From MichaelMoore.com:

Guerra unveils why his investigation led him to the Vice President.

WILLACY COUNTY - District Attorney Juan Guerra says his investigation took him all the way to the top, to the Vice President of the United States. He showed NEWSCHANNEL 5 records that he says could be used to prove Dick Cheney is guilty of criminal activity.

The charges against the Vice President stem from the Willacy State Jail in Raymondville and from the inmate, Gregorio De La Rosa, Jr., who was killed there by a fellow inmate in 2001. Guerra says that the elected officials let the jail get away with murder so that they can keep making money.

"Greed will get you discovered and arrested every time, and that's what happened to Cheney," Guerra said.

Guerra says he went through Cheney's financial records and the prison companies' financial records and found the connection. The three top prison companies Guerra researched were Corrections Corporation of America, GEO Group and Cornell. Those three have the Vanguard Group in common, which is an investment company that puts money into all three prison companies.

"We knew Vanguard was the key," said Guerra.

For more continue reading here.

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Saxby Chambliss continues to lie misrepresent the reasons for the Georgia Senate runoff on Tuesday. In the first instance he claims he must have gotten a good portion of the African American vote on Nov. 4th to have been able to have beaten Jim Martin. Exit polling reveals Jim Martin got 93% of that vote, just under what Barack Obama got in the state. Chambliss also claims to have gotten more votes than Obama, which is in fact true, slightly over 23,000 more. However, what he conveniently neglected to mention is that he got 200,000 less than John McCain.

Earlier this month on Hannity and Colmes, Chambliss gave as the reason for this closeness of the result that the Obama people getting out their vote, especially early.

COLMES: Why do you think you’ve been unable…[to] close the deal with the people of Georgia in terms of what happened on Election Day?

CHAMBLISS: Well, listen, we have, for the first time in the history the our state, a 30-day advanced vote period, and let’s give the Obama people credit. They did a good job of getting out their vote early.

There was a high percentage of minority vote, and I am tickled to death that as many Georgians as did examined their right to vote. That’s what make our election process the envy of the whole free world, but we weren’t able to get enough of our folks out on Election Day.

Gee, I wonder who he was talking about? Think Progress has the video. And for the record, Chambliss got about 70% of the "our folks" (white) vote.

The other factor for the surprisingly close result earlier was Chambliss's support of the bailout package in September, despite Chambliss throwing cold water on such recession talk a few months earlier, saying "I don't know if we're in a recession. I don't know what that even means." And that's true, he apparently doesn't, giving the definition as "two consecutive months of negative GDP growth". In fact, it's quarters, not months.

There's a rapidly developing consensus among Washington's Very Serious person set that Obama's plans to negotiate with Iran should get only one try, and if that fails then the bombing should begin.

Today Iran's parliamentary Speaker and the Ayatollah's most trusted negotiator, Ali Larijani, told the press that Iran's parliament is considering a request from the U.S. Congress to "parliamentary negotiations between the two countries". (And just wait till the wingnuts start howlking about a Dem Congress sidelining the Lame Duck In Chief!) Also today, France's President Sarkozy partly walked back his previous confrontational rhetoric on Iran and said that Obama's statements "reflect our shared views on the necessity of dialogue without concessions with Tehran as the only way to obtain a negotiated end to the crisis."

It would seem that prospects for an international consensus on negotiations, and prospects for Iran actually taking those negotiations seriously, are quite hopeful. Yet David Ignatius in today's WaPo leads the bellicose VSP charge to give Obama a very short timeline to make any diplomatic initiatives work, echoing the tack of more rightwing and neocon thinktanks.

He begins by lamenting the fact that the Bush administration's hawks appear to have failed in their push to attack Iran and then recapitulates hawkish hype over Iran's nuclear program, conveniently forgetting that both the IAEA and the last US intelligence community's NIE say there's no evidence Iran has a weapons program behind its civilian one. He then goes on to catalogue repeated Bush administration failures in the diplomatic arena, seemingly without irony, and to say that Obama must have a Plan B if his own venture fails at the first hurdle.

