Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania - soon to be ex-senator Santorum - is nominated for martrydom and/or sainthood by NY Times resident whore David Brooks. As we've written before, Brooks is now sitting in the chair of former Times op-ed columnist WILLIAM SAFIRE, who singlehandedly threw so much journalstic **** at the Clintons that other Republican hacks were able to PILE ON, Abu Grhaib pyramid style, and eventually Tom DeLay's lame-duck Congess impeached the sitting president for a CONSENSUAL AFFAIR - but only after Ken Starr diverted his $70 million - SEVENTY MILLION TAXPAYER DOLLARS - "independent" investigation from a financial investigation into (literally) assigning DOZENS of FBI agents to INTERROGATE WOMEN about their sex lives, and especially any relations they may have had with President Clinton.
Anyways, David Brooks is now the resident TIMES replacement for Safire, whom (did we mention) had been a lead speechwriter for President Nixon.
At any rate, it's GREAT to hear other writers and critics KEEPING AFTER the Times SERIAL TENDENCY to LIE, MISINFORM, DISTORT, and SHILL right-wing Republican talking points and propaganda.
=====================================
Santorum In Memoriam
by Gerald McEntee
10.31.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gerald-mcentee/santorum-in-memoriam_b_32902.html
David Brooks' obituary for Rick Santorum's Senate career in the Sunday New York Times all but nominated the two-term Pennsylvania senator for political martyrdom. "After Election Day," Brooks wrote, "the underprivileged will probably have lost one of their least cuddly but most effective champions."
I'm not sure what unholy bargain Brooks brokered with his editors to write such blasphemy, but here are a few of Saint Santorum's legislative "accomplishments" that Brooks conveniently omitted.
Santorum voted 12 times against raising the minimum wage, trapping millions of American families in poverty. In fact, just after Santorum sponsored an amendment to deny a wage hike to restaurant workers, executives from Outback Steakhouse, among the amendment's biggest backers, hosted a fundraiser for him. (Santorum flew to the fundraiser on the Wal-Mart corporate jet.)
There are many more examples. He voted against the Family and Medical Leave Act. He introduced legislation to kill the 40-hour workweek. He supported efforts to gut overtime pay protections. And David Brooks thinks Rick Santorum is an "effective champion" of the underprivileged and struggling families?
The right can try to cast Santorum in the martyr role all they want. But Santorum's IMMORAL VOTING RECORD and downright un-Christian rhetoric have lifted the curtain and exposed him as a national embarrassment. And David Brooks [and his LYING editors and publisher at the NY TIMES] aside, voters are tired of Rick's shtick.
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Monday, October 30, 2006
President Bush's abject, in-your-face lies and distortions would be QUITE IMPOSSIBLE if "Mainstream Media" did their jobs....
The great Robert Parry has been journalisticly plugging away at presidential lies, and government and "major media' cover-ups, since he first broke some of the stories that would later become the Iran-Contra scandal, only to find his reporting IGNORED by the government (including Democrats who were then in the majority) and CENSORED by his own editors.
Here, he documents the Bush's White House's ability to COMMUNICATE ABJECT LIES, by using the powers of the presidency, the powers of Republican Party command structure and millions of dollars of corportate-lobbyist donations, and above all punching all the right buttons to get the "Major Media" to pathetically befoul themselves as little more than propagators of abject propaganda and serial lies for the radical right agenda of secrecy in government, tax cuts for wealthy while trying to turn Americans into $200-per-month subsistence level citizens (as over half of South America's entire population now gets by on), and of course authortarian policies with a theologic veneer, much as Southern preachers defended slavery and the cruelty of a slave-based economy in the ante-bellum (and post-Civil War) South.
(Re "Lies," for example, the President's insistence, over many occassions and many different public appearances, that "Saddam Hussein WOULD NOT ALLOW international weapons inspectors into Iraq...." when the FACTS are that the IAEA Inspectors WERE_ON_THE_GROUND in Iraq, and were FORCED TO LEAVE that country in advance of the US "Shock and Awe" bombings as ordered by the Bush White House.
=============================================
All the President's Lies
By Robert Parry
October 30, 2006
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/103006.html
Many Americans are cynical about what they hear from politicians – and often with good reason – but perhaps no U.S. political leader in modern history has engaged in a pattern of lying and distortion more systematically than George W. Bush has.
Bush’s lies also aren’t about petty matters, such as some personal indiscretion or minor misconduct. Rather his dishonesty deals with issues of war and peace, the patriotism of his opponents, and the founding principles of the American Republic.
They are the kinds of lies and distortions more befitting the leader of a totalitarian state whipping up his followers to go after some perceived enemy than the President of the world’s preeminent democracy seeking an informed debate among the citizenry.
For instance, in an Oct. 28 speech in Sellersburg, Indiana, Bush worked the crowd into a frenzy of “USA, USA” chants by accusing Democrats of not wanting to “detain and question terrorists,” not wanting to listen in on “terrorist communications,” and not wanting to bring terrorists to trial – all gross distortions of Democratic positions.
Bush has used this same gambit for many years. He characterizes his strategies and actions in the most innocuous ways; he then ignores honest reasons for disagreement with him; and he characterizes his opponents’ positions in the most absurd manner possible.
So, regarding the “war on terror,” Bush never mentions the constitutional concerns about his strategies or the questions about their effectiveness. According to him, his decisions are always benign and obvious; those of his opponents border on the crazy and disloyal.
“When al-Qaeda or an al-Qaeda affiliate is making a phone call from outside the United States to inside the United States, we want to know why,” Bush told the cheering Indiana crowd. “In this new kind of war, we must be willing to question the enemy when we pick them up on the battlefield.”
Referring to the capture of alleged 9/11 conspirator Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Bush said, “when we captured him, I said to the Central Intelligence Agency, why don’t we find out what he knows in order to be able to protect America from another attack.”
Bush then contrasted his eminently reasonable positions with those held by the nutty Democrats.
“When it came time on whether to allow the Central Intelligence Agency to continue to detain and question terrorists, almost 80 percent of the House Democrats voted against it,” Bush said, as the crowd booed the Democrats.
“When it came time to vote on whether the NSA [National Security Agency] should continue to monitor terrorist communications through the Terrorist Surveillance Program, almost 90 percent of House Democrats voted against it.
“In all these vital measures for fighting the war on terror, the Democrats in Washington follow a simple philosophy: Just say no. When it comes to listening in on the terrorists, what’s the Democratic answer? Just say no. When it comes to detaining terrorists, what’s the Democrat answer?”
Crowd: “Just say no!”
Bush: “When it comes to questioning terrorists, what’s the Democrat answer?”
Crowd: “Just say no!”
Bush: “When it comes to trying terrorists, what’s the Democrat’s answer?”
Crowd: “Just say no!”
Bush vs. the Truth
Yet, Bush realizes that the Democrats are not opposed to eavesdropping on terrorists, or detaining terrorists, or questioning terrorists, or bringing terrorists to trial.
What Democrats – and many conservatives – object to are Bush’s methods: his tolerance of abusive interrogation techniques; his assertion of unlimited presidential authority; his abrogation of habeas corpus rights to a fair trial; and his violation of existing laws, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which already gives the President broad powers to engage in electronic spying inside the United States, albeit with the approval of a special court.
Bush’s critics argue that all his “war on terror” objectives can be achieved without throwing out more than two centuries of American constitutional traditions or by violating human rights, such as prohibitions against torture.
While Bush says Democrats don’t want to try terrorist, their real complaint about his Military Commissions Act of 2006 comes from its denial of habeas corpus for non-citizens and its vague wording that could apply its draconian provisions to American citizens as well. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Who Is ‘Any Person’ in Tribunal Law?”]
Bush’s defenders may argue that the President was just using some oratorical license in the Indiana stump speech. But all the points he made to the crowd, he also has expressed in more formal settings.
The distortions also fit with Bush’s long pattern of slanting the truth or engaging in outright lies when describing his adversaries, both foreign and domestic.
Yet Bush is almost never held to account by a U.S. news media that seems almost as cowed today as it was when Bush misled the nation into the Iraq War or – after the invasion – when he lied repeatedly, claiming that he had no choice but to invade because Saddam Hussein had barred U.N. weapons inspectors from Iraq. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush & His Dangerous Delusions.”]
Even when acknowledging that Bush’s statements often turn out to be false, his defenders say it’s unfair to call him a liar. They say he’s just an honest guy who gets lots of bad information.
False Talking Points
But there comes a point when that defense wears thin. The evidence actually points to a leader who wants his subordinates to give him a steady supply of “talking points” that can be used to achieve his goals whether the arguments are true, half true or totally false.
How else can anyone explain why the most expensive intelligence system in history acted in 2002-03 like a kind of backward filter in processing evidence about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s purported ties to al-Qaeda.
The CIA’s reverse analytical filter consistently removed the nuggets of good information – when they undercut Bush’s positions – and let through the dross of misinformation.
In September 2006, the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a report that detailed how the U.S. intelligence community surrendered its duty to provide the government with accurate data and instead gave the Bush administration what it wanted to hear.
The committee concluded that nearly every key assessment as expressed in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq’s WMD was wrong:
“Postwar findings do not support the [NIE] judgment that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program; … do not support the [NIE] assessment that Iraq’s acquisition of high-strength aluminum tubes was intended for an Iraqi nuclear program; … do not support the [NIE] assessment that Iraq was ‘vigorously trying to procure uranium ore and yellowcake’ from Africa; … do not support the [NIE] assessment that ‘Iraq has biological weapons’ and that ‘all key aspects of Iraq’s offensive biological weapons program are larger and more advanced than before the Gulf war’; … do not support the [NIE] assessment that Iraq possessed, or ever developed, mobile facilities for producing biological warfare agents; … do not support the [NIE] assessments that Iraq ‘has chemical weapons’ or ‘is expanding its chemical industry to support chemical weapons production’; … do not support the [NIE] assessments that Iraq had a developmental program for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle ‘probably intended to deliver biological agents’ or that an effort to procure U.S. mapping software ‘strongly suggests that Iraq is investigating the use of these UAVs for missions targeting the United States.’”
The Senate Intelligence Committee also concluded that the Bush administration’s claims about the supposed relationship between the Iraqi government and al-Qaeda were bogus. Rather than cooperating with Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, as the Bush administration has claimed for the past four years, it turned out that the Iraqi government was trying to arrest Zarqawi.
But the creation of the bogus Saddam Hussein-Osama bin Laden link was not accidental. According to the committee report, the misinformation came via an administration mandate to cast every shred of information in the harshest possible light.
That systemic bias was revealed in the guidelines for a CIA paper produced in June 2002, entitled “Iraq and al-Qa’ida: Interpreting a Murky Relationship.”
The CIA study was designed to assess the Iraqi government’s links to al-Qaeda. But the analysts were given unusual instructions, told to be “purposely aggressive in seeking to draw connections, on the assumption that any indication of a relationship between these two hostile elements could carry great dangers to the United States.”
A former CIA deputy director of intelligence told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the paper’s authors were ordered to “lean far forward and do a speculative piece.” The deputy director told them, “if you were going to stretch to the maximum the evidence you had, what could you come up with.”
In other words, the CIA analysts set out to hype any evidence of possible links between Iraq and al-Qaeda. So, if some piece of information contained even a remote possibility of a connection, the assumption had to be that the tie-in was real and substantive.
When Zarqawi snuck into Baghdad for medical treatment, therefore, the assumption could not be that the Iraqi authorities were unaware of his presence or couldn’t find him; it had to be that Saddam Hussein knew all about it and was collaborating with Zarqawi.
This practice of assuming the worst – rather than attempting to gauge likelihoods as accurately as possible – guaranteed the kind of slanted and even fanciful intelligence reports that guided the United States to war in 2002-2003.
What Bush Wanted
But what is equally clear from the Senate report is that the U.S. intelligence community was giving Bush exactly what he wanted so he could present a litany of alleged grievances that would justify an unprovoked invasion.
Even after the falsity of the intelligence was known, Bush gave CIA Director George Tenet, the bureaucrat who oversaw this perversion of intelligence, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor that can be bestowed on an American civilian.
This pattern of slanting information about Iraq also has not stopped. It continues to the present day.
For instance, one of Bush’s favorite arguments in his stump speeches is that the Democrats are playing into Osama bin Laden’s hands by seeking a U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq.
“In Washington, the Democrats say [Iraq is] not a part of the war against the terrorists, it’s a distraction.” Bush told that crowd in Sellersburg, Indiana. “Well, don’t take my word for it – listen to Osama bin Laden. He has made it clear that Iraq is a central part of this war on terror. He and his number two man, Zawahiri have made it abundantly clear that their goal is to inflict enough damage on innocent life and damage on our own troops so that we leave before the job is done.”
But that isn’t what the latest intelligence on al-Qaeda’s goals shows. Indeed, U.S. intelligence has intercepted communiqués from al-Qaeda leaders to Zarqawi in 2005 that actually reveal their alarm at the possibility of a prompt U.S. military withdrawal and their goal of “prolonging the war” by keeping the Americans bogged down in Iraq.
In a Dec. 11, 2005, letter, a senior al-Qaeda leader known as “Atiyah” lectured Zarqawi on the need to take the long view and build ties with elements of the Sunni-led Iraqi insurgency that had little in common with al-Qaeda except hatred of the Americans.
“The most important thing is that the jihad continues with steadfastness and firm rooting, and that it grows in terms of supporters, strength, clarity of justification, and visible proof each day,” Atiyah wrote. “Indeed, prolonging the war is in our interest.” [Emphasis added.]
The “Atiyah letter,” which was discovered by U.S. authorities at the time of Zarqawi’s death on June 7, 2006, and was translated by the U.S. military’s Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, also stressed the vulnerability of al-Qaeda’s position in Iraq.
“Know that we, like all mujahaddin, are still weak,” Atiyah told Zarqawi. “We have not yet reached a level of stability. We have no alternative but to not squander any element of the foundations of strength or any helper or supporter.” [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Al-Qaeda’s Fragile Foothold.”]
Atiyah’s worries reiterated concerns expressed by bin Laden’s deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri in another intercepted letter from July 7, 2005. In that letter, Zawahiri fretted that a rapid U.S. pullout could cause al-Qaeda’s operation in Iraq to collapse because foreign jihadists, who flocked to Iraq to fight Americans, would give up the fight and go home.
“The mujahaddin must not have their mission end with the expulsion of the Americans from Iraq, and then lay down their weapons, and silence the fighting zeal,” wrote Zawahiri, according to a text released by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence.
To avert mass desertions, Zawahiri suggests that Zarqawi talk up the “idea” of a “caliphate” along the eastern Mediterranean.
What al-Qaeda leaders seem to fear most is that a U.S. military withdrawal would contribute to a disintegration of their fragile position in Iraq, between the expected desertions of the foreign fighters and the targeting of al-Qaeda’s remaining forces by Iraqis determined to rid their country of violent outsiders.
In that sense, the longer the United States remains in Iraq, the deeper al-Qaeda can put down roots and the more it can harden its new recruits through indoctrination and training. These intercepted letters also fit with last April’s conclusion by U.S. intelligence agencies that the U.S. occupation of Iraq has proved to be a “cause celebre” that has spread Islamic radicalism around the globe.
Bush surely knows all this, but he also appears confident that he can continue to sell a distorted interpretation of the evidence to a gullible U.S. public. Basically, it appears that the President believes that the American people are very stupid.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'
Here, he documents the Bush's White House's ability to COMMUNICATE ABJECT LIES, by using the powers of the presidency, the powers of Republican Party command structure and millions of dollars of corportate-lobbyist donations, and above all punching all the right buttons to get the "Major Media" to pathetically befoul themselves as little more than propagators of abject propaganda and serial lies for the radical right agenda of secrecy in government, tax cuts for wealthy while trying to turn Americans into $200-per-month subsistence level citizens (as over half of South America's entire population now gets by on), and of course authortarian policies with a theologic veneer, much as Southern preachers defended slavery and the cruelty of a slave-based economy in the ante-bellum (and post-Civil War) South.
(Re "Lies," for example, the President's insistence, over many occassions and many different public appearances, that "Saddam Hussein WOULD NOT ALLOW international weapons inspectors into Iraq...." when the FACTS are that the IAEA Inspectors WERE_ON_THE_GROUND in Iraq, and were FORCED TO LEAVE that country in advance of the US "Shock and Awe" bombings as ordered by the Bush White House.
=============================================
All the President's Lies
By Robert Parry
October 30, 2006
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/103006.html
Many Americans are cynical about what they hear from politicians – and often with good reason – but perhaps no U.S. political leader in modern history has engaged in a pattern of lying and distortion more systematically than George W. Bush has.
Bush’s lies also aren’t about petty matters, such as some personal indiscretion or minor misconduct. Rather his dishonesty deals with issues of war and peace, the patriotism of his opponents, and the founding principles of the American Republic.
They are the kinds of lies and distortions more befitting the leader of a totalitarian state whipping up his followers to go after some perceived enemy than the President of the world’s preeminent democracy seeking an informed debate among the citizenry.
For instance, in an Oct. 28 speech in Sellersburg, Indiana, Bush worked the crowd into a frenzy of “USA, USA” chants by accusing Democrats of not wanting to “detain and question terrorists,” not wanting to listen in on “terrorist communications,” and not wanting to bring terrorists to trial – all gross distortions of Democratic positions.
Bush has used this same gambit for many years. He characterizes his strategies and actions in the most innocuous ways; he then ignores honest reasons for disagreement with him; and he characterizes his opponents’ positions in the most absurd manner possible.
So, regarding the “war on terror,” Bush never mentions the constitutional concerns about his strategies or the questions about their effectiveness. According to him, his decisions are always benign and obvious; those of his opponents border on the crazy and disloyal.
“When al-Qaeda or an al-Qaeda affiliate is making a phone call from outside the United States to inside the United States, we want to know why,” Bush told the cheering Indiana crowd. “In this new kind of war, we must be willing to question the enemy when we pick them up on the battlefield.”
Referring to the capture of alleged 9/11 conspirator Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Bush said, “when we captured him, I said to the Central Intelligence Agency, why don’t we find out what he knows in order to be able to protect America from another attack.”
Bush then contrasted his eminently reasonable positions with those held by the nutty Democrats.
