Yahoo! News - Bush Seeks Help of Allies Barred From Iraq Deals: "President Bush found himself in the awkward position on Wednesday of calling the leaders of France, Germany and Russia to ask them to forgive Iraq's debts, just a day after the Pentagon excluded those countries and others from $18 billion in American-financed Iraqi reconstruction projects."

Diebold e-mail discusses price gouging Maryland: "An e-mail found in a collection of files stolen from Diebold Elections Systems' internal database recommends charging Maryland 'out the yin-yang,' if the state requires Diebold to add paper printouts to the $73 million voting system it purchased."

PBS | I, Cringely . Archived Column Diebold makes a lot of ATM machines. They make machines that sell tickets for trains and subways. They make store checkout scanners, including self-service scanners. They make machines that allow access to buildings for people with magnetic cards. They make machines that use magnetic cards for payment in closed systems like university dining rooms. All of these are machines that involve data input that results in a transaction, just like a voting machine. But unlike a voting machine, every one of these other kinds of Diebold machines -- EVERY ONE -- creates a paper trail and can be audited. Would Citibank have it any other way? Would Home Depot? Would the CIA? Of course not. These machines affect the livelihood of their owners. If they can't be audited they can't be trusted. If they can't be trusted they won't be used.

AlterNet: Baker Takes the Loaf: "In the case of Jim Baker, who will be acting as a de facto Treasury secretary for international affairs, our elected Congress will have no chance to ask him who is paying his firm nor even require him to get off conflicting payrolls."

Guardian | Israel trains US assassination squads in Iraq: "Israeli advisers are helping train US special forces in aggressive counter-insurgency operations in Iraq, including the use of assassination squads against guerrilla leaders"

Moving Targets: Will the counter-insurgency plan in Iraq repeat the mistakes of Vietnam?: "An American who has advised the civilian authority in Baghdad said, “The only way we can win is to go unconventional. We’re going to have to play their game. Guerrilla versus guerrilla. Terrorism versus terrorism. We’ve got to scare the Iraqis into submission.”...

Rumsfeld repeatedly criticized Air Force General Charles Holland, a four-star Special Forces commander who has just retired, for his reluctance to authorize commando raids without specific, or “actionable,” intelligence. Rumsfeld has also made a systematic effort to appoint Special Forces advocates to the top military jobs....The new civilian Assistant Secretary for Special Operations in the Pentagon is Thomas O’Connell, an Army veteran who served in the Phoenix program in Vietnam, and who, in the early eighties, ran Grey Fox, the Army’s secret commando unit....
The Special Forces in-country numbers are not generally included in troop totals. Bush and Rumsfeld have insisted that more American troops are not needed, but that position was challenged by many senior military officers in private conversations with me. "You need more people," the former adviser, a retired admiral, said. "But you can't add them, because Rummy's taken a position. So you invent a force that won't be counted.""

At present, there is no legislation that requires the President to notify Congress before authorizing an overseas Special Forces mission. The Special Forces have been expanded enormously in the Bush Administration. The 2004 Pentagon budget provides more than six and a half billion dollars for their activities--a thirty-four-per-cent increase over 2003."

Exclusive: Cheney and the 'Raw' Intelligence Cheney’s office has denied that the veep bypassed U.S. intelligence agencies to get intel reports from the INC. But a June 2002 memo written by INC lobbyist Entifadh Qunbar to a U.S. Senate committee lists John Hannah, a senior national-security aide on Cheney’s staff, as one of two “U.S. governmental recipients” for reports generated by an intelligence program being run by the INC and which was then being funded by the State Department. Under the program, “defectors, reports and raw intelligence are cultivated and analyzed”; the info was then reported to, among others, “appropriate governmental, non-governmental and international agencies.” The memo not only describes Cheney aide Hannah as a “principal point of contact” for the program, it even provides his direct White House telephone number. The only other U.S. official named as directly receiving the INC intel is William Luti, a former military adviser to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich

AlterNet: Good-bye, Mr. President: The Secret Resignation Letters: "letters written by disaffected members of the Bush administration who so disagreed with administration policies that they preferred the uncertainty of the unemployment line to toeing the party line"

Independent News: "Repeated visits to the scene, interviews with Iraqi civilians and US soldiers, and close inspection of the battle damage by scores of correspondents have failed to eliminate several troubling and crucial questions. Where are the bodies? Did they exist? Or was this death toll - as some suspect - a fabrication which was intended to generate positive headlines for the US, after a disastrous weekend in which guerrilla attacks killed 14 foreigners, including seven Spanish intelligence officers?"

