Now the Republicans may have to come up with another way to rig elections

They've lost the sure-bet of black box voting in many states, and now that their scheme to replace U.S. attorneys who refuse to intimidate voters with political operatives who will is imploding, I wonder what they'll come up with to retain power in 2008?

The Senate Judiciary Committee asked Bradley Schlozman, a former senior civil rights attorney and U.S. attorney, to speak with investigators. The Justice Department, meanwhile, said it wouldn't try to prevent Congress from granting immunity to White House liaison Monica Goodling if she testifies before a committee.

Lawmakers want to talk to Schlozman and Goodling as part of an inquiry into whether the department played politics with the hiring and firing of department officials. The inquiry began as a question about whether U.S. attorneys - presidential appointees who serve as the top federal law enforcement officials in their state districts - were fired for political reasons.

It has grown, however, into an investigation of whether the agency let politics affect criminal investigations and whether officials made employment decisions for political reasons.

Lawmakers want to question Schlozman, who now works for the Executive Office for United States Attorneys, about a voter fraud lawsuit he filed against Missouri in the lead-up to the 2006 election. Committee members said they wanted to know whether Schlozman's predecessor was forced out for not endorsing that lawsuit, which was ultimately dismissed.

``The Committee would benefit from hearing directly from you in order to gain a better understanding of the role voter fraud may have played in the administration's decisions to retain or remove certain U.S. attorneys,'' Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., wrote in a letter co-signed by the committee's top Republican, Arlen Specter of New York.

The letter asked Schlozman to voluntarily submit to interviews and testimony and provide documents to the committee.

Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman, said politics do not influence decisions about whether to bring a case.

``The Justice Department brings its civil actions and criminal prosecutions based on evidence, not on politics,'' Boyd said. ``We expect U.S. Attorneys to bring election and voter fraud cases where evidence of such fraud exists.''

You have to admire the ability of people who work for this administration to so baldfacedly lie with a perfectly straight face.

Meanwhile, Congress might consider hiring Greg Palast, who seems to be able to get his hands on documents that Congress is told are "lost":

Voting rights attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has called for prison time for the new US Attorney for Arkansas, Timothy Griffin and investigation of Griffin’s former boss, Karl Rove, chief political advisor to President Bush.

“Timothy Griffin,” said Kennedy,”who is the new US attorney in Arkansas, was actually the mastermind behind the voter fraud efforts by the Bush Administration to disenfranchise over a million voters through ‘caging’ techniques - which are illegal.”

[Hear Kennedy on Griffin, Rove and ‘caging lists’ below or here]

Kennedy based his demand on the revelations by BBC reporter Greg Palast in the new edition of his book, “Armed Madhouse.” On one page of the book, Palast reproduces a copy of a confidential Bush-Cheney campaign email, dated August 26, 2004, in which Griffin directs Republican operatives to use the ‘caging’ lists.

This is one of the emails subpoenaed by Congress but supposedly “lost” by Rove’s office. Palast obtained 500 of these, fifty with ‘caging’ lists attached.

‘Caging’ lists are “absolutely illegal” under the Voting Rights Act, noted Kennedy on his Air America program, Ring of Fire. The 1965 law makes it a felony crime to challenge voters when race is a factor in the targeting. African-American voters comprised the bulk of the 70,000 voters ‘caged’ in a single state, Florida.

Palast wrote in his book, “Here’s how the scheme worked. The Bush campaign mailed out letters,” particularly targeting African-American soldiers sent overseas. When the letters sent to the home addresses of the soldiers came back “undeliverable” because the servicemen were in Baghdad or elsewhere, the Republican Party would, “challenge the voter’s registration and thereby prevent their absentee ballots being counted.”

The Republicans successfully challenged “at least one million” votes of minority voters in the 2004 election.

Every day, it becomes more apparent that the "spoiled brat" factor in the Republican Party that has always characterized the life of George W. Bush has infected the entire Republican Party. George W. Bush has ALWAYS insisted on changing the rules so that he wins every time:

Even if he loses, his friends say, he doesn't lose. He'll just change the score, or change the rules, or make his opponent play until he can beat him. "If you were playing basketball and you were playing to 11 and he was down, you went to 15," says [childhood best friend Doug] Hannah, now a Dallas insurance executive. "If he wasn't winning, he would quit. He would just walk off.... It's what we called Bush Effort: If I don't like the game, I take my ball and go home. Very few people can get away with that." So why could George get away with it? "He was just too easygoing and too pleasant."

.

And now, after being drunk with power for over six years, Bush's socipathy has infected the entire Republican Party. They want ALL the marbles. They feel they're ENTITLED to all the marbles. They've held ALL the power for the better part of the last six years, and as soon as anyone dares stand up to them, they cry like babies. When it looks like there's a chance they can't win an election fairly, they rig the system, whether it's through racially-based "felon purges" of people with similar names to actual felons, or thuggish intimidation of people trying to accurately recount votes, or the use of unverifiable voting machines made by companies run by Republican campaign contributors, or as we see now, the hijacking of the entire Department of Justice to serve the electoral needs of the party.

Americans like to believe that we believe in fair play. We give lip service to "playing by the rules" and to obeying the law. So why is it that so many Americans have been so willing to look the other way for this man who has a history of changing the rules until he wins? Why has George W. Bush been granted an exemption to the rules the very people who have supported him hold sacrosanct?