May 30 was nationally observed as Decoration Day, also known as Memorial Day, from 1868 through 1970. The date was established by the G.A.R., which was the largest organization of civil war veterans.

http://www.suvcw.org/logan.htm

Headquarters, Grand Army of the Republic

Washington, D.C., May 5, 1868

The 30th day of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land. In this observance no form or ceremony is prescribed, but posts and comrades will in their own way arrange such fitting services and testimonials of respect as circumstances may permit.

We are organized, comrades, as our regulations tell us, for the purpose, among other things, "of preserving and strengthening those kind and fraternal feelings which have bound together the soldiers, sailors, and marines who united to suppress the late rebellion." What can aid more to assure this result than by cherishing tenderly the memory of our heroic dead, who made their breasts a barricade between our country and its foe? Their soldier lives were the reveille of freedom to a race in chains, and their death a tattoo of rebellious tyranny in arms . . .

- - John A. Logan

Reconciliation
Word over all, beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again
      and ever again, this soiled world;
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin - I draw near,
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.
- - Walt Whitman

Pudgenet writes, "People on the left were claiming [Plame] was covert without actually knowing it . . . [a]nd don't even get me started on the still-repeated lie that Bush's '16 words' were in any way based on the forged documents, or affected by Joe Wilson's trip. Both the leftwing AND the rightwing noise machines are full of crap . . ."

1. People like me believe Plame was covert because the CIA asked Justice to investigate her outing. (No, I don't believe the CIA is as partisan as the Bush-Cheney White House.)

2. The African uranium nonsense, whatever its source, was disproven by Joe Wilson's trip to Niger. (No, the truth cannot be lawyered away by adding the words "the British govt.")

3. What left-wing noise machine? (Michael Moore's occasional documentaries? Really?)

The Noise Machine consists of overt Gop partisans including but not limited to Faux News and talk radio ("Wilson's wife was a desk-jockey!") in concert with a corporate media that in lieu of real reporting parrots the shouting of the Gop partisans ("There's a firestorm of controversy raging today over the question of whether Valerie Plame was really covert").

If there is a Left-Wing Noise Machine out there somewhere, someone must've forgotten to plug it in, because it has been awfully quiet -- like, forever.

I suppose Tony Snow means that if VP wasn't on a covert mission the day she was outed, then she "wasn't covert anymore" and Novak has a King's X.

I wonder if Mr. Snow would agree that, come Feb. 1, 2009, George W. Bush won't be president anymore, and should be denied any further protection from the Secret Service at that time.

The relevant truth of Ms. Plame's status falls on one or another side of the (apparently) nano-thin line separating "legally covert for these circumstances" and "not legally covert for these circumstances" - but regardless,

Shouldn't the Executive Branch of our Federal Government err on the side of caution? Or, just to prove their case, should they take out some full page ads in major papers and publish photos and names of every single CIA "desk-jockey" and "non-covert" employee just to settle once and for all that it would be a fine and awesome thing to do?

I don't care whether she was officially/ legally/ technically/ from-any-random-person's-point-of-view "COVERT". I want the Government NOT to be leaking information about ANY American who is possibly engaged in intelligence activity for all of our benefits. And, I thought it was illegal (or at the very least wrong and shameful) for them to be doing that, for whatever reason.

did a little photoshopping on Glenn's image today:

http://www.shakesville.com/2007/05/freddy-got-fingered/#more-1099

:-)

yere forgots to curruck the one *n* in Glen shoe hada too n's.

I wokkud up frums a nap. Ans whuts i see? Pure bad spullers!

There seems to be an endless, ever-flowing stream of this sort of "I'm shocked, SHOCKED" response to the right-wing lie machine. Why?

No attack on you, Glenn, but by this point shouldn't our expressions of shock be reserved for when (if?) these guys tell the truth? As things stand, we're stamping our feet like toddlers, demanding that the MSM, the punditry and the political hacks in the administration start playing by the rules of political discourse. That's like standing next to an angry rattlesnake and vigorously demanding that it stop biting you as it sinks its fangs into your ankle over and over and over again. When will it stop biting you? Well, uh, never, dude; it's a snake.

That citation of Tony Snow's lie about Plame's status, for example; it was reported as if the utterances of the press secretary for the Bush White House were supposed to be a source of accurate information. The question shouldn't be "Why is Tony Snow lying to us?" but "Why are we even listening to what Tony Snow says?" Let's be real here; if we had a press that was even remotely interested in truth and accuracy the White House press briefings would have been discontinued years ago when the press stopped showing up.

I don't know that there's any alternative, but for the last few years it seems that the leftist press has spent nearly all its time trying to prove that the rightist press and the government in power were telling lies. Okay - we've got it. Isn't it time to move on to something else? Isn't it time that we started focusing mainly on the direct dissemination of accurate information? We're spinning our wheels, spending far too much time proving what is true by pointing out what isn't. The liars are guiding the discourse, paralyzing us with our perceived need to point out that the snake is biting us instead of assuming that the snake's nature is to bite and looking for a big, heavy rock to kill it with.

Remember that scene in "Reversal of Fortune" when Dershowitz is appealing Von Bulow's conviction to the Rhode Island Supreme Court? The court won't allow new evidence in an appeal, but Dershowitz must introduce new evidence if his appeal is to be successful, so he attacks the existing evidence in the hope that the prosecutor will feel compelled to answer his attacks. And the prosecutor falls for it; he goes after Dershowitz's points one by one. And he loses the appeal.

That's the sort of reactive behavior we seem to spend a lot of our time engaging in, and it's self-defeating. It gives control of the ball to the other team. What we should be doing is looking for a way to gain possession of the ball ourselves.

In my opinion.