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Was clear enough Marko and I agree with most of what you said. Just don't completely agree with your taker on Moore... Even there I actually agree on some. BfC interesting, books less, last one complete shit.

The question I have is why do Alec Baldwin, Madonna, Sean Penn and other Hollywood types make front page news with their anti-everything America rhetoric, but this doesn't even make page 3 in the Metro section of any newspaper except the base newspaper in San Antonio.

Surely you jest. You expect front page news for doing something positive for ANYTHING US military related?

He is more than likely blacklisted by Hollywood & the media, for such a terrible deed...



Remember the formula is: US + US military = evil.

If the (very extensive and histerical) Gitmo reports, Koran abuse and Abu Graib reports dont give you a clue, nothing else will

surnami wrote:He is more than likely blacklisted by Hollywood & the media, for such a terrible deed...

Conjecture.

Remember the formula is: US + US military = evil.

If the (very extensive and histerical) Gitmo reports, Koran abuse and Abu Graib reports dont give you a clue, nothing else will

If the US military engages in something negative it must be reported instead of the Fox News cheerleading.

As far as I'm concerned, US media is, for some reason, very soft on US military and the ruling dynasty.

Kaptur Alerts Colleagues of Unfolding Scandal - Brown says illegalities put presidential election in question
by Steve Eder
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0609-08.htm
As the word spread Tuesday night that the Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation had lost $215 million in a high-risk investment, U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur alerted her colleagues to the mounting concerns in her home state.

Miss Kaptur, during a statement on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday night, said "there is a major political scandal that is unfolding in the state of Ohio."



"The governor of our state has permitted millions and millions of dollars of workers' money from the Ohio Worker's Compensation Fund to be invested in high-risk investments," Miss Kaptur said in a statement that was placed on the congressional record.

Her accusations came just hours after the bureau acknowledged that it lost $215 million in a high-risk fund run by Pittsburgh businessman Mark D. Lay, who has contributed to Gov. Bob Taft's campaign, and other candidates, including some Democrats. The governor's office was notified of the loss last October, but a spokesman for Mr. Taft said yesterday he was not made aware of the concerns.

The $215 million loss - coupled with a failed $50 million rare-coin investment with Tom Noe, a prominent Republican campaign contributor - have given Democrats political ammunition against the GOP, which has dominated state government for years.

Democrats such as Miss Kaptur and U.S. Rep. Sherrod Brown of Lorain say the latest scandals mirror problems in Washington and even call into question the results of the 2004 presidential election.

"Shame on the governor of Ohio," said Miss Kaptur, who put The Blade's Tuesday online story breaking the news of the $215 million loss into the Congressional record. "Shame on the state officials of the State of Ohio. What a tragedy they have perpetrated on the people of our state."

Mr. Brown said state government leaders have been "inept" and "incompetent" for a decade and the "depth of corruption in Ohio might set national records."

Mr. Brown called out Governor Taft, as well as GOP gubernatorial candidates Attorney General Jim Petro, State Auditor Betty Montgomery, and Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.

"The governor's cronies have been losing money, and the attorney general, the auditor, and the secretary of state seem to hear no evil and see no evil," he said.

In this case, it appears "the people who are supposed to be the watchdog of state's government have all contributed to the corruption."

Mr. Brown, a former Ohio secretary of state, said the situation in Ohio mirrors problems in Washington.

"I've watched up close the arrogance of [Republican House Majority Leader] Tom DeLay," he said, "and I see the way Taft, and Blackwell, and Petro … and those folks run the state government."

Dan Allen, a spokesman for Mr. DeLay, responded yesterday: "The Democrats would like nothing more than to focus on these partisan attacks and ignore the fact that they have become the party of no ideas, no solutions, and no agenda."

Democrats say there is still more ground to be covered in investigating problems in Ohio, including a look at the 2004 presidential campaign.

Mr. Noe, whose attorneys told authorities two weeks ago that $10 million to $12 million of the state's assets were missing from the coin fund, is facing multiple investigations, including a federal probe into whether he laundered money into President Bush's re-election campaign. The Republican contributor was considered a Bush "pioneer" because he raised at least $100,000 for Mr. Bush's campaign.

"I think the George Bush campaign raised a lot of illegal money in Ohio," Mr. Brown said. "That puts the election in some question. I know these people stop at nothing and I know their incompetence kept a significant number of people from getting to vote."

President Bush has returned $4,000 in campaign contributions from Mr. Noe, joining Mr. Taft and a host of Ohio Republicans who have returned Noe campaign cash.

Scott McClellan, a spokesman for President Bush, told reporters last week that "there are some serious allegations that have been raised against" Mr. Noe.

"They have raised concerns with people in Ohio, they have raised concerns at the White House," he said. "And the President felt it was the right thing to return those contributions that came directly from him."

Deep gloat: Bush faces his own Nixon moment
by Alan Bisbort
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.ph ... ed&order=0
As Our Fearless Leader pedals his Pee Wee Herman bike more maniacally than usual these days, he's in desperate need of another monumentally weird news story to distract the nation "bigtime," as Dick Cheney would say. His approval ratings are in the low 40s (in the 30s on Social Security); Iraq refuses to behave the way he fantasized it; Congress has defied him on stem cells and lunatic-fringe judges; John Bolton and his moustache are on ice; prisoners have been tortured on his watch; dead bodies are piled in mounds everywhere he looks.

Poor boy. It's a wonder he doesn't just hide out on his ranch with his pillow over his head blissfully ignoring reality the way he ignored classes at Yale, his military commitment, his failed businesses, even his baseball team. If things get any worse, he may have to rename his ranch NeverNeverLand and invite young boys in for sleepovers.



Barely having dipped his toe into the pond of his second term, GWB is already a lame duck. He'll be even lamer when the Democrats retake the Congress in 2006, at which point there's a remote possibility that, well, let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Which is why he doesn't need any monumentally weird news stories about Watergate hogging headlines in his lapdog press.

George W. Bush is facing his Nixon Moment. Indeed, the revelation of the identity of Deep Throat this past week was a national wake-up call. It was a reminder of just how far "investigative journalism" has fallen in this nation, where the best of that formerly celebrated breed are working at cartoon magazines (Sy Hersh at the New Yorker), as an exile in England (Greg Palast), as a satirist (Jon Stewart and The Daily Show) or wielding a camera (Michael Moore).

If a Deep Throat with close White House ties were today to funnel the truth to the press corps, half of the reporters would soil their britches in fright and the other half would run and rat him out to Massuh Rove. We got a glimpse of that dynamic when longtime White House insider -- a Republican, no less -- Richard Clarke spilled the beans on Bush's bungling the war on terror. Rather than address the issues of national importance Clarke raised in his book, the media focused on Clarke's "motives."

