Netanyahu Blames Iran for Israelis Murdered in
Bulgaria

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has blamed Iran for the bombing of a bus which killed at least seven Israelis in a Bulgarian resort. He said “all signs point to Iran” and said Israel would “respond with force”. – Israelis killed in Bulgaria bus suicide bombing

SUICIDE BOMBER OR planted explosives, the outcome was the same. Death, carnage and outrage.

Statement by the President on the Terrorist Attack in Bulgaria

I strongly condemn today?s barbaric terrorist attack on Israelis in Bulgaria. My thoughts and prayers are with the families of those killed and injured, and with the people of Israel, Bulgaria, and any other nation whose citizens were harmed in this awful event. These attacks against innocent civilians, including children, are completely outrageous. The United States will stand with our allies, and provide whatever assistance is necessary to identify and bring to justice the perpetrators of this attack. As Israel has tragically once more been a target of terrorism, the United States reaffirms our unshakeable commitment to Israel?s security, and our deep friendship and solidarity with the Israeli people.

Read The Full Article:
http://taylormarsh.com/blog/2012/07/netanyahu-blames-iran-for-israelis-murdered-i
n-bulgaria/

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Wouldn't it be neat if Romney's VP were an
exorcist

Exorcism by Shutterstock.Seriously, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal participated in an exorcism in college.  From Tim Murphy at Mother Jones:No, really. Jindal himself wrote about the experience in 1994 for the New Oxford Review, in an article entitled "Beating a Demon: Physical Dimensions of Spiritual Warfare." The short of it is that, while Jindal was an undergraduate, his close friend,...

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Americablog/~3/xMAeS-YUykU/wouldnt-it-be-neat-if-r
omneys-vp-were.html

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What's Better For Romney-- People Talking About
Bainism or About Mormonism

Romney is absolutely desperate to change the topic to anything and away from what he's hiding in those 23 years of tax returns he showed McCain before being rejected as a suitable running mate. He's now dangling the promise of announcing which stale white bread Republican he'll name as his own running mate. Pawlenty, Thune, Portman... is there any difference? But at least he can take some solace in the fact that most people aren't still talking about him being a tool for a Mormon takeover of the U.S. government. Or are they? A couple weeks ago, there was talk of Mitt's Mormon army mobilizing and earlier this week the NY Times brought up the "M" word again. The Mormon aristocracy-- the ones who call the shots for the entire enterprise-- are, according to the Times, "are joining together in a new effort: delivering the White House to Mitt Romney... These families-- Marriotts, Rollinses, Gardners and others-- have formed a financial bulwark and support network for Mr. Romney at every important point in his political career."

Mr. Romney?s candidacy has produced great pride among many Mormons, known officially as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But for this core group of the religion?s most prominent families, the ties to Mr. Romney go deeper. They share with him not only a faith, but also a dramatic history in which they have scaled the ladder of American society, starting as vilified outsiders and, after helping to settle the American West, rising to the heights of wealth and success within four generations.

To take one concrete measure of their support, records show that roughly two dozen members of Mormon families provided nearly $8 million of the financing for the ?super PAC? working to elect Mr. Romney, Restore Our Future, putting them in league with its Wall Street, real estate and energy donors. Prominent Mormons including the JetBlue founder David G. Neeleman and the Credit Suisse chief executive Eric Varvel are on his finance team.

Many of Mr. Romney?s major Mormon backers are tied to businesses with robust agendas in Washington-- lobbying on tax, aviation and tourism policy, according to federal filings-- and have something to gain by having a friend in the White House.

But several of these donors say that their giving has nothing to do with their business interests. And while that is a common refrain among major financial supporters of both parties, in this case the candidacy they are backing represents something bigger as it draws new attention to their religion.

?I think for Mormons, particularly for prominent ones who already feel widely accepted and admired individually, this feels like a chance to also see their church, which they love, accepted and admired institutionally,? said Richard Eyre, a Mormon and a best-selling author who lives in Utah and is a friend of the Romneys.

