Monday, August 16, 2004

TUBE TIME Lie of the night  Chris Matthews surprised me again last night on "Hardball" when he pounded Sr. Political Strategist Mathew Dowd for the Bush-Cheney campaign over a doctored clip that is appearing on the GOP website. The clip tries to show John Kerry saying that he is an anti-war president which the President is using in his speeches. Full Video on Hardball interview. Matthews was incensed that the GOP took the clip from his own interview with Senator Kerry 220 days ago and in it's full context Senator Kerry said the opposite. Dowd could only ignore the facts that were in front of him and tried to justify the lie. Matthews told him that they should take the clip of the GOP website and tell the President the truth. Way to go Chris. You get four stars **** for exposing a lie. 10:06:24 PM    comment []

I  was watching Crossfire today on my Tivo, because I'm a James Carville fan. I tried to see, but my eyes were blinded by the clothes Tucker Carlson was wearing. A yellow bow tie on a pink shirt! He either was on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy or needs to be. Now that would be an episode I wouldn't want to miss! 9:47:47 PM    comment []

Bush gives us a prelude to what we might expect at the Kerry /Bush debates: Sound Clip O' Fun! Yes, that is the audience laughing at Bush because...you decide: Bush On What Soveriengty Means 6:46:56 PM    comment []

You can't fool our President: Listen   6:30:53 PM    comment []

No Way Out By Fred Kaplan Is there any hope of avoiding catastrophe in Iraq? This is a terribly grim thing to say, but there might be no solution to the problem of Iraq. There might be nothing we can do to build a path to a stable, secure, let alone democratic regime. And there's no way we can just pull out without plunging the country, the region, and possibly beyond into still deeper disaster. Read on 6:17:01 PM    comment []

This is brilliant article appearing in the Atlantic Online Edited excerpt: Inside Al-Qaeda’s Hard Drive Budget squabbles, baby pictures, office rivalries—and the path to 9/11 by Alan Cullison My acquisition of the al-Qaeda computers was unique in the experience of journalists covering radical Islam. On the night before Kabul fell, Taliban officials were fleeing the city in trucks teetering with their personal effects. The looter who sold me the computers figured that al-Qaeda had fled as well, so he crawled over a brick wall surrounding the house that served as the group's office.  On the door of the room, he said, was the name of Muhammad Atef—al-Qaeda's military commander and a key planner of 9/11. Each day, he said, Atef would walk into the office carrying the laptop in its black case. The looter knew he had something good. Full Story What emerged was an astonishing inside look at the day-to-day world of al-Qaeda, as managed by its top strategic planners—among them bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, Atef, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, all of whom were intimately involved in the planning of 9/11, and some of whom (bin Laden and al-Zawahiri) are still at large. Perhaps one of the most important insights to emerge from the computer is that 9/11 sprang not so much from al-Qaeda's strengths as from its weaknesses. The computer did not reveal any links to Iraq or any other deep-pocketed government; amid the group's penury the members fell to bitter infighting. The blow against the United States was meant to put an end to the internal rivalries, which are manifest in vitriolic memos between Kabul and cells abroad. Al-Qaeda's leaders worried about a military response from the United States, but in such a response they spied opportunity: they had fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and they fondly remembered that war as a galvanizing experience, an event that roused the indifferent of the Arab world to fight and win against a technologically superior Western infidel. The jihadis expected the United States, like the Soviet Union, to be a clumsy opponent. Afghanistan would again become a slowly filling graveyard for the imperial ambitions of a superpower. 4:57:02 3:06:02 PM    comment []

USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll results See latest results 2:39:26 PM    comment []

Listen to the new song by "The Politnics" It premiered on the Randi Rhodes show last month! "I can't stop singing it," Randi said, on her radio talk show which is heard on  Air America. Kick Out the Republicans. 11:45:53 AM    comment []

Neocons and the Iraq War   President Bush, responding in Columbus, Ohio, to questions Kerry has raised about his motivation in going to war against Iraq. Bush said his decision to strike there was a profoundly difficult and personal one. "Committing troops into harm's way is the most difficult decision a president can make," Bush told an audience of nearly 1,000. "That decision must always be last resort. That decision must be done when our vital interests are at stake, but after we've tried everything else. There must be a compelling national need to put our troops into harm's way. I felt that." That "compelling national need" to go to war is a neoconservative view on foreign policy. A Washington-based organization known as the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), funded by three foundations closely tied to Persian Gulf oil and weapons and defense industries, drafted the war plan for U.S. global domination through military power.  PNAC FULL DOCUMENT   In a report just before the 2000 election The PNAC spells out their plan. On page 51: The process of transformation, the plan said, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor. The PNAC is part of the New Citizenship Project, whose chairman is also William Kristol, and is described as a non-profit, educational organization whose goal is to promote American global leadership. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Jeb Bush, and Paul Wolfowitz signed a Statement of Principles of the PNAC on June 3, 1997, along with many of the other current members of Bush's war cabinet. Wolfowitz was one of the directors of PNAC until he joined the Bush administration. 9:26:50 AM    comment []

