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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Your mythical "Anne" on whom you're pinning all your hopes doesn't exist. She makes an error in her "letter" that no native Alaskan would: She says "snowmobile." In fact, in Alaska everyone calls them "snowmachines."
That makes it doubtful that "Anne" is who she says she is.
Obama deserves respect. Had I been given the opportunity to sit face to face with O'Reilly, I would have thrown away everything just to punch him in the face. The guy's got my vote.
@Retired Military Patriot (September 5, 2008 07:16 AM:
Obama, after all, had stared down Papa Bear. And in the No-Spin Zone, that's the greatest leadership credential of all.
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1838954,00.html?xid=newsletter-daily
Yes, and then he probably went back to his hotel room, stuck his finger down his throat, flushed the toilet, and took a long, hot shower.
I know I woulda.
Joe Klein, Time, 8-5-08
It was odd seeing John McCain without snark. I suspect his honorable, at times moving, and in some ways remarkable acceptance speech will be judged favorably by the public. It was a reminder of what he had once been as a politician ... and yet it did feel flat after the full-throttle bilge and vitriol of Sarah Palin and Rudy Giuliani the night before. It also seemed more a valedictory than an acceptance speech — more the end of a career than the beginning of a presidency.
This is yet another McCain gamble: he figures that the only way the country will elect a Republican after eight years of scandal and stupidity is to promise a completely different Republican party. His essential message was right: Washington does have to catch up to the global economy, shake loose the bonds of the special interests and industrial-age bureaucracies. But there was little in this speech that indicated that he had any idea how to do that besides relying on his fierce sense of righteousness. And the Republican Party is what it is: an overwhelmingly Caucasian group of people — 93% of the delegates were white — who cheer more vociferously for tax cuts than they do for country.
The vast middle of the speech — the part after his bracing introduction ("I don't work for a party ... I work for you") and before he told his prison camp stories — was a half-hearted and unadventurous slog through the world of policy, a vivid demonstration of how little McCain cares about this stuff. It was notable only for the steady stream of misrepresentations of Barack Obama's positions
In the end, the strongest aspect of the speech may have been the awkwardness of the delivery. What we saw tonight was the real John McCain. But his offering was thin for a country in a heap of trouble. Given the admitted failure of his party, he didn't present anything more than his own integrity as an action plan. And given the anger and vitriol of his campaign — given the scurrilous, sarcastic speeches he allowed to be delivered on Wednesday night; given the embarrassing antics and media conspiracies spouted by his staff — McCain's reputation for integrity has been badly damaged.
McCain's presence in our public life has been, on balance, a valuable thing. His speech tonight gave intimations of why that has been so, but it lacked the drive and creativity of a true presidential acceptance. He is the standard-bearer of a failed ideology — ironically, a belief in 'me first' before country — and tonight the leap between what McCain really cares about, and what his party really believes, proved too great a chasm for an old warrior to bridge.
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1838965,00.html?xid=newsletter-daily
You are an idiot and you've never been to Alaska.
You have just become the Repug all time champion of Grasping at Straws.
Go away. Go fall asleep in a snow drift.
Yes he is and he's going to stay that way.
Your petition is a joke. Take it out on the streets of St. Paul and see how many residents sign it, because they are the only ones who count. I wouldn't want you and your asshat friends ruining my town. The people of St. Paul feel the same way. Just because they come from St. Paul doesn't make them Pauliacs. Deal with it.
http://www.anchoragesnowmobileclub.com/index.htm
Following 9/11, President Bush and seven top officials of his administration waged a carefully orchestrated campaign of misinformation about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
By Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith (linked at sig)
January 23, 2008, http://projects.publicintegrity.org/WarCard/
President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.
Let's try and get reporters to get quotes from both presidential candidates and both vice presidential candidates on that... not too likely that the reporters are going to ask those questions, though...
Why not? Well, one possible response for the candidates is to say, "Well, I read in every single newspaper that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, that he was restarting his nuclear program, that he had stockpiles of nerve gas and anthrax powders and was going to use "unmanned drones" to launch assaults on the U.S. - because he was an out-of-control madman with his finger on the trigger?"
"So, why didn't you in the press do your job and find out whether these allegations were true or not? Why did you print whatever these "anonymous U.S. officials" told you to print without even bothering to get a second opinion?"
That is what the press printed, by and large, and the media executives also they made it clear what angle they wanted to see pursued: this was all about "defense against terrorism". Anyone who got out of line was fired, or found themselves in limbo, unable to get their work out to the public.
Lara Logan, for example - had to get public support to get her live footage of combat in Iraq on CBS, and then she went on the Jon Stewart show and said she'd shoot herself in the head if she had to watch U.S. media coverage of the war in Iraq.
Huffington Post didn't like that, and neither did Fox News, and so all of a sudden Lara Logan's out-of-wedlock pregnancy was huge news, and was picked up by the so-called celebrity press, in a not-too-subtle attempt to embarrass her and even possibly destroy her news career.
The contrast between the "liberal" media's treatment of Lara Logan (entertainment gossip) and that of Sarah Palin's 17-year old daughter is pretty striking. Poor parenting just hasn't come into the question - for example, did the kids in question really know much about birth control or the basics of the birds and the bees? That's the kind of treatment celebrity pregnancies get, and if the press wants to tar someone, they can do it very easily - that's what the tabloids are for (Huff Post is just another tabloid, and no, there is no coverage of wars in Iraq or Afghanistan at the Fluff Post).
So, that's probably why the U.S. press is not going to be asking the candidates their views on the faked evidence that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq, "which we should have done regardless", right?
The people who own the U.S. press, by and large, are pro-Republican war pigs who have made billions off the Iraq War and they don't want to see any public discussion of how the whole thing was set up.
Someone should ask those questions, though - but who would carry the story?
The real story, actually, is of how Cheney worked with James Woolsey and Chalabi's INC to circumvent the CIA, which was not producing reports that supported the Cheney-Rumsfeld neocon agenda of aggressive warfare.
They did that by going to the British, who produced an intelligence report that was then used by the Cheney-Rumsfeld team as the basis of allegations about nuclear and biological weapons in Iraq. Rumsfeld also controlled the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and was actively using it to circumvent the CIA, which was not producing the needed "evidence."
Another major part of their PR campaign was the promotion of Kenneth M. Pollack's "The Threatening Storm: The Case For Invading Iraq". According to Pollack, ex-CIA, ex-NSC, and now a Brookings Institute tankhead at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, Iraq had ballisitic missiles, nuclear weapons, biological and chemical weapons, drones, and an unstable madman at the helm. The book was rushed through by Random House, and then was used as the basis of multiple policy meetings that all promoted an immediate Iraq invasion.
Not suitable for public consumption, is it?
Yours, Ike Solem
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
