Hi there!  Come on in.  It's been an interesting day, don't you think?  Especially for a Saturday.  No, that's alright.  It's wet outside, you can't help the footprints.   Cristobal, something like that?  I don't pay that much attention to these storms, it's just a blow. 

Sox is over there, gave her a bath tonight so she's feeling all girly and pretty.  New collar and everything.  Oh, yea, as long as they're paying attention to her she'll be there for life.  Something to drink?  I think I might have that, I'll check.  Wine OK if I don't?  Grab a seat, be right back.

Hello!  Guarding the frig?  Oh my God, did you make those?  I may have to kiss you.  Give me one, quick, so I don't follow up on my urge .... oh good grief, yuumm!  And you?  I'll be damned, I never really thought you'd stop by.  Why tonight?  Never mind, it doesn't matter.  It's just so good to see you, come here. 

Sometimes friends are hard to comprehend, as are we all.  Some are there wherever you look, they have your back, they never leave your side.  Some are there so seldom that you almost think they're lost.  But you find they're not, because when you say their name there they are.  Solid, but fleeting.  Some are confrontational, challenging, aggravating and obtuse.  And still love, and are loved, deeply.  Sometimes so deeply it demands compromise.  Some are new and refreshing, leading to lots of conversation on the way to finding surprising things in common.  What fun that can be.

Sox, what are you doing?  Yes, you're beautiful.  Everybody says so, even if you are old and fat.  Kidding, sweetheart!  What?  Aren't they delicious?  I swear I think that's what brought Sox over here, she doesn't leave a free hand easily.  Save that last one for me!  

I write this in response to a front page post asking which of John McCain's policy positions has he been consistent over the last 10 years?

Try phasing out Social Security.  John McCain can call it whatever he wants, but he has been consistent -- consistently wrong -- on that issue over the last 10 years. 

How about the use of military force to spread democracy?  On that McCain has clearly been consistent and consistently wrong.

The federal government's role in providing relief to the uninsured?  Again, McCain -- like our current President -- has been consistent and consistently wrong on that issue. 

Increasing the federal minimum wage?  McCain has consistently voted against that, and even voted last year to repeal the landmark law.  Again, consistent like Bush, and consistently wrong. 

So, yeah, on some significant policy issues John McCain has been consistent -- consistently wrong, too.

Can Leah Daughtry Bring Faith to the Party?
By Daniel Bergner, New York Times Magazine, July 20:

On Sundays she is a Pentecostal preacher. During the week she is planning the Democratic convention....

In her positions as Dean’s top aid and the convention’s top official, Daughtry, who is 44 years old, is leading the Democratic Party’s new mission to make religious believers — particularly ardent Christian believers — view the party and its candidates as receptive to, and often impelled by, the dictates of faith. She sparked this crusade, both to transfigure the party’s image as predominantly secular and to take enough votes from the Republicans to win this year’s presidential election, in the aftermath of George W. Bush’s 2004 defeat of John Kerry. And in her vocation as a Pentecostal pastor she stands for faith in an extreme form. There is nothing equivocal about her belief. Hers is a religion not only of divine healing but of talking in tongues....

...in early 2005...Dean....asked her to stay on as chief of staff and backed her plan to hire a team, to be known as Faith in Action, that would help the party to hear, and to be heard by, voters of deep religious conviction. Gradually she put together the F.I.A. group that has met weekly at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in Washington: three evangelicals, a Catholic, a Muslim and a Jew, all with backgrounds blending work in religion and politics. (F.I.A., Daughtry says, will very likely be melded now with the Obama campaign for the coming months, then recommence on its own after the election.)....

This will be the first Democratic convention to start with a religious service, another sign meant to prove that the party is serious about belief, and the F.I.A. members, who have worked for months on how best to inject faith into the convention, want to be sure the gathering is led, and well-attended, by a wide range of the religious....

The big tent theory behind this all is a political good. But it is ok to politely refuse the pompoms and quietly think "ick ick ick, no thanks, I think I will be busy doing other stuff that week?"  This is coming from someone who has often disagreed with the more radical fundamentalist atheist contingent in the blogosphere:  the idea of an "old timey religion" populist revival convention really does turn me off. I really do still like the overall political marketing potential of a moderate version of the separation of church and state thingie, and I think a lot of fellow Americans cynical about politics right and left might agree with me on that front.

Now that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has endorsed Barack Obama's plan to withdraw American combat troops from his country over 16 months, what will John McCain's response be?

Some are hailing al-Maliki's position as bolting the door closed on McCain's candidacy. But I think McCain and Bush will just slide to the left, closing the gap with Obama's solution while claiming an accelerated troop withdraw is now justified by great progress in events on the ground, all courtesy of the surge. The media won't even comment on the shell game McCain and Bush will play.

I would expect Petraeus to give al-Maliki's idea a nod this weekend, as well.

Any other views on this?

The following is a post about golf.  If you want to read something political, stop here.

I was the weird kid who watched tennis and golf.  I first really noticed golf at age 12, a time when this cocky Australian with his stylish outfits and long game ascended to the top of the world rankings and drove TV ratings for the game.  So, I watched golf even before Tiger won his first US Junior Amateur.  And my favorite golfer - as my worn leather Great White Shark glove would attest - was Greg Norman.

Fast forward to July 19, 2008.   Norman is leading the Open Championship by two strokes after three rounds.  Greg freaking Norman.

That's 53-year-old Greg Norman.  Leading a major championship. 

That's Greg Norman, he of the "Saturday Slam" in 1986.  Greg Norman of the Larry Mize and Bob Tway miracles. 

That's Greg Norman, who's got more money than Croesus, thanks to his excellent business acumen.  Greg Norman, who should be enjoying his recent marriage to Chris Evert while sitting on a beach he just bought somewhere.

Of course, Norman being Norman, and Royal Birkdale having 30-mph gusts this weekend, the man may be headed for yet another memorable Sunday collapse.  But only one other 50-something (Julius Boros) has ever held a third-round major lead. 

(Of course, this was the 1973 US Open, where Johnny Miller shot a final-round 63 at Oakmont Country Club to blow everyone away.  So, Boros didn't exactly choke.)

Now, 12 years after the last time he led a major after three rounds, Norman's leading the way once again.  Of course, 12 years ago was 1996, when Norman blew a six-shot lead in the Masters and lost to Nick Faldo. 

That meltdown hurt to watch for any golf fan.  But, 3 years past when he's eligible for the Senior TOUR, Norman would exorcise the ghosts of his major-championship past with a win tomorrow. 

Here's hoping he does some ghostbusting.  

We now return you to your regular Maverick mashing.

How about that for a stunning headline?
 
"Gordon Brown prepared the ground for a historic realignment in the "war on terror" yesterday by setting out a four-point plan for withdrawal of British troops from Iraq by the end of next year."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/brown-plans-to-withdraw-troops-as-he-backs-obama-over-war-on-terror-872388.html

I suppose the gazillion dollar question is whether  or not it gets the play it deserves in the US?

Welcome to your official live party blogging thread.

Congrats, TPM-aholics!  We've made it.  It's not Saturday, July 19th, and the fun is about to begin.

(And if you don't know what I'm talking about, then where have you been for the last month?  Er, I mean, read Genghis' latest post.)

An hour from now, we'll begin our conversation with Don Bivens, DNC chair from Arizona.

So let's get ready to rock, roll, and GOBAMA!

And yes, in case you wondering, even if you won't be able to attend on of the parties, you can support this fine effort -- and the Obama campaign -- by contributing through the  TPM-aholics fundraiser page.

This event is neither sponsored nor supported by Talking Points Memo.

Citizens for Responsible Ethics in Washington, DC filed a  FOIA request for the FBI transcripts of their "interview" with the Vice President. CREW is a private organization doing the job of Congress, collecting evidence of VP crimes:

"[R]equesting copies of the interview that the FBI conducted of Vice President Richard B. Cheney as part of the investigation into the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson's covert CIA identity. CREW is requesting the same records that the House Committee on Government Oversight has sought through a subpoena and over which the White House has claimed executive privilege."

AG Mukasey previously refused to respond to a subpoena for similar documents citing executive privilege, prompting Georgetown LawProf Jonathan Turley to (again) suggest Congress (possibly) use inherent contempt to arrest the Attorney General. Waxman prepared a contempt resolution against Mukasey.

Internet References:
A. Date Turley appeared on Olbermann's "Countdown;
B. Transcript for July 17, 2008.

Two years after the 2006 "mandate," Congress is still looking for the light switch:

Turley, Nov 2006, responding to questions about enhanced Congressional oversight: "Well, first, someone has to find where the boxes are to turn lights back on in Congress."

CREW Works, Congress Diddles

Without a table for impeachment investigation, CREW has plenty of space to stomp.   Pelosi has time to attend Netroots, but "no time" to lead an impeachment investigation on torture. Yet Turley after the November 2006 election, anticipated the opposite:

Turley: "You know, one of the reasons we have a government of checks and balances is not just for this type of partisan bickering, but it’s just that government works better when there’s more than one set of eyes on a problem."

Pelosi, with a gleam in her eye relishes the thought of letting the President flounder without challenge. Some observers believe the floundering would increase if there was a serious investigation.

Consider the Federalist Papers on the value of investigations and impeachment: The United States government structure should, in theory, responsibly ensure safety through impeachment:

Federalist 77: "We have now completed a survey of the structure and powers of the executive department, which, I have endeavored to show, combines, as far as republican principles will admit, all the requisites to energy. The remaining inquiry is: Does it also combine the requisites to safety, in a republican sense -- a due dependence on the people, a due responsibility?

The answer to this question has been anticipated in the investigation of its other characteristics, and is satisfactorily deducible from these circumstances; from the election of the President once in four years by persons immediately chosen by the people for that purpose; and from his being at all times liable to impeachment, trial, dismission from office, incapacity to serve in any other, and to forfeiture of life and estate by subsequent prosecution in the common course of law."

Speaker Pelosi has fallen well short of her legal duties and responsibilities, as the Framers intended. Pelosi impermissibly removed impeachment, which the Framers intended to be "at all times" a credible check on the Executive. Had she been committed to obligations as Speaker, there might not be calls to declare the Speaker's position vacant.
 
Conyers in his book expressly mentioned the Presient's crimes of "torture," but we have no official Judiciary Committee-led war crimes investigation.  Conyers promised a "non basement" impeachment.   We're out of the basement, but still without an investigation, just a wishy-washy hearing into the "Imperial Presidency".

What's worse, having a mock investigation in the basement; or leaving the Constitution in the basement during phony hearings in the Committee?

Let's turn back the clock to when Conyers was in the basement and consider what we should have asked him:

Why do we need a federal government or a democratic "victory" when a private organization required to collect evidence and do the job of Congress?

What happened to Checks and balances; what about the light switch called "The Constitution"?

Do you plan to investigate the President when you become Chairman; or are you going to make excuses to pretend that your hands are still tied?

Is there any collusion with the Speaker and President to thwart full invstigations?

No--I wouldn't vote for him.  Actually, not residing in New Jersey, I wouldn't even have the opportunity to vote for him--not that it would make any difference. 

However, I strongly support him throwing his xenophobic hat in the ring [actually, just to be ironic, I think he should throw a sombrero into the ring].  Please Lou, run!  I'm begging you, asking you, daring you.  In fact, if you don't run, it's safe to say that you lack cojones.

The periodic reports that Sweet Lou might challenge New Jersey Governor John Corzine have been music [usually, Tejano music] to my ears.  The self-styled "independent voice" is said to be mulling over the idea [perhaps even taking a siesta].

Just as a brief aside, whenever someone refers to themselves as an "independent voice", i.e., Lou Dobbs and Bill O'Reilly, that means that they are actually Republicans and trying to hide that fact from their viewers/listeners. 

Nothing would make me happier than watching this pompous, rabble-rousing buffoon get his considerably large ass handed to him in a race for the governorship.  I look forward to Sweet Lou campaigning for votes from the 14% of New Jersey's population that is Hispanic.  Perhaps you can sell them your scapegoating poison-pill.  This is a vanity project that I could most definitely get behind. 

How can I help Lou?  What can I do to goad you into taking your pontifical gobbledygook onto the campaign trail?

Please Lou . . . don't deny us your considerable talents for buffoonery. 

So, yesterday, CENTCOM Gen. David Petraeus said that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki doesn't want a firm timetable for US withdrawal from Iraq.

“Again, what [al-Maliki] has said is not a timeline or a timetable. He said time horizons, which, again, we think that there's nothing wrong with talking about time horizons."

Apparently, the Prime Minister didn't get the DoD approved talking points.  Today, Maliki said that he prefers Barack Obama's 16-month timetable proposal.

"US presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes."

So now, the very country that the Reichwingers supported invading - theoretically to make it free - says we should leave. 

If we don't leave, then that puts the lie to said motivation, leaving just oil as the primary reason for attacking. 

If we do leave, then Obama's judgment of withdrawing with all deliberate haste is proven correct.

On the menu at 1600 Pennsylvania tonight:  Sunni crow, with a side of Shi'ite hat, lightly braised in Republican sweat.

Just want to say that I am so proud of Obama for going to the Middle East. He ought rightly to have dismissed McCains cheap political taunt and stayed on the campaign trail; instead he's not only visiting Iraq, but Afghanistan, Israel Palestine and Europe too.

Perhaps McCain himself needs to take another trip over there before the election, given Maliki's recent call for a withdrawal timetable

During a pivotal scene in the movie 'Network', Frank Hackett, the head of the UBC television network and vice-president of CCA, the corporation that owns UBC, is forced to respond to rumors that CCA has a deal to be bought out by a Saudi company. 

Hackett, played by Robert Duvall, is in a pinch because the deal has just been exposed on UBC's top-rated program, The Howard Beale Show.  During the program, Howard Beale, played by the late Peter Finch, whips the studio crowd into a frenzy by exhorting them and the audience at home to flood the White House with telegrams to stop the deal.

Hackett, left to absorb the consequences of Beale's show, tells the other executives in the room:

CCA has two billion in loans with the Saudis,and they hold every pledge We’ve got. 

We need that Saudi money bad.  Disaster.  The show is a disaster.

Unmitigated disaster. The death knell. 

I'm ruined.  I'm dead.  I'm finished.

Any second that phone’s gonna ring and Clarence McElheny is gonna tell me that Jensen wants me in his office tomorrow so he can personally chop my head off.

Four hours ago, I was the sun-god at CCA.  Mr Jensen’s hand-picked golden boy. 

The heir apparent. 

Now... I’m a man without a corporation.

Four hours ago, John McCain was man with a shot at the presidency.  Not a great shot, mind you, but more then a puncher's chance.  Now . . . he's a man without an issue.

Granted, that 'chance' was almost entirely predicated on being 'right' about the surge in Iraq and his ability to portray Barack Obama as a dangerous foreign policy novice whose election would lead to defeat in Iraq; a reversal of fortune since now we're 'winning'.

That chance is gone. 

Prime Minister Maliki's statement, leaked by the White House on accident [thanks guys!] closes the door on the argument that a time-line would be 'reckless' and lead to 'surrender'.

Maliki endorses the plan of Barack Obama, the Bush Administration is negotiating with Iran & McCain is calling for more troops in Afghanistan.  Seems as if everyone is adopting the foreign policy goals of the 'reckless' 'novice', Barack Obama. 

What's left for John McCain to run on now--the economy?  Good luck with that.

I'm so happy to see Senator McCain pushing more ill-considered policies.  Resuming his gas-tax-holiday promotion, McCain raises some questions about how and why this would work.

There is no excess supply of gasoline - we buy all the gas that's available for sale.  There is little incentive for competition between gas retailers, which is why gas prices vary so little between filling stations.  Sure, labor costs, real-estate values, local/state regulations, and local/state taxes play a role.  But once you account for those disparities, there's not much left - prices are pretty flat.

So eliminating the federal gas tax may change the cost of gas for people selling gas, but it may not lower prices at the pump.  With oil prices fluctuating every day, and worldwide demand continuing to increase, prices will be hard to predict.  Maybe the gas retailers, small and large, will take the tax holiday as a little more margin for themselves, or maybe the oil refiners will raise their gas prices a bit (market conditions?) to offset the gas-tax discount.

Let's say we get a gas tax holiday for six months.  Will it affect prices at all?  Probably not.  And that would be fairly horrible for all concerned.  Gas tax holiday proponents would be ridiculed, oil companies would be demonized, and the federal government would be out several billion dollars in revenue. 

But our government, makers and enforcers of laws, some-time arbiter of the market, could lock in the savings.  The feds - in this case, Congress - could set gas prices.  Leaving aside whether or not this is a good idea, it is an implicit element in this gas tax holiday theory.  How else could one guarantee savings for the average gas consumer?  Should we have a gas tax holiday and just hope for lower gas prices?  Last time I checked, hope is not a plan. 

Surely Senator McCain has more behind his gas tax holiday proposal than meaningless pandering, right?  He's a man of substance/character/integrity/steel/heroism/profanity/etc, his gas tax holiday must be legit.

So, in the language of the proprietor, when will the campaign press start asking McCain if he is in favor of price controls on gasoline to insure savings for consumers?  How would those price controls be enforced?  And why does he want to bring Soviet-style, command-economy policies to the United States - didn't we win the Cold War?

Did you know that talks with Iran to negotiate its nuclear program were taking place in Geneva? I didn't. The talks included France, Britain, China, Russia, Germany, and the U.S. Who knew!

Did you know that in a dramatic about-face, the U.S. actually attended the talks? If you didn't know, don't feel bad, I didn't know this myself. That's why I'm writing about it. Undersecretary of State William Burns joined the meeting with Iran's top nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili. As far as I've been able to discover, this was our first face-to-face contact with Iran since 1979.


It's not that I don't pay attention to the news. I tend to pay lots of attention if the news involves Iran. But I found out about the meeting after it had already ended, when a friend from Canada e-mailed me a link to the U.S.'s statement to Iran, made today: You have two weeks to suspend uranium enrichment or else.


Two weeks. That's not very much time. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said:

We hope the Iranian people understand that their leaders need to make a choice between cooperation, which would bring benefits to all, and confrontation, which can only lead to further isolation.

Okay, strong rhetoric that translates to even harsher sanctions. Like what, I don't know. But the difference here is twofold: the U.S. formally attended the talks, and now we have backup. In other words, we are progressing toward a goal. Iran seems to think it will take time to reach that goal. I wonder. What I wonder is, do we really have the same goal Iran does? Or are we going through perfunctory motions as we did before we bombed Baghdad? I also wonder why the news of the U.S.'s attendance at the meeting hasn't been a bigger deal to the MSM? That just irritates the crap out of me.

I won't link to all the articles by journalists and others who think we are headed for a military confrontation with Iran. Seymour Hersh, Ray McGovern, Scott Ritter, and others have voiced their certainty that we will engage with Iran, and I believe them. It gives me lots of anxiety because I do not trust the current administration to be patient. The only one who seems to be a little patient is, surprisingly, Condoleeza Rice.

Now that Obama is overseas, in the middle of the action, what do you think his response is going to be? Do you think his experience there will change his views about Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, or Israel?

In the meantime, for anyone who wants to do something to protest potential U.S. aggression against Iran, United for Peace & Justice is staging discussions and demonstrations in several states across the country July 19 through July 21. Check out the National Days of Action Against War on Iran Calendar here. I didn't know about these events until today, either, so please rec if you want other people to know about them, too. Thanks.

Obama hit two three pointers with ease while visiting troops in a gym in Kawait.  They loved it. 

May seem trivial, but the symbolism...

An extra-marital musical parody, literally ripped from the headlines. It’s a tabloid treasure trove of alleged adulterers, featuring a cast of thousands – a veritable “Who’s Who” of who’s doing who.

They may call it adultery, but there’s nothing adult about THIS video…

http://parodyandson.blogspot.com

OOOPS!

WH Accidentally Sends Press Story About Maliki Endorsement of Obama's Iraq Plan


Inside the Grand Oil War Party's OODA loop...waaaay inside

Can you hear the do-do-do-do music? How about Rod Serling's voice? If not, just close your eyes and think about your current government. (Amazing isn't it?) Welcome To The HUB Zone.

A speeding limo filled with hookers races through the night in downtown DC. Has fate earmarked them for a smokey Mormon ritual? Or, is it just an escape from the clutches of a skin-eating-filthy hottub? do-do-do-do

Numerous companies in the DC area are granted HUBZone status & contracts even though their businesses model resembles a Cayman Islands phone booth operation.

Monitoring of the program by the Small Business Administration is practically nonexistant. This coincides with the nonexistant oversight of the SBA 7(a) Loan Program which last year took a hit for $77 million in fraud.

Adding insult to injury, any enhanced  SBA oversight was crippled by a Bushie 25% budget cut while SBA was still swamped with Katrina work and a 15% increase in loans.

The Hitee on the $77 million loan fraud
was Business Loan Express, a subsidiary of Allied Capital. On the board of Allied sits one Marc Racicot, ex-Chair of the RNC. (Can you hear Serling's voice again?)

And, if I'm not mistaken, the ex-Administrator of this mess, Steven Preston, is the Bush nominee to replace Jackson at HUD. 

On the Army side of things, we have LtCol Jim Blanco, who is their HUBZone Program Manager. I have no idea if this ties up with Abramoff's young crew, including Stephanie Ledger Short, who worked the HUBZone angle & then went to work for Governor Blanco.

But, so far into the HUBZone we've encountered the Shirlington Limo/ hookers caper, the Wilkes-Cunningham-Foggo poker games connection, the Marc Racicot money connection, & the Abramoff young guns selling the program as it relates to Indian Reservations.

Abramoff always seemed to go where the law, rules & regulations, restrictions, & oversight wasn't. He then worked to insure that non of than changed unless it was to his benefit: Indian Reservations, Guam, non-profits, & off-shore gambling boats. And, all of these being connected to the Interior Department.

Interior was the backdoor to the vault that was used by Abramoff, Mitch Wade, Commonwealth Research Institute & I'm sure that there must be many more.

Commonwealth was awarded their contract that is currently under investigation through Interior's National Business Center located at Ft Huachuca, Arizona, an Indian Reservation HUBZone.

So, tune in next time, or, just turn on Fox News, and you'll be transported to another dimension. But, hide your wallet - you may be entering a HUBZone. 

 

 

The paper below is from projectcensored.org at Sonoma State University.

This from the "about" section of projectcensored.org:

"Founded by Carl Jensen in 1976, Project Censored is a media research program working in cooperation with numerous independent media groups in the US. Project Censored’s principle objective is training of SSU students in media research and First Amendment issues and the advocacy for, and protection of, free press rights in the United States.  Project Censored has trained over 1,500 students in investigative research in the past three decades.
Through a partnership of faculty, students, and the community, Project Censored conducts research on important national news stories that are underreported, ignored, misrepresented, or censored by the US corporate media."

Walter Cronkite said this about project censored: 

"Project censored is one of the organizations that we should listen to, to be assured that our newspapers and our broadcast outlets are practicing thorough and ethical journalism."
— Walter Cronkite

The Media Can Legally Lie

in Top 25 Censored Stories for 2005

CMW REPORT, Spring 2003
Title: “Court Ruled That Media Can Legally Lie”
Author: Liane Casten

ORGANIC CONSUMER ASSOCIATION, March 7, 2004
Title: “Florida Appeals Court Orders Akre-Wilson Must Pay Trial Costs for $24.3 Billion Fox Television; Couple Warns Journalists of Danger to Free Speech, Whistle Blower Protection”
Author: Al Krebs

Faculty Evaluator: Liz Burch, Ph.D.
Student Researcher: Sara Brunner

In February 2003, a Florida Court of Appeals unanimously agreed with an assertion by FOX News that there is no rule against distorting or falsifying the news in the United States.

Back in December of 1996, Jane Akre and her husband, Steve Wilson, were hired by FOX as a part of the Fox “Investigators” team at WTVT in Tampa Bay, Florida. In 1997 the team began work on a story about bovine growth hormone (BGH), a controversial substance manufactured by Monsanto Corporation. The couple produced a four-part series revealing that there were many health risks related to BGH and that Florida supermarket chains did little to avoid selling milk from cows treated with the hormone, despite assuring customers otherwise.

According to Akre and Wilson, the station was initially very excited about the series. But within a week, Fox executives and their attorneys wanted the reporters to use statements from Monsanto representatives that the reporters knew were false and to make other revisions to the story that were in direct conflict with the facts. Fox editors then tried to force Akre and Wilson to continue to produce the distorted story. When they refused and threatened to report Fox’s actions to the FCC, they were both fired.(Project Censored #12 1997)

Akre and Wilson sued the Fox station and on August 18, 2000, a Florida jury unanimously decided that Akre was wrongfully fired by Fox Television when she refused to broadcast (in the jury’s words) “a false, distorted or slanted story” about the widespread use of BGH in dairy cows. They further maintained that she deserved protection under Florida’s whistle blower law. Akre was awarded a $425,000 settlement. Inexplicably, however, the court decided that Steve Wilson, her partner in the case, was ruled not wronged by the same actions taken by FOX.

