Lying must be a reflexive action

With these people...

Oregon Republican candidate Mike Erickson:

Congressional candidate Mike Erickson took a six-day visit to Cuba in 2004 that he called a "humanitarian trip" to aid disabled Cubans oppressed by Fidel Castro, but the trip was instead a vacation that included bars, Havana cigars and the Tropicana nightclub.

Erickson said he visited a medical center, met with doctors and attended a presentation on the plight of the disabled. But travel documents obtained by The Oregonian, others who accompanied Erickson and representatives of U.S. and Cuban charities tell a different story.

For example, the medical center Erickson said he visited does not exist.

Mary Matalin tries to step away from the shit splatter of Corsi's idiotic fictional book:

Republican strategist Mary Matalin, head of Threshold Editions, which published Jerome Corsi's falsehood-laden book The Obama Nation, reportedly wrote in an email to Slate.com's Timothy Noah that her role at Threshold is "more akin to a consultant relative to the issue of potential interest among political readers." But according to her own website, Matalin "runs Threshold, a new conservative publishing imprint at Simon & Schuster".

Yet then there are those who cannot help but search out and tell the truth.

Thank you, Helen Thomas.

I have the power!!

(He-Man reference to those who weren't forced to watch tv with your children...)



The bloggers are the reason our country is so polarized and divided. Not the Bush administration with its mangling of the Constitution and unnecessary wars. Gee... I feel so emboldened!

Think Progress:

At a National Press Club event earlier this week, NBC White House correspondent David Gregory argued that, because is so much polarization in politics today, “people try to divine or assign our motives” for asking certain questions at the White House press briefings. When Helen Thomas asked Gregory what was responsible for the polarization, Gregory answered:

I think it’s because of the internet largely. The polarized atmosphere in the internet and blogs and whatnot have been a major contributor to that.

I think the neocons had every thing lined up for Bush's thousand year reich but hadn't planned for the power of the internet. Damn those bloggers and their pajamas!

Update 12/4: Richard Power of Words of Power has a fantastic list of what bloggers have done in recent history. I stand amazed at our evil might!

Green light, red light

Lights are on but nobody's home. Helen Thomas tries to get Dana Perino to answer a question:

Q Would the President seek an explicit green light from Congress if he intended to bomb or attack Iran, or does he think he has that right?

MS. PERINO: Well, Helen, there is no intention of bombing Iran. We are on a diplomatic track. We are working with our partners, the U.N. Security Council. We have provided them, the Iranians, a road map to get to a civil nuclear program. They have walked away from that. We are hoping that they'll come back. We are both working with our U.N. Security Council partners as well as pursuing sanctions on our own, and there is not an intention to bomb Iran, as you said.

Q Does the President think he has the right to do it without going through Congress?

MS. PERINO: That is -- it's a hypothetical situation, Helen. I'm not going to answer it.

Q It's not hypothetical. It's concrete.

MS. PERINO: Go ahead. Sarah.

Why does the White House even have a press room?

Helen Thomas

As interviewed by Chicago Dyke at Corrente: (Via Bryan at Why Now?)

Asked about her famous quote that Bush is the “worst president in history,” she reminded me that she said so in 2002. She says that while he could have improved, he didn’t and hasn’t yet, and I don’t think she’s holding her breath waiting for that to change. Clearly the issue that makes Ms. Thomas the most emotional and forceful in her assertion about the failures of this administration is the war. She called it “unconscionable” and a “quagmire.” She seemed particularly irked that the rationale for the war keeps changing, and that to this day it’s hard to get a consistent answer from members of the administration, “you ask five people and you get five different reasons,” she notes with no small feeling.
I can understand why this would be such an infuriating reality for someone who has such impeccable credentials as a journalist and who knows how to talk to politicians; it’s beyond insulting.

Ms. Thomas doesn’t think there is any good reason for the war. “People are killing, and dying, for what?” Asked why she thinks the American people have accepted this war for so long, she said that 9/11, and the fear and uncertainty it engendered, kept people behind the war effort far longer than would’ve been possible otherwise. “Fear is a powerful weapon,” she relates, and she notes how strong the urge is to support the president after an attack. She said that such fear caused people to accept not only the war, but also government intrusions on privacy, and the shifting rationale for the war.

[snip]

Ms. Thomas had two words to answer my question, ‘what is the biggest problem facing good government today?’ “Lousy leadership.” The follow up question about what is different today compared to when she first entered the business was hardly more reassuring. Back then, and unlike today, people understood the true meaning of public service, and followed in the tradition of Lincoln. People in previous governments have wanted to “make a contribution” and help “the sick, the poor, those without shelter” and had concern for issues like fairness and health care. She stressed that this isn’t found in the Beltway today, and she blames much of our current situation on Reagan, “when all this began.”