HOW COME THESE GUYS STILL HAVE A JOB?

By "these guys," I mean Wall Street stock analysts. Most of them underperform market indices and that's been true for a while. The Big Picture finds this report from Bloomberg about a narrow slice of analysts, the ones who follow the stocks of Brokers and Dealers. Investors who followed their advice lost 17% in the last year, twice the decline of the S&P 500. Of the 38 analysts tracked, 31 produced losses, a loss rate of 81.6%!!!

TIME TO RE-DEFINE "CORE INFLATION"?

So-called "core inflation" excluded food and energy costs because they are so volatile. It's seems clear now that energy costs will only keep rising and the same appears to be true for food costs.

When will food prices stop rising? No time soon, experts say
By John Yaukey, Gannett News Service
USA Today

...the cost of putting a meal on the table or a beer on the bar is likely to remain high for years, economists say.

Perhaps most worrisome, some leading causes of the recent price increases show no signs of receding, prompting some economists to warn of "the end of cheap food."

The Agriculture Department expects U.S. food prices to rise beyond inflation for the next few years.

"The question now is the rate of the increase," said Ephriam Leibtag, an economist with the department's Economic Research Service.

GREAT! A DUMMY'S PUPPET CALLING SOMEONE ELSE IGNORANT

The puppet is McCain's economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin and in an interview on Bloomberg TV, he said Pres. Fredo didn't know much about economics. In FatsWorld, this comment will upset all the people (?) who still think Bush is a great guy.

McCain Aide Says Bush Knows Little About Economy (Update1)
By Matthew Benjamin

June 6 (Bloomberg) -- George W. Bush's policies on the economy, other than on taxes, have been a failure, suggested John McCain's top economic policy adviser.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin said the only similarity between McCain's economic plan and Bush's is a commitment to keep taxes low.

``Sadly, it seems that is all President Bush understood in the economy,'' Holtz-Eakin said in an interview to be broadcast this weekend on Bloomberg Television's ``Conversations with Judy Woodruff.''

DAVID BRODER OF THE WASHINGTON POST IS A HIGHLY-PAID WHORE

(Via Atrios)

Broder is often referred to as "The Dean" of Beltway pundits and that's some indication of the status he holds in The Village. His moral status is more like juvenile delinquent, however, and Glenn Greenwald makes this very clear in his examination of Broder's attitude toward war lies and sex lies. Despite the overwhelming evidence that impeachment proceedings against the war criminals in the WH are justified, Broder sees things differently:

You'll have to forgive me, but I am reluctant to see every big policy dispute turned into a criminal or impeachable affair. There needs to be accountability but there also needs to be proportionality. This country is engaged in two wars and has serious, serious domestic problems. To stop everything and attempt to impeach and remove a president who has less than a year to serve would not strike me as the best use of our energy. And for what? So Dick Cheney can be president?

Violations of the Constitution are not mere policy disputes and to think otherwise shows an incredible lack of judgment. Broder's assertion that everything would stop during the impeachment proceedings is naive and self-serving. Broder's claim amounts to using national security as a reason not to enforce the Rule of Law.

MEANWHILE, BACK IN PAKISTAN...

The war on terror isn't going so well in Pakistan's tribal territories and according to McClatchy, the extremists have increased their power in the entire country. The wingnuts are too busy trying to gin up a war with Iran to notice this.

Al Qaida's attack on Danes reveals its grip on Pakistan
By Saeed Shah | McClatchy Newspapers
posted on Thursday, June 5, 2008

Pakistan is currently negotiating peace deals with Taliban extremists based in its northwest tribal territory, a policy that Washington already has criticized. The evidence of al Qaida activity in the heart of the country could further undermine U.S. confidence in Pakistan's new anti-terror approach.

On Thursday, al Qaida took responsibility for an attack on the Danish mission in Pakistan, chillingly warning that the blast will "only be the first drop of rain". The statement praised the efforts of Pakistani jihadists in the operation.

"This (al Qaida claim) means that Pakistan is under great threat. It has to be bloody careful," said Talat Masood, a retired general who is now a security analyst. "For al Qaida, Pakistan is a soft country, anyone can do anything here, the unprofessional way we do our security."

More worrisome than al Qaida's influence in the tribal belt is its network across major cities in Pakistan, experts believe.

