Gas stoves and M&Ms!

 

You can interrupt a Democratic president because....

It shows you're a REAL journalist guy and anyway Republican preznits don't need the aggravation? They can't threaten you with Cheney's secret assassination squad? Republican preznits are special?

Even with the interruptions or non, I can sure tell who actually is presidential, has a grasp of all the facts and nuances, can complete complex sentences, and use big words. And not get testy being interviewed by an asshole. (Or interviewing an asshole.)

God... just listening to Georgie's excuses is nauseating... all of them WRONG. His condescending style of speech, his simplistic view of the world, his platitudes, his sound bites.... I am so glad this man is off the world stage.

Just keep him off.

*edited for stupid grammar.

Why are they so afraid of Obama

Speaking on television to the nation, talking to the press, talking to students, talking to heads of state?

Could it possibly be because the president is an amazing orator, especially after eight years of Georgie? That Obama can be charming and persuasive? That he uses facts and logic?

Is this why they bleat about overexposure?

I don't see any weakness...

I see a lot of political muscle.

Thank god.

Standing up to bullies

In Baghdad:

BAGHDAD, Sept. 17 -- The Iraqi government on Monday said it had revoked the license of Blackwater USA, an American security company involved in a shootout in Baghdad that killed at least nine people, raising questions over which nation should regulate tens of thousands of civilian hired guns operating in Iraq.

The Iraqi government's announcement was its most public assertion to date of its right to take action against foreign security companies when a suspected crime has been committed.

In Canada:

I asked some other bystanders if they knew what had happened. Two men, who said they had witnessed the whole thing, told me that she had been walking down the street smoking a cigarette. A cruiser drove past, stopped, and an officer got out and approached her. She ran. The police caught her. She resisted. She was a tiny little thing, they said, but she put up a helluva fight. It took three officers to bring her down.

“And the big cop, he slammed her face-down into the sidewalk just like she was a huge man,” said one of the men.

Then, he said, they cuffed her and went to put her in the van. She was part-way in when suddenly she just collapsed. Unconscious. She was bleeding from the head. That’s roughly when I came along.

(found via JJ of Unrepentant Old Hippie)

In school:

First, I had to throw a kid out of the benchmark tests for screaming at me. She told me to go ahead and call her mother because "my mother hates you."

The rest of the testing went well.

6th period the principal came in to "help" and it made things worse. They were out of control. Totally wrecked my plans.

7th was ok.

8th was 8th and then came the brawl...

You can hear it start, and my kids went for the door. I got there first. Only 2 got past me - the rest bounced off me. Kareem (the dumb fuck) tried to get out the door by crawling between my legs.

I felt myself start to go - so I went down hard right on his ribs - all 225 of Blodge. That left me in control of Kareem, left the door blocked, and made sure I was balanced and wouldn't fall. The VP came by and said what the hell happened? I told him. Kareem said ow.

To the media who drools for a scandal:

No president (or president-elect) can operate in a fish-bowl. On the other hand, when it comes to scandals, there is an exception and a need for extraordinary transparency. Thus, if you truly want to change the scandal paradigm, you should operate in a fish-bowl to show you have absolutely nothing to hide. Accordingly, I offer this suggestion for your consideration: Email all your past and present staff, all designated appointees, and any others with whom you have an informal relationship if they could have had contact with Blagojevich about your senate seat, and request they all report to you any and all such information that in any manner relates to the appointment to fill your senate seat. Instruct everyone to err on the side of too much information. In addition, tell everyone than when responding to you that they should also post their responses at your website to make them public. In short, you should insist that the public be told everything that you are told, and you should make it all available at you website - www.change.gov. Such action by you would forever change the standards of presidents in dealing with potential presidential scandals and nip this one before it can cause any more problems for your new administration. This would be a change everyone could believe in.

In their homes...

If a candidate is running an ugly campaign

It reflects his desire to run an ugly campaign. John McCain is not an honorable man forced to do what he doesn't want to do. That would indicate a) he's not even able to control his own staff and campaign aides or b) he has no clue what is being done in his name or even worse 3) he's totally clueless because of the onset of senility.

John McCain clearly knows what he is doing. He is playing both sides and playing them for all they're worth.

John McCain may have been at one time honorable. He is no longer.

Glenn Greenwald:

Time's Ana Marie Cox, in a Bloggingheads discussion with Ann Althouse, does an excellent job of expressing what is still, amazingly enough, the prevailing media view of John McCain: namely, that this deeply honorable and principled man is vehemently opposed to running an ugly, dirty campaign against Barack Obama, and that is happening despite McCain's deep opposition to such campaigns and the way it profoundly violates his code of honor.

