PBMom's Blog

Video speaks a thousand words....

Let the interview go to about 2:57 when she asks the interviewer, what exactly does a VP do?  May I suggest to the potential commander-in-chief a Wikipedia.....

 

 

What also worries me is some things she thinks is true, like the founding fathers created the Pledge of Allegience. 

She does seem to have things in common with the current administration.  She can shoot a gun like Cheney (hope she hasn't shot her friend in the face), and she apparently removes people from office if they don't share similar beliefs as her, like the attorney general scandal.  She also was originally backing the "Bridge To Nowhere" before she was against it. 

http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/
2008-08-31-palin-bridge_N.htm

Although she says she is against earmarks, she apparently didn't mind when they were for her own town.  According to this article:

"And as mayor of the small town of Wasilla from 1996 to 2002, Palin also hired a Washington lobbying firm that helped secure $8 million in congressionally directed spending projects, known as earmarks, according to public spending records compiled by the watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste and lobbying documents.

Wasilla's lobbying firm was headed by Steven Silver — a former chief of staff to Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, a key proponent of the bridge project."

It has also been alleged that she was a member of the Alaskan Independence Party; her name is mentioned as being a member during one of their meetings.  The AIP wants to become an independent state, much like some people in Texas want Texas to leave the United States.  But I guess it is okay now that she has been nominated to the position for which she doesn't know the job description.

And all the people on the right are going to hear is, "No abortion for any reason."  When will the conservative right quit being used as a political tool to get their votes and then be discarded?  I've heard every politician in the Republican party use it as a tool to get votes and then once in office, then hush-hush it under the table.  What makes you think it is any different this year?  You are being used once again.  Please wake-up. 

The FBI admitted this woman was not vetted until the Wednesday of the Democratic Convention.  You really want a president that makes a very, very important decision about who his running mate will be that quickly?  You really think this person was the "best person for the job?"  I sure hope nothing happens to McCain if he becomes president because the thought of someone who doesn't know what the VP does scares me more than Cheney does.  And note to the Republican party:  I don't vote based on my genitalia.  And as Hillary Clinton so eloquently stated last week, if you voted for her just because she was female, then they missed the point. 

 

Here we go again.  In just the last day or two, I've already read two blogs that state that Barack Obama would stand by Muslims instead of standing by Americans.  They use this quote from his book "Audacity of Hope": 

"I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction."

HE DID NOT SAY STAND WITH AMERICANS!!!!!

Deep, deep sigh.  I guess the Republicans have started the same smear campaign as they did with John Kerry, an honorable man who served in Vietnam when their president, President Bush, got himself a safe pass in the Guard and then at some point decided not to report for duty.  Even John McCain himself thought what was being said about his fellow Vietnam veteran was horrible.  Your presumed nominee, John McCain, would not endorse these type of tactics, so why do you feel you must do so against the presumed nomineee of the Democratic Party? 

If anybody had bothered to actually read the page from which it came from, it says this:

In the wake of 9/11, my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans, for example, have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging. They have been reminded that the history of immigration in this country has a dark underbelly; they need specific reassurances that their citizenship really means something, that America has learned the right lessons from the Japanese internments during World War II, and that I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.

For those who need an interpreter, Barack Obama spoke of the importance of not allowing inflamed public opinion to result in innocent members of immigrant groups being stripped of their rights, denied their due as American citizens, or placed into confinement, as was done with Japanese-Americans during World War II. The original contains no specific mention of "Muslims."

Any American, regardless of their religious orientation, is protected under our Constitution.  Every person in this country who is member, regardless of whether they came here through legal immigration or were born here are guaranteed the same rights you have.  Oh, perhaps you didn't know that babies are born in America every day and some of them are growing up in Muslim homes.  According to the way some Republicans are thinking, does that mean America is now harboring terrorists and now we have to invade ourselves?  Do you see how ridiculous you sound?   You would do yourselves a world of good if you stuck to facts so that you would sound like intelligent constituents engaged in the real issues. 

Do you think you are doing your party a public service by saying that some Americans are okay and others are not? 

Do you think you are doing your party a public service by passing your gossip and rumors and lies as fact?  If you are Christian, by doing that, you are already sinning against God.   Since lying violates the virtue of truthfulness, a lie does real violence to another.  It affects his ability to know, which is a condition of every judgment and decision.  It contains the seed of discord and all consequent evils.  Lying is destructive of society; it undermines trust among men and tears apart the fabric of social relationships.  See Sir 27:16; Prov 25:9-10   John McCain is a honorable man and he isn't going to put up with this BLEEP when the Bush administration encouraged it. 

You are already violating Christ's law of "love one another as I have loved you."  Also "Love Thy Neighbor." 

These attempts of smearing another are not going to work this time, and I'm most certain that John McCain is going to speak up, as he already has shown, after comments made by Parsley and Hagee horrified him. 

Let's run a clean campaign folks.  I will.  My challenge to you:  Are you capable of learning any new tricks? 

I'm asking all of Bloggersville for their support in this.  This will take you less than 10 minutes and it will mean a great deal to parents who are trying to legally force school districts to provide FAPE (free appropriate public education) to their children in a court where the odds are stacked against them to begin with, because the schools are paying their lawyers huge sums of money (your tax money) to fight us versus what we were asking for in the first place that usually only costs a fraction of the sum they are paying the parasite...I mean lawyer...for things like like teacher training, special adaptive equipment, just to name a few. 

We asking you to step up to the plate on Tuesday, May 6 by calling your Congressional Representatives (202-224-3121) and asking that they co-sponsor H.R. 4188, the IDEA Fairness Restoration Act (H.R. 4188).

The IDEA Fairness Restoration Act allows parents who prevail in due process or litigation under IDEA to be reimbursed for their expert witness fees — an expense few parents can afford. This bipartisan bill will help to level the playing field for parents of children with disabilities.

Find Your Representative. Go to http://www.house.gov and put your zip code into the box in the upper left corner.  You can also use http://www.congress.org to find this information.  When you find who it is, call the number and ask for his office.  All you need to say to them, the person who answers, or the educational aide for the office is

"Please co-sponsor H.R. 4188, the IDEA Fairness Restoration Act.  It is expensive for parents of children with disabilities to pay for medical and technical experts to support their child's case. Most parents cannot afford this expense on their own."

If you can't make a long-distance call, go to your Representative's web site at http://www.house.gov.  to look up your Representative and get their local phone number.  You can also find their local phone numbers at http://www.congress.org

Please call on May 6. Do not send an email. We need Congress to hear our voices. When many people call, Congress listens.  It's easier to do than voting multiple times on American Idol, and you don't even have to leave the comfort of your home or workplace.  Do it for a child who needs you now.    Do it for Patrick, who someday may be in that position of fighting for his basic rights (via us, his parents). 

The bloggers went through a period of posting all the rumor mill emails out that are were totally untrue about Obama.  They are making their rounds again.  This email that goes out says it is true because it was on snopes.com and the person checked it out.  If they truly did, they would see what was actually posted.  Let me just say that I support Obama.  However, if these rumors were circulating about any other candidate, I would be there to say please stop it.  Isn't gossiping and spreading mistruths a sin in the eyes of a Christian?  So here is the actual post on Snopes since it is obvious people aren't looking at the report. 

