Bandar Bush is Kewl With This

Saudis want to limit nuclear inspections

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More Details of Newsweek's heinus acts of barbarism

In U.S. Report, Brutal Details of 2 Afghan Inmates' Deaths

Even as the young Afghan man was dying before them, his American jailers continued to torment him.

The prisoner, a slight, 22-year-old taxi driver known only as Dilawar, was hauled from his cell at the detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, at around 2 a.m. to answer questions about a rocket attack on an American base. When he arrived in the interrogation room, an interpreter who was present said, his legs were bouncing uncontrollably in the plastic chair and his hands were numb. He had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days.

Then the article gets even uglier.

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Why was Newsweek forcing interrogators to use this method?
(crazy free press - when will the horror end. Torture is a private personal matter between prisoner and interrogator. Reporting such violence is harmful to the prisoner's self-esteem. Don't they have feelings?)

Red Cross warned U.S. over Quran

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The International Committee of the Red Cross gathered "credible" reports about U.S. personnel at the Guantanamo Bay naval base disrespecting the Quran and raised the issue with the Pentagon several times, a group spokesman said Thursday.

Simon Schorno said the allegations were made by detainees to Red Cross representatives who visited the detention facility throughout 2002 and 2003.

Looks like the DOD updated their torture specs after that revelation:
Abusing Humans: Yes
Abusing Quran: No

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Culture of Life
(well only for those we're okay with you know - not those kinda folks the hung out with Jesus)

Preserving the Global AIDS Fund

The world has two big programs that fight AIDS in poor countries. One, created by President Bush, will spend more than a billion dollars in 15 hard-hit nations this year. It is a very important lifesaving initiative, but it could do even more. The pharmaceutical industry has kept it from buying cheap generic versions of AIDS medicines. And the religious right has pushed it toward abstinence-only programs and away from the people most likely to become infected: prostitutes, gays and intravenous-drug users. Fortunately, there is also the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which has been free to do the work America shuns. But its ability to continue to do so is at risk.

In April, the Global Fund's board set up a committee for policy and strategy that is so powerful it has been described as a shadow executive board. The fund's board is choosing a leader for the supercommittee this week, but at the moment there is one candidate: Randall Tobias, who runs Mr. Bush's AIDS program. Mr. Tobias may be approved to avoid angering the United States, the fund's largest donor, but the risk to its independence is too great.

Mr. Tobias did the right thing this week by quashing, at least for now, an effort by American religious conservatives to make the thousands of groups getting grants from the Global Fund sign a pledge that they oppose prostitution. Many groups would have refused to sign, not because they favor prostitution, but because they see a pledge as an ideological test that would hinder their ability to help women who are forced into sex work.

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Red State Welfare

Senator concerned politics played role in base closings; Pentagon denies any outside role

In a carefully worded statement, Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) questioned why states that supported President Bush's reelection (red states) had a net job gain of 11,000, while states that opposed Bush (blue states) lost nearly 25,000 positions.

Look if you are anti-science and anti-paying for education you gotta need a little help when it comes to the actual being able to provide paying jobs department.

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Long ago it was Monday: The Top Ten Conservative Idiots, No. 198

2. George W. Bush
Run! Run for your lives! Last week the Capitol Building, the White House, and the U.S. Supreme Court building were evacuated when a couple of lost Bush supporters in a Cessna light aircraft strayed into Washington D.C.'s no fly zone. Laura Bush was rushed into a secure bunker, Dick Cheney was hustled from one undisclosed location to another, F-16 fighter jets buzzed the capitol and fired warning flares at the disoriented airmen. It was all very exciting. Fortunately there was one person who wasn't interrupted by all this mayhem - Our Great Leader, George W. Bush. Turns out Bush was too busy riding a bike around Maryland to be bothered with such things as, oh, the possibly imminent death of his wife.


Bush: "Sorry, did I miss something?"

Yup - believe it or not, Bush wasn't told about the evacuation of 30,000 people in the middle of D.C. until the all-clear was sounded. And according to press secretary Scott McClellan, that's perfectly normal. Scott told the press last week that, "He was not in danger, a situation where protocols have been put in place to address the situation. The protocols were followed." In fact, Scott uncomfortably lauded the protocols several times, even to questions like, "Might there be something wrong with protocols that render the president unnecessary when the alarm is going off at his house?" Still, even if the president didn't need to know that someone was about to crash an airplane on his front lawn, it made for great breathless cable news coverage - which was especially convenient coming on the same day that...

3. The Bush Administration
...Tom Ridge finally admitted what everyone already knew: government-issued terror alerts are used for partisan political purposes. Yes, in the latest in a long line of damning revelations by former Bush cabinet members, Ridge complained last week that "he often disagreed with administration officials who wanted to elevate the threat level to orange, or 'high' risk of terrorist attack, but was overruled," according to USA Today. Overruled? Overruled by whom? Let's see. Tom Ridge was the head of Homeland Security. That means he was the number one head honcho in charge of the safety of the nation - aside of course from the Commander-in-Chief, George W. Bush, who, as we have already established, is not even informed when someone's about to fly a plane into his house. So if Ridge wasn't in charge of deciding when to raise the alert level, who was? We'll give you a clue:


Rove: "It was me! I did it!"

...