There are allegations that sections of Pakistan's extensive intelligence network are sympathetic to the jihadists. ... It is thought that al Qaida has linked up with myriad Pakistan former sectarian groups, such as Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, which have now adopted the ideology of global jihad. These banned groups, and their multiple splinter organizations, have a well-developed network of cells across Pakistan, including in the mega-city of Karachi and the most populous province, Punjab.

I GET TIRED OF WINGERS TELLING ME WHAT I BELIEVE

I was engaged in a discussion thread last night and a conservative seemed surprised that I could and would quote the New Testament. (h/t Nicole at Crooks & Liars) George Will was on Colbert and Dr. Slammy got the video clip and made a partial transcript. According to the transcript, Will made this tired claim:

Conservatives tend to favor freedom and are willing to accept inequalities of outcome from a free market and liberals tend to favor equality of outcome and to sacrifice and to circumscribe freedom in order to get it.

This crap about liberals favoring "equality of outcome" has been alive in Wingnut World for quite some time. I'm not sure who first came up with this but I did find that Milton Friedman referred to liberals this way in his book Free to Choose which was published in 1980. Friedman did not get around to mentioning by name anyone who actually believes this, so I think this is an early example of wingnut propaganda. As Dr. Slammy convincingly argues, there aren't many liberals who favor equality of outcome but you can't convince wingnuts of this fact.

McCAIN IS STILL DELUSIONAL ABOUT IRAQ

McWAR gave an interview to USA Today and he flat out lies about Teh Surge:

"It's very clear that the surge is winning this war," said McCain, whose most recent trip to Iraq was in March.

Even a neo-con war whore knows that Teh Surge is nowhere near as important as the Anbar Awakening and Al Sadr's order to his militia to stand down.

FATS VERSUS McCAIN

Jeffrey Feldman writes on HuffPo that Fats Limbaugh challanged McWAR's manhood and he provided the link. McWAR was in New Orleans and implicitly criticized the way Pres. Fredo handled Katrina. For Fats, that's a terrible thing because it not only resembles the criticism Fredo received from liberals, it also reflects the reality.

Fats then tries to make the point that George Bush not only isn't hated, he's actually liked:

...you're going to find out that George Bush isn't hated. People may disapprove of his job, but they do not dislike him.

The voters on our side are not going to put up with that because he's not disliked, he's not despised, he's not hated. You Republicans that don't have the guts and the courage to separate yourself from what you read in the media and listen to the Democrat candidates say had better realize, this president is not hated, he is not disliked. Big difference in that and being unpopular.

I'm going to tell all of you Republicans, not just Senator McCain, if you think that you can make hay and be reelected by running around trashing your own president, the president of your party, who is far more beloved than Senator McCain is in this party -- he may not be popular nationwide, he may not be popular in these polls, but he is not disliked. He is not considered disloyal. He is not considered somebody who goes against the interests of his own party for his own personal benefit.

The confusion here between personality and performance is part of the GOP campaign style, as Chait pointed out: The GOP can't run on political issues so it has to run on trumped up "character" issues.

ON IRAN, THE WAR WHORES ARE A TINY MINORITY

(h/t Raw Story)


Satyam at ThinkProgress reports that a poll by Public Agenda found that only 7% of Americans favor taking military action against Iran!

POLITICS BEFORE EVERYTHNG

The criminal and immoral Bush regime only invited one person to the legal proceedings against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others charged as masterminds of the 9-11 attacks. That person was Deborah Burlingame, a wingnut who was used to attack the Jersey Girls who called for an independent investigation into 9-11 and has appeared on FAUX News to defend the criminal Bush regime.

From The Raw Story:

For Mohammed's arraignment Thursday before a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, the Pentagon secretly invited only one woman whose brother was a pilot killed in the plane that crashed into the Pentagon in the 2001 attacks. The woman, Debra Burlingame, was un-invited after the New York Daily News revealed she was a "GOP loyalist," who praised President Bush during the 2004 Republican convention and has savaged the 9/11 widows who have questioned the administration's actions.

McWAR THE MAVERICK???

Not so much, really. We know he's backed Bush on torture and wiretapping and now we find that he's even more aligned with Bush than we thought. (h/t Democratic Underground)
Jason Rosenbaum at Progressive Media USA finds a study by Congressional Quarterly that shows McCain is more like McSAME.

According to CQ, Senator John McCain has voted with President Bush 100% of the time in 2008 and 95% of the time in 2007.