The dynamic was the same before the war began. Only a fool or blindly partisan hack thought attacking Iraq was justified. As Daily Kos notes, "The only thing surprising about the Iraq occupation is that it has so persistently mirrored what war critics predicted; a rapid military 'win,' followed by a Vietnam-like insurgency that bogs down U.S. forces and destabilizes any nascent attempts at self-government. That's not horn-tooting; anyone not fully under the spell of yay! war could see it coming ten miles off."

Yet, the media turned it into a he said/she said proposition. They presented, as "he said," the White House's insistence that Saddam had WMDs and posed an immediate threat to U.S. security, as well as the unchallenged innuendo that he had a connection to the terrorists that carried out the 9/11 attacks. On the "she said" side, you had Hans Blix, Scott Ritter, the United Nations, all of our traditional sissie allies and most of the rest of the world begging, cajoling, screaming NO.

Though one side was clearly lying -- the very definition of high crimes and misdemeanors -- their version was always given (more than) equal weight. In fact, the New York Times colluded with the lying side, via Judith Miller's criminally misleading reportage of Saddam's WMD cache, and Bob Novak was an outright accomplice to treason by revealing the name, at the White House's bidding, of an undercover CIA agent, compromising national security. Worst of all, Bob Woodward, one of the titans of Watergate, became George W. Bush's biggest wartime cheerleader.

So much for our press.

George W. Bush needs another runaway bride, not this collective gloating over Deep Throat. That's because Watergate equals impeachment. We don't want to be thinking impeachment right now. Why? Because no president in American history is more impeachable than George W. Bush. There has not been such high crimes and misdemeanors, such chicanery, manipulation, murder and looting since, well, ever. Nixon's crime was the cover up, not the initial act. Bush's crimes are so numerous that any cover up, including ones willingly aided by a national press obsessed with Michael Jackson's sexual psychosis and hillbilly brides, will ultimately fail.

It has been said that the six-year witch hunt of Bill Clinton was payback for Watergate. But, if indeed there is a predictable trajectory to our national Greek tragedy, the payback for Clinton will be an even bigger bitch.

Let the impeachment begin.

Fair enough, Zeus. I too enjoyed Bowling for Columbine, even though I myself own a gun :P I'm not going to shoot anyone just yet, mind you.

I do understand there is a problem with gun ownership, however. Not everyone is as sensible as I am :P

BTW: for those who asked about Red, he seems to be fine. His son posted over on World Football:

http://wc6.worldcrossing.com/webx?14@@.1ddde93c

JAMES TARANTO

The Crying Game

What makes George Voinovich so contemptible? Michael Collins of the Scripps Howard News Service posed the question over the weekend, in an article amusingly titled "Scorn Over 'Buckeye Boo-Hoo' Mystifies Experts":

Ever since Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, got all weepy on the Senate floor a few weeks ago, he has been widely mocked by pundits, wags, bloggers, editorial writers and just about everybody else with a sense of emotional superiority. . . .

Although it's nothing new for politicians to become the laughingstock of an increasingly cynical public, even the experts are a little baffled by the outpouring of hostility directed at Voinovich's outpouring of emotion.

"We don't universally make fun of politicians when they cry--that's the interesting thing," said Randolph Cornelius, a Vassar College professor and researcher who has studied human emotions, and weeping in particular.

In some cases, in fact, letting the tears flow can enhance a politician's image. Think Rudolph Giuliani and 9/11. Giuliani's emotional, misty-eyed public appearances in the days after the terrorist attacks softened his brusque image as New York mayor and helped him build needed political capital, Cornelius said.

The difference, of course, is that tears were one appropriate response to the enormity of 9/11. Similarly, we saw a congressman on TV during the recent stem-cell debate who was in tears as he talked about the plight of cancer-stricken kids, which is indisputably sad.

Voinovich, by contrast, was blubbering because John Bolton, a man who is purported to be socially rough-edged, is about to become America's ambassador to the U.N. This is not something that would make a normal person weep. "If he cried every time he thought of a brusque federal official, Lake Erie couldn't hold all the tears," political scientist John Pitney tells Collins.

The emotional incongruity of Voinovich's response is enough to make him seem weird, but the contempt to which he has been subject is also owing to the way in which he came to oppose Bolton. At first he seemed totally indifferent to the question of who would be the U.N. ambassador, not even bothering to show up for the Bolton hearings. He finally appeared on the day the committee was to have voted on the nomination, listened to the Democrats ritually denounce Bolton, and then declared himself troubled, causing a delay in the vote.

When the time finally came to send Bolton's nomination to the floor, Voinovich declared that he had been persuaded Bolton was "the poster child of what someone in the diplomatic corps should not be" and that he would oppose the nomination on the Senate floor--though it didn't become clear until later that he hoped to drown Bolton in his own tears.

What makes Voinovich's lachrymosity so ludicrous is its sincerity. Does Chris Dodd or Joe Biden or John Kerry or Barbara Boxer cry herself to sleep thinking about mean old John Bolton going to Turtle Bay? Not a chance. Their campaign against Bolton was totally cynical, motivated by a combination of ideology and partisanship. And Voinovich fell for it! Their phony sanctimony touched his heart and drove him to tears. His crying fit on the Senate floor was a display of weak-mindedness as well as emotional incontinence.

Or, to put it another way, the Democrats can't win elections or accomplish much of anything else--but damned if they can't make George Voinovich cry. Even an expert should understand why that makes him the most ridiculous man in politics today.


So Does Michael Jackson

"ACLU Needs to Leave the Boy Scouts Alone"--headline, Decatur (Ala.) Daily, June 14

LOL

Proof is in the memo: Soldiers died for a lie
by Beth Quinn
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=21504
We've reached the point where it's easy to spot us liberals.

We're the ones whose heads are popping off, leaving bloody little neck stumps behind. We're pumping out the word, "But ... but ... but ..." over and over in sheer frustration at the absurdity of it all.

What else is there to say when some fool in Washington says the equivalent of, "No, you're wrong. Humans don't breathe oxygen. No truth in that!"

And then - just to compound the absurdity - the press reports that humans don't breathe oxygen. And then Americans are suddenly waving flags about the fact that we can now breathe underwater.

Yet the opposite happens when someone says something anti-Bush, such as, "We now have proof that Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq." Whoops and lo and behold! - the press fails to report this kind of un-American news at all.

That's what happened six weeks ago when The Times of London obtained and printed a top-secret memo written by a guy named Matthew Rycroft, Britain's secretary of foreign affairs.

What has become known as the Downing Street Memo is a report on a meeting between Rycroft and the White House in July 2002 - a good seven months before Bush invaded Iraq. The memo says Bush had already decided to attack. It also says Bush knew there were no WMDs in Iraq, but that "the facts were being fixed around the policy."