“When it came time on whether to allow the Central Intelligence Agency to continue to detain and question terrorists, almost 80 percent of the House Democrats voted against it,” Bush said, as the crowd booed the Democrats.
“When it came time to vote on whether the NSA [National Security Agency] should continue to monitor terrorist communications through the Terrorist Surveillance Program, almost 90 percent of House Democrats voted against it.
“In all these vital measures for fighting the war on terror, the Democrats in Washington follow a simple philosophy: Just say no. When it comes to listening in on the terrorists, what’s the Democratic answer? Just say no. When it comes to detaining terrorists, what’s the Democrat answer?”
Crowd: “Just say no!”
Bush: “When it comes to questioning terrorists, what’s the Democrat answer?”
Crowd: “Just say no!”
Bush: “When it comes to trying terrorists, what’s the Democrat’s answer?”
Crowd: “Just say no!”
Bush vs. the Truth
Yet, Bush realizes that the Democrats are not opposed to eavesdropping on terrorists, or detaining terrorists, or questioning terrorists, or bringing terrorists to trial.
What Democrats – and many conservatives – object to are Bush’s methods: his tolerance of abusive interrogation techniques; his assertion of unlimited presidential authority; his abrogation of habeas corpus rights to a fair trial; and his violation of existing laws, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which already gives the President broad powers to engage in electronic spying inside the United States, albeit with the approval of a special court.
Bush’s critics argue that all his “war on terror” objectives can be achieved without throwing out more than two centuries of American constitutional traditions or by violating human rights, such as prohibitions against torture.
While Bush says Democrats don’t want to try terrorist, their real complaint about his Military Commissions Act of 2006 comes from its denial of habeas corpus for non-citizens and its vague wording that could apply its draconian provisions to American citizens as well. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Who Is ‘Any Person’ in Tribunal Law?”]
Bush’s defenders may argue that the President was just using some oratorical license in the Indiana stump speech. But all the points he made to the crowd, he also has expressed in more formal settings.
The distortions also fit with Bush’s long pattern of slanting the truth or engaging in outright lies when describing his adversaries, both foreign and domestic.
Yet Bush is almost never held to account by a U.S. news media that seems almost as cowed today as it was when Bush misled the nation into the Iraq War or – after the invasion – when he lied repeatedly, claiming that he had no choice but to invade because Saddam Hussein had barred U.N. weapons inspectors from Iraq. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush & His Dangerous Delusions.”]
Even when acknowledging that Bush’s statements often turn out to be false, his defenders say it’s unfair to call him a liar. They say he’s just an honest guy who gets lots of bad information.
False Talking Points
But there comes a point when that defense wears thin. The evidence actually points to a leader who wants his subordinates to give him a steady supply of “talking points” that can be used to achieve his goals whether the arguments are true, half true or totally false.
How else can anyone explain why the most expensive intelligence system in history acted in 2002-03 like a kind of backward filter in processing evidence about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s purported ties to al-Qaeda.
The CIA’s reverse analytical filter consistently removed the nuggets of good information – when they undercut Bush’s positions – and let through the dross of misinformation.
In September 2006, the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a report that detailed how the U.S. intelligence community surrendered its duty to provide the government with accurate data and instead gave the Bush administration what it wanted to hear.
The committee concluded that nearly every key assessment as expressed in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq’s WMD was wrong:
“Postwar findings do not support the [NIE] judgment that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program; … do not support the [NIE] assessment that Iraq’s acquisition of high-strength aluminum tubes was intended for an Iraqi nuclear program; … do not support the [NIE] assessment that Iraq was ‘vigorously trying to procure uranium ore and yellowcake’ from Africa; … do not support the [NIE] assessment that ‘Iraq has biological weapons’ and that ‘all key aspects of Iraq’s offensive biological weapons program are larger and more advanced than before the Gulf war’; … do not support the [NIE] assessment that Iraq possessed, or ever developed, mobile facilities for producing biological warfare agents; … do not support the [NIE] assessments that Iraq ‘has chemical weapons’ or ‘is expanding its chemical industry to support chemical weapons production’; … do not support the [NIE] assessments that Iraq had a developmental program for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle ‘probably intended to deliver biological agents’ or that an effort to procure U.S. mapping software ‘strongly suggests that Iraq is investigating the use of these UAVs for missions targeting the United States.’”
The Senate Intelligence Committee also concluded that the Bush administration’s claims about the supposed relationship between the Iraqi government and al-Qaeda were bogus. Rather than cooperating with Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, as the Bush administration has claimed for the past four years, it turned out that the Iraqi government was trying to arrest Zarqawi.
But the creation of the bogus Saddam Hussein-Osama bin Laden link was not accidental. According to the committee report, the misinformation came via an administration mandate to cast every shred of information in the harshest possible light.
That systemic bias was revealed in the guidelines for a CIA paper produced in June 2002, entitled “Iraq and al-Qa’ida: Interpreting a Murky Relationship.”
The CIA study was designed to assess the Iraqi government’s links to al-Qaeda. But the analysts were given unusual instructions, told to be “purposely aggressive in seeking to draw connections, on the assumption that any indication of a relationship between these two hostile elements could carry great dangers to the United States.”
A former CIA deputy director of intelligence told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the paper’s authors were ordered to “lean far forward and do a speculative piece.” The deputy director told them, “if you were going to stretch to the maximum the evidence you had, what could you come up with.”
In other words, the CIA analysts set out to hype any evidence of possible links between Iraq and al-Qaeda. So, if some piece of information contained even a remote possibility of a connection, the assumption had to be that the tie-in was real and substantive.
When Zarqawi snuck into Baghdad for medical treatment, therefore, the assumption could not be that the Iraqi authorities were unaware of his presence or couldn’t find him; it had to be that Saddam Hussein knew all about it and was collaborating with Zarqawi.
This practice of assuming the worst – rather than attempting to gauge likelihoods as accurately as possible – guaranteed the kind of slanted and even fanciful intelligence reports that guided the United States to war in 2002-2003.
What Bush Wanted
But what is equally clear from the Senate report is that the U.S. intelligence community was giving Bush exactly what he wanted so he could present a litany of alleged grievances that would justify an unprovoked invasion.
Even after the falsity of the intelligence was known, Bush gave CIA Director George Tenet, the bureaucrat who oversaw this perversion of intelligence, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor that can be bestowed on an American civilian.
This pattern of slanting information about Iraq also has not stopped. It continues to the present day.
For instance, one of Bush’s favorite arguments in his stump speeches is that the Democrats are playing into Osama bin Laden’s hands by seeking a U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq.
“In Washington, the Democrats say [Iraq is] not a part of the war against the terrorists, it’s a distraction.” Bush told that crowd in Sellersburg, Indiana. “Well, don’t take my word for it – listen to Osama bin Laden. He has made it clear that Iraq is a central part of this war on terror. He and his number two man, Zawahiri have made it abundantly clear that their goal is to inflict enough damage on innocent life and damage on our own troops so that we leave before the job is done.”
But that isn’t what the latest intelligence on al-Qaeda’s goals shows. Indeed, U.S. intelligence has intercepted communiqués from al-Qaeda leaders to Zarqawi in 2005 that actually reveal their alarm at the possibility of a prompt U.S. military withdrawal and their goal of “prolonging the war” by keeping the Americans bogged down in Iraq.
In a Dec. 11, 2005, letter, a senior al-Qaeda leader known as “Atiyah” lectured Zarqawi on the need to take the long view and build ties with elements of the Sunni-led Iraqi insurgency that had little in common with al-Qaeda except hatred of the Americans.
“The most important thing is that the jihad continues with steadfastness and firm rooting, and that it grows in terms of supporters, strength, clarity of justification, and visible proof each day,” Atiyah wrote. “Indeed, prolonging the war is in our interest.” [Emphasis added.]
The “Atiyah letter,” which was discovered by U.S. authorities at the time of Zarqawi’s death on June 7, 2006, and was translated by the U.S. military’s Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, also stressed the vulnerability of al-Qaeda’s position in Iraq.
“Know that we, like all mujahaddin, are still weak,” Atiyah told Zarqawi. “We have not yet reached a level of stability. We have no alternative but to not squander any element of the foundations of strength or any helper or supporter.” [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Al-Qaeda’s Fragile Foothold.”]
Atiyah’s worries reiterated concerns expressed by bin Laden’s deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri in another intercepted letter from July 7, 2005. In that letter, Zawahiri fretted that a rapid U.S. pullout could cause al-Qaeda’s operation in Iraq to collapse because foreign jihadists, who flocked to Iraq to fight Americans, would give up the fight and go home.
“The mujahaddin must not have their mission end with the expulsion of the Americans from Iraq, and then lay down their weapons, and silence the fighting zeal,” wrote Zawahiri, according to a text released by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence.
To avert mass desertions, Zawahiri suggests that Zarqawi talk up the “idea” of a “caliphate” along the eastern Mediterranean.
What al-Qaeda leaders seem to fear most is that a U.S. military withdrawal would contribute to a disintegration of their fragile position in Iraq, between the expected desertions of the foreign fighters and the targeting of al-Qaeda’s remaining forces by Iraqis determined to rid their country of violent outsiders.
In that sense, the longer the United States remains in Iraq, the deeper al-Qaeda can put down roots and the more it can harden its new recruits through indoctrination and training. These intercepted letters also fit with last April’s conclusion by U.S. intelligence agencies that the U.S. occupation of Iraq has proved to be a “cause celebre” that has spread Islamic radicalism around the globe.
Bush surely knows all this, but he also appears confident that he can continue to sell a distorted interpretation of the evidence to a gullible U.S. public. Basically, it appears that the President believes that the American people are very stupid.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'
Republican Swift-Boating of VA Sen candidate James Webb: Typical SHAMELSS, BRAZEN, Trumped Up Outrage "taken out-of-context for easily led masses..."
<< At the end of the day, the Rove Republicans have once again highlighted how shameless they can truly be. Not only have they brazenly and without remorse attacked the patriotism of decorated veterans like Max Cleland and Senator McCain, but now they're attacking a decorated veteran who wrote about the war. They've ripped these passages out of context for the easily led masses and posted them on Drudge. Then, in the most ridiculous strategic move in this outrageous stratagem, they pooped out Lynne Cheney and dumped her in CNN's lap to perpetuate this trumped up outrage against a Vietnam War veteran. >>
Johnny Reb Allen's Swift Boating Of Jim Webb
Bob Cesca
10.27.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/johnny-reb-allens-swift-_b_32694.html
Bear with me as I try to figure out this Jim Webb situation. Senator Allen and the mighty GOP cabal is making a big deal about several historical novels written by Jim Webb and endorsed by Senator McCain which depict the horrors of the Vietnam War. The horrors include sexual references and acts which many veterans observed in the war. This somehow proves Jim Webb's lack of character.
Am I getting it so far?
Good. Let's continue.
Senator Allen and many of his fellow right wing parrots never served in Vietnam or in any war for that matter and one of the only Republicans who did in fact serve in Vietnam is actually on the record claiming the book is a vivid depiction of the some of the war's atrocities.
Got it. But wait...
Senator Allen, meanwhile, made a cameo appearance in the awful movie Gods and Generals (in the interest of fairness, Stephen Lang, who played Stonewall Jackson, was brilliant). Gods and Generals, apart from being a preachy love letter to the Confederacy with an editorial pace making it seem only about two minutes shorter than the actual war, contained repeated instances of the word "darkies" to describe African-Americans while glorifying the generals who engaged in what technically amounted to an organized military and political insurrection against the United States. Senator Allen is seen in the movie singing the Bonnie Blue Flag lyric, "Hurrah! Hurrah! For Southern rights, hurrah!" implying, in part, the right to own slaves. Senator Allen, when you boil it right down, portrayed a traitor against the United States. An insurgent, if you will.
Yet few would be insane enough to indict Allen for this, other than his taste in writer/directors. It was a movie about actual events and actual behavior in Virginia during the American Civil War. He was involved in a production which fictionalized actual historical events -- events which included the ugliness of American war. Even after repeated allegations of racism, no-one I can think of has actually made an argument against Allen based on his Gods and Generals appearance. If anything, the Republicans could've made a gigantic hoohah over the fact that Allen appeared in the same scene as "far-left secular progressive" Ted Turner who, by the way, financed the movie and portrayed a Confederate officer.
That said, Senator Allen has again exposed his own lack of character and, more than anything, his myriad of political weaknesses in this latest desperate smear of his opponent. Allen dressed up in a mustache and butternut uniform and performed in a theatrical account of the Civil War which dramatized, in part, some of the ugliest truths of that era. Webb actually served meritoriously in the Vietnam War and wrote about the ugly truths he witnessed in wartime and its aftermath. Allen pretended to be a soldier, which is as close as he ever came to actual military service, while Webb served bravely and honorably.
Now tell me -- because maybe I'm missing it -- do Senator Allen and his chickenhawk supporters in the wingnut media have a leg to stand on? Does Lynne Cheney, who has written salacious books and whose husband received five deferments from the draft during Vietnam ("Dick did not"), have any right to impugn Jim Webb on CNN? Do the hypocrite roll call. It's not too difficult. Check out some of Arnold's movies. Check out what the president and others did while members of Yale's Skull & Bones society.
At the end of the day, the Rove Republicans have once again highlighted how shameless they can truly be. Not only have they brazenly and without remorse attacked the patriotism of decorated veterans like Max Cleland and Senator McCain, but now they're attacking a decorated veteran who wrote about the war. They've ripped these passages out of context for the easily led masses and posted them on Drudge. Then, in the most ridiculous strategic move in this outrageous stratagem, they pooped out Lynne Cheney and dumped her in CNN's lap to perpetuate this trumped up outrage against a Vietnam War veteran.
Now Jim Webb, a well-vetted Reagan appointee, has been forced to defend his stories of the war. Likewise, Michael J. Fox has been forced to defend his Parkinson's symptoms. What kind of party is this which controls our entire government and most of our media right now? It's surely a party which hasn't deserved a single second of that kind of success. And the only reason why they've managed to attain this power is very simply because they're good at "one thing," as Karl Rove quoted from City Slickers this week. That one thing is manipulation. They manipulate you and everyone they encounter through fear, deception and ignorance of the truth. They manipulate good people into defending themselves when no defense would otherwise have been required.
I think I've grasped this now. Thanks for your patience.
A final note to anyone who's written about the atrocities of the Iraq War and who plans to one day serve in politics. Delete now -- especially if there's a chapter about Abu Ghraib containing the phrase "naked men smeared with feces forming a human pyramid." Who knows what brand of futuristic cyberwingnut will try to nail you on it.
Johnny Reb Allen's Swift Boating Of Jim Webb
Bob Cesca
10.27.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/johnny-reb-allens-swift-_b_32694.html
Bear with me as I try to figure out this Jim Webb situation. Senator Allen and the mighty GOP cabal is making a big deal about several historical novels written by Jim Webb and endorsed by Senator McCain which depict the horrors of the Vietnam War. The horrors include sexual references and acts which many veterans observed in the war. This somehow proves Jim Webb's lack of character.
Am I getting it so far?
Good. Let's continue.
Senator Allen and many of his fellow right wing parrots never served in Vietnam or in any war for that matter and one of the only Republicans who did in fact serve in Vietnam is actually on the record claiming the book is a vivid depiction of the some of the war's atrocities.
Got it. But wait...
Senator Allen, meanwhile, made a cameo appearance in the awful movie Gods and Generals (in the interest of fairness, Stephen Lang, who played Stonewall Jackson, was brilliant). Gods and Generals, apart from being a preachy love letter to the Confederacy with an editorial pace making it seem only about two minutes shorter than the actual war, contained repeated instances of the word "darkies" to describe African-Americans while glorifying the generals who engaged in what technically amounted to an organized military and political insurrection against the United States. Senator Allen is seen in the movie singing the Bonnie Blue Flag lyric, "Hurrah! Hurrah! For Southern rights, hurrah!" implying, in part, the right to own slaves. Senator Allen, when you boil it right down, portrayed a traitor against the United States. An insurgent, if you will.
Yet few would be insane enough to indict Allen for this, other than his taste in writer/directors. It was a movie about actual events and actual behavior in Virginia during the American Civil War. He was involved in a production which fictionalized actual historical events -- events which included the ugliness of American war. Even after repeated allegations of racism, no-one I can think of has actually made an argument against Allen based on his Gods and Generals appearance. If anything, the Republicans could've made a gigantic hoohah over the fact that Allen appeared in the same scene as "far-left secular progressive" Ted Turner who, by the way, financed the movie and portrayed a Confederate officer.
That said, Senator Allen has again exposed his own lack of character and, more than anything, his myriad of political weaknesses in this latest desperate smear of his opponent. Allen dressed up in a mustache and butternut uniform and performed in a theatrical account of the Civil War which dramatized, in part, some of the ugliest truths of that era. Webb actually served meritoriously in the Vietnam War and wrote about the ugly truths he witnessed in wartime and its aftermath. Allen pretended to be a soldier, which is as close as he ever came to actual military service, while Webb served bravely and honorably.
Now tell me -- because maybe I'm missing it -- do Senator Allen and his chickenhawk supporters in the wingnut media have a leg to stand on? Does Lynne Cheney, who has written salacious books and whose husband received five deferments from the draft during Vietnam ("Dick did not"), have any right to impugn Jim Webb on CNN? Do the hypocrite roll call. It's not too difficult. Check out some of Arnold's movies. Check out what the president and others did while members of Yale's Skull & Bones society.
At the end of the day, the Rove Republicans have once again highlighted how shameless they can truly be. Not only have they brazenly and without remorse attacked the patriotism of decorated veterans like Max Cleland and Senator McCain, but now they're attacking a decorated veteran who wrote about the war. They've ripped these passages out of context for the easily led masses and posted them on Drudge. Then, in the most ridiculous strategic move in this outrageous stratagem, they pooped out Lynne Cheney and dumped her in CNN's lap to perpetuate this trumped up outrage against a Vietnam War veteran.
Now Jim Webb, a well-vetted Reagan appointee, has been forced to defend his stories of the war. Likewise, Michael J. Fox has been forced to defend his Parkinson's symptoms. What kind of party is this which controls our entire government and most of our media right now? It's surely a party which hasn't deserved a single second of that kind of success. And the only reason why they've managed to attain this power is very simply because they're good at "one thing," as Karl Rove quoted from City Slickers this week. That one thing is manipulation. They manipulate you and everyone they encounter through fear, deception and ignorance of the truth. They manipulate good people into defending themselves when no defense would otherwise have been required.