First thing snopes does is post the actual email circulating.  Then it tells you the variations:  Here is what they say in the Variations:   One version of the e-mail in circulation claims "We were told this was checked out on 'snopes.com'. It is factual. Check for yourself." and includes a link to this web site. It's our guess that  whoever included that bit was counting on folks to not check, as our article says the opposite: that the polemic is not factual but rather is false.

Then Snopes tells the origins.  But what is most important is I will list what the email says and what SNOPES ACTUALLY says about those comments:

Claim:   Barack Hussein Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., a black MUSLIM from Nyangoma-Kogel, Kenya and Ann Dunh am, a white ATHEIST from Wichita, Kansas. Obama's parents met at the University of Hawaii.

Truth:  

Barack Hussein Obama (Senator Obama's father) was born on the shores of Lake Victoria in Alego, Kenya. He met and married an American woman, Ann Dunham of Wichita, Kansas, while they were both attending the University of Hawaii. Their son, also named Barack Hussein Obama was born on 4 August 1961 at the Queen's Medical Center in Honolulu, Hawaii. 

Although the elder Obama was raised as a Muslim, no evidence supports the claim that he was ever a "radical Muslim," and Senator Obama's family histories note that his father was an atheist or agnostic (i.e., no longer a practicing Muslim) by the time he married the younger Obama's mother. Of his mother's religious views, Senator Obama wrote: "For my mother, organized religion too often dressed up closed-mindedness in the garb of piety, cruelty and oppression in the cloak of righteousness. This isn't to say that she provided me with no religious instruction. In her mind, a working knowledge of the world's great religions was a necessary part of any well-rounded education. In our household the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology. On Easter or Christmas Day my mother might drag me to church, just as she dragged me to the Buddhist temple, the chinese New Year celebration, the Shinto shrine, and ancient Hawaiian burial sites. But I was made to understand that such religious samplings required no sustained commitment on my part. Religion was an expression of human culture, she would explain, not its wellspring, just one of the many ways — and not necessarily the best way — that man attempted to control the unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives. In sum, my mother viewed religion through the eyes of the anthropologist she would become; it was a phenomenon to be treated with a suitable respect, but with a suitable detachment as well."  

Claim:   When Obama was two years old, his parents divorced. His father returned to Kenya . His mother then married Lolo Soetoro, a RADICAL Muslim from Indonesia. When Obama was 6 years old, the family relocated to Indonesia . Obama attended a MUSLIM school in Jakarta . He also spent two years in a Catholic school.  

Truth:

Barack Obama's parents divorced when he was two years old, his father moving to Connecticut to continue his education before returning to Kenya. When the younger Obama was six years old, his mother married again, this time to Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian oil manager. Barack and his mother moved to Jakarta, Indonesia, where Obama spent 4-5 years attending both Muslim and Catholic schools before his mother sent him back to the United States to live with his maternal grandmother. The school Barack Obama attended in Indonesia was "Muslim" primarily in the sense that the preponderance of its student body was Muslim (because Indonesia is predominantly Muslim country), but both the Muslim and Catholic schools he attended in Indonesia offered a few hours of religious instruction each week.  

In his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope, Obama elaborated on his early schooling, explaining that he attended both Catholic and Muslim schools in Indonesia — not out of any particular religious affiliation, but because his mother wanted him to obtain the best education possible under the circumstances: "During the five years that we would live with my stepfather in Indonesia,I was sent first to a neighborhood Catholic school and then to a predominantly Muslim school; in both cases, my mother was less concerned with me learning the catechism or puzzling out the meaning of the muezzin's call to evening prayer than she was with whether I was properly learning my multiplication tables.

Claim:   Obama takes great care to conceal the fact that he is a Muslim.   He is quick to point out that, "He was once a Muslim, but that he also attended Catholic school." Obama's political handlers are attempting to make it appear that he is not a radical.

Truth

Barack Obama never stated that he "was once a Muslim" (radical or otherwise), so his "handlers" have nothing to "conceal." Obama's communications director Robert Gibbs noted that "Senator Obama has never been a Muslim. As a six-year-old in Catholic school, he studied the catechism." Barack Obama has been associated with the United Church of Christ since the mid-1980s, describes himself as a Christian, and says that he is "rooted in the Christian tradition."   

Claim:   Obama's introduction to Islam came via his father, and this influence was temporary at best. In reality, the senior Obama returned to Kenya soon after the divorce, and never again had any direct influence over his son's education.

Truth

As noted above, Barack Obama's parents divorced when he was only two years old, and his father then moved thousands of miles away, from Hawaii to Connecticut, so he couldn't have received much of an "introduction to Islam" from his (biological) father:  "My father was almost entirely absent from my childhood, having been divorced from my mother when I was two years old.   At the time of his death, my father remained a myth to me, both more and less than a man. He had left Hawaii back in 1963, when I was only two years old, so that as a child I knew him only through the stories that my  mother and grandparents told.  (Barack's only other childhood contact with his father occurred when he was eleven years old, and his father came to visit Hawaii for a month at Christmastime. The elder Obama died when Barack Jr. was twenty-one years old.)   

Claim:   Lolo Soetoro, the second husband of Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, introduced his stepson to Islam. Obama was enrolled in a Wahabi school in Jakarta. Wahabism is the RADICAL teaching that is followed by the Muslim terrorists who are now waging Jihad against the western world.

Truth

The claim that Obama attended a radical Wahabbist school in Indonesia in the mid-1960s is exceedingly far-fetched, given that:  The large Indonesian community resident in Mecca was a medium through which knowledge about Wahhabism reached Indonesia, but the community itself appears to have remained virtually immune to Wahhabi influences. In reality there was little direct influence of Wahhabism on Indonesian reformist thought until the 1970s.  Insight magazine claimed in a January 2007 article that Barack Obama spent at least four years attending what is variously described as a "madrassa," a "radical Muslim religious school," or a "Muslim seminary" in Indonesia, but CNN has more recently reported that its own investigation found those claims to be false:   "[R]eporting by CNN in Jakarta, Indonesia and Washington, D.C., shows the allegations that Obama attended a madrassa to be false. CNN dispatched Senior International Correspondent John Vause to Jakarta to investigate.

He visited the Basuki school, which Obama attended from 1969 to 1971. 

"This is a public school. We don't focus on religion," Hardi Priyono, deputy headmaster of the Basuki school, told Vause. "In our daily lives, we try to respect religion, but we don't give preferential treatment." 

Vause reported he saw boys and girls dressed in neat school uniforms playing outside the school, while teachers were dressed in Western-style clothes. 

"I came here to Barack Obama's elementary school in Jakarta looking for what some are calling an Islamic madrassa ... like the ones that teach hate and violence in Pakistan and Afghanistan," Vause said on the 'Situation Room.' "I've been to those madrassas in Pakistan ... this school is nothing like that."