These Mormon bigwigs want revenge for perceived past injustices... and they want to take over. "[W]e want the world to know about our religion," says the boss of the Marriott chain, one of Romney's biggest financiers after organized crime in China. He thinks Mormons are in "obscurity" and need to come out and Romney taking over the White House will give them a leg up. Another Mormon big shot and multimillionaire, shady Bain corporate raider Kevin Rollins, excuses Mormon clannishness by insisting they've been "beaten up and pushed and kicked around, and through that process they really stuck together." Another one of the sleaziest of Romney's Mormon cronies, Don Stirling helps run the Romney Death Star, the Restore Our Future SuperPAC, which is funded by Mormons, the Macau Triads, and class warfare billionaires and multimillionaires.

The irony in all this Mormon talk, is that the actual founders of the religion would be aghast at Romney's lack of ethics at his obscene greed and deceit and the way he's lived his hypocritical life at odds with their teaching. Ryan Combe is also from a respected and admired Utah Mormon family, but he's a progressive-- and one who takes ethical teaching very seriously. "[I]f Joseph Smith or Brigham Young were preaching today," he told me last month, "I think they would be considered very liberal." Joseph Smith ran for president on a progressive program-- a program very much at odds with today's Republican Party-- and with Mitt Romney. Smith was aggressively devoted to Separation of Church and State and very much against slavery. And when it came to the GOP's and Mitt Romney's adherence to the economics of selfishness and greed...

"The course pursued by men of business in the world has a tendency to make a few rich, and to sink the masses of the people in poverty and degradation. Too many of the elders of Israel take this course. No matter what comes they are for gain-- for gathering around them riches..." (Brigham Young, An Approach to Zion, Hugh Nibley). The economic policies pursued by the GOP of today and advocated by Mitt Romney, are without a doubt the single most blatant conflict between GOP and the teachings of the LDS Church and its leaders... Joseph Smith and Brigham Young spoke often about the idea of economic justice and one need only to look at the expansive welfare system of the LDS Church to realize the importance they place on protecting the poor and underprivileged. "Here are those who begin to spread out, buying up all the land they are able to do, to the exclusion of the poorer ones who are not so much blessed with this world's goods, thinking to lay foundations for themselves only, looking to their own individual families, and those who are to follow them (Joseph Smith, Brother Brigham Challenges the Saints, by Hugh Nibley). Joseph Smith felt so strongly that this was not the way to "build Zion" that he went as far as to say that, "if there is not repentance... you will be broken up and scattered from this promised land."

Read The Full Article:
http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2012/07/whats-better-for-romney-people-talkin
g.html

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HuffPo: Romney never would have run if he thought
he'd have to release his tax returns

Could Mitt Romney wind up waving goodbye? I can scarcely believe it, but ...Whoa. This is pretty nuclear if true:

Mitt Romney has been determined to resist releasing his tax returns at least since his bid for Massachusetts governor in 2002 and has been confident that he will never be forced to do so, several current and former Bain executives tell The Huffington Post. Had he thought otherwise, say the sources based on their longtime understanding of Romney, he never would have gone forward with his run for president.

Now, a word of warning: There isn't a single quotation in this piece from any of these Bain executives?not even a quote from an unnamed individual. So all of these observations were provided on some sort of not-for-attribution basis. It doesn't mean that this story is incorrect, but it does mean that we have no way of directly judging these remarks?which, after all, go to Mitt Romney's alleged state of mind, not necessarily an easy thing to know.

But the implications are extraordinary, especially this part:

While Romney may personally prefer to drop out before releasing more returns, people who know him note that he doesn't always do what he wants. Torn between his longtime desire to be president and his equally strong belief that he should not be forced to release more returns, Romney may turn, as he has with so many big decisions, to strict numbers-based analysis. If he plummets in the polls and the risk of defeat presses itself on him, the sources say, his calculation could change.

The notion that Romney could abandon the presidential race at this late hour?an almost unprecedented event?rather than release his tax returns just boggles the mind. And of course, this all swings back to the question of just what exactly is Romney hiding in all those 1040s? If it's something so devastating that he has to drop out rather than reveal his returns, the whole political world would be rendered speechless.

Again, treat this story with the skepticism it deserves. But there's no doubt that a very, very bad situation for Romney just got worse.

P.S. Check out who one of the two co-authors on the story is: Abby Huntsman, a daughter of Jon Huntsman?who of course was one of Mitt Romney's rivals for the Republican nomination this year.