This, my fellow Americans, is the hottest news out there in the big, old rest of the world. The story, which has been reported prominently in The Times of London since May 1, has gotten more hits on the Internet than any other in the newspaper's history.

All the world - except America - is buzzing about the fact that George Bush created the WMD threat to justify his war in Iraq.

But here in America, where news is increasingly controlled by the White House, this story has barely made the back pages. Still not a word about it on CNN. And it's only in the past couple of weeks that the Washington Post has started writing about it.

Fortunately for us, Record reporter Dave Richardson has been paying attention (see accompanying story).

What we're talking about here is proof that Bush engineered the war in Iraq - based on a lie.

What we're talking about here is 1,700 dead Americans - based on a lie.

What we're talking about here is Lou Allen of Milford, Pa.; Brian Pavlich of Port Jervis; Eugene Williams of Highland; Irving Medina of Middletown; Doron Chan of Highland; Catalin Dima of White Lake; Brian Parrello of West Milford, N.J.; Kenneth VonRonn of Bloomingburg; Joseph Tremblay of New Windsor.

All dead - based on a lie.

What I can't understand - what's making my head pop off - is that so many Americans are indifferent to this kind of news. Is it because Americans expect presidents to lie, so it's not news when they do (unless it involves sex)?

Is it because this is simply confirmation of what we sort of knew all along anyway and - so what - we got Saddam (even though Osama is still at large)?

Is it because no one really cares what happens to our troops - even those of you with those stupid, yellow "Support Our Troops" magnets on your cars? Tell me, what have you done to support our troops other than put a stupid, yellow magnet on your car?

If you really want to support our troops, I have a suggestion: Demand a confession from George Bush.

Last week, 89 members of Congress signed a petition authored by Democratic Rep. John Conyers doing just that. They want answers. You should, too.

Before all our heads pop off, let's add our names to Conyers' petition. Let's start acting like Americans again. Let's force Bush to act like one, too.

And then, if it turns out he lied, as the Downing Street Memo most surely suggests, let's impeach him.

That's what we do to presidents who lie, remember?

Kids in the Military: They Won't Go
by Bob Herbert
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0613-21.htm
George W. Bush is in no danger of being ranked among the nation's pre-eminent commanders in chief. Not only has he been unable thus far to win the war in Iraq, but on his watch significant sectors of the proud U.S. military have been rapidly deteriorating.

The Army reported on Friday that it had fallen short of its recruitment goals for a fourth consecutive month. The Marines managed to meet their recruitment target for May, but that was their first successful month this year.

Scrambling to fill its ranks, the Army is signing up more high school dropouts and lower-scoring applicants.

With the war in Iraq going badly and allegations of abuse by military personnel widespread, young men and women are increasingly deciding that there's no upside to a career choice in which the most important skills might be ducking bullets and dodging roadside bombs.

The primary reason the U.S. went to an all-volunteer military in 1973 was to ensure that those who did not want to fight wouldn't have to. That option is now being overwhelmingly exercised, discretion being the clear choice over valor. Young people and their parents alike are turning their backs on the military in droves.

The Army is so desperate for even lukewarm bodies that it is reluctant to release even problem soldiers, troops who are seriously out of shape, or pregnant, or abusing alcohol or drugs. And it is lowering standards for admission to the junior officer ranks. For example, minor criminal offenses that previously would have been prohibitive can now be overlooked.

At the same time Army recruiters have been chasing high school kids with such reckless abandon that a backlash is developing among parents who, in many cases, want the recruiters kept out of their children's schools.

"To the extent that we think students are threatened by recruiters, it's our job to intervene," said Amy Hagopian, a co-chair of the Parent-Teacher-Student Association at Garfield High School in Seattle. Ms. Hagopian, who has an 18-year-old son, complained that recruiters too often put the hard sell on impressionable high school youngsters without informing them of the potential dangers of a life in the military.

Recruiters with the gift of gab go into the schools with a glamorous pitch, bags full of goodies for the kids (T-shirts, donuts, key chains) and a litany of promises they often can't keep. The kids don't hear much about their chances of being maimed or killed, or the trauma that often results from killing someone else.

(A soldier's job is to kill. I can still hear the drill sergeants in basic training screaming at us decades ago: "What are you? What are you?" And we'd scream back: "Killers! Killers!" And the sergeants would say, "What is your purpose?" And we would shout: "To kill! To kill!")

The Army, frantically searching for solutions, is offering enlistments as short as 15 months and considering bonuses worth up to $40,000. But it may be facing a problem too difficult for any amount of money to overcome. Americans are catching on to the hideousness and apparent futility of the war in Iraq. Five marines were killed in a single bomb attack in western Iraq on Thursday. On Friday, a front-page Washington Post headline described the effort to rebuild the Iraqi military as "Mission Improbable."

A Washington Post-ABC News poll last week found that nearly three-quarters of Americans believe the number of casualties in Iraq is unacceptable, and 60 percent believe the war was not worth fighting.

There's something frankly embarrassing about a government offering trinkets to children to persuade them to go off and fight - and perhaps die - in a war that their nation should never have started in the first place. It's highly questionable whether most high school kids are equipped to make an informed decision about joining the military, which is exactly why they're targeted. The additional knowledge and maturity gained in the first few years after high school make it easier for a young man or woman to make a wiser, more meaningful choice, pro or con.

The parents of the kids being sought by recruiters to fight this unpopular war are creating a highly vocal and potentially very effective antiwar movement. In effect, they're saying to their own children: hell no, you won't go.

USA Today and the Downing Street Memo
by Cynthia Bogard
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0613-27.htm
What can reading USA Today tell us about the Downing Street Memo (DSM) story? Zip. Zilch. Nothing. At least that was the case for the first 38 days after the memo was published in London's Sunday Times. USA Today published not a word about it until June 8, 2005. This week though, the leaked 2002 memo that indicates the Bush Administration had already decided to go to war on Iraq months before it brought the subject before the United Nations finally made it into the nation's national newspapers, including USA Today (page 8; and reprinted at http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0608-01.htm). And it's likely to get another spike in coverage this Thursday when my hero John (that's you, Representative Conyers, not you Senator Kerry) opens a Congressional hearing and presents a letter to the president signed by 500,000 voters demanding answers about the DSM.

Why should progressives care what that lightweight daily, USA Today, has to say about the DSM? With a circulation of over 2.2 million, it reaches twice as many Americans as either of the intelligentsia's papers, the New York Times or Washington Post. It is also the nation's most "national" paper--the one you'll find in mini-marts and hotels from Maine to Mississippi, Wisconsin to Washington. When Middle America reads a national paper, it's typically USA Today. What's most interesting, if not at all surprising, about USA Today's relationship to the DSM, though, is how closely the paper mirrors the Bush/Blair and right-wing "minimize, malign and control" strategy for dealing with the memo.