I think I've grasped this now. Thanks for your patience.
A final note to anyone who's written about the atrocities of the Iraq War and who plans to one day serve in politics. Delete now -- especially if there's a chapter about Abu Ghraib containing the phrase "naked men smeared with feces forming a human pyramid." Who knows what brand of futuristic cyberwingnut will try to nail you on it.
Sunday, October 29, 2006
GAO chief warns of US "ECONOMIC DISASTER." Shouldn't this be page _A-1_ of the Whore NY Times and Cowardly Wa. Post...?
The NY TIMES and Washington POST have been PIMPING and WHORING Bush's TAX CUTS for MILLIONAIRES and BILLIONAIRES for so long (along with other serial administration gross abuses of the public trust and government obligations), that when the inevitable "America_the_Bankrupt" headline breaks out... they CENSOR IT miles and miles and miles from their FRONT PAGE HEADLINES.
Unlike the treatment these media whores gave "The Lincoln Bedroom SCANDAL!" and "White House Trashing SCANDAL!" and "Travel Office SCANDAL!" and a dozen other MANUFACTURED_OUT_OF_THIN_AIR scandals and accusations levelled at the previous administration...
(notice also how this article, about bad economic news for the administration and government, much less for millions of American workers and taxpayers, is also buffered by the folksey, talksey "David Walker sounds like he's running for office" story-line...)
<<
WHAT THEY DON'T TALK ABOUT is a dirty little secret everyone in Washington knows, or at least should. THE VAST MAJORITY OF ECONOMISTS and BUDGET ANALYSTS AGREE: The ship of state is on a disastrous course, and will founder on the reefs of ECONOMIC DISASTER if nothing is done to correct it. >>
-------------------------------------
GAO chief warns economic disaster looms
By MATT CRENSON, AP National Writer
Sat Oct 28, 6:54 PM ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061028/ap_on_go_ot/america_the_bankrupt
AUSTIN, Texas - David M. Walker sure talks like he's running for office. "This is about the future of our country, our kids and grandkids," the comptroller general of the United States warns a packed hall at Austin's historic Driskill Hotel. "We the people have to rise up to make sure things get changed."
But Walker doesn't want, or need, your vote this November. He already has a job as head of the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress that audits and evaluates the performance of the federal government.
Basically, that makes Walker the nation's accountant-in-chief. And the accountant-in-chief's professional opinion is that the American public needs to tell Washington it's time to steer the nation off the path to financial ruin.
From the hustings and the airwaves this campaign season, America's political class can be heard debating Capitol Hill sex scandals, the wisdom of the war in Iraq and which party is tougher on terror. Democrats and Republicans talk of cutting taxes to make life easier for the American people.
What they don't talk about is a dirty little secret everyone in Washington knows, or at least should. The vast majority of economists and budget analysts agree: The ship of state is on a disastrous course, and will founder on the reefs of economic disaster if nothing is done to correct it.
There's a good reason politicians don't like to talk about the nation's long-term fiscal prospects. The subject is short on political theatrics and long on complicated economics, scary graphs and very big numbers. It reveals serious problems and offers no easy solutions. Anybody who wanted to deal with it seriously would have to talk about raising taxes and cutting benefits, nasty nostrums that might doom any candidate who prescribed them.
"There's no sexiness to it," laments Leita Hart-Fanta, an accountant who has just heard Walker's pitch. She suggests recruiting a trusted celebrity — maybe Oprah — to sell fiscal responsibility to the American people.
Walker doesn't want to make balancing the federal government's books sexy — he just wants to make it politically palatable. He has committed to touring the nation through the 2008 elections, talking to anybody who will listen about the fiscal black hole Washington has dug itself, the "demographic tsunami" that will come when the baby boom generation begins retiring and the recklessness of borrowing money from foreign lenders to pay for the operation of the U.S. government.
"He can speak forthrightly and independently because his job is not in jeopardy if he tells the truth," said Isabel V. Sawhill, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution.
Walker can talk in public about the nation's impending fiscal crisis because he has one of the most secure jobs in Washington. As comptroller general of the United States — basically, the government's chief accountant — he is serving a 15-year term that runs through 2013.
This year Walker has spoken to the Union League Club of Chicago and the Rotary Club of Atlanta, the Sons of the American Revolution and the World Future Society. But the backbone of his campaign has been the Fiscal Wake-up Tour, a traveling roadshow of economists and budget analysts who share Walker's concern for the nation's budgetary future.
"You can't solve a problem until the majority of the people believe you have a problem that needs to be solved," Walker says.
Polls suggest that Americans have only a vague sense of their government's long-term fiscal prospects. When pollsters ask Americans to name the most important problem facing America today — as a CBS News/New York Times poll of 1,131 Americans did in September — issues such as the war in Iraq, terrorism, jobs and the economy are most frequently mentioned. The deficit doesn't even crack the top 10.
Yet on the rare occasions that pollsters ask directly about the deficit, at least some people appear to recognize it as a problem. In a survey of 807 Americans last year by the Pew Center for the People and the Press, 42 percent of respondents said reducing the deficit should be a top priority; another 38 percent said it was important but a lower priority.
So the majority of the public appears to agree with Walker that the deficit is a serious problem, but only when they're made to think about it. Walker's challenge is to get people not just to think about it, but to pressure politicians to make the hard choices that are needed to keep the situation from spiraling out of control.
To show that the looming fiscal crisis is not a partisan issue, he brings along economists and budget analysts from across the political spectrum. In Austin, he's accompanied by Diane Lim Rogers, a liberal economist from the Brookings Institution, and Alison Acosta Fraser, director of the Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
"We all agree on what the choices are and what the numbers are," Fraser says.
Their basic message is this: If the United States government conducts business as usual over the next few decades, a national debt that is already $8.5 trillion could reach $46 trillion or more, adjusted for inflation. That's almost as much as the total net worth of every person in America — Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and those Google guys included.
A hole that big could paralyze the U.S. economy; according to some projections, just the interest payments on a debt that big would be as much as all the taxes the government collects today.
And every year that nothing is done about it, Walker says, the problem grows by $2 trillion to $3 trillion.
People who remember Ross Perot's rants in the 1992 presidential election may think of the federal debt as a problem of the past. But it never really went away after Perot made it an issue, it only took a breather. The federal government actually produced a surplus for a few years during the 1990s, thanks to a booming economy and fiscal restraint imposed by laws that were passed early in the decade. And though the federal debt has grown in dollar terms since 2001, it hasn't grown dramatically relative to the size of the economy.
But that's about to change, thanks to the country's three big entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicaid and especially Medicare. Medicaid and Medicare have grown progressively more expensive as the cost of health care has dramatically outpaced inflation over the past 30 years, a trend that is expected to continue for at least another decade or two.
And with the first baby boomers becoming eligible for Social Security in 2008 and for Medicare in 2011, the expenses of those two programs are about to increase dramatically due to demographic pressures. People are also living longer, which makes any program that provides benefits to retirees more expensive.
Medicare already costs four times as much as it did in 1970, measured as a percentage of the nation's gross domestic product. It currently comprises 13 percent of federal spending; by 2030, the Congressional Budget Office projects it will consume nearly a quarter of the budget.
Economists Jagadeesh Gokhale of the American Enterprise Institute and Kent Smetters of the University of Pennsylvania have an even scarier way of looking at Medicare. Their method calculates the program's long-term fiscal shortfall — the annual difference between its dedicated revenues and costs — over time.
By 2030 they calculate Medicare will be about $5 trillion in the hole, measured in 2004 dollars. By 2080, the fiscal imbalance will have risen to $25 trillion. And when you project the gap out to an infinite time horizon, it reaches $60 trillion.
Medicare so dominates the nation's fiscal future that some economists believe health care reform, rather than budget measures, is the best way to attack the problem.
"Obviously health care is a mess," says Dean Baker, a liberal economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington think tank. "No one's been willing to touch it, but that's what I see as front and center."
Social Security is a much less serious problem. The program currently pays for itself with a 12.4 percent payroll tax, and even produces a surplus that the government raids every year to pay other bills. But Social Security will begin to run deficits during the next century, and ultimately would need an infusion of $8 trillion if the government planned to keep its promises to every beneficiary.
Calculations by Boston University economist Lawrence Kotlikoff indicate that closing those gaps — $8 trillion for Social Security, many times that for Medicare — and paying off the existing deficit would require either an immediate doubling of personal and corporate income taxes, a two-thirds cut in Social Security and Medicare benefits, or some combination of the two.
Why is America so fiscally unprepared for the next century? Like many of its citizens, the United States has spent the last few years racking up debt instead of saving for the future. Foreign lenders — primarily the central banks of China, Japan and other big U.S. trading partners — have been eager to lend the government money at low interest rates, making the current $8.5-trillion deficit about as painful as a big balance on a zero-percent credit card.
In her part of the fiscal wake-up tour presentation, Rogers tries to explain why that's a bad thing. For one thing, even when rates are low a bigger deficit means a greater portion of each tax dollar goes to interest payments rather than useful programs. And because foreigners now hold so much of the federal government's debt, those interest payments increasingly go overseas rather than to U.S. investors.
More serious is the possibility that foreign lenders might lose their enthusiasm for lending money to the United States. Because treasury bills are sold at auction, that would mean paying higher interest rates in the future. And it wouldn't just be the government's problem. All interest rates would rise, making mortgages, car payments and student loans costlier, too.
A modest rise in interest rates wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, Rogers said. America's consumers have as much of a borrowing problem as their government does, so higher rates could moderate overconsumption and encourage consumer saving. But a big jump in interest rates could cause economic catastrophe. Some economists even predict the government would resort to printing money to pay off its debt, a risky strategy that could lead to runaway inflation.
Macroeconomic meltdown is probably preventable, says Anjan Thakor, a professor of finance at Washington University in St. Louis. But to keep it at bay, he said, the government is essentially going to have to renegotiate some of the promises it has made to its citizens, probably by some combination of tax increases and benefit cuts.
But there's no way to avoid what Rogers considers the worst result of racking up a big deficit — the outrage of making our children and grandchildren repay the debts of their elders.
"It's an unfair burden for future generations," she says.
You'd think young people would be riled up over this issue, since they're the ones who will foot the bill when they're out in the working world. But students take more interest in issues like the Iraq war and gay marriage than the federal government's finances, says Emma Vernon, a member of the University of Texas Young Democrats.
"It's not something that can fire people up," she says.
The current political climate doesn't help. Washington tends to keep its fiscal house in better order when one party controls Congress and the other is in the White House, says Sawhill.
"It's kind of a paradoxical result. Your commonsense logic would tell you if one party is in control of everything they should be able to take action," Sawhill says.
But the last six years of Republican rule have produced tax cuts, record spending increases and a Medicare prescription drug plan that has been widely criticized as fiscally unsound. When President Clinton faced a Republican Congress during the 1990s, spending limits and other legislative tools helped produce a surplus.
So maybe a solution is at hand.
"We're likely to have at least partially divided government again," Sawhill said, referring to predictions that the Democrats will capture the House, and possibly the Senate, in next month's elections.
But Walker isn't optimistic that the government will be able to tackle its fiscal challenges so soon.
"Realistically what we hope to accomplish through the fiscal wake-up tour is ensure that any serious candidate for the presidency in 2008 will be forced to deal with the issue," he says. "The best we're going to get in the next couple of years is to slow the bleeding."
Unlike the treatment these media whores gave "The Lincoln Bedroom SCANDAL!" and "White House Trashing SCANDAL!" and "Travel Office SCANDAL!" and a dozen other MANUFACTURED_OUT_OF_THIN_AIR scandals and accusations levelled at the previous administration...
(notice also how this article, about bad economic news for the administration and government, much less for millions of American workers and taxpayers, is also buffered by the folksey, talksey "David Walker sounds like he's running for office" story-line...)
<<
WHAT THEY DON'T TALK ABOUT is a dirty little secret everyone in Washington knows, or at least should. THE VAST MAJORITY OF ECONOMISTS and BUDGET ANALYSTS AGREE: The ship of state is on a disastrous course, and will founder on the reefs of ECONOMIC DISASTER if nothing is done to correct it. >>
-------------------------------------
GAO chief warns economic disaster looms
By MATT CRENSON, AP National Writer
Sat Oct 28, 6:54 PM ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061028/ap_on_go_ot/america_the_bankrupt
AUSTIN, Texas - David M. Walker sure talks like he's running for office. "This is about the future of our country, our kids and grandkids," the comptroller general of the United States warns a packed hall at Austin's historic Driskill Hotel. "We the people have to rise up to make sure things get changed."
But Walker doesn't want, or need, your vote this November. He already has a job as head of the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress that audits and evaluates the performance of the federal government.
Basically, that makes Walker the nation's accountant-in-chief. And the accountant-in-chief's professional opinion is that the American public needs to tell Washington it's time to steer the nation off the path to financial ruin.
From the hustings and the airwaves this campaign season, America's political class can be heard debating Capitol Hill sex scandals, the wisdom of the war in Iraq and which party is tougher on terror. Democrats and Republicans talk of cutting taxes to make life easier for the American people.
What they don't talk about is a dirty little secret everyone in Washington knows, or at least should. The vast majority of economists and budget analysts agree: The ship of state is on a disastrous course, and will founder on the reefs of economic disaster if nothing is done to correct it.
There's a good reason politicians don't like to talk about the nation's long-term fiscal prospects. The subject is short on political theatrics and long on complicated economics, scary graphs and very big numbers. It reveals serious problems and offers no easy solutions. Anybody who wanted to deal with it seriously would have to talk about raising taxes and cutting benefits, nasty nostrums that might doom any candidate who prescribed them.
"There's no sexiness to it," laments Leita Hart-Fanta, an accountant who has just heard Walker's pitch. She suggests recruiting a trusted celebrity — maybe Oprah — to sell fiscal responsibility to the American people.
Walker doesn't want to make balancing the federal government's books sexy — he just wants to make it politically palatable. He has committed to touring the nation through the 2008 elections, talking to anybody who will listen about the fiscal black hole Washington has dug itself, the "demographic tsunami" that will come when the baby boom generation begins retiring and the recklessness of borrowing money from foreign lenders to pay for the operation of the U.S. government.
"He can speak forthrightly and independently because his job is not in jeopardy if he tells the truth," said Isabel V. Sawhill, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution.
Walker can talk in public about the nation's impending fiscal crisis because he has one of the most secure jobs in Washington. As comptroller general of the United States — basically, the government's chief accountant — he is serving a 15-year term that runs through 2013.
This year Walker has spoken to the Union League Club of Chicago and the Rotary Club of Atlanta, the Sons of the American Revolution and the World Future Society. But the backbone of his campaign has been the Fiscal Wake-up Tour, a traveling roadshow of economists and budget analysts who share Walker's concern for the nation's budgetary future.
"You can't solve a problem until the majority of the people believe you have a problem that needs to be solved," Walker says.
Polls suggest that Americans have only a vague sense of their government's long-term fiscal prospects. When pollsters ask Americans to name the most important problem facing America today — as a CBS News/New York Times poll of 1,131 Americans did in September — issues such as the war in Iraq, terrorism, jobs and the economy are most frequently mentioned. The deficit doesn't even crack the top 10.
Yet on the rare occasions that pollsters ask directly about the deficit, at least some people appear to recognize it as a problem. In a survey of 807 Americans last year by the Pew Center for the People and the Press, 42 percent of respondents said reducing the deficit should be a top priority; another 38 percent said it was important but a lower priority.
So the majority of the public appears to agree with Walker that the deficit is a serious problem, but only when they're made to think about it. Walker's challenge is to get people not just to think about it, but to pressure politicians to make the hard choices that are needed to keep the situation from spiraling out of control.
To show that the looming fiscal crisis is not a partisan issue, he brings along economists and budget analysts from across the political spectrum. In Austin, he's accompanied by Diane Lim Rogers, a liberal economist from the Brookings Institution, and Alison Acosta Fraser, director of the Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
"We all agree on what the choices are and what the numbers are," Fraser says.
Their basic message is this: If the United States government conducts business as usual over the next few decades, a national debt that is already $8.5 trillion could reach $46 trillion or more, adjusted for inflation. That's almost as much as the total net worth of every person in America — Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and those Google guys included.
A hole that big could paralyze the U.S. economy; according to some projections, just the interest payments on a debt that big would be as much as all the taxes the government collects today.
And every year that nothing is done about it, Walker says, the problem grows by $2 trillion to $3 trillion.
People who remember Ross Perot's rants in the 1992 presidential election may think of the federal debt as a problem of the past. But it never really went away after Perot made it an issue, it only took a breather. The federal government actually produced a surplus for a few years during the 1990s, thanks to a booming economy and fiscal restraint imposed by laws that were passed early in the decade. And though the federal debt has grown in dollar terms since 2001, it hasn't grown dramatically relative to the size of the economy.
But that's about to change, thanks to the country's three big entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicaid and especially Medicare. Medicaid and Medicare have grown progressively more expensive as the cost of health care has dramatically outpaced inflation over the past 30 years, a trend that is expected to continue for at least another decade or two.
And with the first baby boomers becoming eligible for Social Security in 2008 and for Medicare in 2011, the expenses of those two programs are about to increase dramatically due to demographic pressures. People are also living longer, which makes any program that provides benefits to retirees more expensive.
Medicare already costs four times as much as it did in 1970, measured as a percentage of the nation's gross domestic product. It currently comprises 13 percent of federal spending; by 2030, the Congressional Budget Office projects it will consume nearly a quarter of the budget.
Economists Jagadeesh Gokhale of the American Enterprise Institute and Kent Smetters of the University of Pennsylvania have an even scarier way of looking at Medicare. Their method calculates the program's long-term fiscal shortfall — the annual difference between its dedicated revenues and costs — over time.
By 2030 they calculate Medicare will be about $5 trillion in the hole, measured in 2004 dollars. By 2080, the fiscal imbalance will have risen to $25 trillion. And when you project the gap out to an infinite time horizon, it reaches $60 trillion.