It's impossible to say whether Iran's march toward nuclear-weapons capability could have been stopped by diplomacy. But there hasn't yet been a good test. Because of bitter infighting in the Bush administration, its diplomatic efforts
were late in coming and, once launched, have been ineffective.

Bush stayed on the diplomatic sidelines for more than five years. A 2003 Iranian overture for a "grand bargain" that would address the nuclear issue went unanswered. Britain, France and Germany (the so-called EU-3) were left alone to try to negotiate a compromise. They concluded the Paris agreement of Nov. 14, 2004, in which Iran agreed to suspend its enrichment efforts. But without U.S. support, this deal withered and the Iranians resumed enrichment in August 2005.

Bush finally agreed to join the nuclear talks in 2006, but only if Iran agreed as a precondition to halt enrichment. Not surprisingly, that diktat went nowhere. The administration effectively dropped that demand this year, sending Undersecretary of State William J. Burns to join an EU-3 meeting in Geneva with Iranian representatives.

Bush also missed the chance to engage Iran in a constructive dialogue about the future of Iraq. Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, agreed to send his top negotiator, Ali Larijani, to Baghdad for talks with the United States in March 2006. That upset Iranian hard-liners, but they needn't have worried. The administration backed out.

It's easy to criticize the Bush record on Iran. But anyone who thinks it will be easy for Obama to make a breakthrough hasn't been paying attention. Iran moves closer every day to becoming a nuclear-weapons power. It views America as an aggressive adversary that wants regime change, no matter what Washington says. Dialogue is worth a try, but Obama and his advisers should start thinking about what they will do if negotiations fail.

Two ignored "grand bargains", in 2003 and 2006, and a sham of diplomacy in the meantime that set out as a precondition exactly what was to be negotiated. Is it any wonder, then, that Iranians see America as "an aggressive adversary that wants regime change" after the last eight years of Bush and the neocons, to say nothing off nonsense like this from VSPs? Yet despite this, and despite the fact that Bush squandered repeated opportunities over the years since 2003, Obama should "start thinking" about what happens if Iran is slow to be convinced that an Obama administration is different? One gets the distinct impression that a failure at the first hurdle would please Ignatius very much indeed.

Shouldn't an Obama administration get at least as long to get it right as Bush did to foul it up? "What they will do if negotiations fail?" How about more negotiations, over the course of years, until we know there's definitely no hope of resolving issues and differences? That's how diplomacy is supposed to work in the world outside the cloisters of the American-exceptionalist D.C. set.

Crossposted from Newshoggers

Democrats.com: Pardon Scorecard: Dictatorship or Democracy?

Buck Naked Politics: The Bush Labor Department is racing to complete a new rule, strenuously opposed by President-elect Barack Obama, that would make it much harder for the government to regulate toxic substances and hazardous chemicals to which workers are exposed on the job.

uggabugga: A Robert Rubin bash-a-thon..."nobody was prepared for the crisis of '08."

The Smirking Chimp: Israel's Settlement on Capital Hill

The Impolitic: Palin is the new Paris Hilton

The Opinion Mill's Weekend Bookchat asks: Is Ann Coulter becoming a Cenobite? Is Bill Ayers worth listening to, let alone reading? Will I.F. Stone ever stop being the target of posthumous smear attempts? And do you know any good black authors to suggest to white people?

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From PBS's Now with David Brancaccio:

As President-elect Barack Obama unveils his top economic team, a leading progressive thinker challenges America's next leader with a controversial plan for economic recovery.

Robert Kuttner, author of the new book "Obama's Challenge," talks to NOW on PBS about the enormous obstacles to -- and potential solutions for -- getting America's economy back on track.

Kuttner offers his advice on how Obama should stimulate a recovery: spending $600-700 billion per year over several years to fundamentally change the economy. "We need the government big time to prevent this from becoming the Great Depression II," Kuttner tells NOW's David Brancaccio.