So far, USA Today has only published the one story on June 8. Salon online magazine, however, did interview its senior assignment editor for foreign news, Jim Cox. And the author of the article, Mark Memmott, was interviewed by Bob Garfield on NPR's On the Media on June 11. A lot can be learned about the strategies that will be used to silence the memo's import in a quick examination of these primary and secondary USA Today sources.

The News Blackout

The Bush Administration successfully stymied almost all mainstream coverage of the issue until Reuter reporter Steve Holland's brave question at the joint Bush-Blair news conference on June 7. They had a lot of help from the White House press corps which, despite 19 daily briefings, asked Bush spokesperson Scott McClellan exactly two questions about the memo between May 1 and USA Today's first mention of it on June 8. But, in an interview with Salon, USA Today's senior editor Jim Cox did express regrets that he hadn't assigned the story earlier. Regrets, though, Mr. Cox, are not the same as news.

The "Suspicious Timing" Argument

At the Bush-Blair news conference, the President stated, "Well you know, I read, kind of, the characterizations of the memo, particularly when they dropped it out in the middle of his race. I'm not sure who they dropped it out is, but I'm not suggesting that you all [indicating assembled White House press corps] dropped it out there." USA Today put it more succinctly, "The Sunday Times' May 1 memo story, which broke just four days before Britain's national elections,." and On the Media interviewer Bob Garfield echoed this emphasis in his introduction, stating the report of the memo "ran in Britain May 1st, four days before the British election." USA Today editor Cox was quoted in his own paper saying that the memo "was disclosed four days before the British elections, raising concerns about the timing."

What the audience was supposed to make of both the President's and the media's statements was that, obviously, London's Sunday Times was trying to skew election results with this suspiciously timed release. Therefore, the memo itself could not be trusted.

The 'Mistaken' Meaning of "Fixed Around"

Perhaps the most quoted phrase of the DSM is the claim Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action and that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

Robin Niblett, Director of the Europe program at The Center for Strategic and International Studies-a foreign policy focused Washington think tank, helpfully suggested in the USA Today article "that it would be easy for Americans to misunderstand the reference to intelligence being 'fixed around' Iraq policy. 'Fixed around' in British English means 'bolted on' rather than altered to fit the policy," he informed us. During his interview with Garfield, Memmott repeated this point as justification for his paper's lack of coverage. "Britain and the United States are separated by a common language, I think is the clich*," he said cutely. He then went on to repeat the idea that, "[T]o someone in Britain it's possible that that phrase 'fixed around' could mean attached to or bolted on. Not necessarily skewed." . So that's where the argument comes down to why it's so important to find out what the person who wrote that meant."

British semantic subtlety as explanation has been subsequently latched onto in the right-wing blogosphere and was used as an argument for dismissing the memo by conservative National Review's Rich Lowry, filling in for David Brooks on the Friday weekly wrap-up segment of the Jim Leher News Hour. (Back around the left side of the blogosphere, real Brits wrote in to say that they understood the phrase to mean 'rigged' too--just like on our side of the pond.)

The "Old News" Argument

James S. Robbins at National Review Online described the DSM this way: "...the memo simply contains the impressions of an aide of the impressions of British-cabinet officials of the impressions of unnamed people they spoke to in the United States about what they thought the president was thinking. It is sad when hearsay thrice-removed raises this kind of ruckus, especially since a version had been reported three years ago (my italics). As smoking guns go, it is not high caliber."

The "old news is no news" argument isn't mentioned in the USA Today June 8 story. But when Memmott was asked by Garfield about other reasons for neglecting the story until June 8, he said, "we and other newspapers as well, and other media, had written a lot in early 2002 about how the Bush Administration was beginning the drumbeat, was moving toward the decision to go to war, to take military action in Iraq. It wouldn't happen until a year later. But there were lots of stories. So there was some sense also among editing ranks, well, we knew this. We knew the Bush Administration had decided well beforehand what its policy course was going to be. Yes this was important. Yes this is a document which seems to put it down on paper. But I think there was a sense of, well is this old news and how important is it?" In his interview with Salon, Cox states, "The memo doesn't say something we haven't heard in one way or another over the last two and a half years."

The Authenticity Issue

No one in the British government has denied the authenticity of the document and an unnamed former senior US official is quoted as saying the account of the senior British Intelligence officer's visit to Washington is "an absolutely accurate description of what transpired." But in the wake of Dan Rather's public undoing and the recent Newsweek scandal, the press has become hyper-vigilant in its quest for absolute authenticity before running a story.

Senior USA Today editor Jim Cox said to Salon, "We could not obtain the memo or a copy of it from a reliable source. There was no explicit confirmation of its authenticity from (Blair's office)."

When On the Media's Garfield opened his interview with Mark Memmott, the very first thing he said in response to Garfield's question about a "gaping hole" in coverage of the memo was, "It's ironic to some extent. Last year the media was jumped on because of the Texas Air National Guard documents that CBS said it had. Bloggers were all over them about the authenticity of those. Now some in the blogosphere were all over the media for not writing about documents which almost all the media had not seen. Only the Sunday Times of London had actual copies that they said were from reliable sources. Others only had second hand information so that explains a lot of the reluctance, at least on the U.S. media's part, to really weigh in this on this one, I think. I know there were attempts made to try to authenticate and obtain the information so that we could do a story and we just never got to the point, I'm told, where we could." Later in the interview Garfield picks up on the implication of this view by saying in regards to the DSM, "let's say it's authentic for a moment." before continuing with his questions (et tu, BG?).

I repeat, none of the people who were at this high-level meeting have disputed the document's authenticity.

So let's summarize. The memo describing the minutes of a meeting attended by our major Iraq war ally, Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top advisors in which it is stated that the Bush Administration saw military action as "inevitable" and that "Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action" even though "the case was thin" and the United Nations had not yet been consulted was

a) not important enough to mention at all

b) old news

c) merely a ploy by a British newspaper to skew elections over there

d) a bunch of mistaken allegations based on a failure to understand British English

e) based on a document which Tony Blair himself had not specifically said was true (though he hadn't denied it either)

f) All of the above.

This, folks, is the framing of the memo that we're up against, the one being promoted by the Bush Administration and Tony Blair and the one being parroted by much of our fearful mainstream media. This is what most Americans are finding out about the Downing Street Memo (if they're finding out anything at all). Some regional and local papers have picked up on the story but coverage is spotty so far. Under these circumstances, we might be grateful that most Americans don't read any newspaper. They get their news from television. Then again, what's the most watched news on TV? It's Fox News.