Vause also interviewed one of Obama's Basuki classmates, Bandug Winadijanto, who claims that not a lot has changed at the school since the two men were pupils. Insight reported that Obama's political opponents believed the school promoted Wahhabism, a fundamentalist form of Islam, "and are seeking to prove it."

"It's not (an) Islamic school. It's general," Winadijanto said. "There is a lot of Christians, Buddhists, also Confucian. ... So that's a mixed school."

The Associated Press reported similarly:  "A spokesman for Indonesia's Ministry of Religious Affairs said claims that Obama studied at an Islamic school are groundless. "

"SDN Menteng 1 is a public primary school that is open to people of all faiths," said the spokesman, Sutopo, who goes by only one name. "Moreover, he studied earlier at Fransiskus Assisi, which is clearly a Catholic school."

Obama later transferred to SDN Menteng 1 the elite, secular elementary school at the center of the controversy. The school is public but is very competitive and has exceptionally high standards. It is located in one of the most affluent parts of Jakarta and attracts mostly middle- to upper-class students, among them several of former dictator Suharto's grandchildren.

Indonesia is home to several of the most radical Islamic schools in Southeast Asia, some with alleged terrorist links. But Akmad Solichin [the vice principal at SDN Menteng 1], who proudly pointed to a photo of a young Barry Obama, as he was known, said his school is not one of them.  Moreover, a statement released by the Obama campaign affirmed that:  "In the past week, many of you have read a now thoroughly-debunked story by Insight Magazine, owned by the Washington Times, which cites unnamed sources close to a political campaign that claim Senator Obama was enrolled for "at least four years" in an Indonesian "Madrassa". The article says the "sources" believe the Madrassa was "espousing Wahhabism," a form of radical Islam.

All of the claims about Senator Obama’s faith and education raised in the Insight Magazine story and repeated on Fox News are false. Senator Obama was raised in a secular household in Indonesia by his stepfather and mother. Obama’s stepfather worked for a U.S. oil company, and sent his stepson to two years of Catholic school, as well as two years of public school.

To be clear, Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian who attends the United Church of Christ in Chicago. Furthermore, the Indonesian school Obama attended in Jakarta is a public school that is not and never has been a Madrassa. 

Claim:   Since it is politically expedient to be a CHRISTIAN when seeking  major public office in the United States, Barack Hussein Obama has joined the United Church of Christ in an attempt to downplay his Muslim background.

Truth

As noted above, Barack Obama describes himself as "a Christian," says that he is "rooted in the Christian tradition," and his association with the United Church of Christ began over twenty years ago, long before he contemplated a political career. (Obama was first elected to the Illinois state senate in 1996, but he has been involved with the United Church of Christ since the mid-1980s.) The beginnings of Obama's relationship with the church were described in an April 2004 Chicago Sun-Times article:  "Obama is unapologetic in saying he has a "personal relationship with Jesus Christ." As a sign of that relationship, he says, he walked down the aisle of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ in response to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's altar call one Sunday morning about 16 years ago.

The politician could have ended his spiritual tale right there, at the point some people might assume his life changed, when he got "saved,"  transformed, washed in the blood. But Obama wants to clarify what truly happened.

"It wasn't an epiphany," he says of that public profession of faith. "It was much more of a gradual process for me. I know there are some people who fall out. Which is wonderful. God bless them ... I think it was just a moment to certify or publicly affirm a growing faith in me."

These days, he says, he attends the 11 a.m. Sunday service at Trinity in the Brainerd neighborhood every week — or at least as many weeks as he is able. His pastor, Wright, has become a close confidant.

So how did he become a churchgoer?

It began in 1985, when he came to Chicago as a $13,000-a-year community organizer, working with a number of African-American churches in the Roseland, West Pullman and Altgeld Gardens neighborhoods that were trying to deal with the devastation caused by shuttered steel plants.

"I started working with both the ministers and the lay people in these churches on issues like creating job-training programs, or after-school programs for youth, or making sure that city services were fairly allocated to underserved communities," he says. "And it was in those places where I think what had been more of an intellectual view of religion deepened.

"I became much more familiar with the ongoing tradition of the historic black church and its importance in the community. And the power of that culture to give people strength in very difficult circumstances, and the power of that church to give people courage against great odds. And it moved me deeply."

Claim:   ALSO, keep in mind that when he was sworn into office he DID NOT use the Holy Bible, but instead the Koran.

Truth

This statement is completely false. It is a mistaken reference to a different politician, Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison, not Barack Obama.

Claim:   Barack Hussein Obama will NOT recite the Pledge of Allegiance nor will he show any reverence for our flag. While others place their hands over their hearts, Obama turns his back to the flag and slouches.

Truth

Senator Obama drew some criticism over a photograph that showed him standing without his hand over his heart during the playing of the U.S. national anthem, but the claim that he "will NOT recite the Pledge of  Allegiance" is false.

During the Democratic candidates' debate on 15 January 2008, Senator Obama    directly refuted the three primary rumors about him that are circulating via e-mail: that he is a Muslim, that he was sworn in to Congress on the Quran, and that he refuses to say the Pledge of Allegiance.

Okay, now you have the truth.  Stop posting things that aren't true. 

This is a reprint from the Galveston Daily News from Sunday.  Feldman and Rogers represents many school districts throughout Texas, a few of which include Galveston, Clear Creek ISD, and Conroe ISD.  They are a new breed of parasites who convince school districts that they better pay them versus working things out in a cooperative manner with parents.  It's better to pay them than to take the millions of dollars they are using in YOUR taxes instead of putting it into teacher training so parents like us don't have to fight to get our children educated properly.  When a parent (of regular education kids) watchdog group in Galveston created a web site to hold their district accountable for what they perceived were lies, Jeff Rogers filed a defamation of character suit on behalf of every member of the school board to force the parents' group first amendment right to say what they wanted to say.    That site, by the way, is gisdwatch.com

So bloggers what do you say.  Do you know how much your school districts are spending on their lawyers and how much of that is specifically for special education issues?  Jeff Rogers, by the way, is going to be a presenter at a conference NELI is putting on (National Educators Law Institute) this Thursday in Houston.  The fee for this conference is $135 per person and no one is allowed to attend who doesn't work for the school districts (your tax money, you should be allowed to go).  Clear Creek ISD is sending 17 people (information obtained through open records act).  If some of those people are teachers, substitutes will have to be hired.  Then there is mileage.  You can do the math.  This seminar is to teach educators things like (from previous conferences--not to call parents on the home line, but rather their cell phones to avoid being tape recorded--how to redecorate the teacher's lounge with special education funding--I kid you not).  Anyway, I digress.  That conference is for another blog.

Let me know how all of you feel about parasitic lawyers getting rich off our tax dollars.

Oh, and by the way, the special education director in Conroe put down Jeff Rogers as her first reference on her application.  So now lawyers are recommending people for jobs in school districts.  I have a copy of that application (again through open records request that another parent obtained).

School district must divorce its lawyers

By Michael A. Smith
The Daily News

Published February 24, 2008

Galveston school trustees should find a new law firm. At issue is the revelation that Superintendent Lynne Cleveland used the district’s firm, Feldman and Rogers, in October to file a divorce petition.

