Mandy: Great blog!
Mark: Thanks to all the contributors on this blog. When I want to get information on the events that really matter, I come here.
Penny: I'm glad I found your blog (from a comment on Think Progress), it's comprehensive and very insightful.
Eric: Nice site....I enjoyed it and will be back.
nora kelly: I enjoy your site. Keep it up! I particularly like your insights on Latin America.
Alison: Loquacious as ever with a touch of elegance -- & right on target as usual!
"Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it."
- Noam Chomsky
Jon Stewart's comedy news show The Daily Show is reportedly under fire from pro-Israeli groups for giving airtime to two pro-Palestinian figures on Wednesday night.
Stewart hosted Palestinian democracy activist Mustafa Barghouti and human rights activist Anna Baltzer, author of A Witness in Palestine, who explained the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the perspective of the Palestinian side.
According to a letter reportedly written by Baltzer and circulated by blogger Eric Johnson, the show "was overwhelmed with angry emails and phone calls prior to the appearance, and up until the last minute it seemed like they might cancel."
"During the taping the show had its only heckler in 11 years," Baltzer wrote. "The entire staff were very nervous and may come to regret the monumental decision (and not make it again) as they will surely be inundated now that the show has aired."
how about freedom of discussion...? how about freedom to debate major issues openly...? and how about a comedian tackling one of the most repressed topics in the world...? yay, jon stewart...
Getting a story on the evening news isn’t easy for any correspondent. And for reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is especially hard, according to Lara Logan, the chief foreign correspondent for CBS News. So she has devised a solution when she is talking to the network.
“Generally what I say is, ‘I’m holding the armor-piercing R.P.G.,’ ” she said last week in an appearance on “The Daily Show,” referring to the initials for rocket-propelled grenade. “ ‘It’s aimed at the bureau chief, and if you don’t put my story on the air, I’m going to pull the trigger.’ ”
Ms. Logan let a sly just-kidding smile sneak through as she spoke, but her point was serious. Five years into the war in Iraq and nearly seven years into the war in Afghanistan, getting news of the conflicts onto television is harder than ever.
“If I were to watch the news that you hear here in the United States, I would just blow my brains out because it would drive me nuts,” Ms. Logan said.
According to data compiled by Andrew Tyndall, a television consultant who monitors the three network evening newscasts, coverage of Iraq has been “massively scaled back this year.” Almost halfway into 2008, the three newscasts have shown 181 weekday minutes of Iraq coverage, compared with 1,157 minutes for all of 2007. The “CBS Evening News” has devoted the fewest minutes to Iraq, 51, versus 55 minutes on ABC’s “World News” and 74 minutes on “NBC Nightly News.” (The average evening newscast is 22 minutes long.)
CBS News no longer stations a single full-time correspondent in Iraq, where some 150,000 United States troops are deployed.
Reporters on Bush: "His rhetoric is exhausted" and he's "going through the motions"
seein' as to how bush has never been particularly interested in doing the REAL work of being president, being much happier to talk smack, show off, bully people, and strut, i'm surprised it's taken this long for the press corps to lose interest...
When White House press secretary Dana Perino appeared on “The Daily Show” last week, host Jon Stewart asked how she got the day off: “Did they not need press secretarying today?”
These days, with President Bush largely relegated to the sidelines rather than the headlines, it’s not surprising that Perino can knock off early.
Fewer than half the seats were filled in the White House briefing room that Thursday afternoon, when deputy press secretary Tony Fratto was even asked at one point if an upcoming economic speech by Bush would provide anything newsworthy.
“No,” Fratto replied, “you shouldn't look for new major announcements tomorrow.” Some laughter and grumbling followed among the press corps.
here are the money quotes...
“You can’t attribute it all to the presidential campaign,” said Julie Mason, White House correspondent for the Houston Chronicle. “[Bush’s] rhetoric is so exhausted. He rarely makes any news. It’s rarely worth anyone’s time to cover him like we used to.”
[...]