MORE ON MR. HIRSH

I noted some of this below but now that I've read the transcript of Hirsh's interview by Cenk Ungyar of The Young Turks, I think we need to read this part:

Michael Hirsh: Well, I'm not sure how. I mean, one of the problems is that the majority of them, the truly prominent members of the punditocrisy if you will, and the top editors were for the war. I mean, the editor of the New York Times, Bill Keller, just before he became editor, wrote an article in Times Magazine called the, you know, the "I Can't Believe I'm a Hawk Club," where he grouped himself with other so-called liberal interventionists who were trying to fit in their support for the Iraq War with their support for the, you know, actions against the Bosnia Slobodan Milosevic in the 90s. And, you know, they went about this as an intellectual exercise all without realizing that the Iraq War, essentially had absolutely nothing to do with the challenge of 9/11, which was the preeminent challenge before us...which has always what's gotten me upset, cause you know, whenever I have taken this position, I've often been accused of being a liberal, a weenie, whatever, when actually I'm a hawk. I've always been a hawk, and as a hawk I wanted vengeance for 9/11 and I wanted justice, which meant getting Bin Laden and Zawahiri getting and making sure they were all very dead. That was the objective. That was the only objective we could have after 9/11. And somehow, all of these reporters of the Iraq War have deafly avoided the fact that Bin Laden and Zawahiri and too many of the Lieutenants are still out there thriving. So that's the argument that I make, and I don't know. I think that the problem is, again, you know, you got Keller, you got the leading editors of the Washington Post, Jim Hoagland, who's a columnist there, Fred Hiatt the editorial page editor, David Remnick of the New Yorker. A lot of the truly preeminent editors of our time were among those who supported the war. So it stands to reason that you're not going to be hearing cries from them for each other to step forward.

FAUX NEWS PEOPLE ARE JUST WEIRD

Ok, Obama and Michelle did a fist bump after he won the nomination. Here's a pic:



MediaMatters let us know how a FAUX News person describes it:

HILL: A fist bump? A pound? A terrorist fist jab? The gesture everyone seems to interpret differently.

ANOTHER SYMPTOM OF THE PROBLEM

It's not only the war whore pundits who need to be held accountable, it's also the war architects. Matt at ThinkProgress provides the video clip and transcript of Richard Clarke on this issue:

I just don’t think we can let these people back into polite society and give them jobs on university boards and corporate boards and just let them pretend that nothing ever happened when there are 4,000 Americans dead and 25,000 Americans grieviously wounded

Unfortunately, the Wingnut Welfare Machine will see that these traitors don't face the consequences of their actions.

HERE'S A SYMPTOM OF THE PROBLEM

The war whore pundits never apologize, never explain and continue to write and go on interview and talk shows. Their books sell well and they are still highly respected. Case in point: Thomas Friedman of the NY Times. (via Atrios)

Cenk Uygur: I think that, you know, one of the things that has not been discussed enough in this McClellan issue is, and these revelations, is the press' role. He said the press is an enabler here, but one thing we have not seen is a lot of mea-culpa from the press.

Michael Hirsh: Absolutely. Absolutely. No, I mean, that's, you know, I was inspired to write that. Because McClellan, I mean of all people Scott McClellan, the human punching bag, a zealous Bush advocate, as you can see now because of this sense of betrayal by his former colleagues in the White House you can hardly believe what he came out and wrote. But, you know, he himself has come and out and said, "You know what, this was a bad idea. This Iraq War was a misconceived strategy." And yes, you have these very prominent gentleman, and sometimes ladies of the press who have not been able to make an equivalent mea-culpa. And I point out that in my case, in my article, you know, I think example number one has got to be Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, who embraced what he called "a war of choice," which, you know, in my view is just the euphemism for a war crime. And he's never been held accountable for it. He continues to go from success to success, and best seller to best seller. And I find that somewhat astonishing. I mean, it's quite clear, it should be by now, that he had no idea what he was talking about.

More of the interview with Hirsh here.

LOOKS LIKE FISCHER IS CORRECT

Israel's Transport Minister warned today that unless Iran stops developing nuclear weapons.

Israeli minister: Israel prepared to attack Iran
By AMY TEIBEL – 2 hours ago

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel will attack Iran if it doesn't abandon its nuclear program, a Cabinet minister hoping to replace embattled Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was quoted Friday as saying.