9. The Robber Barons
While we're on the subject of hurting the poor, let's take a quick look at some economic news from last week. It turns out that while consumer prices are rising and wages remain comparatively stagnant for the middle class, CEOs are getting quite the windfall. Did you know that the chief executives of the 500 largest U.S. corporations received an average pay raise of 54% last year? Nice huh? But to be fair, it's only because they're doing such a great job screwing the consumer. For example, while health care premiums are steadily increasing and health care benefits are steadily decreasing, the third-highest paid CEO last year made $124.8 million. Who is he? William McGuire of UnitedHealth Group, America's biggest insurance company. Or take CEO Ray Gilmartin of Merck, who received a "performance-based bonus" in 2004 despite the fact that Merck stock fell by 28 percent. And the real kick in the face? These guys didn't just get a 54% pay raise - they also made out like bandits from George W. Bush's tax cuts for the rich. So while Our Great Leader tries to take away your Social Security safety net and you're struggling to pay your bills this summer, spare a thought for the poor underprivileged CEOs. And remember: according to Chan Chandler and Co., this is just what Jesus would have wanted.

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Howdy, hope you don't mind if I just wander around in your home... never know what I might find? Hey - is that a computer? Let me just see what you got here in Quicken.

GOP Aides Say New Patriot Act Obliges Bush

WASHINGTON - The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is working on a bill that would renew the Patriot Act and expand government powers in the name of fighting terrorism, letting the FBI subpoena records without permission from a judge or grand jury.

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The end of Democracy: The End of Freedom of the press round up

• Blah3 - Crunch Time for the US Media

  I have problems with the wording in this article, but it raises a good point. When is the media going to stand up for itself?

  Bush administration officials, whose case and planning for war with Iraq and treatment of prisoners have been questioned by the news media, seized on Newsweek's foul-up as another example of the media's failings, the better to impugn the credibility of all its critics.
  
  Newsweek's discredited report that American interrogators in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, tormented captive Muslims by flushing a Quran down a toilet got sensationalized attention in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where at least 17 people died in rioting triggered by it.
  
  Administration officials lined up to criticize the magazine once it became apparent that the story was falling apart. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called it "appalling." Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman called it "irresponsible." Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld denounced it and added that "people need to be very careful about what they say." [emphasis mine]

  "Donald Rumsfeld is a Doctor Strangelove Psychopath" Was I being very very careful?

  Let's leave aside the buzz-words like 'botched' and 'discredited,' and look at the Rumsfeld quote. Any member of the media who reads that quote and does not see a thinly-veiled threat should quit the business now. And if there's a journalist left in this country who does see the implicit threat, they'd better realize that now is the time for them to save their profession.
  
  Mind you, there's no love lost here for the media. They've proven themselves over the last 5 years to be shallow, sensationalistic, opportunistic, simple-minded, pandering, and willing to lower the bar on their own profession at every opportunity. They've swallowed the Bush administration's lies whole, and parroted them without question at a time when it's crucial that they do the exact opposite. They've gotten fat and happy, content to report on bullshit stories like Michael Jackson and the Runaway Bride while there are real stories and real scandals out there, and real problems in this country that they've chosen to pay no attention to whatsoever.
  
  They've lost whatever game they once had. But when the Secretaries of State and Defense, a Pentagon spokesman and the White House press secretary pile on Newsweek - and by extension threaten all other media outlets in this country with suffering the same fate as CBS News and Newsweek if they don't 'watch what they say' - you have to wonder if they're finally going to get fed up and say 'enough.'
  
  Now is the time. In the past year, the White House has stripped two prestigious media outlets of any trace of pride or respectability, and done so on two stories that remain essentially true. The Texas Air National Guard story was 'discredited,' but everyone seems to forget that while much was made of the 'faked' memos, the content of those memos was never denied or disproven. Bush did go AWOL. It was a fact when that story was 'debunked,' and it remains a fact today.

• Editorial: Newsweek/It doesn't deserve the diatribes

  Newsweek used as a source a "senior government official," normally a Cabinet secretary or someone fairly close to that rank, who had previously been a reliable source. It then showed the report to two Pentagon officials before publication. One declined comment and one corrected another aspect of the story. Neither challenged the Qur'an-in-the-toilet statement.
  
  Only after the report had been printed did the original source back away from his assertion that he had seen the confirmation in a military report on abuse at Guantanamo. On reflection, he thought perhaps he saw it in other reports or drafts; but he did see it.
  
  As for this short Newsweek item causing the rioting and deaths in Afghanistan, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan told Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Richard Myers that the violence was "not at all" tied to Newsweek, but was an insurgency seeking to prevent the national reconciliation that President Hamid Karzai is trying to promote. Before the Newsweek item was even published, both the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse reported a new surge of Taliban-led violence.
  
  Besides, the White House itself committed much more egregious errors in the way it so casually used dubious intelligence to make a case for going to war in Iraq. As the blog Daily Kos pointed out Tuesday, McClellan seems to have a double standard. In his discussion with reporters on July 17, 2003, he was asked: Bush is "president of the United States. This thing he told the country on the verge of taking the nation to war has turned out to be, by your own account, not reliable. That's his fault, isn't it?"
  
  McClellan responded: "No."

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End of Democracy - Nuclear Option Edition Round up

• Frist Implodes on Senate Floor

  This morning on the floor of the Senate, Sen. Chuck Schumer asked Majority Leader Bill Frist a simple question:

  SEN. SCHUMER: Isn’t it correct that on March 8, 2000, my colleague [Sen. Frist] voted to uphold the filibuster of Judge Richard Paez?

