The L.A. Times uncovers yet another sleazy donor to the Clinton Foundation.  

This one, Alibaba Inc., is a Chinese internet company that is helping the Communist government to crack down on Tibetan activists.

Last month, the firm, Alibaba Inc., carried a government-issued "most wanted" posting on its Yahoo China homepage, urging viewers to provide information on Tibetan activists suspected of stirring recent riots.

Alibaba, which took over Yahoo's China operation in 2005 as part of a billion-dollar deal with the U.S.-based search engine, arranged for the former president to speak to a conference of Internet executives in Hangzhou in September 2005. Instead of taking his standard speaking fees, which have ranged from $100,000 to $400,000, Clinton accepted an unspecified private donation from Alibaba to his international charity, the William J. Clinton Foundation.

On November 4, 2006, the Saturday before Election Day, I wrote this diary in which I said

Gas prices are about to start going up, right after the election

. . .

Gasoline prices have fallen suspiciously far in the months prior to the election, following a wave of public discontent over obscenely high prices that corresponded with a free fall in GOP politicians' popularity.

So, how are we doing at the gas pump today?

If you drive a car, you know the answer:  Only four weeks after the election, with no need to keep the prices down and the voters less angry at the GOP, we are already paying 10 to 20 cents per gallon more for gasoline than we were paying the weekend before the 2006 election.

Some statistics after the flip.

Have the oil companies been pushing prices down before the election as a favor to their GOP friends, to try and put a damper on anti-GOP voter sentiment?

Gas prices are about to start going up, right after the election:
 
Pump prices set to take off

The price of gasoline available to unbranded retailers rose sharply this week, prompting predictions that the long cycle of declining pump prices is ending.

Since Monday, the spot gasoline price for unbranded retailers in San Diego County has jumped about 20 cents a gallon, a dramatic increase even in an industry increasingly accustomed to volatility. The increase pushed the regional wholesale spot price to about $1.82 per gallon.

The spike has renewed suspicions among consumer groups that refiners held prices in check to defuse gasoline costs as an election issue, a contention vehemently denied by a national refiners trade group.

San Diego runs short of absentee ballots

Unusually high demand and a printing order that wasn't filled fast enough caused the San Diego County Registrar of Voters to run short of absentee ballots this week. About 5,000 photocopies were mailed out instead, said Registrar of Voters Mikel Haas.

Trust us, they say, we will copy your vote onto a real ballot and count it later!

When those ballots are returned, registrar's employees will copy voters' choices by hand onto regular card stock ballots that can be run through the optical scanners that count the votes.

And who is responsible for this snafu, you ask?

Our "friends" at Diebold, the same wonderful people behind the questionable electronic-voting machines that Election Day voters will use in San Diego County.

Haas said the ballots were to be printed by Diebold, the same company that makes the electronic touchscreen machines that will be used Tuesday. Diebold officials told him there had been problems with the printing press operation, Haas said.

More in extended...

In unusually blunt terms, Senator Clinton questioned the current administration's response to an intelligence briefing President Bush received about a month before the 9/11 attacks. It mentioned that Al Qaeda was intent on striking the United States using hijacked planes.

"I'm certain that if my husband and his national security team had been shown a classified report entitled `Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States,' he would have taken it more seriously than history suggests it was taken by our current president and his national security team," she said during an appearance on Capitol Hill.

Yes!  That's the message!  Clinton tried; Bush didn't try.

"I think my husband did a great job in demonstrating that Democrats are not going to take these attacks," she said.

But wait, there's more!

I was at home, my family and I had just finished dinner, when the phone rang.  We live in CA-50, where Francine Busby is the Democratic nominee against GOP lobbyist Brian Bilbray, who is now the incumbent after winning a special election in June to replaced now-convicted Republican felon and federal prison inmate Randy "Duke" Cunningham.

The caller ID said the call was coming from 1-801-623-4628.  

I answered the phone, and the caller, obviously calling from a call center, asked to speak to "the male in the household who is a registered voter".  Since that would be me, I said so.

After the caller confirmed that I was likely to vote in the November election, I asked who she was calling on behalf of.  She said she was calling on behalf of The Tarrance Group.

More after the flip.

On Wednesday night, CA-50 Democratic nominee Francine Busby and her opponent, lobbyist-turned-Congressman Brian Bilbray appeared on MSNBC's Hardball to bicker about immigration policy, and to rate the Bush presidency on a scale of one to ten.  Alas, ol' W didn't even get a good rating from his GOP robot in CA-50.

Here is a link to a video clip of the broadcast.

If you'd rather just read the transcript of the show, click here.  

More about the broadcast after the flip.  No more up front, because our Kingpin is so miserly about the amount of text we can put in the main box.

