The O’Reilly clip… better late than never.
(ADVISORY: Do not play with children in the room.)

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Toby Keith

“I Love This Bar”

The Bush administration repeatedly ignored corruption at the highest levels within the Iraqi government and kept secret potentially embarrassing information so as not to undermine its relationship with Baghdad, according to two former State Department employees.
Arthur Brennan, who briefly served in Baghdad as head of the department’s Office of Accountability and Transparency last year, and James Mattil, who worked as the chief of staff, told Senate Democrats on Monday that their office was understaffed and its warnings and recommendations ignored.
Brennan also alleges the State Department prevented a congressional aide visiting Baghdad from talking with staffers by insisting they were too busy. In reality, Brennan said, office members were watching movies at the embassy and on their computers. The staffers’ workload had been cut dramatically because of Iraqi Prime MinisterNouri al-Maliki’s “evisceration” of Iraq’s top anti-corruption office, he said.

More at Yahoo News

Clinton’s campaign chairman McAuliffe doing damage control on Meet the Press

If Barr can siphon off some McCain votes, then I wish him luck. I also think it will be interesting to see where Rush Limbaugh goes from here. He doesn’t hide the fact he’s not a fan of John McCain. So will he back Bob Barr… or do his regular two-faced-about-face and start kissing McCain’s behind?

Former GOP Rep. Barr will seek presidency as Libertarian

WASHINGTON - Heaping scorn on both major political parties, former Republican Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia declared his candidacy Monday for the Libertarian Party presidential nomination.

Barr, 59, vowed to slash the federal government, restore civil liberties curbed since 2001 and pull back U.S. troops from abroad, both in Iraq and at bases around the world.

His campaign could draw support from libertarian-minded or conservative Republicans who are unhappy with the expected nomination of Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

Though McCain’s already clinched the nomination, as many as one out of four primary voters cast protest votes against him, and conservative icons such as radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh regularly criticize him.

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) on CNN’s Late Edition, May 11, 2008,  attempting to plant fear in voter’s minds about Obama.   This is sickening.  

 

Speaking out against the war, female veterans describe regular abuse at the hands of their peers — and the military’s failure to address it.

I knew it was bad, but I didn’t know just how bad. Colonel Ann Wright, retired U.S. Army, grabbed the audience’s attention at a panel called Women in the Military, hosted last month by Women Center Stage in New York City, when she said that one in three women in the military is sexually abused by her male colleagues. Ann wants to see huge signs displaying this statistic in every recruiting office, to let young women know what to expect if they sign up.

More at Alternet

Amendment 2, known as the Florida Marriage Protection Act, will be on the November ballot. The amendment states:

This is being sold as a ban on gay marriage, but it will also take away the rights of domestic partners. To be sure, there are many senior citizens in Florida in domestic partner relationships. We need to be strong and start fighting hard in Florida to get these nuts who waste time and our tax dollars on this kind of legislation out of office

What impact will it have on Florida residents?

For more information on fighting this amendment go to Florida Red and Blue, a non partisan campaign against this amendment.

Oh, we talk the big talk, but…

It’s getting extremely difficult to brag about being an American. Take voting, for example. Doesn’t it make you feel sad when you come to realize that, as far as honest elections goes, your country ranks low on the scale? Even purple-fingered Iraqis laugh at us.

Confusing ballot designs still plague elections

The solution should have been a no-brainer, voting experts say. After all, it was a badly designed ballot that enflamed the 2000 election meltdown and introduced the vagaries of chads to the political lexicon - pregnant, hanging and otherwise.

So it would seem that redesigning ballots to make them simpler should have been a high priority. But that hasn’t been the case, voting experts say.

Eight years after the fiasco in Florida’s Palm Beach County, confusing ballots continue to stymie voters and plague elections in this primary season.

“The sad fact is, we still have not systematically addressed the need for good ballot design standards,” said Lawrence Norden of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school. “We’ve spent billions of dollars on overhauling election administration in this country, but we’re still seeing the same ballot design mistakes in almost every federal election.”