  Here was Frist’s response:

  The president, the um, in response, uh, the Paez nomination - we’ll come back and discuss this further. … Actually I’d like to, and it really brings to what I believe - a point - and it really brings to, oddly, a point, what is the issue. The issue is we have leadership-led partisan filibusters that have, um, obstructed, not one nominee, but two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, in a routine way.
  ...
  The issue is not cloture votes per se, it’s the partisan, leadership-led use of cloture votes to kill - to defeat - to assassinate these nominees. That’s the difference. Cloture has been used in the past on this floor to postpone, to get more info, to ask further questions.

  When Frist voted to filibuster Paez’s nomination it had been pending for four years. It’s hard to believe he couldn’t get all the info he needed or ask all the questions he had during that time. Make no mistake about it: Bill Frist was trying to kill the Paez nomination. A press release issued the following day by former Sen. Bob Smith, who organized the filibuster effort, read “Smith Leads Effort to Block Activist Judges.”

• More hypocrasy here: Caught with their Pants Down--43 GOP senators
  
  
• Watch the senators: Video of Dem Senators Boxer, Leahy, and the excellent speech by Schumer.
  
  
• Schumer Talk Before His Floor Speech

  It boils down to this - the Republicans will not give up the Nuclear Option. And the Democrats can not accept it.
  
  Why are the Republicans doing this when, in Schumer's words, there are 25 Republican Senators who believe in the filibuster? Four words.
  
  The Extreme Religious Right. James Dobson & Co. To put it plainly, this is Schiavo Part 2. Frist has made a despicable Faustian bargain - do what Dobson tells him on the Nuclear Option, judicial nominees, and just about everything else, and they will back him for President in 2008.
  
  It is that simple. Senator Schumer expressed amazement at the total control that the Extremists have over the WHOLE Republican Party. He stated that is has never been like this before.
  
  Indeed, one can see and feel it. This is NOT good politics for the GOP. And they know it. But the control of the Extreme Right is complete. They can NOT say no to Dobson and his reactionary friends.

  
  
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Run down on Galloway's visit to Wahington

• FT.com - Galloway dismisses Congress oil claims

  In blistering testimony in Washington, he said the committee had no evidence he received any money from an alleged 20m barrels of oil allocations issued to him, through his associates, in return for his support for lifting sanctions against the regime of Saddam Hussein.
  
  "I am not now nor have I ever been an oil trader, and neither has anyone on my behalf," he said in testimony under oath before the Senate permanent subcommittee on investigations. "If you had any letters on me they would have been up there on a slide-show."
  
  Mr Galloway, who had earlier warned he came "not as the accused but as the accuser", then used the Senate committee floor to launch a tirade against US Iraq policy. "I told the world that your case for the war was a pack of lies," he said. "In everything I said about Iraq I turned out to be right, and you turned out to be wrong, and 100,000 people have paid with their lives, 1,600 of them US soldiers.
  
  "You are trying to divert attention from the crimes you supported."
  
  After the hearing, Mr Galloway quipped, "I'm a politician that pleads guilty of using events like these for political purposes."

• Mr. Galloway Goes to Washington

  Norm Coleman is an idiot.
  
  Not an ideological idiot, not a partisan idiot, not even a useful idiot -- just a plain old-fashioned, drool-on-his-tie idiot.
  
  The Minnesota Republican senator who took Paul Wellstone's seat after one of the most disreputable campaigns in American political history, has been trying over the past year to make a name for himself by blowing the controversy surrounding the United Nations Oil-for-Food program into something more than the chronicle of corporate abuse that it is.
  ...
  The problem for Coleman is that Coleman is not a standard-issue American politician -- the kind who has nothing to say and says it poorly. He is a veteran of the rough-and-tumble politics of Glasgow and the equally rough-and-tumble politics of the British parliament. In other words, Galloway comes from places where voters and politicians do not suffer fools. And anyone who has ever followed British politics knows that George Galloway has beaten every political challenge he has faced -- even those posed by British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
  
  Galloway called Coleman's bluff and flew to Washington for a remarkable appearance before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. "I am determined now that I am here, to be not the accused but the accuser," Coleman announced as he stood outside the Capitol Tuesday. "These people are involved in the mother of all smoke screens."
  
  The member of parliament tore through Coleman's flimsy "evidence," issuing an unequivocal denial that began, "Mr Chairman, I am not now, nor have I ever been an oil trader and neither has anyone been on my behalf. I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one, and neither has anybody on my behalf." He accused Coleman of being "remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice" and pointed out error after error in the report the senator had brandished against him.

• Galloway: I won Senate showdown

  Galloway said he was "absolutely" convinced he had been vindicated from allegations that he received vouchers for 20 million barrels of oil from Saddam Hussein's regime.
  
  "These people think they can smear people without them having the right to speak back and this time I got that right and I knocked them for six," he told reporters before leaving the U.S.
  
  He said after his appearance before the Senate panel Tuesday that his accusers had little credibility "outside of Washington."

• And finally, read the transcript yourself - expecially for such stellar moments such as:

  “Now I want to deal with the pages that relate to me in this dossier and I want to point out areas where there are - let’s be charitable and say errors. Then I want to put this in the context where I believe it ought to be. On the very first page of your document about me you assert that I have had ‘many meetings’ with Saddam Hussein. This is false.
  
  “I have had two meetings with Saddam Hussein, once in 1994 and once in August of 2002. By no stretch of the English language can that be described as “many meetings” with Saddam Hussein.
  