Americans Fed Up With Bush's Iraq War
by Margaret Talev
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/p ... 6870.shtml
Americans have become increasingly wary of the war in Iraq, with new polling showing that nearly half want an immediate pullout of U.S. troops and more than a third fear the strife is turning into a 21st-century Vietnam.

The Pew Research Center poll released Monday found that 46 percent of Americans favor bringing the troops home as soon as possible, up from 36 percent last October. The nonpartisan survey of 1,464 Americans, conducted June 8-12, also found that less than half of the respondents - 47 percent - now believe the U.S. will accomplish its goals in Iraq.



The findings come on the heels of a Gallup Poll in which nearly six in 10 Americans say they favor either a partial (31 percent) or total (28 percent) pullout of U.S. troops.

After Iraq's independent election earlier this year, "there was a burst of optimism," said Pew associate director Carroll Doherty. For Americans, he said, "it had the effect of, if not raising optimism, staving off some pessimism. But since then, most of the news people see has been bad 0 suicide bombings, U.S. troops being killed. It's pretty unrelenting.

"Troops are dying, and people don't see an end game, a way out," he said. "It's this idea that we're in for the long haul and things, at least in perception, aren't getting better."

Just prior to President Bush's re-election last fall, Americans were strongly in favor, by a 57-to-36 margin, of keeping U.S. troops in Iraq until the situation stabilized. But since then that gap has steadily shrunk, so that now 50 percent want the troops to remain and 46 percent want them brought home.

The findings come as Democrats and even an occasional Republican are stepping up their criticisms of Bush's strategy in Iraq, where more than 1,700 U.S. troops have died, and of the operation of an embattled military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., who advocated calling French fries "freedom fries" after France opposed the U.S. invasion, said on ABC's "This Week" that he and some of his colleagues would offer legislation calling for a timetable for withdrawing troops.

And the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, plans to hold an unofficial hearing this week on whether the Bush administration had decided as early as the summer of 2002 to invade Iraq, as Conyers says a British government memo suggests.

The Bush administration has repeatedly rejected the idea of setting timetables for troop withdrawal from Iraq, saying that would only give leverage to terrorists and insurgents.

"The president believes it is vital that we complete our mission, and that means training Iraqi security forces," spokesman Scott McClellan said Monday. "Then our troops can return home with the honor they have deserved."

McClellan also defended the U.S. operation at Guantanamo.

"We remain a nation at war," he said. "The individuals who are at Guantanamo Bay are dangerous terrorists who seek to do harm to the American people."

At the same time, he said Bush believes "we should always be looking at our options" when it comes to dealing with detainees.

Pew's survey found Americans are not as concerned about the situation at Guantanamo, with 54 percent saying reports of mistreatment of suspected terrorists represent isolated incidents and 34 percent saying they are part of a more widespread pattern of abuse.

"In Washington, I don't think Bush is seeing anything close to a real problem within his party," Doherty said. "I do think you're seeing individual voices, but not the rank and file. I do think individual members of Congress are hearing about this at home, and if they are criticizing the president a little bit more on Iraq, it probably reflects what they're hearing from their constituents."

Why are the Democrats such weenies?
by Jon Carroll
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.ph ... ed&order=0
Why are the Democrats such weenies? Howard Dean makes the unremarkable statement that the GOP is the party of white Christians, and other Democrats run and flee and say, "Oh no, oh no!" And a Republican yahoo accuses Dean of "political hate speech." Neither "white" nor "Christian" is an epithet. A glance at the videotape from last year's Republican convention indicates that both characterizations are entirely fair.

And yet some Democrats think Dean is being too confrontational. We should be nice to the lying liars or people will think we're, gasp, partisan. "Partisan" is a good thing; it's what the Founding Fathers had in mind. The problem comes when one party stays very partisan and the other party starts modifying and mollifying and trying to find some mythical friendly center. I loved Mister Rogers, but I never thought he'd make a good chairman of the Democratic Party.



So maybe lunatic liberals should keep a few things in mind. First, the Bush administration is increasingly unpopular. The latest ABC/Washington Post poll reveals that 52 percent of the American people disapprove of the way Bush is running the country. Ask specifically about Iraq, and the numbers climb -- 58 percent disapprove of his handling of the war.

Which means, according to Eric Alterman, "George W. Bush's approval rating is now a full twenty points lower than Bill Clinton's was on the day he was impeached." I believe the American people want a party that will express their displeasure at the elitist and corrupt Bush administration in strong and vigorous terms.

People should stop believing the bullfluff that Fox News represents some significant percentage of the populace. The latest Nielsen ratings show that the Fox News Channel has 1,758,000 viewers in prime time, with only 416,000 falling into the 25-54 demographic. This is in a nation of 300 million people. However much noise it makes and however much room it takes up in the brains of media people, Fox is a very small muffin in a very large bakery -- a small, wizened, bitter muffin. Ignore it; everyone else does.

Elitist? Since February, the U.S. Army has missed its recruiting goals every month, sometimes by as much as 40 percent. People do not like the war, and they do not want their sons and daughters dying in the cause of ... whatever the cause is. You'd think that Bushies would support the beleaguered military by enrolling high-profile Republican scions in the Army -- both Bush daughters are eligible to sign up -- but it's not happening. Sacrifice does not play well in the "go back to sleep" Bush propaganda parameters. Nah, they make the wars -- let someone else fight them.

Corrupt? You bet. I think we have scandal fatigue, because some of the newer ones are just not getting any play at all. A senior Air Force procurement officer, Darleen Druyun, made a deal to lease Boeing refueling tankers for $23 billion, despite Pentagon studies showing that the tankers were unnecessary. Then Druyun quit the government and joined Boeing. Such a coincidence. Two years later, she pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud and was sentenced to nine months in the federal pen.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration has ignited a trade war with Europe over "illegal subsidies" to Airbus because the alleged subsidies hurt the trade position of, yes, Boeing. We'd never give illegal subsidies to Boeing, oh my no.

This is just one example of the malign effects of the revolving door between big business and the Bush administration. There's the case of Philip Cooney, a former American Petroleum Institute lobbyist who signed on as the chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality (!!). According to documents obtained by the New York Times, Cooney "repeatedly" edited official documents to eliminate or downplay the now widely accepted links between greenhouse gases and global warming.

The White House is still taking the position that global warming is a liberal conspiracy. The liberals' ability to cause a drought in Australia has amazed many.

This is merely the latest in a long series of incidents, from "abstinence only" sex education campaigns to downplayed links between smoking and heart disease, in which the administration has adjusted the facts to fit its conclusions -- and to please its corporate donors and its ultraconservative base.