A new era of nuclear weapons / Bush's buildup begins with little debate in Congress Congress, with only a limited debate, has given the Bush administration a green light for the biggest revitalization of the country's nuclear weapons program since the end of the Cold War

News: "Bush Baghdad trip distracts media from black sheep brother"

The Unofficial Paul Krugman Web Page Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey, who has introduced a bill requiring that digital voting machines leave a paper trail and that their software be available for public inspection, is occasionally told that systems lacking these safeguards haven't caused problems. "How do you know?" he asks.

An Aggressive Conservative vs. a "Liberal to be Determined": "a format where conservatives out-number, out-talk and out-interrupt their liberal opponents. "

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | How British charity was silenced on Iraq

FT.com / Rebuilding Iraq

HoustonChronicle.com - Neil Bush deals detailed in divorce records

HoustonChronicle.com - Neil Bush provides sample for paternity case

Channelnewsasia.com president's brother had agreed to strategize with China's Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp at the same time the Bush administration is trying to help US firms compete more effectively against the Chinese.

United Press International: The Bush family saga

U.S. Newswire - House Leader Tom DeLay's Political Fundraising in the Name of Charity Concerns Philanthropy Watchdog; NCRP Urges IRS to Deny Tax-Exempt Status

AM - US budget 'out of control': Wall Street bank: "'The only thing I can tell you is evidently the word 'tomorrow' no longer exists in the vocabulary of otherwise responsible members of Congress'. So says Warren Rudman"

Islamist Turks still blame West | csmonitor.com: "There was no such thing as [mass suicide bombings] happening in Turkey before the Iraq war."

Medicare Bill Would Enrich Companies (washingtonpost.com): "The employers would get $70 billion in direct payments and $16 billion more in new tax breaks over the next 10 years. Thomas A. Scully, administrator of the federal agency that runs Medicare, said employers 'should be having a giant ticker-tape parade.'...They requested what Scully called 'a modest buyout,' equivalent to perhaps $350 per retiree. The bill, he said, provides more than twice that amount, a sum 'way beyond their wildest requests.' "

A New Age for AARP: "AARP Services, Inc., makes millions in royalties ($123 million last year) from the sale of health insurance, and could profit from passage of the bill."

CBS News | NYT: FBI Watching War Protesters | November 22, 2003 21:06:20

U.S. Seeks Advice From Israel on Iraq : "Some U.S. officials acknowledge that they blanch at the idea of the Pentagon adopting tactics from Israel, a nation regularly criticized for security tactics it employs to battle armed groups it has never managed to quell....Indeed,...the Israeli army's...current chief of staff, Moshe Yaalon, along with a group of retired heads of the Shin Bet internal security service and even some active-duty soldiers say the methods have been unduly harsh and threaten to destroy Israeli and Palestinian society if no solution is found to the conflict. But such concerns have not slowed the flow of information between Washington and Jerusalem."

CIA Seeks Probe of Iraq-Al Qaeda Memo Leak (washingtonpost.com): "If they had such a productive relationship, why did they have to keep trying?"

* TELL US THE TRUTH *

U.S. Military Returns to War Tactics (washingtonpost.com):"In a...public relations push to highlight what it deems to be successes in Iraq -- he showed a picture at a news conference on Thursday of the shot-up truck next to two bodies covered by black shrouds.....'The Americans want to follow the Israeli plan,' said Hamed Hassan, an elderly resident of Hawijat Ali. 'It doesn't work there. Why will it work here?' "

Right, the war was over. Now we're starting it again. Dead bodies are great PR and proof of US success.

New Doubts About Bush Trade Agenda (washingtonpost.com): "President Bush's free-trade agenda is in serious danger of slipping into reverse as next year's national elections loom"

Tobacco-state lawmakers push last-minute buyout plan: "the quota plan is an 'ill-advised scheme,' R. Bruce Josten, executive vice president of the Chamber of Commerce of the United States of America, wrote in a Nov. 14 letter to House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill."

