As we approach the 2006 elections, things are just getting worse and worse for President Bush and the GOP. It all boils down to one issue: IRAQ.

There is no good ending to a war that you’ve already won. We need to bring the troops home and then the GOP can fight amongst themselves on who is better at screwing up America’s national security.

Commentary from Connor Williams.

Music by Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, Heavy Mellow, and The Hillary Step.

Among the big telecommunications companies, only Qwest has refused to help the NSA, the sources said. According to multiple sources, Qwest declined to participate because it was uneasy about the legal implications of handing over customer information to the government without warrants.

Qwest did the right thing here and decided to protect its consumers’ interests over the government’s curiousity absent a court order. If the president had truly felt that this was a dire issue of national security, he would have gone to the FISA court and gotten a warrant or at the very least, compelled Qwest to comply through executive order. Verizon, BellSouth and AT&T chose to help the NSA with this illegal activity.

The Arbitrends radio rankings for Los Angeles came out today and things don’t go so well for the BushCo radio minions. Right wing talk radio ratings are down across the board:

Limbaugh drew a 4.1 last month. This month he dropped to a 3.3.
Sean Hannity was at a 2.7 last month. He’s now at a 1.8.
Laura Ingraham: 1.1 to 0.8.
Dennis Prager/Michael Medved: 1.2 to a 0.7.
Hugh Hewitt: 1.3 to 0.7.

Air America managed a 0.5 to 0.9 rise, which apparently is decent considering the poor quality of their transmission signal.

We imagine most of our listeners are of a similar political persuasion and as such, don’t spend much time listening to right wing radio. What we don’t realize is that right wing talk is pervasive on this nation’s AM dials, and with the top-down control of Karl Rove, is monolithic in its message. And the local emphasis of much talk radio makes it particularly intimate and effective. They’ve decided that the warrantless NSA spying is just fine.

Over at Firedoglake among others, they’ve started a Roots Project to use local talk radio and other media outlets such as newspaper editorials in a coordinated way to pressure local Republican lawmakers who are in a delicate spot politically right now. By exerting coordinated local effort combined with the collaborative abilities of the blogosphere, we can push some GOP members who might otherwise toe the Bush line towards accountability. They’re looking for help in Kansas, Pennsylvania, Maine, Nebraska, South Carolina, and Ohio. Jane wrote:

What we’d like to do is organize people from these states who know the media outlets in their areas the best (as well as local blogs, as both Kos and Atrios noted this morning) and work with them to put pressure on these people over specific issues since blogs like FDL, Crooks & Liars, Glenn Greenwald and others can drive traffic and make these efforts more impactful.

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If you live in any of these states and would like to help organize these efforts, or simply take part in them, please either email me or leave word in the comments section. We’ll start to put together a network of local media that can be quickly and effectively targeted within these markets, putting in place an infrastructure to work with Glenn Greenwald to apply selective pressure on critical Senators as the investigations into the illegal NSA wiretap investigations go forward.

Think you might be interested?

The shady details of the UAE port deal continue to come out as the AP reported that one of the UAE sheiks donated at least $1 million to the Bush Library Foundation.

A sheik from the United Arab Emirates contributed at least $1 million to the Bush Library Foundation, which established the George Bush Presidential Library at Texas A&M University in College Station.

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The donations were made in the early 1990s for the library, which houses the papers of former President George Bush, the current president’s father.

The list of donors names Sheik Zayed Bin Sultan al Nahyan and the people of the United Arab Emirates as one donor in the $1 million or more category.

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Other Arab donors include the state of Kuwait, the Bandar bin Sultan family, the Sultanate of Oman, King Hassan II of Morocco and the amir of Qatar. The former Korean prime minister and China also gave tens of thousands of dollars to the library.

Has there ever been any actual effort to protect America from this administration or is it solely about fear and corporate profits? After all, the Treasury Secretary yesterday said that economics are apparently more important than national security.