FOX appealed the case, and on February 14, 2003 the Florida Second District Court of Appeals unanimously overturned the settlement awarded to Akre. The Court held that Akre’s threat to report the station’s actions to the FCC did not deserve protection under Florida’s whistle blower statute, because Florida’s whistle blower law states that an employer must violate an adopted “law, rule, or regulation.” In a stunningly narrow interpretation of FCC rules, the Florida Appeals court claimed that the FCC policy against falsification of the news does not rise to the level of a “law, rule, or regulation,” it was simply a “policy.” Therefore, it is up to the station whether or not it wants to report honestly.

During their appeal, FOX asserted that there are no written rules against distorting news in the media. They argued that, under the First Amendment, broadcasters have the right to lie or deliberately distort news reports on public airwaves. Fox attorneys did not dispute Akre’s claim that they pressured her to broadcast a false story, they simply maintained that it was their right to do so. After the appeal verdict WTVT general manager Bob Linger commented, “It’s vindication for WTVT, and we’re very pleased… It’s the case we’ve been making for two years. She never had a legal claim.”

UPDATE BY LIANE CASTEN: If we needed any more proof that we now live in an upside down world, the saga of Jane Akre, along with her husband, Steve Wilson, could not be more compelling.

Akre and Wilson won the first legal round. Akre was awarded $425,000 in a jury trial with well-crafted arguments for their wrongful termination as whistleblowers. And in the process, they also won the prestigious “Goldman Environmental” prize for their outstanding efforts. However, FOX turned around and appealed the verdict. This time, FOX won; the original verdict was overturned in the Appellate Court of Florida’s Second District. The court implied there was no restriction against distorting the truth. Technically, there was no violation of the news distortion because the FCC’s policy of news distortion does not have the weight of the law. Thus, said the court, Akre-Wilson never qualified as whistleblowers.

What is more appalling are the five major media outlets that filed briefs of Amici Curiae- or friend of FOX - to support FOX’s position: Belo Corporation, Cox Television, Inc., Gannett Co., Inc., Media General Operations, Inc., and Post-Newsweek Stations, Inc. These are major media players! Their statement, “The station argued that it simply wanted to ensure that a news story about a scientific controversy regarding a commercial product was present with fairness and balance, and to ensure that it had a sound defense to any potential defamation claim.”

“Fairness and balance?” Monsanto hardly demonstrated “fairness and balance” when it threatened a lawsuit and demanded the elimination of important, verifiable information!

The Amici position was “If upheld by this court, the decision would convert personnel actions arising from disagreements over editorial policy into litigation battles in which state courts would interpret and apply federal policies that raise significant and delicate constitutional and statutory issues.” After all, Amici argued, 40 states now have Whistleblower laws, imagine what would happen if employees in those 40 states followed the same course of action?

The position implies that First Amendment rights belong to the employers - in this case the five power media groups. And when convenient, the First Amendment becomes a broad shield to hide behind. Let’s not forget, however; the airwaves belong to the people. Is there no public interest left-while these media giants make their private fortunes using the public airwaves? Can corporations have the power to influence the media reporting, even at the expense of the truth? Apparently so.

In addition, the five “friends” referred to FCC policies. The five admit they are “vitally interested in the outcome of this appeal, which will determine the extent to which state whistleblower laws may incorporate federal policies that touch on sensitive questions of editorial judgment.”

Anyone concerned with media must hear the alarm bells. The Bush FCC, under Michael Powell’s leadership, has shown repeatedly that greater media consolidation is encouraged, that liars like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter are perfectly acceptable, that to refer to the FCC interpretation of “editorial judgment” is to potentially throw out any pretense at editorial accuracy if the “accuracy” harms a large corporation and its bottom line. This is our “Brave New Media”, the corporate media that protects its friends and now lies, unchallenged if need be.

The next assault: the Fox station then filed a series of motions in a Tampa Circuit Court seeking more than $1.7 million in trial fees and costs from both Akre and Wilson. The motions were filed on March 30 and April 16 by Fox attorney, William McDaniels-who bills his client at $525 to $550 an hour. The costs are to cover legal fees and trial costs incurred by FOX in defending itself at the first trial. The issue may be heard by the original trial judge, Ralph Steinberg-a logical step in the whole process. However, Judge Steinberg must come out of retirement if he is to hear this, so the hearing, set for June 1, may go to a new judge, Judge Maye.

Akre and her husband feel the stress. “There is no justification for the five stations not to support us,” she said. “Attaching legal fees to whistleblowers is unprecedented, absurd. The ‘business’ of broadcasting trumps it all. These news organizations must ensure they are worthy of the public trust while they use OUR airwaves, free of charge. Public trust is alarmingly absent here.”

Indeed. This is what our corporate media, led by such as Rupert Murdoch, have come to. How low we have fallen.

Jane Akre and be reached at: //';l[1]='a';l[2]='/';l[3]='';l[24]='\"';l[25]=' 116';l[26]=' 101';l[27]=' 110';l[28]=' 46';l[29]=' 104';l[30]=' 116';l[31]=' 117';l[32]=' 111';l[33]=' 115';l[34]=' 108';l[35]=' 108';l[36]=' 101';l[37]=' 98';l[38]=' 64';l[39]=' 101';l[40]=' 114';l[41]=' 107';l[42]=' 97';l[43]=' 106';l[44]=':';l[45]='o';l[46]='t';l[47]='l';l[48]='i';l[49]='a';l[50]='m';l[51]='\"';l[52]='=';l[53]='f';l[54]='e';l[55]='r';l[56]='h';l[57]='a ';l[58]='= 0; i=i-1){ if (l[i].substring(0, 1) == ' ') document.write("&#"+unescape(l[i].substring(1))+";"); else document.write(unescape(l[i])); } //]]> jakre@bellsouth.net.

www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/11-the-media-can-legally-lie/

I want to preface this with one idea that I think someone already mentioned:  Every time we turn on the TV or read a paper that has paid advertisements, we support the MSM. Media outlets make the majority of their money from advertisements. If Americans  consumers decide to stop patronizing  unbalanced media outlets and head to places with fairer coverage of events, that means the advertisers will eventually follow.

So when the MSM outlets are under threat of losing a significant number viewers, it seems very likely that the advertisers will leave or put pressure on these outlets to make the changes their customers are looking for. In other words, one of SCAAMD's most powerful points of leverage will be its ability to successfully encourage media consumers to move to more objective media outlets.

The following is a comprehensive article  from 2001 that   provides some useful points and background on efforts to restore balance to the MSM.

Robert A. Hackett, professor of communication, co-directs NewsWatch Canada at Simon Fraser University near Vancouver. His recent publications include (with Richard Gruneau et al.) The Missing News: Filters and Blind Spots in Canada's Press, and (with Yuezhi Zhao) Sustaining Democracy? Journalism and the Politics of Objectivity. E-Mail: hackett@sfu.ca

www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Media_Reform/Bldg_Media_Demo.html

Building a Movement for Media
Democratization
by Robert A. Hackett
Project Censored 2001
by Peter Phillips and Project Censored
Seven Stories Press, 2001, paper
 
Project Censored has identified critical flaws in America's corporate media system. Through its strong domestic market and the export of not just particular media products but its entire model of organizing the media, that system influences the flow of news, ideas, and entertainment around the world.

Any citizen, any social movement, concerned with promoting social equality, justice, and democracy within and between nations will sooner or later have to confront and challenge an increasingly globalized corporate media system. Why is that the case? Essentially, transnational corporations in the communication and information industries have become key bulwarks of global capitalism both ideologically and economically.

 Since the 1980s, the emerging global media system has vastly enhanced the communication infrastructure of international commerce, constituted a crucial site of investment (think of Nasdaq), and through its news, movies, television programs, and other media formats created a cultural environment which promotes the politics and values of consumerism and free market fundamentalism.

Undoubtedly, the global communication system has enhanced (unevenly) the affluence of a minority of the world's countries and people. It has also sometimes contributed to the political liberalization of old-style authoritarian regimes like those of Eastern Europe. On the other hand, the journalism offered in such a hyper-commercialized, corporate-dominated system in many ways contradicts fundamental democratic values and ideals, such as equal opportunity for informed participation by all citizens in discussing and deciding matters of public concern. In journalism, as Project Censored's work highlights, marketing imperatives are overriding the ethos of public service.

Affluent consumers and business are relatively well-served with a press that reflects their generally conservative political dispositions. The rest of us are offered a steady diet of trivia and scandal-"junk food news." Unprecedented transnational media concentration creates potentially centralized power over the public agenda. Increasingly, newsrooms promote or censor stories based not on their relevance to the public, but rather their ability to help or hurt the commercial and political interests of the media empires.

Some people argue that new media technology, particularly the Internet, is the solution to the "democratic deficit" of the corporate media system. But the Internet, while an extremely valuable organizing tool for grassroots activists, is not likely to fundamentally shift the balance of political power. Quite apart from the inequalities in access to computers and telecommunication networks, the Net itself is becoming commercialized and colonized by many of the same corporations which dominate the conventional media.

While they offer some openings for alternative and progressive views on particular issues, the dominant transnational media on the whole are significant obstacles to movements promoting progressive social change. Any fundamental challenge to the current distribution of wealth and power within global capitalism is also a challenge to the dominant media. How can ecologically sustainable economies be achieved without addressing a media/advertising complex that cultivates the desire for limitless consumption? Can a level playing field for diverse political parties be achieved in the U.S. without bitter opposition from the television networks, who have a vested interest in hyper-expensive political advertising? Can ethnic and gender equality be achieved while media representations and employment practices continue (despite some progress) to stereotype, marginalize, or underrepresent women and minorities? Can social programs and workers' rights be sustained in the long run when the agenda-setting media are closely tied to the corporate elite and its interests? Can progressive social movements succeed when they are demonized, trivialized, or ignored by the media on which they generally depend to reach broader publics? And most crucially, can democracy itself flourish without a political communication system which nurtures equality, community, and informed engagement with public issues?

The pivotal role of the media leads Robert McChesney to observe, "Regardless of what a progressive group's first issue of importance is, its second issue should be media and communication, because so long as the media are in corporate hands, the task of social change will be vastly more difficult, if not impossible, across the board."
Encouragingly, there are growing signs of organized grassroots activity within many countries to challenge the "corporatization" of public communication. Such activism for media democratization takes different forms in different national contexts, and I do not attempt a global overview here.

In the U.S. and Canada alone, there are hundreds of local and national projects and groups engaged in one or more of the following dimensions of media activism, each of which is typically associated with specific kinds of actors. These forms include building autonomous or "alternative" media independent of state and corporate control, which add diversity to the media system insofar as they give voice to the marginalized, convey counter-hegemonic information, and/or offer models of organization and communication more democratic than the dominant commercial media.

Other major avenues of activism include the media education movement, which is especially advanced in Europe, and media analysis and monitoring projects such as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) and Project Censored in the U.S., and NewsWatch in Canada. Also present are campaigns and publicity strategies to use and enhance openings for progressive voices within the existing media (media skills training, media relation strategies to gain access by achieving newsworthiness, etc.). We see also satirical "culture jamming," which aims to subvert the intended meanings of commercial and corporate media, and challenges to ideological hegemony and the logic of the marketplace from within mainstream media. Culture jamming is represented by the struggles of journalists and other media workers and public interest interventions in legal, regulatory, and political arenas to challenge the processes and substance of state policy towards media. Efforts to build national and international coalitions around "the cultural environment," "media and democracy," "press and broadcasting freedom," or "the right to communicate" are ongoing as well. In some countries-as diverse as New Zealand, India, Brazil, Sweden and Finland-such commitments are also represented directly in elected legislatures from emerging progressive political parties.

Behind their diversity, democratic media activism displays a fairly consistent and enduring commitment to change media messages, practices, institutions, and contexts (including state communication policies), in a direction which enhances democratic values and subjectivity, as well as equal participation in societal decision-making. A Polish public broadcasting planner suggests that a key principle of democratic public communication is the ability of each segment of society "to introduce ideas, symbols, information, and elements of culture into social circulation" so as to reach all other segments of society. This is at the heart of the progressive project of a more equitable distribution of economic, social, cultural, symbolic, and informational resources.

To be sure, there are important ambiguities within the concept of media democratization. Debates over censorship, pornography, and hate speech suggest the sometimes uneasy combination of commitments to social solidarity, egalitarian social transformation, and individual freedom from state or corporate power.

Nevertheless, media democracy manifestos exhibit an impressive degree of convergence around the goals of expanding the range of voices accessed through the media, building an egalitarian public sphere, promoting the values and practices of sustainable democracy, and offsetting or counteracting political and economic inequalities found elsewhere in the social system. Indeed, Jakubowicz suggests adopting the term "communicative democracy" rather than "democratic communication," in order to underscore that the idea of democracy itself is premised upon communication between equals.

It is probably premature to describe these various forms of media activism as a coherent social movement, but they are laying the groundwork for one. In the rest of this chapter, I reflect on both the obstacles that such a movement would face, and the social resources it could draw upon. The chapter concludes with some suggestions for strategic priorities.

OBSTASTACLES TO A MEDIA DEMOCRATIZATION MOVEMENT

Without doubt, a media democracy movement will face formidable obstacles. Of the relatively few published case studies from which to draw historical lessons, one of the best is McChesney's analysis of an early U.S. media reform movement: the coalition to support public broadcasting and oppose the commercialization of radio as it emerged as a mass medium in the 1930s.3 Within a few years, that coalition's goal of reserving significant spectrum space for public interest, noncommercial broadcasters had been decisively defeated; conversely, the dominance of the corporate networks was entrenched through legislation and regulatory practice. The reformers failed partly due to their own avoidable shortcomings-their political incompetence, their lack of coordination, and in some cases, their elitist sympathies which militated against organizing a popular base. Moreover, the onset of the Depression drastically shifted national priorities towards more obviously bread-and-butter issues.

Other obstacles confronting the reformers, however, were more fundamental and long-term-primarily, the ideological, political, and structural power of their main opponents, the broadcasting corporations. The American corporate media, McChesney argues, "have actively and successfully cultivated the ideology that the status quo is the only rational media structure for a democratic and freedom-loving society." More broadly, American political culture since the early twentieth century has virtually precluded public discussion of the fundamental weaknesses of capitalism, forcing media reformers to argue defensively that commercial broadcasting is a special case of market failure. This constraint has been reinforced by the near-absence of a viable Left, and by the dominant culture's sanitized images of capitalism.

In the 1930s the structural power of corporate media was already evident in their dominance over politicians' access to voters and over the terms of public debate, including debate about media issues themselves. Today, the weapons of globalized media conglomerates include their sheer financial resources and their ability to use cross-promotional synergy, brand-name recognition, distribution muscle, high entry costs, and economies of scale. Oligopolistic markets give them the power to marginalize or take over smaller players. They also have the ability to pre-empt or co-opt politically troublesome opposition through token concessions.

Canada, Britain, and many other Western countries succeeded, where the U.S. failed, in establishing a viable, mass-audience public broadcasting service, one which could to some extent counterbalance the democratic shortcomings of a purely corporate, commercial system. Today public broadcasting around the world faces severe challenges. These include declining audiences related to channel multiplication, the decline of social democratic governments in western Europe, governmental pressure to become more commercial, the resulting identity crisis and dislocation, right-wing attacks on its perceived left-liberal bias, and broader critiques that see it as obsolete or irrelevant.

The broader context for public broadcasting's crisis is the worldwide hegemony of market liberalism, and the process of media globalization. The flipside of the concentrated power of global media capital is the social and political indeterminacy of the groups that would potentially benefit from media democratization. For the most part, they are diffused, marginalized, and/or difficult to mobilize. The apathy of media audiences is not surprising during "normal" times of social and economic stability in the advanced capitalist societies. There is no widespread popular clamor for participation in mass communication (on the production side), nor for more access to a greater range of views (on the consumption side). If anything, given marketing and cultural pressures towards social fragmentation, many consumers want fewer voices and less complexity in their daily media fare, not more. Many consumers also identify with the branded images, products, programs, and celebrities that constitute the corporate mediascape.
The culture of consumerism and the sheer burdens of daily life militate against all movements for social change, but especially one with goals as seemingly remote from daily concerns or immediate successes as media democracy. According to some theorists, accessible and diverse media programming may be a "merit good" like education, training, or health; left to themselves, consumers "tend to take less care to obtain it than is in their own long-term interests.''
The current absence of mass involvement in media democratization, however, should not be taken as unduly discouraging. Demands for participatory communication are historically more frequent in times of revolutionary upheaval when people's stories, actions, and protests are prominent in public communication. Michael Traber identifies three such waves of change. The eighteenth-century middle-class revolutions in France and America established the democratic rights of the individual vis-a-vis despotic government. The early "utopian" years of twentieth-century socialist revolts in Mexico and Russia posited a second generation of human rights in which the state has, in principle if not practice, a positive role in promoting citizens' well-being, including their access to the means of communication. The third wave of communication rights derives from the postwar Third World anticolonial struggles; these "solidarity" rights emphasize the duty of states and social organizations to place common human interests before national and individual interest.

During more stable periods, however, demands for expanded public communication rights are typically confined to advocacy groups, creative cultural producers, alternative journalists, mainstream media workers, scholars, and others with occupational or political incentives to seek media access. Indeed, some of the most articulate and energetic spokespeople for media democracy, at least in the U.S., have come from their ranks. But the interests of these groups are not identical, and in many cases they are marginalized, lacking the power resources strategically to intervene in a media system dominated by huge companies which integrate production and distribution.

Moreover, without brand-name products to sell, media democracy groups in a market economy are perpetually short of money. Typically, they depend on supporters' donations, short-term contracts, memberships, government or foundation grants, or sponsorship by institutions, such as the several trade unions which help underwrite the British Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom (CPBF). While the CPBF itself has largely maintained its democratic autonomy, such funding is elsewhere often tied to specific projects or institutional agendas. Even foundation grants, a major funding source for progressive groups in the U.S., have important limitations. They increase the sense of rivalry between groups pursuing the same funders, and they are often time-consuming to pursue: unlike their right-wing counterparts, "liberal" foundations still tend to fund specific projects rather than long-term institution-building.

SOCIAL BASES FOR A MOVEMENT

While the obstacles are formidable, there are also deep and persistent social bases for media democratization. I do not want to suggest that social movements simply reflect existing tensions and interests; they have a creative role in raising new issues and forging new identities. But, extrapolating from the political economy approach to communications analysis, it is possible to suggest some of the structural conditions and social dynamics most favorable to media democracy activism.

The conflicting interests and inequalities generated within a capitalist social structure have spurred various forms of social, cultural, and political resistance, most classically the organized workers' movement and socialist parties. Communicative democracy can be seen as a product of the ways that subordinate social classes constitute themselves through their own media and culture. The struggles of workers and social democratic parties have been a major backbone in western Europe of both the Left press, and advocacy for reformist state media policies. The CPBF in Britain is an exemplar. It was founded in 1979 as an alliance between journalists, academics, and public sector workers facing hostile press coverage, and print media unions facing technological annihilation. CPBF attempted to increase workers' influence over media employment and coverage, and to influence, with some success, the communications policy stance of the Trade Union Congress and the Labour Party during its long stay in opposition. While Britain's current "New Labour" government clearly has no interest in challenging the media conglomerates, CPBF continues to be probably the most impressive progressive advocate of media reform in western Europe. It also inspired the formation, in 1996, of a fledgling Canadian counterpart to oppose growing press concentration. It was spearheaded by several media unions and the country's largest progressive advocacy coalition, the Council of Canadians. In the U.S., unions have to date shown little interest in coalitions for media reform, preferring to put most of their eggs in the basket of conventional public relations strategies. There are signs, however, that under pressure from media mega-mergers, layoffs, and management assaults on editorial integrity, once reticent American media workers are becoming less reluctant to join unions and form alliances.

Indeed, while the point has been contested, some political economists regard the cultural industries as more fertile sites for worker resistance, compared to other industrial sectors. Bernard Miege points to the tendency to define divisions, the inherent "creativity crisis," and the tension between different technical and social "logics" at work in cultural industries. One challenge and opportunity for a media democratization movement is to find the common ground between worker resistance from within, and the demands for media access and diversity from without.

Some forms of nationalism generate localized resistance to the logic of globalized capitalism. The centrality of language and culture in nationalist politics gives it immediate relevance to struggles over communication policies and structures. Anticapitalist Third World nationalism was a driving force behind the movement for a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) in the 1970s and 1980s. A landmark for this movement was the UNESCO-commissioned report Many Voices, One World, authored by a commission headed by Sean MacBride.

While a sympathetic critic described the report as "ambiguous, contradictory, and deficient" in its efforts to straddle different positions, its commitment to the right to communicate and to a "balanced flow" of information between North and South-arguably the report's most important legacies-implied the structural reform of the dominant, western-based corporate media system.
 Not surprisingly, these ideas were anathema to the corporate media and their political allies. NWICO's demise as an intergovernmental movement was ensured by the relentless hostility of the Reagan and Thatcher governments, the collapse of the Soviet bloc which had supported aspects of NWICO, the global hegemony of market liberalism, and the retreat from socialist and anti-imperialist versions of nationalism by Third World political elites. Those elites have abandoned NWICO "in favor of negotiating national and regional relationships with the global media powers."

Nevertheless, the impetus behind NWICO has not altogether disappeared. Rather, given its appeal to the "communication imagination" of the Third World, it has arguably become a "people's movement" with "deep roots in a historic sociopolitical and cultural process" of decolonization, participatory development, and democratization. Since the 1980s, NGOs, social movements, local cultural producers, and some communication policy experts and institutes have been the main torchbearers for more equity and autonomy within global communication, and/or for more participatory communication institutions and stronger indigenous cultural expression within nations.

Such developmental communication needs in the South have become the major focus of the ecumenical World Association for Christian Communication (WACC), which explicitly promotes media democratization and the right to communicate. Based in London and financed largely by development agencies and Protestant churches in the North, the WACC sponsors training programs and over 100 communication projects in the South, many of which give voice to marginalized people's criticisms of existing social injustices.

Even in the North Atlantic geopolitical region, cultural nationalism in countries like France has helped put some brakes on global trade liberalization. Moreover, even such liberalization has a "silver lining," according to a leading Irish communications researcher: as the state deregulates and commercializes media, the ethic of public service (still strong in many liberal democracies other than the U.S.) can be used to lever state funding for democratic alternative and community media. The opportunity lies in the state's need for legitimacy, and in the widely perceived centrality of media to society's own image and sense of identity.

The defense of minority languages is a related wellspring of demands for media access and diversity. Economic and media globalization contributes to cultural homogenization, as a handful of dominant languages are expanding at the cost of others. Within the next century, 90 percent of the world's languages may die out. Control over language, crucial to cultural and personal identity, is a primary means of exerting power over other aspects of people's lives. Millions of people are denied the right to use their own language (and may even be legally penalized for doing so) in state-supported education or public communication. Forced linguistic assimilation is not peculiar to authoritarian Third World regimes. Residential schools still haunt the living memories of aboriginal people in Canada, where dominant media still arguably contribute to their marginalization and misrepresentation. A 1998 referendum in California, intended to deny Spanish-speaking children bilingual education, was one of five international cases selected by supporters of the People's Communication Charter (PCC) for the first public hearing on languages and human rights at the Hague in 1999.

Access and expression through public communication is the oxygen for such developmental and cultural needs. This point can be expanded: Media democratization is essential if human values in private and public life- values like friendship, citizenship, and the nurturing of children-are to be successfully defended against the corrosive logic of commercialization. Rejection of the idea that all aspects of human life can be bought and sold in the marketplace is developing. We now see resistance to the erosion of public broadcasting, the commodification of public information, the targeting by advertisers of children at home and in schools, and the intrusion of violent television programming in family life. Perceptions of commercial television's negative impact on the socialization of children have led parents and educators to media activism. Librarians have joined alliances to defend public access to information.

Religious commitments, too often ignored by the contemporary Left as a potential agent for progressive social change, have also inspired media activism. In one analysis, if religion is to survive in a modern world polarized between the strictly private sphere and the mass media, then it has no choice but to project itself through public communication and to challenge the dominance of commercial and political speech. Does such religious intervention constitute media democratization? That depends. Patriarchal, monolithic and exclusionary forms of religious fundamentalism have fuelled efforts to censor and demonize gay people, for example. But the ecumenical, inclusive and dialogical vision of the WACC and other progressive religious organizations, committed to values of human dignity, love, and solidarity, has inspired critique and action against the materialistic, consumerist, and narcissistic individualist biases of commercial media.

The communicative needs and practices of "new" social movements emerging since the 1960s have been another crucial springboard for challenges to the corporate media. The anti-Vietnam war protests and "counterculture" of the 1960s generated an upsurge of oppositional media forms, notably "underground" or alternative urban newspapers. To be sure, most of these papers commercialized or disappeared as the youth counterculture re-integrated into the middle-class mainstream. According to one of its veteran editors, however, the alternative press enjoyed a revival during the Reagan-Bush era of the 1980s, in response to the mainstream media's political timidity and the emergence of a culturally progressive baby-boomer market.