Cleveland should not have asked the district’s attorney, Erik Nichols, for a favor.

Nichols should have referred Cleveland to one of the hundreds of Texas attorneys not employed by the district.

Taken by itself, a reasonable person could call the favor an example of really poor judgment and move on.

But the context, the explanation offered by Cleveland and the rationalization offered by Nichols compound the error to the extent that somebody needs to go.

Cleveland said she turned to Nichols because they are good friends. She paid Feldman and Rogers from her own pocket to file the divorce petition.

One of Cleveland’s jobs is to assess whether the school board and, by very short extension, the taxpayers are getting the best legal services for their dollars.

The cost of those services, which is considerably more than average, already has become an issue.

Administrators recently attempted to almost double the district’s legal budget from $150,000 to $267,500. School board president Andy Mytelka objected.

“I think we need to exercise a little more control,” Mytelka said. “I would like to approve the bills before the check is cut.”

Maybe the costs were, and the increase would have been, justified. But who can credibly make that argument? Cleveland, speaking objectively about her good friend?

And that’s not the whole story. There’s also the stunningly bad legal advice the firm has given the board pretty consistently for a long time.

Its attorneys have told the board it could talk about things in closed session that can’t legally be talked about in closed session.

By telling the board what the board wanted to hear, they gave it a flimsy legal shield, but at the cost of its credibility in the community.

The firm told the board it should sue a woman for libel for things she posted on a blog. That advice was ill advised at best, and probably self-serving as well. Nobody stood to gain from such litigation except Feldman and Rogers.

The kicker, however, was Nichols’ take on the divorce filing.

“We do these things for clients,” he said. “We do things for people all the time through the different school communities. We’ve gotten board members out of dog-bite cases and represented people’s children who get in trouble and need assistance.

“You do favors in business from time to time. It’s only a conflict of interest if you’re giving a benefit to someone to induce them to give you something.”

Nichols is describing the good-old-boy system. Never mind that the legal advice often is bad and always is more expensive; I do you favors from time to time.

Nichols doesn’t even understand who his client is. It’s not Cleveland, who got the favor, nor is it the school board. It’s the legal entity called Galveston Independent School District. Nor does he understand that doing favors from time to time for your client’s employees is by definition “giving a benefit to someone to induce them to give you something.” That something being the district’s lucrative legal business.

For the record, David Feldman repudiated Nichols’ comment, saying the firm does not do favors for clients. The public record says otherwise, however.

The taxpayers deserve better than this firm appears equipped to provide.

Michael A. Smith is associate editor of The Daily News.

 

I thought this was pretty hysterical.  This was on the cover of one of my 1000 catalogues that were delivered to me in my mailbox over the holidays. 

Okay, let's be fair, if we are going to have a Hillary Nutcracker, we are going to need to have a Rudy nutcracker.  It's only fair and won't appear sexist in any way. 

Rudy, oh Rudy, not to miss a beat of his 9/11 self-promotion, when asked about Hillary's emotional breakdown said he understood because in the days after 9/11.... is there not a question that he will respond to that he doesn't mention 9/11 in it??? 

 

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What lengths would you go to for your favorite presidential candidate?   Donate money?  Volunteer in the campaign office?  Just cast your ballot?  I had the opportunity to meet some fans crazy for Ron Paul in the neighborhood across from mine.  This is what he and his wife (along with his friends) did for Ron Paul: 

I was driving down the road that leads to my subdivision about a week and a half ago.  For 0.3 of a mile, I kept looking in my rearview mirror going "what the???"  It looked like tsome person had painted their car in stripes (actually from a distance it looked like one of Patrick's shirts!).  So when I signaled to turn into my subdivision, the car moved over to the left lane, and as I'm turning into my subdivision, the car passed me, and I got a real good look and I said to myself, "OH MY GOD!  That's crazy!!"  I must go find these people.  I want the picture of that car on my blog!"  I went to my house, got my camera and there was only one subdivision they could have turned into, and I proceeded to go street by street.  I said, "Okay, someone with Ron Paul bumper stickers all over it is not going to park in the garage because they are wanting people to see the car.  And I found it on the third street.  I went up to the house and told them I blogged on Fox 26 and I would really love to put the picture on my blog and to write a blog about their car and could they tell me the story of how it came to be.  I was like a kid on Christmas.  I wonder is this how all the reporters at Fox 26 feel all the time?  I felt like I found something secret that no one else knew about and I couldn't wait to share it with all of you.    He sent me these better high-resolution pictures that his friend took.  To see all the pictures, go to my photo album and look at the album called RonPaulCar.  The car belongs to Clay and Angela Kitchens.  It took 500-600 stickers and 7 hours with the help of their friends Jason Shutt and Jens Jorgensen.  I was so impressed with how they matched the lines on the curves of the car.  It looked like someone who matched wallpaper, a skill I do not possess.  

I was hoping more of my favorite bloggers would comment on this, but I think some of them avoid the "political" blog like the plague.  So I'm going to try to put it under "entertainment."  So as entertainment value, do you like the car?  Does it bring a smile to your face as it did mine?  No political commentary necessary.  What is your general reaction when you look at the picture?

I saw this in the Parade section of the Houston Chronicle this weekend and thought it worthy of repeating here. 

"After the horrific collapse of a highway bridge in Minneapolis in August, politicians nationwide called on the federal government to repair America's infrastructure.  Now the politicos who control the pursestrings have spoken.  Though $1 billion for bridge repairs was added to the transportation/housing bill just approved by the Senate, an amendment to stop funding "pork" until all of the at-risk bridges have been fixed was rejected 82 to 14.  Instead, $2.5 billion will go toward pet projects like these:

Volcano monitoring in Alaska:     $3 million

A hiking and biking trail in West Virginia       $1 million

A prototype streetcar in Oregon         $750,000

A minor league ballpark in Montana:    $500,000

Renovation of a peace garden in North Dakota:    $450,000

Some things in Washington will never change.  I'll see if I can find the link to see which 14 senators voted to stop the pork. 