  “As a matter of fact, I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns. I met him to try and bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war, and on the second of the two occasions, I met him to try and persuade him to let Dr Hans Blix and the United Nations weapons inspectors back into the country - a rather better use of two meetings with Saddam Hussein than your own Secretary of State for Defense made of his.

  and

  “I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims did not have weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.
  
  “Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.
  
  If the world had listened to Kofi Annan, whose dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened to President Chirac who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the anti-war movement in Britain, we would not be in the disaster that we are in today. Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq’s wealth.
  
  “Have a look at the real Oil-for-Food scandal. Have a look at the 14 months you were in charge of Baghdad, the first 14 months when $8.8 billion of Iraq’s wealth went missing on your watch. Have a look at Halliburton and other American corporations that stole not only Iraq’s money, but the money of the American taxpayer.
  
  “Have a look at the oil that you didn’t even meter, that you were shipping out of the country and selling, the proceeds of which went who knows where? Have a look at the $800 million you gave to American military commanders to hand out around the country without even counting it or weighing it.
  
  “Have a look at the real scandal breaking in the newspapers today, revealed in the earlier testimony in this committee. That the biggest sanctions busters were not me or Russian politicians or French politicians. The real sanctions busters were your own companies with the connivance of your own Government.”

  
  
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Sign the petition.

MoveOn PAC: Fire Tom DeLay

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Watch:

The British Are Coming - George Galloway

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Python's Terry Jones:

Let them eat bombs
The doubling of child malnutrition in Iraq is baffling

A report to the UN human rights commission in Geneva has concluded that Iraqi children were actually better off under Saddam Hussein than they are now.

This, of course, comes as a bitter blow for all those of us who, like George Bush and Tony Blair, honestly believe that children thrive best when we drop bombs on them from a great height, destroy their cities and blow up hospitals, schools and power stations.

It now appears that, far from improving the quality of life for Iraqi youngsters, the US-led military assault on Iraq has inexplicably doubled the number of children under five suffering from malnutrition. Under Saddam, about 4% of children under five were going hungry, whereas by the end of last year almost 8% were suffering.
...
In the UK there may now be 3.6 million children living below the poverty line, and 12.9 million in the US, with no prospect of either government finding any cash to change that. But surely this is a price worth paying, if it means that George Bush and Tony Blair can make any amount of money available for bombs, shells and bullets to improve the lives of Iraqi kids. You know it makes sense.

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A note from a friend: A Letter From the Front Lines

I am writing this from the front lines of the war on terror. It's difficult being here, trying to get through each day without wondering whether some terrorist has decided that today is a good day for me to die. I'm currently located about 15 miles from an area that has recently been labeled as the most dangerous two miles in the entire country, a fact that can be extremely unsettling if one chooses to dwell on it.
Compounding the peril of this situation is the inadequate funding and support that we're receiving from the government. Our explicit and repeated requests for protective measures that would make us safer go unheeded.

You're probably thinking, "Don't worry, soldier. You'll be home from Iraq soon." The thing is, I'm not a soldier. I'm not even in Iraq. I'm just a regular guy living in New Jersey, where terrorism is not just something you see on TV.
...
I live in Union County, home to an area that terrorism experts have dubbed "the most dangerous two miles in America." David Kocieniewski of the NY Times recently wrote an article that summed up the threat fairly well:

It is the deadliest target in a swath of industrial northern New Jersey that terrorism experts call the most dangerous two miles in America: a chemical plant that processes chlorine gas, so close to Manhattan that the Empire State Building seems to rise up behind its storage tanks.

According to federal Environmental Protection Agency records, the plant poses a potentially lethal threat to 12 million people who live within a 14-mile radius.

Yet on a recent Friday afternoon, it remained loosely guarded and accessible. Dozens of trucks and cars drove by within 100 feet of the tanks. A reporter and photographer drove back and forth for five minutes, snapping photos with a camera the size of a large sidearm, then left without being approached.

That chemical plant is just one of dozens of vulnerable sites between Newark Liberty International Airport and Port Elizabeth, which extends two miles to the east. A Congressional study in 2000 by a former Coast Guard commander deemed it the nation's most enticing environment for terrorists, providing a convenient way to cripple the economy by disrupting major portions of the country's rail lines, oil storage tanks and refineries, pipelines, air traffic, communications networks and highway system.

Go to his site to read more, and realize it isn't all just gardens in the garden state (no seriously - for those of you elsewhere in the nation, New Jersey's the Garden State - it really is - it say's it right there on the license plate).

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The Media willfully participates in the dismantling of Freedom (via the Term "Newsweek Riots")

Freedom of the Press directly attacked by the White House

Olbermann: The resignation of Scott McClellan

Thursday, General Richard Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Donald Rumsfeld’s go-to guy whenever the situation calls for the kind of gravitas the Secretary himself can’t supply, told reporters at the Pentagon that rioting in Afghanistan was related more to the on-going political reconciliation process there, than it was to a controversial note buried in the pages of Newsweek claiming that the government was investigating whether or not some nitwit interrogator at Gitmo really had desecrated a Muslim holy book.