Will Obama usher in the most sweeping reforms since the New Deal to get the economy working again?

You can watch the rest of the segment here and Jed has more over at DailyKOS.

Joe Jackson, "Sunday Papers," from 1979.

Pretty spare offerings this Sunday. The Villagers' obsessive use of movement conservatives seems to be abating somewhat, but you'll notice once again that very few bona fide liberals are few and far between still:

ABC's "This Week" - Sens. Jack Reed, D-R.I., and Richard Lugar, R-Ind.

CBS' "Face the Nation" - Authors round table.

NBC's "Meet the Press" - First lady Laura Bush; Said Jawad, Afghanistan's ambassador to the U.S.; Ted Turner, CNN founder and author of a new memoir.

CNN's "Late Edition" - Sens. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., and Arlen Specter, R-Pa.; Sajjan Gohel, director of international security, Asia-Pacific Foundation; Ron Gettelfinger, president of United Auto Workers; Gene Sperling, former Clinton administration economic adviser; Maj. Gen. Mark Hertling, the commander of U.S. forces in northern Iraq.

CNN's "GPS with Fareed Zakaria" - This week, Fareed speaks to world experts about foreign policy challenges facing Barack Obama.

"Fox News Sunday" - Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga.

"The Chris Matthews Show" - Panel: David Ignatius, Ceci Connolly, Katty Kay, Mark Whitaker. Topics: Will the right and left give Obama a honeymoon? How will Islamic extremists view Obama's presidency?

What's catching your eye this morning?

From Preston Sturges's Sullivan's Travels (1941). Open Thread below...

Peace, Love and Happiness from Superhero Brother

I'm always looking for upbeat tunes for my MP3 player to keep me moving as I work out. I heard this on my local classic rock station and immediately downloaded it. I defy you not to move to this music.

From The Young Turks Nov. 26, 2008. I agree with Cenk. We're going to see Joe the Plumber doing a reality show before he finally goes away. And the McCain campaign is going to go down as one of the worst in history for relying on someone like guy this to keep their campaign alive.

Teddy at FDL reports that Rep. Danny Davis is in line to replace Barack Obama in the U.S. Senate.

But if Davis really wants that seat, then he really needs to finally answer exactly why he took part in that bizarre coronation ceremony for the Rev. Sun Myung Moon back in 2002.

Davis not only took a leading part in the ceremony, he's been unapologetic about it since. All of which raises serious questions about Davis' judgment: If he so readily succumbs to the ministrations of one of the world's craziest right-wing ideologues, who else will he sucker for?

Eric Zorn at the Chicago Tribune is wondering the same thing. Back when this story first emerged, Zorn contacted Davis and asked if he had made a mistake.

"A mistake?" he asked, chuckling in that distinctive, friendly baritone. "No, not a mistake. This was about the promotion of peace. That's all. We were recognizing Rev. and Mrs. Moon as parents. I find it difficult to see that as far out in any way."

Yeah, except that Rev. and Mrs. Moon see themselves as the parents of the entire world. That ceremony was about crowning them as the world's rulers. Read John Gorenfeld's book, Bad Moon Rising, for the complete details.

Surely Illinois can do better than this.

There are a lot of conflicting reports coming out of the Indian subcontinent right now, and no-one seems to have told their right hand what their left hand is doing. For instance, The UK's Telegraphreports Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister of Mumbai, saying that two British citizens were among the terrorists who first attacked Mumbai two days ago and who are still being winkled out of their positions by Indian special forces- while elsewhere the Mumbai Police Commissioner Hassan Gafoor is being quoted as saying "We have found nothing to indicate they were British."

That confusion extends to speculation about who is to blame, although India seems to be prematurely certain. Pranab Mukherjee, India's Foreign Minister, has said: "Preliminary evidence, prima facie evidence, indicates elements with links to Pakistan are involved." India is stopping and searching Pakistan-flagged merchant vessels, yet the best indications are that the terrorists came ashore from Indian fishing vessels. Rather than admit it might have an indigenous terrorism problem, which would open an unhappy can of worms about tensions between militant Muslim extremists and equally militant Hindu supremacists, the Indian government is stretching as hard as it can to implicate Pakistan. Their working theory is that these Indian boats were hijacked off Pakistani shores - yet they've no evidence for that at all.