Most Americans are neither ultraconservative nor superrich, and they are interested in hearing the truth. The Democrats should be interested in telling the truth, and telling it in a strong and convincing manner. They cannot flinch when the White House does one of its "gay marriage booga booga" dances. Be not afraid, Democrats. This is not an occasion in which the meek will inherit the earth. Speak for the people, because the people need you to end the madness.

Timid media enabling Bush's lies
by Bill Gallagher
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.ph ... ed&order=0
President George W. Bush keeps the lies flowing with the comfortable assurance that, even when he's caught red-handed with documented evidence of his deceptions, he can just shrug, lie again, and most in the American media will let him get away with it.

On a recent 18-day overseas trip, I sought to keep up with the important issues of our times, the progress of the Detroit Pistons topping my list of "I've got to know" matters. With the invaluable Internet, the cable news networks and the Turkish love of basketball, the critical scores got my way. For other news of the world, the BBC -- the "Old Gray Lady" of responsible broadcasting -- provided the basics.

An aside: The Pistons are one of the finest and most professional organizations in all of sports. When they're on, Pistons-style defense and team play is a joy to watch. But even after annihilating the Los Angeles Lakers last year and literally destroying the franchise, then returning to the finals this year after overcoming a 3-2 deficit with the Miami Heat in the Eastern Division Finals, the Pistons don't get the national attention they've so nobly earned.

First, it's fashionable to dismiss Detroit. If the same team played in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago or Boston, the national media would be hailing the Pistons as a revolutionary concept for the NBA -- a highly successful team whose success is built on just that, being a team. No single star. No Kobe. No Shaq. No Michael Jordon. No Larry Bird.

The Pistons' work ethic and commitment to team effort rather than individual flash makes them brilliant on the court, but not in the mold preferred by NBA marketers looking for brand names, not brand teams. Members of the media also like the simplicity of a marquee star instead of the complex dynamics of team play. They tend to choose style over substance, and most possess the attention span found in the infant rat.

But the shortcomings of sports reporters are insignificant compared to the monumental and ongoing failures of most in the mainstream media in covering George W. Bush's serial lying. Bush glibly declares fabricated reality and the lap dogs in the media lick it up and dare not challenge his assertions. Nowhere was this pattern more obvious than in the president's dismissal of questions about the damning "Downing Street Memo." On May 1, the Sunday Times of London published the secret British government document showing the Bush administration had made the decision to wage war on Iraq nearly one year before the U.S. invasion.

In the memo's most revealing passage, Sir Richard Dearlove, head of Britain's MI6 intelligence service, reported to Prime Minister Blair on his recent trip to Washington and discussions with top members of the Bush administration about Iraq.

"Military action was now seen as inevitable," he wrote. "Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were fixed around that policy."

The memo exposes Bush's repeated lies that he was seeking peace and that war was a "last resort." It is the first documentary evidence revealing the great deception.

The British government never tried to deny the authenticity of the memo, yet the story was given scant attention in the American media.

Finally, five weeks after it was published, a reporter found the nerve to question Bush about the "smoking gun" memo. Last Tuesday, as members of the White House press corps sat on their hands, a reporter from British news agency Reuters dropped the question on Bush.

The president denied he planned war while pretending to pursue peace, saying, "There's nothing farther from the truth." With Tony Blair alongside him, Bush scoffed at the notion the decision to attack Iraq came a year before bombs were dropped on Baghdad. "Both of us didn't want to use our military. It was our last resort," Bush told the reporter.

It is a self-evident truth that Bush was hell-bent for war and regime change in Iraq, and the reasons were concocted to achieve those ends. We have the eyewitness accounts of former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and former National Security Council aide and terrorism specialist Richard Clarke. They both say Bush used the horrors of 9/11 to shift focus to Iraq, which had nothing to do with the attacks.

How can the mainstream American media sit back so cynically and say so little about a report that proves Bush fixed intelligence to justify pre-emptive war? The issue reaches to the heart of government credibility and integrity. It deserves the utmost public attention.

USA Today, the nation's largest-circulation daily newspaper, finally got around to mentioning the memo last Wednesday, following the Bush-Blair joint news conference. The headline read "'Downing Street Memo' Gets Fresh Attention." How about any attention at all?

In the article, reporter Mark Memmott wrote, "A simmering controversy over whether American media have ignored a secret British memo about how President Bush built his case for war with Iraq bubbled over into the White House on Tuesday." What controversy?

There is no question the American media ignored the report. Memmott notes that only Knight-Ridder, on May 6, mentioned the story in a fairly timely fashion, and that the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and New York Times got on the bandwagon about a week later. Justifying the slow response to a major story by spreading collective guilt, Memmott wrote, "None of the stories appeared on the newspapers' front pages. Several other major media outlets, including the evening news programs on ABC, CBS and NBC, had not said a word about the document before Tuesday. Today marks USA Today's first mention."

When it comes to "American Idol," rich details of the Michael Jackson case, Paris Hilton's underwear preferences, "Star Wars" box office figures and any new diet fad, you can count on USA Today being way out in front on those earth-shattering issues. But a fabricated reason for a war that has cost thousands of lives just doesn't merit much, if any, play.

Jim Cox, USA Today's senior assignment editor for foreign news, offered a lame excuse. "We could not obtain the memo or a copy of it from a reliable source," Cox claimed. "There was no explicit confirmation of the authenticity from (Blair's office). And it was disclosed four days before the British elections, raising concerns about the timing."

So we're being asked to accept USA Today's explanation that the paper couldn't nail down the story for five weeks, but when a gutsy British reporter brought it up at a White House news conference, the memo catapulted into the headlines. What pure crap.

I wrote about the memo in this space on May 10 and described it as "dynamite." At the time, I felt I was late and behind on the story. I guess not.

The U.S. media wallow in the sludge of the scandal they've created in ignoring the story. It's not Rush Limbaugh, talk-radio thugs and the Fox News Channel that have propagandized the American people into a nation of lockstepping political zombies. It's the mainstream media that have done the most damage.

A recent cover of the conservative "National Review" magazine depicts a toilet with "Insert Mainstream Media Credibility Here" written on the seat with an arrow pointing into the bowl. The editors are right for all the wrong reasons.

They blasted "Newsweek" for its story that a U.S. interrogator had flushed a Koran down the toilet at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. "Newsweek" later retracted the story over a sourcing issue.

But a couple of weeks later, the Pentagon acknowledged there had been verified incidents of military personnel disrespecting the Muslim holy book. Several former detainees have offered eyewitness accounts of guards tossing pages of the Koran into toilets. "Newsweek" made mistakes, but the substance of its report was accurate, a point missed in the media frenzy over the retraction.

