Guranteed 95% of these incumbents get re-elected, thats the norm in this flawed political system. Ignorant and shallow voters lack the sophistication to perform an honest analysis, arrive at a decision and rid the country of their craven “representatives”.

I can say my two Senators voted against this bill. They are from WI. The idiot Rep. Sensenbrenner voted for this as the rest of the Republican from my state.
Sensenbrenner is up for reelection this November and I told him I would never vote for him. He is arragant and a rude person. He votes for everything I don’t believe in.

You belief doesn’t matter crapola, its the damn facts that matter.

Either that, or it just shows how ignorant/misinformed the american people are.

As for the 12 wimps who still claim to be Democrats, they’ve had their lesson and they refuse to learn from it. I’m not surprised to see Carper, Landrieu, Salazar, and the Nelsons on that list. I can actually picture them being herded around the Senate floor by a border collie. Those poor frightened little lambs. But, it boggles the mind to see Rockefeller, Lautenberg, Johnson, and Stabenow voting with them.

Of the Dems who voted for the authorization to use force, a lot of them have been accused, some of them unfairly, as having voted for the war. I’m willing to give them some leeway on that, because they didn’t see the unfiltered intelligence, they believed the intelligence briefers, and they didn’t feel that they had enough evidence of Bush being a chronic liar to suspect that it all might be complete bullshit. They took him at his word that he’d work with the UN and allow the inspectors to finish their job and they believed that he only wanted the authorization to use as a threat against Saddam.

So, I don’t think it’s necessarily fair to accuse those Dems of “voting for war”, but these 12 have voted for torture. They have no excuses. They can’t hide behind ignorance or sense of duty or whatever other lame ass excuse that they’re going to offer during their next re-election campaign. They voted for torture. It’s just that simple. And they make me sick.

Hopefully, we can get Lamont elected and then the rest of them can see their political demise on the horizon.

Got the poll results handy for the numbers of Americans who think 9/11 was an inside job, Iraq still has WMDs and Elvis is alive do you ? Same kind of stunning insight evident from the same gene pool ?

By the way, I don’t know how it is in your state but in my state my govenor is pushing for stronger voting standards. In other words deny the voters who have very little voice but their vote that one element of power.

Comparisons to Hitler’s rise are very appropriate. He was a populist, manipulating public opinion to support his accendance to power. Same as the republicans and Bush are doing, declaring martial law in a war against ourselves. Your neighbor maybe a terrorist or is it “enemy combantant”, have to throw them in jail to protect America…

1: CNN is if anything, a conservative news source.

2: The assumption is that the American people don’t believe the current administration about Iraq.

The second someone screams “Lib’rul Media” is the second I get very, very suspicious about what they are trying to sell me. South Africa went through a phase where it was all the liberal media too, and guess what? The “liberal media” turned out to have been glossing over the worst bits of the Nat government.

1. It’s a CNN poll.
2. The assumption that what the American People believe is somehow truth.

Heralded Iraq Police Academy a ‘Disaster’

By Amit R. Paley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 28, 2006; A01

BAGHDAD, Sept. 27 — A $75 million project to build the largest police academy in Iraq has been so grossly mismanaged that the campus now poses health risks to recruits and might need to be partially demolished, U.S. investigators have found.

The Baghdad Police College, hailed as crucial to U.S. efforts to prepare Iraqis to take control of the country’s security, was so poorly constructed that feces and urine rained from the ceilings in student barracks. Floors heaved inches off the ground and cracked apart. Water dripped so profusely in one room that it was dubbed “the rain forest.”

“This is the most essential civil security project in the country — and it’s a failure,” said Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, an independent office created by Congress. “The Baghdad police academy is a disaster.”

Bowen’s office plans to release a 21-page report Thursday detailing the most alarming problems with the facility.

Even in a $21 billion reconstruction effort that has been marred by cases of corruption and fraud, failures in training and housing Iraq’s security forces are particularly significant because of their effect on what the U.S. military has called its primary mission here: to prepare Iraqi police and soldiers so that Americans can depart.

Federal investigators said the inspector general’s findings raise serious questions about whether the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has failed to exercise effective oversight over the Baghdad Police College or reconstruction programs across Iraq, despite charging taxpayers management fees of at least 4.5 percent of total project costs. The Corps of Engineers said Wednesday that it has initiated a wide-ranging investigation of the police academy project.

The report serves as the latest indictment of Parsons Corp., the U.S. construction giant that was awarded about $1 billion for a variety of reconstruction projects across Iraq. After chronicling previous Parsons failures to properly build health clinics, prisons and hospitals, Bowen said he now plans to conduct an audit of every Parsons project.

“The truth needs to be told about what we didn’t get for our dollar from Parsons,” Bowen said.

A spokeswoman for Parsons said the company had not seen the inspector general’s report.