Why are the AARP Board and CEO Providing a Virtual Soft Money Ad Campaign for The Republicans? - BuzzFlash Reader Contribution "AARP, which formally unveiled its new headquarters building in downtown Washington last month, has softened its earlier militancy because it is preoccupied with its profit-making enterprises, including $100 million in earnings from the sale of insurance, mostly Medicare supplemental policies."

FT.com Home UK: "Mr Livingstone said that the cost of policing the Bush visit would add £2 to the average council tax bill in the capital. 'I think most Londoners would be happy to give £4 for him not to come,' the mayor said."

DeadBrain - News, Politics, Satire, Spoof, Parody and Humour

Interwebnet.org - Blair's Constituency Divided

The Observer | UK News | 'Shoot-to-kill' demand by US

Mirror.co.uk - BRITS ARE NOT ANTI-US..WE JUST DON'T LIKE BUSH: "But tone matters in politics and Bush's tone was that of an upright finger directed at the rest of the planet."

Macon.com - Your Macon Everything Guide: "Officials at Georgia Military College turned away reporters and photographers who were invited to hear a speech Wednesday by a helicopter pilot involved in the rescue of Jessica Lynch."

30 Media Outlets Protest Treatment in Iraq: "U.S. troops are harassing journalists in Iraq and sometimes confiscating equipment, digital camera disks and videotapes."

FT.com / World / US: "US multinational companies are 'acutely worried' about the business consequences of Bush administration foreign policy"

Jacksonville.com: Metro: Anti-Iraq war veterans pulled from parade 11/12/03: "veterans have earned a special right to have their voices heard"

Yahoo! News - Senate Begins All-Night Debate on Judges: "We confirmed 98 percent of President Bush's judges and all we got was this lousy T-shirt."

FAST FACTS: "The United States military has had to face troops previously trained by its own military or supplied with U.S. weaponry in Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, and now in Afghanistan. Due to the advanced capabilities these militaries have acquired from past U.S. training and sales, the U.S. had to invest much more money and manpower in these conflicts than would have otherwise been needed."

Yahoo! News - Some experts skeptical about US economic rebound despite solid data: "David Rosenberg, chief North American economist for Merrill Lynch, said a closer look at the data show most employment gains were in low-wage jobs, with incomes barely budging and some key economic sectors left behind.
'We don't mean to dwell on the darker side of Friday's nonfarm payroll report, especially since everyone is dancing around the kitchen table ... (but) we end up being a tad skeptical,' Rosenberg said. "

Army Times - News - More News An act of ‘betrayal’
In the midst of war, key family benefits face cuts

Spin of the Day

MoveOn.org: Democracy in Action FREEDOM AND SECURITY: a speech by the winner of the 2000 presidential election.

Vote count marred by computer woes 5,352 Indiana voters equals 144,000 computer votes.

Analysis of an Electronic Voting System

FrontPage - Diebold-CD Wiki "The only possible motive I can see for disabling some of the security mechanisms and features in their system is to be able to rig elections."

Salon.com News | Osama University? On Oct. 21, the House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill that could require university international studies departments to show more support for American foreign policy or risk their federal funding.

The Yale Herald - Nov 7, 2003 - Jerry's phat ('cause of all the ice cream): "He is currently embarking on the Pants on Fire campaign in which, to highlight what he claims are the lies President George W. Bush, DC '68, has told the country, he drags a 12-foot statue of Bush with flaming pants behind his motorcycle on various trails around the country."

POLITICS-U.S.: Feith is the Answer "(V)irtually everything that has gone wrong in Iraq -- especially those matters that Congress is either investigating or is poised to probe -- is linked directly to his office. ''All roads lead to Feith,'' noted one knowledgeable administration official this week."

