Jan 31
Two videos from a Glasgow (thanks Justine) High Green band that’s seems to be melting the polar caps. Look for Stephen Graham of Snatch fame as the Bastard.
Jan 31
It’s sad when TDS is the closest thing we have to reporting the obvious. Now, if we could only get Bush to write a book and go on Oprah.
Crooks and Liars TDS: Oprah vs News
TDS: Oprah vs News
Jan 31
“Some might be wondering when one of these bastions of the supposed “liberal media” is going to give a show to – stay with me now – an actual liberal?
Just look at the long list of conservative hosts Beck will be joining on the cable dial. On Fox weekdays, you’ve got Bill O’Reilly, John Gibson, Brit Hume and Neil Cavuto, not to mention shows like “Fox & Friends” dominated by conservatives (and don’t get me started on “Hannity & Colmes”).
The weekends feature shows hosted by ex-GOP Rep. John Kasich, Iran-Contra criminal Oliver North, the far-right editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, and the conservative tag team of Fred Barnes and Morton Kondracke.
Things are not quite so bad elsewhere, but progressives have little to be happy about. MSNBC features conservatives Tucker Carlson and Joe Scarborough, not to mention Chris Matthews, whose starry-eyed worship of George W. Bush grows more embarrassing by the week. But MSNBC is home to the one – count ‘em, one – cable show hosted by a progressive, “Countdown with Keith Olberman.”
Olberman’s show is the highest rated on MSNBC, although that might not do him much good – Phil Donahue had the network’s highest rated show before he was canned in February 2003, right before the start of the Iraq war. Told by consultants that Donahue’s show could become “a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity,” MSNBC showed him the door.
That same week, they hired right-wing hate radio screamer Michael Savage, whom they quickly got rid of after he told a caller to “Get AIDS and die.”"
Philadelphia Daily News | 01/30/2006 | JUST ANOTHER CABLE CONSERVATIVE
Jan 31
Who needs all those pesky results anyway?
Jan 31
The Tin Drum meets Peter Pan in this blissfully beautiful video. Cheers to the location scout.
Jan 30
“SCARBOROUGH: My people say the Democrats left the doors open, Chris. Wide open.
MATTHEWS: Yes, there’s a lot of speculation about it being a setup. There is. The shame is that good guys, guys like Gordon Liddy, have been smeared with this. I know Gordie, and he’s a hell of a guy, lucid and well spoken.
SCARBOROUGH: I know, he really is. Might’ve had a great career on radio or TV, but the Democrats effectively snuffed that chance out for him.
MATTHEWS: It’s a shame, and still the Democrats are playing the victim in all of this, and really have a hornet’s nest rattled up. Special Prosecutor Archie Cox was demanding access to those tapes as part of the Senate Watergate investigation. Evne though Cox had been hand-picked by the President, it’s pretty clear he’s way too partisan a player in this, actively working for the Democrats.
SCARBOROUGH: So right, Chris. Archie Cox was supposed to be a neutral player, but wow, has he gone after the President like a rabid pit bull. Not at all what the country needs right now.”
Jan 30
“…a compelling and obsessive humanization of American eccentricity.”
-Slant Magazine
Jan 30
Finally a comprehensive fact filled rebuttal to the propaganda Bush is peddling to cover his ass on domestic spying. A MUST READ.
Jan 30
“”How does one report the facts,” asked Rob Corddry on “The Daily Show,” “when the facts themselves are biased?” He explained to Jon Stewart, who played straight man, that “facts in Iraq have an anti-Bush agenda,” and therefore can’t be reported.
Mr. Corddry’s parody of journalists who believe they must be “balanced” even when the truth isn’t balanced continues, alas, to ring true. The most recent example is the peculiar determination of some news organizations to cast the scandal surrounding Jack Abramoff as “bipartisan.”
Let’s review who Mr. Abramoff is and what he did.
Here’s how a 2004 Washington Post article described Mr. Abramoff’s background: “Abramoff’s conservative-movement credentials date back more than two decades to his days as a national leader of the College Republicans.” In the 1990′s, reports the article, he found his “niche” as a lobbyist “with entree to the conservatives who were taking control of Congress. He enjoys a close bond with [Tom] DeLay.”
Mr. Abramoff hit the jackpot after Republicans took control of the White House as well as Congress. He persuaded several Indian tribes with gambling interests that they needed to pay vast sums for his services and those of Michael Scanlon, a former DeLay aide. From the same Washington Post article: “Under Abramoff’s guidance, the four tribes … have also become major political donors. They have loosened their traditional ties to the Democratic Party, giving Republicans two-thirds of the $2.9 million they have donated to federal candidates since 2001, records show.”