Medicare so dominates the nation's fiscal future that some economists believe health care reform, rather than budget measures, is the best way to attack the problem.
"Obviously health care is a mess," says Dean Baker, a liberal economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington think tank. "No one's been willing to touch it, but that's what I see as front and center."
Social Security is a much less serious problem. The program currently pays for itself with a 12.4 percent payroll tax, and even produces a surplus that the government raids every year to pay other bills. But Social Security will begin to run deficits during the next century, and ultimately would need an infusion of $8 trillion if the government planned to keep its promises to every beneficiary.
Calculations by Boston University economist Lawrence Kotlikoff indicate that closing those gaps — $8 trillion for Social Security, many times that for Medicare — and paying off the existing deficit would require either an immediate doubling of personal and corporate income taxes, a two-thirds cut in Social Security and Medicare benefits, or some combination of the two.
Why is America so fiscally unprepared for the next century? Like many of its citizens, the United States has spent the last few years racking up debt instead of saving for the future. Foreign lenders — primarily the central banks of China, Japan and other big U.S. trading partners — have been eager to lend the government money at low interest rates, making the current $8.5-trillion deficit about as painful as a big balance on a zero-percent credit card.
In her part of the fiscal wake-up tour presentation, Rogers tries to explain why that's a bad thing. For one thing, even when rates are low a bigger deficit means a greater portion of each tax dollar goes to interest payments rather than useful programs. And because foreigners now hold so much of the federal government's debt, those interest payments increasingly go overseas rather than to U.S. investors.
More serious is the possibility that foreign lenders might lose their enthusiasm for lending money to the United States. Because treasury bills are sold at auction, that would mean paying higher interest rates in the future. And it wouldn't just be the government's problem. All interest rates would rise, making mortgages, car payments and student loans costlier, too.
A modest rise in interest rates wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, Rogers said. America's consumers have as much of a borrowing problem as their government does, so higher rates could moderate overconsumption and encourage consumer saving. But a big jump in interest rates could cause economic catastrophe. Some economists even predict the government would resort to printing money to pay off its debt, a risky strategy that could lead to runaway inflation.
Macroeconomic meltdown is probably preventable, says Anjan Thakor, a professor of finance at Washington University in St. Louis. But to keep it at bay, he said, the government is essentially going to have to renegotiate some of the promises it has made to its citizens, probably by some combination of tax increases and benefit cuts.
But there's no way to avoid what Rogers considers the worst result of racking up a big deficit — the outrage of making our children and grandchildren repay the debts of their elders.
"It's an unfair burden for future generations," she says.
You'd think young people would be riled up over this issue, since they're the ones who will foot the bill when they're out in the working world. But students take more interest in issues like the Iraq war and gay marriage than the federal government's finances, says Emma Vernon, a member of the University of Texas Young Democrats.
"It's not something that can fire people up," she says.
The current political climate doesn't help. Washington tends to keep its fiscal house in better order when one party controls Congress and the other is in the White House, says Sawhill.
"It's kind of a paradoxical result. Your commonsense logic would tell you if one party is in control of everything they should be able to take action," Sawhill says.
But the last six years of Republican rule have produced tax cuts, record spending increases and a Medicare prescription drug plan that has been widely criticized as fiscally unsound. When President Clinton faced a Republican Congress during the 1990s, spending limits and other legislative tools helped produce a surplus.
So maybe a solution is at hand.
"We're likely to have at least partially divided government again," Sawhill said, referring to predictions that the Democrats will capture the House, and possibly the Senate, in next month's elections.
But Walker isn't optimistic that the government will be able to tackle its fiscal challenges so soon.
"Realistically what we hope to accomplish through the fiscal wake-up tour is ensure that any serious candidate for the presidency in 2008 will be forced to deal with the issue," he says. "The best we're going to get in the next couple of years is to slow the bleeding."
CBS WHORES the favorite media fallacy: If Repubs do it, Dems ARE GUILTY TOO..!
Who Made The Sleaziest Ad?
The ad PRODUCED BY the REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE AGAINST Harold Ford in Tennessee MAY BE THE SLEAZIEST OF THE SEASON. That’s hard to say definitively, because we’ve got more than a week to go and desperate candidates will do desperate things to get elected.
But here’s the thing. Negative, attack ads like that used to be produced by “shadowy outside groups” and took days to track down who actually made the ad and who paid for it.
Well, it ain’t so hard anymore. We know who did that ad…they told us right at the end of it – THE REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE. . That’s right. Despite all the brouhaha over campaign reform—and getting rid of those independent groups that finance so many sleazy ads—the sleazy ads are now financed by a new source: THE POLITICAL PARTIES THEMSELVES.
=================
NOTE HOW EASILY the CBS news whores JUMP from finding THE RNC GUILTY of producing this ad... to SMEARING, TARRING, and SLANDERING Howard Dean and the Democratic Party as GUILTY of doing same, WITHOUT PRODUCING A LICK OF EVIDENCE!!
DAMN YOU, you CBS NEWS WHORES! IN case you are TOO STUPID or TOO CORRUPTED to notice, the Rethuglicans OWN A MONOPOLY on power in the US government at this point: THEY CONTROL the HOUSE, the SENATE, the WHITE HOUSE, the SUPREME COURT, most federal courts, all government agencies; most state houses and gov's mansions, AND the "Fourth Estate" (media/press whore-land) as well. In states like Florida today, the Rethugs have MONOPOLY POWER on both state houses, the Gov's mansion, the US House, the US Senate, and the White House..... THAT's SIX out of SIX!
And Republican rule in all those houses is SO STRONG, that they FREEZE Democrats OUT OF EVEN CONSIDERATION in writing bills.
AND the Republicans "won" that MAJORITY POWER JUGGERNAUT, by TWO DECADES of RELENTLESS ATTACK and ACCUSATION ADS against Democrats. The ads that are SYNONYMOUS with Vietnam War chickenhawks like KARL ROVE and NEWT GINGRICH and TOM DeLAY and DICK Cheney and... ALL FOUR of the Bush sons.
And even WITH the huge Rethuglican MONOPOLY on goverrnmental power in so many cases... and even WITH the Rethuglican huge advantage in FUND RAISING garnered by their "SLUSH-FUND KICKBACKS" to big corporate donors who receive sweet-heart tax cuts and huge government business contracts... EVEN WITH ALL THAT, the Rethuglicans STILL must depend on AGGRESSIVE DISENFRANCHISEMENT and COMPUTERIZED VOTE FRAUD to steal elections. That is, **STEAL** the LEGAL VOTES of LEGAL American voters (while crying "VOTE FRAUD!" against the Democrats, of course)....
...even with ALL THOSE ADVANTAGES, the craven, cowardly, corrupt CBS 'news' network INSISTS that Democrats ARE AUTOMATICALLY GUILTY of the Republican's worst, SLEAZIEST CAMPAIGN ADS.
YOU, Sirs, ARE cheap, sleazy WHORES!
==========================
Who Made The Sleaziest Ad?
by CBS news
October 27, 2006
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2006/10/27/couricandco/entry2132340.shtml
The ad produced by the Republican National Committee against Harold Ford in Tennessee may be the sleaziest of the season. That’s hard to say definitively, because we’ve got more than a week to go and desperate candidates will do desperate things to get elected.
But here’s the thing. Negative, attack ads like that used to be produced by “shadowy outside groups” and took days to track down who actually made the ad and who paid for it.
Well, it ain’t so hard anymore. We know who did that ad…they told us right at the end of it – The Republican National Committee. That’s right. Despite all the brouhaha over campaign reform—and getting rid of those independent groups that finance so many sleazy ads—the sleazy ads are now financed by a new source: THE POLITICAL PARTIES THEMSELVES.
It's an easy way to put on negative ads and give the national parties and the candidates deniability. Here’s how it works.
You create an independent expenditure subsidiary of the national party and erect a wall between it and the rest of the committee. And you tell people that the RNC doesn't have any idea what the independent expenditure subsidiary is doing because it is not allowed to know by law. Same applies to the Democrats. And to all official party committees, like the ones that deal specifically with campaigns for the House or the Senate. And it’s all perfectly legal. In fact, the Supreme Court upheld this practice.
The ads are funded by the committees. But technically, they don’t have any say or know anything about them or where and when they’re playing. Hmmm. Do you believe that?
That’s exactly what Ken Mehlman, Chairman of the Republican National Committee said when confronted about the anti-Ford ad that credited his committee with its content and production. Howard Dean would tell you the same thing if confronted about some of the many ads the DNC produces through its independent expenditure apparatus.
The RNC and DNC get away with this because they can. They'll fund all the negative ads and happily so. So, the good news is that you don’t need shadowy groups anymore. The bad news is that now they’re officially part of the system…and apparently untouchable and unaccountable.
The ad PRODUCED BY the REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE AGAINST Harold Ford in Tennessee MAY BE THE SLEAZIEST OF THE SEASON. That’s hard to say definitively, because we’ve got more than a week to go and desperate candidates will do desperate things to get elected.
But here’s the thing. Negative, attack ads like that used to be produced by “shadowy outside groups” and took days to track down who actually made the ad and who paid for it.
Well, it ain’t so hard anymore. We know who did that ad…they told us right at the end of it – THE REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE. . That’s right. Despite all the brouhaha over campaign reform—and getting rid of those independent groups that finance so many sleazy ads—the sleazy ads are now financed by a new source: THE POLITICAL PARTIES THEMSELVES.
=================
NOTE HOW EASILY the CBS news whores JUMP from finding THE RNC GUILTY of producing this ad... to SMEARING, TARRING, and SLANDERING Howard Dean and the Democratic Party as GUILTY of doing same, WITHOUT PRODUCING A LICK OF EVIDENCE!!
DAMN YOU, you CBS NEWS WHORES! IN case you are TOO STUPID or TOO CORRUPTED to notice, the Rethuglicans OWN A MONOPOLY on power in the US government at this point: THEY CONTROL the HOUSE, the SENATE, the WHITE HOUSE, the SUPREME COURT, most federal courts, all government agencies; most state houses and gov's mansions, AND the "Fourth Estate" (media/press whore-land) as well. In states like Florida today, the Rethugs have MONOPOLY POWER on both state houses, the Gov's mansion, the US House, the US Senate, and the White House..... THAT's SIX out of SIX!
And Republican rule in all those houses is SO STRONG, that they FREEZE Democrats OUT OF EVEN CONSIDERATION in writing bills.
AND the Republicans "won" that MAJORITY POWER JUGGERNAUT, by TWO DECADES of RELENTLESS ATTACK and ACCUSATION ADS against Democrats. The ads that are SYNONYMOUS with Vietnam War chickenhawks like KARL ROVE and NEWT GINGRICH and TOM DeLAY and DICK Cheney and... ALL FOUR of the Bush sons.
And even WITH the huge Rethuglican MONOPOLY on goverrnmental power in so many cases... and even WITH the Rethuglican huge advantage in FUND RAISING garnered by their "SLUSH-FUND KICKBACKS" to big corporate donors who receive sweet-heart tax cuts and huge government business contracts... EVEN WITH ALL THAT, the Rethuglicans STILL must depend on AGGRESSIVE DISENFRANCHISEMENT and COMPUTERIZED VOTE FRAUD to steal elections. That is, **STEAL** the LEGAL VOTES of LEGAL American voters (while crying "VOTE FRAUD!" against the Democrats, of course)....
...even with ALL THOSE ADVANTAGES, the craven, cowardly, corrupt CBS 'news' network INSISTS that Democrats ARE AUTOMATICALLY GUILTY of the Republican's worst, SLEAZIEST CAMPAIGN ADS.
YOU, Sirs, ARE cheap, sleazy WHORES!
==========================
Who Made The Sleaziest Ad?
by CBS news
October 27, 2006
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2006/10/27/couricandco/entry2132340.shtml
The ad produced by the Republican National Committee against Harold Ford in Tennessee may be the sleaziest of the season. That’s hard to say definitively, because we’ve got more than a week to go and desperate candidates will do desperate things to get elected.
But here’s the thing. Negative, attack ads like that used to be produced by “shadowy outside groups” and took days to track down who actually made the ad and who paid for it.
Well, it ain’t so hard anymore. We know who did that ad…they told us right at the end of it – The Republican National Committee. That’s right. Despite all the brouhaha over campaign reform—and getting rid of those independent groups that finance so many sleazy ads—the sleazy ads are now financed by a new source: THE POLITICAL PARTIES THEMSELVES.
It's an easy way to put on negative ads and give the national parties and the candidates deniability. Here’s how it works.
You create an independent expenditure subsidiary of the national party and erect a wall between it and the rest of the committee. And you tell people that the RNC doesn't have any idea what the independent expenditure subsidiary is doing because it is not allowed to know by law. Same applies to the Democrats. And to all official party committees, like the ones that deal specifically with campaigns for the House or the Senate. And it’s all perfectly legal. In fact, the Supreme Court upheld this practice.
The ads are funded by the committees. But technically, they don’t have any say or know anything about them or where and when they’re playing. Hmmm. Do you believe that?
That’s exactly what Ken Mehlman, Chairman of the Republican National Committee said when confronted about the anti-Ford ad that credited his committee with its content and production. Howard Dean would tell you the same thing if confronted about some of the many ads the DNC produces through its independent expenditure apparatus.
The RNC and DNC get away with this because they can. They'll fund all the negative ads and happily so. So, the good news is that you don’t need shadowy groups anymore. The bad news is that now they’re officially part of the system…and apparently untouchable and unaccountable.
Saturday, October 28, 2006
Huffpost: NY Times pimps "Congress can't do anything about Bush's war..even if Dems gain majority."
We don't know if we here at MediaWhoresUSA have started a trend or not, but by all means, we hope everyone in America will join in the fun.... IT'S EASY to catch the NEW YORK TIMES pimping war, "UNITARY RULE" (aka, totalitarian dictatorship and all the trappings thereof: stolen elections, secret elections, secret wars, torture, secretive budget billions, a foreign policy based on death squads, warlords, and theocratic 'allies', redistribution of wealth to the hyper-wealthy and destruction of the middle class, gutting of social services and gutting of oversight over financial irregularities and corporate misconduct ) and of course the eternal offspring of totalitarian regimes; propaganda and OUTRIGHT LIES and FABRICATIONS.
Thanks, Mark Weisbrot, Robert Naiman, and Huffpost, for this latest addition to the awful follies of the LYIN' "we love government by lies and propaganda" NY Times.
================================
New York Times Says Dem Congress Won't Have Authority to Change Course of Iraq War
Mark Weisbrot and Robert Naiman
Robert Naiman, Just Foreign Policy, October 27
10.27.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-weisbrot-and-robert-naiman/new-york-times-says-dem-c_b_32678.html
INCREDIBLE, BUT TRUE.
In the course of an article making fun of Congressional Democrats for not having a unified position on the war, the New York Times reported today that "even if the Democrats win one or both houses of Congress, they will not have the authority to change the course of the war significantly."
SAY WHAT?
I can think of four explanations -
1) The New York Times has gone over to the dark side, and now supports the theory of the unitary executive, according to which President Bush has the sole power to determine how to perform his duties. Doesn't seem likely.
The Times wrote in an editorial on July 25:
"Some of Mr. Bush's signing statements have become notorious, like the one in which he said he didn't feel bound by the new law against torturing prisoners...But all serve the 'unitary executive theory' cherished by some of Mr. Bush's most extreme advisers, including Vice President Dick Cheney and his legal staff. This theory says that the president -- and not Congress or the courts -- has the sole power to decide how to carry out his duties."
That would be a big turnaround.
2) The Times thinks that the Bush Administration could continue to carry out the war even if Congress cut off funding. It's happened before, you say, like when Congress cut off funding in the 1980's for the CIA's terrorist army in Nicaragua, and the Reagan Administration continued to fund them using intermediaries, in what is now known as the Iran-Contra scandal. But we're talking about 140,000 U.S. troops here. This is not an operation that can be run in secrecy.
3) The Times is confused between the authority to do something and the willingness to do it. This is possible, but seems unlikely.
4) Someone told this to the reporter and he didn't bother to attribute it and the editor didn't bother to check it. This seems to me like the most plausible explanation.
In any event, if it bothers you that the New York Times is reporting that Congress has no authority over Iraq policy, do let the Public Editor know.
Thanks, Mark Weisbrot, Robert Naiman, and Huffpost, for this latest addition to the awful follies of the LYIN' "we love government by lies and propaganda" NY Times.
================================
New York Times Says Dem Congress Won't Have Authority to Change Course of Iraq War
Mark Weisbrot and Robert Naiman
Robert Naiman, Just Foreign Policy, October 27
10.27.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-weisbrot-and-robert-naiman/new-york-times-says-dem-c_b_32678.html
INCREDIBLE, BUT TRUE.
In the course of an article making fun of Congressional Democrats for not having a unified position on the war, the New York Times reported today that "even if the Democrats win one or both houses of Congress, they will not have the authority to change the course of the war significantly."
SAY WHAT?
I can think of four explanations -
1) The New York Times has gone over to the dark side, and now supports the theory of the unitary executive, according to which President Bush has the sole power to determine how to perform his duties. Doesn't seem likely.
The Times wrote in an editorial on July 25:
"Some of Mr. Bush's signing statements have become notorious, like the one in which he said he didn't feel bound by the new law against torturing prisoners...But all serve the 'unitary executive theory' cherished by some of Mr. Bush's most extreme advisers, including Vice President Dick Cheney and his legal staff. This theory says that the president -- and not Congress or the courts -- has the sole power to decide how to carry out his duties."
That would be a big turnaround.
2) The Times thinks that the Bush Administration could continue to carry out the war even if Congress cut off funding. It's happened before, you say, like when Congress cut off funding in the 1980's for the CIA's terrorist army in Nicaragua, and the Reagan Administration continued to fund them using intermediaries, in what is now known as the Iran-Contra scandal. But we're talking about 140,000 U.S. troops here. This is not an operation that can be run in secrecy.
3) The Times is confused between the authority to do something and the willingness to do it. This is possible, but seems unlikely.
4) Someone told this to the reporter and he didn't bother to attribute it and the editor didn't bother to check it. This seems to me like the most plausible explanation.
In any event, if it bothers you that the New York Times is reporting that Congress has no authority over Iraq policy, do let the Public Editor know.