Shaul Mofaz, a former chief of staff and defense minister, also said Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for Israel's destruction, "will disappear before Israel does," the Yediot Ahronot daily reported.

"If Iran continues its nuclear arms program — we will attack it," he was quoted as saying. "The sanctions aren't effective. There will be no choice but to attack Iran to halt the Iranian nuclear program."

REUTERS adds this:

A spokesman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert did not address Mofaz's comments directly but said that "all options must remain on the table" and said more could be done to put financial pressure on Tehran.

"Israel believes strongly that while the U.N. sanctions are positive, much more needs to be done to pressure the regime in Tehran to cease its aggressive nuclear program," spokesman Mark Regev said.

"We believe the international community should be considering further tangible steps such as embargoing refined petroleum headed for Iran, sanctions against Iranian businessmen traveling abroad, tightening the pressure on Iranian financial institutions and other such steps," he added.

And if you don't think these remarks made much of an effect, AFP connects them to other issues:

Oil surges to new heights after Israeli warning on Iran
3 hours ago

NEW YORK (AFP) — Crude oil prices went on a record-setting surge Friday as fears of a new Middle East conflict were fanned by comments from a top Israeli official about Iran.

New York's main oil futures contract, light sweet crude for July delivery, leapt 10.75 dollars a barrel -- its biggest one-day jump ever -- to close at a record 138.54 dollars.

Compounding the dollar squeeze were remarks by Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz reported Friday by the Yediot Aharonot newspaper, analysts said.

Antoine Halff, an analyst at Newedge Group, said: "The Mofaz comments bring home the point that the dispute over Iran's nuclear program remains unresolved and that the risks of military confrontation are indeed increasing.

"This will likely be a growing source of market volatility until a solution to the dispute is found."

THE WAR WHORE VIRUS

Once released into the world, the consequences are hard to predict. Noriel Roubini provides an opinion piece by Joschka Fischer, former Foreign Minister of Germany, about the likelihood of a pre-emptive attack by Israel on Iran's nuclear facilities.

And sixth, with the approaching end of the Bush presidency and uncertainty about his successor's policy, the window of opportunity for Israeli action is seen as potentially closing.

The last two factors carry special weight. While Israeli military intelligence is on record as saying that Iran is expected to cross the red line on the path to nuclear power between 2010 and 2015 at the earliest, the feeling in Israel is that the political window of opportunity to attack is now, during the last months of Bush's presidency.

The neo-cons will do what they can to make this happen.

THE WAPO ALSO FAILS US

Just like almost all the other major news outlets, the Washington Post failed to report the details of the Rome meetings between DoD neo-cons and Manucher Ghorbanifar.

HE DOESN'T KNOW MUCH ABOUT THE CONSITITUTION, EITHER

John McCain gives us more evidence that he's unfit to be President. He's admitted to not knowing much about economics (and later denied it) and this is an implicit admission that he doesn't know much about our Constitution.

Adviser Says McCain Backs Bush Wiretaps
By CHARLIE SAVAGE
Published: June 6, 2008
NY Times

In a letter posted online by National Review this week, the adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, said Mr. McCain believed that the Constitution gave Mr. Bush the power to authorize the National Security Agency to monitor Americans’ international phone calls and e-mail without warrants, despite a 1978 federal statute that required court oversight of surveillance.

Mr. McCain believes that “neither the administration nor the telecoms need apologize for actions that most people, except for the A.C.L.U. and trial lawyers, understand were constitutional and appropriate in the wake of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001,” Mr. Holtz-Eakin wrote.

The Times lets us know that this is ANOTHER flip-flop by McWAR:

In an interview about his views on the limits of executive power with The Boston Globe six months ago, Mr. McCain strongly suggested that if he became the next commander in chief, he would consider himself obligated to obey a statute restricting what he did in national security matters.

Mr. McCain was asked whether he believed that the president had constitutional power to conduct surveillance on American soil for national security purposes without a warrant, regardless of federal statutes.

He replied: “There are some areas where the statutes don’t apply, such as in the surveillance of overseas communications. Where they do apply, however, I think that presidents have the obligation to obey and enforce laws that are passed by Congress and signed into law by the president, no matter what the situation is.”

Following up, the interviewer asked whether Mr. McCain was saying a statute trumped a president’s powers as commander in chief when it came to a surveillance law. “I don’t think the president has the right to disobey any law,” Mr. McCain replied.