[Television analyst Andrew Tyndall] said that he felt it wasn’t so much the media disdaining the White House so much as Bush is now “going through the motions.”
my impression is that bush has been giving the same speech since he first took office, and it sounded "exhausted" even then... after it became obvious that a serious number of his brain cells were either dying or committing suicide, i have been incapable of understanding why anyone would pay any attention to him at all...
i've posted this youtube clip before, but it's time to trot it back out... the question now is the same question we've been asking for the past seven-plus years... what is wrong with this man...?
John Stewart signaled the start of the writer's strike on Thursday. His shows are written fresh so none are in the can. HBO: Real Time with Bill Maher is also fresh and Friday's featured an Interview with Blackwater expert Jeremy Scahill:
Blackwater's Total Intelligence Solutions, LLC, very name suggests a private version of what SAIC/Government's attempted with the Total Information Awareness program. SourceWatch calls Blackwater USA, "America's Holy Warriors". And why not, as Friedrich Nietzsche said:
Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose."
That is why "America's Holy Warriors" are so intent upon private military warriors smiting sin. It is another reason that people should become alarmed at Scahill's disclosure that Erik Prince of Blackwater, USA, just received part of a $15 billion contract to fight the war on drugs. And that is just some of what we know about. Blackwater seems eager to smite sin with military force. How long before Blackwater gets into smiting sex porn and nudity, despite our First Amendment, et al?
So when my First Amendment right to what I want to write, see, produce or watch is encroached upon, I am loudly a First Amendment absolutist. And then Bill Mahers' other guests, Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame, were a direct dichotomy to an absolute First Amendment. Valerie Plame agreed that the death penalty was appropriate for those that revealed her CIA employment. The blueprints that are used to destabilize parties, religions, race relations, labor, states and regions can anger opponents. It is better to carve out exceptions to our First Amendment, we are told.
On PBS: Bill Moyers Journal, we learned that FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is pushing for even more media consolidation and plans to ram it through before Christmas.
What is happening in Pakastan CAN happen here. Look around. It is happening already. We need our First Amendment and our writers now more than ever.
the virtually unquestioned article of faith in most of the liberal/progressive blogosphere goes like this...
Bush = bad; Clinton = good it really should be more like this...
Bush = evil; Clinton = bad
the latest tortured response to yet another of the r's whiney, "well, clinton did it TOO," b.s. revolving around clinton's pardon of marc rich and 210 others in his last 9 weeks in office, is a case in point... today's progress report takes on tony snow, arguably a more adept purveyor of lies than scotty mcclellan, who, in a usa today op-ed, tries to justify bush's making a mockery of the entire american justice system... snow 1) minimizes the egregiousness of bush's action by noting the president's plenary constitutional powers (another subliminal plug for the unitary executive), and 2) makes the usual comparison with bill clinton... snow argues that since bush was acting in accordance with his executive powers, and that there was little investigation of clinton's pardons, why should bush be taking heat for commuting libby's sentence... the progress report rebuts by pointing out that "federal prosecutors concluded 'it wasn't appropriate to bring charges' in [Clinton's] case"...
dems, liberals and progressives need to stop defending bill clinton... just because he's a democrat, working overtime to make him look good doesn't add one whit to democratic credibility... it would be a LOT more honest to point out that clinton was acting within the same corrupt system that's still in place, and certainly held up his end by keeping it going for his eight years in office... the LAST myth we need to foster is that everything is going to be different when a democratic president takes office on 20 january 2009...
also, let's keep some of the facts on marc rich out in the open... while rich didn't obstruct an investigation into the outing of a cia agent and, on top of that, lie about it, rich isn't exactly a candidate for sainthood either...
In 1983, Rich and partner Pincus Green were indicted by U.S. Attorney and future mayor of New York City Rudolph Giuliani, on charges of tax evasion and illegal trading with Iran. Both of them fled to Switzerland before a court appearance, and they remained on the FBI's Most Wanted List for many years.
