Don Siegelman, the former Alabama governor, is asking a federal appeals court to throw out his conviction on dubious corruption charges. His appeal has some surprising backers: a bipartisan group of 54 former state attorneys general has submitted a brief on his behalf. Congress is also investigating charges that Mr. Siegelman was politically targeted.
Mr. Siegelman was the Democrats’ strongest candidate to retake the Alabama governorship, and Congress has uncovered evidence that the United States attorney’s office in Montgomery — with possible White House input — may have decided to prosecute him to undermine his campaign. The former presidential adviser Karl Rove, who has been accused of pushing to have Mr. Siegelman indicted, has been subpoenaed by both the House and Senate, but has refused to testify...
Even the highly partisan Bush Justice Department appears to be losing confidence in its case. It originally appealed Mr. Siegelman’s sentence, hoping to add more than 20 years. It recently withdrew the appeal without explanation.
Congress should compel Mr. Rove to testify. And it should keep investigating this prosecution and what role crass politics may have played. While it does, the 11th Circuit should cast a skeptical eye on this case, based on the law and the facts.
In a recent appearance on “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” Karl Rove was asked if he had a role in the Justice Department’s decision to prosecute Don Siegelman. The former Democratic governor of Alabama was convicted and sentenced to more than seven years, quite possibly for political reasons, and there is evidence that Mr. Rove may have been pulling the strings.
Mr. Rove, who has traded in his White House job for that of talking head, talked a lot but didn’t answer the question. He also did not directly deny being involved. The House Judiciary Committee has subpoenaed him to testify. It should do everything in its power to see that he does and that he answers all of its questions.
Thank you Larry Beinhart for finally putting together a clear article for all to read about Gore's win and the massive coverup by the mainstream media led by the NY Times:
The New York Times: "STUDY OF DISPUTED FLORIDA BALLOTS FINDS JUSTICES DID NOT CAST THE DECIDING VOTE."
If you were still interested, after the headlines, and bothered to read the stories, it didn't get much better. I read it in the New York Times. Frankly, I missed the key paragraph, until I saw it pointed out in an article by Gore Vidal. I subsequently went back and read all the stories. The Times was the worst in terms of active misdirection. They spent the first three paragraphs supporting the headline and they explicitly stated that Bush would have won even with a statewide recount. Finally, in the fourth paragraph -- if you got that far -- was the statement quoted above:
"If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards, and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won, by a very narrow margin."
There it was. A very simple statement. Al Gore got more votes in Florida than George Bush. It is also very well buried. It had arcania about chads on both sides of it. Even so, as if in a panic to make sure that nobody might think that it mattered that Al Gore got more votes than George Bush, the Timesdismissed what the Consortium had spent a million dollars to find out: "While these are fascinating findings, they do not represent a real-world situation. There was no set of circumstances in the fevered days after the election that would have produced a hand recount of all 175,000 overvotes and undervotes." Even though that would seem to be a fairly obvious interpretation of the law and it is what was found when someone actually did sit down and count the votes.
The NY Times public editor explains why the paper of record failed to cover last month's Winter Soldier hearings:
Dear Reader,
Thank you for writing about the Winter Soldier event in Maryland last month and its lack of coverage by the Times.
My assistant checked with various editors at the Times to see if there was any discussion about covering the Winter Soldier meeting. The editor in the Washington bureau who oversees national security coverage said he had not been aware of the group or its meeting. The Times normally has three Pentagon reporters. The meeting fell within their area of coverage, and one of them probably would have been assigned had editors chosen to staff the event. But one is on book leave, one was traveling with the secretary of defense, and one was in Iraq covering the war. The Times also did not cover an announcement the following day by Vets for Freedom, a group supporting the war and claiming more than 13 times the membership of Iraq Veterans Against the War, the group which organized Winter Soldier.
One group was emphasizing what it charged were war crimes, war profiteering and war mismanagement. The other group was protesting what it charged was the failure of the media to report more fully on signs of progress in Iraq, such as rebuilt schools and infrastructure.