Friday, October 27, 2006
Whore "Mainstream Media" CENSORS the story of computer programmer's SWORN TESTIMONY that he wrote ELECTION STEALING SOFTWARE before 2000 election.
Video of sworn testimony before Congress, click arrow in YouTube screen, (below).(photo- Congressman Tom Feeney, R-FL, in 2000 the Speaker of the Florida statehouse.)
<< Republican Congressman Tom Feeney of Oviedo asked a computer programmer in September 2000, prior to that year's contested presidential vote in Florida, TO WRITE SOFTWARE THAT COULD ALTER VOTE TOTALS on TOUCH-SCREEN VOTING MACHINES, the programmer said.
Former computer programmer Clint Curtis made the claim Monday in sworn testimony to Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee investigating allegations of voter fraud in the 2004 presidential election involving touch-screen voting in Ohio.
In his testimony, Curtis said that Feeney, then a member [SPEAKER, the_most_powerful member] of the Florida House of Representative, met with Curtis and other employees of Yang Enterprises, an Oviedo software company, and asked if the company could create a program that would allow a user to ALTER THE VOTE TOTALS while using the touch-screen machine. The program had to be written so that even the human-readable computer code WOULD NOT SHOW its illicit capabilities, Curtis recalled. >>
Computer programmer Clint Curtis testifies, under oath, to Congress, that he wrote vote-stealing software in Florida in advance of the 2000 election under contract to the most powerful Florida state legislator, then Speaker of Florida statehouse Tom Feeney.
=======================================
Feeney implicated in vote fraud
Congressman sought to alter totals, testimony in Ohio case says
By Alex Babcock
December 16, 2004
http://www.seminolechronicle.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2004/12/16/41c2fdb042ea1
Republican Congressman Tom Feeney of Oviedo asked a computer programmer in September 2000, prior to that year's contested presidential vote in Florida, to write software that could alter vote totals on touch-screen voting machines, the programmer said.
Former computer programmer Clint Curtis made the claim Monday in sworn testimony to Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee investigating allegations of voter fraud in the 2004 presidential election involving touch-screen voting in Ohio.
In his testimony, Curtis said that Feeney, then a member of the Florida House of Representative, met with Curtis and other employees of Yang Enterprises, an Oviedo software company, and asked if the company could create a program that would allow a user to alter the vote totals while using the touch-screen machine. The program had to be written so that even the human-readable computer code would not show its illicit capabilities, Curtis recalled.
Curtis said he wrote a prototype program for Feeney, and that he believed the program might not only be usable on touch-screen voting machines, which some counties - predominantly in South Florida - now use, but also on optical-scan machines, which most of the state's counties used in the 2004 elections.
Feeney could not be reached for comment.
Michael O'Quinn, an attorney for Yang Enterprises, said Curtis' claims are outrageous and that Feeney never discussed such a program with the company. He said Feeney's only relationship with the company was as its legal counsel. Feeney worked at the law firm with O'Quinn until 2002, when he resigned after being elected to Congress.
"I immediately assumed that he was trying to keep you guys from cheating," Curtis told Democrats at the hearing Monday. Curtis further said that Li Woan Yang, a co-owner of the company, told him that, "We need to hide the fraud in the source code, not reveal the fraud, because it's needed to control the vote in South Florida."
Curtis, who formerly lived in Oviedo, quit the software company in December 2000, after the November 2000 election that preceded Feeney rise to become speaker of the Florida House.
"I left because all of the meetings with Feeney let me know I wasn't in a situation I wanted to be in," he said in an interview with the Chronicle. "He's in there selling contracts, telling us how to bid them, special little formulas being employed, how you get right point structure. They were going to limit how many vendors could apply to government contracts so only connected vendors could get on the approved list."
O'Quinn confirmed that Curtis resigned, but said he told the company he got a job in another state. Curtis ended up working for the Florida Department of Transportation. O'Quinn also disputed the allegation that Feeney helped work on government bids, saying Feeney was careful to avoid such work because of ethics rules. Feeney "played no role whatsoever" in helping Yang secure government contracts, O'Quinn said. The company currently does work for NASA, the state Department of Transportation and other companies.
Yang Enterprises, in a statement released to the public, said Curtis' allegations are "categorically untrue."
Democrats and independent groups are challenging presidential election results in Ohio, and have claimed that irregularities in some precinct results might have been caused by tampering with electronic voting machines.
Curtis said he has been trying to get attention drawn to his claims since shortly after leaving Yang Enterprises, but has had difficulty until this year. After watching a news report about voting machines in Florida being installed at precincts without having their software inspected, he said he redoubled his effort to get public attention.
"People finally care," Curtis told the Chronicle. "Coming forward isn't the problem, it's people caring."
The Democrats are listening, as is a non-partisan government watchdog group called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. The group, which began working with Curtis in early December, is working to verify elements of his story.
Curtis says he is also working with the FBI to investigate another claim he has made against Yang, that the company is spying on NASA. In its response, the company said that the man named by Curtis as the recipient of NASA-related information has never worked for the company.
The company also says Curtis' claims are based on a grudge he has with the company. O'Quinn said he's also being motivated by money.
The Justice Through Music Project, a nonprofit organization that engages young people about political issues, has offered $200,000 for proof of election fraud in 2004.
Curtis said he has not pursued that money, which has not been offered to him.
Thursday, October 26, 2006
Rumsfeld snarls at reporters. Obedient DC press puppies run for the milk bowl & puppy papers..
(sigh. We'll let the War Secretary debase the DC press puppies all by himself. But we MIGHT volunteer: Why doesn't SOMEONE in the national press corpse ask Mr. Rumsfeld how he can be off by SO MANY MULTIPLES when he said "six days... six weeks... I don't belive the war will go on past six months"?)
<< "You ought to just back off, take a look at it, relax, understand that it's complicated, it's difficult," Rumsfeld said regarding deadlines... >>
["Deadlines".... that is, UNLIMITED, OPEN-ENDED war-powers to commit ever increasing quantities of US troops and treasure to the occupation, including almost certainly a military draft as soon as the irritating US midterm elections are over.]
============================================
Rumsfeld tells war critics to 'back off'
By PAULINE JELINEK, Associated Press Writer
26 Oct. 2006
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061026/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/rumsfeld
WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Thursday that anyone demanding deadlines for progress in Iraq should "just back off," because it is too difficult to predict when Iraqis will resume control of their country.
During an often-combative Pentagon news conference, Rumsfeld said that while benchmarks for security, political and economic progress are valuable, "it's difficult. We're looking out into the future. No one can predict the future with absolute certainty."
He said the goals have no specific deadlines or consequences if they are not met by specific dates.
"You're looking for some sort of a guillotine to come falling down if some date isn't met," Rumsfeld told reporters. "That is not what this is about."
His comments came less than two weeks before an election for control of Congress in which the Bush administration's conduct of the war has become a defining issue. They also came two days after a timeline was first announced by U.S. officials in Baghdad and underscored strains that have emerged between the two countries.
Bush administration officials said Tuesday that they and Iraqi leaders had agreed to craft guidelines toward progress in the country. The next day, Iraq's president disavowed them, saying the benchmarks merely reflected campaign season pressures in the U.S.
Noting that this is the political season, Rumsfeld also complained that critics and the media are trying to "make a little mischief" by trying to "find a little daylight between what the Iraqis say or someone in the United States says."
Rumsfeld often spars with reporters at Pentagon briefings, but Thursday his criticism of journalists seemed more pointed than usual.
"That's a rather accusatory way to put it," he said in response to one question about reducing troop levels.
Members of both parties say next month's congressional elections have become a referendum on the war in Iraq. Control of Congress could hinge on whether voters believe the Bush administration is on the right path or if there should be a change in course and significant reduction in U.S. troop levels there.
Rumsfeld's comments on the benchmarks further muddied the waters on whether there is agreement between the Iraqis and the U.S. on how quickly progress must be made there.
"They're still in discussions," he said.
U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad announced in Baghdad on Tuesday that Iraqi leaders had agreed that by the end of the year, they will have a plan that roughly lays out the times by which they want certain things accomplished.
The next day, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki rejected Khalilzad's announcement and said his government had not agreed to anything. President Bush responded that al-Maliki was correct in saying mandates could not be imposed on Iraq, but said the United States would not have unlimited patience.
"You ought to just back off, take a look at it, relax, understand that it's complicated, it's difficult," Rumsfeld said regarding deadlines. "Honorable people are working on these things together. There isn't any daylight between them."
On Thursday, veteran U.S. diplomat David Satterfield told foreign reporters in Washington that "there is not a significant disagreement" with al-Maliki. "No one is imposing benchmarks," said Satterfield, who is Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's coordinator for Iraq.
In fact, he said, the timelines, which apply also to economic progress, were worked out over a long period of discussions with Iraqi officials and they essentially are Iraqi benchmarks.
Echoing the tone used by President Bush on Wednesday, Rumsfeld also said it is "an enormously challenging process to defeat the terrorists" in Iraq. Bush had expressed disappointment with the progress in the war.
In other comments, Rumsfeld said the U.S. is considering whether it should speed up money planned for recruiting, training and equipping Iraqi security forces. Officials have said training Iraqis to take over security is key to withdrawing U.S. and other coalition forces.
Since 2004, the U.S. government has earmarked $11.3 billion for assistance to the Iraqi security forces.
"We intend to increase their budgets" as well as their capabilities, Rumsfeld said, and officials will help make the improvements more quickly. He did not cite any figures, however.
His press secretary, Eric Ruff, said a review of their needs is under way.
Associated Press writer Lolita C. Baldor contributed to this report.
<< "You ought to just back off, take a look at it, relax, understand that it's complicated, it's difficult," Rumsfeld said regarding deadlines... >>
["Deadlines".... that is, UNLIMITED, OPEN-ENDED war-powers to commit ever increasing quantities of US troops and treasure to the occupation, including almost certainly a military draft as soon as the irritating US midterm elections are over.]
============================================
Rumsfeld tells war critics to 'back off'
By PAULINE JELINEK, Associated Press Writer
26 Oct. 2006
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061026/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/rumsfeld
WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Thursday that anyone demanding deadlines for progress in Iraq should "just back off," because it is too difficult to predict when Iraqis will resume control of their country.
During an often-combative Pentagon news conference, Rumsfeld said that while benchmarks for security, political and economic progress are valuable, "it's difficult. We're looking out into the future. No one can predict the future with absolute certainty."
He said the goals have no specific deadlines or consequences if they are not met by specific dates.
"You're looking for some sort of a guillotine to come falling down if some date isn't met," Rumsfeld told reporters. "That is not what this is about."
His comments came less than two weeks before an election for control of Congress in which the Bush administration's conduct of the war has become a defining issue. They also came two days after a timeline was first announced by U.S. officials in Baghdad and underscored strains that have emerged between the two countries.
Bush administration officials said Tuesday that they and Iraqi leaders had agreed to craft guidelines toward progress in the country. The next day, Iraq's president disavowed them, saying the benchmarks merely reflected campaign season pressures in the U.S.
Noting that this is the political season, Rumsfeld also complained that critics and the media are trying to "make a little mischief" by trying to "find a little daylight between what the Iraqis say or someone in the United States says."
Rumsfeld often spars with reporters at Pentagon briefings, but Thursday his criticism of journalists seemed more pointed than usual.
"That's a rather accusatory way to put it," he said in response to one question about reducing troop levels.
Members of both parties say next month's congressional elections have become a referendum on the war in Iraq. Control of Congress could hinge on whether voters believe the Bush administration is on the right path or if there should be a change in course and significant reduction in U.S. troop levels there.
Rumsfeld's comments on the benchmarks further muddied the waters on whether there is agreement between the Iraqis and the U.S. on how quickly progress must be made there.
"They're still in discussions," he said.
U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad announced in Baghdad on Tuesday that Iraqi leaders had agreed that by the end of the year, they will have a plan that roughly lays out the times by which they want certain things accomplished.
The next day, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki rejected Khalilzad's announcement and said his government had not agreed to anything. President Bush responded that al-Maliki was correct in saying mandates could not be imposed on Iraq, but said the United States would not have unlimited patience.
"You ought to just back off, take a look at it, relax, understand that it's complicated, it's difficult," Rumsfeld said regarding deadlines. "Honorable people are working on these things together. There isn't any daylight between them."
On Thursday, veteran U.S. diplomat David Satterfield told foreign reporters in Washington that "there is not a significant disagreement" with al-Maliki. "No one is imposing benchmarks," said Satterfield, who is Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's coordinator for Iraq.
In fact, he said, the timelines, which apply also to economic progress, were worked out over a long period of discussions with Iraqi officials and they essentially are Iraqi benchmarks.
Echoing the tone used by President Bush on Wednesday, Rumsfeld also said it is "an enormously challenging process to defeat the terrorists" in Iraq. Bush had expressed disappointment with the progress in the war.
In other comments, Rumsfeld said the U.S. is considering whether it should speed up money planned for recruiting, training and equipping Iraqi security forces. Officials have said training Iraqis to take over security is key to withdrawing U.S. and other coalition forces.
Since 2004, the U.S. government has earmarked $11.3 billion for assistance to the Iraqi security forces.
"We intend to increase their budgets" as well as their capabilities, Rumsfeld said, and officials will help make the improvements more quickly. He did not cite any figures, however.
His press secretary, Eric Ruff, said a review of their needs is under way.
Associated Press writer Lolita C. Baldor contributed to this report.
Michael J. Fox, dying before our eyes of a cruel disease, as fodder for Limbaugh's sneering hate-filled rant....
RUSH LIMBAUGH, wallowing in rolls of gross HYPOCRISY and ghoulish scorn, mocks Michael J. Fox's appeal for stem-cell research to help millions of other Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, ALS, and others subjected to degenerative neural diseases or injury, from having to suffer a similar fate in the future.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F05T9cU8hxQ
Make no mistake: Rush Limbaugh is perhaps the supreme practitioner in America of the Right-Wing politics of HATE. They will sneer and scorn young women and even girls raped and subjected to incest in order to CRIMINALIZE the "morning after pill" and/or abortion counseling and other reproductive health care. They will (some of them to the 'right' of even Limbaugh) show up at Iraq war military funerals and heap condemnation on the grieving families of those who have given their all; they will (in the case of Ann Coulter) sneer and deride 9-11 widows seeking a comprehensive investigation into the 9-11 tragedy as "millionaire celebrities basking in the attention of their husband's deaths, and unduly seeking to influence the political discourse."
("Millionaire celebrity pundits seeking to influence the political discourse" IS, of course, the very DEFINITION of Ann Coulter and other Right-Wing female pundits like her....)
- Right-Wing commentators will engage in all this SCORN and abject HATRED for one reason, and one reason only: TO AMASS POLITICAL POWER, and the wealth that goes with, by DIVIDING America based on a ghoulish, hypocritical, and divisive agenda of (paraphrasing) "WE 'conservatives' are better than they are... they are no more than subhuman criminal scum not worthy of mention in the national news, much less of having political rights or economic enfranchisement."
Limbaugh and the Right-Wing HEAPING SCORN on EVEN those popular and beloved celebrities struck down in the prime of their lives by ALS (Lou Gehrig), spinal cord injury (Christopher Reeves), Parkinsons (Michael J. Fox) or other debilitating diseases for which stem cell research holds out the best hope for a brighter future.
The Washington Whore Post gets around to noticing Rush Limbaugh's seething lies and bullying hatred.... 15 years late.
It's About Time - [the Washington Post Finally Comments on Limbaugh's Seething Hate]
by David Flores
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
http://davidflores.blogspot.com/
The Washington Post takes Rush Limbaugh to task for claiming that Micheal J. Fox was faking the effects of Parkinson's disease for a T.V. commercial. It's about time. Really, it's about 15 years too late. Rush Limbaugh and other conservative commentators enjoy a huge audience (the figure I've heard is 30 million) and yet they have been allowed to say outrageous, hateful things, and peddle outrageous lies with little scrutiny from the mainstream media, who apparently consider their shows not beneath them, and not worthy of comment. For years, an undercurrent of hatred has seethed beneath the surface of of our society, fed by these dishonest provocateurs. What we need are more exposés of their lies and demagoguery. Ignoring them won't make them go away, or make them any less influential.
=====================================
(Our comments:)
WASHINGTON POST editors caught being ghoulish, lying, bullying THUGS once again, this time re the story about RUSH LIMBAUGH's sneering scorn for actor Michael J. Fox's TV endorsement (political ad) for a candidate who supports STEM CELL research. It is disconcerting and jarring to watch the video of Michael Fox swaying and jerking as he tries to deliver his short, 40 second comment. Not just as a human and a fellow American, but as a "family quality" entertainer who has entered our homes and our lives via the magic of the big screen and the little screen, literally watching his life fall apart before our eyes.
....(video Michael J. Fox's political ad for Claire MxCaskill)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=QMliHkTDHaE&mode=related&search=
Ten seconds into the video we KNOW that Michael Fox is DOOMED by his disease, and that only the most miraculous drug discovery at this late date will save him.
But leave it to Right-Wing Hate radio hate monkey RUSH LIMBAUGH to find not an ounce of empathy or sympathy with Michael Fox's condition. Limbaugh sneers that Michael is either "acting" ("he's an actor, you know") or "OFF HIS MEDS."
AS IF, by taking meds and completely ELIMINATING the scary, jerky motion of the disease, Michael Fox should have NO right to comment on stem cell research! Of course this is most certainly NOT the case; there IS NO MEDICATION which prevents the symptoms of Parkinson's disease, a DEGENERATIVE failure of the nerve cells, similar in effect to Alzheimer's, Lou Gehrig's, and other neural diseases.
Indeed, the TRUTH is the complete, 100% OPPOSITE of what LYING Rush Limbaugh told his listeners: Michael Fox was ABLE to speak in swaying, jerky motion BECAUSE of his medications..... without the medications ("he went off his meds") Fox WOULD NOT BE ABLE TO SPEAK AT ALL.
So much for the Lying, Ghoulish Rush Limbaugh, a person who should, if anything, have an ounce of respect for people 'on medications,' since his lame excuse for taking handful-sized quantities of Oxycontin "hillbilly heroin" was that he was addicted to the pills due to prolonged doctor-prescribed medication.
How about the ghoulish EDITORS of the WASHINGTON POST?