Analysts also say that the sophistication of the attacks point to training outside India, and Pakistan is India's favorite venue. But there are also Islamist terror camps in Bangladesh, where the 10,000 strong JMB group receives ample funding and arms from sympathizers across the Muslim world. Even in India, a massive country with large rural areas under-patrolled by police, Islamist terrorist camps have been found in the Karnataka jungles of the Southwest. The Maoist Naxalite movement operates in thirteen of India's twenty-six states and is a robust organisation with anywhere up to 20,000 members. In April 2006, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called the Naxalite threat the “biggest internal security challenge ever faced by our country.” There's plenty of indigenous terrorist training capacity, not all of it controlled by or even backed by Pakistan.

However, institutional paranoia is the defining mental state of Pakistani-Indian relations. One of the big stories right now in Pakistan is about official claims that India is planning to destroy Pakistan by thirst, using dams on the Indus to deprive Pakistan's population centers of water. Rumor has it that, when Pakistani President Zardari recently offered to commit Pakistan to a "no first use" nuclear policy in a broadcast to Indian TV, he infuriated his military leadership from Kayani on down. Indian finger-pointing will not have defused their anger.The Indian and Pakistani governments have said that the head of Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency has agreed to to go to Indiato share information, at India's invite. However, despite the PR spin of Zardari's civilian government it's in no way clear that the dog yet wags the tail when it comes to civilian control of Pakistan's military and that visit might yet not happen in such a hostile atmosphere - which Indian politicians will immediately see as a sign of guilt.  

Both nations' militaries have defined themselves in terms of their rivals since the two states separated and there's little real sign of that abating. Despite American VSP received wisdom that two US allies will never war between themselves, neither the Indians nor Pakistani's see things that way. An op-ed in The Asian Age newspaper back in 2006, following the massive Mumbai rail bombs, made it very clear:

There is a reality about India-Pakistan relations that sudden bonhomie cannot wish away. The reality is decades of distrust and suspicion, nurtured and cultivated by vested interests that include governments in Pakistan and political parties in India. The Hindu-Muslim angle remains the cornerstone of this distrust, as does the deeply embedded view that Islamabad and New Delhi can never really wish well for the other. Both governments are willing to lie down and be tickled endlessly by Washington, but when it comes to each other, every word is dissected and every action viewed under the prism of dislike and intolerance.

That op-ed is no longer online, but I quoted it last in 2006 post in which I argued that willfully ignoring this dynamic of paranoia was setting the U.S. up for it's next foreign policy disaster.

The incoming Obama administration (and my friends at the Center for American Progress) seems to have learned nothing from the Bush administration's mistakes in this regard and is set to perpetuate them. There's a massive helping of "pony plan" in Democratic plans for the region. The NYT today explains the idea thus:

Reconciliation between India and Pakistan has emerged as a basic tenet in the approaches to foreign policy of President-elect Barack Obama, and the new leader of Central Command, Gen. David H. Petraeus. The point is to persuade Pakistan to focus less of its military effort on India, and more on the militants in its lawless tribal regions who are ripping at the soul of Pakistan.

A strategic pivot by Pakistan’s military away from a focus on India to an all-out effort against the Taliban and their associates in Al Qaeda, the thinking goes, would serve to weaken the militants who are fiercely battling American and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

And Reuters correspondent Myra MacDonald adds:

...the argument is that the cause of instability in Afghanistan is in Pakistan, and that Pakistan in turn will never fully turn against Islamist militants as long as it believes it might need them to counter India.  Since Pakistan is nervous both about the growing power of India on its eastern border, and about rising Indian influence in Afghanistan on its western border, the best way to calm the situation down, so the argument goes, would be to persuade the two rivals to make peace.