But Monday afternoon, while offering himself up to the networks for a series of rare, almost unprecedented sit-down interviews on the White House lawn, Press Secretary McClellan said, in effect, that General Myers, and the head of the after-action report following the disturbances in Jalalabad, Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, were dead wrong. The Newsweek story, McClellan said, “has done damage to our image abroad and it has done damage to the credibility of the media and Newsweek in particular. People have lost lives. This report has had serious consequences.”
...
Whenever I hear this White House talking about ‘doing to damage to our image abroad’ and how ‘people have lost lives,’ I strain to remember who it was who went traipsing into Iraq looking for WMD that will apparently turn up just after the Holy Grail will - and at what human cost.
...One of the most under-publicized analyses of 9/11 concludes that Osama Bin Laden assumed that the attacks on the U.S. would galvanize Islamic anger towards this country, and they'd overthrow their secular governments and woo-hoo we've got an international religious war. Obviously it didn't happen. It didn't even happen when the West went into Iraq. But if stuff like the Newsweek version of a now two-year old tale about toilets and Qu’rans is enough to set off rioting in the streets of countries whose nationals were not even the supposed recipients of the ‘abuse’, then weren’t those members of the military or the government with whom Newsweek vetted the plausibility of its item, honor-bound to say “you can’t print this”?

Or would somebody rather play politics with this? The way Craig Crawford reconstructed it, this one went similarly to the way the Killian Memos story evolved at the White House. The news organization turns to the administration for a denial. The administration says nothing. The news organization runs the story. The administration jumps on the necks of the news organization with both feet - or has its proxies do it for them.

That’s beyond shameful. It’s treasonous.

Side Note he also has this great line: Fox News Channel (which, only today, I finally recognized - it’s the newscast perpetually running on the giant video screens in the movie “1984”)

This is an attack on the press - with the unstated goal of further weakening the already spineless into submission or even to go as far discussing the restriction of press coverage to "protect our soldiers."

Daily Kos is on it: Push Back on the White House Newsweek Scam

A brief message today: What we are witnessing is nothing more than an attempt to intimidate the press corps so that they will be afraid to do their jobs.
Simply put, we must not allow this to happen, particularly when the struggle to hold this Administration accountable has been so difficult.

There are serious, serious questions about the White House's conduct in the Newsweek matter. More importantly, there are countless unanswered questions about documented and verified cases of detainee abuse and other matters. These questions must be answered.

It is time to circle the wagons and demand that the press corps continue to be vigilant. I intend to contact media outlets to demand that they pursue the unanswered questions about this Administration.

White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan owes us some answers as well. This morning, I wrote to him asking for an accounting. This letter will soon be in the hands of the entire White House Press corps.

The letter is excellent, and the comments feature other ideas for letters you could write and to whom to write. Letters still have power... at least for now.

Kos himself notes the irony of: White House lectures on single source?

Yes the White House now demands more evidence to back up an article then it itself considers enough to back up a war.

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Read it for yourself

The Downing Street Memo :: The text

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Daily Kos :: White House, Secret Service Stories on Gannon/Guckert Passes Don't Match

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If you declare America a "Christian Nation," who's Christianity is it?

Is it those loving souls like Rev. Fred Phelps?

Anti-gay group plans picket

DRACUT -- A Kansas-based evangelical group plans to picket Englesby Intermediate School June 6 after a student won an essay contest writing about openly gay comedienne Ellen DeGeneres.

A flier from the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka singles out a Women in History essay written by a 12-year-old student who chose DeGeneres as her subject. The invective-laden leaflet includes a photo of the Englesby School and a grotesque devil. The diatribe attacks the staff, labeling it a “homo-fascist regime,” among other things.

Acting Police Chief Kevin Richardson said he received a communication from Fred Phelps, pastor of the Kansas church, asking for information about securing the proper permits. Richardson recoiled when shown the flier, saying, “No, we didn't get this.”
...
Phelps gained notoriety by demonstrating at the funeral of Matthew Shepard, the 21-year-old Wyoming man who was murdered in an anti-gay hate crime in 1998. Phelps and his supporters stood across the street from the church shouting at the mourners and holding signs that read, “Matthew is in hell.”

Ah for the days of slogans such as "Jesus Saves" and "God Loves You."....

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Krugman: Staying What Course?

There has been notably little U.S. coverage of the "Downing Street memo" - actually the minutes of a British prime minister's meeting on July 23, 2002, during which officials reported on talks with the Bush administration about Iraq. But the memo, which was leaked to The Times of London during the British election campaign, confirms what apologists for the war have always denied: the Bush administration cooked up a case for a war it wanted.

Here's a sample: "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and W.M.D. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
...
Meanwhile, America's strategic position is steadily deteriorating.

Next year, reports Jane's Defense Industry, the United States will spend as much on defense as the rest of the world combined. Yet the Pentagon now admits that our military is having severe trouble attracting recruits, and would have difficulty dealing with potential foes - those that, unlike Saddam's Iraq, might pose a real threat.

In other words, the people who got us into Iraq have done exactly what they falsely accused Bill Clinton of doing: they have stripped America of its capacity to respond to real threats.

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UK film: terror fears exaggerated

The film, a non-competition entry, argues that the fear of terrorism has come to pervade politics in the United States and Britain even though much of that angst is based on carefully nurtured illusions.

It says Bush and U.S. neo-conservatives, as well as British Prime Minister Tony Blair, are exaggerating the terror threat in a manner similar to the way earlier generations of leaders inflated the danger of communism and the Soviet Union.

It also draws especially controversial symmetries between the history of the U.S. movement that led to the neo-cons and the roots of the ideas that led to radical Islamism -- two conservative movements that have shaped geopolitics since 1945.

Curtis's film portrays neo-cons Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Donald Rumsfeld as counterparts to Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri in the two respective movements.

The Fear plays into the fact that when people think of death they are more likely to support charismatic leaders who talk about national honor and make them feel part of something greater. When people aren't scared they are actually more likely to support a politician who actually gives a damn.

