It can be said, Hamsher's got skirt. [My understanding is "skirt" is the acceptable female gender equivalent to "balls".] It's likely Priscilla Painton wasn't prepared to receive Jane's call based on her response. Why Painton wasn't expecting such a call speaks volumes. I wonder who one her staff failed to warn her. Can't believe that no one at Time follows FireDogLake or Unclaimed Territory.

This group of GOP will be proved vain too, and fail. Light always shines in the dark.

Klein's current huffing and chuffing is entirely about the fact that his vanity has been revealed so ably by Glenn. His vanity, not to mention his corporate masters, won't allow him to admit his error, so he piffles around trying to make the situation something it isn't in order to squirm free from the rock on one side and the hard place on t'other.

Did you ever see such a preposterous site as two grinning hippos making love at a zoo? Pedinska, forgive me?

Never been quite fortunate enough to witness amorous hippos, though I did once see a pair of Galapagos tortoises gettin' it on at the National Zoo. Apart from an occasional very loud groan (the sound travels a truly remarkable distance when a tortoise is excited) it was a pretty boring scene. ;->

Ondelette - nice synopsis of al Neocon. We won't have much success getting them on the State Department list, but I bet they're on a lot of similar lists that exist in other countries around the world.

Once you've decided that universal surveillance is the cure for this or that threat, it becomes awfully difficult to allow any exceptions.

WT - the shooters in this country have absolutely no problem making 'exceptions' to the Consitution in order to allow universal surveillance. The reading comprehension they apply to the 2nd amendment is extended in order to totally pervert the 4th. Makes you wonder why they have such a big problem with licensing of guns.

C'mon, people-- give poor Joe a break. He's just another paid flunky in the media empire founded by Henry Luce (Time, Life and Fortune magazines).

As for the proud tradition at Time that Joe is upholding, consider the following:

As tragic events unfolded in Europe, Luce ran his thriving magazine empire with an odious tilt. "In 1934 he devoted an entire issue of Fortune to glorifying Mussolini and Fascism," wrote independent journalist George Seldes. And in Time, Luce "permitted an outright pro-fascist, Laird Goldsborough, to slant and pervert the news every week." -Normon Solomon, http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/3802/

And when the "New American Century" was still just a fanatical gleam in the Neocons' eyes, Luce penned an editorial in the Feb. 7, 1941 issue of Life magazine, described here in a 1/04/03 article by Marty Jezer:

In 1941, Henry Luce, the founding editor of Time Magazine, predicted the coming of the American Century. The time has come, he said, "to accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation of the world and in consequence to assert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such means as we see fit."-http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0104-09.htm

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The seat can endure no more than the head can absorb. I'm out to see if the chuck wagon in town has some fresh tangerines oranges for a picker upper, truck deodorizer, and breath freshener.

Let's support Florida's citrus farmer wagon cart economy. I feel like saying..."nugatory"...Oh,

thank nature for the impulse buying.

no buy.

online.

no lie.

No need for remorse, cavalier attitudes beget hippo jokes.

Seriously though, Thomas Ricks does a long study in Fiasco about how when things start going wrong, everyone believes that more intelligence is the answer. Check these out, though.

http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/423/kurtz.html

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/29/big_win_for_poindexter/

The bad guy is whoever you want them to be.

I do think jayackyroyd nailed it at FDL (h/t AnnieW):

What dooms Joe to continue making this kind of mistake is he starts from the premise that everything is partisan; he’s bought into the republican meme that there are no facts, only politics.

What's true of Joe is true of all horserace punditry. The only question now is the chicken and the egg: Did the pundits buy into the Republican meme that there are no facts, only politics, or did the Republicans extract a successful strategic meme by realizing that the pundits believed there are no facts, only politics, and playing to the pundits as a means of effecting social control? For the pundits, it's cheaper to do this than to investigate and report, which lends credence to the latter explanation.

This entire brou-ha-ha is about one portion of the original article which describes how Democrats shoot themselves in the foot with political correctness... -- shooter242

Your excerpt is not the quote that started "this entire brou-ha-ha". On November 21st, Glenn block-quoted a more salient excerpt from Klein's article in which Klein stated that the FISA legislation was...

a Democratic bill that [...] would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target's calls to be approved by the FISA court, an institution founded to protect the rights of U.S. citizens only.

It was these bold-faced falsehoods that "started the whole brou-ha-ha".

"That is the ultimate stated end goal that this is to move to"

Thanks, Jim.

OT yes; but priceless. I think he and the chimp-in-chief must have the same ESL tutors.

However, I’m not sure the enigmatic Colonel should be “our favorite butcher of the English language”

It’s so hard to choose between Boylanisms and Bushisms. You also need to keep in mind that the chimp-in-chief has not denied authenticity of any of his memorable musings.

You mean like the previous administration?

There is too good a likelihood that the present administration has used the cover of national security to spy on and hamstring its political opponents.-- Holly McLachlan

Do you have any evidence, or are you just indulging in wishful thinking that your President is like Putin or Chavez?

There certainly was plenty of evidence around the FBI files and absolutely no repercussions for the Clintons. Assuming there was some sort of evidence shouldn't Bush get the same treatment as the Clintons? Or for that matter feted at the UN like all the other totalitarians?

-- shooter242

Shooter - For once I agree with you. I think Bush should get exactly the same treatment as the Clintons. Please start pushing for the appointment of a special prosecutor today. You can even pick the area in which one should be appointed to investigate, as long as he/she is allowed to expand the scope of the investigation (mission creep) to the same extent that Ken Starr was able. I'll provide you with the beginning of a list of possibilities:

• Intelligence manipulation in the Iraq War lead up
• No bid contracts in the occupation - War Profiteering
• Accounting boondoggles in the CPA
• Use of imported slave labor in the construction of the American Embassy in Iraq
• American business relationships with Saudi families who have supported al Qaeda (Carlyle Group)
• Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force and their secret plan for Iraqi oil(hint: it is not a plan that has anything to do with cheap gas prices)
• Purging of voter rolls/noncounting of votes in FL, OH, AZ, NM, CO, etc during the 2000 and 2008 presidential elections being approximately 10 times more likely if you are a poor person of color than if you are an affluent white person

• and, of course, to return from my little OT excursion there:

• the ongoing invasion of the private communications of Americans by an Administration with nothing but contempt for the Constitution it swore to uphold.

Please feel free to expand the list to include as many other areas of ineptitude and mendacity on the part of this administration as you see fit.