How Rudy Guiliani declared himself a virtual saint for his masterly activities surrounding 9/11?  This was the fluff but there is a brutal reality that is now emerging.

Go to therealrudy.org and observe that other side.  Robert Greenwald has a film that includes comments by New York firefighters and family members of 9/11 victims.

The picture that emerges concerning then Mayor Rudy Guiliani is anything but flattering, vastly different from the image he currently touts on the campaign trail and in debates with competitors for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.

One of Karl Rove’s toughest assignments was to juggle the elements of the so-called Bush Republican coalition by catering to the religious right at election time. Operatives needed to walk this potentially fatal minefield softly.  

While seeking not to upset the vital religious right constituency, other more moderate conservative types needed to be kept within the Republican fold.  Their support also needed to be retained to stand any chance of triumphing on the national scene.

A student of history, Rove certainly correlated this challenge alongside that perennially faced by his idol Richard Nixon when he sought the presidency.  As the saying then went, Nixon would "fly right for money and fly left for votes."

Bob Herbert had a column in the New York Times September 25 that by all rights deserved strong mainstream media attention based on the importance of its subject matter.

The Don Imus and Bill O’Reilly controversies paled into comparative insignificance next to what Republicans are doing to African Americans seeking the basic right of congressional representation in the seat of the nation’s federal government, Washington, D.C.

Despite all the bold talk by leading Republican Party operatives that the party seeks to reach out to everyone including minorities, this claim has once more been reduced to hypocritical posturing due to the point Herbert made that is receiving so little comment within the mainstream media.  

It is understandable why Fox News has become so preoccupied with showcasing O.J. Simpson.  The controversy-shrouded former running back’s latest brushes with the law and impending trial offer a perfect opportunity.

Simpson’s current legal difficulties afford an ideal distraction.  The Republican Party’s neoconservative television propaganda arm can use Simpson to once more mesmerize its faithful by distancing them from the discomforting realities of the disasters confronting the neoconservative regime that Fox stridently touts.

Fox hopes that the masses are not paying attention to the U.S. Today story running in its September 24 edition.  

Since January 2001 I have withheld the term and designation of President from the current occupant of the White House for the basic reason that he was never elected.  

The unconscionable fraud and blatant racism of the Jeb Bush-Katherine Harris team in perpetrating fraud in Florida during the 2000 presidential election and its aftermath was nothing other than the kind of pernicious fascism that has reigned in banana republics and prevented honest victors from attaining office.

More of the same occurred in 2004 in Ohio, as unmasked by Robert Fitzakis and others.  Meanwhile mathematics professor Steve Freeman and others have validated the reliable exit polls that revealed John Kerry as winner of the popular vote over Bush by a 51-48 margin.  

When Ann Coulter appeared on Chris Matthews’s "Hardball" and unleashed more of her diseased venom against John Edwards, statements so scurrilous, dishonest and thoroughly pathetic that they need not be repeated here, it was easy to see a familiar pattern.

Matthews is on MSNBC, the same network that brought Phil Donahue’s show to a quick halt for allegedly "bad ratings" that were better than Matthews’s.  The difference was that while Matthews fawns over figures such as Coulter, Dick Cheney and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Donahue had the true audacity to present speakers with differing viewpoints to the Cheney-Bush full speed ahead Iraq invasion.

One of the most candidly memorable interviews in an ever nose-diving mainstream media occurred when Donahue interviewed former Desert Storm commander General Norman Schwarzkopf, who explained that a decision was made not to invade Baghdad during the 1991 Gulf War for reasons that have been confirmed in tragic detail.

Schwarzkopf asserted that with the major religious and ideological split dividing Iraq consisting of Shiites and Sunnis that if America invaded turmoil would result in a nation that would be soon enveloped in bloody civil war.  Has anyone seen any recent repeats of this interview?

Today Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich defied Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s "impeachment is off the table" declaration and stated that, as so many of us have been writing and saying, impeachment may be the only way to terminate the Cheney-Bush corrupt and power hungry corporate ruling cabal.

Democrats.com is one of the groups asserting the importance of contacting Kucinich’s office and declaring support by urging that he introduce Articles of Impeachment before the House of Representatives.

Kucinich stated:

"This week the House Appropriations committee removed language from the Iraq war funding bill requiring the Administration, under Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11 of the Constitution, to seek permission before it launched an attack against Iran.  Since war with Iran is an option of this Administration and since such war is patently illegal, then impeachment may well be the only remedy which remains to stop a war of aggression against Iran."

Jerry Falwell achieved one of the demagogical milestones in American political history during the 1984 presidential race when he solemnly proclaimed that the Republican ticket of Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush had been selected by God to lead the nation.  Democrats and other comparably appalled citizens expressed outrage at Falwell for in effect declaring, "God is a Republican".

Falwell was back busily at work again this week, declaring before a convention of the "godly faithful" that Hillary Clinton, should she be the Democratic nominee for president in 2008, would serve as an even greater lightning rod to mobilize his constituency than the Devil.  