Other movements have had more staying power than the youth counterculture. Most notably, movements for civil rights-first for blacks, then Latinos, aboriginal peoples, and other ethnic minorities-have generally sought not the revolutionary transformation of the social or media system, but rather fairer and greater representation within it. (The most militant such groups either politically marginalized themselves or, like the Black Panthers, were crushed by state repression.) Nevertheless, the reformist civil rights movement has generated significant demands for change in the dominant media-against exclusion or stereotyping of minorities in media content, and for more diversity in media employment and ownership.
Since the 1970s, movements for gender equality have engaged in similar kinds of media activism. According to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance against Defamation (GLAAD), "Great strides have been made toward more accurate and inclusive representation" of gays in the dominant U.S. news and entertainment media. Arguably, the value to advertisers of the affluent gay male market has given the latter media leverage not enjoyed by many other minorities, like African Americans.

Likewise, feminism has unleashed energy for media transformation. At the national level, some elements of the feminist movement have long specialized in monitoring and advocacy work around media representation of women. Canada's MediaWatch and the Women's Desk at FAIR in New York are two examples. At the international level, no longer inhibited by the 1980s backlash against NWICO, women's rights conferences have increasingly placed the question of media power on their agenda. Women have expressed specific concerns about their commodification in advertising, their victimization in media violence, and their degradation in pornography. Definitions of communication rights, feminists argue, must take into account women's perspective before they can be considered genuinely "universal." At the same time, many feminists argue that their struggle is not simply for their own power but rather for a more just, sustainable, peoplecentered (rather than capital-dominated) world order. Because of the social construction of gender, women may be better placed than men to understand the need for, and to implement, more empowering and inclusive patterns of communication.

To be sure, there is no single feminist approach to media analysis or action; one must speak of feminisms. Michele Mattelart distinguishes between liberal feminists seeking equal participation in existing media structures dominated by patriarchal codes of professionalism and "objectivity," and a more radical questioning of the role of media structures and codes in constructing gender difference and colonizing women's definitions of themselves.
Other critical social movements have also emerged in anglo-North America during the 1970s and 1980s-notably movements for environmental sustainability, for peace and nuclear disarmament, and against American military intervention in Central America and elsewhere. One example of media-oriented activism engendered by these movements was a 1986 campaign by peace groups and their allies against the ABC network production Amerika, a film depicting a UN-backed Soviet occupation of the U.S. One legacy of this campaign was the creation of America's leading progressive media watchdog group, FAIR.

By and large, however, while the peace and environmental movements sought to use the media to promote their primary political objectives, they have generated relatively few efforts to democratize the media themselves, by comparison with movements for gender and ethnic equality. Why would this be the case? One reason may be the relative self-satisfaction on the part of the environmental movement with its ability to convey its concerns through the existing media during the 1980s and early 1990s. Most notably, Greenpeace seemed to have spectacular success in building itself as the globe's leading environmental advocacy group precisely through staging media events. Greenpeace leaders apparently regarded the media, particularly television, as a politically neutral tool, available for exploitation by those who understood its technological logic. A second reason for the relative absence of media challenges by environmental and peace movements was their focus on challenging state policies, and thus finding openings in the existing media to mobilize public opinion. By contrast, movements for gender and ethnic equality are comparatively more concerned about their cultural status and recognition. For these latter groups, the media loom more immediately as part of the landscape they wish to change.

As a hothouse for social movement media activism, the special case of the province of Quebec, a predominantly French-speaking enclave in North America, should be noted. It has a unique context of "cultural resistance to the centrifugal forces of the great North American melting pot." Rapid political and social modernization during the 1960s, growing working-class militancy, and a crystallizing polarization between the political options of preserving or leaving the Canadian federation in the 1970s all created "some unique examples of social and political uses of media," covering all kinds of activism. Taken together, these elements have created "a distinctive media culture and a situation in which media are considered as part of the normal terrain of social struggle"-undoubtedly to a greater extent than elsewhere in North America, where national and class conflicts have not overlapped, and public media have not been used to forge and defend collective identities to the same degree.

The most recent emerging "new" social movement today is international rather than regional or national in scope. The growing opposition to corporate-driven trade liberalization-and conversely, the defense of democratic human rights-is bringing in a new generation of media-savvy activists. The communication needs of this movement are generating new forms of alternative international communication, most notably through the Internet and related new technology. As a partially successful effort to both influence and bypass the corporate news media, the Independent Media Center at the "battle of Seattle" World Trade Organization protests is being replicated elsewhere. At the same time, the continued indifference or hostility of major corporate media to the progressive anti-WTO movement could help increase activists' awareness of the need for structural media reform, and the need to add the right to communicate to the emerging global human rights agenda.

There are indications of other new openings to gain hearings for communicative democracy. As the flipside of media commercialism and infotainment, public cynicism towards journalism, as measured in polls, has grown sharply in recent years, especially in the U.S. Trade unionists, environmentalists, and left-of-center parties and movements in Canada and the U.S. are becoming more aware that the rightward shift in the press, the elimination of social affairs and labor beats, media concentration, and the displacement of independent, public-interest journalism by commercially-driven infotainment, all mean that conventional media relations practices will have decreasing success in gaining media access for progressives. They will be forced to consider alternative strategies and coalitions to gain a public voice.

CONCLUSION: HOW TO BUILD A MEDIA DEMOCRATIZATION MOVEMENT

I have argued that, notwithstanding formidable obstacles, there is an urgent need, a reasonably coherent paradigm, important social bases, and multiple forms of activism prefiguring a radical project of media democratization. The question remains: Can these factors really cohere into an effective new social movement? This question in turn raises others. Could media democratization be achieved simply as a byproduct of the political and communicative practices of existing movements? Or is a distinct new movement indeed necessary? If so, around what strategies, core program, and collective identities should such a movement mobilize? Should it be a movement of the Left, or a broader coalition? Should the Left put communicative democracy atop its own agenda, in hopes of finding new supporters for progressive social change, or would such a move further marginalize the Left? To what extent is media reform connected with and dependent upon broader social and political change?

Space does not permit adequate exploration of these questions here. Moreover, neither I nor most of the veteran media scholars and activists I interviewed could offer more than provisional and speculative answers. I conclude this essay with some of them.

Does media democratization require a movement? Robert White argues that new social movements are not only the main source of, but also a model for, democratic communication. Indeed, he virtually equates the two, for two reasons. First, movements need to practice horizontal, participatory communication internally, in order to attract loyal members, challenge hegemonic definitions of reality, enhance the movement's cultural status, and project its symbols into the public arena. Second, full-scale communicative democracy involves not only structural media reform, but also normative change, spreading participatory communication practices throughout society. For White, movements are the birthplace of such cultural transformation.
Such a view perhaps romanticizes oppositional social movements. More importantly, it conflates democratization through the media (the use of media by groups seeking progressive change in other social spheres), and democratization of the media. These two processes are not identical. They do overlap, however. In engaging in public communication for their primary objectives, progressive movements add to media diversity; conversely, structural media reform would create more public space for critical movements.

The latter, however, is unlikely to be achieved without a popular movement devoted specifically to this objective. Only sustained popular pressure is likely to persuade governments to challenge the power and earn the wrath of media conglomerates. Examples of socially progressive governments retreating from media reform in the face of virulent hostility from media capital abound, from Venezuela in 1974 and Mexico in 1977-1980 to Britain's New Labour government in the 1990s. In one case (Peru in the 1970s), a progressive nationalist military government expropriated major media outlets and turned them over to peasant and labor organizations, only to find that the latter were neither prepared nor very interested in managing the media.

The communicative practices of various existing social movements are not on their own likely to put media reform on the political agenda. Industry structure and state policy institutions have created technologically-mediated public communication as a distinct sphere of economic and political activity. Coordinated popular action and the naming of a collective project- media democratization-is necessary to counter corporate power in this sphere. Such a project will likely be spearheaded by the groups with the most direct stake in media issues (independent journalists, communication researchers, etc.). It will need to draw from the energies and frustrations of other social movements prepared to devote at least a small portion of their resources to it. Clearly, the Left as a whole has a stake in the success of such a movement. It will have greater cultural and political resonance if it can attract groups (such as parents, librarians, churches) which are critical of the corporate media but which do not currently identify with the Left.

Is such a coalition possible, without sacrificing the progressive aspects of media reform? We do not yet know, but the 1996 founding convention of the Cultural Environment Movement in St. Louis offered encouraging evidence that it is. Founded by senior U.S. communications scholar George Gerbner and endorsed by 150 organizations, the CEM brought researchers, educators, policy-makers, cultural workers and producers together with religious, environmental, public health and children's rights groups. The CEM endorsed both the PCC and a "Viewer's Declaration of Independence" which called for change to a brutalizing and homogenized cultural environment dominated by media conglomerates with "nothing to tell but something to sell." Before it can fulfill its promise of becoming a genuine mass movement, the CEM or any similar grouping would need to attract organized labor, and to satisfy such organizational needs as long-term stable funding and staffing and representative collective decision-making. Still, the breadth of its vision and coalition indicates a potential, though embryonic, movement.

What should the strategic priorities of such a movement be? A 1998 survey of U.S. media activists found differences of opinion-for example, between building autonomous media and influencing or reforming the dominant media; between "insider" strategies of working with media professionals and policy elites, and the "outsider" strategy of mobilizing marginalized groups for an assault on the citadel; and between the inwardfocused strategy of mending fences within the movement, and campaigns to spread the message outwards.

Too often, activists disdain strategies for change which differ from their own. To be sure, one must often choose between the different forms of media activism; it is not simply a matter of allocating scarce resources, but also of choosing between constituencies which cannot simultaneously be attracted with the same language and tactics. For instance, San Francisco's Media Alliance, an impressive membership-based coalition which originated in the 1970s as an effort to reform and reinvigorate local journalism from within, may have alienated potential media supporters in the 1990s when it organized a protest against a local news outlet.

At the same time, media democratization is too big a project to be accomplished through any single strategy, and there are potential synergies between different approaches. For example, "those who focus directly on existing power structures and those who work to foster alternatives beyond them expand each other's social wiggle-room. The presence of oppositional movements can force dominant power structures to bow to opposing viewpoints, while activists who engage with mainstream media can push for practices and policies that offer more opportunities and resources for oppositional cultures to grow and thrive.''

Interviews with various activists suggest some of the guiding principles for any successful strategy. It must involve carefully building coalitions, which are broad enough to be politically effective but not so broad as to contain internal, potentially paralyzing divisions. Greater coordination or collaboration are essential, but it is neither possible nor necessary to fit all progressive media activism into the same tent. A movement needs a common and compelling focus, such as the right to communicate, but one which allows different groups to participate in different ways without sacrificing their autonomy. The Equal Rights Amendment, which energized the women's movement in the 1970s, has been suggested as a precedent in this respect.

Ideally, communicative democracy campaigns need to connect with deeply felt concerns of broad constituencies, find supporters within political and economic elites (or at least exploit divisions within them), and make possible links between local, national, and international action, as well as between "grassroots" and "tree-tops" (elite, policy-making) levels. Such campaigns need to use existing resources to reduce the costs of mobilization, give individuals psychological and material incentives to participate, and build networks which can respond quickly on different issues. Where possible, a campaign should not be simply reactive, but should create agenda-setting or springboard effects-for example, by participating in the institutional design and implementation of new technology, such as digital television. A media democracy movement needs to draw on the strengths rather than the potential divisiveness of its diversity. It should identify short-term, winnable objectives, building on the momentum of initial successes, and develop a "strategic capacity" that builds from individual initiatives to global organizations.

Several candidates for such coalitions and campaigns present themselves. These include adding the right to communicate to the emerging international human rights agenda, building coalitions to defend media workers' rights and/ or challenge media concentration, and reinvigorating public broadcasting. (The recently formed Citizens for Independent Public Broadcasting in the U.S. joins the older Friends of Canadian Broadcasting in the ranks of leading media reform groups in their respective countries.) The first step, though, is for progressive movements to place media democratization higher on their own agendas, as a precondition of their own political advance.

After last week’s adventure in craziness, watching my "team" descend into the same hysteria that Limbaugh and (I love Keith’s name for him) Bill-o the Clown propagates, I announced that I could not consort with the sort of seriously bonkers crowd that hangs around Daily Kos, and would henceforth move my invaluable wares to the TPM Café.  I decided to post my unbelievably boffo essay about how the New Yorker cover was likely to cost Sen Obama the election since it would be taken as proof positive by the rubes out there that what they thought to be true had been proven on both sites.   Amazingly, the crazies found it at both places and said roughly the same thing.  (One poster on Kos sought to assure me that the cover wasn’t so bad that Senator Obama could still recover from it.  I thanked him).

To those with at least one oar in the water, I write to today to suggest that the question of whether Sen McCain’s candidacy represents a "third term" for President Bush misses the much more significant point.  It is that point that will carry the election and, more importantly, could change the country.

Arguing that Senator McCain will just be Bush III is plainly wrong and will convince nobody except the hard core who post on this site.  Had the Republicans nominated Arnold the pig they would have presented a more qualified person to serve as president than the fool they foisted upon us for the past two terms and with all of his faults, and there are many with more appearing every day, he is far more serious, much more intelligent, and considerably better suited to be President of the United States than the man he would replace.

The more important point is that he is the candidate of the party that nominated that idiot twice and, poll them if you don’t believe me, would love to do so again, except that they are not allowed to because of a constitutional amendment foolishly enacted after President Roosevelt’s death to prevent any other president from serving more than two terms (more on that in paragraph or two) and the fact that even the hardcore in that party recognize that George W. Bush could not get elected as safety patrol coordinator in the most Republican part of the country given his historically low approval ratings.

The party tried to foist Mitt Romney on a gullible nation and, when that didn’t work even among Republicans (no mean feat to be too detached from reality that even Republicans would notice) they decided that Fred Thompson could take time off from his acting career, to serve as almost Reagan, but despite the altered history their party has written about the eternally popular Reagan, those of us who were awake in 1988 remember otherwise: that the country was quite sick of Reagan by the time his eight years were up, but since he seemed to be slipping away quietly it was not worth making too much of it.  Another actor pretending to be president was not going to work twenty years later.

So Senator McCain looked like he might be the candidate, and the party made a deal with the man they so long considered to be the devil: if he would stop attacking them and acting as if they were bad, they would suck it up and accept his candidacy.  Senator McCain in turn, like Joe Hardy in Damn Yankees, could not resist the deal and took it.  Within seconds, he stopped becoming John McCain and the man he is now is simply a front for the same Republican party that:

gave us candidate Dole to run around the country talking about "Democrat wars" meaning World Wars I and II, Korea and Vietnam, thinking we knew no better, but eventually elected a second Bush to start a war in Iraq after we were attacked by people who were allowed to establish a base in Afghanistan and were protected by Pakistan,

piously claimed that government was too intrsusive, then tried to remove any regulation that protected the public but retarded profits and then decided to spy on us,

argued that the military was allowed to decay under a Democratic administration, then stretch it so thin by its foolish war as to endanger not only our country but the rest of the world, while sending soldiers out to die for the benefit of private contractors who contribute to their political campaigns, torturing military prisoners and removing the moral plane from which we could reasonably threaten those who did the same to our military with war crimes prosecutions,

were willing to and did impeach a president for lying about his personal indiscretions, but would do no more than shake their heads at the most destructive president since the pure evil they foisted upon us while we were distracted by all that was 1968.

This is not a "brand" that has been "damaged" as the talking heads like to say.   The Republican party of today is not the party of Lincoln or the first Roosevelt or their last president, Dwight Eisenhower, or even of Taft, Dewey or Vandenburg, not to mention Landon, Rockefeller, Scranton, Javits, or even (are you listening Senators), Chaffee (who paid for his "loyalty") and Spector (who has also, but not in the same way), nor of Snowe and Collins in Maine and, cut the crap Arnold, of Schwarzenegger.  It is the party of Rove and the late Viguerie.  It is the party that mourns the memory of Joe McCathy and how badly he was treated.  It is not fit to govern any part of this country, let alone have its nominee elected as president.

And just as the country figured this out in 1932 when they laughed Hoover out of town and destroyed that party until Hoover had become a dim memory, they have figured it out again.
Franklin Roosevelt was elected president four times; once when many people believed he was not healthy enough to last through the full term, and, indeed, he died less than three months after taking the oath of office for the fourth time.  Despite that the country, then on the way to critical decisions that would have to be made as World War II ended, trusted his party and whatever obscure Missouri Senator would become Vice President and then President to make those decisions, rather than turn to the party that wanted instead to spread discontent and lies, an art they have perfected today.

Since they could not beat him in a fair election, though, they convinced the country to prevent them from freely electing the best person available for the presidency if that person had already served for two terms.  It is the most undemocratic part of our Constitution which survives today, right up there with the one that forbids any person not born a US citizen from becoming president, which both spares us a Schwarzenegger candidacy, but prevents Jennifer Granholm, the governor of Michigan, from being president or, umm, a candidate for Vice President.

This party means nothing good for our country.  That's the change we are all seeking and from that change, a great hundred days should follow to change our country if not forever, for a good long time.

The other day, the Bush administration announced an agreement with the Maliki administration in Iraq that involved "a general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals" for drawing down the current American occupying force in Iraq. You could practically see the sour expressions on the White House press office's faces as they released even this over-euphemized acknowledgment that the Iraqi government is not likely to endorse an occupation without end. In light of the domestic political discourse, in which the Republicans (including McCain) have consistently equated a 'timetable' with 'surrender', any agreement with Iraq that even contained the word 'time' was going to be distasteful and disadvantageous politically for Republicans, after all.

But the situation for Maliki is exactly the opposite: given that there clearly have been some improvements in security, and given that he and his party have gained a little stature back by working with Sunnis and pushing back against fellow Shi'i, he's hoping for good election results in Iraq -- and getting good results means standing tall in the current status-of-force negotiations with the lame-duck Bush adminstration. Maliki needs to show that he's limiting the duration of US occupation and constraining the autonomy of US troops and especially contractors.

So, here's my question: what did the Arabic equivalent of the statement by the Bush administration say? The Bushies characterized the agreement, again, as "a general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals." Why do I suspect that the Arabic press release from the Maliki adminstration -- and there must have been one -- said something like "definitive timetable for withdrawal, with certain benchmarks" (or something like that)?

The Bush and Maliki people want to project opposite images, after all -- but they have the advantage that most Americans don't read Iraqi Arabic. Since many Iraqis do read English, the American statement had to include 'time' in some formulation, though it could be surrounded with as many vague words as necessary to satisfy Bush. In contrast, there's much less pressure on the Iraqi government to euphemize, since they know that neither Americans nor most American news outlets know or care enough to check the Arabic.

So, Arabic speakers: can someone report on the Iraqi press release(s) on this subject?

Other than hatred for George Bush, what is the reason for supporting Obama? How has he proven himself qualified to be President? Hillary Clinton pointed out that while McCain offered a lifetime of experience, all Obama had to bring to the office was a speech he gave a few years ago. Where is the landmark legislation he proposed? Where are the Senate bills bearing his name, the bills he worked with the opposing party to craft, like McCain/Feingold, McCain/Kennedy, McCain/Lieberman? What great business experience does he have? What executive experience? What military experience? What can anyone point to that would show that this man is uniquely qualified to be the leader of the free world? Obama's like a teenager who knows just how to fix the world, without ever having left his parent's home, he should spend some time learning before he tells everyone else how things should be done.

I thought about simply cutting and pasting last week's post, or the previous week's that, or the one before that.... The data aren't changing much, but what shifts in state-by-state there are tend to favor Obama a little more. We're at a lull in poll movement. As usual, I'm using composite polling data from Votemaster Andrew Tanenbaum's www.electoral-vote.com as input to two simulations, one using a 4% margin of error (the standard for most state polls), and another using a 12.25% margin of error (the current value I get from a linear regression of the 2004 state-by state polling data errors compared with the actual 2004 election).

This week's results:
4% Margin of Error
Obama wins 99.94%, averages 317.3 EV
McCain wins 0.04%, averages 210.7 EV
Electoral tie 0.02%

12.25% Margin of Error
Obama wins 96.6% averages 314.0 EV
McCain wins 3.1%, averages 214.0 EV
Electoral tie 0.3%

The 4% margin of error simulation captures what current polls say, and Obama is simply ahead by too much in too many places to see how he wouldn't win in an election held now. He has double-digit leads in states with 211 electoral votes, while McCain has such a lead in states with just 83, so while several states in the middle might go either way, McCain would need to win just about all of the marginally close states to eke out a win.

The most relevant new polls this week are almost all breaking in Obama's favor: Obama now leads in Michigan by 8, continuing a trend in his favor. It's his largest ever lead there, and is the third straight poll there where Obama has improved (moving from a 4 point deficit in late May). Early i

Iowa, Rasmussen now shows Obama ahead by 10 (up from a 4 point lead in Survey USA's mid June poll, and a 7 point lead in Rasmussen's previous poll in early June), suggesting this one-time swing state may also be moving beyond the polling margin of error.

Rasmussen now shows Obama retaking the lead in Nevada, where he's now up by 2 after traling by 3 in their previous poll in June. Obama lead in February and March, then trailed regularly, and now he's back in front there.

McCain still leads in North Carolina, but it may be tightening a little more, as Survey USA shows him up by 5, and Rassmussen now shows him ahead by 3.

Obama is making more of the Mountain West competitive, as he now trails by just 4 in South Dakota (following last week's gains in North Dakota and Montana).

The other new polls are in states clearly in one column or another, with some movement favoring Obama, and other movement favoring McCain, but nothing which yet suggests any of these states may be competitive in November.

The state-by-state polling data certainly do paint an optimistic picture for Obama, but these simulations assuredly overstate the likelihood of his winning. While there hasn't been much movement recently in winning percentages, McCain was leading Obama in mid-May, which shows that things can change over time.  We're still  over three months from the election, and most of the country isn't really paying close attention yet.

As a point of comparison, political futures sites like www.intrade.com and the Iowa Electronic Markets currently give the GOP about a 30-35% chance of winning in November, with the Democrats at about 65%-70%. That's surely more accurate than a 95% or better chance for a Democratic win, but my biased personal opinion is that Obama's chances are better than the markets say; I'd guess he has about a 75% chance of winning.

Tonights show was very revealing of what has occurred in this country and places us on notice of the seriousness of our situation. If you haven't seen this show and have the means to watch it, it is highly recommended.

Willian Greider especially, revealed the flaws that have crept into our system of governance and the regulatory environment. The things that have occurred and the reasons behind them are aptly described.

Hi there, come on in.  So good to see you!  Sox, please get out of the way.  I'm so sorry....Sox!  Go lay down.  Now.

Good girl.

How was your day?  Can I get you a drink?  Wanna play 20 questions?  Yea, I know.  Grab a seat and I'll get you that beer.  Actually, that sounds good for tonight, think I'll get two.  Save me a pillow, looks like the sofa's full.

I really love seeing so many friends get together like this.  The dynamics are facinating.  Two people in a deep conversation by the door ... there's three others laughing at what only needs to be funny to them ... Look!  Has to be about five or six people outside, loudly and with great animation discussing recipies.  What else?  See her over there in the chair?  Her eyes are closed, but she's awake.  She's softly swaying to the music.  Nice spot, next to where Sox snores.  My favorite in the living room.

Then, of course, there's the kitchen.  Funny how it's like the real living room.  Certain people are drawn to the kitchen and to the others within.  Leaning against the counter, sitting at the table.  It's all too casual, and all too real.  Everybody has a kitchen.  For some, the very sight of a refrigerator and a stove causes a sigh of relaxation.

Excuse me?  Oh!  Sorry about that.  Here's your beer.  Thanks for saving the pillow, of course the floor's fine.  My little spot in a space full of friends.  Now.  I've run my mouth enough, what's up with you?

Two statements from Markos Moulitsas, made minutes apart on MSNBC: 

I'm not going to carry water for Barack Obama…I'm not going to be like the Republicans who excused George Bush time and time again.

He's not tacking to the center...We're squarely behind him...At the end of the day, he's our nominee, and we're behind him 100 percent.

Via the National Review:

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YjVmNTkzMGEyYTRiYTA1OGY4ZTRmMDI2Y2Q0ZjQwNzk=

A few weeks ago, I got an email message from my eldest sister, out of the blue, telling me that her mother-in-law had passed away.  I sent my condolences back, via email, and meant to send a card, but things came up that week and I never did send the card.  I was not really all that close with her husband and his side of the family, having lived in California for most of their early marriage years, and I can only recall having met my sister’s mother-in-law twice, if that.

But not sending a card was inexcusable.  It really was.

Somewhere in the middle of my sister’s email message to me was buried the fact that her son was having his graduation that week as well.  My nephew. 

My nephew is a wonderful guy who makes my heart sing every time I look at him.  He’s got big brown eyes, long eyelashes, a beautiful smile, and a heart of gold.  He works hard, he loves his girlfriend, and he sends me silly questionnaires over myspace.com all the time.  Every time I see him, I just want to hug him close -- but he hates that sort of mushy stuff.  He just wants to be hugged by his girlfriend.  I know this because he’s a friend of mine on myspace and I check in on him regularly.