David Montgomery's report on Limbaugh's sneering scorn of Michael Fox is a minimally competent story, There are several errors and misleading statements: Limbaugh's audience is now well down from the 10 million that Montgomery reports, and at one point Montgomery writes of Limbaugh's sneering radio scorn as "a CRITIQUE."
"CRITIQUE"??? David Montgomery, you sad, pathetic whore! Right before our eyes Michael Fox's life is disintegrating, his nervous system falling apart, and YOU call Limbaugh's sneering comments "A CRITIQUE"?
Indeed, most of the reporting follows this "mocking scorn as 'critique'" template, with Montgomery at every point giving Rush LIMBAUGH the BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT, and putting THE ONUS for (gasp!) making a political ad on Michael Fox.
Montgomery writes "To Rush Limbaugh on Monday, Michael J. Fox looked like a faker." This comment certainly gives Limbaugh the benefit of the doubt: how ANYONE could see the Michael Fox video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMliHkTDHaE) and say that Mr. Fox was "a faker" stretches one's credulity. More likely, Limbaugh realized that the disease is what he saw on the screen (Michael Fox has, after all, given up a lucrative Hollywood career in what would be the prime opportunity for him to do heavier, more in-depth roles), BUT CHOOSE TO GO ON THE ATTACK ANYWAYS, Limbaugh's sense of MILLIONAIRE RIGHT-WING ENTITLEMENT ALLOWING him to HEAP SCORN on a person dying of a debilitating disease.
We realize that this last point is a quibble, but the fact remains that Rush Limbaugh has HIS microphone and audience 3 hours a day, 5 times a week, plus whenever else he wants to arrange it, while a political advocate like Michael Fox (and millions of other Americans) can only get THEIR voices heard (to a wide audience) in the days and weeks before an important election.
SO WHY DOES the WASHINGTON POST **REFLEXIVELY** credit Rush Limbaugh with GOOD MOTIVES and GOOD INTENTIONS... even when he is sneering at a victim of a deadly_disease?
Why, indeed.
And look at the TITLE the cowardly, ghoulish Washington Post editor assigned to Montgomery's article: "Rush Limbaugh On the Offensive Against Ad With Michael J. Fox."
THIS TITLE gives a reader scanning the headline NO IDEA or information that Rush Limbaugh is ATTACKING A VICTIM OF A DEADLY DISEASE!
Rush Limbaugh - ENTITLED to his 3 hours a day, 5 days a week broadcast, ENTITLED to smear, scorn, and sneer at anyone he wants. American citizens dying of a horrible disease, however, according to the WHORE POST, must "justify" their comments against the (implied) LEGITIMATE "offensive" of the Right-Wing commentator, with the audience of a million scowling dittoheads, many of whom undoubtedly make their paychecks, savings, retirements, and income based at least in some part on GOVERNMENT PROGRAMS that they love to hear Mr. Limbaugh heap scorn on.
To the Washington Post editor who assigned that DIVERSIONARY headline to the Limbaugh-sneers story, you, sir, are a GHOULISH WHORE. Yes, Mr. Limbaugh HAS gone "back on the offensive" against a person with a deadly disease. Thanks for NOT putting the "deadly disease" part in your misleading headline. And thanks for choosing that ATROCIOUS photo of Michael Fox to accompany your horrid little story.
And you, sirs, the senior editors and publishers of the Washington Post who put this PAGE A-1 ABOVE THE FOLD story about the state of America's right-wing political discourse on PAGE C-1: YOU, Sirs, are ghoulish whores.
Your paper betrays its roots as the organ of a formerly SLAVERY and SEGREGATION city; a city (Washington, DC) where for decades the 15th Amendment to the US Constitution WAS IGNORED in broad daylight, every day for years on end, BECAUSE YOU WOULD RATHER COURT ABUSIVE POWER than stand up for the ideals and very Constitutional rights and laws we have come to regard as "All American." As we recall, during slavery TWO to THREE SLAVES WOULD DIE, for every slave delivered as chattel property cheap labor in the America's. THAT IS THE SENSE OF MURDEROUS ENTITLEMENT that both THE WASHINGTON POST and RUSH LIMBAUGH feel is their just due.
==========================================
Rush Limbaugh On the Offensive Against Ad With Michael J. Fox
By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 25, 2006; Page C01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/24/AR2006102400691.html
Possibly worse than making fun of someone's disability is saying that it's imaginary. That is not to mock someone's body, but to challenge a person's guts, integrity, sanity.
To Rush Limbaugh on Monday, Michael J. Fox looked like a faker. The actor, who suffers from Parkinson's disease, has done a series of political ads supporting candidates who favor stem cell research, including Maryland Democrat Ben Cardin, who is running against Republican Michael Steele for the Senate seat being vacated by Paul Sarbanes.
"He is exaggerating the effects of the disease," Limbaugh told listeners. "He's moving all around and shaking and it's purely an act. . . . This is really shameless of Michael J. Fox. Either he didn't take his medication or he's acting."
Limbaugh, whose syndicated radio program has a weekly audience of about 10 million, was reacting to Fox's appearance in another one of the spots, for Missouri Democrat Claire McCaskill, running against Republican Sen. James M. Talent.
But the Cardin ad is similar. It is hard to watch, unless, for some reason, you don't believe it. As he speaks, Fox's restless torso weaves and writhes in a private dance. His head bobs from side to side, almost leaving the video frame.
"This is the only time I've ever seen Michael J. Fox portray any of the symptoms of the disease he has," Limbaugh said. "He can barely control himself."
Later Monday, still on the air, Limbaugh would apologize, but reaction to his statements from Parkinson's experts and Fox's supporters was swift and angry.
"It's a shameless statement," John Rogers said yesterday. Rogers, Fox's political adviser, who also serves on the board of the Parkinson's Action Network, added: "It's insulting. It's appallingly sad, at best."
"Anyone who knows the disease well would regard his movement as classic severe Parkinson's disease," said Elaine Richman, a neuroscientist in Baltimore who co-wrote "Parkinson's Disease and the Family." "Any other interpretation is misinformed."
Fox was campaigning yesterday for Tammy Duckworth, a congressional candidate, outside Chicago, when he alluded to Limbaugh's remarks. "It's ironic, given some of the things that have been said in the last couple of days, that my pills are working really well right now," he said, according to a report on the CBS2 Web site.
After his apology, Limbaugh shifted his ground and renewed his attack on Fox.
"Now people are telling me they have seen Michael J. Fox in interviews and he does appear the same way in the interviews as he does in this commercial," Limbaugh said, according to a transcript on his Web site. "All right then, I stand corrected. . . . So I will bigly, hugely admit that I was wrong, and I will apologize to Michael J. Fox, if I am wrong in characterizing his behavior on this commercial as an act."
Then Limbaugh pivoted to a different critique: "Michael J. Fox is allowing his illness to be exploited and in the process is shilling for a Democratic politician."
Limbaugh's shock at Fox's appearance is a measure of the disease's devastation, advocates say. Contrary to the charge that Fox might not take his medicine to enhance his symptoms, the medicine produces some of the uncontrolled body movements.
"Stem cell research offers hope to millions of Americans with diseases like diabetes, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's," Fox says in the Cardin ad. "But George Bush and Michael Steele would put limits on the most promising stem cell research."
Fox has appeared in ABC's "Boston Legal" this season. In his scenes, taped over the summer, Fox does not shake or loll his head as he does in the Cardin commercial, but does appear to be restraining himself, appearing almost rigid at times.
A source with direct knowledge of Fox's illness who viewed the Cardin ad said Fox is not acting to exaggerate the effects of the disease. The source said Fox's scenes in "Boston Legal" had to be taped around his illness, as he worked to control the tremors associated with Parkinson's for limited periods of time.
Staff writer Frank Ahrens contributed to this report.
Michael J. Fox. (Scott Olson - Getty Images)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/24/AR2006102400691.html
by David Flores
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
http://davidflores.blogspot.com/
The Washington Post takes Rush Limbaugh to task for claiming that Micheal J. Fox was faking the effects of Parkinson's disease for a T.V. commercial. It's about time. Really, it's about 15 years too late. Rush Limbaugh and other conservative commentators enjoy a huge audience (the figure I've heard is 30 million) and yet they have been allowed to say outrageous, hateful things, and peddle outrageous lies with little scrutiny from the mainstream media, who apparently consider their shows not beneath them, and not worthy of comment. For years, an undercurrent of hatred has seethed beneath the surface of of our society, fed by these dishonest provocateurs. What we need are more exposés of their lies and demagoguery. Ignoring them won't make them go away, or make them any less influential.
=====================================
(Our comments:)
WASHINGTON POST editors caught being ghoulish, lying, bullying THUGS once again, this time re the story about RUSH LIMBAUGH's sneering scorn for actor Michael J. Fox's TV endorsement (political ad) for a candidate who supports STEM CELL research. It is disconcerting and jarring to watch the video of Michael Fox swaying and jerking as he tries to deliver his short, 40 second comment. Not just as a human and a fellow American, but as a "family quality" entertainer who has entered our homes and our lives via the magic of the big screen and the little screen, literally watching his life fall apart before our eyes.
....(video Michael J. Fox's political ad for Claire MxCaskill)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=QMliHkTDHaE&mode=related&search=
Ten seconds into the video we KNOW that Michael Fox is DOOMED by his disease, and that only the most miraculous drug discovery at this late date will save him.
But leave it to Right-Wing Hate radio hate monkey RUSH LIMBAUGH to find not an ounce of empathy or sympathy with Michael Fox's condition. Limbaugh sneers that Michael is either "acting" ("he's an actor, you know") or "OFF HIS MEDS."
AS IF, by taking meds and completely ELIMINATING the scary, jerky motion of the disease, Michael Fox should have NO right to comment on stem cell research! Of course this is most certainly NOT the case; there IS NO MEDICATION which prevents the symptoms of Parkinson's disease, a DEGENERATIVE failure of the nerve cells, similar in effect to Alzheimer's, Lou Gehrig's, and other neural diseases.
Indeed, the TRUTH is the complete, 100% OPPOSITE of what LYING Rush Limbaugh told his listeners: Michael Fox was ABLE to speak in swaying, jerky motion BECAUSE of his medications..... without the medications ("he went off his meds") Fox WOULD NOT BE ABLE TO SPEAK AT ALL.
So much for the Lying, Ghoulish Rush Limbaugh, a person who should, if anything, have an ounce of respect for people 'on medications,' since his lame excuse for taking handful-sized quantities of Oxycontin "hillbilly heroin" was that he was addicted to the pills due to prolonged doctor-prescribed medication.
How about the ghoulish EDITORS of the WASHINGTON POST?
David Montgomery's report on Limbaugh's sneering scorn of Michael Fox is a minimally competent story, There are several errors and misleading statements: Limbaugh's audience is now well down from the 10 million that Montgomery reports, and at one point Montgomery writes of Limbaugh's sneering radio scorn as "a CRITIQUE."
"CRITIQUE"??? David Montgomery, you sad, pathetic whore! Right before our eyes Michael Fox's life is disintegrating, his nervous system falling apart, and YOU call Limbaugh's sneering comments "A CRITIQUE"?
Indeed, most of the reporting follows this "mocking scorn as 'critique'" template, with Montgomery at every point giving Rush LIMBAUGH the BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT, and putting THE ONUS for (gasp!) making a political ad on Michael Fox.
Montgomery writes "To Rush Limbaugh on Monday, Michael J. Fox looked like a faker." This comment certainly gives Limbaugh the benefit of the doubt: how ANYONE could see the Michael Fox video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMliHkTDHaE) and say that Mr. Fox was "a faker" stretches one's credulity. More likely, Limbaugh realized that the disease is what he saw on the screen (Michael Fox has, after all, given up a lucrative Hollywood career in what would be the prime opportunity for him to do heavier, more in-depth roles), BUT CHOOSE TO GO ON THE ATTACK ANYWAYS, Limbaugh's sense of MILLIONAIRE RIGHT-WING ENTITLEMENT ALLOWING him to HEAP SCORN on a person dying of a debilitating disease.
We realize that this last point is a quibble, but the fact remains that Rush Limbaugh has HIS microphone and audience 3 hours a day, 5 times a week, plus whenever else he wants to arrange it, while a political advocate like Michael Fox (and millions of other Americans) can only get THEIR voices heard (to a wide audience) in the days and weeks before an important election.
SO WHY DOES the WASHINGTON POST **REFLEXIVELY** credit Rush Limbaugh with GOOD MOTIVES and GOOD INTENTIONS... even when he is sneering at a victim of a deadly_disease?
Why, indeed.
And look at the TITLE the cowardly, ghoulish Washington Post editor assigned to Montgomery's article: "Rush Limbaugh On the Offensive Against Ad With Michael J. Fox."
THIS TITLE gives a reader scanning the headline NO IDEA or information that Rush Limbaugh is ATTACKING A VICTIM OF A DEADLY DISEASE!
Rush Limbaugh - ENTITLED to his 3 hours a day, 5 days a week broadcast, ENTITLED to smear, scorn, and sneer at anyone he wants. American citizens dying of a horrible disease, however, according to the WHORE POST, must "justify" their comments against the (implied) LEGITIMATE "offensive" of the Right-Wing commentator, with the audience of a million scowling dittoheads, many of whom undoubtedly make their paychecks, savings, retirements, and income based at least in some part on GOVERNMENT PROGRAMS that they love to hear Mr. Limbaugh heap scorn on.
To the Washington Post editor who assigned that DIVERSIONARY headline to the Limbaugh-sneers story, you, sir, are a GHOULISH WHORE. Yes, Mr. Limbaugh HAS gone "back on the offensive" against a person with a deadly disease. Thanks for NOT putting the "deadly disease" part in your misleading headline. And thanks for choosing that ATROCIOUS photo of Michael Fox to accompany your horrid little story.
And you, sirs, the senior editors and publishers of the Washington Post who put this PAGE A-1 ABOVE THE FOLD story about the state of America's right-wing political discourse on PAGE C-1: YOU, Sirs, are ghoulish whores.
Your paper betrays its roots as the organ of a formerly SLAVERY and SEGREGATION city; a city (Washington, DC) where for decades the 15th Amendment to the US Constitution WAS IGNORED in broad daylight, every day for years on end, BECAUSE YOU WOULD RATHER COURT ABUSIVE POWER than stand up for the ideals and very Constitutional rights and laws we have come to regard as "All American." As we recall, during slavery TWO to THREE SLAVES WOULD DIE, for every slave delivered as chattel property cheap labor in the America's. THAT IS THE SENSE OF MURDEROUS ENTITLEMENT that both THE WASHINGTON POST and RUSH LIMBAUGH feel is their just due.
==========================================
Rush Limbaugh On the Offensive Against Ad With Michael J. Fox
By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 25, 2006; Page C01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/24/AR2006102400691.html
Possibly worse than making fun of someone's disability is saying that it's imaginary. That is not to mock someone's body, but to challenge a person's guts, integrity, sanity.
To Rush Limbaugh on Monday, Michael J. Fox looked like a faker. The actor, who suffers from Parkinson's disease, has done a series of political ads supporting candidates who favor stem cell research, including Maryland Democrat Ben Cardin, who is running against Republican Michael Steele for the Senate seat being vacated by Paul Sarbanes.
"He is exaggerating the effects of the disease," Limbaugh told listeners. "He's moving all around and shaking and it's purely an act. . . . This is really shameless of Michael J. Fox. Either he didn't take his medication or he's acting."
Limbaugh, whose syndicated radio program has a weekly audience of about 10 million, was reacting to Fox's appearance in another one of the spots, for Missouri Democrat Claire McCaskill, running against Republican Sen. James M. Talent.
But the Cardin ad is similar. It is hard to watch, unless, for some reason, you don't believe it. As he speaks, Fox's restless torso weaves and writhes in a private dance. His head bobs from side to side, almost leaving the video frame.
"This is the only time I've ever seen Michael J. Fox portray any of the symptoms of the disease he has," Limbaugh said. "He can barely control himself."
Later Monday, still on the air, Limbaugh would apologize, but reaction to his statements from Parkinson's experts and Fox's supporters was swift and angry.
"It's a shameless statement," John Rogers said yesterday. Rogers, Fox's political adviser, who also serves on the board of the Parkinson's Action Network, added: "It's insulting. It's appallingly sad, at best."
"Anyone who knows the disease well would regard his movement as classic severe Parkinson's disease," said Elaine Richman, a neuroscientist in Baltimore who co-wrote "Parkinson's Disease and the Family." "Any other interpretation is misinformed."
Fox was campaigning yesterday for Tammy Duckworth, a congressional candidate, outside Chicago, when he alluded to Limbaugh's remarks. "It's ironic, given some of the things that have been said in the last couple of days, that my pills are working really well right now," he said, according to a report on the CBS2 Web site.
After his apology, Limbaugh shifted his ground and renewed his attack on Fox.
"Now people are telling me they have seen Michael J. Fox in interviews and he does appear the same way in the interviews as he does in this commercial," Limbaugh said, according to a transcript on his Web site. "All right then, I stand corrected. . . . So I will bigly, hugely admit that I was wrong, and I will apologize to Michael J. Fox, if I am wrong in characterizing his behavior on this commercial as an act."
Then Limbaugh pivoted to a different critique: "Michael J. Fox is allowing his illness to be exploited and in the process is shilling for a Democratic politician."
Limbaugh's shock at Fox's appearance is a measure of the disease's devastation, advocates say. Contrary to the charge that Fox might not take his medicine to enhance his symptoms, the medicine produces some of the uncontrolled body movements.
"Stem cell research offers hope to millions of Americans with diseases like diabetes, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's," Fox says in the Cardin ad. "But George Bush and Michael Steele would put limits on the most promising stem cell research."
Fox has appeared in ABC's "Boston Legal" this season. In his scenes, taped over the summer, Fox does not shake or loll his head as he does in the Cardin commercial, but does appear to be restraining himself, appearing almost rigid at times.
A source with direct knowledge of Fox's illness who viewed the Cardin ad said Fox is not acting to exaggerate the effects of the disease. The source said Fox's scenes in "Boston Legal" had to be taped around his illness, as he worked to control the tremors associated with Parkinson's for limited periods of time.
Staff writer Frank Ahrens contributed to this report.