The Times also does a pretty good job outlining McWAR's previous flip-flops:

In February, for example, Mr. McCain voted against limiting the Central Intelligence Agency to the techniques approved in the Army Field Manual on Interrogation, which complies with the Geneva Conventions. Mr. McCain said the C.I.A. needed the flexibility to use other techniques so long as it did not abuse detainees.

GATES ISN'T LIKE BUSH

SECDEF Gates knows that serious problems begin at or near the top and acted accordingly. Bush awarded Bremer, Franks and Tenet the Medal of Freedom.

Gates ousts Air Force leaders in historic shake-up
By ROBERT BURNS – 15 minutes ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — Defense Secretary Robert Gates ousted the Air Force's top military and civilian leaders Thursday, holding them to account in a historic Pentagon shake-up after embarrassing nuclear mix-ups.

Gates announced at a news conference that he had accepted the resignations of Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Michael Moseley and Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne — a highly unusual double firing.

Gates said his decision was based mainly on the damning conclusions of an internal report on the mistaken shipment to Taiwan of four Air Force electrical fuses for ballistic missile warheads. And he linked the underlying causes of that slip-up to another startling incident: the flight last August of a B-52 bomber that was mistakenly armed with six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.

The report drew the stunning conclusion that the Air Force's nuclear standards have been in a long decline, a "problem that has been identified but not effectively addressed for over a decade."

WHY THE NATIONAL JOURNAL IS WRONG ABOUT OBAMA

The National Journal claimed that Obama was "the most liberal" Senator based on his 2007 voting record and the wingnuts have been repeating this result for some time. MediaMatters shows that the study was conceptually flawed:

As Media Matters for America has repeatedly documented (here, here, here, here, here, and here), among the votes Obama cast that contributed to National Journal's "most liberal senator" label were those to implement the 9-11 Commission's homeland security recommendations, provide more children with health insurance, expand federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, and maintain a federal minimum wage. Obama himself, when asked by Politico editor-in-chief John F. Harris about the National Journal's 2007 vote ratings during a February 11 Politico/WJLA-TV interview, criticized the National Journal's methodology by noting that it considered "liberal" his vote for "an office of public integrity that stood outside of the Senate, and outside of Congress, to make sure that you've got an impartial eye on ethics problems inside of Congress."

MediaMatters also found another, more objective study:

Raasch also asserted: "Obama's federal legislative record is too sparse for a long-term ideological stamp although the National Journal labeled him the Senate's most liberal member." Raasch did not note however that, in contrast with a study by political science professors Keith Poole and Jeff Lewis that considered all Senate votes, National Journal uses a more subjective methodology, basing its ranking on "99 key Senate votes, selected by NJ reporters and editors, to place every senator on a liberal-to-conservative scale." In contrast with the National Journal results for 2007, Poole and Lewis' study placed Obama in a tie for 10th most liberal senator in 2007.

McCLATCHY IS MUCH BETTER, AGAIN!

In two articles about the recent Senate Intelligence Committee Majority Report, McClatchy has outperformed most of the news media. In "Senate committee: Bush knew Iraq claims weren't true," Jonathan S. Landay lets us know important and true findings:

Contentions by Bush and Cheney that Saddam had to be removed because he could give terrorists weapons of mass destruction to strike the United States were "contradicted by available intelligence information" that found that the late Iraqi dictator was unlikely to make such transfers, the report said.

Cheney's assertions that Mohammad Atta, the chief Sept. 11 hijacker, had met months before the attack with an Iraqi intelligence officer in the Czech capital, Prague, were also unsubstantiated, the inquiry found.

However, while intelligence reports "generally substantiated" their claims that Iraq had secretly restarted a nuclear weapons program, the committee said, Bush and other officials failed to disclose that the State Department disputed that finding.

The administration's statements also failed to disclose that the Energy Department joined the State Department in rejecting allegations that Iraq had tried to buy uranium in Africa, the report said.

To my current knowledge, none of the big news outlets published these facts and that means they have let us down again.

McClatchy does a better job than the AP in reporting on some of the bogus evidence for invading Iraq. In "Did Iranian agents dupe Pentagon officials?," John Walcott gives us more information about how dysfunctional the war whores were. First, the DoD's own counter-intelligence unit suspected that Iranian agents may have deliberately misled the U.S. about Iraq. Unfortunately,

A top aide to then-secretary of defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, however, shut down the 2003 investigation into the Pentagon officials' activities after only a month, and the Defense Department's top brass never followed up on the investigators' recommendation for a more thorough investigation, the Senate report said.