The ongoing abuses at the detention camp don't get nearly the media attention the "Newsweek" story did. Amnesty International recently released a 308-page report offering stinging criticism of U.S. treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo. The report describes 10 documented cases of abuse and mistreatment. The human rights organization found that U.S. word games result in a dilution of the absolute ban on torture and the creation of "a new lexicon for abuse and torture." Amnesty International Secretary General Irene Khan said, "Guantanamo has become the gulag of our time."

President Bush howled over the abuse charges, saying, "It's an absurd allegation." He failed to note the FBI and Red Cross International also found similar incidents of abuse.

Amnesty International Executive Director William Schultz struck right back. "What is 'absurd' and indeed outrageous is President Bush's attempt to deny the deliberate policies of his administration. What is 'absurd' and indeed outrageous is the administration's failure to undertake a full, independent investigation," he said.

As with the "Downing Street Memo," the Guantanamo scandal gets scant attention from the stenographers in the Washington press corps.

A new Gallup poll shows public confidence in newspapers and TV news has fallen to an all-time low.

It is a richly deserved distinction for the people who helped Bush sell his lies, and who fail in their fundamental role in a free society.

Good articles, Eugene. I have to say though, that I was not surprised when the Downing Street Memo came out. I had seen a documentary two years ago on BBC where interviews from ex-workers in the British Diplomatic Service said the very same thing; that the war was planned long in advance. Some of them went as far as saying it was talked about in a meeting between Bush and Blair shortly after 9/11! I'm not sure THAT's true, but I was not surprised by the memo. I knew the war had been planned in advance.

I'm sure you knew that too, but the media reaction is interesting. As far as I'm aware, The Times is owned by Rupert Murdoch. He is a Blair supporter, so I doubt he would be trying to "skew the elections" against his favoured candidate.

Power Line

Cheap reparations, Part Two

LaShawn Barber finds the Senate's apology for not passing anti-lynching legislation to be as absurdly lame as I do. She writes:

Generations of blacks have been lulled into feeding from the government trough, and the damage it caused will reverberate for generations. And those numbskulls down the street are apologizing for failing to pass anti-lynching laws 100 years ago. Lord, give me strength.
I’m sick of politicians wasting time and money pandering to blacks, treating us like empty-headed children, spoon-feeding us putrid pabulum, and prostrating themselves for every perceived slight. Don’t apologize to “Black People.” Apologize to individual blacks who actually care about this mess.

Apologize for failing to protect Americans against foreign invaders. Apologize for taking our hard-earned money and giving it to people who don’t want to earn it themselves. Apologize for constantly referring to me as “African American,” implying that I’m a lesser American than everyone else. Apologize to all Americans for pushing racially divisive entitlements and preferences and insane “hate crime” laws. Thanks to your misguided paternalism, racial tension will always be front and center.

From sorryeverybody.com

The definition of insanity
by Molly Ivins
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=21533
Sometimes you look at the people Bush appoints to high public office and the only possible response is, "What were they thinking?"

Zalmay Khalilzad for U.S. ambassador to Iraq? Why not just send Richard Perle? Khalilzad is a second-rank neo-con with all the same credentials as the rest of those bozos -- pre-emptive war, world hegemony, Project for a New American Century... the whole stinking lot of it. Plus, he's been a big booster for Iran's ayatollahs, the Afghani Mujahideen and the Taliban, not to mention an oil company consultant. Isn't that just jim-dandy?



What this tells us is that the administration has learned exactly nothing from the past three years of insurgency in Iraq. The 1,700-dead, $1 billion-a-week mistake will continue to be run in exactly the same way we have already proved doesn't work. We'll keep trying to put out a growing insurgency with too small an army as the country drifts ever-closer to civil war. It's like Ben Franklin's definition of insanity -- doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.

As one who has long argued that George W. Bush is not stupid, I must admit that not learning from your mistakes is a prime signal of stupidity. But of course, in order to learn from your mistakes, you have to recognize you made them. The president assured us just last week he is "heartened" by what is happening in Iraq and, "I am pleased with the progress." The vice president says there is "major progress" and the insurgency is in its "last throes." These folks are in such deep denial.

Chris Cox, now there's an appointment of near-genius level. Hey, is this the man you would put in charge of the Securities and Exchange Commission to protect investors from greedy, capitalist crooks? Cox, a Republican from Orange County, Calif., helped produce the Enron mess and subsequent scandals in the first place. Just the guy for the job!

Cox led the fight in 1995 to pass the "Private Securities and Litigation Reform Act," which provided extensive legal protections to corporate executives, accountants and lawyers who make misleading statements. The law paved the way for corporate executives to lie without fear of being sued -- it's the Ken Lay Protection Act.

In 2002, Cox said he "rejected the notion that Enron's meltdown should cause Congress to rethink deregulation." The guy's home state was ripped off for $10 billion by Enron. Here's another one who can't learn from his mistakes.

Of course, the fact that he's gotten more than $640,000 in campaign money from the very people he will now be regulating has nothing to do with his views.

Cox, according to The New York Times, is a devotee of Ayn Rand, the high priestess of unregulated capitalism. On announcing the Cox appointment, Bush said, "As a champion of the free-enterprise system in Congress, Chris Cox knows that a free economy is built on trust." Trust? How about trust but verify?

While working for the law firm of Latham & Watkins, Cox himself was sued, according to the Los Angeles Times, for work that involved him in a business scheme that robbed nearly 8,000 investors of approximately $136 million. The scheme cheated customers out of their retirement nest eggs by enticing them to invest in phony mortgages. High-level officers of the company pled guilty.

The charge against Cox was that he helped write a deceptive plan to sell mutual fund shares. Cox claimed ignorance and said he was only distantly involved, but The Associated Press later uncovered documents that showed him to be more involved with the convicted dealer than he previously let on.

And a new development in the most ludicrous nomination yet, John Bolton, Mr. Diplomacy, for ambassador to the United Nations. It turns out that in addition to trying to get American intelligence analysts who disagreed with him fired, Bolton axed an international civil servant for having the temerity to do his job.

In 2001, Jose Bustani, head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), says Bolton "telephoned me to try to interfere, in a menacing tone, in decisions that are the exclusive responsibility of the director-general." Bolton was opposed to Bustani's effort to get Iraq and other Arab countries involved in the OPCW.

Bustani aide Bob Rigg of New Zealand said: "Why did they not want OPCW involved in Iraq? They felt they couldn't rely on OPCW to come up with the findings the U.S. wanted."

Bolton then arranged to have Bustani fired in a way a U.N. tribunal has since said was "unlawful." I'll bet they just can't wait to see Bolton's moustache up at the United Nations. How could we possibly make more friends there?