Read The Full Article:
http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/1AVrFsxl5cw/-HuffPo-Romney-never-w
ould-have-run-if-he-thought-he-d-have-to-release-his-tax-returns

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Tennessee Republicans Condemn Their Governor For
Having Gay And Muslim Employees

Gov. Bill Haslam (R-TN)

Republican legislators in Tennessee are circulating a resolution that would condemn their own party’s governor, Bill Haslam (R), for choosing not to fire a gay person on his staff. The resolution, which has been signed by nine country Republican chapters so far, would also denounce the Governor for keeping a Muslim woman in his employ, and for not supporting two highly conservative pieces of legislation.

Haslam did not hire the Muslim or gay employees. Rather, he simply kept them on the payroll after a change of leadership.

The Tennessean obtained copies of the counties’ nearly-identical resolutions, which say Haslam has “forced this GOP organization to lose the confidence in our Governor during an election year.” One of the reasons listed for why Republicans have lost confidence, it continues, is that Haslam allowed “openly homosexuals to make policy decisions”:

According to the Tennessean on January 15, 2012, Governor Haslam admitted to retaining 85% of the Democrat Governor Phil Bredesen?s Executive Service Employees.

One of the latest Executive Service Employees has included Samar Ali, an expert in Shariah Compliant Finance which is one of the many ways Islamic terrorism is funded. She is also a one-time Obama appointee and her family has a long history of supporting the Democrat Party.[...]

Allowed and retained openly homosexuals to make policy decisions in the Department of Children?s Services.

Some of the county party leaders have since equivocated a bit on the language used in the resolutions. Talking Points Memo, which spoke with one of the county GOP chairs, reports that the man refused to comment on the line about “openly homosexuals.” According to TPM, he said “I don?t know how to respond appropriately to that one.”

Haslam has been minimally supportive of the LGBT community in his state; he opposed the state’s controversial ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill (but supported an abstinence-only bill that had the same effect), and protected LGBT-inclusive nondiscrimination policies on college campuses in Tennessee. But the Governor is far from a gay rights’ activist — he opposes marriage equality and thinks a non-discrimination requirement for employers is a regulatory burden.

Read The Full Article:
http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2012/07/18/543121/haslam-gay-muslim-employees/

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Mixed Signals In Europe’s Offshore Wind
Market: Industry On Track For ‘Best Year Ever,’ But Orders For New Turbines Slow

Battling severe economic headwinds, Europe’s wind industry has picked up the pace and substantially increased offshore projects developed in the region.

According to the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA), developers connected 132 turbines to the grid in the first half of this year. Those turbines, which have the cumulative capacity to generate 523 megawatts, represent a 50 percent increase over the first half of 2011.

As EWEA points out, 2012 has turned into a surprisingly good year for offshore wind in Europe:

2012 could turn out to be the best year ever for offshore wind energy in Europe, as a further 160 turbines, totaling 647.4 MW, are built but awaiting grid connection. But this is subject to weather conditions at sea and grid connection delays.

A total of 4,336 MW offshore wind capacity was operating as of 30 June 2012 – up from 3,294 MW in June 2011 – producing electricity for the equivalent of 4 million households.

During the first half of 2012 overall, 13 wind farms were under construction. Once completed these wind farms will account for an additional capacity of 3,762 MW.

In the first six months of this year, the number of financial transactions closed equaled the number closed in all of 2011. As we pointed out last fall, no projects in 2011 had been financed through debt; however, 30 percent of projects closed this year were done so with debt. EWEA attributes the increase in deals to the diversity of commercial banks and public financing agencies engaged in the market.

However, the Danish wind consultancy MAKE Consulting estimates that project financing will need to grow by 50 percent over the next five years in order for European countries like Britain, Germany, and France to meet their offshore wind targets. With European banks continuing to develerage themselves, it’s not clear if the necessary project finance will be available.

Bloomberg News also reported on an upcoming report from MAKE on the slump in sales of offshore turbines that will impact the future pipeline of projects:

Sales of offshore wind turbines collapsed in the first half, a sign the power industry and its financiers are struggling to meet the ambitions of leaders from Angela Merkel in Germany to Britain?s David Cameron.

One unconditional order was made, for 216 megawatts, 75 percent less than in the same period of 2011 and the worst start for a year since at least 2009, according to preliminary data from MAKE Consulting, a Danish wind-energy adviser. Vestas Wind Systems A/S (VWS) of Denmark, the largest manufacturer, won the contract while Germany?s Siemens AG (SIE) was among those shut out.