Michael J. Fox. (Scott Olson - Getty Images)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/24/AR2006102400691.html
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
NY Times caught BOLD-FACED LYING to boost lyin' Joe Lieberman's Rethuglican wolf in Dem. sheep's clothing campaign...
We like to think that we here at MediaWhoresUSA.blogspot.com have been having some affect at FOCUSING ATTENTION on the serial lies and journalistic frauds of the NEW YORK TIMES. We have certainly been yelling for years - since long before the publication of Gene Lyon's and Joe Conason's landmark book "The Hunting of a President," which is pretty much a catalogue of Times and Washington Post horrific reporting of EVERY Republican accusation, slander, and innuendo against the Democratic president (Clinton) for almost a full decade.
Of course THE TIMES and JOE LIEBERMAN are birds of a feather: both at one point in their careers (history) were FOR Civil Rights, but both now PRETEND NOT TO NOTICE serial and severe Republican DISENFRANCHISEMENT efforts.
Both the Times and Joe Lieberman mouth platitudes about American "rights," especially CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS and especially FREEDOM OF THE PRESS, while both ENABLE the Bush administration's JIHAD AGAINST PRESS FREEDOMS. (See our previous post on the US drop in world press freedom rankings.)
Both PRETEND a concern for justice, WHILE IGNORING the DIEBOLDIZATION of the American voting process.
Both Lieberman and the Times SUPPORT THE Bush lies_to_war mantra, and both tend to WHITEWASH the torture, contractor CORRUPTION, and other ABUSES of the administration of the war.
The above is only a partial catalogue of the Times and Lieberman's de facto SUPPORT for Bush administration policies, abuses, and misleading rhetoric. SO IT IS NO SURPRISE to see that the TIMES is here apologizing for being caught, red-handed, LYING about the Lieberman record.
-----------------------------------------------
Correction: Joe Lieberman and ‘Stay the Course’
By Jennifer Medina
October 24, 2006, 7:33 pm
http://empirezone.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/10/24/correction-joe-and-stay-the-course/
Senator Joseph I. Lieberman has used the phrase “stay the course” several times in discussing the war in Iraq in recent years, echoing a key phrase of the White House, contrary to an article published today in The Times.
The article used a database to analyze hundreds of Mr. Lieberman’s war-related comments since 2001. It pointed out that Ned Lamont, the Democratic nominee for United States Senate, frequently criticized Mr. Lieberman for being a strong supporter of the Bush Administration’s “stay the course” policy on Iraq, and said that in the statements reviewed the senator never actually uttered that phrase.
In fact, Mr. Lieberman has used the phrase at least half a dozen times over the last two years, during a presidential debate and in several television interviews — including several instances that were covered in The Times database. As recently as November 2005, upon returning from a trip to Iraq, for instance, he said on CNN’s American Morning that he agreed with the administration’s view that it was necessary to “stay the course.”
“I agree to the extent that we have to stay the course of the policy we chose in overthrowing Saddam and helping the Iraqi people become free, which will really make use a lot more secure and set the terrorists back,” Mr. Lieberman said, adding that some of the war tactics should change.
The original article noted that the database, which included more than 300 Iraq-related comments since the Sept 11 terrorist attacks, could not be comprehensive. But five of Mr. Lieberman’s “stay the course” references were, in fact, included in the database, and should have been mentioned in the article. It is unclear why the phrase did not come up when the database was checked before publication. The same search on Tuesday, after readers complained, yielded the correct results.
Mr. Lieberman used the phrase several times in 2004, saying during a presidential primary debate in Iowa that January: “We have to stay the course in Iraq now and continue to build a stable, modernizing, democratizing country there.”
After losing his party’s primary, in April, 2004. Mr. Lieberman said in a televised press conference that he blamed his loss on his support for the war in Iraq and praised the Bush administration’s policy.
“I thought the president gave the strongest case that I can remember him giving about why we went in and why we have to stay the course,” he said then. “We’ve got to adopt a strategy of success. A defeat will create chaos in Iraq, chaos in the Middle East, and will embolden the terrorists in a way that will endanger our future and our children’s future.”
Mr. Lieberman also made his support for the president clear during an interview on CNN’s Larry King Live a month later, saying “the president’s right.”
“It’s been a lot harder to achieve it than we hoped it would be,” he said of America’s mission in Iraq. “But we’ve got to stay the course and finish the job.”
In July, Mr. Lieberman used the phrase again on Fox News’ “Hannity & Colmes,” saying of the president: “What I’m most happy about is that he said that he will stay the course in Iraq until we finish the job and the Iraqis are in control of their own destiny.”
Aron Pilhofer contributed reporting.
Note: This is an advance version of a corrective article to be published Wednesday in the newspaper and on nytimes.com.
Of course THE TIMES and JOE LIEBERMAN are birds of a feather: both at one point in their careers (history) were FOR Civil Rights, but both now PRETEND NOT TO NOTICE serial and severe Republican DISENFRANCHISEMENT efforts.
Both the Times and Joe Lieberman mouth platitudes about American "rights," especially CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS and especially FREEDOM OF THE PRESS, while both ENABLE the Bush administration's JIHAD AGAINST PRESS FREEDOMS. (See our previous post on the US drop in world press freedom rankings.)
Both PRETEND a concern for justice, WHILE IGNORING the DIEBOLDIZATION of the American voting process.
Both Lieberman and the Times SUPPORT THE Bush lies_to_war mantra, and both tend to WHITEWASH the torture, contractor CORRUPTION, and other ABUSES of the administration of the war.
The above is only a partial catalogue of the Times and Lieberman's de facto SUPPORT for Bush administration policies, abuses, and misleading rhetoric. SO IT IS NO SURPRISE to see that the TIMES is here apologizing for being caught, red-handed, LYING about the Lieberman record.
-----------------------------------------------
Correction: Joe Lieberman and ‘Stay the Course’
By Jennifer Medina
October 24, 2006, 7:33 pm
http://empirezone.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/10/24/correction-joe-and-stay-the-course/
Senator Joseph I. Lieberman has used the phrase “stay the course” several times in discussing the war in Iraq in recent years, echoing a key phrase of the White House, contrary to an article published today in The Times.
The article used a database to analyze hundreds of Mr. Lieberman’s war-related comments since 2001. It pointed out that Ned Lamont, the Democratic nominee for United States Senate, frequently criticized Mr. Lieberman for being a strong supporter of the Bush Administration’s “stay the course” policy on Iraq, and said that in the statements reviewed the senator never actually uttered that phrase.
In fact, Mr. Lieberman has used the phrase at least half a dozen times over the last two years, during a presidential debate and in several television interviews — including several instances that were covered in The Times database. As recently as November 2005, upon returning from a trip to Iraq, for instance, he said on CNN’s American Morning that he agreed with the administration’s view that it was necessary to “stay the course.”
“I agree to the extent that we have to stay the course of the policy we chose in overthrowing Saddam and helping the Iraqi people become free, which will really make use a lot more secure and set the terrorists back,” Mr. Lieberman said, adding that some of the war tactics should change.
The original article noted that the database, which included more than 300 Iraq-related comments since the Sept 11 terrorist attacks, could not be comprehensive. But five of Mr. Lieberman’s “stay the course” references were, in fact, included in the database, and should have been mentioned in the article. It is unclear why the phrase did not come up when the database was checked before publication. The same search on Tuesday, after readers complained, yielded the correct results.
Mr. Lieberman used the phrase several times in 2004, saying during a presidential primary debate in Iowa that January: “We have to stay the course in Iraq now and continue to build a stable, modernizing, democratizing country there.”
After losing his party’s primary, in April, 2004. Mr. Lieberman said in a televised press conference that he blamed his loss on his support for the war in Iraq and praised the Bush administration’s policy.
“I thought the president gave the strongest case that I can remember him giving about why we went in and why we have to stay the course,” he said then. “We’ve got to adopt a strategy of success. A defeat will create chaos in Iraq, chaos in the Middle East, and will embolden the terrorists in a way that will endanger our future and our children’s future.”
Mr. Lieberman also made his support for the president clear during an interview on CNN’s Larry King Live a month later, saying “the president’s right.”
“It’s been a lot harder to achieve it than we hoped it would be,” he said of America’s mission in Iraq. “But we’ve got to stay the course and finish the job.”
In July, Mr. Lieberman used the phrase again on Fox News’ “Hannity & Colmes,” saying of the president: “What I’m most happy about is that he said that he will stay the course in Iraq until we finish the job and the Iraqis are in control of their own destiny.”
Aron Pilhofer contributed reporting.
Note: This is an advance version of a corrective article to be published Wednesday in the newspaper and on nytimes.com.
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
America drops NINE places on world PRESS FREEDOM rankings. Thanks to the HORRIFIC 'reporting' from NY Lyin' Times & Cowardly Washington Post....
Think that we are "biting the hand" [i.e. the Washington Post] that reports this story"?
Well, just take a look at the WP story: they link you to THEIR OWN general, encyclopedic pages about each of the countries they name in their story... BUT OMIT the MOST IMPORTANT LINK, the one to "Reporters Without Borders" who compiled the rankings!
COULD IT BE that the Washington Post editors and publishers want to MISINFORM or NOT inform their readers???
And, note as well... NO WHERE IN THIS STORY does the Washington Post INFORM US exactly WHAT America's previous rank was, HOW FAR we have fallen, and what our CURRENT RANK IS!
THEY DO A STORY about "US FALLS IN PRESS FREEDOM RANKINGS"..... WITHOUT TELLING US HOW FAR WE FELL, what our previous rankings were, and what our CURRENT RANKING IS!
MUCH LESS WHAT, exactly it was, THAT CAUSED AMERICA TO DROP in the "press freedom" rankings!
Washington Post, YOU SAD, PATHETIC WHORES!
-----------------------------------------------------------
Well, HERE is the Reporters Without Borders 2006 Annual report:
http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=17084
pdf download at:
http://www.rsf.org/IMG/pdf/report.pdf
How can we comment on this report without going into a 1,000 page PhD thesis? How about mentioning some comments on the Big Ed Schultz radio show today (www.WeGotEd.com), that Mr. Bush is A MASTER of MANIPULATING his captive White House press corps, Bush using each and every question HE asks reporters as a means to make personal comments and observations on dress, hairstyle, physical size, (eg "stretch" and "little stretch"), to engage in small-talk with the reporters, to get mad at some questions, and of course the ever-present non-answer-answer or diversionary answer, WITH NO FOLLOW UP QUESTION allowed or entertained.
THE WASHINGTON PRESS CORPS' stunning SERVILE SUBSERVIENCE would be QUITE IMPOSSIBLE were the WASHINGTON POST and NEW YORK TIMES to INSIST on aksing the hard, probing, demanding questions THAT IT IS THEIR BUSINESS TO ASK.
INTIMIDATION of the US press/media STARTS IN THE WHITE HOUSE and the person of George W. Bush; and the WHORE Post and WHORE Times are the LEAD CHEERLEADERS in the entire USA for this abject, gross ABUSE and MISUSE of America's precious, and hard-fought reputation as a world leader in FREEDOM OF THE PRESS.
==============================
U.S. Rank on Press Freedom Slides Lower
By Nora Boustany
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, October 24, 2006; A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/23/AR2006102301148_pf.html
Some poor countries, such as Mauritania and Haiti, improved their record in a global press freedom index this year, while France, the United States and Japan slipped further down the scale of 168 countries rated, the group Reporters Without Borders said yesterday.
The news media advocacy organization said the most repressive countries in terms of journalistic freedom -- such as North Korea, Cuba, Burma and China -- made no advances at all.
The organization's fifth annual Worldwide Press Freedom Index tracks actions against news media through the end of September. The group noted its concern over the declining rankings of some Western democracies as well as the persistence of other countries in imposing harsh punishments on media that criticize political leaders.
"Unfortunately nothing has changed in the countries that are the worst predators of press freedom, and journalists in North Korea, Eritrea, Turkmenistan, Cuba, Burma and China are still risking their life or imprisonment for trying to keep us informed," the organization said in a news release. North Korea holds the worst ranking at 168.
Iran ranks 162nd, between Saudi Arabia and China. The report said conditions in Russia and Belarus have not improved. It said that Russia continued to steadily dismantle the independent media and that the recent slaying of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya "is a poor omen for the coming year."
Northern European countries top the index, with no reported censorship, threats, intimidation or physical reprisals, either by officials or the public, in Finland, Ireland, Iceland and the Netherlands. All of those countries were ranked in first place.
Serious threats against the artists and publishers of the Muhammad cartoons, which caricatured the prophet of Islam, caused Denmark, which was also in first place last year, to drop to 19th place. Yemen, at 149th place, slipped four places, mostly because of the arrests of journalists and the closure of newspapers that reprinted the cartoons. Journalists in Algeria, Jordan, Indonesia and India were harassed because of the cartoons as well.
Although it ranked 17th on the first list, published in 2002, the United States now stands at 53, having fallen nine places since last year.
"Relations between the media and the Bush administration sharply deteriorated after the president used the pretext of 'national security' to regard as suspicious any journalist who questioned his 'war on terrorism,' " the group said.
"The zeal of federal courts which, unlike those in 33 U.S. states, refuse to recognize the media's right not to reveal its sources, even threatens journalists whose investigations have no connection at all with terrorism," the group said.
Lucie Morillon, the organization's Washington representative, said the index is based on responses to 50 questions about press freedom asked of journalists, free press organizations, researchers, human rights activists and others.
France, 35th, dropped five places since last year because of searches of media offices and journalists' homes, as well as physical attacks on journalists during a trade union dispute, the group said.
In Lebanon, a series of bomb attacks targeting journalists and publishers in 2005, and Israeli military attacks last summer, contributed to a drop in the country's ranking from 56th to 107th in the past four years.
Well, just take a look at the WP story: they link you to THEIR OWN general, encyclopedic pages about each of the countries they name in their story... BUT OMIT the MOST IMPORTANT LINK, the one to "Reporters Without Borders" who compiled the rankings!
COULD IT BE that the Washington Post editors and publishers want to MISINFORM or NOT inform their readers???
And, note as well... NO WHERE IN THIS STORY does the Washington Post INFORM US exactly WHAT America's previous rank was, HOW FAR we have fallen, and what our CURRENT RANK IS!
THEY DO A STORY about "US FALLS IN PRESS FREEDOM RANKINGS"..... WITHOUT TELLING US HOW FAR WE FELL, what our previous rankings were, and what our CURRENT RANKING IS!
MUCH LESS WHAT, exactly it was, THAT CAUSED AMERICA TO DROP in the "press freedom" rankings!
Washington Post, YOU SAD, PATHETIC WHORES!
-----------------------------------------------------------
Well, HERE is the Reporters Without Borders 2006 Annual report:
http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=17084
pdf download at:
http://www.rsf.org/IMG/pdf/report.pdf
How can we comment on this report without going into a 1,000 page PhD thesis? How about mentioning some comments on the Big Ed Schultz radio show today (www.WeGotEd.com), that Mr. Bush is A MASTER of MANIPULATING his captive White House press corps, Bush using each and every question HE asks reporters as a means to make personal comments and observations on dress, hairstyle, physical size, (eg "stretch" and "little stretch"), to engage in small-talk with the reporters, to get mad at some questions, and of course the ever-present non-answer-answer or diversionary answer, WITH NO FOLLOW UP QUESTION allowed or entertained.
THE WASHINGTON PRESS CORPS' stunning SERVILE SUBSERVIENCE would be QUITE IMPOSSIBLE were the WASHINGTON POST and NEW YORK TIMES to INSIST on aksing the hard, probing, demanding questions THAT IT IS THEIR BUSINESS TO ASK.
INTIMIDATION of the US press/media STARTS IN THE WHITE HOUSE and the person of George W. Bush; and the WHORE Post and WHORE Times are the LEAD CHEERLEADERS in the entire USA for this abject, gross ABUSE and MISUSE of America's precious, and hard-fought reputation as a world leader in FREEDOM OF THE PRESS.
==============================
U.S. Rank on Press Freedom Slides Lower
By Nora Boustany
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, October 24, 2006; A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/23/AR2006102301148_pf.html
Some poor countries, such as Mauritania and Haiti, improved their record in a global press freedom index this year, while France, the United States and Japan slipped further down the scale of 168 countries rated, the group Reporters Without Borders said yesterday.
The news media advocacy organization said the most repressive countries in terms of journalistic freedom -- such as North Korea, Cuba, Burma and China -- made no advances at all.
The organization's fifth annual Worldwide Press Freedom Index tracks actions against news media through the end of September. The group noted its concern over the declining rankings of some Western democracies as well as the persistence of other countries in imposing harsh punishments on media that criticize political leaders.
"Unfortunately nothing has changed in the countries that are the worst predators of press freedom, and journalists in North Korea, Eritrea, Turkmenistan, Cuba, Burma and China are still risking their life or imprisonment for trying to keep us informed," the organization said in a news release. North Korea holds the worst ranking at 168.
Iran ranks 162nd, between Saudi Arabia and China. The report said conditions in Russia and Belarus have not improved. It said that Russia continued to steadily dismantle the independent media and that the recent slaying of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya "is a poor omen for the coming year."
Northern European countries top the index, with no reported censorship, threats, intimidation or physical reprisals, either by officials or the public, in Finland, Ireland, Iceland and the Netherlands. All of those countries were ranked in first place.
Serious threats against the artists and publishers of the Muhammad cartoons, which caricatured the prophet of Islam, caused Denmark, which was also in first place last year, to drop to 19th place. Yemen, at 149th place, slipped four places, mostly because of the arrests of journalists and the closure of newspapers that reprinted the cartoons. Journalists in Algeria, Jordan, Indonesia and India were harassed because of the cartoons as well.
Although it ranked 17th on the first list, published in 2002, the United States now stands at 53, having fallen nine places since last year.
"Relations between the media and the Bush administration sharply deteriorated after the president used the pretext of 'national security' to regard as suspicious any journalist who questioned his 'war on terrorism,' " the group said.
"The zeal of federal courts which, unlike those in 33 U.S. states, refuse to recognize the media's right not to reveal its sources, even threatens journalists whose investigations have no connection at all with terrorism," the group said.
Lucie Morillon, the organization's Washington representative, said the index is based on responses to 50 questions about press freedom asked of journalists, free press organizations, researchers, human rights activists and others.