 

 

What lengths would you go to for your favorite presidential candidate?   Donate money?  Volunteer in the campaign office?  Just cast your ballot?  I had the opportunity to meet some fans crazy for Ron Paul in the neighborhood across from mine.  This is what he and his wife (along with his friends) did for Ron Paul:  I was driving down the road that leads to my subdivision about a week and a half ago.  For 0.3 of a mile, I kept looking in my rearview mirror going "what the???"  It looked like tsome person had painted their car in stripes (actually from a distance it looked like one of Patrick's shirts!).  So when I signaled to turn into my subdivision, the car moved over to the left lane, and as I'm turning into my subdivision, the car passed me, and I got a real good look and I said to myself, "OH MY GOD!  That's crazy!!"  I must go find these people.  I want the picture of that car on my blog!"  I went to my house, got my camera and there was only one subdivision they could have turned into, and I proceeded to go street by street.  I said, "Okay, someone with Ron Paul bumper stickers all over it is not going to park in the garage because they are wanting people to see the car.  And I found it on the third street.  I went up to the house and told them I blogged on Fox 26 and I would really love to put the picture on my blog and to write a blog about their car and could they tell me the story of how it came to be.  I was like a kid on Christmas.  I wonder is this how all the reporters at Fox 26 feel all the time?  I felt like I found something secret that no one else knew about and I couldn't wait to share it with all of you.    He sent me these better high-resolution pictures that his friend took.  To see all the pictures, go to my photo album and look at the album called RonPaulCar.  The car belongs to Clay and Angela Kitchens.  It took 500-600 stickers and 7 hours with the help of their friends Jason Shutt and Jens Jorgensen.  I was so impressed with how they matched the lines on the curves of the car.  It looked like someone who matched wallpaper, a skill I do not possess.  They've had quite the mixed reaction, both extremes, people either love it or hate it.  Obviously they are crazy about Ron Paul.  He said he had never been politically active but he listened to what Ron Paul was saying and has become a huge supporter.  He said he's been trying to meet Ron Paul ever since they did the car so they could show it to them. 
He gave me this link and said it pretty much summed it up for him:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=FG2PUZoukfA

What do you all think?  Isn't this great?  How far would you go for your candidate?  Even if you don't agree with Ron Paul's views, you have to admit, the car is pretty awesome! 

Welcome invitations to all my blogger friends if they want to attend a school ARD meeting on Monday, Nov 26, at 12:30 to just sit there and observe.  The district is going to have probably 12 people from their side, they are likely to have surrounding me, rolling their eyes, etc.   I brought a friend on Nov 13 and it really made a difference in her pointint out the loud sighs, the rolling eyes, etc.  It was 3 of us about 12 of them.  They do that for intimidation.  My friend noticed the two people didn't talk at all. 

Come find out what a 10-day recess is like.  If an agreement cannot be reached (which I feel there won't be since I found out they've already called their lawyers warning this was going to due process), they we will be filing for due process, a hearing which I will make open to the public and open to media...and ho, ho, ho, through the holiday season.

The primary issue:  They want to cut Patrick's 30 minutes a week to 30 minutes every 9 weeks (basically 3.3 minutes a week). 

Their reasoning:  The teacher will do the work.

My argument:  We aren't for more and please leave this child's stuff alone when he is finally starting to relearn skills he had lost since 2004. 

If you have to have surgery, do you want it to be done by a certified nurse or a physician.  If you have a child who's disabilities to the severe degree they have and recouping their skills and are making very slow progress, he still can make progress.  They can bother to come and do direct and consultive services for a total minutes of 30 minutes so that the teacher can continue on. 

They also

1.  Have given up on him

2.  Think he is too old, have this on tape.

The usual stuff. 

The spot:   Wilkerson Intermediate School (in the Conroe ISD)

See this link for the address and phone numbers and picture of the front of the schoool.

http://www.conroeisd.net/schools/45.asp

It will take start  at 12:30 so you would need to be there by then. 

Jeff can't come, so I'll look for strength through solidarity.  Blog here is you might be able to come. 

I found where a hearing officer heard a case like this and instead of ordering 30 minutes of OT per week directly performed by registered occupational therapy, he found in the favor of the parent and the parent got 6 hours a week for her child and her child did fantastic. 

Even though we constantly work with him at home, that cannnot figure into anything they think or do because the laws in IDEA says that school is 100% required to educate my child.  Whatever I do is bonus plus. 

Wilkerson is very near I-45/Grogan's Mill Road, so let me know via the blog if you might like to see the next round in The Bowens versus Conroe ISD

From the Unity08.com site:

"What would Thanksgiving be like if we cooked the same turkery over and over, year after year, and served it bland, tasteless, and downright inedible?  Well, it would be kind of like "Politics-As-Usual, which has been feeding us that turkey for many years now.  It's time to cook up a new year to lead the country, as you well know, and Unity08 has the recipe. 

For your own health, our meal is pork-barrel and mud-slinging free:

Ingredients:

1 package of Our Country (divided)

1/2 teaspoon of American Values (hard work, ingenuity, inspiration)

1/2 teaspoon of New Technology

5 cups of Crucial Issues

1 box of Questions to Ask the Candidates

1 handful of Candidates (formed into teams)

1 Online Convention pressure cooker (the largest you can find):

Instructions:

1.  Boil Politics As Usual, pour it out, and start anew.

2.  Combine American Values with New Technology (stir vigorously)

3.  Sift and rank Crucial Issues

4.  Mull over Questions to Ask the Candidates

5.  Place Crucial Issues, Questions and Candidate Teams into Online Convention pressure cooker.

6.  Reduce to Unity Ticket.

7.  Serve hot and complement with election of the next President of the United States.

 

I thought it was cute and thought I'd pass it on to share.  Unity08 wants to present a third-party option for people to vote for president and will be electing their presidential/vice-presidential ticket after a massive online convention in June 2008.  If you are interested in learning more about them, they are at http://www.unity08.com

Happy Thanksgiving!

The high-priced law firms schools hire are now using a different tactic to keep parents quiet. 

 

In Galveston ISD, the law firm of Feldman and Rogers has sent a letter to Sandra Tetley and her group called “Galveston Alliance for Neighborhood Schools” at http://www.gisdwatch.com  demanding that she remove libelous statements and other “legally offensive” statements.

 

What has she posted?  Feldman says there are 16 examples of what he says are libelous postings.  Half were posted for Ms. Tetley and the other half were posted by anonymous users.  Tetley says the postings were opinions only.

 

The postings on the web site accuse Superintendent Lynne Cleveland, trustees, and administrators of lying, manipulation, falsifying budget numbers, using their positions for ‘personal gain’, violating the Open Meetings Act and spying on employees, among other things. 

 

Ms. Tetley says that everyone deserves to have their opinion and she doesn’t think Feldman & Rogers has the right to make her or anyone else take down criticisms of them off the web site.  Tetley goes on to say that “People are very tired of what this type of government is doing.  They are using our money to silence us.” 

 

Tetley and her group have long criticized the district for reconfuring its middle schools, closing elementary schools, meeting in executive sessions some claimed were illegal, refusing to divulge the contents of a letter from a civil rights consultant and for issuing a budget forecast that was off by $10 million. 

 

The law on this is that it is difficult to prove a public official has been libeled.  Aside from proving the libelous statements are damaging, public officials must also prove actual malice.  Actual malice means knowing a statement is false or having reckless disregard for the truth.  An appeals court ruled in 2002 that school districts can’t sue for defamation, so the Galveston school district may have some hurdles if it moves forward with its lawsuit.  In a case that Galveston school district’s attorney argued is different, Port Arthur’s public school district in 2001 tried to sue a blogger for defamation.  The Texas Ninth Court of Appeals tossed out the lawsuit based on black-letter law:  NY Times v Sullivan. 

 

But Feldman has a new twist on it.  He says that the school district would not be the plaintiff if a suit were filed, the firm would file a suit on behalf of administrators in their official capacities and individual board members.  The suit, however, would be funded from the district’s budget. 