In Germany?s section of the North Sea, utility RWE AG (RWE) is working on foundations for its $1.2 billion Nordsee Ost development but can?t install turbines until a grid connection is made. Competitor EON AG (EOAN) said in February its Amrumbank West project will be delayed 15 months because of grid issues.

The financial crisis has helped draw out negotiations on funding. Centrica Plc (CNA), Dong Energy A/S and Siemens in June completed a $660 million financing for the Lincs wind farm off the U.K.?s shores two years after talks first started.

The cost of financing and connecting projects to the grid has raised the installed cost of offshore projects by 30 percent in the first half of this year, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Analysts at the firm say they expect those costs to fall as installation techniques become more standardized and financing bottlenecks open up. In June, the UK’s Crown Estate issued a report concluding that the cost of offshore wind projects could fall by one third by 2020.

Despite the mixed picture, the industry is taking a decidedly optimistic view about growth. The industry’s trade group projects that the European offshore wind market will grow from roughly 4 gigawatts of cumulative capacity to 150 gigawatts of cumulative capacity by 2030 — meeting about 14 percent of European electricity demand.

Read The Full Article:
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/07/18/543301/mixed-signals-in-europes-offsh
ore-wind-market-industry-on-track-for-best-year-ever-but-orders-for-new-turbines-slow/

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Louisiana Exonerees Who Spent 27 Years Behind
Bars Sue For Civil Rights Violations

Bright and Truvia on the day they were released from state prison

Two Louisiana men who spent 27 years in state prison before a judge overturned their 1975 murder conviction are filing suit over civil rights violations. Gregory Bright and Earl Truvia have filed a lawsuit seeking $1 million in damages for each year they were wrongfully behind bars, accusing prosecutors under former District Attorney Harry Connick of withholding critical evidence from their case.

The jury deliberated for merely 12 minutes before returning guilty verdicts for Bright and Truvia. They never heard about the two other suspects in the murder case who had been questioned earlier by police, and they were not presented with the evidence about the criminal, drug and mental health history of the lone witness who testified against Bright and Truvia. Prosecutors failed to reveal that the woman who claimed she saw Bright and Truvia with the murder victim on the night he was killed was a paranoid schizophrenic who testified under a false name to hide her background.

The Times-Picayune reports that the two men are attempting to set a precedent with their civil rights case that will persuade the Supreme Court to rule more harshly against district attorney prosecutors in future cases:

Truvia and Bright are hoping ultimately that more cases of alleged prosecutorial misconduct will reverse the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling last year, voiding a $14 million judgment for former death row inmate John Thompson. In that case, the high court found that the district attorney’s office could not be held liable for failing to train prosecutors to turn over evidence based on a single case, and that Thompson had failed to prove a pattern.

Attorneys for Truvia and Bright claim they’ve unearthed new evidence showing that the “custom, policy and practice (of Connick’s office) was to conceal exculpatory evidence.”

“If (the Supreme Court) would have had our evidence, that probably would have pushed Thompson over the edge,” said William Mitchell, one of the attorneys for the men.

Defense advocates from advocacy organizations like the Innocence Project argue that the Thompson decision relieves prosecutors of the full weight of their responsibility for their convictions. There have been 294 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the U.S. since 1989, and exonerations for death row convicts in particular may come too late. Countless cases of wrongful conviction spurred the Justice Department and the FBI to recently launch the largest-ever review of post-conviction criminal cases.

Read The Full Article:
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/07/18/541551/louisiana-exonerees-file-suit/

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3 Ways The House GOP’s Labor, Health, and
Education Funding Bill Hurts The Poor And Disadvantaged

Our guest blogger is Katie Wright, a Research Associate with the Half in Ten campaign at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Today, the House Republican bill that funds labor, health and education programs for the next fiscal year was considered by an appropriations subcommittee. Unfortunately, like the House Republican budget that it?s based on, this bill makes deep cuts to important programs and illustrates the House GOP?s upside-down priorities.