France, 35th, dropped five places since last year because of searches of media offices and journalists' homes, as well as physical attacks on journalists during a trade union dispute, the group said.
In Lebanon, a series of bomb attacks targeting journalists and publishers in 2005, and Israeli military attacks last summer, contributed to a drop in the country's ranking from 56th to 107th in the past four years.
Bob Cesca highlights the PROPAGANDA: Bush-Rove-Cheney portray THEIR FAILUR to CAPTURE Osama bin Laden... as COMPETENT LEADERSHIP in "war on terror"??!
Great post by Bob Cesca, with a slightly humorous, mildly vulgar take on the PROPAGANDA 800-pound gorilla in America's living room: The Bush-Rove-Cheney-Rumsfeld administration's efforts to portray their serially, GROSSLY INCOMPETENT (not to mention grossly corrupt) administration of "THE WAR ON TERROR," as reason to give them MORE unsupervised, unlimited power!
We mean to tell ya, NOTHING illustrates the appalling state of America's ENTIRE "major media" as a PROPAGANDA ORGAN of the Bush-Rethuglican Party, than that the cowardly editors and publishers of the NEW YORK TIMES and WASHINGTON POST can NOT get their hired writers to ask the OBVIOUS question: "HOW CAN YOU CLAIM COMPETENCE in the "war on terror," when OSAMA bin LADEN and his commanders are still on the lam FIVE YEARS AFTER 9-11..?"
<< Were I Ken Mehlman, Karl Rove or George W. Bush, I don't think I'd spend millions of dollars thrusting Bin Laden up the collective poop-chutes of the nation. Sure, their goal was noble. That is, if you define "noble" as "USING al-Qaeda PROPAGANDA with the DELIBERATE GOAL of TERRORIZING American voters."
But what this advertisement says to me, and hopefully many others, is that the Republican government has UTTERLY FAILED to CAPTURE THESE MURDERERS and thus the King of All Jihadists REMAINS A THREAT TO AMERICA five-plus years after 9/11. This ad tells me that Bin Laden and his chief deputy are still at large due to the incompetent Bush administration and the congressional Republicans who have allowed them to get away with this COLOSSAL FAILURE. >>
=======================================
Bin Laden Is The GOP Spokesman Because President Bush Sucks So Much
Bob Cesca
10.24.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/bin-laden-is-the-gop-spok_b_32354.html
We've all seen the ad. Bin Laden, Zawahiri, a ticking time bomb, explosions, a heartbeat and the ominous phrase: "These are the stakes." And it's probably the best ad of this midterm election cycle... for the Democratic Party. Strangely enough, it was an ad paid for and created by... the Republican Party.
Were I Ken Mehlman, Karl Rove or George W. Bush, I don't think I'd spend millions of dollars thrusting Bin Laden up the collective poop-chutes of the nation. Sure, their goal was noble. That is, if you define "noble" as "using al-Qaeda propaganda with the deliberate goal of terrorizing American voters."
But what this advertisement says to me, and hopefully many others, is that the Republican government has utterly failed to capture these murderers and thus the King of All Jihadists remains a threat to America five-plus years after 9/11. This ad tells me that Bin Laden and his chief deputy are still at large due to the incompetent Bush administration and the congressional Republicans who have allowed them to get away with this colossal failure.
What are the stakes? The Republicans have failed to capture the demons featured in the commercial, so... what? Oh right. Of course. We're supposed to re-elect the Republicans who let them go. As the Toronto Star reported Monday, "The Republicans still can't find Osama bin Laden, but they know how to showcase him." Five years simply hasn't been enough time for these tough-talking cowboys -- the shock and awesome messiahs -- the resolute, crisp, lapel flag commandos -- to capture a 6'5" man who's on kidney dialysis and probably hiding within the borders of a so-called allied nation.
The Democratic candidates, meanwhile, have stated across the board that they intend to continue the fight against terrorists by such "weakling" means as implementing the 9/11 Commission recommendations within their first 100 hours. Not days -- and certainly not within five years -- 100 hours after they take their oaths in January. They want to increase funding for first responders and stop the White House from cutting $1.1 billion in funding for state and local law enforcement. They want to increase Special Forces numbers to track and kill terrorists and involve the world community in an all-out global manhunt.
And all of that (and the many other programs proposed by the Democrats) make them somehow less capable than the incompetent Bush Republicans who have allowed Bin Laden, their leading spokesman, to run free all this time? The Republicans who, via their misguided Iraq War, have actually increased the threat of terrorism worldwide. The Republicans who would rather shatter the Geneva Conventions, leaving our fighting men and women increasingly vulnerable to being tortured at the hands of our enemies, than unite the world around a common goal -- a goal even the Iranians would've supported after 9/11.
Or maybe, all things being equal the simplest answer is the right one. Bin Laden is a better spokesman for the GOP than is President Bush. Casting Bin Laden in a national GOP commercial is ultimately more effective and LESS damaging for the Republicans than casting the president. In fact, have you seen a single NRCC, NRSC or RNC commercial featuring George W. Bush? Maybe it's not because he's electoral poison right now. Perhaps he's too busy stumping for racists and guys who (allegedly) strangle their mistresses. Or maybe he's too busy betraying his followers by suddenly flip-flopping on his "stay the course in Iraq" pledge. Or maybe George W. Bush has been quoted too often saying he doesn't spend too much time on Bin Laden and hence has let him go. The president not spending time on the Bin Laden issue is a pretty damn big stake, if you ask me or anyone else with an intact brain stem.
And yet the Republicans think their voters are idiots. They believe their voters are naive special needs children who will see Bin Laden with a spooky tick-tock sound and, rather than questioning why he hasn't been captured under the Bush Republicans, will kneejerk into saying, "YNUCK! Mmm-doy -- hey that tick-tock is scaring me and that Bin Laden! IEEEE! The Democrats won't capture him [even though George W. Bush will still be the president after November 7] and we'll all die down dead! These ARE them there stakes! Doy!"
But even though I don't share many of the values of the president's supporters, I don't think they're as stupid as Karl Rove thinks they are. With this commercial, the RNC and the White House are counting on the stupidity of the electorate. They're counting wrong.
Send
We mean to tell ya, NOTHING illustrates the appalling state of America's ENTIRE "major media" as a PROPAGANDA ORGAN of the Bush-Rethuglican Party, than that the cowardly editors and publishers of the NEW YORK TIMES and WASHINGTON POST can NOT get their hired writers to ask the OBVIOUS question: "HOW CAN YOU CLAIM COMPETENCE in the "war on terror," when OSAMA bin LADEN and his commanders are still on the lam FIVE YEARS AFTER 9-11..?"
<< Were I Ken Mehlman, Karl Rove or George W. Bush, I don't think I'd spend millions of dollars thrusting Bin Laden up the collective poop-chutes of the nation. Sure, their goal was noble. That is, if you define "noble" as "USING al-Qaeda PROPAGANDA with the DELIBERATE GOAL of TERRORIZING American voters."
But what this advertisement says to me, and hopefully many others, is that the Republican government has UTTERLY FAILED to CAPTURE THESE MURDERERS and thus the King of All Jihadists REMAINS A THREAT TO AMERICA five-plus years after 9/11. This ad tells me that Bin Laden and his chief deputy are still at large due to the incompetent Bush administration and the congressional Republicans who have allowed them to get away with this COLOSSAL FAILURE. >>
=======================================
Bin Laden Is The GOP Spokesman Because President Bush Sucks So Much
Bob Cesca
10.24.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/bin-laden-is-the-gop-spok_b_32354.html
We've all seen the ad. Bin Laden, Zawahiri, a ticking time bomb, explosions, a heartbeat and the ominous phrase: "These are the stakes." And it's probably the best ad of this midterm election cycle... for the Democratic Party. Strangely enough, it was an ad paid for and created by... the Republican Party.
Were I Ken Mehlman, Karl Rove or George W. Bush, I don't think I'd spend millions of dollars thrusting Bin Laden up the collective poop-chutes of the nation. Sure, their goal was noble. That is, if you define "noble" as "using al-Qaeda propaganda with the deliberate goal of terrorizing American voters."
But what this advertisement says to me, and hopefully many others, is that the Republican government has utterly failed to capture these murderers and thus the King of All Jihadists remains a threat to America five-plus years after 9/11. This ad tells me that Bin Laden and his chief deputy are still at large due to the incompetent Bush administration and the congressional Republicans who have allowed them to get away with this colossal failure.
What are the stakes? The Republicans have failed to capture the demons featured in the commercial, so... what? Oh right. Of course. We're supposed to re-elect the Republicans who let them go. As the Toronto Star reported Monday, "The Republicans still can't find Osama bin Laden, but they know how to showcase him." Five years simply hasn't been enough time for these tough-talking cowboys -- the shock and awesome messiahs -- the resolute, crisp, lapel flag commandos -- to capture a 6'5" man who's on kidney dialysis and probably hiding within the borders of a so-called allied nation.
The Democratic candidates, meanwhile, have stated across the board that they intend to continue the fight against terrorists by such "weakling" means as implementing the 9/11 Commission recommendations within their first 100 hours. Not days -- and certainly not within five years -- 100 hours after they take their oaths in January. They want to increase funding for first responders and stop the White House from cutting $1.1 billion in funding for state and local law enforcement. They want to increase Special Forces numbers to track and kill terrorists and involve the world community in an all-out global manhunt.
And all of that (and the many other programs proposed by the Democrats) make them somehow less capable than the incompetent Bush Republicans who have allowed Bin Laden, their leading spokesman, to run free all this time? The Republicans who, via their misguided Iraq War, have actually increased the threat of terrorism worldwide. The Republicans who would rather shatter the Geneva Conventions, leaving our fighting men and women increasingly vulnerable to being tortured at the hands of our enemies, than unite the world around a common goal -- a goal even the Iranians would've supported after 9/11.
Or maybe, all things being equal the simplest answer is the right one. Bin Laden is a better spokesman for the GOP than is President Bush. Casting Bin Laden in a national GOP commercial is ultimately more effective and LESS damaging for the Republicans than casting the president. In fact, have you seen a single NRCC, NRSC or RNC commercial featuring George W. Bush? Maybe it's not because he's electoral poison right now. Perhaps he's too busy stumping for racists and guys who (allegedly) strangle their mistresses. Or maybe he's too busy betraying his followers by suddenly flip-flopping on his "stay the course in Iraq" pledge. Or maybe George W. Bush has been quoted too often saying he doesn't spend too much time on Bin Laden and hence has let him go. The president not spending time on the Bin Laden issue is a pretty damn big stake, if you ask me or anyone else with an intact brain stem.
And yet the Republicans think their voters are idiots. They believe their voters are naive special needs children who will see Bin Laden with a spooky tick-tock sound and, rather than questioning why he hasn't been captured under the Bush Republicans, will kneejerk into saying, "YNUCK! Mmm-doy -- hey that tick-tock is scaring me and that Bin Laden! IEEEE! The Democrats won't capture him [even though George W. Bush will still be the president after November 7] and we'll all die down dead! These ARE them there stakes! Doy!"
But even though I don't share many of the values of the president's supporters, I don't think they're as stupid as Karl Rove thinks they are. With this commercial, the RNC and the White House are counting on the stupidity of the electorate. They're counting wrong.
Send
Monday, October 23, 2006
Now we're getting somewhere! Melanie Morgan calls for WWII style "blitz" of Iraq. Maybe she's referring to the firebombings of Hamburg & Dresden?
Great catch and commentary by C&L (CrooksAndLiars.com):
<< Morgan is the typical warmonger who believes we should "kill'em all."–vaporize every living person without regard to human life—even though Iraq never attacked us. (She's also quite comfortable with torture,) Morgan has no idea how many casualties there are in Iraq because she doesn't want to know. >>
http://www.blogger.com/posts.g?blogID=28835186
The truth is, most of those Americans who are hard-core supporters of the war, despite all the horrifying news of how it is run and of the gross, blatant corruption of the leadership and companies which are spending millions of American TAX DOLLARS there every day - WOULD LIKE TO DO TO IRAQ what American pioneers, settlers, and homesteaders did to the American Indians: DRIVE 'em OFF THE LAND entirely, and TAKE the resources that were there. As in the land rush in Oklahoma, the Dakotas (where WIld Bill Hickock met his fate in a mining boom town that, being in "illegal" or Indian territory, was beyond the jurisdiction of American law), California, not to omit mention of the Carolinas and New England and Kentucky Valley (etc).
Today, Chris Mathews and Hardball are giving the Right-Wing commentators such as Melanie Morgan the vehicle to broadcast their desires for "HAMBURG!" and "DRESDEN!" treatment for Iraqi towns and cities, those commentators having failed to appreciate that the United States has already pulled a "Guernica" on Fallujah.
("Blitz-kreig" is German for "Lighting-war" and meant what is today called "Combined Arms" warfare; particularily using air power - bombings - to support traditional infantry, artillery, and armor attacks on tactical targets. The "London Blitz" in particular referred to the wholesale bombings of cities by the German Luftwaffe, a treatment they first used on Guernica, Spain, in support of Franco's Civil War there in the late 1930s, a "treatment" that was extended to dozens of other European cities including Coventry, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam, the later pounded by a barrage of over 2,000 German V-1 buzz-bombs and V-2 ballistic missiles.)
IF the US war in Iraq gets any more efficient at killing Iraqis, it will be entering "ANFAL" territory: the **US backed, supported, and FINANCED** campaign by the Saddam regime to CONDUCT MASS MURDER and GENOCIDE on Kurdish towns and villages, a campaign marked by bulldozers leveling hundreds of towns and villages, and pushing corpses into mass graves - with the full knowledge, if not approval, of the US goverment under President George H.W. Bush (sr.) in the late 1980s. ( See chapter two of Galbraith's "The End of Iraq.")
--------------------------------------------------
MORGAN: I think that…yeah, we should have a lot more troops in the beginning. Look, I’m not a cheerleader for the President of the United States. Um, I…I believe that he made the right decision and he did it for the right reasons. I don’t agree with all of the way the war has been prosecuted. I think we should have gone in and just blitzed Iraq. We haven’t had a, a serious war, really, since WWII. We’ve had…
MATTHEWS: What would that mean, blitz?
MORGAN: It would have…it means that we should have gone in and be prepared to win it, not just to do…to avoid collateral damage. And I think that’s one of the mistakes that uh, this administration has made…
See C&L for their complete editorial and links to the MSNBC "Hardball" transcript.
And remember: Chris Mathews and "Hardball" got their great start in cable "news" by muckracking, churning, and broadcasting the "Monica!" scandal 24-7-365. After spending $70 million in government, taxpayer monies first investigating "Whitewater" (a financial investigation in which Ken Starr was completely unable to indict the Clintons for any of the thousands of allegations that were thrown against them) the Ken Starr Republican investigation finally had to settle on the "Monica" affair as means to impeach President Clinton, an impeachment that failed.
<< Morgan is the typical warmonger who believes we should "kill'em all."–vaporize every living person without regard to human life—even though Iraq never attacked us. (She's also quite comfortable with torture,) Morgan has no idea how many casualties there are in Iraq because she doesn't want to know. >>
http://www.blogger.com/posts.g?blogID=28835186
The truth is, most of those Americans who are hard-core supporters of the war, despite all the horrifying news of how it is run and of the gross, blatant corruption of the leadership and companies which are spending millions of American TAX DOLLARS there every day - WOULD LIKE TO DO TO IRAQ what American pioneers, settlers, and homesteaders did to the American Indians: DRIVE 'em OFF THE LAND entirely, and TAKE the resources that were there. As in the land rush in Oklahoma, the Dakotas (where WIld Bill Hickock met his fate in a mining boom town that, being in "illegal" or Indian territory, was beyond the jurisdiction of American law), California, not to omit mention of the Carolinas and New England and Kentucky Valley (etc).
Today, Chris Mathews and Hardball are giving the Right-Wing commentators such as Melanie Morgan the vehicle to broadcast their desires for "HAMBURG!" and "DRESDEN!" treatment for Iraqi towns and cities, those commentators having failed to appreciate that the United States has already pulled a "Guernica" on Fallujah.
("Blitz-kreig" is German for "Lighting-war" and meant what is today called "Combined Arms" warfare; particularily using air power - bombings - to support traditional infantry, artillery, and armor attacks on tactical targets. The "London Blitz" in particular referred to the wholesale bombings of cities by the German Luftwaffe, a treatment they first used on Guernica, Spain, in support of Franco's Civil War there in the late 1930s, a "treatment" that was extended to dozens of other European cities including Coventry, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam, the later pounded by a barrage of over 2,000 German V-1 buzz-bombs and V-2 ballistic missiles.)
IF the US war in Iraq gets any more efficient at killing Iraqis, it will be entering "ANFAL" territory: the **US backed, supported, and FINANCED** campaign by the Saddam regime to CONDUCT MASS MURDER and GENOCIDE on Kurdish towns and villages, a campaign marked by bulldozers leveling hundreds of towns and villages, and pushing corpses into mass graves - with the full knowledge, if not approval, of the US goverment under President George H.W. Bush (sr.) in the late 1980s. ( See chapter two of Galbraith's "The End of Iraq.")
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MORGAN: I think that…yeah, we should have a lot more troops in the beginning. Look, I’m not a cheerleader for the President of the United States. Um, I…I believe that he made the right decision and he did it for the right reasons. I don’t agree with all of the way the war has been prosecuted. I think we should have gone in and just blitzed Iraq. We haven’t had a, a serious war, really, since WWII. We’ve had…
MATTHEWS: What would that mean, blitz?
MORGAN: It would have…it means that we should have gone in and be prepared to win it, not just to do…to avoid collateral damage. And I think that’s one of the mistakes that uh, this administration has made…
See C&L for their complete editorial and links to the MSNBC "Hardball" transcript.
And remember: Chris Mathews and "Hardball" got their great start in cable "news" by muckracking, churning, and broadcasting the "Monica!" scandal 24-7-365. After spending $70 million in government, taxpayer monies first investigating "Whitewater" (a financial investigation in which Ken Starr was completely unable to indict the Clintons for any of the thousands of allegations that were thrown against them) the Ken Starr Republican investigation finally had to settle on the "Monica" affair as means to impeach President Clinton, an impeachment that failed.
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