Even some of the religious right saw potential problems stemming from such a tasteless and absurd remark.  They engaged in instant spin control, insisting that the right reverend from Virginia was only kidding and his remark was not to be taken seriously.

We stand at the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 tragedies. No solid answers have been provided.  An unconvincing cover-up has been presented, and only under great public duress.  

It is time to assess what really happened on 9/11 and conceive of creative strategies to dig the truth from out of the dusty caverns to which a thoroughly unprincipled unelected government has buried it.

In that the law has been creatively used in a class action lawsuit regarding 9/11 on behalf of deceased victims' family members, another lawsuit that should be promptly filed in federal court is one pertaining to the unconscionable, blood-stained profits that neoconservative warmongers representing America's invisible and unelected government have realized over the corpses and shattered bodies of service personnel and civilians in the Middle East.

On Monday, March 13 at 4 p.m. Ned Lamont will announces his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate in Connecticut in the historic setting of the Old Statehouse in Hartford.  

Lamont's candidacy occurs amidst a groundswell from progressive forces over positions taken by his opponent, incumbent Senator Joseph Lieberman, whose resume includes serving as running mate to then Vice President Al Gore in the 2000 presidential race.

After analyzing the issues I wholeheartedly endorse the candidacy of Ned Lamont and believe that it holds not only the best course for propagating progressive ideals in the twenty-first century, but has been rendered necessary under evolving political circumstances.  Taking this position puts me in a far different context than when I began my citizen participation in Los Angeles.  

George W. Bush's television appearance in which he shed tears on behalf of Dick Cheney's accidental shooting ordeal reminds me of a story I heard years ago that taught a valuable lesson.

The efficient taskmaster of the Nazi Auschwitz death camp was praised by Hitler for his efficiency in carrying out the mass executions mandated in the brutal regime's quest to "purify" society in the important early stages of what was intended by the Fuhrer to be a one thousand year rule.  

At one point the operational function had to be carried out by subordinates as the taskmaster took one week off from duties due to grievance over the death of his pet cat.  The story illustrated what happens when individuals become divorced from reality.  

While it is ordinarily commendable to grieve over a deceased pet, this grieving cat owner thought nothing of gassing scores of helpless individuals who had done nothing to personally displease him.

Many emitted understandable groans over the prospect of none other than George W. Bush showing up at the funeral of one of America's civil rights legends, Coretta Scott King, and shamelessly attempting to pretend that he shares her vision.

The Bush vision is totally different than that of the departed African American leader.  As Texas governor Bush made a sweetheart deal with corporate polluters, which resulted in the befouling of the air in Houston.  

Those in Houston's poorest neighborhoods, African Americans and Hispanics who had their lungs invaded by the noxious poisons, incurred the major health detriment.  The very young and elderly were most at risk.

We also know that Bush ignored the poorest Texas citizens and continued the same policy on the broader stage in Washington, D.C. after his selection by a one vote U.S. Supreme Court majority.  

In trying to peg the ruling Cheney-Bush Junta the term that comes to mind is Let's Make a Deal Democracy provided by a brigade of hypocritical Chicken Hawks.  

Isn't it funny that this evil beast Saddam Hussein was not really such a bad fellow when we were in the midst of Operation Let's Make a Deal with him during the Reagan years?  Even the coiner of the memorable term "Evil Empire" for the Soviet Union did not mind.

Our own CIA helped bring the Iraqi dictator to power in the first place and when deals were there to be made that we felt were in our interest then Donald Rumsfeld could sit there in Saddam's office and smile as the brutal dictator was gassing his own Kurdish population.  

The Thursday, February 2 story by Richard Norton-Taylor in London's Guardian reveals information from a memo of a White House meeting on January 31, 2003 between George W. Bush and Tony Blair in which Bush revealed that the U.S. intended to invade Iraq whether or not there was a second UN resolution and even if UN inspectors found no evidence of a banned Iraqi weapons program.

Phillipe Sands, a professor of international law at University College in London, revealed the memo in a new edition of his book, Lawless World.  Professor Sands last year exposed doubts shared by British Foreign Office lawyers about the legality of the invasion in disclosures which eventually forced Prime Minister Blair to publish the full legal advice given to him by Attorney General Lord Goldsmith.  

The new smoking gun reveals a flagrant violation of international law.  Waging war under such circumstances constitutes a breach of the Nuremberg and Geneva codes and the UN Charter, which legitimize such action only in clear and present danger situations involving self-defense.

Remember Senator Orrin Hatch's great performance during the Clarence Thomas confirmation proceedings?  

In between pouting and childish tantrums he managed, with help from Arlen Spector, to trash Anita Hill when it was later confirmed by David Brock, who was helping lead the smear brigade and later turned on the radical right, that the law professor was telling the truth.

It was Hatch who hatched a booby hatch theory that Hill's testimony describing devout rightist Thomas's penchant for pornography stemmed from plagiarizing the famous seventies' book and later film, The Exorcist.  Hatch ultimately got his wish to have Thomas confirmed, where he has become a reliable rubber stamp marching to the tune of the patriarch of judicial reaction, Antonin Scalia.