The top aide was Stephen Cambone, who's now working for a defense contractor. McClatchy also lets us know more about war whore Ledeen:

Those contacts were brokered by an American civilian, Michael Ledeen, a former Pentagon and National Security Council consultant and a leading advocate of invading Iraq and overthrowing Iran's Islamic regime.

And we also get to know more about who participated in the Rome meetngs:

The first meetings with Ghorbanifar, which were disclosed in August 2003 by the Long Island, N.Y., newspaper Newsday, took place in Rome in December 2001. They were attended by two Pentagon Iran experts, Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin; by an Italian military intelligence official, and by Ledeen.

On the Iranian side were Ghorbanifar, an unidentified Iranian exile from Morocco and an alleged Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps defector.

And we get to know what some in the DoD thought of Ledeen's contacts:

When the CIA and the State Department discovered that Ledeen and Ghorbanifar were involved, they opposed any further contact with the two. Ledeen's contacts, the Defense Human Intelligence Service concluded, were "nefarious and unreliable," the Senate committee reported.

And yes, idiot GOP politicians were also involved:

According to the report, Ledeen, however, persisted, presenting then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith with a new 100-day plan to provide, among other things, evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that supposedly had been moved to Iran — Saddam Hussein's archenemy. This time, the report said, Ledeen solicited support from former speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich and from three then-GOP senators, Sam Brownback of Kansas, Jon Kyl of Arizona and Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania.

Rhode and Ghorbanifar met again in Paris in June 2003 with at least the tacit approval of an official in Cheney's office, the Senate report said.

He reported back to officials in the Pentagon and the vice president's office, but "there is no indication that the information collected during the Paris meeting was shared with the Intelligence Community for a determination of potential intelligence value," the report said.

This is exactly the type of reporting we desperately need to combat the war whores.

TWO GOOD EXAMPLES IN ONE

First, the number of comments about The Hill blog's post shows you how many hits you can get if Drudge links to you. Second, you can see what the remaining hard-core, in the bunker GOPers think.

RADIO TIDBITS

I caught a little bit of both Hannity and Mark Levin today and they are both stuck in the past, as David Frum might put it. Both tried to portray Obama as a "radical" or "radical leftist" and that's the same position the blog Red State has taken. This is from an e-mail I received from Erick Erickson:

Last week at RedState we uncovered the news that Barack Obama was endorsed by something called the New Party. Since then we have investigated what the New Party was.

It is abundantly clear that the New Party was a political party designed to push the Democratic Party to the far left.

The radical left Democratic Socialists of America praised the New Party's endorsement of Obama and itself promoted Obama.

Tom Delay goes so far as to claim Obama is a Marxist and Goofball Gasbag Mike Gallagher agreed with him (from Andy Barr at The Hill blog) -

Former House Republican Leader Tom DeLay (Texas) called Barack Obama a "Marxist" on the Mike Gallagher radio show Thursday.

Explaining that Obama clinching the Democratic nomination is a good thing for John McCain, DeLay said Obama's "weakness" is that "nobody knows him."

"And if McCain does not define him as what he is — hey, I have said publicly, and I will again, that unless he proves me wrong, he is a Marxist," DeLay said.

The radio host agreed with DeLay, who is facing money laundering charges, saying Obama is "desperately trying to cover up what seems to be the kind of old school Marxist radical liberal failed ideology."

"Absolutely," DeLay said. "No doubt about it."

Matt at ThinkProgress has the audio clip.

THIS IS A SERIOUS QUESTION

The wingnuts whine all the time about the bias of the TV branch of the MSM but Atrios asks a great question:

Is there a single pundit on the teevee who expresses the opinion of the majority of the country about Iraq? There might be some politicians or political surrogates, but your basic pundit?

Serious question. I can't think of one.

Most Americans (63%) want out of Iraq in 1 or 2 years and certainly disagree with McWAR about having troops there for a century.

MORE ON AIPAC & IRAQ & SPIES FOR ISRAEL

The Senate Intelligence Committee released another report on the pre-war intelligence and in the AP report, I found this interesting tidbit. Note the distance between the initial mention of the

The report's Iran-related information focuses on the series of meetings in Rome over three days in December 2001. The U.S. was fighting in Afghanistan and working on initial planning for the Iraq war.