In the back of my mind I knew he was 18 and therefore this year was the year he’d be leaving high school and moving on to college, but somehow with everything else going on, I missed the date of his graduation (not that I was ever given an invitation or any other head’s up except for that one brief line in my eldest sister’s email that I didn’t catch until much later) and I missed it.  I let it pass without a card or acknowledgement, let alone a gift.

I am, of course, making up for this huge oversight when I see him next weekend, with a sincere apology, the gift of a book all about his favorite hobby which is also his career goal:  photography and video, film-making, and the entire industry in general.  Money, of course, too.  Of course.

Will he get over it, and read the book?  That’s my hope.

I’m not much of an aunt.  I am an extremely self-centered, self-contained single woman with no children of my own.  For some reason, my nieces and nephew seem to love me anyway.  For this, I am extremely grateful, but bewildered.  If I was one of them, I’d say, “Yo.  The money is nice, but get more involved if you really love us.”  They don’t do this, though.  So either they understand me and don’t mind, or they just consider me the laughingstock family asshole but cash my checks anyway.

All this being said, I am making an effort to broaden my horizons and get more involved.

Not just with my family, mind you, but in the political arena.  Most specifically, with the media and its reporting.  I hate miscommunication and resentment.  God knows, it has run rampant in my family through the years, to nothing but bad ends.  To see it running rampant nationally, even globally, is sheer heartache, to me.  That’s why I hate watching Fox News.  Which is why I didn’t realize until recently that the mainstream media is more biased than I had thought, and Fox News is not alone in being able to get away with it.

Thanks to raider99, I have found a group with a common cause, called SCAAMD:  Sudden Citizens’ Action Against Media Distortion.  Here’s the link explaining the group:

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/2008/07/sudden-citizens-action-against.php

You can find more about them in any post that starts with SCAAMD here at TPM, until they get their own page.  Oops, wait.  I joined this week, so I can say us.

My nephew won’t be joining the group, I’m sure, but my nephew is not as overlooked as my eldest sister thinks, either.  In between my political activities and work and home, I do indeed check in on her two youngest via myspace, where I was befriended by them both a long time ago. 

This is not to say it’s okay to miss a graduation, or forget what year of school my nephew’s in.

Had my Republican sister informed me that an upcoming graduation was coming and had she invited me, or at least reminded me, I would’ve had a gift and acknowledgement at the ready.  That’s what a good but weird Democratic spinster aunt does, no?

Pile on, peeps, with the harshest of criticisms about how bad an aunt I am.  I deserve it.

But at the same time, I hope you pile on the media for what it has become, which is, in a nutshell:  Far worse than I.

J, I love you.  I promise not to miss your first film’s red carpet premiere.

First of all I never thought that Obama needed to go on this International tour before the election anyway.  I've always felt that McCaine or others against Obama would plot somehow to conveniently erase him from the race.  It became even more obvious when that ugly reference to the Kennedy Assasination was referenced in the primaries.  I just think McCaine goaded Obama into "proving his Foreign Policy expertise."   This is just a set-up and if I were Obama, I would cancel and/or reschedule to travel with both Senators McCaine and Clinton in tow.  He DID challenge Obama to travel with him to these countries at the beginning of the race...

Now McCaine is really showing that he knows nothing about "Security,"  National or Otherwise.  Further more, being a POW and admitting to your captors to having committed war crimes is no indication of knowing how to win a war.  If he had really admitted to committing war crimes, do you really think he would be alive today...and Oh!  is attempting suicide while in captivity another way to win a war?  Why do McCaine's ideas on Iraq and Afghanistan suddenly sound like what Obama has been saying for the last 11 months???  Who is the expert?

How do presidential candidates choose their v.p. running mates?  With both McCain and Obama soon to choose theirs, here's a look back at one case. 

Richard Nixon placed a glass on the counter.  He filled the glass three-quarters full with his favorite scotch whiskey.  Nixon drank Famous Grouse.  He then, as his tradition dictated, added a scoop’s worth of ice cubes to his drink.  Nixon liked to crunch into frigidity.  Nixon liked the hard edges in his mouth.  Nixon liked the breakage and shattering effect.
     He did not pour a drink for his guest.  He did not particularly like his guest.  Politics was a game of needing, not liking, and no man knew that more than Dick Nixon.
     Nixon’s guest did not like his host.  Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York, was the consummate glad-hander.  The man oozed sincerity insincerely.  The man oozed warmth with frigidity.  
     Nelson Rockefeller, being Nelson Rockefeller, wanted to be president without running for president.  He wanted the Republican Party to beg him to run.  He wanted the electorate to elect him in a landslide.  He didn’t want to be vetted.  He didn’t want to travel.  He didn’t want the sweat of the campaign.  He didn’t mind paying for advertising, and throwing money around in general.  He didn’t mind gossiping with the press.  The man was used to entitlement, not political pugilism.
     Richard Nixon was the ultimate political pugilist.  

Want to read more?  Please check out: http://entertainment.enterto.com/rss_article_bjosepher.html?e=16069

KBR, the former subsidiary of Halliburton, has been accused of <A href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/18/world/middleeast/18contractors.html?th&emc=th">shoddy electrical work </a>, in connection to the deaths of 13 Americans, numerous injuries, 283 electrical fires which destroyed or damaged military facilities in Iraq, plus reports of soldiers receiving electric shocks almost on a daily basis</a>.

Back in 1998, Barack Obama voted against the Kyoto protocol that Al Gore fought so hard to negotiate. He wanted to please her buddies in the Illinois' coal industry.
Now he appears very excited about and supportive of Al Gore's new call for reduction in emissions.

The USA Today has an article today titled, "Obama shifts stance on environmental issues."

Analysts from both Greenpeace and the non-partisan Clean Air Watch expressed their distrust for Obama when it comes to his willingness to fight against the coal industry.

"He's definitely trying to straddle two politically irreconcilable objectives: taking decisive action against global warming while keeping a healthy coal industry," said Frank O'Donnell, president of the non-partisan Clean Air Watch. "Obama's record certainly suggests that environmentalists aren't going to be calling the shots in his administration without input from industry."


http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-07-17-obama-coal_N.htm

Sen. John McCain has stated categorically that Sen. Barack Obama should not have the audacity to offer his ideas on foreign policy without first going to the country in question. 

Like McCain did with his highly publicized stroll down a block in the heavily fortified Geen Zone to a pre-swept market, wearing a flak jacket, surrounded by combat troops armed to the teeth and under the watchful protection of a couple of BlackHawk helicopters to demonstrate how well the "surge" has worked, despite the fact that publicity photos of his promenade were tightly cropped to leave out his bodyguards -- all one hundred-and-some-odd of them.

According to McCain's waterboarded logic, effective foreign policy is based on entry stamps in your passport. In McCainland, that means you have to go to Iraq, to be "authorized" to talk about Iraq. 

Hmmmmm.... perhaps we should be holding McCain to his own standard: travel there first, talk policy later. When was John McCain last in Tehran? Havana? Caracas? Pyongyang?

Thinking about "bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb-ing" Iran, John? Just a minute please... sorry but we don't see your visa. Wanna overthrow Raul and Fidel? Sorry, but we don't see where you were admitted to the country. Got plans to hunt down Hugo? Um, not so fast. We don't see your boarding pass. Tempted to try to corner North Korea? Kim Jong Il didn't let you past the 38th parallel.

Oh, I see... That rule doesn't apply to you, just your Democratic opponent.

Uh-huh... ri-iiiiiiiiiiiiiii-ight.

I like John McCain.  Most voters like John McCain.  The press likes John McCain.  John McCain's likability is about the only thing he has going for him in his campaign for president.  Well . . . that and a supplicant media.

Everyone involved in a campaign or supporting a particular candidate usually believes that their candidate receives unfair coverage by the media.  This happens in one of two fashions: either we believe the media is too tough on our guy/gal; or, not tough enough on their opponent.  Regardless, we all work the refs.  It's a standard exercise in every campaign.

However, just because we all work the refs doesn't mean some of the pointed complaints are without merit. 

This is all a long wind-up to the media's maddening coverage of John McCain.  It's been written in many places that the supplicant media ostensibly runs around as stenographers regurgitating John McCain's fantasy 'Straight-Talk' narrative.

Here's how I see John McCain's 'Straight-Talk' shtick: as shtick.  It's a means that serves an end; being elected president.  The idea that John McCain is a 'Straight-Talk' 'maverick' is pure fantasy.  It's a construct created by John McCain to advance his political career. 

And, there's nothing wrong with that.  John McCain is a skilled politician.  And if he can dupe an unwitting media to push his preferred narrative, he'd be crazy not to.  But, it seems as if the media has almost reveled in finding anything that can be used to skewer Barack Obama as a 'typical politician'.  The media has gone out of its way to latch onto anything regarding Sen. Obama that allows them to portray him as, god forbid, a politician trying to win an election.

Fact is, all good politicians have a shtick.  Bill Clinton's was the lip-biting 'I feel-your-pain' empathy.  However, the press doesn't have to blindly push the candidate's shtick.  Hell, Clinton was repeatedly scorned as 'slick Willie' for his shtick.

John McCain's 'Straight-Talk' shtick is, in a sense, somewhat akin to a pick-up line.  Except that his shtick is that he doesn't really have a shtick.  It like the scene in the unbelievably outdated Cameron Crowe movie 'Singles'.  The lead male character [representing a politician in my example] is at a bar [representing the American electorate] and wants to talk to a girl that he sees [an American voter].  Here's how the scene plays out:

-Hey.
-Hello.

My friend and I have this argument, and here it is.

He says when you're at a place like this...you can't just be yourself,
you need an act.

So anyway, I saw you standing there...so I thought,
A: I could just leave you alone.
B: I could come up with an act, or
C: I could just be myself.

I chose C.  What do you think?

I think that A: You have an act... and that
B: Not having an act is your act.

John McCain's act is that he doesn't have an act.  That's an act!  I'll never understand how smart people in the media are either unwilling or unable to see this plain fact.

Sen. McCain provided another example of this in Michigan today.  Speaking of national emissions standards, McCain started out with his usual 'my friends, I'm going to have to give you a little straight-talk' preface before informing the audience that [with regards to whether or not states, such as California, should be able to set higher emissions standards]:

I have to say I guess at the end of the day I support the states being able to do that, but I also think there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to sit down and work this out."

McCain defended this position again at a press conference after his town hall, but when asked specifically by a reporter from the Detroit News about comments he had made last month in support of a national emission standard that would overrule state standards, he seemed confused.

"I'll get back to you on that," McCain said. "It's a complicated issue. I'll have my folks get to you."

Before I go on, just a general note to the media: whenever John McCain starts a sentence with 'my friends, I'm going to give you a little straight-talk'; whatever follows is sure to be a politically expedient pander.

John McCain has two stock responses when caught pandering.  The first is to become angry at the questioner for asking the question [i.e., McCain becoming 'visibly angry' when asked about how his experience as a POW qualified him for the presidency]; or second, to express bafflement and state that he will "have my folks get to you" [i.e., today in Michigan or when asked about Carly Fiorina giving voters the impression that Sen. McCain supported insurance coverage for birth control].

These are Sen. McCain's stock responses.  Every time McCain is confronted with his stated positions on issues [e.g., voting against insurance coverage for birth control & national emissions standards] while speaking to a group that he is trying to portray his position s something other then what it is; his response seems to be to feign confusion and defer [e.g., "I'll get back to you on that," McCain said. "It's a complicated issue. I'll have my folks get to you."] or to get angry at the questioner.

I would be able to tolerate this nonsense more if the blatant pandering wasn't couched in honorable terms.  For example, here's how Sen. McCain characterized his anger to the the POW question: 

McCain then collected himself and apologized for his initial reaction.

"I kind of reacted the way I did because I have a reluctance to talk about my experiences," he said, noting that he has huge admiration for the "heroes" who served with him in the POW camp and said the experience taught him to love the U.S. because he missed it so much.

"I am always reluctant to talk about these things," McCain said.

Sure you are, Senator.   We all know that you're the last honorable man in politics and would never exploit your former POW status for crass political purposes [ahem, Pittsburgh Steelers].

Again, all politicians pander to a degree, although with Sen. McCain there seems to be no subject with which he is above pandering about [again see, Pittsburgh Steelers POW story].  However, it's a little bit ridiculous to explicitly state that you are above pandering [i.e., 'giving you a little straight-talk'] right before pandering [i.e., 'I support the states being able to do that'] and then recoiling in disgust [or completely obfuscating] when called on the pandering by stating that you're too honorable to pander [i.e., "I kind of reacted the way I did because I have a reluctance to talk about my experiences"].

I'm not sure if the media is simply stupid or willfully ignorant.  Either way, that they allow this nonsense to continue is, frankly, jaw-dropping.

A few weeks ago, the Phoenix New Times exposed the County Attorney's propensity to use seized racketeering funds to organizations committed to "bring(ing) sinners to Christ" - a key constituency going into his re-election campaign this fall.   http://phoenixnewtimes.com/2008-06-05/news/andrew-thomas-spends-public-money-to-bring-sinners-to-christ/

Now, County Atty Andrew Thomas is apparently spending office money to "present" a "book signing" of a local talk show host and his tale of investigating the issue of illegal immigration by crossing the border undercover.  The KTAR website is unclear as to what money the MCAO is using to go into the business of promoting private authors, but it is not worded in a way to indicate that it is private campaign money. 

Thomas and Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio seem to have come to the conclusion that book-signing appearances for books aimed at their followers  are a valuable tool in their campaigns - Arpaio has his own book out, and is campaigning/hawking around the county.  But, using public funds for book-signings is taking it to another level of sleaziness.

John McCain has released his first real "negative" ad of the election season.  In it, he attempts to hit Obama on, among other things, voting against funding the troops.  (Never mind that the Straight Talk Express did the same thing.)

If I had $50 million or so to spare, I'd form my own 527, specifically to roll out truthful response ads for GOP nonsense.  (I know, Obama doesn't want third party ads.  But, damn it, it's my hypothetical $50 million.)  And this would be the script for my first ad.

John McCain says that Barack Obama has changed his positions on supporting our troops.  But what do the FACTS say?

Barack Obama called for pre-emptive air strikes against Pakistan.  George Bush and John McCain disagreed...but then launched the strikes.

Barack Obama called for using a phased withdrawal in Iraq to allow more troops in Afghanistan.  George Bush and John McCain disagreed...but now they agree a timetable is needed.

Barack Obama called for using strong diplomacy to defuse Iran's nuclear ambitions in advance.  George Bush and John McCain disagreed...but now they are all for meeting with Iranian leaders.

Barack Obama called for a timetable for withdrawing troops from Iraq.  George Bush and John McCain disagreed...but now they think a timetable is needed.

George Bush and John McCain have been arm-in-arm, making one blunder after another for eight years.  It's time for a President who has the temperament, judgment and intellect to make the right call - the first time.

I'm not Barack Obama, but I approve this message.

The campaign will eventually go after this guy.  I'm going to use every keystroke I can to put the lie to the "Maverick" right now, and every chance I get.  Who's with me?

I think Senator Barack Obama is smart by talking about Iraq, Afghanistan and Foreign policy now.  By the time October rolls around, Americans will be so UPSET over the economy and lack of jobs they'll tell Senator John McCain politely to "shut up" about war and his heroism.

They'll say -- we're HURTING HERE JOHN McCAIN!! What are YOU going to do about it?

As Senator John Kerry's attempt to push his military experience during his 2004 campaign back fired on him, so shall McCain's.

Americans will see through the game this time.

They are tired of hearing what kind of HERO somebody was almost 40 years ago -- they are more worried about TODAY and what somebody's going TO DO ABOUT IT.

On a side note however, I wish somebody in the Obama camp would remind Americans that President George W. Bush hasn't visited Iraq since the 'surge' has supposedly worked either (according to him and McCain).  I'm also not sure he's even visited Afghanistan yet.

The times Bush has gone to Iraq, it's been to land on a military base, not once did he walk the "safe" streets of Baghdad.  And he's the man that started these wars and has been the 'decider' ever since.

One time Bush went for a photo opportunity during Thanksgiving.  Remember the 'Fake' turkey he carried around that day?

Somebody needs to remind Americans and McCain of these facts.

Former president Bill Clinton only yesterday indicated that he will be ready to campaign for Barack Obama whenever he needs him. Using his unquestionably effective role in Hillary's (subsequently abortive) campaign as a criterion for determining his probable impact on Obama's  interms of concrete and definable outcomes, there is every reason for a positive anticipation of an outcome beneficial to the Obama campaign particularly in the rural areas and among the so-called Reagan Democrats where Bill is said to have been especially effective. And, conversely, Clinton also has a lot to gain interms of his rehabilitation among a critical Democratic costituency including Blacks. He has an opportunity to salvage his almost diminished image among this group, paving the way for his wife's reintegration fully into the Democratic fold as well following their campaining style that left a large segment in the ranks of the party utterly disaffected and less disposed towads the Clintons. 

Pretty much everyone has seen this coming for a long, long time -- John McCain shouting from the rooftops that Barack Obama "voted against funding for the troops."

He's been saying it for months now, and it's one the attack lines in the ad they just released today. Much to my frustration, the media have repeated this charge from McCain without any second-guessing, and the Obama campaign has not responded in the most effective way possible.

So, for the media, for the Obama campaign, and for all you good folks on TPM, repeat after me:

JOHN MCCAIN ALSO VOTED AGAINST FUNDING THE TROOPS!!!!

The Obama campaign will probably respond by pointing out all the times he did vote for troop funding bills, and the collective response will be "so what?" Point out that McCain has done the same exact thing he's attacking Obama for, and the whole line of attack falls apart, putting McCain on the defensive.

While we may not hear much about it, there's still violence in Iraq. A car bomb killed 15 people two days ago and wounded 90 at a market in the northern town of Tal Afar.

Several bombings on Tuesday killed around 40 people in northern areas, where al Qaeda militants are still feared despite a series of military offensives.

Now that Bush and McCain and the neocons have done a 180 on Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran, it's clear they're playing politics with our sons and daughters lives.  

I wouldn't be surprised if they made a deal with Iran--call off their Iranian commanders in Iraq for three months in return for the U.S. not attacking Iran, but rather starting diplomatic talks.

How much more damage can they do in the next three months?

DETROIT (Reuters) - Republican presidential candidate John McCain said on Friday that his Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, is likely to be in Iraq over the weekend.

ADVERTISEMENT
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The Obama campaign has tried to cloak the Illinois senator's trip in some measure of secrecy for security reasons. The White House, State Department and Pentagon do not announce senior officials' visits to Iraq in advance.

"I believe that either today or tomorrow -- and I'm not privy to his schedule -- Sen. Obama will be landing in Iraq with some other senators" who make up a congressional delegation, McCain told a campaign fund-raising luncheon.

Full article avaliable here

That is ridiculous and is putting Obama's safety and security at risk.  Didn't Geraldo Rivera almost get lynched in Iraq by US Military for giving away troop movement in a in-the-sand drawing? I can't believe McCain wouldn't know any better. 

Shameful. 

Steven Todd Wilder
860 E Park Ave
Tallahassee, FL
32301

(850)877-7249
http://marcambinder.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/07/hrc_campaign_aides_buy_2012_we_1.php

I am confident that many Florida Democrats will not appreciate this.

Just heard on NPR's Science Friday, that for the last 7 votes in the Senate having to do with solar energy, McCain was not present for ANY of the votes, while Obama was present for 5 of the 7 and voted "yes" each time.
Given that McCain is the Senator from Arizona, which stands to benefit mightily from solar energy power creation (they could supply the entire nation's electrical needs using solar plants in Arizona), this was an irresponsible lapse on his part. Given the crisis of energy of the past 18 months, it shows something beyond mere irresponsibility.
Obama's campaign should take advantage of this lapse on McCain's part and point out just how out-of-touch he is with the needs of the 21st Century.

    Nancy Pelosi says that W is a total failure.  Actually, I didn't think he was that good.  Could she be, as George might say, misoverestimating him?

Too Old and Brain-dead

If you were Martin Tankleff, six hours of VHS tape could have saved you 17 years. Last week, the New York State Attorney General's office decided not seek a new trial against Tankleff, who was recently set free after serving 17 years of a prison sentence for his parents' murder, which he did not commit but falsely confessed to.  

Just 17 years-old at the time, Tankleff was told by his interrogators that his father had awakened from a coma and identified him as the culprit, and that his dead mother had his hair in his hands. He wondered aloud whether he could've committed the murder in a blackout and produced a confession at the detectives' encouragement, a confession he quickly recanted. If there had been an audio or video recording of the confession, the jury that convicted Tankleff may well have reached a different conclusion.

Tankleff is hardly alone. Studies suggest that 15-25% of wrongful convictions stem from false confessions. Research shows that juveniles, like Tankleff, and people with mental disabilities are especially vulnerable to police pressure and thus more likely to falsely confess to crimes they did not commit. Because confessions are often viewed as the most powerful evidence at trial, they frequently trump other evidence that indicates a defendant's innocence.  

It's much less expensive and far easier to videotape an interrogation now than it was in 1988, and over 450 police and sheriff's departments across the country have independently adopted electronic recording procedures, with uniformly positive experiences. But only seven states and the District of Columbia require electronic recording of custodial interrogations for homicide interrogations.

The other 43 states should follow their lead by requiring custodial interrogations to be recorded electronically from beginning to end. Recording creates an objective record that helps convict the guilty, protects officers from false claims of abuse or coercion, and reduces the number of motions to suppress, speeding up the judicial process. It cans also prevent innocent men like Martin Tankleff from spending half their lives incarcerated for crimes they did not commit.

The Justice Project, an organization which works to increase fairness and accuracy in the American criminal justice system, is proud to sponsor the Justice Newsladder, a new tool to find the top news and articles about criminal justice reform.

In a conference call today, arranged by the Republican Party of Florida, the star attraction was Colonel Bud Day (the octogenarian POW who served with John McCain and now acts as a campaign surrogate). 

While riffing on such topics as the "truthiness" of 527 groups, and the greatness of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, Colonel Day unleashed this showstopper. 

The Muslims have said either we kneel or they're going to kill us. ... I don't intend to kneel and I don't advocate to anybody that we kneel, and John doesn't advocate to anybody that we kneel.

This, incidentally, is the rationale given on the call for continuing the war (er, occupation) in Iraq.  Clearly, Maverick McCain isn't counting on too many Arab-American votes.

And, since Bud Day has a Social Security number of 12...
 
...this has been yet another McCaincient Moment, brought to you by the makers of Viagra.

Okay Genghis, Ben, Cricket, one eyed folks, here it is the one and only creative avatar challenge!

Enough of this politix!

John Ashcroft claims that OLC justified waterboarding as a technique. But when Jack Goldsmith, who succeeded Yoo at OLC, reviewed interrogation policy, he found that waterboarding was specifically prohibited by OLC policy, although not by OLC opinion.

In Goldsmith's book "The Terror Presidency," he says that during his tenure at OLC- he succeeded Yoo- he unwrote Yoo's memos because they were unconstitutional AND unnecessary. He writes:

“The August 1, 2002, opinion analyzed the torture statute in the abstract, untied to any concrete paractices. Then, in a second August 1, 2002, opinion that still remains classified, OLC applied this abstract analysis to approve particular and still-classified interrogation techniques. These separately and specifically approved techniques contained elaborate safeguards and were less worrisone than the abstract analysis in the public torture opinions themselves, which went far, far beyond what was necessary to support the precise techniques, and in effect gave interrogators a blank check.”(pp. 150-151; emphasis added.)

Now, Goldsmith then says he rewrote the Yoo-Bybee memoranda in a manner which specifically outlawed waterboarding. This is what he says about the ‘interrogation techniques’ themselves which he was reviewing:

“Although I was worried by what the sloppy interrogation opinions might be used to justify, I had not concluded that the actual interrogation techniques approved by the Justice Department were illegal….In April 2003, the Secretary of Defense had relied on the March OLC opinion [which had been written by John Yoo] to approve twenty-four interrogation techniques. Most of these techniques had long been in the military manual and viewed by military lawyers to be consistent with the Geneva Conventions….”[pp. 152-153; emphasis added.]

See the inconsistency? Waterboarding has long been viewed by military lawyers as violating the Geneva Conventions.  It appears that the policies Goldsmith was reviewing, pursuant to his bringing in line of the "Torture memos" to the Conventions and Army practice, did not include ALL of the policies that had been used. This can be called "lawyering in the dark." Goldsmith should be called before the House Judiciary Committee ASAP.

McCain changes auto emissions stance

I know - what a surprise!

U.S. Sen. John McCain backtracked Friday on a pledge to set national auto emissions standards that would supersede those California and other states want to set.

"I guess at the end of the day, I support the states being able to do that," he said at a town hall meeting at the GM Technical Center.

The statement appears to contradict a statement McCain made to The Detroit News last month, when he said he hoped to set a national standard that would make state standards unnecessary.

So I can buy a guzzler in PA and bring it to MD. Sounds effective.

"It'd be nice to have a friend in Washington," said Don Jamison, 49, a bumper systems engineer. "Of course, he's politicking for votes, so he's going to be telling us all kinds of things."