 

Prosecutions for libel on government have no place in the American system of jurisprudence, the Supreme Court ruled in Times v Sullivan which set the standard for defamation.  “If the government is permitted to use public resources to bring defamation claims against its critics, criticism of government will be silenced through, at the very least, fear of monetary loss,” stated the opinion authored by Justice David B. Gaultney.  A government or public official, however, could file individual lawsuits if the defamatory attack is specifically targeted at them, the opinion states.  And that is why Feldman says the district has a sound legal basis to sue Tetley. 

 

Port Arthur public school district argued that alleged defamatory statements injured the district’s reputation, which was important in an era of competition for students between public and private school.  “The importance of maintaining a government’s good reputation does not justify permitting the government to attack its critics by defamation suits,” the opinion states.  They say that the material on the site was deterring potential employees and families from moving into the school district. 

 

So what do you think?  Does Ms. Tetley have the write to continue posting these things?  What if we all had lawsuits brought against us because we criticize our representatives?  These people are representatives who are responsible for our children; their seats are electable.  If people like Ms. Tetley and Philip Klein of Nederland who runs a site called SouthEast Texas Political Review, don’t post these things, doesn’t it set a precedence of us blindly accepting what is spoon-fed to us? 

 

By the way, Mr. Klein was sued in April 2000 after he wrote a story reporting mayhem at a Port Arthur public high school prom.  He wrote that there was a “huge gang fight” at Thomas Jefferson High School’s prom, labeling it:  “TJ’s prom from hell.”  The district sued him for defamation.

 

How do you feel about your tax dollars being spent on such ridiculous things?

It's official.  Stephen Colbert will not be allowed to be on the ballot in South Carolina in his bid to run for president.  He paid his $2500 fee, and 40 minutes later, the committee decided he wasn't serious about his bid to run and therefore denied his request.

He was leading in the polls higher than Bill Richardson and Dennis Kucinich and was close to catching up to Joe Biden. 

He wanted to fill out applications for both ballots, but the Republican application was $35,000 just for the state of South Carolina.

I have a message for Stephen Colbert:  If you are truly serious about running, try Unity08.  They love you.

 

From Hitler to the Bin Laden Family:

This portion is taken from The Guardian, a UK paper, from several years ago.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1312540
,00.html

How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power

Rumours of a link between the US first family and the Nazi war machine have circulated for decades. Now the Guardian can reveal how repercussions of events that culminated in action under the Trading with the Enemy Act are still being felt by today's president

Ben Aris in Berlin and Duncan Campbell in Washington
Saturday September 25, 2004
The Guardian

George Bush's grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.

The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.

His business dealings, which continued until his company's assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.

The evidence has also prompted one former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor to argue that the late senator's action should have been grounds for prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

The debate over Prescott Bush's behaviour has been bubbling under the surface for some time. There has been a steady internet chatter about the "Bush/Nazi" connection, much of it inaccurate and unfair. But the new documents, many of which were only declassified last year, show that even after America had entered the war and when there was already significant information about the Nazis' plans and policies, he worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler's rise to power. It has also been suggested that the money he made from these dealings helped to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its political dynasty.

Remarkably, little of Bush's dealings with Germany has received public scrutiny, partly because of the secret status of the documentation involving him. But now the multibillion dollar legal action for damages by two Holocaust survivors against the Bush family, and the imminent publication of three books on the subject are threatening to make Prescott Bush's business history an uncomfortable issue for his grandson, George W, as he seeks re-election.

While there is no suggestion that Prescott Bush was sympathetic to the Nazi cause, the documents reveal that the firm he worked for, Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH), acted as a US base for the German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, who helped finance Hitler in the 1930s before falling out with him at the end of the decade. The Guardian has seen evidence that shows Bush was the director of the New York-based Union Banking Corporation (UBC) that represented Thyssen's US interests and he continued to work for the bank after America entered the war.

Tantalising

Bush was also on the board of at least one of the companies that formed part of a multinational network of front companies to allow Thyssen to move assets around the world.

Thyssen owned the largest steel and coal company in Germany and grew rich from Hitler's efforts to re-arm between the two world wars. One of the pillars in Thyssen's international corporate web, UBC, worked exclusively for, and was owned by, a Thyssen-controlled bank in the Netherlands. More tantalising are Bush's links to the Consolidated Silesian Steel Company (CSSC), based in mineral rich Silesia on the German-Polish border. During the war, the company made use of Nazi slave labour from the concentration camps, including Auschwitz. The ownership of CSSC changed hands several times in the 1930s, but documents from the US National Archive declassified last year link Bush to CSSC, although it is not clear if he and UBC were still involved in the company when Thyssen's American assets were seized in 1942.

Three sets of archives spell out Prescott Bush's involvement. All three are readily available, thanks to the efficient US archive system and a helpful and dedicated staff at both the Library of Congress in Washington and the National Archives at the University of Maryland.

The first set of files, the Harriman papers in the Library of Congress, show that Prescott Bush was a director and shareholder of a number of companies involved with Thyssen.

The second set of papers, which are in the National Archives, are contained in vesting order number 248 which records the seizure of the company assets. What these files show is that on October 20 1942 the alien property custodian seized the assets of the UBC, of which Prescott Bush was a director. Having gone through the books of the bank, further seizures were made against two affiliates, the Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation. By November, the Silesian-American Company, another of Prescott Bush's ventures, had also been seized.

The third set of documents, also at the National Archives, are contained in the files on IG Farben, who was prosecuted for war crimes.

A report issued by the Office of Alien Property Custodian in 1942 stated of the companies that "since 1939, these (steel and mining) properties have been in possession of and have been operated by the German government and have undoubtedly been of considerable assistance to that country's war effort".

Prescott Bush, a 6ft 4in charmer with a rich singing voice, was the founder of the Bush political dynasty and was once considered a potential presidential candidate himself. Like his son, George, and grandson, George W, he went to Yale where he was, again like his descendants, a member of the secretive and influential Skull and Bones student society. He was an artillery captain in the first world war and married Dorothy Walker, the daughter of George Herbert Walker, in 1921.

In 1924, his father-in-law, a well-known St Louis investment banker, helped set him up in business in New York with Averill Harriman, the wealthy son of railroad magnate E H Harriman in New York, who had gone into banking.

One of the first jobs Walker gave Bush was to manage UBC. Bush was a founding member of the bank and the incorporation documents, which list him as one of seven directors, show he owned one share in UBC worth $125.

The bank was set up by Harriman and Bush's father-in-law to provide a US bank for the Thyssens, Germany's most powerful industrial family.

August Thyssen, the founder of the dynasty had been a major contributor to Germany's first world war effort and in the 1920s, he and his sons Fritz and Heinrich established a network of overseas banks and companies so their assets and money could be whisked offshore if threatened again.

By the time Fritz Thyssen inherited the business empire in 1926, Germany's economic recovery was faltering. After hearing Adolf Hitler speak, Thyssen became mesmerised by the young firebrand. He joined the Nazi party in December 1931 and admits backing Hitler in his autobiography, I Paid Hitler, when the National Socialists were still a radical fringe party. He stepped in several times to bail out the struggling party: in 1928 Thyssen had bought the Barlow Palace on Briennerstrasse, in Munich, which Hitler converted into the Brown House, the headquarters of the Nazi party. The money came from another Thyssen overseas institution, the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvarrt in Rotterdam.