Social Psychologists Study Relationship Between Fear of Death, Voting Preferences

For their current research, the scientists asked subjects to think about their own death or a control topic and then read campaign statements of three hypothetical political candidates, each with a different leadership style: charismatic, task-oriented, or relationship-oriented. Following a reminder of death, there was an almost 800 percent increase in votes for the charismatic leader, but no increase for the two other candidates.
...
What can voters do to ensure that they make choices in a rational way, based on political qualifications and the positions of the candidates? They may need to monitor efforts by candidates to capitalize on fear mongering and make a greater effort to vote with their heads, rather than with their hearts, and be aware of how concerns about death affect human behavior.

Terror alerts and Bush's Presidency is just marketing.

A lot has been written how today's world eerily foreshadow the world written about in 1984 and The Handmaid's Tale.

Unfortunately it also seems to mirror Phillip K. Dick's The Penultimate Truth.

Here's a review on Amazon that says it best.

To begin with, he spins a cognitive framework of a world in perpetual war, waged by robots above the surface of the earth which has become too ravaged by radioactivity to support human life. Humans are reduced to living underground in "tanks", subterranean factories whose economy depends upon the constant repair of damaged robot warriors from the surface. The only source of information about this grim cognitive framework pipes in through the Television tube, where a Dear Great Leader sits behind the imposing desk of authority, surrounded by the symbols of state. He prattles about the sacrifices made by the millions surviving in the tanks, he talks about the struggles to build a free society on the surface, the despicable nature of the enemy, the threat to liberty, and so on and so forth. You get the picture. You have heard it yourself on the nightly news for years and years.
...
So the crisis comes when the chief mechanic for the tank grows desperately ill. Death is certain unless they can obtain an artificial organ transplant. How can they do that? They have no power, no initiatives available in this regard. If he dies, they will fall behind in their quota, their food rations will be cut, the lives of the entire tank are at stake. So in a desperate state they decide to send one of their own to the surface on a quest for an artificial organ. When he makes his way to the surface, he fears instant incineration from the death dealing warrior robots--instead, imagine his surprise as he discovers that the entire planet is a beautiful sunlit garden, inhabited not by fierce warrior robots and smoking ruins, but instead a privileged leisure class served by the robots in luxury, devoting their time to spinning little fearful fictions for the slaves laboring down below...

The meek don't inherit the world in this Dick tale. The marketing consultants do.

- rob 4:18 PM - [PermaLink] -

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I feel a tremor in the force, as if a thousand high school students suddenly cried out "whoa"

Lucas jabs at 'Bush's empire'

But there were also murmurs at the parallels being drawn between Bush's administration and the birth of the space opera's evil Empire.

Baddies' dialogue about bloodshed and despicable acts being needed to bring "peace and stability" to the movie's universe, mainly through a fabricated war, set the scene.
...
Lucas, speaking to reporters, emphasised that the original "Star Wars" was written at the end of the Vietnam war, when Richard Nixon was U.S. president, but that the issue being explored was still very much alive today.

"The issue was, how does a democracy turn itself into a dictatorship?" he said.

"When I wrote it, Iraq (the U.S.-led war) didn't exist... but the parallels of what we did in Vietnam and Iraq are unbelievable."

He acknowledged an uncomfortable feeling that the United States was in danger of losing its democratic ideals, like in the movie.

"I didn't think it was going to get this close. I hope this doesn't come true in our country."

- rob 3:36 PM - [PermaLink] -

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A public ripe for a dismantling of freedom? 22% of Americans hate freedom and 43% aren't that hot on it.

New Survey Finds Huge Gap Between Press and Public on Many Issues

NEW YORK A survey to be released Monday reveals a wide gap on many media issues between a group of journalists and the general public. In one finding, 43% of the public says the press has too much freedom, while only 3% of journalists agree. And just 14% of the public can name "freedom of the press" as a guarantee in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, in the major poll conducted by the University of Connecticut Department of Public Policy.

Six in ten among the public feel the media show bias in reporting the news, and 22% say the government should be allowed to censor the press.

- rob 3:32 PM - [PermaLink] -

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Via many a blog:
THE CENSORSHIP CAMPAIGN GETS A BOOST: NOTHING BUT GOOD NEWS 24/7, PLEASE... AND DON'T MAKE US MAKE YOU!

- rob 2:11 PM - [PermaLink] -

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The President's bike ride was ended immediately so he could be notified about the burrito

Giant Burrito Causes School Lock-Down

CLOVIS, N.M. (AP) -- A 911 call about a possible weapon at a middle school prompted police to put armed officers on rooftops, close nearby streets and lock down the school. All over a giant burrito.

Someone called authorities Thursday after seeing a boy carrying something long and wrapped up into Marshall Junior High School. The drama ended two hours later when the suspicious item was identified as a 30-inch burrito filled with steak, guacamole, lettuce, salsa and jalapenos. It was wrapped inside tin foil and a white T-shirt.

- rob 1:54 PM - [PermaLink] -

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"More than any time in history mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction.

Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly."
- Woody Allen

- rob 1:51 PM - [PermaLink] -

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The Protocols were followed:

1. Run through the capital building screaming "run! run for your lives!"
2. evacuate the President's wife
3. Deploy fighter jets to assess the situation.
4. Decide if you want to shoot down the aircraft or not based on a phone call with Karl Rove.
5. Give the all clear.
6. Wait
7. Wait
8. Give The President a fresh water bottle
9. During some small talk about American Idol and the Michael Jackson trial let him know all's cool in Washington but there was a bit of a bugaboo there for a while

And the protocols were followed well

McClellan Says No Need to Notify Bush in D.C. Scare

NEW YORK On the day after more than 30,000 people -- including the vice president, the first lady, and a former first lady -- were evacuated from their offices or homes in Washington, D.C., but the president, who was biking in Maryland was not notified until the threat passed, reporters grilled Press Secretary Scott McClellan at his daily briefing.
...
Q: Scott, yesterday the White House was on red alert, was evacuated. The first lady and Nancy Reagan were taken to a secure location. The Vice President was evacuated from the grounds. The Capitol building was evacuated. The continuity of government plan was initiated. And yet the president wasn't told of yesterday's events until after he finished his bike ride, about 36 minutes after the all-clear had been sent. Is he satisfied with the fact that he wasn't notified about this?

McCLELLAN: Yes. I think you just brought up a very good point -- the protocols that were in place after Sept. 11 were followed. The president was never considered to be in danger because he was at an off-site location. The president has a tremendous amount of trust in his Secret Service detail. ...

This would be the same secret service that thought it was a-okay to have the President hang around at an elementary school in a publicly scheduled and publicized photo-op while attacks were carried out in Washington and D.C. Did they instantly assess that there was no danger.. and besides the Prez is really getting in to this goat book.

Q: The fact that the president wasn't in danger is one aspect of this. But he's also the commander in chief. There was a military operation underway. Other people were in contact with the White House. Shouldn't the commander in chief have been notified of what was going on?

McCLELLAN: John, the protocols that we put in place after Sept. 11 were being followed. They did not require presidential authority for this situation. I think you have to look at each situation and the circumstances surrounding the situation. And that's what officials here at the White House were doing. ...

The officials in the White House:

Official One: There's a plane headed right for us! Fighter Jets are on the way!

Official Two: Evacuate everyone... scare the wits out of the feeble sheep in the capitol building

Official Three: Get Palpati...errr... Cheney out of here... Save his life! Even if it means risking yours!

Official Four: God Save us! We knew this day could come!

Official Five: Shouldn't we notify the President?

Officials two, three, four: What! and interrupt his bike ride!!!!

official One: That would be a breach of protocol.

Q: Even on a personal level, did nobody here at the White House think that calling the president to say, by the way, your wife has been evacuated from the White House, we just want to let you know everything is OK?

McCLELLAN: Actually, all the protocols were followed and people were -- officials that you point out were taken to secure locations or evacuated, in some cases. I think, again, you have to look at the circumstances surrounding the situation, and it depends on the situation and the circumstance. ...
...
Q: I think there's a disconnect here because, I mean, yesterday you had more than 30,000 people who were evacuated, you had millions of people who were watching this on television, and there was a sense at some point -- it was a short window, a 15-minute window, but there was a sense of confusion among some on the streets. There was a sense of fear. And people are wondering was this not a moment for the president to exercise some leadership, some guidance during that period of time?

MR. McCLELLAN: The president did lead, and the president did that after September the 11th when we put the protocols in place to make sure that situations like this were addressed before it was too late. And that was the case -- that was the case in this situation. ...

McCellan continued, "Come on guys the prez stood on a mass grave with a bullhorn... That's leadership! What you want to lead like all the time?

Besides, it should be noted that prior to 9/11 the protocol for an unscheduled aircraft headed for the White House was to order more pretzels.

Q: Might there be something wrong with protocols that render the president unnecessary when the alarm is going off at his house?

McCLELLAN: That's not at all what occurred, Ken. And I would disagree strongly with the way you characterize it for the reasons I started earlier, and that I talked about. This was a situation where the president was in an off-site location. He was not in danger, a situation where protocols have been put in place to address the situation. The protocols were followed. ...
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Q: Doesn't the President want to be involved in what could be a decision to shoot down a plane over Washington?

McCLELLAN: To answer your question, I was just getting ready to address exactly what you're bringing up. The protocols that were put in place after Sept. 11 include protocols for that, as well. And there are protocols there. They're classified. But they do not require presidential authority. ...

Ahh... the protocols are classified... but trust us the protocols are freaking good. Damn they are the best protocols ever.... In fact these secret protocols are going to end the war in Iraq, and end world hunger. Failure to worship the protocols is a capitol offense.

News Flash: Looks like Rove has the authority to order passenger planes shot down... no wonder they're trying to kill Amtrak.

Q: And wasn't there a possibility that a plane headed for the White House, that this was the leading edge of some broader attack, isn't the president concerned that maybe he should have been alerted to the fact that this could have been the beginning of a general attack?

McCLELLAN: That was not the case, and I think the Department of Defense yesterday indicated that they didn't sense any hostile intent on the part of the plane, so again --

Q: How did they know -- how did they know this plane wasn't laden with WMD or some other type of weapons like that? Did they get reassurances from the pilot? Or how did they know that?

McCLELLAN: Well, again, if you want to give me a chance to respond, I'll be glad to. The protocols were followed. This situation, as you're well aware, turned out to be an accident. The Department of Defense pointed out yesterday that they didn't sense any hostile intent on the part of the plane. There were fighter jets scrambled. There was a Blackhawk helicopter scrambled, as well, to get in contact with the plane. ...

Q So if it was assessed that there was no hostile intent on the part of this aircraft, can you tell us why 30,000 people -- 35,000 people were told to run for their lives?