You think?

What's the difference between a timetable and a time "horizon"?

If you can answer that question you're smarter than me.

It seems Bush-McCain want to neutralize Iraq as an issue for the election because they know its a loser for them. So...declare victory and get out?

But why? With polls showing Obama with a 20 point lead on economic issues, the only thing really holding him back is voter's worries about his national securtiy credentials.

If the republicans take Iraq off the table as an issue by declaring victory before Novemeber, all that would leave is domestic and economic issues, where Obama absolutely blows McCain out of the water.

Asked whom they trust more to handle the economy, 54 percent named Obama, while 35 percent said McCain. Obama also holds double-digit leads on dealing with the federal budget deficit and on immigration. On social issues such as abortion and same-sex civil unions, 56 percent prefer Obama, 32 percent McCain.

So what's the deal here? Is this a "genuine" effort to try to bring this war to an end, or is this just a bait and switch? Tell the voters your position is the same as Obama's so it neutralizes a bad issue for you only to reverse course and change your mind once you've been elected? Is this like Nixon's "secret plan" to win the war?

July 19th is a momentous day in the brief history of TPM-aholics. This group was formed a few months ago to bring together those of us who have come to know one another, after a fashion, at the Cafe, and to utilize theses relationships to help Barack Obama win the White House and Democrats to win across the country. So far, we've hosted results watching parties, purchased virtual beers for one another, and chatted online. But tomorrow is our first organized fundraiser. Members of the cafe will host parties in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Austin, Tucson, and Taipei. If you live in one of these places and would like to attend a fundraiser, click the associated link or contact me at xengis@google.com, and I'll put you in touch with the host.

If you don't live in one of these places, you can still participate. At 9:15pm EST / 6:15pm PST / 9:15am in Taiwan, we will have a conference call with Don Bivens, superdelegate and Chairman of the Arizona Democratic Party, who will speak with us about building Democratic inroads and purple states and offer his perspective on a certain well-known senator from Arizona. If you wish to participate on the call, please sign up for the event, and we'll send you details for calling in.

I also encourage any of you who can't make the events to contribute to our fundraiser by offering a campaign contribution at our fundraiser page.

I would like to officially extend the party invitation to all TPM staff, particular to the main office in New York and to David Kurtz in Austin. While we know that you cannot officially endorse this fundraiser, if you should happen to get lost in Brooklyn and wander in by accident, we promise not to tell.

Finally, I would like to thank in advance all the party hosts--Boo_lala, Chino Blanco, Bademeus, Benjoya, and AM--and my fellow organizers California Paige and Articleman, for helping to pull this off.

PS Please recommend this post to spread the word.

PPS For those of you who read my last post and are nonplussed by my sudden change of sentiment, I assure you that I am not a flip-flopper. My position has evolved over the last 24 hours.

PPPS This event is not supported or endorsed by Talking Points Memo.

PPPPS Just wanted to push it to 4 P's.

All the elements of the typical portayal of Barack Obama in the media are blended into this satirical piece titled, "'Time' Publishes Definitive Obama Puff Piece":

Excerpt:

"According to political analysts, the Time piece features the most lack-of-depth reporting on Obama ever published, and for the first time reveals a number of inconsequential truths about the candidate, including how he keeps in shape on the campaign trail, and which historical figures the presidential hopeful would choose to have dinner with.

"The sheer breadth of fluff in this story is something to be marveled at," New York Times Washington bureau chief Dean Baquet said. "It's all here. Favorite books, movies, meals, and seasons of the year ranked one through four. Sure, we asked Obama what his favorite ice cream was, but Time did us one better and asked, 'What's your favorite ice cream, really?'"

-Snip-

Readers have so far responded favorably to the piece, with sales of the latest issue of Time nearly tripling that of an issue last month featuring a 36-page exposé that tore apart and vilified former candidate Hillary Clinton's health-care plan.

Read it here:
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/time_publishes_definitive_obama?utm_source=onion_rss_daily

In "School is Hell," Matt Groening identified the "9 Types of College Professors."  One of my favorites was "the single theory to explain everything maniac" and the warning at the bottom ("warning: theory may be correct.")

So, here I am, the single theory to explain everything maniac, back to remind everyone that McCain's pronouncement that Barack Obama is a dangerous liberal extremist was entirely predicable and surprising only because it is coming a little ahead of schedule. 

Once again, this is coming from the standard old reliable GOP game plan that they've executed in every election for the last quarter century. 

In June and July, the Democratic nominee is a convictionless, unprincipled flip-flopper (and his wife is unpatriotic).  From August to October, he's the most scariest, liberalest liberal extremest ever to darken the corridors of power in these United States (and his wife is unpatriotic). 

The only news here is that they've elevated the "liberal extremist" to their candiates talking points a little early.  Usually, the "most liberal politician ever!" thing is only whispered by surrogates before the conventions, just to warm up the meme, you see, so the MSM doesn't hit it cold.  Usually it only becomes the main line for their candidate during or after their convention.   

And, like clockwork, every four years, the MSM obediently laps up the GOP talking points from those musty old pages (it's still in hardcopy, in a three ring binder, of course, because their candidates never seem to know how to use computers) and faithfully regurgitates them to the public like they're brand new, revealed wisdom.  And never, ever, ever do they dare point out that the Republicans have been running this same scam in every election since 1984.   Nor, indeed may they even take note of the glaring contradiction between claiming someone's actions show them to have made a career out of opportunistic flip-flopping and having made a career of being a rigid proto-Marxist ideologue. 

So yeah, evidently, the  flip-flopper thing ran out of gas a couple of weeks sooner than usual, and that is a little bit interesting.  Otherwise, its just the same banality that's made journalism what it is today over these last two and a half decades. 

However, the early roll out of Phase II of the GOP All-Purpose Master Plan for Electoral Victory does give me an opportunity to tie my two theories of American electoral meme-age into one grand Unified Theory of General Election Banality.  

Yes, on the basis of anecdotes, some screeds written by real bloggers like Somersby and Greenfield and Josh, and my own dogmatic faith in the power of written snark to reveal actual truth, I dare to theorize that the overlap between the Republican game plan and my "only four stories" theory of MSM general election coverage is not a coincidence. 

For the overwhelming majority of you who find me totally unmemorable or, worse, have blotted my posts out of their minds because I'm a clear and present danger to their liberties and, indeed, to their precious bodily fluids, my "only four stories" theory was laid out here in a post that took an unexpected turn into a calm, reasoned examination of my own  political leanings. 

  Briefly, the "four stories" theory goes like this: the MSM only has four stories in the summer and fall of an election year:  

1.  The Democratic nominee is a flip-flopping unmanly flip-flopper (before the convention).

2.  The Democractic nominee is the most liberalest librul who ever liberalized a government institution, a terrifyingly extreme extremist in his librulizm (after the convention). 

3.  John McCain is a straight-talking maverick who says what he means and means what he says.  If it comes out of his mouth its true so you don't need to check it and you better not challenge it (he was tortured for his country you know, but don't mention it because he hates to talk about it).   

4.  Oh those silly, squabbling, back-biting, disorganized Democrats!  Har har har!  The idea that they could run a government is too laughable to seriously contemplate. 

The reason for the overlap is obvious to devotees of the liberal blog critique of the MSM.  After decades of abuse by Republicans for their supposed "liberal bias,"  the MSM became so accomodating to the will of its abuser that was incapable of even perceiving a fact that cannot be pounded into one of these frames.

There are encouraging signs of recovery among some members of the MSM which seem to date to the shock of Katrina, but breaking free of the effects of abuse cannot be accomplished overnight.  The tendency to fall back into the supplicating behaviors and learned helplessness is ever-present.  And, of course, some never break free and, indeed, are incapable of even perceiving that they have a problem. 

So anyhoo, the only real question is whether the Republicans, having activated the "liberal extremist"  phase this early can stick with it until November and, if not, whether the MSM's collective head will explode in the face of a mounting flood of facts that can't fit into one of their four frames. 

First, I have to give destor23 a "Thread O'The Month" nomination (and a Nature Boy "WHOOO!") for "John McCain Limerick Thread!"  If you've not seen it yet, it's highly recommended.  Get on there and contribute to the humorous evisceration of the Straight Talk Express! 

Be careful of overdosing, though:  It took me until a few hours ago to stop talking in A-A-B-B-A rhyme construction.

Now, for my personal top-five limerick list.  This is incredibly tough, because almost every limerick I read from the other posters was gut-busting.  But here we go anyway.

First, from JasonEverettMiller, on McCain Family Values:

When Johnny got back from the war
He discovered his wife was no more
So he tossed her aside
For a hot trophy bride
Who would pay his bills evermore.

Now, from Donal, who had a number of quality posts here but got the most out of every word in this one:

Did ye hear of poor Carol McCain?
She waited for years, but in vain
Her dreams were aborted
When he saw she'd been shorted
And left her to go play the swain

This gem, from AdAbsurdum, leaves the finish as an exercise for the reader:

Excuse me the following stunt,
Of making a statement so blunt,
We need to be bold,
High office withhold,
From a man who calls his wife a

Now, ewmulaw's take on the humorous effect of the trailing ellipsis:

This thread is really quite genius,
It helps bridge the divide between us.
Recommend now,
Or it keeps moving down
Like John McCain's old shriveled...

Finally, from Mrs. Pangaea, who made an Ali-like return to the ring with this:

In this presidential election
The issue's not homeland protection
global warming or oil
nor economic turmoil
but Viagra for John M's erection.

So, these are my personal favorites. Again, thanks to destor23 for a great thread, and a hearty "Well Done!" to all those demented TPMers who emptied their intellectual clips into John McCain's weathered carcass.

For weeks now, Senator McSame & Co. have taken every opportunity to upbraid Senator Obama for his not having been to Iraq in over two years and of never having been to Afghanistan. The official propaganda arm of the Republican party, aka Fox News, even went so far as to have a count clock in frame showing how long it had been.

Needless to say, they saw the ploy as a win-win situation. If Obama didn't go they could say: "How can he speak authoritatively on Iraq when he hasn't even been there since the surge began? How can he put forth a plan for troop withdrawal when he hasn't spoken with the commanders on the ground?"

And the flip side was if he did go they could say: "See, Senator McCain shamed him into going which only proves he doesn't have the chops to be Commander-in-Chief." They really thought they had Obama by the short and curlies.

Obama has decided to visit Iraq and Afghanistan but as part of a much wider visit to some European countries as well. Initially, the McSame surrogates and the candidate himself were crowing how Obama had folded. That was until they realized they had actually handed Obama an opportunity to garner national and international media coverage on an unprecedented scale.

From yesterday's New York Times:

WASHINGTON — Senator John McCain’s trip to Iraq last March was a low-key affair: With a small retinue of reporters chasing him abroad, the NBC News anchor Brian Williams reported on Mr. McCain’s visit there from New York, including it in the “in other political news” portion of his newscast.

But when Senator Barack Obama heads for Iraq and other places overseas this summer, Mr. Williams is planning to catch up with him in person, as are the other two network evening news anchors, Charles Gibson of ABC and Katie Couric of CBS, who, like Mr. Williams, are far along in discussions to interview Mr. Obama on successive nights.

And while the anchors are jockeying for interviews with Mr. Obama at stops along his route, the regulars on the Obama campaign plane will have new seatmates: star political reporters from the major newspapers and magazines who are flocking to catch Mr. Obama’s first overseas trip since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee. A “Meet the Press” interview is also being planned.

Oops! When Senator McSame had made a similar trip a few weeks ago, it barely merited a 30 second segment on the nightly news programs and the occasional piece on the cable news networks (except you-know-who of course). And to compound the problem for the McSameites, the Europeans are enthralled with and fascinated by Barack Obama. The press he will receive overseas will be enormous. McSame & Co will be lucky if they get barely noticed during the course of Obama's trip.

Does the possibility exist that Obama will do or say something that could come back to haunt him and damage his campaign? Of course. Anything is possible. But let's not forget that what we are dealing with here is the most highly organized and tightly run political campaign in decades. They beat the previous holders, the Clintons, didn't they? My bet is this trip is going to have an astonishing effect on the presidential race.

So now the campaign that last week accused us of being a bunch of whiners are now themselves the whiners. How else to explain this bit of sour grapes?

McCain Now Criticizes Obama for Travels

Earlier in the day, Mr. McCain’s communications director, Jill Hazelbaker, dismissed Mr. Obama’s trip as nothing more than “the first of its kind campaign rally overseas.”

The moral of the story? Be careful what you wish for.

As David Brooks points out in today's NYT, we have a lot of big problems that need solving in America. But, he says, historically people try to get conservatives to handle the big problems. So hooray for McCain!

Apparently, Brooks has not paid attention to the last eight years of major problems not being solved by a conservative government. Or if not ignored, aggravated.

It's a highly intelligent and insightful column that he no doubt wrote in 2000.

English is a wonderful language. It can be precise when appropriate and it can be -- as Bill Clinton demonstrated repeatedly -- just as vague as its user desires.

For an example, and to stop maundering around my topic, let's examine Merriam-Webster's online definitions of the intransitive verb <i>to compomise</i>:

<blockquote>1 a: to come to agreement by mutual concession b: to find or follow a way between extremes
2: to make a shameful or disreputable concession &lt;wouldn't compromise with their principles&gt;</blockquote>

When Sen. Obama's supporters say they approve of his penchant for compromising, of course they are referring to definition one. When his critics say they disapprove of his willingness to compromise, they tend to use the word in the sense of definition two.

So our challenge as thoughtful voters is to decide under which definition the Senator is operating.

Some of Sen. Obama's supporters seem to have the view that even if he is acting shamefully (without conceding that he is doing so), he earns our support simply by being Not John McCain or Not A Republican. One suspects that most of these folks are effectively "Yellow Dog" Democrats, willing to vote for a yellow dog provided it carries the "(D)" designation in its name. There is nothing ignominious or immoral about that. My point is simply that the voting philosophy of these folks boils down to a "must-have" mindset. Again, perfectly righteous whether or not others would view them as entirely rational.

There are many kinds of "must-have" voters and they fall on all points of the left/right spectrum. Some of these will vote for the candidate that rejects reproductive choice and gay rights even though they might despise other positions the candidate takes. Others will vote for the person they see as the pro-labor candidate come rain or come shine. You can undoubtedly come up with many more examples.

I am a "must-have" voter as well. My set of sine qua non issues has eleven elements. These elements are the Constitution of the United States and particularly its first ten amendments. I am constitutionally (pun intended) incapable of supporting any candidate who fails a constitutional test.

One would hope that everyone is a "must-have" voter over certain issues. Most of us would not support a candidate who advocated the reinstatement of slavery, regardless of the perfection of his or her other positions. The same with legalizing treason. Requiring female circumcision. Converting to monarchy. Requiring the execution of the mentally-ill. The fact that none of your "must-have" issues is in debate at the moment does not excuse you from the set of "must-have" voters.

Now each individual can choose whether a given compromise falls under Merriam-Webster's definition one (pragmatic) or definition two (disreputable). If the compromise under consideration contradicts one of one's "must-have" issues, the compromise is unacceptable. Otherwise, it is pragmatic, even though one may strongly dislike its consequences.

Proposition 8, the hot-button measure to engrave a ban on same-sex marriage into the state constitution, is trailing by nine points, according to a new Field Poll.

More than two-thirds of GOP poll respondents (68 percent) said they would vote for the ban, while 63 percent of Democrats said they would vote "no."

Independents sided with the "no" side even more than Democrats (66 percent).

The Sacramento Bee

CapitolAlert

Chino Blanco

I don't know how they do it, but there is a secret knowledge that Republicans sometimes have that gives them a chance at winning elections they should logically not win. Some of them have a way of presenting themselves that appeals to average Americans despite the Republican policies which have harmed us individually and as a nation. John McCain has this manner that appeals to people. The video of McCain in Kansas City this week demonstrates what I mean. He just sounded like "the man on the street". He was even able to project this when he spoke to the NAACP,  a group which he knew was not likely to give him much support. Never mind what his policies are, or how wrong-headed or incoherent they might be. McCain had the common touch. Never mind that a cutback on the gas tax is just a band aid that will have little effect, McCain projected empathy and concern to his audience with his proposal. He projected sincerity and humility in a way that Bush could have only mimicked. How real it was I won't conjecture, but I will say that his audience felt that it was.I've read a lot of McCain putdowns in progressive blogs lately. Commenters like to vent. I confess, I like to do that too, but we'd better be careful. McCain does echo a lot of Bush Administration policy and he should be nailed for it. However, Americans know that McCain is a different person. He's not the same arrogant, puffed-up sock puppet that Bush is. We must not conflate the two on the personal level.  If we do, we seriously run the risk of becoming the elitists that are an anathema to most Americans. The elitism that Obama has been accused of can be a weapon used against him, and us. This election is not in the bag, make no mistake about it. I don't care what the consensus is or what the conventional wisdom says. We will do well to keep arrogance and bravado out of it.I want make one thing clear: this post is about perceptions and what people project, how an audience responds to what a speaker exudes, and not about their policies or the ultimate soundness of their ideas. John McCain radiates empathy and concern, and a lot of people respond to that, no matter what you have heard over the past few months. He can win a lot of votes because of it. If progressive Americans want to succeed in ending the nightmare of the past seven and a half years we had better learn to sufficiently respect the opposition now, and not later.

Please don't recommend this, as it will look foolish once the other one drops off...

Shorter Charles Krauthammer

"Who does that uppity nigger think he is?"

Diary: Colorado River drought

BBC reporter travels along the Colorado River, keeping a diary. Days are in reverse order on the page. This is from Day One:

The river helped form the Grand Canyon. It is one of planet Earth's most iconic rivers.

It has also been the source of life for this region and the people living here for hundreds of years, which is now a problem, as far as people like Shana Watahomigie are concerned.

Two vast dams were built along the river in the last century. They have caused changes to the ecology of the river.

The lakes behind the dams supply water to agriculture, to industry and to tens of millions of people living in the south-western US.

"We are compromising [the river] by controlling it," says (park ranger Shana) Watahomigie. "The plants have suffered. The wildlife has suffered, as well as human beings. Now the water isn't reaching them."

...

For the best part of a decade the water levels have been falling rapidly.

The tens of millions of water users downstream, in huge sprawling cities like Las Vegas and Los Angeles, are simply using too much water.

Day Two:

The rock is naturally black, but where the water used to be it has turned white, because of the calcium in the water. The bathtub line is 100ft high here.

This matters.

The reservoir, and the Colorado River which serves it, is still the principal water source for millions of Americans. Some argue that one day there may not be enough water to feed the cities here.

There are disagreements as to why water levels in the lake are dropping.

Many environmentalists argue climate change is to blame.

Day Three

There's plenty of disagreement about what's causing the drought. Many here say it's just a dry spell, that the rains will return.

But the General Manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, Patricia Mulroy, says there's no doubt in her mind that man-made climate change is to blame.

"We're going to have to change our whole approach to water management in this part of the United States", she says.

It's such thinking that helps explain the water authority's push to stop any water being wasted.

Already they recycle all the city's used water. If it goes down a plug hole, or a drain it stays in the system.

But if a rogue sprinkler sprays the road, or a hosepipe is left running into a lawn, the water is lost.

Hence the water police.

If there is one thing that we have learned from an ever-consolidated corporate media, it is that, once a narrative gets established, it is very hard to get people to walk away from it. Unfortunately, most of the time, these narratives are incredibly destructive for our national dialog. One of the most destructive of these is the assumption that with Reagan's “landslide” election in 1980 represented a massive realignment of voters toward the Republican Party, that there was a “revolution”. This assumption is based primarily on the fact that Reagan was able to capture about a quarter of people who affiliated themselves with the Democratic Party at exit polls, diminishing Carter's Democratic support from 77% in 1976 to 66% in 1980. But even the most cursory look at the 1980 election and elections afterward completely dispel any notion that Reagan ushered in generations of conservative rule. What did happen was that the media's obsession with the “Reagan Revolution” turned our national debate on its head and gave away the terms and framing to the Republicans. In 2006, Democrats split the national electorate 53-47 -- not a huge margin -- but picked up the biggest House shift in 12 years and the biggest Senate shift in 26 years. By the end of the Reagan Administration, the 10-15% of Democrats that had defected from Carter and Mondale went to Dukakis, not Bush Sr., and although he won the electoral college 426-111, Bush Sr. only beat Dukakis 53%-46%, nearly identical to the Democrats 2006 win. The electoral system in the United States is set up for "landslide" elections, where even the slightest shift in the electorate can have significant consequences. By 1992, the so-called "Reagan Revolution" had fractured significantly -- It was the first time that any political party since the foundation of modern politics had received less total votes than they had in the previous election cycle. If that is what we are calling a "revolution" in politics today, then 2006 was a liberal revolution. We are likely to see huge demographic shifts in the 2008 elections. Kerry won 41% of the white vote in 2004, and I expect that Obama won't get much higher than that but certainly won't get lower. But Bush captured 11% of the black vote in 2004... Obama will get 92%+. Kerry won the hispanic demographic only 53%-44% over Bush in 2004... polls are showing Obama starting off with a 62-35 lead over McCain among hispanics, and that is right after the end of a very polarizing primary campaign where hispanics found their home with Clinton. Obama is also likely to improve the national share of protestants, those making above $75,000 a year, college graduates, non-union households and -- most devestatingly for hte GOP -- the Midwest and West. We're not likely to see a Reagan-like electoral college landslide for Obama, but I think it is safe to predict he'll come in above 340. Democrats will likely blow the GOP out in the congressional electorate. Will Republicans admit there has been an Obama Revolution following hte 08 elections? I don't think so. This sensationalism was first exposed by the documentary The Made for TV Election. In order to understand, though, how we have gotten to where we are, we must first understand how these trends started. A documentary, recently re-introduced to the world, entitled “The Made for TV Election” examines the rise of corporate influence over the media in the eyes of the 1980 presidential election which pitted Ronald Reagan against Jimmy Carter and asks the viewer to look at coverage spanning from the New York Times to CNN, not as news, but as show-business. Candidates were cast and tested in such a way, real events handled and timed in such a way, edited in such a way, dropped or included in such a way that candidates and real events emerged as television theatre rather than a serious national discussion on the course of our nation. The Made for TV Election is hosted by Martin Sheen and the never-before-broadcast and critically-acclaimed documentary is receiving attention based on its foresight into the future destruction of our national dialog. Helen Thomas, the “Dean” of the White House Press Corps, said about The Made for TV Election, "Profoundly enlightening... a devastating look at TV's impact on the presidency." The Made for TV Election demonstrates, in a thorough and complete way, how commercial broadcast networks use polls, gaffes, flip-flops, stereotypes, and show business values to create winners and losers in a drama of their own making to pump the ratings--and distract you from what you need to be an informed citizen and understand what's really happening in America. Norman Lear, founder of the People for the American Way, says that the Made for TV Election "should be seen by every American in every city and town." Howard Rosenberg said that the documentary is "Pertinent, powerful and persuasive... handsomely produced.... brilliant...” Thanks to the wonderful power of grassroots organizers that released the documentary from the grips of corporate control, for US politics and news junkies everywhere, this "must see TV" is now available to you on DVD. Order this 93 minute documentary feature and see what The Powers That Be didn't want you to see, to know what they didn't want you to know: http://www.themadefortvelection.com. In order to take back our country, we must remain vigilant and prepared to fight corporate control of our media and our democracy. The Made for TV Election was the first salvo, and remains one of the most potent, in that battle.

Ever since the dawn of 24/7 cable news networks and the abolishment of the Fairness Doctrine, the media has been dominated by blowhards whose only interest is pumping up ratings and stacking the profits at the expense of the American people. Every story, every narrative is treated as a shockingly controversial topic that must be explored in segment after segment regardless of its basis in facts or reality. We have been given an especially overbearing dose of this profit-driven media template recently, as “controversies” surrounding the relationship between Barack Obama and Jereimiah Wright and Hillary Clinton's comments regarding the assassination of Robert Kennedy received more attention in just one or two weeks than the 47 million Americans without health care, the 13 million American children living in poverty and the state of our crumbling national infrastructure could ever hope to receive in a lifetime. The reasoning is very simple – CNN, MSNBC and Fox News, among others, know that stories about poverty and education don't sell advertising minutes.

This disturbing trend has been a long time in the making. The Telecommunications Act of 1996, signed into law under President Bill Clinton, gave media conglomerates the permission they desperately desired to soak up as many newspapers, TV and radio stations as they could. Now, about ninety percent of American media outlets are owned by six corporations: News Corp., General Electric, Disney, Viacom, Comcast and Clear Channel – all of which have shown strong conservative biases throughout their history. Moreover, companies like Verizon, AT&T and Time Warner have begun lobbying Congress to allow them to charge users for the content they view on the Internet. In the Bush Era of secretive government and censorship of dissenting opinions, there is no battlefront worth fighting more on than preventing the further consolidation of American media and the subjugation of American democracy.