By the late 1930s, Brown Brothers Harriman, which claimed to be the world's largest private investment bank, and UBC had bought and shipped millions of dollars of gold, fuel, steel, coal and US treasury bonds to Germany, both feeding and financing Hitler's build-up to war.

Between 1931 and 1933 UBC bought more than $8m worth of gold, of which $3m was shipped abroad. According to documents seen by the Guardian, after UBC was set up it transferred $2m to BBH accounts and between 1924 and 1940 the assets of UBC hovered around $3m, dropping to $1m only on a few occasions.

In 1941, Thyssen fled Germany after falling out with Hitler but he was captured in France and detained for the remainder of the war.

There was nothing illegal in doing business with the Thyssens throughout the 1930s and many of America's best-known business names invested heavily in the German economic recovery. However, everything changed after Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Even then it could be argued that BBH was within its rights continuing business relations with the Thyssens until the end of 1941 as the US was still technically neutral until the attack on Pearl Harbor. The trouble started on July 30 1942 when the New York Herald-Tribune ran an article entitled "Hitler's Angel Has $3m in US Bank". UBC's huge gold purchases had raised suspicions that the bank was in fact a "secret nest egg" hidden in New York for Thyssen and other Nazi bigwigs. The Alien Property Commission (APC) launched an investigation.

There is no dispute over the fact that the US government seized a string of assets controlled by BBH - including UBC and SAC - in the autumn of 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy act. What is in dispute is if Harriman, Walker and Bush did more than own these companies on paper.

Erwin May, a treasury attache and officer for the department of investigation in the APC, was assigned to look into UBC's business. The first fact to emerge was that Roland Harriman, Prescott Bush and the other directors didn't actually own their shares in UBC but merely held them on behalf of Bank voor Handel. Strangely, no one seemed to know who owned the Rotterdam-based bank, including UBC's president.

May wrote in his report of August 16 1941: "Union Banking Corporation, incorporated August 4 1924, is wholly owned by the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. My investigation has produced no evidence as to the ownership of the Dutch bank. Mr Cornelis [sic] Lievense, president of UBC, claims no knowledge as to the ownership of the Bank voor Handel but believes it possible that Baron Heinrich Thyssen, brother of Fritz Thyssen, may own a substantial interest."

May cleared the bank of holding a golden nest egg for the Nazi leaders but went on to describe a network of companies spreading out from UBC across Europe, America and Canada, and how money from voor Handel travelled to these companies through UBC.

By September May had traced the origins of the non-American board members and found that Dutchman HJ Kouwenhoven - who met with Harriman in 1924 to set up UBC - had several other jobs: in addition to being the managing director of voor Handel he was also the director of the August Thyssen bank in Berlin and a director of Fritz Thyssen's Union Steel Works, the holding company that controlled Thyssen's steel and coal mine empire in Germany.

Within a few weeks, Homer Jones, the chief of the APC investigation and research division sent a memo to the executive committee of APC recommending the US government vest UBC and its assets. Jones named the directors of the bank in the memo, including Prescott Bush's name, and wrote: "Said stock is held by the above named individuals, however, solely as nominees for the Bank voor Handel, Rotterdam, Holland, which is owned by one or more of the Thyssen family, nationals of Germany and Hungary. The 4,000 shares hereinbefore set out are therefore beneficially owned and help for the interests of enemy nationals, and are vestible by the APC," according to the memo from the National Archives seen by the Guardian.

Red-handed

Jones recommended that the assets be liquidated for the benefit of the government, but instead UBC was maintained intact and eventually returned to the American shareholders after the war. Some claim that Bush sold his share in UBC after the war for $1.5m - a huge amount of money at the time - but there is no documentary evidence to support this claim. No further action was ever taken nor was the investigation continued, despite the fact UBC was caught red-handed operating a American shell company for the Thyssen family eight months after America had entered the war and that this was the bank that had partly financed Hitler's rise to power.

The most tantalising part of the story remains shrouded in mystery: the connection, if any, between Prescott Bush, Thyssen, Consolidated Silesian Steel Company (CSSC) and Auschwitz.

Thyssen's partner in United Steel Works, which had coal mines and steel plants across the region, was Friedrich Flick, another steel magnate who also owned part of IG Farben, the powerful German chemical company.

Flick's plants in Poland made heavy use of slave labour from the concentration camps in Poland. According to a New York Times article published in March 18 1934 Flick owned two-thirds of CSSC while "American interests" held the rest.

The US National Archive documents show that BBH's involvement with CSSC was more than simply holding the shares in the mid-1930s. Bush's friend and fellow "bonesman" Knight Woolley, another partner at BBH, wrote to Averill Harriman in January 1933 warning of problems with CSSC after the Poles started their drive to nationalise the plant. "The Consolidated Silesian Steel Company situation has become increasingly complicated, and I have accordingly brought in Sullivan and Cromwell, in order to be sure that our interests are protected," wrote Knight. "After studying the situation Foster Dulles is insisting that their man in Berlin get into the picture and obtain the information which the directors here should have. You will recall that Foster is a director and he is particularly anxious to be certain that there is no liability attaching to the American directors."

But the ownership of the CSSC between 1939 when the Germans invaded Poland and 1942 when the US government vested UBC and SAC is not clear.

"SAC held coal mines and definitely owned CSSC between 1934 and 1935, but when SAC was vested there was no trace of CSSC. All concrete evidence of its ownership disappears after 1935 and there are only a few traces in 1938 and 1939," says Eva Schweitzer, the journalist and author whose book, America and the Holocaust, is published next month.

Silesia was quickly made part of the German Reich after the invasion, but while Polish factories were seized by the Nazis, those belonging to the still neutral Americans (and some other nationals) were treated more carefully as Hitler was still hoping to persuade the US to at least sit out the war as a neutral country. Schweitzer says American interests were dealt with on a case-by-case basis. The Nazis bought some out, but not others.

The two Holocaust survivors suing the US government and the Bush family for a total of $40bn in compensation claim both materially benefited from Auschwitz slave labour during the second world war.

Kurt Julius Goldstein, 87, and Peter Gingold, 85, began a class action in America in 2001, but the case was thrown out by Judge Rosemary Collier on the grounds that the government cannot be held liable under the principle of "state sovereignty".

Jan Lissmann, one of the lawyers for the survivors, said: "President Bush withdrew President Bill Clinton's signature from the treaty [that founded the court] not only to protect Americans, but also to protect himself and his family."

Lissmann argues that genocide-related cases are covered by international law, which does hold governments accountable for their actions. He claims the ruling was invalid as no hearing took place.

In their claims, Mr Goldstein and Mr Gingold, honorary chairman of the League of Anti-fascists, suggest the Americans were aware of what was happening at Auschwitz and should have bombed the camp.

The lawyers also filed a motion in The Hague asking for an opinion on whether state sovereignty is a valid reason for refusing to hear their case. A ruling is expected within a month.