It was always an ambitious plan — getting India and Pakistan to put behind them 60 years of bitter struggle over Kashmir as part of a regional solution to many complex problems in Afghanistan.  Have the Mumbai attacks pushed it out of reach? And if so, what is the fall-back plan?

Even before Mumbai, Obama's plan was looking like it might fall apart. Before reports from Mumbai had begun to surface, the Indian foreign minister, in a joint press conference with his Pakistani opposite number, had poured cold water on an important facet of the plan:

On Jammu and Kashmir, Mukherjee rejected any third party interference, when asked to comment on the reports that the US president-elect was mooting to appoint Bill Clinton as his emissary to settle Kashmir issue. "There was no question of the intervention of third party. Kashmir is a bilateral issue between India and Pakistan. It is part of composite dialogue process," he stressed.

Still, it remains true that Pakistan is the true "central front" for international terrorism. Every single major Islamist terror attack in the West in the last decade has had links to Pakistan. Bush's policy of hiding the truth and appeasing Pakistan's military dictator while fuelling a regional arms race by selling to both sides didn't work. Invading Pakistan is a non-starter. If any plans to foster an Indo-Pakistan thaw are unworkable because of deep-seated paranoia and anger - and I believe they are - then I personally have no idea what to do. The thing is, I don't feel confident that anyone else does either. Obama's plan, born from think-tanks like the Center for American Hope, always felt to me like a case of "we have to have a plan that stresses negotiation" rather than any deep seated conviction that such a plan would work.

The intertwined Gordian Knot of Afghanistan-Pakistan-India has no easy or obvious solutions, and is essentially uncuttable by Alexander's method while two of those three are nuclear powers. The US and the West will be working hard at it for decades, and there's no clear hope that even then it will be soluble. Imperial Britain's "divide and conquer' policies for its former dominions, decades of local tit-for-tat provocations and short-term thinking from successive US governments haven't done anything except tangle the knot further. It's a problem for the world comparable in scale to that of Israel and Palestine, but gets far less attention - and it's still the venue for the most likely next American foreign policy disaster.

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Candice Gingrich, who recently slammed her brother Newt for his anti-gay remarks, visited the set of Countdown to talk to Keith about the recent shift in opinion after Prop 8 passed and the protests occurred.

Eric Cantor (R-VA), incoming Republican Whip, gives the same tired and canned response on why republicans are failing to reach out to minorities, becoming more and more a homogeneous group of like-minded, mainly white conservatives. Cantor says they'll reach out by appealing to economic concerns like "the diminution of their 401-K's", lowering taxes, and all the other red herrings that don't answer why people of color, and whole regions of the country are moving away from the republicans in droves. It's doubtful chanting "Tax cuts! Tax cuts! Tax cuts!" will make the Republicans a more inclusive party.

According to exit polling, these groups voted for Obama:

• 95% of African Americans
• 67% of Hispanics
• 62% of Asians

Now if population and demographics were a static thing the republicans might have a reasonable and viable strategy with this approach. McCain did win the popular vote among White people, and did really well among White people over 65 (68%). Unfortunately for them time is not on their side. Those aged 18-29 voted for Obama by over thirty points, which is itself an ominous sign for the future, if you're a republican.

Consider the Hispanic vote alone. After all the anti-immigrant vitriol of the past couple of years the Republicans are pushing away a group which should be at least somewhat inclined to vote for them. And what happened this year? As conservative columnist Linda Chavez put it, Ask the 14 out of 16 hard-line, anti-immigration Republicans who lost their seats this time around to pro-comprehensive reform Democrats how well this worked at the polls. And then consider that by 2050 Hispanics will double in their share of the U.S. population, from 15% to 30%, or in raw numbers nearly tripling from 46.7 million to 132.8 million in 2050. Overall, minorities will become the majority.