Overall, the bill slashes funding for the programs under the jurisdiction of the committee by $6.8 billion compared to fiscal year 2012. To make matters worse, the cuts and damaging legislative riders contained in the bill will fall disproportionately on the shoulders of the poor and disadvantaged. Here are the three worst ideas in the House Labor, Health, and Education funding bill:

1) Decimating the Corporation for National and Community Service. The bill cuts nearly three quarters ($777.4 million) of the funding for the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), a federal agency that engages more than five million Americans each year in citizen service and has enjoyed bipartisan congressional support. This staggering cut would end successful community improvement programs like Americorps, VISTA, the Social Innovation Fund and the National Civilian Community Corps. Not only do national service programs strengthen nonprofit partners and communities around the country, they also provide an important pathway into civic life for veterans newly-returned from Iraq and Afghanistan.

2) Prohibiting home health aides from getting the wages and benefits they deserve. As the baby boomer generation ages, providing quality home care has become increasingly important. But home health aides often do backbreaking work for low-wages with few benefits. A troubling legislative rider on this bill would make it harder to push for a regulation that would extend minimum wage and overtime protections to these workers.

3) Making it more difficult for those in underserved communities to access healthy food. The House GOP uses this bill to take a political cheap shot at the White House by prohibiting funds from being used to implement the Healthy Food Financing Initiative. Championed by Michelle Obama, the initiative leverages the proven work of public and private nonprofits, agencies, and businesses in providing affordable, healthy food options to those in ?food deserts? without easy access to a grocery store. Without access to affordable healthy foods, low-income Americans in underserved communities are forced to purchase cheap, empty calories or go hungry, which can contribute to poor health and educational outcomes in children over the long-term.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the House GOP doesn?t stop there. The bill contains ideologically-based riders which prevent funds from being used to implement the Affordable Care Act and prohibit funding for Planned Parenthood, which is used to provide services such as breast and cervical cancer screenings for underserved women. Among other problematic provisions, it would eliminate programs designed to better outcomes for students in low-performing schools, while quadrupling funding for abstinence education.

This bill would pull the rug out from under millions of families trying to make ends meet. With more than 103 million Americans scraping by on low incomes today, the House GOP should invest, not cut, in programs that expand economic opportunity and create shared prosperity for all.

Read The Full Article:
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/07/18/543251/worst-ideas-house-labor-fundin
g/

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Updated: FEC Enables Billionaires' Secrecy Club,
Deletes 2008 Records

enlargeIf ever there was cause for an investigation, this is it. Even for a hack group like the FEC, this goes beyond the pale. Alternet reports:

We have discovered that sometime after January of this year, the FEC deleted a whole set of contributions totaling millions of dollars made during the 2007-2008 election cycle. The most important of these files concern what is now called ?dark money? ? funds donated to ostensible charities or public interest groups rather parties, candidates or conventional political action committees (PACs). These non-profit groups ? which Washington insiders often refer to generically as 501(c)s, after the section of the federal tax code regulating them ? use the money to pay for allegedly educational ?independent? ads that run outside conventional campaign channels. Such funding has now developed into a gigantic channel for evading disclosure of the donors? identities and is acutely controversial.

In 2008, however, a substantial number of contributions to such 501(c)s made it into the FEC database. For the agency quietly to remove them almost four years later with no public comment is scandalous. It flouts the agency?s legal mandate to track political money and mocks the whole spirit of what the FEC was set up to do. No less seriously, as legal challenges and public criticism of similar contributions in the 2012 election cycle rise to fever pitch, the FEC?s action wipes out one of the few sources of real evidence about how dark money works. Obviously, the unheralded purge also raises unsettling questions about what else might be going on with the database that scholars and journalists of every persuasion have always relied upon.

On its face, this is cause for outrage. But wait until you see the information they deleted:

Harold Simmons? contribution to the American Issues Project in 2008 is a sterling instance of what we are talking about. The Texas tycoon, with major interests in minerals and waste disposal that critics charge have been furthered by his long history of political donations, was already famous for the millions he poured into the notorious ?Swift Boat? campaign that shredded John Kerry?s 2004 bid for the presidency. In 2008, he came back with what, until the September financial collapse, looked like another potential game-changer. With almost $2.9 million dollars of his money, the American Issues Project financed a television ad linking Barack Obama to William Ayres, who decades before had been a member of the Weather Underground. The ad created a sensation, with many critics questioning both its verisimilitude and its legality.

And this:

The FEC identifies, or used to identify, contributions to 501(c) 4 organizations with a code that begins with the letter C followed by eight numbers, of which the first is always a 9. We find that all such files (save for one case that plainly never belonged there) have been deleted.