News organizations like the Times, with its own substantial investment in independent reporting from Iraq tend to prefer their own on-scene accounts of the war, rather than relying on charges and counter-charges at home by organizations with strongly held political viewpoints about the war.
Sincerely,
Clark Hoyt
Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting covers this unbelievable letter in full but it is worth highlighting the absurdity of the statement that the Times was unaware of the hearings. The Times D.C. bureau received three press releases about Winter Soldier, 150 Times staffers were also sent press releases, Democracy Now covered the hearings in full and the progressive blogosphere devoted much space to the hearings. And we are asked to believe that the Times didn't know about it? Wow!
Clearly the Times would rather the public believe that it is merely inept, grossly uninformed and unprofessional rather than simply doing the bidding for the pro-war political elite.
Below is the Winter Soldier testimony of Jon Michael Turner. See Hot Potato Mash's entire coverage (14 videos) of this heartbreaking event here.
UPDATE: Check out Winter Soldier: Rules of the Game by Bhc for a comprehensive look at Winter Soldier and the corporate media and how they relate to the first rule of fight club.
The NY Times' Nicholas D. Kristof believes that “staying in Iraq indefinitely undermines our national security by empowering jihadis”. He adds, that if you disagree with this assessment and “believe that staying in Iraq does more good than harm, you must answer the next question: Is that presence so valuable that it is worth undermining our economy?” All supporters of the continuing occupation of Iraq should be forced to answer that question in light of the following:
Granted, the cost estimates are squishy and controversial, partly because the $12.5 billion a month that we’re now paying for Iraq is only a down payment. We’ll still be making disability payments to Iraq war veterans 50 years from now.
Professor Stiglitz calculates in a new book, written with Linda Bilmes of Harvard University, that the total costs, including the long-term bills we’re incurring, amount to about $25 billion a month. That’s $330 a month for a family of four.
A Congressional study by the Joint Economic Committee found that the sums spent on the Iraq war each day could enroll an additional 58,000 children in Head Start or give Pell Grants to 153,000 students to attend college. Or if we’re sure we want to invest in security, then a day’s Iraq spending would finance another 11,000 border patrol agents or 9,000 police officers.
Imagine the possibilities. We could hire more police and border patrol agents, expand Head Start and rehabilitate America’s image in the world by underwriting a global drive to slash maternal mortality, eradicate malaria and deworm every child in Africa.
All that would consume less than one month’s spending on the Iraq war.
Moreover, the Bush administration has financed this war in a way that undermines our national security — by borrowing. Forty percent of the increased debt will be held by China and other foreign countries.
“This is the first major war in American history where all the additional cost was paid for by borrowing,” Mr. Hormats notes. If the war backers believe that the Iraq war is so essential, then they should be willing to pay for it partly with taxes rather than charging it. (emphasis added)
One way or another, now or later, we’ll have to pay the bill. Professor Stiglitz calculates that the eventual total cost of the war will be about $3 trillion. For a family of five like mine, that amounts to a bill of almost $50,000.
Everyone is abuzz about the NY Times McCain philandering/ethics story but for the wrong reasons. The most troubling aspect of this story is its timing as the Times sat on the story since before the Iowa caucuses. Why run it now a day after the Wisconsin primary and once John McCain has all but wrapped up the GOP nomination?
The answer is what happened in the Wisconsin primary -- that Barack Obama creamed Hillary Clinton and all but assured himself the Democratic nomination for the general election. This was and is horrible news for John McCain and Republican hopes for recapturing the White House in November. As I blogged about here and here, Barack Obama matches up far better than Hillary Clinton against John McCain. This is why we recently found everyone from President Bush to Fox “News'” jumping on the Hillary bandwagon while simultaneously attacking Obama at every opportunity.
Once Obama essentially wrapped up the nomination last night, it became abundantly clear that Republicans needed a Plan D (Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson representing Plans A and B to the McCain Plan C). That Republicans are so willing to throw McCain under the bus is hardly surprising considering he fell into the nomination based more on his supposed opponent (Hillary) and the failure of the other Republican presidential hopefuls rather than based on anything he brought to the table. Once coroneted, McCain still failed to win the hearts of the hardcore CPAC haters or the evangelical base and he continues to struggle against Mike Huckabee despite a full-court press by the GOP establishment.