On Sunday, Busby stepped up and attacked Bilbray's blind, unquestioning support of Mr. Bush's War in Iraq:

Democratic congressional candidate Francine Busby criticized Republican Rep. Brian Bilbray yesterday for backing President Bush's vow to "stay the course" in Iraq, but she stopped short of calling for a specific timetable to withdraw troops.

Busby's remarks came one day after Bilbray, in a published report, said military decisions in Iraq are up to the president "and if you want to make them, you run for president."

"Mr. Bilbray is wrong," Busby said at a news conference outside the Veterans Museum and Memorial Chapel in Balboa Park.

This is an angle that Busby will have to return to repeatedly if she wants to reverse the outcome of the June special election.

More in Extended, below.

AMARAH, Iraq - Iraqis looted a military base vacated by British troops and stripped it of virtually everything removable on Friday, an indication of possible future trouble for U.S.-led coalition forces hoping to hand over security gradually to the Iraqi government.

Men, some with their faces covered, ripped corrugated metal from roofs, carried off metal pipes and backed trucks into building entrances to load them with wooden planks. Many also took away doors and window frames from Camp Abu Naji.

"The British forces left Abu Naji, and the locals started looting everything," 1st Lt. Rifaat Taha Yaseen of the Iraqi Army's 10th Division told Associated Press Television News. "They took everything from the buildings."

In the words of Yogi Berra:  It's like deja vu all over again.

Howard Kaloogian, who finished a distant third among Republican candidates in the CA-50 primary last week (even though he had the endorsement of James Dobson and Focus on the Family), has announced that he will support Eric Roach if Roach decides to take on Bilbray in the GOP primary on June 6. That is the same day that Bilbray will be facing Democratic nominee Francine Busby in the runoff to fill the remainder of the term of convicted GOP felon Randy "Duke" Cunningham.

(Quote after the flip.)

Bill seeks abortion's end in Ohio

A Cincinnati legislator's bill to ban abortion in Ohio drew widespread support here Wednesday from a dozen groups eager to trigger a review of Roe v. Wade by what they see as an increasingly conservative U.S. Supreme Court.

. . .

Introduced nine months ago by Rep. Tom Brinkman, R-Mount Lookout, House Bill 228 would make it a felony to carry out abortions or transport a woman across state lines to have one. It would allow abortions only to save the life of a mother.

It is on.  Are we ready to stop this, in Ohio, Indiana, and wherever else the GOP will attack?

     ACS posted the text of Sen. Edwards' speech here on the ACS blog, at http://www.acsblog.org/ .

     Sen. Edwards spoke on the importance of the courts in our nation, the Radical Right's persistent efforts to pervert the courts for their own unsavory ends, and the nomination of John Roberts to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The ability of ordinary people to go to court and obtain justice is under siege. This is no coincidence.

It is part of a calculated political agenda that plays out every day in Congress and the Executive Branch, an agenda designed to put powerful corporate interests ahead of ordinary people.

I call it "protect the powerful" jurisprudence because that is what it is designed to do.

     More of Sen. Edwards' thoughtful comments -- and his questions for John Roberts -- after the jump.

The latest in the saga of Republican congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham and the graft he has taken from his benefactor, defense contractor Mitchell Wade:  About two dozen demonstrators gathered outside Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham's gated driveway Friday to protest his real-estate dealings with a defense contractor that they dubbed "Mansiongate."

More after the flip about "Duke" stuffing his pockets while diverting millions of dollars to his defense-contractor buddy.

Eleanor Clift's column is about Democratic and union efforts to appeal to workers and shoppers at the union-hating Wal-Marts of the suburbs and exurbs.  She notes that, in an effort at sprucing up its image, the SEIU recently adopted a new logo with purple as its primary color:

Let's take the jump here.

The fundies hate diversity.  They hate acknowledgement of any religion but their own.  And in their narrow-minded paranoid world, they have invented non-existent bogeymen, "elitists" whom they say have taken over "their" culture:

Wake up, folks.  These dangerous loonies have declared all of us the enemy, and they have declared war on everyone who doesn't look and think like them.

More from articles in today's LA Times and NY Times after the jump.

Here's some more depressing evidence of what climate change is doing:

Top photo is Carroll Glacier in Alaska, taken about 100 years ago.  Bottom photo -- with the foot of the glacier completely gone -- was taken recently.

More photos and story after the jump.

          Under the rightwingers' "conscience laws", rightwing true believers could, and will, pressure pharmacists, especially in relatively isolated areas, to make birth control prescriptions effectively unavailable -- by convincing these pharmacists to "exercise their conscience" and turn away women with prescriptions.  If every pharmacist within 100 miles suddenly has this "conscience" imposed on him or her, women will have no access to prescription birth control.