Mark my word. This is the issue I have been harping on for months now, there is a plan afoot to rig the next presidential election by controlling and manipulating the voting machines in key states. It's been hinted at in the underground news economy of the Internet. Now Scoop/NZ has laid it out.

Rigging the vote is Plan the Bush/GOP Plan A. If Plan A is thwarted, or exposed, or becomes impossible to implement there is always Plan B. I believe the Bush/GOP Plan B is to cancel the presidential election altogether" "for national security reasons," of course.

Call me a conspiracist if you will, but I also believe that creation of the Homeland Security Department was undertaken in part to set up in advance the mechanism of justification for imposing marshal law and laying the groundwork for such an ace-in-the-hole ploy of calling off national elections. As I said: Mark my word

It's 2003, and Florida is just getting around to thinking about fining a GOP operative and a sham committee for allegedly trying to intimidate justices of the state Supreme Court considering the 2000 recount.

First you shuck, then you jive, then you shuck a little more. Fall back, call back, crack a little more. That's what they call ballin' the jack.

Blame Clinton. That's the solution!!! One would have thought better of AP, it being a wire service and all. But here's one of its stories on the Bush Administration's climbdown on the Iraq-uranium claim. It reveals an AP reporter manfully stretch, stretch stir-etching to link the Clinton Administration to the problem.

Friday's episode clearly weakened the credibility that Tenet -- the only holdover from the Clinton administration and a former staff director for the Senate Intelligence Committee -- has with Congress as key lawmakers called for accountability.

What is said about George Tenet is true enough, but the point is, why was this irrelevant factoid mentioned at all, other than to provide a way to work in the name Clinton some where close to the world "lie?"

Wish I'd said that. One of this week's best quotes comes from William Rivers Pitt:

There are many who believe that blaming George W. Bush for the errors and gross behavior of his administration is tantamount to blaming Mickey Mouse for mistakes made by Disney. There is a great deal of truth to this. Groups like Rumsfeld's 'Cabal,' and the right-wing think tanks so closely associated to the creation of administration foreign policy, are very much more in control of matters than Bush. [Emphasis added]