Clearly the Republican elite saw the Wisconsin results as the last straw. They know that McCain cannot beat Obama no matter how much they rely on the Southern Strategy and stealing elections (which need to be relatively close). The fact is that there is not one significant area where McCain is superior to Obama:
Old vs. Young
Old vs. New
Old vs. Good looking
Anti-hope vs. Hope
Plain spoken vs. Articulate
Uninspiring vs. Inspiring
Another 100 years in Iraq vs. Against the war from the start
Terrible fundraiser vs. Great fundraiser
Lousy campaigner vs. Crazy good campaigner
So while we are going to hear conservative talk radio and Fox “News” rail against the bias of the New York Times in the coming days, it would be wise to withhold judgment until the newspaper clarifies why it held the story until now. Did a GOP insider or a former McCain underling finally corroborate parts of the story? If so, it's safe to assume that those orders came from Republican higher-ups since it would otherwise be career suicide.
And if that is the case, just what is Plan E? Jeb? Cheney? Romney? Newt? Perhaps only Bush's Brain knows...
The NY Times calls for the firing of John Tanner, the chief of the Justice Department's voting section, because of the “offensive” and “bigoted” comments he made at the National Latino Congreso which I captured on video and posted at The Brad Blog:
A House Judiciary subcommittee was the site of a sad spectacle the other day: John Tanner, who heads the Justice Department’s voting section, trying to explain offensive, bigoted comments he made about minority voters. It was a shameful moment that crystallized the need for immediate steps to fight for the rights that Mr. Tanner has been working so hard to undermine.
The administration should, of course, fire Mr. Tanner. Congress should pass a bill to criminalize deceptive campaign practices. And it should reject a pending nominee to the Federal Election Commission, Hans von Spakovsky.
The Justice Department has a long history of protecting the voting rights of minorities. In the Bush administration, the department’s voting rights section has been taken over by ideologues most interested in denying the ballot to minorities, poor people and other groups likely to vote Democratic.
Fox 'News' admits to propaganda! Maybe the mouthpiece of the right wing propaganda machine felt compelled to come clean after Ann Coulter recently outed the company.
I have a new respect for Overstock CEO Patrick M. Byrne:
In all fairness I should exclude a small number of the Wall Street financial media from the charge of being hand-puppets for financial elites. Barron's is nothing but marketing literature for about 8 hedge funds, the Wall Street Journal is to Wall Street as Sports Illustrated is to sports, Fortune is People Magazine for capitalists, and The New York Post is for people who move their lips when they read People. But the same New York Times which employs Establishment-defending hacks like Floyd Norris and Joe Nocera also employs Gretchen Morgenson, who has integrity. Forbes reporters doing highly-credible jobs on these and related issues include Liz Moyer and Nathan Vardi, while Bloomberg has explored it through the superb investigative stories of Bob Drummond, and broadcast a shocking 25 minute Bloomberg Special Report by Gary Matsumoto. In addition, PBS gave fair treatment to Aguirre. In the same vein, I believe there are honest SEC Commissions (e.g., Cox and Atkins), and that the rank-and-file of the SEC are straight-shooters as well: it is the upper echelons that have lost track of for whom they work. In short, these systems are not monolithic.
Once upon a time, it was easy to be a GOP propagandist.
Bill O'Reilly Equates DailyKos with Nazis and KKK
Up until the mid-1990s, Republicans could spew out lies all day long and rarely had to worry about any watchdogs holding them accountable. Oh sure, there were a few obscure leftist print publications here and there, but they had tiny circulations and were often difficult to come by.
Back then, the GOP propagandists certainly didn't have to worry about the corporate mainstream media keeping them honest. Indeed, the likes of CNN, The Wall Street Journal, and even The New York Times were quite happy to carry the GOP's water.
Bill O'Reilly attacks DailyKos again
With the dawn of the Web, it began to dawn on the GOP propagandists that they were no longer able to spew out lies without being challenged.
Suddenly, anyone could set up a Web site for relatively little cost and effort and instantly have a potential worldwide audience.