[snip]

The national press corps continues to revere John McCain despite what is widely acknowledged to be the toxic and ugly campaign he's running because they still think that this campaign is being run despite McCain's character and wishes, not because of them. The idea that someone should be judged by their actual conduct never seems to occur to them, nor do they accept what ought to be the rather self-evident proposition that someone who repeatedly does dishonorable things is, by definition, dishonorable. By their fruits ye shall know them. Or, as former/long-time McCain lover Andrew Sullivan put it:

I'm afraid that [Atlantic Editor] Jim [Fallows] is dealing with what we're all dealing with: the fact that the myth we had of McCain is, in fact, a lie. The real McCain - dishonest, dishonorable and despicable - is now in plain sight. To say I'm disillusioned would be an understatement. The last six weeks have shown us all something we'd rather never have found out. But we can't ignore it now, can we?

Some obviously can -- and are.

Exactly. People in the media would come away from an interview with George Bush declaring he was really a nice guy. As if they couldn't see that both Bush and McCain are ultimate professionals who know how to finesse the media. We who stand back and watch are stunned that the media falls for this trick every single damn time. Cox is just the latest one to fall.

What really happened

Was what 99% of the media was not reporting. McClatchy reporters respond to McClellan's book:

Enough self-aggrandizing trumpet-blowing. OK, Scott, What Happened?

Here's what happened, based entirely on our own reporting and publicly available documents:

* The Bush administration was gunning for Iraq within days of the 9/11 attacks, dispatching a former CIA director, on a flight authorized by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, to find evidence for a bizarre theory that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the first World Trade Center attack in 1993. (Note: See also Richard Clarke and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill on this point).

* Bush decided by February 2002, at the latest, that he was going to remove Saddam by hook or by crook. (Yes, we reported that at the time).

* White House officials, led by Dick Cheney, began making the case for war in August 2002, in speeches and reports that not only were wrong, but also went well beyond what the available intelligence said at that time, and contained outright fantasies and falsehoods. Indeed, some of that material was never vetted with the intelligence agencies before it was peddled to the public.

* Dissenters, or even those who voiced worry about where the policy was going, were ignored, excluded or punished. (Note: See Gen. Eric Shinseki, Paul O'Neill, Joseph Wilson and all of the State Department 's Arab specialists and much of its intelligence bureau).

* The Bush administration didn't even want to produce the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs that's justly received so much criticism since. The White House thought it was unneeded. It actually was demanded by Congress and slapped together in a matter of weeks before the congressional votes to authorize war on Iraq.

* The October 2002 NIE was flawed, no doubt. But it contained dissents questioning the extent of Saddam's WMD programs, dissents that were buried in the report. Doubts and dissents were then stripped from the publicly released, unclassified version of the NIE.

* The core of the administration's case for war was not just that Saddam was developing WMDs, but also that, unchecked, he might give them to terrorists to attack the United States. Remember smoking guns and mushroom clouds? Inconveniently, the CIA had determined just the opposite: Saddam would attack the United States only if he concluded a U.S. attack on him was unavoidable. He'd give WMD to Islamist terrorists only "as a last chance to exact revenge."

* The Bush administration relied heavily on an Iraqi exile, Ahmed Chalabi, who had been found to be untrustworthy by the State Department and the CIA. Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress were given millions, and produced "defectors" whose tales of WMD sites and terrorist training were false, fanciful and bogus. But the information was fed directly to senior officials and included in official White House documents.

* The same INC-supplied "intelligence" used in the White House propaganda effort (you got that bit right, Scott) also was fed to dozens of U.S. and foreign news organizations.

* It all culminated in a speech by Secretary of State Colin Powell to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003 making the case against Saddam. Virtually every major allegation Powell made turned out later to be wrong. It would have been even worse had not Powell and his team thrown out even more shaky "intelligence" that Cheney's office repeatedly tried to stuff into the speech.

* The Bush administration tried to link Saddam to al Qaida and, by implication, to the 9/11 attacks. Officials repeatedly pushed the CIA for information on such links, and a separate intel shopwas set up under Defense Under Secretary Douglas Feith to find "proof" of such ties. Neither the CIA nor anyone else ever found anything resembling an operational relationship between Saddam and al Qaida.

* An exhaustive review of Saddam Hussein's regime's own documents, released in March 2008, found no operational relationship between Saddam and al Qaida.

* The Bush administration failed to plan for the rebuilding of postwar Iraq, as we were perhaps the first to report. The White House ignored stacks of intelligence reports, some now available in partially unclassified form, warning before the war about the possibilities for insurgency, ethnic warfare, social chaos and the like.

