take off virally. "Even people who are steeped in it, it's very, very difficult to start something deliberately that will catch on." Still, there's some evidence it's been done. Snopes determined that a gushing pro-Bush e-mail from 2004 about watching the President worship in the pews of St. John's Church in Washington was actually written by the press spokeswoman for Republican Senator Lamar Alexander. Her name is Laura Lefler, and she now works for Senator Bob Corker. I tried to contact Lefler to get a sense of what inspired her to write the e-mail and how, exactly, she disseminated it, but she wouldn't return my calls or e-mails. The most notorious smear forward of this cycle is the Obama/madrassa canard, which represents the cutting edge of electronic rumor. At least two weeks before the Obama/madrassa smear appeared in the online magazine Insight, on January 17, it had been circulating widely in an e-mail forward that laid out the basics of Obama's bio in a flat, reportorial tone before concluding thus: Obama takes great care to conceal the fact that he is a Muslim.... Lolo Soetoro, the second husband of Obama's mother...introduced his stepson to Islam. Osama was enrolled in a Wahabi school in Jakarta. Wahabism is the radical teaching that is followed by the Muslim terrorists who are now waging Jihad against the western world. Since it is politically expedient to be a Christian when seeking major public office in the United States, Barack Hussein Obama has joined the United Church of Christ in an attempt to downplay his Muslim background. Let us all remain alert concerning Obama's expected presidential candidacy. Did you catch that typo in the crucial sentence? And the strategic deployment of Obama's middle name? It's a coldly effective bit of slander: a single damning lie (the school Obama attended was a run-of-the mill public elementary school) snuggled tightly within a litany of mundane facts, followed by dark insinuation. Who wrote it? The unsatisfying answer is, we'll probably never know. "The thing to keep in mind about e-mail is that there is absolutely zero built-in security or data integrity," my friend Paul Smith, a software developer with EveryBlock.com, explained to me when I asked him if there was any way I could trace the Obama e-mail to its original author. "That's why there is spam. I could construct an e-mail from scratch and deliver it and have it seem like it was coming from Steve Jobs, and for all intents and purposes the receiver would have no way of knowing it wasn't from Cupertino." But even if the identity of the e-mail's author was unrecoverable, it was still possible to trace back the roots of its content. The origin proved even more bizarre than I could have guessed. On August 10, 2004, just two weeks after Obama had given his much-heralded keynote speech at the DNC in Boston, a perennial Republican Senate candidate and self-described "independent contrarian columnist" named Andy Martin issued a press release. In it, he announced a press conference in which he would expose Obama for having "lied to the American people" and "misrepresent[ed] his own heritage." Martin raised all kinds of strange allegations about Obama but focused on him attempting to hide his Muslim past. "It may well be that his concealment is meant to endanger Israel," read Martin's statement. "His Muslim religion would obviously raise serious questions in many Jewish circles where Obama now enjoys support." A quick word about Andy Martin. During a 1983 bankruptcy case he referred to a federal judge as a "crooked, slimy Jew, who has a history of lying and thieving common to members of his race." Martin, who in the past was known as Anthony Martin-Trigona, is one of the most notorious litigants in the history of the United States. He's filed hundreds, possibly thousands, of lawsuits, often directed at judges who have ruled against him, or media outlets that cover him unfavorably. A 1993 opinion by the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, in Atlanta, described these lawsuits as "a cruel and effective weapon against his enemies," and called Martin a "notoriously vexatious and vindictive litigator who has long abused the American legal system." He once even attempted to intervene in the divorce proceedings of a judge who'd ruled against him, petitioning the state court to be appointed as the guardian of the judge's children. When I asked Martin for the source of his allegations about Obama's past, he told me they came from "people in London, among other places." Why London, I asked? "I started talking to them about Kenyan law. Every little morsel led me a little farther along." Within a few days of Martin's press conference, the conservative site Free Republic had picked it up, attracting a long comment thread, but after that small blip the specious "questions" about Obama's background disappeared. Then, in the fall of 2006, as word got out that Obama was considering a presidential run, murmurs on the Internet resumed. In October a conservative blog called Infidel Bloggers Alliance reposted the Andy Martin press release under the title "Is Barack Obama Lying About His Life Story?" A few days later the online RumorMillNews also reposted the Andy Martin press release in response to a reader's inquiry about whether Obama was a Muslim. Then in December fringe right-wing activist Ted Sampley posted a column on the web raising the possibility that Obama was a secret Muslim. Sampley, who co-founded Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry and once accused John McCain of having been a KGB asset, quoted heavily from Martin's original press release. "When Obama was six," Sampley wrote, "his mother, an atheist, married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian Muslim, and moved to Jakarta, Indonesia.... Soetoro enrolled his stepson in one of Jakarta's Muslim Wahabbi schools. Wahabbism is the radical teaching that created the Muslim terrorists who are now waging Jihad on the rest of the world." On December 29, 2006, the very same day that Sampley posted his column, Snopes received its first copy of the e-mail forward, which contains an identical charge in strikingly similar language. Given the timing, it seems likely that it was a distillation of Sampley's work. Despite the fact that CNN and others have thoroughly debunked the smear, the original false accusation has clearly sunk into people's consciousness. One Obama organizer told me recently that every day, while calling prospective voters, he gets at least one or two people who tell him they won't be voting for Obama because he's a Muslim. According to Google, "Barack Obama Muslim" is the third most-searched term for the Illinois senator. And an August CBS poll found that when voters were asked to give Obama's religion, as many said Muslim as correctly answered Protestant. Oh yeah. And the e-mail continues to circulate. "Everybody started calling me" when the e-mail first made the rounds, Andy Martin told me. "They said, 'Hey, did you write this?' My answer was 'they are all my children.' "

I'm a 46-year-old father of two. And yet I often find myself shocked at how the kids of our nation have no real rights. Once in a while I find a news story which underlines this epiphany. This is the first of a series which will probably not have an ending.

Captain Underpants ruins Halloween on LI Sun Oct 28, 4:57 AM ET Call it the Misadventure of Captain Underpants and the Peeved Principal. A suburban Long Island high school has banned all Halloween costumes after three senior girls showed up last year dressed as the underwear-baring subject of a series of best-selling children's books.

(Go ahead and click on the link now. There are no pictures, but you know you wanna check for yourself)

Long Beach High School Principal Nicholas Restivo, who sent the three seniors home to change last year, said the episode solidified his sense that the school's costume tradition was disruptive.

Excuse me, Mister Restivo. Halloween is supposed to be disruptive - that's the entire point of the friggin' holiday!

For the Captain Underpants costumes, the three girls donned beige leotards and nude stockings under white briefs and red capes to portray the superhero, who has battled such foes as talking toilets. To Restivo, the appearance was that the girls were naked.

I have seen high-school girls wearing sumo wrestler costumes. Is this not offensive? Or is is just possible that Principal Restivo is disturbed by what goes through his own dirty mind when he sees what looks like a naked young girl?

"I'm being a principal. I'm not being an ogre," Restivo said. He added that some gory costumes could make some students uncomfortable.

Woah...we are talking about high school students here, right? The same demographic targeted by all slasher films ever made? In what alternate universe does this guy live?

Some students don't see it that way. They are circulating a petition opposing the costume crackdown. "It's one thing if the school won't let us wear outfits that are revealing or inappropriate, but if it is an innocent Halloween costume, we should be allowed to wear it," said junior Meghan Beck.

Good luck, kids, but I doubt your petition will accomplish much. You have no rights.