So Mr. Abramoff is a movement conservative whose lobbying career was based on his connections with other movement conservatives. His big coup was persuading gullible Indian tribes to hire him as an adviser; his advice was to give less money to Democrats and more to Republicans. There’s nothing bipartisan about this tale, which is all about the use and abuse of Republican
Yet over the past few weeks a number of journalists, ranging from The Washington Post’s ombudsman to the “Today” show’s Katie Couric, have declared that Mr. Abramoff gave money to both parties. In each case the journalists or their news organization, when challenged, grudgingly conceded that Mr. Abramoff himself hasn’t given a penny to Democrats. But in each case they claimed that this is only a technical point, because Mr. Abramoff’s clients — those Indian tribes — gave money to Democrats as well as Republicans, money the news organizations say he “directed” to Democrats.
But the tribes were already giving money to Democrats before Mr. Abramoff entered the picture; he persuaded them to reduce those Democratic donations, while giving much more money to Republicans. A study commissioned by The American Prospect shows that the tribes’ donations to Democrats fell by 9 percent after they hired Mr. Abramoff, while their contributions to Republicans more than doubled. So in any normal sense of the word “directed,” Mr. Abramoff directed funds away from Democrats, not toward them.
True, some Democrats who received tribal donations before Mr. Abramoff’s entrance continued to receive donations after his arrival. How, exactly, does this implicate them in Mr. Abramoff’s machinations? Bear in mind that no Democrat has been indicted or is rumored to be facing indictment in the Abramoff scandal, nor has any Democrat been credibly accused of doing Mr. Abramoff questionable favors.
There have been both bipartisan and purely Democratic scandals in the past. Based on everything we know so far, however, the Abramoff affair is a purely Republican scandal.
Why does the insistence of some journalists on calling this one-party scandal bipartisan matter? For one thing, the public is led to believe that the Abramoff affair is just Washington business as usual, which it isn’t. The scale of the scandals now coming to light, of which the Abramoff affair is just a part, dwarfs anything in living memory.
More important, this kind of misreporting makes the public feel helpless. Voters who are told, falsely, that both parties were drawn into Mr. Abramoff’s web are likely to become passive and shrug their shoulders instead of demanding reform.
So the reluctance of some journalists to report facts that, in this case, happen to have an anti-Republican agenda is a serious matter. It’s not a stretch to say that these journalists are acting as enablers for the rampant corruption that has emerged in Washington over the last decade.
Jan 27
Jan 26
Is this the stammering of someone telling the truth?
Bush bobs and weaves on Abramoff photos
Now consider this bit of investigative journalism by Joshua Micah Marshall:
“But early this afternoon, I decided to take one more go at Reflections. I talked to company president Joanne Amos. We went back and forth over various questions about whether photographs at the site were available to the public and why some had been removed. When she, at length, asked me who it was in the picture with the president. I told her we believed it was Jack Abramoff.
Amos very straightforwardly told me that the photographs had been removed and that they had been removed because they showed Abramoff and the president in the same picture. The photos were, she told me, “not relevant.” ”
Jan 26
“Why is the White House so desperate to downplay any contact between the president and Jack Abramoff — even though the photos of Bush making nice with Abramoff are bound to surface sooner or later? And why is the White house refusing requests to release information about Abramoff’s White House meetings — what today’s Washington Post described as “a legitimate inquiry about what an admitted felon might have been seeking at the highest levels of government”?”
The Blog | Arianna Huffington: CSI: K Street | The Huffington Post
Jan 26
WOW! If this doesn’t make a colander out of the ship of lies Bush and Gonzales have been sailing:
“The Bush Administration opposed legislation that would have given them the very power they now claim they needed, power they now claim they didn’t have under FISA. It’s because they didn’t have this power, they now claim, that they had to break the law and spy without a warrant. But this law would have given them much of the legal power they wanted. Yet they said they didn’t need it, and worse yet, that the proposed legislation was likely unconstitutional. But now we know they did it anyway…
… So Bush chose to break the law when he had an alternative. And what’s worse, this suggests that Bush feared the Supreme Court would never let him spy on Americans the degree to which he wanted, the court would find it unconstitutional, so that’s why Bush never sought the change in the law proposed in 2002 – Bush thought it would have been struck down by the Supreme Court. So Bush chose to break the law in order to circumvent the Supreme Court enforcing the US Constitution.”
AMERICAblog:Bush administration OPPOSED legislation to make it easier to wiretap under FISA
Jan 26
When we first heard about The Complete New Yorker (every single issue of The New Yorker digitized page for page), we quickly put it on our Presidents Day gift list. But, after reading this we’ll be waiting eagerly for the second edition.
Jan 25
Behind the pre planned making of staged set up propaganda set ups.