Read the report for the links and for what real journalism should look like. Thank you, Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay.

Rook of Rook's Rant talks about the savaging of McClellan by both sides.

Spocko of Spocko's Brain also shows sympathy for McClellan's dilemma.

Digby speaks.

Jamison Foser of Media Matters.

Dan Froomkin.

emptywheel.

Glenn Greenwald:

One of the most amazing aspects of this week has been watching network media stars feign shock over the fact that anyone could suggest that they were "deferential, complicit enablers" of the Bush march to war. It's as though they never heard anyone ever suggest such a thing until George Bush's own Press Secretary mocked them for being meek, uncritical disseminators of government propaganda, and now -- they seem to want to convey -- they're just so confused and astonished that anyone could possibly think that about them.

What happened and then..

What actually happened.

Did you in the media think we didn't notice what you were doing?

Did you think we were impressed by your embarrassingly softball questions to anyone in the Bush administration when we knew what questions real reporters would ask; what we desperately wanted you to ask? Did you think we would forget what real journalists and real news looked like when we watched you become simple stenographers? Did you realize how many readers, watchers, customers turned their backs on your obedient spewing of the daily White House talking points and found real news on the internet?

We did notice. From the beginning. From the very start, the stench of catapulted propaganda made the media reek. We could see it, smell it.

Did you think we were stupid? Did you think we wouldn't mind being shoved off the air, mocked off the newspapers, scorned in the public square and literally told to shut up for daring to even question the motives of the Bush administration? Did you really think you could make your own irresistible reality and we would buy into it?

We didn't. Not once.

We could see all the wires, red herrings, curtains with small egos behind them. We could hear every subtle shift in the explanations, reasons, and increasingly bizarre excuses. We could hear every tone, vowel emphasis, verb choice. It exposed all your actions, intentions, projections. We knew you were lying.

We know this has been going on for a long time, but right now we're addressing George Bush's two horribly long terms of office. Where countries fell because of your unquestioning support of the worst administration ever. Where people were tortured, families separated, soldiers died because you decided to buy into what Bush was selling. Where land was poisoned, allies insulted, treaties broken because you asked no questions but assured us this was okay. Where people drowned, species were lost, toxic toys were played with as you assured us this was the way to do business.

You may be just waking up from the delirious fog that was piped into Bush's bubble, but we've been watching from the outside. You might want to tell us you didn't know, you weren't in the loop, you weren't there, but we know you were. You lied to us.

That's what happened.

And we won't forget.

crossposted at American Street

Just what is wrong with John McCain's health?

That he pulls a 'now you see it, now you don't' Rovian style stunt? The man is 72 years old, for god's sakes! There will be things clearly going wrong with him and all this stupidity does is focus even more closely on him: (my bold)

After a long delay, John McCain finally allowed a hand-picked group of journalists very limited access to a small portion of his medical records. The campaign is spinning the event as a release, but it's no such thing. McCain hosting a game of telephone and congratulating himself for transparency.

The LA Times got the real story behind the so-called release: all the strings attached. Campaign staffers told the paper that the chosen reporters would be given only three hours to view about 400 pages of documents from 2000 to 2008. They wouldn't even allowed to make photocopies for their own reference, or to show to experts.

Curiously, this year's crop of journalists were not given access to the records that McCain released to an equally select group during his last presidential bid. The last batch of records covered McCain's lifetime medical history through 1999.

The favored news outlets are the Washington Post, the Arizona Republic, Bloomberg, Reuters, and the Associated Press. All other media will have to make due with a pool report generated by the elect, a 90-minute conference call with McCain's doctors and campaign-produced summaries to be posted online.

McCain let a group of hand picked lay-people view an incomplete set of medical records for a ridiculously short period of time. Their access was so limited as to render their opinions worthless.

This so-called release was a clever bit of media manipulation. The campaign made its hand-picked journos complicit in the records charade. Friendly media got a scoop. With that scoop came a vested interest in downplaying the ridiculous restrictions placed on them. If the public understood the conditions under which their were reporting, their coverage wouldn't seem impressive at all.

Does he have Alzheimer's? He's getting kinda confused. Did the few reporters get to that page? Did they call any recognizable disease by another more obscure name so they can say they told us? How will we know? Just how many cancers have they found in him? Can we ever actually know?

This is stupid. Why on earth would anyone vote for someone who clearly has something to hide? Or, maybe, McCain can let the reporters actually do their job and assure the American people that McCain is really and truly healthy rather than just guessing.