The Republican Leadership and their lockstep brigade cannot be trusted.

They cannot be trusted with your money.

The balanced budget amendment was a cornerstone of the Republicans' "Contract With America" 10 years ago, and halting efforts to resurrect it has underscored party divisions over a budget deficit that will reach $422 billion this year.

They cannot be trusted with your health.

As debate began last week over a bill that would let a federal court hear Schiavo's case, thereby extending her life, Frist, a heart-lung surgeon from Tennessee, questioned the diagnosis.

"I question it based on a review of the video footage ... And that footage, to me, depicted something very different than persistent vegetative state," Frist said last Thursday, explaining he had also spoken to members of Schiavo's family and neurologists who reviewed her case.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, who practiced internal medicine, called Republicans' efforts to pass the bill "grandstanding" and criticized the majority leader's comments.

"For Senator Frist to say he could make a diagnosis based on the videotape certainly is not medically sound," Dean said. "I would not want my doctor making any diagnosis of me on videotape, and I'm speaking as a doctor."

They cannot be trusted with our Constitution.

The Secret Service revealed that we were "ID'ed" when local Republican staffers saw a bumper sticker on the car we drove which said "No More Blood For Oil." Evidently, the free speech expressed on one bumper sticker is cause enough to eject three citizens from a presidential event. (Similarly, someone was ejected from Bush's Social Security privatization event in Arizona the same day simply for wearing a Democratic t-shirt.)

The Secret Service also revealed that ticket distribution and staffing of the Social Security event was run by the local Republican Party. They wanted us to be clear that it was a Republican staffer - not the Secret Service - who kicked us out of the presidential event. But this revealed something else that should be startling to all Americans.

After allowing taxpayers to finance his privatization events (let's call them what they really are after all,) and after using the White House communications apparatus to set them up, Bush is privatizing the ticket distribution and security staffing at his events to the Republican Party. The losers are not just taxpayers, but anyone who values the First Amendment. Under the banner of a "private event" the Republican Party is excluding citizens from seeing their president because of the lone sin of expressing the wrong idea on a bumper sticker or t-shirt. The question for Americans is - will we allow our freedom to be privatized?

I am under no illusion that the Democratic party is perfect. Nor the Greens, nor the Libertarians.

However, the Republican ascendancy is the corruption at the heart of American democracy.

They lie to the press.

Jonathan Landay of Knight-Ridder Newspapers reported today that contrary to what Condi Rice said just this weekend, the White House knew at the time of Bush’s 2003 SOTU that the CIA couldn’t prove the allegations that Bush was making. In fact, contrary to the Washington Post’s story today, “senior CIA officials” gave the exact date of when they notified the White House of their findings that the story was crap: March 9, 2002, a full ten months before Bush’s SOTU speech. This same story was given today by the CIA to the Associated Press as well. It appears that George Tenet has the best quick-response team in town, and has no plans to take one for Bush.

They lie to the Schindlers and to their "Cult of Anti-Death"  constituents.

It is a fundamental principle that Congress cannot simply overrule court decisions it does not like -- except in the very limited case in which it can amend federal statutes in a case that turns on statutory interpretation. But here, Congress tried to rewrite--or rather,invalidate-- prior judicial rulings that were the law of Terri's case, violating the bedrock principle of the separation of powers among three co-equal branches of government.

Ironically, in so doing, Republicans in Congress also betrayed two of their own fundamental beliefs: The belief in federalism or "states' rights" (remember, it was a state court that issued the order Congress nullified), and the belief in the sanctity of marriage (state statutes had made Michael, as Terri's husband, her presumptive legal guardian).

At the core they do not believe in democracy , but in the preservation of their personal power. (Yes, I'm looking at you, Tom Delay.) They are comfortable dismantling the checks and balances that have been the bulwark of this Republic for over 200 years because they are certain they will remain in power with their feet on the necks of the chattel class (read "cheap labor, yay!" they've created.

They will continue on this course of action until it either succeeds or costs them too much personally. (Yes, I'm looking at you again, Rep. Delay, backing off the Schiavo controversy so quickly when that poor woman's body was insufficient to shield your hypocrisy from view.)

It needs to start costing them. Relentlessly.

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