blog!

blog!
How the Newest Media Revolution Is Changing Politics, Business, And Culture
by David Kline, Dan Burstein, Arne J. De Keijzer (Editor), Paul Berger (Editor)



I bought this book tonight. I'm sure you'll see me commenting about it in days to come.

My Favorite North Carolina T-Shirt

My Favorite North Carolina T-Shirt


John Edwards has made alleviating poverty the issue of his lifetime.


He's inviting young people to join him in the fight against poverty.


The Hurricane Katrina tragedy heightened public awareness of his
'Two Americas' message.



Elizabeth rocks!
She'd be a First Lady to rival Eleanor Roosevelt.
Check out her Bookclub.



*For Anton Zuiker (aka MisterSugar), who is this week's Tar Heel Tavern (#34) host.
Photo credit: Elizabeth - WFMY
All others: Ethan W. Camwell

AP: Punish Dems for Bush's Lies? Fire This Loser of a Writer!

AP: Punish Dems for Bush's Lies? Fire This Loser of a Writer!

The AP says Edwards, Other Democrats Could Be Punished in '08 for Iraq Vote

This headline is so Campaign 2004!
Has this AP writer been f**ing asleep?!

Potential Democratic presidential candidates who voted to give President Bush the authority to use force in Iraq could face a political problem -- they supported a war that their party's rank-and-file now strongly view as a mistake...Their pro-war votes -- cast three years ago -- could haunt them as they seek early support among die-hard Democrats and gauge whether to launch formal candidacies for the party's 2008 presidential nomination.

IS THIS SOME KIND OF A JOKE?!

Bush has made a long series of catastrophic decisions - with authority facilitated by lies which he told Congress. Since they impulsively and determinedly rushed into this disastrously-planned war, with every opportunity that arose to turn the course in Iraq around, the Bush administration has continued to take the same-style wrong turns.

The worst thing Bush has ever done is to have misled the American people and their Representatives. He failed to tell the truth about the 23 or so rationales he offered for going to war in Iraq. Was his purpose to mix the messages - and to confuse and mislead Congress? If not, that was still the result. The Downing Street memos have revealed that the Bush adminstration fixed the intelligence to fit their chosen policy - and it was a policy decided upon well before 9/11. The existence of weapons of mass destruction and the Al Qaeda-September 11 connection were proven to be totally false. Secretary of State Colin Powell has acknowledged that his appearance in front of the UN body in 2003 to beat the drums on WMD was a dreadful scar on his otherwise shining record.

Someone tell this AP writer (and whoever approved the headline) to GET FRIGGEN REAL!
I don't want to hear total crap like this anymore.

Democrats are not going to blame their own Representatives for being deceived by the (proven) deceitful Bush administration.

The failure to find WMD in Iraq resulted in two inquiries into prewar intelligence. One led by a partisan-laden Senate intelligence committee and the other by a White House-appointed panel. It should not be surprising that both panels confined themselves to investigating the intelligence community only, concluding that the White House was an "innocent victim" of bad intelligence. There was never a probe into the political use (and abuse) of the available intelligence by the Bush administration. Senate majority leader Bill Frist and majority chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee Sen Pat Roberts made sure of it. (Yet partisan hack-journalist/male escort Jeff Gannon got an eyeful of a senstive INR report from an still-unknown one of the Republican sentries of WHIG.)

My prediction is that Democrats will unite and rightly point their fingers at the Commander in Chief. After all, he's the one who happens to be Republican and had loud and partisan Republican support for this war. He's the leader with the 39% popularity rating....the leader who has convinced a clear majority of Americans responding to polls that he misled this nation to war in Iraq.

John Kerry said this about Iraq last autumn during the campaign season, and he was right:

Before the war, before [Bush] chose to go to war, bi-partisan Congressional hearings... major outside studies... and even some in the administration itself... predicted virtually every problem we now face in Iraq.

This president was in denial. He hitched his wagon to the ideologues who surround him, filtering out those who disagreed, including leaders of his own party and the uniformed military. The result is a long litany of misjudgments with terrible consequences.

The administration told us we'd be greeted as liberators. They were wrong.

They told us not to worry about looting or the sorry state of Iraq's infrastructure. They were wrong.