GOP propagandists like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly soon discovered, to their horror, that they could no longer peddle their daily lies and bullshit and have no one to challenge them.
GORE VIDAL: “It's when the news starts to break, how two presidential elections, 2000 - 2004, were stolen and the New York Times would not review the book written about it by Congressmen Conyers, nor Washington Post, nor Wall Street Journal -- the great instruments of news were silent. Well, they're saying 'we don't give a damn about the United States.'”
I am dumb. I thought that the 2006 election was a make it or break it election for the country. If the Democrats could not manage to win the House and God willing, the Senate, it would surely have been the nail in the coffin for the Republic. With the Republican led Congress refusing to perform its Constitutional duty of oversight and Republican partisans in the Supreme Court, it would be impossible to stop the criminal Bush administration from completing its goal of permanent Republican rule. But, lo and behold, the stars aligned perfectly, Democrats won both houses, and I began to believe in miracles again.
And I was a fool. That is, Harry and Nancy and the rest of the Congressional Democrats played me for a fool. They told us they would lead us out of Iraq and instead we got a “Surge”. It wasn't their fault, they cried, because they didn't have enough votes to override a presidential veto. But what good was the election victory if Democrats remained impotent? At least the Democrats were not the evil Republicans, I consoled myself, who were destroying the Constitution by advocating torture, suspending the Writ of Habeas Corpus and attempting to subvert our democracy.
I was a fool. Here we are more than a half year after Democrats took control of Congress and we still torture, Habeas Corpus has not been reinstated and the White House continues to lie and obstruct Congressional efforts to investigate the US attorney scandal which, ultimately, is about stealing elections. Seriously, how is it possible that Habeas Corpus has not been restored after all this time? Yeah, I know, it's because Democrats don't have a veto proof majority. Thankfully, we were still better off with Dems than Republicans.
A fool, I was. Then yesterday I read the following headline in the NY Times, “Democrats Scrambling to Expand Eavesdropping” and I felt as if I had the wind knocked out of me. It was one thing to claim that the President and slim majorities prevented Democrats from ending the war and restoring our Constitutional rights and quite another to conspire with Bush to take away our rights. This was disgraceful and went beyond the pale.
According to James Risen, without whom we might not know about illegal spying on Americans by the Bush administration, “Democrats appear to be worried that if they block such legislation, the White House will depict them as being weak on terrorism.” News flash, by capitulating on this issue Democrats will insure that those worries are realized.
Political weakness means not being able to get things done. When Democrats hold a majority in both Houses and cannot start a troop withdrawal from Iraq, stop a surge, restore Habeas Corpus, prevent torture and stop the government from spying on Americans, they are the definition of weak. Meanwhile, George W. Bush is a lame duck president, who is universally despised with approval ratings worse than Nixon's, whose minority party barely supports him and yet, he can seemingly get Democrats to agree to allow the most untrustworthy administration ever to spy on Americans without a warrant.
Believe it or not, it's far worse for Democrats than it appears. Because not only are the Democrats proving themselves impotent, but they are empowering a president who has shown nothing but contempt for Congress. See video below for a couple examples of this contempt:
To summarize, the Bush administration stonewalls Congress at every turn. It claims executive privilege for everyone and anyone and even in the case of a deceased soldier. The president refuses to replace the nation's chief law enforcement official who has repeatedly lied to Congress. The White House impedes Congressional attempts at oversight by refusing to turn over documents and emails necessary to investigations. And Bush has literally made an end run around Congress by way of Presidential signing statements.
And despite it all Democrats are willing to work with the President? That is insane! Have you no self-respect? How many times will you let someone punch you in the face until you say enough? Well, I have finally reached that point and I am saying enough. I will no longer play the fool. And I will no longer support the Democratic party until they start acting like the majority and representing their party. And that begins with telling the president to fuck off when it comes to spying on Americans.
And if Harry and Nancy continue to capitulate to this lawless president you can damn well bet that Democrats and progressives will be telling them to fuck off too in November 2008.