A PDF of the original report finding fault with electronic voting machines. Abstract:
Recent election problems have sparked great interest in managing the election process through the
use of electronic voting systems. While computer scientists, for the most part, have been warning of
the perils of such action, vendors have forged ahead with their products, claiming increased security and
reliability. Many municipalities have adopted electronic systems, and the number of deployed systems is
rising. For these new computerized voting systems, neither source code nor the results of any third-party
certification analyses have been available for the general population to study, because vendors claim that
secrecy is a necessary requirement to keep their systems secure. Recently, however, the source code
purporting to be the software for a voting system from a major manufacturer appeared on the Internet.
This manufacturer’s systems were used in Georgia’s state-wide elections in 2002, and the company just
announced that the state of Maryland awarded them an order valued at up to $55.6 million to deliver
touch screen voting systems.1
This unique opportunity for independent scientific analysis of voting system source code demonstrates
the fallacy of the closed-source argument for such a critical system. Our analysis shows that
this voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts.
We highlight several issues including unauthorized privilege escalation, incorrect use of cryptography,
vulnerabilities to network threats, and poor software development processes. For example, common voters,
without any insider privileges, can cast unlimited votes without being detected by any mechanisms
within the voting terminal. Furthermore, we show that even the most serious of our outsider attacks
could have been discovered without the source code. In the face of such attacks, the usual worries about
insider threats are not the only concerns; outsiders can do the damage. That said, we demonstrate that
the insider threat is also quite considerable. We conclude that, as a society, we must carefully consider
the risks inherent in electronic voting, as it places our very democracy at risk.

Why War? Features Here's a link blogger dot com appears to allow.

: What Diebold doesn't want you to know about their voting machines: they subtract votes. "I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16022 [votes] when it was uploaded."

Apparently Blogger dot com doesn't want you to know either as they won't allow the link to be published.

The New York Review of Books: Strictly Business

CBS News | Sounds Of Silence | October 31, 2003 17:11:09: "Kean has complained for several weeks about executive branch foot-dragging and has suggested the administration may be trying to run out the clock on the committee's mandate, which expires in May.

Kean's not the only one who's upset. Other Republican members of the committee, including former Sen. Slade Gorton, a stalwart conservative, have echoed his complaints. And, given that the commission's mandate is to determine how the attacks happened and to make recommendations about stopping another one, these complaints are serious business.

Any lack of cooperation from the White House is troubling, but one key point of contention is especially disturbing: whether the commission will have access to daily intelligence briefings given to the president in the weeks before September 11, 2001. Particularly in light of revelations that at least one of these reports indicated that al Qaeda was planning to hijack U.S. airliners"

Yahoo! News - Groups Question Voting Machines' Accuracy: "'The vendors ... they're going to tell you it's perfect and wonderful. (But) there are a lot of issues out there that haven't been answered. It's a scary thing.' "

Yahoo! News - Top Israeli Officer Says Tactics Are Backfiring: "Israel's senior military commander told columnists for three leading newspapers this week that Israel's military tactics against the Palestinian population were too repressive and were fomenting explosive levels of 'hatred and terrorism' that might become impossible to control."

Windfalls of War - The Center for Public Integrity

Christian Aid reports: "billions of dollars of oil money that has already been transferred to the US-controlled Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) has effectively disappeared into a financial black hole"

Why is Bush avoiding the Australian media? Don't ask - National - smh.com.au: Denied access to Bush, "Australian media will learn of events [in Canberra] from news reports filed in the US."

Curtains Ordered for Media Coverage of Returning Coffins (washingtonpost.com): " Since the end of the Vietnam War, presidents have worried that their military actions would lose support once the public glimpsed the remains of U.S. soldiers arriving at air bases in flag-draped caskets. To this problem, the Bush administration has found a simple solution: It has ended the public dissemination of such images by banning news coverage and photography of dead soldiers' homecomings on all military bases. "

News: " 'It is a tragedy that US soldiers have killed so many civilians in Baghdad. But it is really incredible that the US military does not even count these deaths....Right now soldiers feel they can pull the trigger without coming under review.'"

KR Washington Bureau | 10/17/2003 | Bush's `dream team' plagued by infighting, backstabbing: "But after nearly three years in office, Bush's dream team is beset by infighting, backstabbing and maneuvering on major foreign policy issues involving North Korea, Syria, Iran and postwar Iraq. The result has been paralysis, inconsistency and a zigzagging U.S. policy that confuses lawmakers on Capitol Hill and disturbs America's friends, allies and would-be partners.
It has hampered U.S. policies in the Middle East, where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues to rage, caused anxiety in Asia, where the administration's refusal to deal directly with North Korea has dismayed allies, and has seriously soured relations with some North Atlantic Treaty Organization members, say U.S. and foreign officials. "

'The Lies of George W. Bush' by David Corn: "Bush has lied his way through most serious policy matters "

Watchdog blasts US, Israel for treatment of media. 21/10/2003. ABC News Online: "Out of 164 countries surveyed by RSF, the United States ranked 31st for its respect for freedom of expression at home, and 135th for its behaviour beyond its borders."