None of this can be news for Republicans so they must see the hand-writing on the wall. What is amazing is that they seem incapable or unwilling to do anything about it. Sure, we might see Michael Steele head the RNC as some kind of figurehead African American, or Louisiana Governor Piyush "Bobby" Jindal gain some level of national prominence but what does it say about a national party that has no African American members in their caucus? Or that in the largest "minority" group of them all, women, the figures of most prominence among House Republicans are the likes of a Michele Bachmann, Marsha Blackburn, Jean Schmidt, and until recently Marilyn Musgrave. And even more potently the new face of the Republican Party herself, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.

Or consider the regional shifts where there are now no Republican congressmen left in New England, their last holdout Chris Shays in Connecticut succumbing to the inevitable by his support of the Bush administration. In New York State there are only 3 of the 29 members.

None of this bodes well for the Republicans.

There's probably no more dangerous place on the planet than being positioned between marauding shoppers and their objects of desire on the morning of Black Friday -- as one unfortunate man discovered today:

A worker died after being trampled and a woman miscarried when hundreds of shoppers smashed through the doors of a Long Island Wal-Mart Friday morning, witnesses said.

The unidentified worker, employed as an overnight stock clerk, tried to hold back the unruly crowds just after the Valley Stream store opened at 5 a.m.

Witnesses said the surging throngs of shoppers knocked the man down. He fell and was stepped on. As he gasped for air, shoppers ran over and around him.

"He was bum-rushed by 200 people," said Jimmy Overby, 43, a co-worker. "They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me. They took me down too...I literally had to fight people off my back."

Maybe it's time for people to start getting some perspective on "holiday bargains." Because this is just sick.

Of course, we are supporters of avoiding this madness altogether by supporting Buy Nothing Day.

Pruning Shears: Breaking the Bailout and the collapse of the financial system

Jon Swift: There is a good chance that when Barack Obama takes over, he will abolish Thanksgiving along with other holidays liberals hate such as Columbus Day, Christmas and the Fourth of July.

Agitprop: Bad Law Professor of the Week

The Washington Note: Obama, Prop 8, and my marriage

Informed Comment: Queen Rania of Jordan has for some time had her own channel on Youtube and has done a number of broadcasts attempting to clarify the reality of Islam, to present a modernist vision of the place of women in Islam, and to combat extremist interpretations of her religion.

OFF THE BEATEN PATH: Progressive By Nature, Left 'Toon Lane, Realizing The Promise, Fresh Briefs

Watch this for yourself and decide: Is Walters, like, checking out Obama during this interview? There's something odd about this ...

It's been a heckuva year both politically in the US, and here at Crooks and Liars. It takes a staff of very dedicated people to put this blog together. I'm grateful for all of them and for each and every reader who takes to time to visit our little corner of the internet.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I've been planning out a trip to Mali and Senegal for a few months and I'm getting ready to leave soon. I failed in persuading Amato to come along-- although I have a feeling if it was Maui instead of Mali, it might have worked. Meanwhile these two west African countries have incredibly rich musical traditions that have had immense impact on popular American music. I've been lucky to have introductions to musicians in both countries. I didn't know much about Bassekou Kouyate-- aside from the fact that he's a cool ngoni player, did some work with Dee Dee Bridgewater and Taj Mahal and that he is at the Royal Albert Hall in London tonight and has a killer My Space page and a wonderful EPK. I'll write back from Bamako after I see him play live in a few weeks. For now, I hope you enjoy his music as much as I do.

From The Onion:

The pardon assures that Libby will not face any more repercussions for his role in the Valerie Plame scandal or be eaten on Thanksgiving.

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Keith takes on a trifecta of idiocracy in his Worst Persons segment from Nov. 26, 2008. First up is LaDonna Hale Curzon from wsRadio.com for offering Sarah Palin radio all the time and instead letting listeners find John McCain radio.

Next up Keith takes on Glenn Beck for his statement that maybe some states should secede from America to protest the bailouts.

And finally Keith takes on the myth of the $70 an hour autoworker and Andrew Ross Sorkin from the New York Times who gave the right wing their talking points on this B.S. Media Matters has more on Andrew Ross Sorkin.