I can't find words strong enough for how evil this is. How craven, how corrupt it is. I don't really care if those files were published before the Citizens United decision, you don't unring bells, and you especially don't unring bells when it concerns the integrity of our democracy.

Here's what I think. I think we had better call our Congresscritters, make a ton of noise, get petitions moving, whatever it takes to get some eyes on this and a call for each and every one of those files to be restored. Right. Now.

Amazing.

Update: According to the crosspost of the Alternet piece at Salon, the FEC responded via email:

In an email, the FEC stated that the absence of information in its database owes to a ?technical problem.? Don Hazen, Alternet's executive editor, wrote to Salon that he had "received the FEC's explanation, but it isn't clear it is credible." We are investigating the matter.

And AlterNet's response here:

We are delighted to see that in an official statementthe FEC backhandedly concedes our central claim: that sometime after January, 2012, important files disappeared from its bulk downloads, which are the crucial avenue for transmission of the agency?s data to the wider world. Sites and scholars relying on these downloads have in fact been seriously misled, as millions of dollars worth of contributions are no longer there. Thanks to a ?technical problem,? the FEC acknowledges, ?some data reported on the FEC Form 5, the Report of Independent Expenditures Made and Contributions Received, were not transmitted to the newer database? it installed. Exactly. Like the records of Simmons, Templeton, Jr., Foster Friess, and the other C9 records we named.

Read The Full Article:
http://crooksandliars.com/karoli/fec-enables-billionaires-secrecy-club-delet

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FEC Enables Billionaires' Secrecy Club, Deletes
2008 Records

enlargeIf ever there was cause for an investigation, this is it. Even for a hack group like the FEC, this goes beyond the pale. Alternet reports:

We have discovered that sometime after January of this year, the FEC deleted a whole set of contributions totaling millions of dollars made during the 2007-2008 election cycle. The most important of these files concern what is now called ?dark money? ? funds donated to ostensible charities or public interest groups rather parties, candidates or conventional political action committees (PACs). These non-profit groups ? which Washington insiders often refer to generically as 501(c)s, after the section of the federal tax code regulating them ? use the money to pay for allegedly educational ?independent? ads that run outside conventional campaign channels. Such funding has now developed into a gigantic channel for evading disclosure of the donors? identities and is acutely controversial.

In 2008, however, a substantial number of contributions to such 501(c)s made it into the FEC database. For the agency quietly to remove them almost four years later with no public comment is scandalous. It flouts the agency?s legal mandate to track political money and mocks the whole spirit of what the FEC was set up to do. No less seriously, as legal challenges and public criticism of similar contributions in the 2012 election cycle rise to fever pitch, the FEC?s action wipes out one of the few sources of real evidence about how dark money works. Obviously, the unheralded purge also raises unsettling questions about what else might be going on with the database that scholars and journalists of every persuasion have always relied upon.

On its face, this is cause for outrage. But wait until you see the information they deleted:

Harold Simmons? contribution to the American Issues Project in 2008 is a sterling instance of what we are talking about. The Texas tycoon, with major interests in minerals and waste disposal that critics charge have been furthered by his long history of political donations, was already famous for the millions he poured into the notorious ?Swift Boat? campaign that shredded John Kerry?s 2004 bid for the presidency. In 2008, he came back with what, until the September financial collapse, looked like another potential game-changer. With almost $2.9 million dollars of his money, the American Issues Project financed a television ad linking Barack Obama to William Ayres, who decades before had been a member of the Weather Underground. The ad created a sensation, with many critics questioning both its verisimilitude and its legality.

And this:

The FEC identifies, or used to identify, contributions to 501(c) 4 organizations with a code that begins with the letter C followed by eight numbers, of which the first is always a 9. We find that all such files (save for one case that plainly never belonged there) have been deleted.

I can't find words strong enough for how evil this is. How craven, how corrupt it is. I don't really care if those files were published before the Citizens United decision, you don't unring bells, and you especially don't unring bells when it concerns the integrity of our democracy.

Here's what I think. I think we had better call our Congresscritters, make a ton of noise, get petitions moving, whatever it takes to get some eyes on this and a call for each and every one of those files to be restored. Right. Now.

Amazing.

Read The Full Article:
http://crooksandliars.com/karoli/fec-enables-billionaires-secrecy-club-delet

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