As I'm sure Chris Cox can tell us, in business, "goodwill" is considered an asset

CQ

Durbin Oddly Silent About The Torture Closer To Home

Dick Durbin set himself apart in the Senate on Tuesday by proclaiming that one could not tell the difference between the behavior of detainees at Gitmo by American military person and that of Nazis, Stalin's gulag guards, or Pol Pot. Despite a national furor over his remarks, Durbin has refused to retract them, although he laughingly added yesterday that it was wrong to think that he had minimized the horrors of the Holocaust and the gulags by equating them with a lack of climate control and indoor plumbing in Gitmo interrogation rooms.

However, in his zeal to protect America from the Creeping New FascismTM of American servicemen, Durbin somehow missed an opportunity to find similar horrors much closer to home. John in Carolina notes that Durbin's political ally and fellow Democrat in Chicago, Cook County Sheriff Michael Sheahan, operates a jail that sounds like it has a lot more problems than Gitmo or anything else run by the American military.

Let's see if we can guess where the following abuses took place -- Gitmo or Cook County:

In one incident, an elite squad of 40 guards took over a maximum-security [unit] ... for the sole purpose of beating and terrorizing the prisoners. A jail investigator determined that the guards' misconduct was covered up by ... medical personnel, who filed false reports and refused or delayed treatment to the prisoners, and by the ... inspector general, who refused to cooperate with the investigation. In the other incident, five inmates in a special incarceration unit ... alleged that they were beaten by 20 or more ... as they lay cuffed and shackled on the floor.
Was that done in the sunny climes of our Cuban installation? No -- that happened in Sheahan's Chi-town jail, in 1999 and 2000. Durbin's pal promised that his jail would improve and that reports of torture and abuse would stop. And they did, mostly because unlike the whistleblowers at Abu Ghraib who were lauded for their efforts to end the isolated cases of abuse at that prison, Sheahan made sure he got rid of the squealers at the Cook County lockup.

Let's try this again. Gitmo or Cook County:

[A] prisoner ... said he was beaten unconscious by guards who had wrapped handcuffs around their fists to make the beating worse. ... Several days later, the whites of his eyes were nearly obscured by the red from blood vessels that had ruptured during the beating, and deep lacerations were held together by staples that had been applied to his scalp. Late last year ... another prisoner ... told of being dragged by several guards through a fire of burning paper and debris that had been raging in the cellblock. His account of this abuse was substantiated by blisters and deep burn marks on his leg.
Now that sounds like what Saddam did on off days when he wasn't feeling all that dastardly -- so this had to have happened at Gitmo, right? Wrong. That's still Durbin's pal Sheahan's Cook County lockup. Why hasn't Durbin taken to the floor of the Senate to decry this treatment? One would think that a man who wants to protect America from the taint of torture and abuse in order to ensure our purity might start in his own back yard.

We'll start taking Durbin seriously when he calls for the National Guard in Illinois to take over the Cook County Jail and demands a federal investigation of his political ally Michael Sheahan, for years of allegations involving abuses much more profound than anything contained in that silly e-mail Durbin read on the floor of the Senate on Tuesday. Until then, chalk up Durbin's feigned moral outrage to the worst kind of political opportunism.

What's the Matter With Ohio?
by Paul Krugman
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/17/opini ... an.html?hp
The Toledo Blade's reports on Coingate - the unfolding tale of how Ohio's Bureau of Workers' Compensation misused funds - deserve much more national attention than they have received so far. For one thing, it's an entertaining story that seems to get weirder by the week. More important, it's an object lesson in what happens when you have one-party rule untrammeled by any quaint notions of independent oversight.

In April, The Blade reported that the bureau, which provides financial support for workers injured on the job, had invested $50 million in Capital Coin, a rare-coin trading operation run by Tom Noe, an influential Republican fund-raiser.

At first, state officials angrily insisted that this unusual use of state funds was a good investment that had nothing to do with Mr. Noe's political connections. An accounting investigation revealed, however, that Mr. Noe's claims to be running a profitable business were fictitious: he had lost millions, and 121 valuable coins were missing.

On June 3, police raided the Colorado home of Michael Storeim, Mr. Noe's business associate, and seized hundreds of rare coins. After changing the locks, they left 3,500 bottles of wine, valued at several hundred thousand dollars, in the home's basement.

On Monday, Mr. Storeim told police that someone had broken into his house over the weekend and stolen much of the wine, along with artwork, guns, jewelry and cars. As I said, this story keeps getting weirder.

Meanwhile, The Blade uncovered an even bigger story: the Bureau of Workers' Compensation invested $225 million in a hedge fund managed by MDL Capital, whose chairman had strong political connections. When this investment started to go sour, the bureau's chief financial officer told another top agency official that he had been told to "give MDL a break."

By October 2004, state officials knew that MDL had lost almost the entire investment, but they kept the loss hidden until this month.

How could such things happen? The answer, it has become clear, lies in a web of financial connections between state officials and the businessmen who got to play with state funds.

We're not just talking about campaign contributions, although Mr. Noe's contributions ranged so widely that five of the state's seven Supreme Court justices had to recuse themselves from cases associated with the scandal. (He's also under suspicion of using intermediaries to contribute large sums, illegally, to the Bush campaign.) We're talking about personal payoffs: bargain vacations for the governor's chief of staff at Mr. Noe's Florida home, the fact that MDL Capital employs the daughter of one of the members of the workers' compensation oversight board, and more.

Now, politicians and businessmen are always in a position to do each other lucrative favors. Government is relatively clean when politicians are sufficiently afraid of scandal to resist temptation. But when a political machine controls all branches of government, and those officials charged with oversight are also reliably partisan, politicians feel safe from investigation. Their inhibitions dissolve, and they take full advantage of their position, until the scandals become too big to hide.

In other words, Ohio's state government today is a lot like Boss Tweed's New York. Unfortunately, a lot of other state governments look similar - and so does Washington.

Since their 1994 takeover of Congress, and even more so since the 2000 election, Republican leaders have sought to make their political dominance permanent. They redistricted Texas to lock in their control of the House. Through the "K Street Project" they have put lobbying firms under partisan control, starving the Democrats of campaign funds. And they are, of course, trying to pack the courts with partisan loyalists.

In effect, they're trying to turn America into a giant version of the elder Richard Daley's Chicago.

These efforts have already created an environment in which politicians from the right party and businessmen with the right connections believe, with good reason, that they have immunity.

And politicians who feel that they can exploit their position tend to do just that. It's a likely bet that the scandals we already know about, from Coingate to Tom DeLay's dealings with the lobbyist Jack Abramoff, are just the tip of the iceberg.

The message from Ohio is that long-term dominance by a political machine leads to corruption, regardless of the policies that machine follows or the ideology it claims to represent.

Marko

it has been long suspected and seems to bear enough evidence that:

1. US did not really care about having UK on the same page about Iraq.

2. The decision to Iraq was made long ago and the reasons for it have been cooked up and doctored to fit. Evidence be damned.