Ex-Navy chief: Kerry earned Nam medals WASHINGTON - The Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said yesterday that John Kerry "deserved" his combat medals for heroism in Vietnam, which some vets have disputed. Sen. John Warner, an ex-Navy secretary under President Richard Nixon, particularly defended the process by which Kerry won his highest honor, the Silver Star. "I'd stand by the process that awarded that medal, and I think we best acknowledge that his heroism did gain that recognition," Warner (R-Va.) told CNN's "Late Edition." "We did extraordinary, careful checking on that type of medal [the Silver Star], a very high one, when it goes through the secretary," Warner said. Full Article 6:07:34 AM    comment []

Putting a spin on the news Objective reporting is getting harder to come by as media outlets increasingly lean to the left or right The ascendancy of "news" with an attitude - a spin, a bias - is undeniable. Whether it's Moore's determined effort to make Bush look dishonest and stupid; Brit Hume, Fox News Channel's chief Washington correspondent, looking as if he swigged sour milk when he mentions Democratic nominee John Kerry....read the rest of the article from NEWSDAY Where those seeking their point of view go: Conservatives   Liberals Local TV news . . . . . . . . . .  66%     54% Daily newspaper . . . . . .       61%     56% Network evening news 3      4%      36% Fox News Channel . . . . . . . 1%       2 9% CNN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . 24%     30% Morning news shows . . . . . 26%     28% Network news magazines . .23%     24% National Public Radio. . . .  13%     33% News pages of ISPs . . . . . . 12%      22% Weekly news magazines . ..12%       16% Network TV Web sites . . . .10%      16% Religious radio shows. . . . ..20%      7% "The O'Reilly Factor". . . . . . 21%      2% "Rush Limbaugh" . . . . . . . .. .20%      5% "The Daily Show". . . . . . . . . . 2%     14% Compiled from staff and wire reports. SOURCE: Study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, June 2004 5:52:09 AM    comment []

Keeping an eye out on the Plame Game: In the Matt Cooper Case, Chilling Implications By Howard Kurtz Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, August 16, 2004; Page C01 Should Matt Cooper go to jail? No one who knows the amiable Time correspondent, who doubles as an amateur stand-up comedian, would think so. Yet he faces imprisonment -- not for lying, cheating or committing journalistic fraud, but for refusing to testify about confidential sources. Cooper didn't "out" Valerie Plame as a CIA operative -- that was columnist Robert Novak, who refuses to say whether he has been subpoenaed by a special prosecutor investigating which senior Bush administration officials leaked the information. Cooper wrote a follow-up piece questioning whether the administration had "declared war" on Plame's husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson. But a federal judge has held Cooper in contempt of court, and he faces an unspecified period behind bars if Time's appeal fails. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4038-2004Aug15.html 5:40:46 AM    comment []

Who Are The Real Neocons? from Steve Clemons @the Washington Note Excerpt: And to be clear about my views of Rumsfeld, I think that the Abu Ghraib disaster so completely undermined America's ability to wage a hearts and minds campaign that Bush's failure to demonstrate the importance of accountability and fire Rumsfeld, as well as Rumsfeld's reluctance to accept responsibility by resigning, multiplied this disaster by an order of magnitude. But Rumsfeld is not a neocon. Neither is Condi Rice -- who I think is taking loyalty to her president and this administration to perverse levels that I would have hoped her character and intellect would not have allowed. The trigger for my thinking today is a superb review of an interesting book in the Washington Post's Book World by Stanley Kutler titled "On How Neocons Grabbed the Opportunity to Create a New World Order." Kutler is reviewing America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and The Global Order by Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke. I recommend reading the review for its own merits, as well as the book.  more.... 5:34:19 AM    comment []

Shirtsleeves Style Is a Strong Suit for Bush By John F. Harris SIOUX CITY, Iowa -- President Bush has formidable obstacles to reelection, but he served a reminder last week that he is a politician with formidable strengths. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3650-2004Aug15.html 5:08:02 AM    comment []