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | The new Great Game: "'I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian,' said Dick Cheney in a speech to oil industrialists in 1998."

Battle brewing over Ohio slots - newarkadvocate.com: "'What really bothers me about the whole arrangement is how patently unfair the arrangement is to the taxpayer of Ohio,' Hooke said. 'It's designed to enrich a handful of racetrack owners.' "

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Families seek truth over Israeli deaths: "The Corries had been told the report was secret until they found that the Israeli government was covertly distributing it among members of the US Congress to prevent an independent investigation. "

And He's Head of Intelligence? His dissembling gets almost comic over another one of his comments. Boykin routinely told audiences that God elevated George W. Bush to the presidency. “Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him,” he would say. “I tell you this morning that he’s in the White House because God put him there.” Boykin now explains that he believes God routinely decides American elections and has done the same thing for “Bill Clinton and other presidents.” This is surely the first time a conservative evangelical has argued that Clinton’s election was caused by divine intervention.

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | The return of Arabophobia: "'I read TE Lawrence before I came here,' a British officer was quoted in the Mail on Sunday. 'A century ago he recognised dishonesty was inherent in Arab society. Today is the same. They do nothing for love and nothing at all if they can help it.'
The attitudes of the officer, shocking though they are, only mirror those of the people who sent him to war. Scratch a neo-con and you find an Arabophobe. Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, has berated Arabs on the 'need to change their behaviour'. Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defence for policy, has talked of Israel's 'moral superiority' over its neighbours. And the veteran foreign policy hawk Richard Perle, when asked about the fears Egyptians had of the Iraq war provoking an Arab backlash, replied: 'Egyptians can barely govern their own country, we don't need advice on how to govern ours.' "

News: "The vote count was not conducted by state elections officials, but by the private company that sold Georgia the voting machines in the first place, under a strict trade-secrecy contract that made it not only difficult but actually illegal - on pain of stiff criminal penalties - for the state to touch the equipment or examine the proprietary software to ensure the machines worked properly."

BlackBoxVoting.org

The Unofficial Paul Krugman Web Page: "What we have here is a form of looting"

FirstEnergy customers lose chance to save billions in electricity costs: "The office charged with protecting Ohio utility consumers has destroyed a closely guarded consultant's report that might have saved billions of dollars for customers in FirstEnergy electric territory."

Another day, another impending war, another uranium trading lie. Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | CIA and Pentagon split over uranium intrigue

News: "[T]wo out of three genetically modified crops in the tests may damage the environment."

washingtonpost.com: Spending On Iraq Sets Off Gold Rush Dyncorp mercs get $20,000 per month. Compare that to US military pay.

YellowTimes.org - ''Our newest savior: General Wesley Clark'': The Washington Post reported that during the Kosovo bombing campaign, Clark "would rise out of his seat and slap the table. 'I've got to get the maximum violence out of this campaign -- now!''"

Two years after the US invasion, Afghanis facing unprecedented terror and abuse (by Zafar Bangash) - Media Monitors Network (MMN)
: "A joke making the rounds of Kabul's cafes these days goes something like this: 'What is worse than being ruled by the Taliban? Being liberated by the Americans!'"

Moscow prepared to stage pre-emptive strikes - www.smh.com.au: "the Kremlin has made it clear it is prepared to use pre-emptive strikes against perceived threats and will continue to mobilise Russia's vast nuclear arsenal to deter a new generation of low-level instability on its borders. "

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Theatre of war: "More than 320 US troops have died since America invaded Iraq, but hundreds more have been injured in the line of duty, many so seriously that they will be disabled for life....Major Gordon Olsen is an orthopaedic specialist.... 'Before I came over, watching the news I was rah-rah and here we go,' he says. 'Now I am just thinking, this needs to stop and go away. When talking to my wife at home, you know, people just hear about a few casualties a day and it doesn't sound like a big deal. But when you see a 19-year-old kid with his leg barely hanging on, that one alone is a big deal.' "