McCLELLAN: Because of the protocols that are in place, John. We want to make sure that the people in the area of the threat are protected. After --

Q: But what was the threat? You just said there was no threat.
...
Q: Right, but there seems to be so many disconnects here. You've got a plane that was assessed as not being a threat, you've got 35,000 people evacuated, you've got a person who you claim is a hands-on commander in chief who is left to go ride his bicycle through the rural wildlands of Maryland while his wife is in some secure location somewhere, it's just not adding up.

McCLELLAN: Well, John, I disagree, and let me tell you why: You have highly skilled professionals who are involved in situations like this, in a variety of different fronts, from our Homeland Security officials to our National Security Council officials to our Secret Service officials and to others and to local officials, and they work very closely together. The protocols that were put in place were followed, and I think they were followed well.

- rob 1:14 PM - [PermaLink] -

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History Is Undone

I'll make this short and bitter: Nothing succeeds like contempt.

What is it that makes hypocrisy so alluring to the masses? I've been thinking long and hard about this one, and the best I can come up with is that it lets everyone off the hook. You're free to hate as long as the message is love. Unprovoked wars can be waged and countries taken over at will as long as we set them free. Tidying an occupied country is free as long as freedom is untidy. A moral majority is the minority as long as the majority is a moral minority. Active judges are good as long as judicial activism is bad. Publicly draping yourself in the flag is a display of patriotism as long as public display of a flag-draped coffin is unpatriotic. You can do more with less as long as you have less and I have more. The New Deal is a bad deal as long as the Bad Deal is a new deal. Social Security will pay you benefits as long as your benefits are cut to make you socially secure. Younger workers will enter the workplace sooner as long as older workers remain in the workplace longer. Permanent tax cuts primarily benefit the middle class as long as the middle class primarily pays for permanent tax cuts. Remember it's your money as long as you remember it's my money. I swear on this bible to uphold the U.S. Constitution as long as the U.S. Constitution swears to uphold this bible. We're a peaceful nation as long as peace depends on everlasting war. I say what it means to be an American as long as to be an American means what I say. A congressman can be gay as long as being anti-gay is the only way to become a congressman.

Frank Rich has this to say:

What adds a peculiar dynamic to this anti-gay juggernaut is the continued emergence of gay people within its ranks. Allen Drury would have been incredulous if gay-baiters hounding his Utah senator had turned out to be gay themselves, but this has been a consistent pattern throughout the 30-year war. ... But surely the most arresting recent case is James E. West, the powerful Republican mayor of Spokane, Wash., whose double life has just been exposed by the local paper, The Spokesman-Review. Mr. West's long, successful political career has been distinguished by his attempts to ban gay men and lesbians from schools and day care centers, to fire gay state employees, to deny City Hall benefits to domestic partners and to stifle AIDS-prevention education. The Spokesman-Review caught him trolling gay Web sites for young men and trying to lure them with gifts and favors. (He has denied accusations of abusing boys when he was a Boy Scout leader some 25 years ago.) Not unlike the Roy Cohn of "Angels in America" - who describes himself as "a heterosexual man" who has sex "with guys" - Mr. West has said he had "relations with adult men" but doesn't "characterize" himself as gay. This is more than hypocrisy - it's pathology. [Emphasis mine.]

Anyone who remembers Fifth Ave. and 53nd St. in NYC about 12 years ago remembers a hectoring young woman with large-scale photographs of hard-core pornography at a little stand she set up in front of the church, screaming at passersby in the most obscene graphic language imaginable; I remember in particular one woman walking by who tut-tutted her, and this crusading antiporno agitator, inflamed, lashed out a high-pitched, deranged, accusatory obscenity: "YOU BEEN SUCKING TOO MUCH COCK, HONEY!!!" She became the poster child and executrix of exactly what she was protesting. You are what you eat.

I've since seen this woman throughout the decade taking up various extremist right-wing causes, all with the same elan, using all the same tactics, the disgusting posters and the little stand. That's how the pathology starts, with one lunatic screaming on the sidewalk in the middle of civilization, inveighing with invective by invoking injustice, unnerving by striking raw nerves, appealing to the unappealing to unsettle reason with raw emotion. She was an amusement at lunch; little did I suspect that in a few short years the United States of America would be doing the same thing to the rest of the world. A history quiz: What caused the act that abrogated the following constitutional protections:

1) Free expression of opinion
2) Freedom of the press
3) Right of assembly and association
4) Right to privacy of postal and electronic communications
5) Protection against unlawful searches and seizures
6) Individual property rights
7) States' right of self-government

A supplemental act creates special security forces and Federal police agencies.

Answer: The Reichstag Fire

The summary of the events of February 28, 1933, concludes:

While it is not clear whether the Nazis intentionally set the Reichstag fire in order to create a national crisis, or whether the Nazis simply were opportunistic, the event was used as justification for a sharp curtailment in constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties.

The Nazis took advantage of the additional Federal police powers to suppress opponents.

It is clear that in other situations, the Nazis did use the tactic of creating a "law and order" crisis so that they could provide a solution which further eroded civil liberties and entrenched their power.

The right-wing Nazis and the left-wing communists were cut from the same cloth -- the point is not that the far right destroyed civil rights. Rather, the point is that a democracy can be destroyed by creating a law-and-order crisis and offering as a 'solution' the abdication of civil liberties and state's rights to a powerful but unaccountable central authority.

Sound familiar?

- Michael 10:13 AM - [PermaLink] -

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"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American people."
- Teddy Roosevelt



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