They told us we had enough troops to provide security and stability, defeat the insurgents, guard the borders and secure the arms depots. They were wrong.

They told us we could rely on exiles like Ahmed Chalabi to build political legitimacy. They were wrong.

They told us we would quickly restore an Iraqi civil service to run the country and a police force and army to secure it. They were wrong.

That still holds true.
One year later, it's truer than ever.
Someone in charge should sit down with this AP journalist and have a chat.
It looks more like a Republican-paid ad than a piece of professional journalism.

Rove, if indicted, to take fall for WHIG

Plamegate:
Rove, if indicted, to take
fall for WHIG

Raw Story is reporting that Karl Rove - facing a possible perjury charge - will step down or take unpaid leave if he's indicted in the Plame investigation. The same goes for Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Source: Time Magazine

Rove apparently has plans to run interference for his fellow WHIG members.

A former White House official says Rove's break with Bush would have to be clean—no "giving advice from the sidelines"—for the sake of the Administration.

Severing his ties would allow Rove—who as deputy chief of staff runs a vast swath of the West Wing—to fight aggressively "any bull___ charges," says a source close to Rove, like allegations that he was part of a broad conspiracy to discredit Plame's husband Joseph Wilson. Rove's defense: whatever he did fell far short of that.

Rove will need to fight aggressively, and I'm sure that he will. I wonder how he thinks he will save his own tail without implicating any of the others.

Speaking of WHIG, William Rivers Pitt explains their role:

WHIG, and its intention to sell an unnecessary war to a shell-shocked public, is only half the story. The other half of the manipulative sales team could be found in the neighborhood occupied by the Department of Defense. The Office of Special Plans, or OSP, was created by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld specifically to second-guess and reinterpret intelligence data to justify war in Iraq. Think of it like baseball: the OSP pitched, and WHIG caught.....

And he takes it a step further..

"....However important Rove and Libby may be to this administration, neither represents the end of the story. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, with deliberation and intent, took this country to war in Iraq based on false premises, inflated intelligence and bald-faced scare tactics. They used September 11 against their own people to get what they wanted. That is the heart of this matter. If Fitzgerald's investigation ends at Rove and Libby, it will have ended too soon....

....Ambassador Joseph Wilson's public attack on Bush for using the now-rubbished Niger uranium evidence, his attack upon the entire rationale for invasion, was a direct and ominous threat to the latticework of disinformation and lies put forth by WHIG and OSP. They didn't attack Wilson's wife because they didn't like her, or because they were bored. They did it because Wilson could have almost singlehandedly dismantled the administration's case for war. They did it to warn any other insiders who might have wanted to talk that there would be serious consequences for public statements. The administration's case for war was championed not by Rove and Libby, but by Bush and Cheney. It was their party, and Wilson was looking to stop the music.

From: Cheney May Be Entangled in CIA Leak Investigation - Reuters:

Miller wrote in her Times article that Fitzgerald asked her to read that portion of the letter aloud to the grand jurors and asked for her reaction to Libby's words. She said that part of the letter had "surprised me because it might be perceived as an effort by Mr. Libby to suggest that I, too, would say we had not discussed Ms. Plame's identity. Yet my notes suggested that we had discussed her job." Bennett, Miller's attorney, yesterday called that part of Libby's letter "a very stupid thing to do." Other lawyers suggested it could become part of any obstruction-of-justice charge Fitzgerald might bring.

Joseph Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame may file a civil lawsuit against President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and others:

In an interview yesterday, Wilson said that once the criminal questions are settled, he and his wife may file a civil lawsuit against Bush, Cheney and others seeking damages for the alleged harm done to Plame's career. If they do so, the current state of the law makes it likely that the suit will be allowed to proceed - and Bush and Cheney will face questioning under oath - while they are in office. The reason for that is a unanimous 1997 U.S. Supreme Court decision ruling that Paula Jones' sexual harassment suit against then-President Bill Clinton could go forward immediately, a decision that was hailed by conservatives at the time.

Norm Solomon explains how NYT reporter Judith Miller functioned with more accountability to US military intelligence officials than to New York Times editors.

There's nothing wrong with this picture if Judith Miller is an intelligence operative for the US government. But if she's supposed to be a journalist, this is a preposterous situation - and the fact that the New York Times has tolerated it tells us a lot about that newspaper.