In order to understand, though, how we have gotten to where we are, we must first understand how these trends started. A documentary, recently re-introduced to the world, entitled “The Made for TV Election” examines the rise of corporate influence over the media in the eyes of the 1980 presidential election which pitted Ronald Reagan against Jimmy Carter and asks the viewer to look at coverage spanning from the New York Times to CNN, not as news, but as show-business. Candidates were cast and tested in such a way, real events handled and timed in such a way, edited in such a way, dropped or included in such a way that candidates and real events emerged as television theatre rather than a serious national discussion on the course of our nation. The Made for TV Election is hosted by Martin Sheen and the never-before-broadcast and critically-acclaimed documentary is receiving attention based on its foresight into the future destruction of our national dialog. Helen Thomas, the “Dean” of the White House Press Corps, said about The Made for TV Election, "Profoundly enlightening... a devastating look at TV's impact on the presidency."

The Made for TV Election demonstrates, in a thorough and complete way, how commercial broadcast networks use polls, gaffes, flip-flops, stereotypes, and show business values to create winners and losers in a drama of their own making to pump the ratings--and distract you from what you need to be an informed citizen and understand what's really happening in America. Norman Lear, founder of the People for the American Way, says that the Made for TV Election "should be seen by every American in every city and town." Howard Rosenberg said that the documentary is "Pertinent, powerful and persuasive... handsomely produced.... brilliant...”

Thanks to the wonderful power of grassroots organizers that released the documentary from the grips of corporate control, for US politics and news junkies everywhere, this "must see TV" is now available to you on DVD. Order this 93 minute documentary feature and see what The Powers That Be didn't want you to see, to know what they didn't want you to know: http://www.themadefortvelection.com.

In order to take back our country, we must remain vigilant and prepared to fight corporate control of our media and our democracy. The Made for TV Election was the first salvo, and remains one of the most potent, in that battle.

Two of my all time favorite experts, William Pfaff and Juan Cole, have both written about Barack Obama's strategy for the war in Afghanistan. A strategy which might be defined as "out of the frying pan (Iraq) and into the fire (Afghanistan). Briefly, to take troops from Iraq and take them to Afghanistan to "fight Al Qaeda".

Pfaff and Cole both coincide in their advice: Bad idea, don't do it.

Please read the quotes below with great care.

Age before beauty, first at bat, William Pfaff:

Barack Obama has announced his intention to commit himself to another disaster in the making. As president, he would dispatch reinforcements “to fight Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan.” During the campaign has repeatedly attacked George Bush for going to war against the wrong enemy, Iraq, in the guise of fighting Al Qaeda. Now he will reinforce the fight against the Taliban, once again in the guise of fighting Al Qaeda. The Taliban are not Al Qaeda, any more than the Iraqis were. There is a civil war going on in Afghanistan. There may soon be a civil war in northern Pakistan. The Taliban are involved in both, and the United States has every interest in staying out of both.(...) At one point in their tangled history they afforded hospitality to their fellow-traditionalist Muslim, the Saudi Arabian Osama ben-Ladin. That was their big mistake. The Bush administration made the bigger mistake of becoming entangled with them, for which the United States will eventually be sorry. Barack Obama should think again about what he proposes to do.

Now for Juan Cole:

If the Afghanistan gambit is sincere, I don't think it is good geostrategy. Afghanistan is far more unwinnable even than Iraq. If playing it up is politics, then it is dangerous politics. Presidents can become captive of their own record and end up having to commit to things because they made strong representations about them to the public.(...) We who admire him don't want Afghanistan to become an albatross around the neck of a President Obama. I am old enough to remember one of the things that nearly killed the Democratic Party as a presidential party in the US, which was the way Lyndon Johnson let himself gradually get roped into ramping up the US troop presence in Vietnam from a small force to 500,000, and then still not win. Afghan tribes are fractious. They feud. Their territory is vast and rugged, and they know it like the back of their hands. Afghans are Jeffersonians in the sense that they want a light touch from the central government, and heavy handedness drives them into rebellion. Stand up Karzai's army and air force and give him some billions to bribe the tribal chiefs, and let him apply carrot and stick himself. We need to get out of there. "Al-Qaeda" was always Bin Laden's hype. He wanted to get us on the ground there so that the Mujahideen could bleed us the way they did the Soviets. It is a trap.

Both Cole and Pfaff coincide that Osama bin Laden is not really the issue. I myself believe that Tora Bora was the unique chance to get him and the US blew it. After that the USA has "taken the bait" and fallen into Bin Laden's trap and should extract itself forthwith.

In the middle of the above extract Juan makes, for me, the most important point:

We who admire him don't want Afghanistan to become an albatross around the neck of a President Obama. I am old enough to remember one of the things that nearly killed the Democratic Party as a presidential party in the US, which was the way Lyndon Johnson let himself gradually get roped into ramping up the US troop presence in Vietnam from a small force to 500,000, and then still not win.

Why is this so important?

Two important premises that I argue from after reading Pfaff and Cole:

(1) If Barack Obama is sworn in a President of the United States, his first objective, as it is the objective of every young man who has ever been elected president, will be to get reelected president. 2012 will loom before him like a chimera and will color his every thought, his every word and his every action.

(2) Democrats with no military experience are obsessed with not being viewed as wimps (Republicans like Bush and Cheney are too, but the Republicans don't attack them). President Obama, not the world's most mannish boy to begin with, will want to prove beyond a doubt to everyone here and abroad that he has big, big, big, cojones.

That need to prove his masculinity was what broke Lyndon Baines Johnson, perhaps the only potentially great president after Roosevelt and cost a million dead Vietnamese and 50,000 dead Americans.

Lyndon Baines Johnson was one of the smartest, big hearted, can do, practical and experienced men to ever sit in the White House. Barack Obama is not worthy to tie LBJ's sandal, or at least nothing in his brief public life would give him any right to presume so. Therefore I think Obama would be much more vulnerable than Johnson to prove he had the "right stuff". That is the formula for disaster, because, don't kid yourself, to "win the war" would finally lead, escalation by escalation into an invasion and dismemberment of Pakistan and that is the abyss, the bottomless pit of America's self destruction if ever there was one.

Quite reasonably you could point out that McCain is also in favor of "winning".

Sure he is. The only thing he has going for him is that people may doubt his health, sanity and temper, but nobody, but nobody, anywhere, is ever going to doubt John McCain's cojones. Which means that if it becomes obvious to military experts that America has to pull out of Afghanistan or suffer the same fate there as the Soviets did, McCain will be able do it without anybody (especially the "Republican attack machine") calling him a wimp or doubting for one moment his patriotism. He has that credit, which would be vital in this situation.

As to Iraq: finally the US will have to content itself with the "legacy" of having removed Saddam Hussein and created a freely elected government in Baghdad. Drawing the line under that would allow Americans to still think that they are somehow "special" and save another few trillion dollars and God knows how many lives.

As Pfaff says,

Barack Obama calls the Iraq prime minister’s demand for an American troop withdrawal schedule “an enormous opportunity.” He is right, and it must be accepted. This is what the majority of the American public voted for, but didn’t get, from the midterm American election of 2006.

Instead the Bush government gave Americans the surge. The surge has resulted in Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s demand for a phased American withdrawal from Iraq. Bush expected the surge to produce victory, whatever that might mean, and the right to dictate the terms on which the United States would stay in Iraq, not leave.

Those terms were made known earlier this year: total American exemption from Iraqi law (meaning extra-territorial legal status), veto over Iraqi government decisions, control over Iraqi military and police operations, authority to arrest and imprison Iraqi citizens and foreigners, immunity for American contractors from Iraqi law, and control of Iraq’s airspace.

The surge did the opposite. It created the conditions for Maliki’s demand that the U.S. and its allies leave. General David Petraeus built cement walls in cities to separate Sunnis from Shi’ites. This meant reciprocal ethnic cleansing in sensitive areas, to suppress conflict.

Petraeus paid Sunni tribal groups to fight foreigners – the self-named “al Qaeda in Mesopotamia” – and to keep order in their areas. He encouraged the Maliki government to impose its authority on the radical militia controlled by the young Shi’ite leader, Moqtada al-Sadr.

This created the conditions in which rival power groups, as in Basra, provisionally settled the power issues at stake between them, which would have (and possibly will again) produce conflict when the occupation ends.

The surge segregated groups, imposed truces, and made provisional arrangements to buy peace between factions. It thus created conditions in which the Iraqis want the occupation to end.

Some in Washington don’t want this because the Pentagon has built bases throughout Iraq it certainly does not want to give up, and the State Department has built in the Green Zone the world’s biggest American embassy, complete with tennis courts, swimming pools, leaking roofs and flooding toilets, and a fast-food shopping mall complete with blast shelters, just for Americans, and is anxious to move in and run Iraq. Is all this to be sacrificed to an unwelcome Iraqi sovereignty?

 No one knows; but it begins to look that way, as according to the latest reports, American and Iraqi officials have now abandoned negotiations, leaving it to a new American president to take up the matter.

Barack Obama, if elected, would do well to immediately accept the Maliki demand, and leave no U.S. forces behind that could pull Americans back into Iraq. Give the Iraq government what it wants, and leave the disaster of the past six years totally on the account of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney

Who knows, if the US did that, maybe someday, when today's dead have turned to dust, some Iraqis might even feel grateful.

But to use that retreat to up the ante in Afghanistan, thus ignoring the experience of both the British and the Russians there, would be the height of folly and lead to disasters that would turn the Vietnam horror into a dry footnote in the theses of future Chinese historians.

http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/

Eternity can seem to one experiencing it a long time indeed.  It is especially so when one’s mortal remains are cooped up in a crypt, and you are exposed to a processional of persons wearing “baseball” caps upon their heads, many of whom are equipped with small wires carrying music to their ears.  And most certainly so when one has occupied the chair of the President, and has been forced to spend seven years of said eternity pondering the exceptionally dangerous governance of that most affrighting of successors – your current Chief Magistrate, Mr. Bush.  With that most eager hope that someone shall read this transmittal of my thoughts from beyond the veil, I, President John Adams, have ventured forth this evening upon your Inter-Net, and provide to you my whole-hearted endorsement for the office of the Presidency the Senator from the State of Illinois, Mr. Obama. 

It may surprise those of you acquainted with my Administration to learn that a Federalist such as myself might break a silence of one hundred and eighty some years for such an odd purpose.  Yet it is my hope to acquit myself well in explaining my motives and reasonings in doing so, that you yet may choose wisely in the instant election.  So first then – why does a Federalist endorse Senator Barack Obama for the First Magistracy?  It would be facile to jest that I do so because there is no Federalist running – both because mere party affinity was never my motive but only true loyalty to these United States, and of course because the Federalist party has ceased to exist, save that it lives in your greatness.  My reasons are these—

Mr. Obama is your best hope for reaching past the perniciousness of faction.  This great issue of my time is also the issue of yours; so history is in all things a cycle returning to itself and replaying itself for Man.  Faction enslaves men by division, turning patriot against patriot and State against State.  Senator Obama is a man who has shown his friendship and loyalty to those who are not with him; he consorts with your Hagel, resolving matters of policy in league with him, with your Lugar, to keep the vast land of Russia free from terrible weapons of great destruction.  He calls upon himself the wrath of your own Faction’s orthodoxy in recent weeks, to stamp himself as a man not bought by any, who governs to his conscience.  Senator McCain cannot say thus of himself; does any among you doubt that he is beholden to the basest intriguers within his ranks – for he cannot prevail without the schemers who laid him low in South Carolina?  The vile pamphleteers of Fox and the minions of Rove are schemers worthy of Hamilton and Bache.  Do not suffer their tool to sit upon the Chair of the Chief Magistrate, for discord and faction will be your sure and sole reward.

War is a great reason to do, or not to do, many a thing.  As I said of the need to avoid conflict with France, great is the guilt of an unnecessary war.  And yet that guilt stains the history you now make.  While America has become the world-straddling empire of my hopes and dreams, it must not seek war, for to do so would neither be just nor worthy of its greatness.   Our Republic is not a creature of Caesars, nor Napoleons.  While your Senator McCain is a good fellow, making him First Magistrate would plow a deeper channel than that already worn by your Tyrant George, with your history flowing ineluctably into an ocean of Permanent War that is not the peace our Declaration of Independency and Union aspired to from the days in Philadelphia and years of struggle through which we threw off the yoke of tyrants.  Our greatest feat was the handing of the sword to the civilian man; and the governance by reason and right over force.  Do not hand the Magistracy to another from that Party of Eternal War or you make of your heroic Armies Gods to lord over you.  Mr. Obama will serve you better than that.

Liberty’s call is another of my reasons.  Mr. Obama is truer to what is Just, what Noble, in affairs of policy.  I can hear my critics, see with my shut eyes the echoing charges trumpeted in their false pamphlets, urging me a Tyrant like George, that I pleasured in the stifling of dissent.  And yet I always held true to the need for a Bill of the People’s Rights.  Mr. Jefferson and I were always one in that (and yet remain so!).  In my simple days, the States were held by invisible threads, thin and frayed.  A great issue of my time was Union; and my sacred duty to preserve it led me into measures I did later regret.  Yet your Tyrant George cannot claim that Union impels him to stifle dissent.  You have so many laws, so many bonds, such great sinews binding together the body of your Union with profound strength.  He has no excuse, however feeble, for his prisons, for his corruption of Federal Office with unqualified seekers.  Mr. Obama will close the prison at Cuba, will respect the many Rights of Man.  Mr. McCain now preens before those who would reject the natural Right to trials, and also those who would establish theirs as the one true religion.  He is in these things not sensible, not a true man of Liberty.

Abigail had asked me to say a word for your Senator Clinton, but as with John Quincy I think it best to let them say in their own voice what they will; for my speech is far too pedestrian, too coarse, too unrefined to convey that which rises in their hearts, and for that reason I bid them to present their thoughts to you on another day.  As I feel my bond to your Inter-Net nearing its present expiration, I dare ask you only one favor for a concerned patriot.  If you could affix one of your Obama Bumper Stickers to some pole or fixture within the grounds where my old bones sleep, I should mark myself proud.  So to curb the twin dangers of Faction, to permit war only when war must come, and for Liberty herself, please cast your vote for Senator Obama, and think kindly if you can of this old patriot, who has only pride in you.

Yours with utmost sincerity,

President John Adams

My friends,

After much perusing of Poblano's excellent site and monkeying around with my favorite Electoral College calculator, I have been tentetively forced to conclude that Straight-Talking John "Maverick" McCain (who was tortured for his country but don't ask because he doesn't like to talk about it) is screwed. 

The Hillary diehards (who are pretty much resembling the political equivalent of the the James-Younger Gang, these days) like to sniff about daily tracking polls and head to head national primaries, but, as we should all frakking know by now, those numbers mean absolutely nothing.  The only number that means anything is 270--the number of electoral votes necessary to win.  (Or, 269, if you don't mind an ugly, divisive, messy Constitutional crisis that we'll probably win anyway). 

It's only July.  Anything could happen and overconfidence is bad, bad, very bad. 

But right now, the electoral college math is almost insurmountable for McCain.  Indeed, the mathematical walls began closing in on him even before the primaries were over.  At this point, he's exactly where Hillary was after February--clinging on in the hope that something, anything, happens to turn things around that radically changes the dynamic.  A gaffe, a scandal, something. 

As of today, one of Bush's '04 states, Iowa, is already lost to the Mav.   Based upon Poblano's regression analysis, as well as an eyeballing the most recent state polls listed on the right hand side of his site, eleven states are in play this year: North Carolina, Florida, Missouri, Nevada, Indiana, Montana, Virginia, Ohio, Michigan and New Meico.  (Poblano calls a state "in play" if his regression shows a November win percentage for either candidate of less than 5%.  He chose that number because, historically, 5% is about the most you can move a number with GOTV and intensive late campaigning.)

The Mav's problems, in a nutshell are a) ten of those in-play states were red last time which means b) when you total up the electoral votes for the states that aren't in play, Mav starts the game with 160 electoral votes while Obama has 242, and, c) in the "in play" category, Michigan, Ohio, New Mexico and Colorado are looking pretty solid, if tight, for Obama.  Even if McCain wins all the others, if Obama carries just those four, he wins big.

Or, look at it this way, Assuming both guys carry their "safe" state, if Obama adds Ohio and Michigan to his bag, he wins.  Moreover, if Obama carries only one of these two he wins if he also carries:

Virginia, or
North Carolina, or
Florida, or
Indiana, or
Missouri, or
Colorado + New Mexico, or
Colorado + Nevada, or
New Mexico + Nevada + Montana. 

Further, if Obama wins Ohio but loses Michigan, he can win in all of these ways and, additionally, can win with:

New Mexico + Nevada, or,
New Mexico + Montana, or
Montana + Nevada, or
Colorado + Montana. 

If you're John McCain's campaign manager and you've got half a brain, its an absolute nightmare.  If McCain were a general, he would be one who has simultaneously to conquer vast swaths of enemy territory while simultaneously stamping out mass rebellions in his own rear areas. Nightmare.  Not aware of many generals who've ever managed to do that.  Julius Caesar, maybe, and Mav is no Julius Caesar.

Oh, and icing on the cake.  For me at least.  Iif you're playing with an electoral vote calculator, notice how important all those states that we were told didn't matter are now and thoroughly they screw McCain's ability to come up with a winning strategy. 

Somewhere, if Mark Penn's head is exploding. 

[Note: I publish this with fear and trepidation. I am not now nor have I ever been a troll or a Republican. If you look at my Blogs here at TPM you will see that. I do not use a thesaurus, so please don't condemn me for using that A-word in the title---I just thought it fit. I would write a similar post if some self-important, pompous right winger proposed a similarly expensive right wing project. Finally, I am fully aware that Bush was born with the same silver spoon as Gore.]

Albert Gore, the Nobel Prize winning climatologist---oh wait! he's got zero training in climatology.

Albert Gore, the Nobel Prize winning meteorologist---oh wait, he's got zero training in meteorology.

Albert Gore, the Nobel Prize winning astrophysicist---oh wait, he's got no training in astrophysics either.

Albert Gore, the born-with-a-silver-spoon-in-his-mouth son of a US Senator has raised the upper limits of audacity and hubris to hitherto unseen heights by calling for a mandated program that would cost the American taxpayers and private investors the tidy sum--even by today's standards--of $1.5 trillion based on a hypothesis he, Mr. Science, believes to be true: Global Warming.

The program would convert the US from a carbon-based fuel economy to a non-carbon-based one, by employing solar, windmill and other non-carbon energy technologies.

The sheer arrogance of a single individual, any individual, proposing a program, any program, that requires the commitment of $1.5 trillion is exceeded only by the financial (and scientific) ignorance that such a proposal evinces.

For instance, what if the price of a barrel of oil were to fall to $80 or $60 or $40 during the life of this program? What then?

For instance, since the prediction even of the next day's weather is such an enormous and complicated mathematical task that the National Weather Service (NWS)_ has the largest collection of Super Computers in the world, more the Pentagon, more than NASA, and the NWS still cannot guarantee with absolute certainty that tomorrow's weather will be so and so; how can a coherent persuasive argument be mustered for such an expenditure based on data whose interpretation may prove erroneous?

And finally, how can a person--Albert Gore, not Albert Einstein--possibly understand any of the physics and mathematics that underlie the prediction of weather and climate changes? I can answer that one for you: He can't. If he were shown the equations, his eyes would glaze over. Without understanding those equations, his guess on the future of climate is no better than yours or mine.

But he relies on "experts," you may say. Yes, that's true. But there is not unanimity on the part of experts, though there may or may not be a general consensus that supports Gore's position.

"A General Consensus" is insufficient grounds to suggest, let alone adopt, a project of this magnitude with taxpayer funds. If the private sector--of which Gore is a part--likes the idea, they are more than welcome to raise the funds and go for it. Otherwise, both Presidential candidates should immediately announce that they have no intention of seizing roughly 12.5% of the nation's GDP based on Senor Gore's beliefs.

The USGovt should never undertake any project of this magnitude, period!

Hi!  Thanks so much for having me over, what a treat.  Sure, no problem, just a bottle of my favorite Zinfandel.  Wow!  The place looks great!  I can't believe it's been so long, what did you do?  Paint and refinishing ... really?  No, now that's a new sofa, right?  If you tell me you just recovered it I may have to kill you.  I can barely put flowers in a vase and you're going all Martha Stewart on me.  Ouch!  That hurt.

Who's here?  Sounds like everybody's having a great time, so glad I came.  Thanks, I'd love a glass.  Oh, gosh, I'd forgotten what a beautiful view you have here.  The full moon rising while the sun finishes the day.  Reminds me of a photograph just before it developes completely.  Truly lovely.

Go ahead!  I'm fine right here.  You've got a house full of folks to worry about ... I understand.  We'll catch up more later.

Hey there!  How are you?  I know, it's been awhile.  Funny how the days have a habit of running into each other.  Staying busy with work and life in general, you know how it is.  No, nothing too bad, knock on wood.  Is that?  It is!  Let's head that way and say hello. 

Give me a hug!  How long has it been?

Fournier's idea of 'accountability journalism' is that the press holds politicians accountable while the press is accountable to no-one.

There is absolutely nothing new in Fournier's approach, or for that matter in politicans who bluster on about how they will hold people accountable.

What would be unusual would be for a politician to stand up and say 'hold me accountable'. As in 'hold me accountable if the pretext for my invasion of a country turns out to be untrue', 'hold me accountable if my tax cuts lead to a runaway deficit', 'hold me accountable if my attorney general is unable to give a straight answer when asked who was responsible for authorizing the use of torture'.

The press have failed to keep the Bush administration accountable - Fournier included. And it is very clear that Fournier has no intention of keeping McCain accountable either. We will see no AP articles examining the inconsistencies in McCain's policies or the fact that there are simply no numbers in his economic 'plan' to add up.

To hold others accountable you have to first accept accountability yourself.

All over the media, McCain is taking credit for the Surge. They are all parroting the message that it has been a success.

The mainstream message is distorted. The Surge is a questionable policy that has failed to meet its own objectives, and even if it did meet those objectives, I maintain that the whole premise is flawed from the start.

I strongly suspect that reducing violence by throwing more bodies at the problem (aka "the Surge") is nothing but a short-term measure. The truth is, if we don't keep Iraq loaded down with hundreds of thousands of Western troops, the minute we leave, the real insurgecy will take place. It's just Whack-a-Mole. We can't stop the anti-Western/anti-American sentiment that has only grown due to the phenomenal job Bush has done to swell the ranks of fundamentalist Islam, not to mention decades of Western imperialism and the centuries-old struggles that are endemic to the region simply because we "reduced violence" in Baghdad, or anywhere in Iraq.

The US has been simplistic about Iraq and the Middle East - let's see - forever. The truth is, the British began their Crusades against the Moslem countries long ago. Queen Isabella ousted the Muslims and Jews around the time of Columbus, even though they were the more enlightened and peaceful members of the Spanish southland. And then, in 1948, brilliant Western minds ousted the Palestinians to put Jewish refugees in their "homeland" of Israel. Maybe that was something that seemed fair at the time to people coming out of WWII and the Holocaust, but it set up an imbalance that we have had to bolster all along.

I'm not anti-Israeli in this, even if I do disagree with some of their policies. They have a right to live, having been there for 60 years now. But, frankly, so do the Palestinians, and so does the whole Islamic world. Extremism is what it is, wherever it's found, and it doesn't go away just because we kill a lot of people – in fact it doesn’t go away precisely because we kill a lot of people, among other things. Even if we kill Osama, another leader will take his place and he is an instant martyr. And if we capture and try him, he’s a well-publicized martyr in a long, drawn-out process. It’s not a winning proposition.

But we've stirred up the pot. We've outraged people by our wanton killing and destruction, our total lack of accountability and our obvious imperialist intentions. If you doubt that, look at the slipshod job done by Halliburton & Co for billions of wasted dollars and the deals we're striking to be sure our Big Oil friends get ultimate control over the precious Iraqi oil. Oh, and there's the small matter of an American base larger than the Vatican.

I'm sure there are many people all over the Middle East who would like to have the freedom - the democratic government - that Bush likes to talk about - after he talked about WMDs, then freedom (as an afterthought and damage control for being caught lying about the first thing), and before he began to betray that the entire Iraq War was about oil and control of the region (as the ultimate conclusion to be reached after everything else turned out to be bullshit). But be that as it may, bringing freedom and democracy to the citizens of the Middle East isn't going to be accomplished at the point of a gun, and when we leave Iraq, the "surge" will be seen for what it is - smoke and mirrors and a delaying tactic that will ultimately leave the next president to deal with the situation. If it's McCain, of course, that won't matter. He's already on board. But if it's Obama, he has his work cut out for him, and the "surge" hasn't corrected the problem.

I don't know the solution, but I suspect it's one of humanitarianism, diplomacy and education more than it is about war. I hope that's true. Otherwise, we are still fighting the Crusades, but in a time of nuclear weapons. Not smart.

And meanwhile, the MSM and McCain and a lot of people are now buying into the idea that the Surge has worked and things are good. Typical shallow analysis, but not good enough. Not even close to good enough.