The Coalition Provisional Authority hired Parsons in 2004 to transform the Baghdad Police College, a ramshackle collection of 1930s buildings, into a modern facility whose training capacity would expand from 1,500 recruits to at least 4,000. The contract called for the firm to remake the campus by building, among other things, eight three-story student barracks, classroom buildings and a central laundry facility.

As top U.S. military commanders declared 2006 “the year of the police,” in an acknowledgment of their critical role in allowing for any withdrawal of American troops, officials highlighted the Baghdad Police College as one of their success stories.

“This facility has definitely been a top priority,” Lt. Col. Joel Holtrop of the Corps of Engineers’ Gulf Region Division Project and Contracting Office said in a July news release. “It’s a very exciting time as the cadets move into the new structures.”

Complaints about the new facilities, however, began pouring in two weeks after the recruits arrived at the end of May, a Corps of Engineers official said.

The most serious problem was substandard plumbing that caused waste from toilets on the second and third floors to cascade throughout the building. A light fixture in one room stopped working because it was filled with urine and fecal matter. The waste threatened the integrity of load-bearing slabs, federal investigators concluded.

“When we walked down the halls, the Iraqis came running up and said, ‘Please help us. Please do something about this,’ ” Bowen recalled.

Phillip A. Galeoto, director of the Baghdad Police College, wrote an Aug. 16 memo that catalogued at least 20 problems: shower and bathroom fixtures that leaked from the first day of occupancy, concrete and tile floors that heaved more than two inches off the ground, water rushing down hallways and stairwells because of improper slopes or drains in bathrooms, classroom buildings with foundation problems that caused structures to sink.

Galeoto noted that one entire building and five floors in others had to be shuttered for repairs, limiting the capacity of the college by up to 800 recruits. His memo, too, pointed out that the urine and feces flowed throughout the building and, sometimes, onto occupants of the barracks.

“This is not a complete list,” he wrote, but rather a snapshot of “issues we are confronted with on a daily basis (as recent as the last hour) by the incomplete and/or poor work left behind by these builders.”

The Parsons contract, which eventually totaled at least $75 million, was terminated May 31 “due to cost overruns, schedule slippage, and sub-standard quality,” according to a Sept. 4 internal military memo. But rather than fire the Pasadena, Calif.-based company for cause, the contract was halted for “the government’s convenience.”

Col. Michael Herman — deputy commander of the Gulf Region Division of the Corps of Engineers, which was supposed to oversee the project — said the Iraqi subcontractors hired by Parsons were being forced to fix the building problems as part of their warranty work, at no cost to taxpayers. He said four of the eight barracks have been repaired.

The U.S. military initially agreed to take a Washington Post reporter on a tour of the facility Wednesday to examine the construction issues, but the trip was postponed Tuesday night. Federal investigators who visited the academy last week, though, expressed concerns about the structural integrity of the buildings and worries that fecal residue could cause a typhoid outbreak or other health crisis.

“They may have to demolish everything they built,” said Robert DeShurley, a senior engineer with the inspector general’s office. “The buildings are falling down as they sit.”

Herman said that he doubted that was the case but that he plans to hire an architecture and engineering firm to examine the facility. He also plans to investigate concerns raised by the inspector general’s office that the Army Corps of Engineers did not properly respond to construction problems highlighted in quality-control reports.

Inside the inspector general’s office in Baghdad on a recent blistering afternoon, several federal investigators expressed amazement that such construction blunders could be concentrated in one project. Even in Iraq, they said, failure on this magnitude is unusual. When asked how the problems at the police college compared with other projects they had inspected, the answers came swiftly.

“This is significant,” said Jon E. Novak, a senior adviser in the office.

“It’s catastrophic,” DeShurley added.

Bowen said: “It’s the worst.”

Why can’t the Bush-cons see that? They are so demented from so much propaganda they think by removing their their freedom they will defeat terrorism, the fact is that they did just what Osama [cough couch] wanted them too.

Bush-cons have fallin hook line and sinker for the carl schmitt unitary executive theory of the third reich, and they are so scared [1 terrorist in a nation of millions and millions] they will throw away their rights. Osama is not really any worse than a common murderer, do you think people would throw away their rights for Hannibal Lecter?

Hell no they wouldn’t.
Did they throw away their rights after Tim Mcveigh blew up the Murrah Building?
Did they throw away their rights after WW1 or WW2?
Did they throw away their rights after Vietnam? Hell no.

Oh, and there’s only one link I saw above, that from around #40 (what with all the disappearing posts, referring to them by number is not so accurate…) by Madison+Guy. So somebody managed to sneak one past the link gremlin!

g’nite… say your prayers…

When certain elements say….what civil war? I think thy should take pause…..the war crimes are beyond the unthinkable….