Many soldiers, same letter / Front Page -The Olympian: "'When I told him he wrote such a good letter, he said: 'What letter?' '"

Study refutes Limbaugh's take on media: "Love him or hate him, he was wrong"

Philly.com - "The Region's Home Page": SOP for the GOP "Serious questions arise when the Democratic mayor of the fifth-largest city in the country discovers, just weeks before a close election, that senior Bush administration officials approved a plan to bug his office"

US 'empire' and its limits | csmonitor.com: "Since the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, the US has deposed five regimes - roughly one every three years, notes Andrew Krepinevich, director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. 'We are in the business of regime change,' he says."

Ex-EPA Officials Question Clean Air Suits (washingtonpost.com): "The utility industry, which contributed $4.8 million to the Bush campaign and other GOP committees in 2000, argued that existing rules have discouraged investment and expansion of energy sources. Under the revised rules announced in August, older plants will not have to install pollution controls"

Bush taps DeWitt for inner circle: "'We're not sure qualities for appointment to the board include being a rich guy, financial supporter and close friend of the president,' said Eric Miller, senior defense investigator for the Project on Government Oversight.
'You need independence on this board. How can you be independent if you're one of the president's largest contributors?' he said."

U.S. May Expand Access To Endangered Species (washingtonpost.com): The best government money can buy. "Safari Club International gave $274,000 to candidates during the 2000 election cycle, 86 percent of it to Republicans. It also spent $5,445 printing bumper stickers for the Bush presidential campaign. Monson has made a variety of contributions himself, including $1,000 to the Bush for President campaign. "

KR Washington Bureau | 10/10/2003 | Leak of CIA officers leaves trail of damage: "the leak by Bush administration officials of that CIA officer's identity may have damaged U.S. national security to a much greater extent than generally realized"

Forbes.com: Princeton student sued over paper on CD copying Use the shift key, go to jail.

Yahoo! News - Israel Demands Withdrawal of Food Report: "Palestinians had been 'reduced to begging' by Israeli security measures.
'There is a permanent, grave violation of the right to food by the occupying forces. There is a catastrophic humanitarian situation, and really it is absurd,' he said at the time.
'Markets don't function, peasants don't go to the field, and they are humiliated in a very, very shocking way.' "

TownHall.com: Conservative Columnists: Robert Novak: [writing in 2001] "Disclosing confidential sources is unthinkable for a reporter seeking to probe behind the scenes in official Washington, but the circumstances here are obviously extraordinary....[W]hy break a reporter's responsibility to keep his sources secret? I wrestled with this question for months and finally decided that my experience with Hanssen contributes to the portrait of this most contradictory of all spies. Furthermore, to be honest to my readers, I must reveal it. "

The New York Times: Politics: "Thirteen months before the 2004 election, a solid majority of Americans say the country is seriously on the wrong track." And the survey polled 41% more Bush voters than Gore voters. [Click on "Poll Watch" link for a .pdf of results]

Yahoo! News - Bill For Iraq Reconstruction Goes Up, Up, Up: "In 2004 alone, Iraq will need some $9.3 billion in areas such as water and education, according to a World Bank statement released Friday. The U.S. assessment says the biggest expense, $8 billion, would go for refurbishing Iraqi oil facilities, while the second biggest expense, $5 billion, would be for police and security. "

Philly.com - "The Region's Home Page": "The Bush administration has also been a factor in persistent confusion." Resarch shows most misinformed watch Fox news.

Charlotte.com - Your Guide to Charlotte Ballenger's wife also agreed with him that the GOP-controlled House's 1995 decision to restrict the money spent on members of Congress and their spouses had helped turn Washington into "a lousy place to live. ...It used to be you'd get invitations to the symphony or the theater ... I don't think you should get $1,000 trips to the Bahamas (from lobbyists). But I don't see where a dinner or a theater ticket is that bad. We had friends who are lobbyists."

Yahoo! News - US congressman blames marriage collapse on Muslim neighbors: "Congressman Ballenger's bizarre comments demonstrate the sheer lunacy of his political and religious views,' said Arsalan Iftikhar, CAIR's director of legal affairs. 'Ballenger's statements are a perfect example of Islamophobic hysteria at the highest levels of government"