Recently in the WSJ he argued

`Democrats don't have the same large volunteer pool the GOP does with its Federated GOP Women, College and Young Republicans, and local party committees. In the primaries, Mr. Obama instead moved hordes of volunteers from state to state. It was a brilliant tactic, but Nov. 4 is different. The volunteers adequate for primaries held over five months will simply not be enough to compete in 51 separate elections (all 50 states plus the District of Columbia) all on one day.`

Now check out what Obama's doing: the title's misleading - the diary covers a lot mroe ground than just Colorado.
Groundgame Obama Colorado Office openings draw 1,200 supporters
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/7/17/185526/033/108/553158

The first thing to check for before bidding is to look for the shipping cost, that can be found at bottom of sale or there'll be a shipping  tool somewhere near bottom, that you put your Zip Code into.. You are looking to save money right? So Media Mail at USPS is about $ 2.19 shipping for 3 sets of used World of Warcraft CD Key without the useless outer boxes to get shipped from Califonia to any

Online PC game publisher YNK Interactiveannounced the launch of the Exchange Market and Special Services for their new
massively multi-player online role-playing game, Rohan: Blood Feud (www.playrohan.com). These two features, in addition to
the previously-released Item Mall, round out the final components of the

You will never get a good answser to compare WoW and AoC. I've heard just about every reason why AoC is going to kill WoW etc. I typically ignore these things, but, at present, more and more sites which deal in WoW gold begin to sell Age of Conan gold, the competition extend to virtual goods in a short time, I think it's really funny, what do you think of it?
Some well-known virtual goods trading site such as ige.com, playerauctions.com, and mmobay.com, all began to sell AoC gold. It was even said that the Age of Conan power leveling was in hot selling too. and now, I don't think I've heard a more ignorant statment.
Perhaps there are certainly more reasons. Just like in WoW before, the players in AoC recieved plenty of chatting spams that sell AoC gold and AoC power leveling. I really don't know if it is a good news or not. A few points to all of you running around screaming about AoC or Warhammer as the WoW killer, I figure, at least, it must be a gold killer first.lol.
A few of men said that AoC is better based on pvp,raids,guilds,combat,explerable area and tht stuff. It's pretty funny. the only things I know is AoC gold is more expensive than wow gold, perhaps Blizzard ought to ban more and more farmers or gold sellers, and then the wow gold price will be up quickly. lol, just kidding.
now,let's review again these points between WoW and AoC in game:
* WoW is cartoony, every detail does not look real.
#AoC looks visually much better over WoW
*WoW has a huge population
#AoC got 400,000 subscribers the first week it came out.
*WoW has the battleground and honor system
#AoC has open pvp, with guild sieges and guild city sieges.
*WoW has unique looking mounts
#AoC allows you to fight from your mount
*WoW has auto attack
#AoC uses directional
It's just like you are comparing apples to oranges, which one is better? who knows.

Media critic Zachary Roth of Columbia Journalism Review has some words today for New York Times' columnist Maureen Dowd, in reference to her "shockingly dumb" column last week in which, besides ripping what she saw as Obama's lacking sense of humor, she warned the senator that he is “in danger of seeming too prissy about food.”

Roth compiles other recent quips by Dowd in reference to Obama's eating habits:

•  In April, she noted that, after Obama “force-fed” himself waffles, pancakes, sausage, and a Philly cheese steak, he was “clearly a man who can’t wait to get back to his organic scrambled egg whites.”

•  The previous week, she had described him as “resisting as the natives tried to fatten him up like a foie-gras goose.”

•  And two weeks before that, she had revealed to readers that, at a Pennsylvania chocolate shop, Obama “spent most of his time skittering away from chocolate goodies, as though he were a starlet obsessing on a svelte waistline,” and that he declined a chocolate cake with frosting, saying “that’s too decadent for me.”

Contact Dowd and give her a piece of your mind.

First, allow me to confess, I’ve been reading my dog-eared copy of Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition recently, and all due credit to Hofstadter, the publisher and any interested heirs. Hofstadter’s tome is without comparison in political writing and I have borrowed liberally here from his chapter on Abraham Lincoln. Though brief, Hofstadter’s treatment of Lincoln provides a searing account of that man’s life, that is equally compassionate and reverential. And unlike Doris Kearn Goodwin’s more recent, A Team Of Rivals, where Lincoln arrives to us almost fully formed, Hofstadter illuminates every step of Lincoln’s excruciating path to our nation’s highest office and fleshes out the sins of a man we now tend to view as pure as driven snow.

 

Also, and perhaps because Hofstadter’s tome had jogged my thoughts of late, I decided to throw my copy of The Button Down Mind of Bob Newhart on the old turntable the other night. Surely someone out there still owns a copy? And remembers the Abraham Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue shtick?

 

“Abe, sweetie,” Newhart starts out on the phone. “How’s things in Gettysburg?” and you’re falling out of your chair. In reference to the infamous address, Newhart, the ostensible marketing guru grows abject. “Aw Abe, now why do you always go and change the speeches?” Then flustered, “You’re wondering why four score and seven years… It, it doesn’t make any sense to you... Abe, just trust me on this one. We test marketed that line in Peoria. They loved it.”

 

And if test marketing the Gettysburg Address isn’t funny, I don’t know what is…

 

But to my point, Newhart’s good-hearted jibing got me to thinking about the lofty way in which we venerate Lincoln in our society and to wonder how our 16th President would have held up in today’s world of endless media scrutiny. Not very well, I think. Abe didn’t do so well in his own time. Between the yoke of a civil war, the dragging of his feet on the issue of slavery and the general tendency of Lincoln’ enemies to portray him as a country oaf, you wonder how we ever arrived at a place where, as Hofstadter put it, “The Lincoln legend has come to have a hold on the American imagination that defies comparison with anything else in political mythology.” Simply stated, when we refer to the man in public discourse, we tend to do so in a way that is utterly devoid of analysis.

 

The truth about Lincoln is, whether or not he intended to run for President from the start, his entire adult life was guided by a singular ambition: that of securing public office. As William H. Herndon put it, a man who was familiar with Lincoln and apparently adored him greatly, “Politics were his life, newspapers his food, and his great ambition his motive power…His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.”

 

 

 

In keeping with this drive, Lincoln immersed himself at an early age in the Whig Party, the equivalent of today’s country club crowd, and made himself quite comfortable among its wealthiest members. It was not without expressed distaste that Lincoln frequented the finest parlors, but the object of securing office came before fighting for abolition. On that hard issue alone, Lincoln left something wanting when it comes to greatness. Consider two of Lincoln’s early quotes regarding Negroes, cited in Hofstadter’s book.

 

“I confess I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down, but I bite my lips and keep quiet.”  And  “What next? Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals. My own feelings will not admit of this, and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of whites will not.”

 

Yikes!

 

The Emancipation Proclamation itself had “all the grandeur of a bill of lading” as Hofstadter noted. William H. Seward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State is quoted as saying in response to it, “We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating the slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.”

 

The instincts of compassion were there in Lincoln, to be sure, but it took him until 1854 to write these words. “As a nation we began by declaring, ‘all men are created equal’. We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics’. When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty, to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”

 

And thus Lincoln tiptoed through one of the greatest social and political minefields of all time; from a standpoint of political expedience, and with carefully suppressed passions. I think it is fair to say, the man we credit with freeing the slaves would be considered the ultimate flip-flopper in today’s parlance.

 

Yet for all that Lincoln spoke out of both sides of his mouth, hoping to get elected, and to maintain his office, and his endless prevarications publicly on the subject of slavery, does anyone doubt Lincoln’s lofty place in American history? I don’t. Here was a man, as Hofstadter put it, who bore the sins of an entire nation, gave his life for it, and did so with “malice towards none and charity for all.” As John Hay, another contemporary who knew Lincoln well, said of him, “he was the greatest character since Christ.”

 

It was against the backdrop that I was reading Bob Herbert’s lament on Barack Obama the other day.

 

My God, he’s tacking to the center. He’s abandoned his principles. He’s lost his compass.

 

That seemed to be the essence of Herbert’s abject lament, and one can only imagine how he would have fared had he been alive then and writing about Lincoln’s political masquerades instead.

 

For me, personally, during this current Presidential campaign, I’ve journeyed from being a staunch supporter of John Edwards to a wary admirer of Obama. And I will admit to casting a somewhat more skeptical eye towards Obama in recent weeks. It is not an easy political minefield he walks, but thus goes the dirty little business of getting elected. Lincoln understood it. Perhaps the straight shooting John Edwards did not. After all, the fact that Edwards was forced out of the nomination process early is damning of American politics, not of the man.

 

Sad as it is for this old hippie to accept, there’s an inescapable fan dance to attaining power, so don’t be surprised to see me holding my nose now and then during this election process, but I still put my faith in this simple belief. Like Lincoln, Obama will do the right thing when history affords him the chance. I don’t expect to like every decision he makes, but let’s not confuse the sordid game of politics with a man’s essential character, or with the stature he’ll bring to the Oval Office. To do so would be to say an imperfect man like Lincoln was never capable of greatness .

 

As with Lincoln, hopefully we are buying something deeper with Barack Obama, some inner metal that goes beyond what a focus group will dictate for today; a man who may not speak for all Americans, all of the time, but who will speak for most of us, most of the time. Above all, in Obama, one can sense the potential for greatness, and even more so, the potential to draw out the greatness in us. At the least, the very act of electing Barack Obama President will tell the world volumes about this nation’s character, more than a hundred years of apologies could ever say.

 

Again, I am only speaking for myself, but I fully expect on the day Obama steps up to the nation’s Capitol and gives his Inaugural Address, the tone and timber of this entire nation will change, along with the tone of this entire planet. It is the power we ascribe to Lincoln and other great characters of history, and I dare say, a thought that will never enter the mind when considering John McCain.

On thonight's Hardball show, McCain's "Summer of Love" ad was played, which references McCain's ordeals in Vietnam.

Now, I'm with Obama and others who honor McCain's service.  But why is John McCain a hero?

Did he do anything especially heroic in combat?  What did he do that was more honorable than other POW's in Vietnam?

I ask this in the spirit of fact finding.  I hope that some of McCain's supporters respond thoughtfully.  Most importantly, I do not intend this post to be the proverbial "hanging curve ball" invitation for people to bash McCain.  I am asking my questions to acquire knowledge.

There has been an inordinate amount of cluck-clucking in the MSM during the past week in an attempt to caricature Jesse Jackson.  However, I don't really care about what he said.  Jackson has always had a mixed legacy.

Although I have often disagreed with and been critical of Jesse Jackson, both politically and in the manner he has sometimes conducted himself, I certainly never bought into the ridiculous Republican Party stereotype of Jesse Jackson as a "race-hustling poverty pimp".

However, as the Jackson-bashing continues I think it's important to remember other aspects of who Jackson is and the issues and causes that he has repeatedly championed throughout his career.

We're two days shy of the twentieth anniversary of the speech that Jesse Jackson gave at the Democratic National Convention in 1988.  The speech can be found at American Rhetoric, which is a fantastic site that I highly recommend.

I'm excerpting parts of the speech, although I would strongly encourage everyone to give it a listen as well.

Common ground.

Easier said than done. Where do you find common ground? At the point of challenge. This campaign has shown that politics need not be marketed by politicians, packaged by pollsters and pundits. Politics can be a moral arena where people come together to find common ground.

We find common ground at the plant gate that closes on workers without notice. We find common ground at the farm auction, where a good farmer loses his or her land to bad loans or diminishing markets. Common ground at the school yard where teachers cannot get adequate pay, and students cannot get a scholarship, and can't make a loan. Common ground at the hospital admitting room, where somebody tonight is dying because they cannot afford to go upstairs to a bed that's empty waiting for someone with insurance to get sick. We are a better nation than that. We must do better.

I think it's self-evident that those causes championed by Jesse Jackson in Atlanta twenty years ago have only grown more dire.  Substitute "home-owner" for "good farmer" and the speech could be given today and carry just as much weight.

We stand at the end of a long dark night of reaction. We stand tonight united in the commitment to a new direction. For almost eight years we've been led by those who view social good coming from private interest, who view public life as a means to increase private wealth. They have been prepared to sacrifice the common good of the many to satisfy the private interests and the wealth of a few.

We believe in a government that's a tool of our democracy in service to the public, not an instrument of the aristocracy in search of private wealth. We believe in government with the consent of the governed, "of, for and by the people." We must now emerge into a new day with a new direction.

I have nothing to add to that sentiment.

Reagan gave the rich and the powerful a multibillion-dollar party. Now the party is over. He expects the people to pay for the damage. I take this principal position, convention, let us not raise taxes on the poor and the middle-class, but those who had the party, the rich and the powerful, must pay for the party.

I just want to take common sense to high places. We're spending one hundred and fifty billion dollars a year defending Europe and Japan 43 years after the war is over. We have more troops in Europe tonight than we had seven years ago. Yet the threat of war is ever more remote.

Germany and Japan are now creditor nations; that means they've got a surplus. We are a debtor nation -- means we are in debt. Let them share more of the burden of their own defense. Use some of that money to build decent housing. Use some of that money to educate our children. Use some of that money for long-term health care. Use some of that money to wipe out these slums and put America back to work!

I just want to take common sense to high places. If we can bail out Europe and Japan; if we can bail out Continental Bank and Chrysler -- and Mr. Iacocca, make [sic] 8,000 dollars an hour -- we can bail out the family farmer.

Again, substitute "Bear Stearns," "Freddie Mac," "Fannie Mae"    & homeowners for "Continental Bank," "Chrysler" & the family farmer & it seems fairly obvious that this portion of the speech could be given just as easily now.

Once again we're coming off an eight-year spending frenzy in which the president has been making commitments and spending money like a drunk sailor without once ever asking for any sacrifice from the American people in return.

And the Republicans are supposed to be the party of self-reliance and personal responsibility?

Most poor people are not lazy. They are not black. They are not brown. They are mostly White and female and young. But whether White, Black or Brown, a hungry baby's belly turned inside out is the same color -- color it pain; color it hurt; color it agony.

Most poor people are not on welfare. Some of them are illiterate and can't read the want-ad sections. And when they can, they can't find a job that matches the address. They work hard everyday.

I know. I live amongst them. I'm one of them. I know they work. I'm a witness. They catch the early bus. They work every day.

They raise other people's children. They work everyday.

They clean the streets. They work everyday. They drive dangerous cabs. They work everyday. They change the beds you slept in in these hotels last night and can't get a union contract. They work everyday.

No, no, they are not lazy! Someone must defend them because it's right, and they cannot speak for themselves. They work in hospitals. I know they do. They wipe the bodies of those who are sick with fever and pain. They empty their bedpans. They clean out their commodes. No job is beneath them, and yet when they get sick they cannot lie in the bed they made up every day. America, that is not right. We are a better Nation than that. We are a better Nation than that.

Some people call that warmed-over liberalism.  I call fighting for the most vulnerable of those among us. And the Democratic Party could use a little of this kind of fighting spirit.

The following is the type of "fight" that I'm looking for in my Democratic Party:

Don't surrender, my friends. Those who have AIDS tonight, you deserve our compassion. Even with AIDS you must not surrender.

In your wheelchairs. I see you sitting here tonight in those wheelchairs. I've stayed with you. I've reached out to you across our Nation. And don't you give up. I know it's tough sometimes. People look down on you. It took you a little more effort to get here tonight. And no one should look down on you, but sometimes mean people do. The only justification we have for looking down on someone is that we're going to stop and pick them up.

But even in your wheelchairs, don't you give up. We cannot forget 50 years ago when our backs were against the wall, Roosevelt was in a wheelchair. I would rather have Roosevelt in a wheelchair than Reagan and Bush on a horse. Don't surrender and don't give up!

Anyone out there remember when we thought of ourselves as a "compassionate" nation.  Once upon a time, we were supposed to be getting a "compassionate conservative".

The last little snippet is my favorite.  Call me maudlin, but I love a good up-from-your-bootstraps inspirational story.  The kind of story that balances the need for personal responsibility with the need for occasional assistance.

And this is the Jesse Jackson that I hope everyone considers when listening to shallow MSM criticism over his hot-mic kerfuffle.  And this is the Jesse Jackson that I wish to offer my profound thanks for leaving such a rich historical legacy:

Why I cannot challenge you this way? "Jesse Jackson, you don't understand my situation. You be on television. You don't understand. I see you with the big people. You don't understand my situation."

I understand. You see me on TV, but you don't know the me that makes me, me. They wonder, "Why does Jesse run?" because they see me running for the White House. They don't see the house I'm running from.

I have a story. I wasn't always on television. Writers were not always outside my door. When I was born late one afternoon, October 8th, in Greenville, South Carolina, no writers asked my mother her name. Nobody chose to write down our address. My mama was not supposed to make it, and I was not supposed to make it. You see, I was born of a teen-age mother, who was born of a teen-age mother.

I understand. I know abandonment, and people being mean to you, and saying you're nothing and nobody and can never be anything.

I understand. Jesse Jackson is my third name. I'm adopted. When I had no name, my grandmother gave me her name. My name was Jesse Burns 'til I was 12. So I wouldn't have a blank space, she gave me a name to hold me over. I understand when nobody knows your name. I understand when you have no name.

I understand. I wasn't born in the hospital. Mama didn't have insurance. I was born in the bed at [the] house. I really do understand. Born in a three-room house, bathroom in the backyard, slop jar by the bed, no hot and cold running water. I understand. Wallpaper used for decoration? No. For a windbreaker. I understand. I'm a working person's person. That's why I understand you whether you're Black or White. I understand work. I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I had a shovel programmed for my hand.

My mother, a working woman. So many of the days she went to work early, with runs in her stockings. She knew better, but she wore runs in her stockings so that my brother and I could have matching socks and not be laughed at at school. I understand.

At 3 o'clock on Thanksgiving Day, we couldn't eat turkey because momma was preparing somebody else's turkey at 3 o'clock. We had to play football to entertain ourselves. And then around 6 o'clock she would get off the Alta Vista bus and we would bring up the leftovers and eat our turkey -- leftovers, the carcass, the cranberries -- around 8 o'clock at night. I really do understand.

Every one of these funny labels they put on you, those of you who are watching this broadcast tonight in the projects, on the corners, I understand. Call you outcast, low down, you can't make it, you're nothing, you're from nobody, subclass, underclass; when you see Jesse Jackson, when my name goes in nomination, your name goes in nomination.

I was born in the slum, but the slum was not born in me. And it wasn't born in you, and you can make it.

Wherever you are tonight, you can make it. Hold your head high; stick your chest out. You can make it. It gets dark sometimes, but the morning comes. Don't you surrender!

Suffering breeds character, character breeds faith. In the end faith will not disappoint.

You must not surrender! You may or may not get there but just know that you're qualified! And you hold on, and hold out! We must never surrender!! America will get better and better.

Keep hope alive. Keep hope alive! Keep hope alive! On tomorrow night and beyond, keep hope alive!  

VOTE. VOLUNTEER. DONATE.

I have been all over on this.  I have been for Hillary, Jim Webb, and Katherine Sebelius; but I am back to Hillary.  My opposition to Hillary has been based on two issues, widely discussed by many.  First, she is not new.  Second, she has this appendage who used to be President and who does not have a lot of self control.  Well, she is a battle axe.  She is up for the fight.  She is ready to bring it to the other side.  She has her own army to bring to the fight.  Neither Webb nor Sebelius nor any other Democrat has any of that.  She also has a boat anchor for a spouse.  So?  If Barack is going to be POTUS, he needs to be tough enough to handle whatever comes his way. Putin/Medvedev.  Ahmadinejad.  Chavez.  Mugabe,  Kim Jong Il, etc.  I think he can handle Bill.  Better to show it up front.  Bill will be there no matter what if Barack wins.  Bite the bulet now, and reap the benefits of a powerful ally.  Obama-Clinton 2008!  Yes We Can! 

Starting a Movement

The TPM community's movement to establish mechanisms for media consumers to challenge media bias, distortion, and lies is going forward.

raider99 is fine tuning the Sudden Citizens' Action Against Media Distortion (SCAAMD) mission statement before sending it to Dan Rather (through a contact).  Here is the mission statement as it now stands:

To develop or encourage the development of tools to facilitate immediate, large-scale citizen action against media distortions, lies and propaganda, and to create a viral campaign to inspire people to speak out.

I think it's a good, succinct statement.  The tricky bit, of course, if how to implement the tools to do this and keep it going.  The best way to do this, I think, is with the help of already established individuals, groups, or organizations that care about keeping the MSM honest and would support a group of people outside of the industry who care as well.

That's why raider99 is going to contact Dan Rather, is establishing contact with Thom Hartmann (though Hartmann's wife currently), and has corresponded with Josh Marshall about working through a TPM site.

CarolBG has written to Media Matters to see if they'd support a landing page for SCAAMD.

Ripper McCord's great post on trying to break through the wall around the AP is both inspiring and a warning about the frustration we will all be facing in much of this crusade.

I've written to Bob Garfield and Brooke Gladstone of NPR's On the Media and, spurred by research by gettex, Columbia Journalism Review.

I may well have omitted other efforts, and if so, I apologize.  I want everyone who is demonstrating commitment to this crusade to be acknowledged and to know that I appreciate their actions.

A Consumer's Crusade

I've referred to SCAAMD's project as a crusade twice, and I've done it pointedly.  A crusade usually comes about because like-minded people recognize the need to change something that has political or social relevance.  The distortions, lies, and propaganda we are all seeing and hearing in the MSM may well be clear to us here at TPM, but they are not to those who rely on the MSM for all of their information about this election in particular and the world in general.

Media Matters' posts just for yesterday included these stories:

<blockquote>In an editorial about the pay gap between male and female workers, The Washington Times falsely asserted that "the relevant factors that affect pay—occupation, experience, seniority, education and hours worked—are ignored by those citing the wage gap." The editorial also asserted that "women tend to place a higher priority on flexibility and personal fulfillment" than on higher pay. In fact, a GAO study found that a pay gap persists even when controlling for work experience, seniority, education, industry, occupation, race, marital status, and job tenure.</blockquote>
<blockquote>Since July 13, the Associated Press has produced four separate articles that have described Sen. John McCain's position on immigration reform without mentioning that McCain's current position that the borders must be secured "first" represents a reversal from his previous position that border security could not be disaggregated from other aspects of comprehensive immigration reform without being rendered ineffective. Nor did the articles mention that McCain said in January that he "would not" vote for the immigration reform bill he co-sponsored if it came to a vote on the Senate floor.</blockquote>
<blockquote>On MSNBC Live, Mika Brzezinski failed to correct Mitt Romney's false assertion that Sen. John McCain "said that [Donald] Rumsfeld needed to go." Although a McCain spokesman reportedly acknowledged that McCain "did not call for his resignation," MSNBC hosts have repeatedly failed to correct guests' assertions that he did so. </blockquote>
<blockquote>NPR's David Welna quoted Sen. Joe Lieberman saying "I don't have any intention" of joining the Republican Party "before the end of this session of Congress," to which Welna added: "Which still leaves unanswered what Lieberman might do in the next session of Congress." But Welna did not note that if Lieberman joined the Republican Party, he would be breaking his promise during the 2006 campaign to caucus with the Democrats if re-elected to the Senate.</blockquote>
<blockquote>In his July 7 Focus on the Family broadcast, James Dobson insisted that he and co-host Tom Minnery were "not throwing stones at Senator Obama for his faith" during an earlier show. However, later in the same broadcast, Minnery questioned if Obama is "even sincere with the way he talks about religion." </blockquote>
<blockquote>The Weekly Standard's Matthew Continetti falsely suggested that Sen. Barack Obama opposed designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization. In fact, Obama said he would have voted against the bill Continetti referenced—the 2007 Kyl-Lieberman amendment—because it "states that our military presence in Iraq should be used to counter Iran," not because it designated the Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization. Indeed, Obama co-sponsored a different bill in 2007 that also would have designated the group a terrorist organization.</blockquote>

Media Matters performs an important service by reporting these instances poor journalism, but they remain merely information unless employed.  It's all a game of insiders when professionals critique professionals about the quality of their work.  The objects of criticism can accept it and make changes or they can easily blow it off.

It's a different story when the consumers of this careless or malicious journalism say they won't accept it any more.  We have more power than we sometimes realize, and we can influence everything from how news is reported to who gets to report it.  We are the ones who can make the examples above and all the examples of lies, distortions, propaganda, and bias count for something by taking action with them.

I'm not sure how all of this will play out, but I'm committed enough to doing something to push the MSM into making immediate corrections to stories and make more effort to get them right in the first place to offer my time, energy, and ideas to the project.

Take a look at raider99's post with the mission statement and tools for action and see if it matters enough to you to join in the effort.

 

First genuine condolences for Tony Snow's wife and children.

As for Tony Snow... he deserves the same sentiment he offered (June 15, 2006) 2500 soldiers who lost their life in Iraq.

Tony Snow... just another number... R.I.P.

For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
June 15, 2006

Q Tony, American deaths in Iraq have reached 2,500. Is there any response or reaction from the President on that?

MR. SNOW: It's a number, and every time there's one of these 500 benchmarks people want something...

Added thought: Bush and Cheney can find time to attend a funeral for one who lied for them but cannot attend a single funeral for a soldier who died for them.