David Brooks is a propagandist and a liar and a big one at that. He is no different than anyone at Fox 'News' or Rush or Beck. Well, that is not exactly true. Because he is soft-spoken, dresses the nerd and doesn't spout the venom of a Coulter or Malkin, he is actually considered by many a real, level-headed, fair journalist. And that is a joke. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
So bad is Brooks that his regular spot on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer undermines the programs credibility. Same goes for Time Russert who gives Brooks a fairly regular platform. And one would have thought that the NY Times would have fired the guy after his 6,233,103 distortion, made up fact and outright lie. He is a corporate whore and a Republican apologist and nothing more. Nothing. But, I clearly have more problems with Brooks' columns and here and here than the Times editors. And I can't help but wonder why a young black journalist was fired for making up facts in a number of stories but Brooks keeps his job despite doing the same in EVERY column?
Is it because Brooks writes Op-Ed's and Jason Blair was in the news department? If so, does that mean that Opinion writers are not beholden to any set of facts or universal truths and are free to lie and generally write fiction? Because if this is the case, shouldn't the paper of record be obligated to include a fiction warning or something along side every Op-Ed? If the Times desires to be better than that, then why does it keep paying David Brooks who the editors must know is incompatible with minimal journalistic standards and integrity?
For more proof of everything above see Dean Baker's fact check of Brooks' latest atrocity here:
1) Brooks says “after a lag, average wages are rising sharply. Real average wages rose by 2 percent in 2006, the second fastest rise in 30 years.” The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the average hourly wage is 1.2 percent higher than its year ago level and still below its December 2002 level. That's almost five years of zero growth. In the late 90s, real wages were growing 1.6 percent annually.
6) He tells readers that “inequality is also rising in part because people up the income scale work longer hours.” Actually, most of the economists I know focus on the increasing inequality in hourly earnings, as in pay per hour, not total pay (see EPI's State of Working America).
8) “Globalization boosts each American household’s income by about $10,000 a year.” What does this mean? Is this compared to a world in which we can't get coffee from Brazil or oil from the Middle East, but rather have a completely autarkic economy?
It will be great when the proponents of the current trade agenda stop arguing against straw men in making their case. No one is advocating autarky.
If only eight large pieces of B.S. in one short column were the exception and not the rule for Brooks. If only. But what is worse than all the lies is that Brooks cherry picks facts and manipulates evidence to paint a picture he knows to be false. In other words, he knowingly and intentionally misleads his readers. And that is the ultimate sin of a journalist. Not to mention the job description of a propagandist.
Maureen Dowd has an interesting Op-Ed today about how many of her Republican family members are finally disgusted with the Bush administration and some are even ready to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate (as long as it's not Hillary). Here's a part of the column about Dowd's sister:
“W.’s loyalty to Cheney has hurt his presidency,” she says sadly. “When Cheney picked himself as vice president, W. should have said, ‘Bug off.’ He could have made his own banquet instead of choosing leftovers. If only he had dialed his father or listened to Powell instead of Cheney and Rumsfeld on Iraq. Not only has W. brought himself down, he’s brought down John McCain, who I wanted to support but can’t because of the war.
”I grew up in the shadow of Walter Reed and was used to seeing servicemen without limbs. But recently after watching a special on soldiers coming home from Iraq with brain injuries, I picked up a picture of my four nephews and I know how I would feel if they had fought in Iraq and came home without limbs or in body bags.
“We are spending billions on this war, and yet veterans and their children are practically getting nothing. I’m no longer a Republican. I’m an American, and I will cast my vote for the person I believe will start the process to get out of Iraq — unless, of course, it’s Hillary.”
Well, better late than never, right? Except, here's the catch which comes by way of the last sentence in Dowd's piece: “My sister still has her picture of W. up. But Cheney is face down in the laundry room.”
WTF people! Wake the F up. Hello disconnect. This just boggles the mind but it is also typical of diehard Republicans. Many will admit major screw ups, incompetence, criminality, the death of innocents and that our country is far worse off today than the day Bush took office. But, at the same time, they keep Bush's picture up on the wall and call you crazy if you even whisper the word impeachment.
Crazy is the right word but it's used in the wrong context. Crazy indeed.