On January 20, 2001, hours before leaving office, President Bill Clinton granted Rich a presidential pardon. Since Rich's former wife and mother of his three children, socialite Denise Rich, had made large donations to the Democratic Party and the Clinton Library during Clinton's time in office, Clinton's critics alleged that Rich's pardon had been bought. Rich had also made substantial donations to Israeli charitable foundations. Clinton explained his decision by noting that similar situations were settled in civil, not criminal court, and cited clemency pleas from Israeli government officials, including Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Federal Prosecutor Mary Jo White was appointed to investigate. She stepped down before the investigation was finished and was replaced by James Comey. Though Comey was critical of Clinton's pardons, he could not find any grounds on which to indict him.
During hearings after Rich's pardon, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who had represented Rich from 1985 until the spring of 2000, denied that Rich had violated the tax laws, but criticized him for trading with Iran at a time when that country was holding U.S. hostages. In his letter to the New York Times, Bill Clinton explained why he pardoned Rich, noting that U.S. tax professors Bernard Wolfman of Harvard Law School and Martin Ginsburg of Georgetown University Law Center concluded that no crime was committed, and that the companies' tax reporting position was reasonable. [New York Times, February 18, 2001][2]. In the same letter Clinton listed Libby as one of three "distinguished Republican lawyers" who supported Rich's pardon.
what we really need to face as a country is that we've got rot sprinkled liberally (pardon the very bad pun) throughout our government... it's become almost impossible to separate out the wheat from the chaff, but it's obvious as hell that there's enough power in congressional leadership to keep the status quo going for a very long time, and that's not even mentioning the horror that is the bush administration and their puppet makeover that is now our supreme court...
thanks to the daily show, here's a photo of the bed all these people sleep in...
Hmmmm... I'm trying to connect "shock and awe" with sex
anybody care to help me out...?
Former Rumsfeld colleague Dr. Harlan Ullman, the US military analyst who devised the concept of "shock and awe," is apparently ready to testify he had sex with a woman from DC Madam Jean Palfrey's "Pamela Martin and Associates."
it seems to me the possibilities here are too rich to even contemplate... if jon stewart passes THIS by, he will forever after be diminished in my eyes...
i don't often laugh out loud, but this got me going...
jon stewart on paul wolfowitz' attorney. robert bennett...
Robert Bennett who represented Bill Clinton in the Lewinsky case, and is the brother of Bill Bennett, former drug czar under George H.W. Bush, father of President George W. Bush, who appointed Wolfowitz to run the World Bank, and this is the giant bed they all sleep in.
"On April 16,2007, you appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and discussed the leak of [former covert CIA Agent Valerie Plame] Wilson's identity," Waxman (D-CA) wrote to Andrew Card, the former White House Chief of Staff. "[White House Counsel Fred] Fielding's position appears to be that it is appropriate for you to discuss these matters on The Daily Show, but not before a congressional committee. You will not be surprised to learn that I take a different view of this matter."
ouch... inescapable logic, imho...
Card served as Bush's chief of staff from the President's inauguration until April 2006. In March, Waxman sought "an on-the-record interview regarding the disclosure of Ms. Wilson's covert identity and the White House procedures for handling classified information," with Card.
But the White House Counsel rejected the request because "former senior White House officials such as the Chief of Staff to the President have historically not been available to Congress to testify, or to be interviewed, about their activities in serving the President," according to the Congressman's letter.
why, oh why, oh why-o, can't we put these criminals occupying the white house out on the street - or, better yet, in jail where they belong...?
McCain has also won support from Alexander Haig and George Shultz, who served as secretaries of state under former president Ronald Reagan, and Lawrence Eagleburger, who was secretary of state under ex-president George H.W. Bush, father of the current president.
he IS in deep, deep trouble... as a presidential candidate, when people start laughing at you, you know you're cooked... however, this also reveals just how the entrenched, war-loving, power structure is wedded to somebody like mccain...
An alternative look at NEWS THAT MATTERS: current events, politics, opinion, perspective, discussion, analysis, issues, debate, and insight - national and global.