I'm sorry, folks, I am going to part company with many of you here and point out the truth you don't want to hear -- Al Gore is a man who doesn't believe the words that come out of his own mouth!!!

Today's announcement that we can replace existing energy infrastructure with renewables in 10 years should clue everyone in to the world of unreality Mr. Gore presides over.  We don't need to point out the obvious -- that wind power requires many more large transmission lines to be built (which the public will oppose) -- that nuclear plants take 10 years to construct -- after you get all the permits, and solar is still the most expensive way to generate electricity of any of the alternatives!!!!!

First, let's review his track record for a moment.  This is a man that presided over the SUV revolution during the Clinton/Gore admin and didn't seem too bothered by our reduction in national mpg.  Second, he didn't utter the slightest whimper about B Clinton's quiet refusal to do anything abut the Kyoto Protocol in 1997.  Only after he lost an election and started searching for a legacy did he begin to doomsday prophecy about imminent climate catastrophe.   I don't remember a word of warning about seas rising 20 feet in a century.  Am I wrong here?

Having established a basis for doubt about the speaker, I probe further to suggest that no serious scientist would postulate that carbon is the sole thermostat of temperature on this planet.  Let's explore the inverse of the present logic -- does anyone on this board seriously believe that if we were cooling the past 10 years, Al Gore would be running around the planet telling us to burn every tree in sight, drive SUV's, and build as many coal-fired power plants as possible?  This is a logical question that begs to be answered.  After all, if carbon is the thermostat, we would simply have to produce more to warm the planet -- right?

This whole debate would not be so consequential if it weren't for the fact that Congress is considering a carbon offset (ie...tax) that is going to raise your electric bill, home heating bill, and gas prices.  It amounts to trillions of dollars over the next 20 years.  I ask the simple question on behalf of the American taxpayers that are going to be stuck with this debt: how much global cooling are we going to get for $ 2 trillion?  Is it going to be 1 degree -- two degrees?  Can any of these politicians pushing this tax give us a guarantee this is going to work?

What Mr. Gore is proposing is that if we fork over $ 2 trillion to offset excess carbon emissions, he can actually work a miracle and reduce the temperature on this planet!!!  Even W has never said anything that arrogant.   Forgive me if i stray from the herd and declare anyone so arrogant as to believe they can control the weather is in desperate need of a 12 step program.

I've been perplexed by the President and John McCain's incessant strategy of promoting the 'success of the surge.' 

Firstly, because it proves all of those fired generals were right about number of troops necessary for succes in Iraq.  Something conveniently missed in the non-coverage of the absurdity of this claim.  Bush is now taking credit for not doing what 'his generals' had told him, and then doing it too late (okay, I admit, better late than never).

Whether or not one believes the surge is a success, we all agree that the reduction in violence, particularly, American force casualties is welcomed.  The Iraqi government has made strides, no doubt.  However, undoubtably, these gains have no affect on American troops as it pertains to ending the war.

With the resurgence of Al Qaeda and Taliban forces in the Af-Pak area, it is now clear that the misadventure in Iraq has distracted us from our real enemies (who are not Iraqi).  With John McCain's acknowledgment of the re-emerging challenges in Afghanistan, made evident by his position reversal, his parallel argument for the continuation of war in Iraq needs to be re-examined.

However, 'the surge is a success' is as far as the right is willing to take the debate.

In a previous posting questioning the actual 'success of the surge,' Billy Glad (TPM user and poster) made the point that Barack Obama had removed statements from his website that doubted the effectiveness of the surge.

I realized this was his only point of contention and that with all of the talk about the 'success of the surge,' Bush nor McCain have explained what that is supposed to mean. 

What conclusions they would like the American public to reach.

The surge is working, let's stay in Iraq for a hundred years!

If this is the argument, it should be refined and explained is such a way that the people understand the surges' relevance.

My copy of the New Yorker was in my mailbox when I arrived home Tuesday night.  I have been receiving the New Yorker for about 30 years after reading Brendan Gill’s book about it, and deciding that my mother (who has probably been a subscribe since the mid or late 1940s) might have been right about what the magazine presents.  Between Roger Angell, John Updike, Woody Allen, Garrison Keillor, Elizabeth Kolbert (today, Elizabeth Drew in the days of yore), Seymour Hersh and the drawings/cartoons, if you insist, and everything else, I am always glad to see it.

This week, of course, I had to slip it under my shirt so that nobody would see it as I walked from the mailbox into my own home, where I could hide in the bathroom and covertly read its hot contents, or more accurately, gaze upon its provocative cover.

Of course, I immediately saw what everyone was talking about.  I mean, the minute you saw the cover you knew—and if you did not know, you suspected your gullible neighbors at least would know—that it was true: there it was, not just in black and white but in starkest color, clear as a bell: Senator Obama is a Muslim, his wife is a terrorist and they hate America and love Osama bin-Laden.  There is no way, with a cover such as this, that he could be elected president and even if he could survive this exposé, his election was certainly made harder by the New Yorker’s attempt at satire.

Sure, you and I would understand the intention of the cover, but if we think that Mr and Mrs. America out there pays attention to this kind of subtle attempt at humor and won’t just accept the cover at face value, well, we have not been paying attention.  After all, John Kerry was swiftboated out of the race, and this is just the kind of thing the Republicans need to fool them once again.

And I’ll tell you one other thing: if you have to explain it was satire, it wasn’t very good satire.

Diane Curtis and Ellen Leuchs live in a state that provides fair and equal marriage rights to all its citizens, regardless of whether the person they want to marry is of the same sex. But in the 2010 census, the federal government won't recognize Diane and Ellen's very legal and legitimate marriage.

Their children Romy and Jamie will be counted as having single parents. They won't be counted as a family.

The Bureau followed the same procedure for the 2000 census, as a result of specific language in the Defense Of Marriage Act, signed into law by President Clinton in 1996. The law requires all federal agencies to recognize only opposite-sex marriages for the purposes of administering federal programs. The Census Bureau does not plan to change its procedure even though gay and lesbian couples can now marry in California and Massachusetts. Curtis was quoted in the Washington Post:

"It's like we've been Photoshopped out of the picture. How long is the federal government going to pretend we don't exist?"

This is just another example of how we need a new direction in this country. We need progressive leaders who will stand up for fairness and equality for all Americans and will recognize fairness and support it wherever it is. Electing Democrats isn't enough. We need leaders who will go above and beyond to stand up for fairness. 

Chez posts a gem of a story about media machinations in Florida:

Steve Wilson and Jane Akre -- WTVT's husband-and-wife investigative team -- had discovered that, despite promises to the contrary, grocery stores across Florida were selling milk produced through the use of recombinant bovine growth hormone, or rBGH. ... To make a long story short, Wilson and Akre's story never aired because Monsanto found out about it ahead of time and put pressure on Hutt-like Fox News chief Roger Ailes who told Dave Boylan to handle it. After putting them through the ringer -- forcing rewrite after rewrite in an effort to supposedly try to give the story more "balance" -- Boylan killed the thing outright and fired Wilson and Akre for reportedly refusing to include what, by almost all accounts, was false information in the story, but not before telling them (according to the lawsuit they immediately filed against the station), "We paid $3 billion for these television stations. We will decide what the news is. The news is what we tell you it is."

Jason Everett Miller proved that where FISA divides us, poetry can unite us in the first ever TPMCafe haiku thread.  Now, at the risk of starting a trend that will make Time's Swampland label all Democrats a bunch of latte-drinking poetry book sniffers, I offer you...

The John McCain Limerick Thread!

I also declare that slant rhymes and syllable mistakes are okay for this one.  A lot of us are at work and should be, you know, working.

Okay, I'll go first:

There once was a man named McCain,
Dumber than dirt and older than rain,
He’s the first guy Rove routed
Way back in 2000
And he’s running for president again?

Okay, your turn.  And as the Irish say: mazel tov.

This race will be over by September

McCain Confirms He is Receiving Social Security Benefits

IndyMac account holders who lined up as early as midnight the Encino, CA branch vent to reporter after learning they must be on a list to get service. Bank officials claim the list includes people from yesterday's line, but some folk claim that they were waiting yesterday, but didn't get on the list. The weatherman says that he's been locked out of ATMs and online banking. A disgruntled fellow in line expresses some confidence in the FDIC, but wonders what happens if several banks fail.

I'm wondering what I'd do if my bank went belly up.

Legal counsel from the Maryland State police disclosed in a fax the identifying information of a covert agent. The intelligence officer was specifically identified in intelligence reports as a "covert" while monitoring 2005 meetings in Marland planning peaceful citizen protests.  The NYT also reported on similar surveillance, matching the Denver Spy Files.

The fax to the ACLU on page 10 of 46 identifies the pseudonym a covert agent used when attending planning meetings for lawful, peaceful demonstrations. Normally, covert identities are protected.

The monitored meetings discussed legal options to protest the death penalty. The disclosed case files show the named-American-civilians were entered into "terrorism" case files. 38 of 46

The information is now publicly available. The disclosures show covert intelligence agents regularly attend court proceedings, public meetings, and civilian assemblies to monitor civilian activity.

The official fax to the ACLU disclosed the name and gender. Only six (6) people attended the meeting. The police attorney who released the information to the ACLU has allegedly failed to fully safeguard and protect the identity of the covert agent.

Using the disclosed information, it is possible to identify the name of the officer who attended the meetings in a covert capacity. Their true identity is no longer adequately protected, arguably a reckless act, aiding the enemies of the United States.

In a similar situation, members of a group identified the photo of a Fresno County Sheriff Department officer killed in the line of duty. The group was led to believe the officer was a member of the organization. Once the officer's name was matched with the photo in the obituary, the organization realized they had been put under surveillance.

The covert agent logged 9 hours 10 of 46. The name the covert agent used in Maryland is disclosed in the released information:

Lucy Shoup

The identifying information of the official who disclosed the name is linked with the following:

Maryland Department of State Police, Legal Counsel Section. 1201 Reisterstown Road, Pikesville, MD 21208. (410) 653-4223. Fax: (410) 653-4270

One IP number linked with this address is

167.102.241.112

Other voice phone numbers linked with this communication hub include :

(410) 653 - 4227 and (410) 653 - 4228

The disclosure of this information raises reasonable doubts about the entity's ability to adequately safeguard informant information, and other sensitive law enforcement information.

We recommend the Maryland State Attorney General immediately work with an independent investigation team to assess the scope of the information breach to include:

- Reviewing why secondary personnel releasing this information did not adequately guard the identifying information in the report

- Assessing whether other personal information, not previously known to the public, was inappropriately disclosed

- Why personal information including vehicle ID numbers, license plates, and driving records were not adequately protected before disclosure to personnel outside law enforcement

The action of the office tend to undermine confidence that cooperating citizens will have their identies protected. This tends to raise the likelihood that criminal elements, intent to induce civilians to remain silent about national security breaches within the law enforcement community, will have an easier time in achieving their illegal objectives.

DOJ OPR should be advised of the disclosures. There needs to be a prompt investigation into the scope of other sensitive law enforcement information that has been inappropriately disclosed related to private citizen's lawful, peaceful, constitutionally-protected activities. American citizens are putting their lives on the line in Iraq and Afghanistan to defend these freedoms. It is unfortunate their brethren in law enforcement are targeting American citizens for exercising rights brave American soldiers are dying over daily in combat operations around the globe.

The conduct of the officers in this surveillance program, and the reckless release of the information substantially undermines confidence the American leadership, law enforcement, and intelligence arms are effectively integrated to defend the Constitution from domestic enemies or safeguard American's civil liberties. They appear more interested in using excuses to abuse Americans for daring to enjoy and exercise the rights the Founders waged the Revolutionary War. Arguably, some of the activity should be investigated in light of allegations of treason:

"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort"

The public must discuss more effective methods to timely oversee, regulate, and monitor state and federal government activities. The concerns precipitating the original meetings have been realized. Yet, American government officials are using the reasonable, lawful resistance to that abuse as a pre-text to substantially violate rights, abuse power, and target those who are justifiably concerned.

This abuse of power is an unreasonable cycle which local, state, and federal officials are unreasonably fueling with their unreasonable assumptions. They require more effective oversight, training, and guidance.

I stood by him when he defended his racist minister and threw his dear grandmother under the you-know-what. I dismissed his terrorist connections and shady real estate deals. I defended his FISA cave and his faith-based whatevers. I even excused his bowling. But I have just learned that Barack Obama is anti-humor, and as I am a lifelong member of humoritarian wing of the Democratic party, I have no alternative but to offer my vote to someone else this November.

I know that you Obamanauts will say that it's no big deal. You'll drone on about the war and abortion and the environment and blabbelyblabla. But this party was built on humoritarianism. When Whig candidate Benjamin Harrison's supporters yelled out "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too," the Democrats had a witty and memorable rejoinder: "Ripsey Rampsey, Rumpsey Dumpsey, Colonel Johnson Shot Tecumseh." ROFL. We've been the party of funny ever since. The Republicans have Limbaugh, Coulture, and O'Reilly. We have Stewart, Colbert, and Kinky Friedman. Without the funny, we'd be the party of quixotic campaigns, petty bickering, and endless self-examination. With the funny, we're the party of quixotic campaigns, petty bickering, endless self-examination, and the funny.

The sad truth is that the Republicans have been closing the funny gap recently. Funniest primary candidate this year? Squirrel-poppin' Mike Huckabee, Republican. And John McCain is no funny slouch either. "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, Iran."  LOL. That's what I call humoritarian. Even better than "Rumpsey Dumpsey." Or remember this gem: "Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno." I choked on my coffee when I heard that one. Or I would have if I drank coffee. It was more like a dry heave. It is true that G.W. isn't much of a jokester, but he has nonetheless fostered humoritarianism by nobly sacrificing his own gravitas to provide fodder for the stand-ups. Indeed, I suggest that the greatest gains in the history of the humoritarian cause have been made under his administration.

As the Republicans surge, the Democrats cut-and-run. Faced with painfully unfunny nominees like Gore and Kerry (he of the "botched joke"), we take the stealth approach. "Of course," we knowingly assure one another, "I've heard that [insert Democratic politician] is very funny in person." Even Hillary Clinton was rumored to be "funny in person." But Barack Obama? He's anti-funny. Too lofty, too gravitas-y, too--you know--black-y. Yes, I know, he did Letterman's top 10, and he did that stand-up thing during the primary. But really, he shouldn't quit his day job. For crying out loud, the man uses proper grammar. How are we supposed to make jokes about a black man with good grammar?

Last week, the proud New Yorker took a stand. The editors of that citadel of American humoritariansim, whose cartoons have caused liberal elites to chuckle condescendingly for generations, refused to surrender to the anti-funny forces destroying our way of life. And what did the Obamanauts do? They threw the New Yorker under the b-word. LIBERALS THREW THE NEW YORKER UNDER THE B*$&#!!! That's like Hindus throwing the cow under the elephant. I never thought that I would live to see the day. I am ashamed. I am appalled. I am really frigging POed. No, I will never vote for McCain even though he can run in funny circles around Obama. But I cannot in good conscience offer my vote to an anti-humoritarian villain who would deny us our constitutional right to think that things are funny. In protest, I will write in someone with a funny name. Like Barack Hussein Osama.

These are not my words , but those of one Larry Hunter, who's creds as a conservative Republican are lengthy, to say the least. Yesterday he wrote a piece for the Daily News outlining his reasons for why he is voting for Obama.

It's an interesting article some of which, especially on Obama's policies and positions I think he is reading wrong, but so be it.

The money quote  comes in the first three paragraphs.

I'm a lifelong Republican - a supply-side conservative. I worked in the Reagan White House. I was the chief economist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for five years. In 1994, I helped write the Republican Contract with America. I served on Bob Dole's presidential campaign team and was chief economist for Jack Kemp's Empower America.

This November, I'm voting for Barack Obama.

When I first made this decision, many colleagues were shocked. How could I support a candidate with a domestic policy platform that's antithetical to almost everything I believe in?

The answer is simple: Unjustified war and unconstitutional abridgment of individual rights vs. ill-conceived tax and economic policies - this is the difference between venial and mortal sins.

Whether Larry has truly seen the light and left the dark side I couldn't say.  The news here - another nail in the Republican Party coffin just got hammered home.

Cross posted at DKos/MyDD

If a gaffe lands in a forest with a million cameras in its face, will anyone hear it- if you are John McCain- I doubt it.

Gaffe 1: I know how to win wars
Respsonse: Now, would this be the Vietnam war, the Czescholvakian war, or the Iraq  babysitting duties ( not really a war because we don't know who is for against/for us)

Gaffe 2: I respect Chuck hagel, but he is wrong on Iraw but not  nearly as wrong as Obama because he actually went to Iraq  and got the market stroll tour yet, somehow confusingly ended up with the same position as Obama
Response: So you mean to tell me, two people can have the same conclusion without going through the same experiences. Is it possible that you don't have to go to Iraq (Please see Obama) to be right and You can go to Iraq and be wrong(Please see Mccain)

I mean if I can pick this up, surely MSM can to

Hillary Clinton should remove her name from the list of possible VP candidates now.  There is nothing to be gained by leaving her name in contention.

Although adding Mrs. Clinton to the ticket would guarantee Party unity and an overwhelming Democratic victory in November, Mr. Obama certainly can win without her.

He can raise enough money to outspend Mr. McCain on advertising and organization across the country, and he puts enough states in play to win, even without her help in Florida, Ohio and Arkansas. 

But winning the Presidency isn't the only issue, and it may not be the most important one.  It is time to pass the torch to a new generation of Democratic politicians and voters.  It is time for new leadership.  There have been many signs that the time has come for the old guard to get out of the way of the new Democratic coalition Mr. Obama has built.  The Reverend Jesse Jackson incident is only the latest sign.

Mrs. Clinton, like Mr. McCain, could never hope to be more than a reformer.  The revolution she sought to continue has run its course.  It's time to try something new, to redefine the revolution in 21st Century terms, even if the new revolution turns out to be as flawed as the old one was.

It's not so much that the next generation has a better chance to succeed.  It's more that it's their turn to try.

I'm new to TPM, so allow me to introduce myself..I am a white, female, born-again Christian, long-time registered Republican who is enthusiastically supporting Obama...I know I'm not the be all, end all, but I AM a member of a number of the demographic groups that Obama is hoping to make inroads with, and he has w/ me.

I had intended to sit out this election because there is no way I can reward the Republican party for 8 years of screwing this country up one side and down the other, but I couldn't see myself voting for "hillbilly" either...then I heard an Obama speech, did some research, and have been actually excited about this race ever since.

But now I'm watching in horror as you Dems attempt to implode his candidacy and give the election to John McCain.

I am all for free speech and for exercising your right to vote for a 3rd party candidate, but if you disagree w/ Obama and just can't violate your precious principles and vote for him, even though the alternative is to give the GOP another 4 years to mess up the country, can't you just do it quietly instead going out of your way to bash him and elevate the other side's position?

Threatening to withhold financial support unless Obama supports every one of your positions is harmful, not helpful. If I base my vote purely based on his positions, I couldn't vote for him...So I'm sucking it up and voting for him anyway. I don't consider it a vote for the "lesser of 2 evils", but rather a vote for hope that this country really CAN be changed.I am so sick of "Politics-as-usual" that I am willing to set aside my differences with him and vote for a man that I believe will help put the government back in the hands of the people, take away the power and influence of the lobbyists, restore a pride in our country, improve relations w/ other countries, get us out of Iraq and deal w/ the real war on terror, address the energy problems w/ REAL solutions (not gas tax holidays...give me a break!) encourage people to take responsibility for themselves while providing a little back up for them so they can, and on and on and on.

Many times in the real world you have to make compromises, no place more than in politics. With such a broad range of opinions, consensus is hard to reach. Many times you have to reach your goal incrementally, taking the best you can get first (as in FISA) and then work to edge closer and closer to your ideal...You cannot ram things down people's throats, just because it is what you want. You pick the person that most closely meets your needs, help get him elected, then work to help him accomplish your goals. If you DEMAND that he support your position, even though it is controversial, he cannot get elected and your hopes are dashed for another 4 years. People, PLEASE dial back the rhetoric (and try to have an intelligent discussion w/o the swearing!)...let's get him elected, THEN do your lobbying to get as much as you can of what you want...This in-fighting will do NOTHING except help to get John McCain elected...God help us all...

Barack Obama's campaign has announced it raised $52,000,000 during the month of June.

That's a 52 followed by six zeroes, no decimal points and a whole lot of buggy GOPer eyes.  As for me, I'm chair-dancing at my desk in celebration.

I have five additional reasons why we should be thrilled with the month's fundraising.

(1) The average donation size was $86.  This means there were over 600,000 individual donations.

(2) The last primaries were on June 3.  So, that means this money was raised in what should have been a slow month.

(3) This figure really doesn't include the HillRaisers.  Many of them are still holding their checkbooks and Rolodexes, for various reasons (VP decision, primary bitterness, Clinton's campaign debt, etc.).

(4) Of the $52M, $50M was raised for the primary.  This means that there are a LOT of donors who can be tapped again for the general election.

(5) Even if Obama doesn't use that $50M money bomb before August, he can still roll it over to the general election.  Since he opted out of public financing for the general, he's free to use any private money he can raise.

FIFTY-TWO MILLION DOLLARS.  Damn!  That's (more than just pocket) change you can believe in.  Somehow, I think we're going to be all right - as long as we don't get complacent or lose focus on the McCaincient Maverick. 

I am flattered that the McCain campaign has invited me to become an "ace" for a 25 buck donation.


McCain himself was know as "Ace" during his Navy career because he managed to down 5 aircraft in that span.  Of course, they were ours, but hey ...

Five (5) is an important number in the McCain pedigree.  It is how much higher than last his graduating rank was in an Annapolis class of about 900.

There may have been a time when Republican ideology mattered, but that was when Republicans still cared about the integrity of their ideas. Now Republicans use ideas as smoke bombs, to impede and destroy and subvert discourse. They have no rational attachment to the ideas they espouse, they just toss them out to give cover to their true agenda, which is the unbridled pursuit of power and money.
As one small example, let's compare the supposedly defining Republican ideal of small gov't. with Republican policies under Bush. There is simply no correspondence between the idea and the policy. The Baer Stearns/Fanny-Freddie bailouts are not just poorly crafted policies but they run completely counter to the rationale Republicans mouth in sinking other policy initiatives. And the bailouts represent a tiny fraction of gov't. profligacy under Bush. Debating Republican ideology is like plotting a new course for the Titanic as it founders in the North Sea. Democracy doesn't work with only one party interested in a sincere debate about issues, and Republicans have abandoned all interest in sincere debate, in their ideals, in democracy itself. Before any new ideas can bring new life to the Republican enterprise, Republicans need to get a lesson in civics. They need to find the integrity of their principles, and as elitist and effete as it may seem to them, bring their ideas to the table and hammer out policies in good faith with (god forbid) Democrats and liberals. America will continue to suffer while we wait for Republicans to take responsibility for their role in making democracy work. TB

AP Headline: "Democrats Try To Spur More Oil Exploration"

Now, as Paul Harvey would say, is the rest of the story, extracted from the body of the article:

Democrats are:

"Seeking to blunt GOP efforts to permit oil exploration off Atlantic and Pacific coasts ..."

"scrambling to appear pro-drilling — even as their leaders appear dead set against reversing the long-standing drilling bans along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts."

Their proposal is:

"an effort by Democrats to counter a push by congressional Republicans to lift a long-standing drilling ban on most offshore U.S. waters."

So there you have it. Once again the Democrats resort to lying to the American people, trying to trick them into thinking that they care about the rising cost of gas and are going to do something about it. The idea of increasing domestic oil production is a no-brainer for anyone with a brain, but Democrats can't grasp it. They instead try to block all efforts to do so while pretending otherwise, hoping that the American people are foolish enough not to see the truth, that the Democrats are just the lap dogs of the environmentalist extremist lobby who will oppose any effort to keep this country from turning into a third world nation.

Hey...He is doing a great job.  The website fivethirtyeight.com has a small but scary poll on Kansas. I don't know what is happening but I will say that McCain's simple message plays well. Drill and we will get more Oil. I can win wars, looking we are winning in Iraq.  Obama, I love the in depth detail of our future...But I don't think most people listen to 20 minute speaches. McCain's keeping it simple stupid is working.

The Role of Emotion in Voters’ Political Decisions

For the past three decades the Republican Party and the conservative movement have mastered the political game of controlling the narrative—the story and basic ideas of politics and governance—giving them competitive edge in dominating the national political scene. When you think of the GOP you automatically know its “brand.” Republicans seem to intuitively know how to construct and frame issues that go to the gut of the voter. Meanwhile the Democrats, placing policies before emotions, have lost elections and have had themselves framed as losers and weak on national security; in other words, they have led themselves to be branded by their opponents.

It's so easy.  Why did I not think of this before?  Three easy steps to ending the bombings in Iraq:

1.  Ban cars.  No cars, no car bombs.
2.  Ban women.  No women, no female suicide bombers.
3.  Ban men.  No men, no male suicide bombers.

See?

Easy!