The petition to The Hague states: "From April 1944 on, the American Air Force could have destroyed the camp with air raids, as well as the railway bridges and railway lines from Hungary to Auschwitz. The murder of about 400,000 Hungarian Holocaust victims could have been prevented."

The case is built around a January 22 1944 executive order signed by President Franklin Roosevelt calling on the government to take all measures to rescue the European Jews. The lawyers claim the order was ignored because of pressure brought by a group of big American companies, including BBH, where Prescott Bush was a director.

Lissmann said: "If we have a positive ruling from the court it will cause [president] Bush huge problems and make him personally liable to pay compensation."

The US government and the Bush family deny all the claims against them.

In addition to Eva Schweitzer's book, two other books are about to be published that raise the subject of Prescott Bush's business history. The author of the second book, to be published next year, John Loftus, is a former US attorney who prosecuted Nazi war criminals in the 70s. Now living in St Petersburg, Florida and earning his living as a security commentator for Fox News and ABC radio, Loftus is working on a novel which uses some of the material he has uncovered on Bush. Loftus stressed that what Prescott Bush was involved in was just what many other American and British businessmen were doing at the time.

"You can't blame Bush for what his grandfather did any more than you can blame Jack Kennedy for what his father did - bought Nazi stocks - but what is important is the cover-up, how it could have gone on so successfully for half a century, and does that have implications for us today?" he said.

"This was the mechanism by which Hitler was funded to come to power, this was the mechanism by which the Third Reich's defence industry was re-armed, this was the mechanism by which Nazi profits were repatriated back to the American owners, this was the mechanism by which investigations into the financial laundering of the Third Reich were blunted," said Loftus, who is vice-chairman of the Holocaust Museum in St Petersburg.

"The Union Banking Corporation was a holding company for the Nazis, for Fritz Thyssen," said Loftus. "At various times, the Bush family has tried to spin it, saying they were owned by a Dutch bank and it wasn't until the Nazis took over Holland that they realised that now the Nazis controlled the apparent company and that is why the Bush supporters claim when the war was over they got their money back. Both the American treasury investigations and the intelligence investigations in Europe completely bely that, it's absolute horseshit. They always knew who the ultimate beneficiaries were."

"There is no one left alive who could be prosecuted but they did get away with it," said Loftus. "As a former federal prosecutor, I would make a case for Prescott Bush, his father-in-law (George Walker) and Averill Harriman [to be prosecuted] for giving aid and comfort to the enemy. They remained on the boards of these companies knowing that they were of financial benefit to the nation of Germany."

Loftus said Prescott Bush must have been aware of what was happening in Germany at the time. "My take on him was that he was a not terribly successful in-law who did what Herbert Walker told him to. Walker and Harriman were the two evil geniuses, they didn't care about the Nazis any more than they cared about their investments with the Bolsheviks."

What is also at issue is how much money Bush made from his involvement. His supporters suggest that he had one token share. Loftus disputes this, citing sources in "the banking and intelligence communities" and suggesting that the Bush family, through George Herbert Walker and Prescott, got $1.5m out of the involvement. There is, however, no paper trail to this sum.

The third person going into print on the subject is John Buchanan, 54, a Miami-based magazine journalist who started examining the files while working on a screenplay. Last year, Buchanan published his findings in the venerable but small-circulation New Hampshire Gazette under the headline "Documents in National Archives Prove George Bush's Grandfather Traded With the Nazis - Even After Pearl Harbor". He expands on this in his book to be published next month - Fixing America: Breaking the Stranglehold of Corporate Rule, Big Media and the Religious Right.

In the article, Buchanan, who has worked mainly in the trade and music press with a spell as a muckraking reporter in Miami, claimed that "the essential facts have appeared on the internet and in relatively obscure books but were dismissed by the media and Bush family as undocumented diatribes".

Buchanan suffers from hypermania, a form of manic depression, and when he found himself rebuffed in his initial efforts to interest the media, he responded with a series of threats against the journalists and media outlets that had spurned him. The threats, contained in e-mails, suggested that he would expose the journalists as "traitors to the truth".

Unsurprisingly, he soon had difficulty getting his calls returned. Most seriously, he faced aggravated stalking charges in Miami, in connection with a man with whom he had fallen out over the best way to publicise his findings. The charges were dropped last month.

Biography

Buchanan said he regretted his behaviour had damaged his credibility but his main aim was to secure publicity for the story. Both Loftus and Schweitzer say Buchanan has come up with previously undisclosed documentation.

The Bush family have largely responded with no comment to any reference to Prescott Bush. Brown Brothers Harriman also declined to comment.

The Bush family recently approved a flattering biography of Prescott Bush entitled Duty, Honour, Country by Mickey Herskowitz. The publishers, Rutledge Hill Press, promised the book would "deal honestly with Prescott Bush's alleged business relationships with Nazi industrialists and other accusations".

In fact, the allegations are dealt with in less than two pages. The book refers to the Herald-Tribune story by saying that "a person of less established ethics would have panicked ... Bush and his partners at Brown Brothers Harriman informed the government regulators that the account, opened in the late 1930s, was 'an unpaid courtesy for a client' ... Prescott Bush acted quickly and openly on behalf of the firm, served well by a reputation that had never been compromised. He made available all records and all documents. Viewed six decades later in the era of serial corporate scandals and shattered careers, he received what can be viewed as the ultimate clean bill."

The Prescott Bush story has been condemned by both conservatives and some liberals as having nothing to do with the current president. It has also been suggested that Prescott Bush had little to do with Averill Harriman and that the two men opposed each other politically.

However, documents from the Harriman papers include a flattering wartime profile of Harriman in the New York Journal American and next to it in the files is a letter to the financial editor of that paper from Prescott Bush congratulating the paper for running the profile. He added that Harriman's "performance and his whole attitude has been a source of inspiration and pride to his partners and his friends".

The Anti-Defamation League in the US is supportive of Prescott Bush and the Bush family. In a statement last year they said that "rumours about the alleged Nazi 'ties' of the late Prescott Bush ... have circulated widely through the internet in recent years. These charges are untenable and politically motivated ... Prescott Bush was neither a Nazi nor a Nazi sympathiser."

However, one of the country's oldest Jewish publications, the Jewish Advocate, has aired the controversy in detail.

More than 60 years after Prescott Bush came briefly under scrutiny at the time of a faraway war, his grandson is facing a different kind of scrutiny but one underpinned by the same perception that, for some people, war can be a profitable business.

FASTFORWARD TO CURRENT DAY

The Bush family has ties to the bin Laden family. 

(The Carlyle Group).  In fact it was The Carlyle Group who bailed out Bush Jr.'s first failed oil venture, one he should have posted a loss, but made a huge profit on it because the bin Laden family bought it from him.  Bush's family seems to have been sleeping with the enemy for many generations.  And no one finds this the slightest bit curious that 1) we can't seem to find him despite that family tie and 2) we haven't been attacked inside our own country.  I can't prove it, but I have a sneaky suspicion a back-table deal was made with the bin Laden family.