The undersecretary for policy at the time, Doug Feith, sent two Pentagon employees to the Rome meetings with Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian middleman already dismissed by the CIA as untrustworthy, and two Iranians — one a current member of the security service, the second a former member.

The meetings also involved an unspecified foreign government's intelligence service. Michael Ledeen, a former Pentagon official and an analyst with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, arranged the meeting and attended.

In one meeting, Ghorbanifar pressed for a change of government in Iran and, on a napkin, outlined a plan to do that, saying it could cost as much as $25 million, according to the report.

Ledeen pursued Ghorbanifar's plan through at least May 2003, the report said. In a letter to Feith, he outlined the Iranian request for a $7 million loan, money for a secret intelligence activity and money for an Iranian media outlet in Southern California. In return, Ghorbanifar promised photos of suspected terrorists inside Iran, the locations of purported Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that he claimed had been moved to Iran, and events that would lead to mass insurrections within Iran.

The report said Bush's deputy national security adviser at the time, Stephen Hadley, failed to fully inform then-CIA Director George Tenet and then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage about the meeting. Hadley and the Pentagon were within their rights to conduct the meeting, the report said.

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said Hadley made the appropriate notifications about the meeting.

The report said Defense Department officials refused to allow "potentially useful and actionable intelligence" to be shared with intelligence agencies, even throughout the Defense Intelligence Agency. Then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz briefed the head of the DIA on the Iranian intelligence but would not let him discuss it, the report said.

Ledeen said Thursday that the notion that the meetings were kept secret from U.S. intelligence is "nonsense" and that he had briefed the U.S. ambassador to Italy twice.

"Any time the CIA wanted to find out what was going on all they had to do was ask," he said.

One of the two Pentagon representatives, Larry Franklin, now faces jail time after pleading guilty to espionage-related charges unrelated to the Rome meeting. Franklin told the committee he believed the intelligence gathered at the meetings "saved American lives." He passed word of the alleged hit teams to a special operations forces commander in Afghanistan.

A casual reader may not connect Franklin with AIPAC and probably won't realize that Ledeen is an extreme war whore. And if you relied on the NY Times report, neither Ledeen nor Franklin are mentioned. Worse, the LA Times, Reuters and UPI don't even mention the Rome meetings.

FATS VERSUS FRUM

I love to see Rove's Coalition crumble and part of that crumbling is the bitter disagreements between wingnut gasbags. Here, David Frum in the NRO is also attacking Hannity's "Return to Reagan" meme.

...the themes and issues with which Rush and I grew up are receding deeper and deeper into history...Rush accuses me and the others of seeking to “water conservatism down.” I counter: it’s the learn-nothing, change-nothing approach that Limbaugh is unwisely endorsing that risks exiling conservatism for a generation.

Perhaps Lincoln said it best, "you cannot fool all the people all the time" and time has run out on the GOP's shell game.

A FRANK ADMISSION

Frank Luntz said that the WH would have to personally attack Patrick Fitzgerald if he indicted anyone in the Executive Branch and that's normal procedure for the GOP and has now become an established part of American politics. It's not surprising that a FAUX News clown would make the same comment about Scott McClellan (via Nicole Belle at Crooks & Liars)

FOX & Friends host Gretchen Carlson, who, as a dutiful employee of the White House propaganda arm, continues the tactic of attacking the messenger when the message makes the Bush administration look bad. In this case, she all but threatens former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan.

Scott McClellan better not have any skeletons in his closet, I hope he didn’t do anything that he doesn’t want the world to know about, because we all have and his secrets are going to be coming out.

IT'S EARLY BUT THIS IS STILL GOOD NEWS

What's especially interesting is how well Obama is doing in these GOP House districts. (h/t Steve Benen at Crooks & Liars)

Democratic Poll Sees Wave Coming in U.S. House
Sarah Lueck reports on Congress.
June 3, 2008, 4:16 pm
Wall Street Journal

Democratic pollsters released what they characterized as a “dramatic” survey showing the possibility of a Democratic wave in Republican congressional districts this fall.

The poll of 1600 voters in 45 Republican congressional districts showed on average a 33% approval rating for President Bush, a 38% approval rating for the incumbent Republican and a strong desire for change.

In the 45 Republican districts the poll found 55% of people said they wanted to vote for a Democrat for Congress, compared to 49% in January. Just 37% of respondents said they would vote for their Republican incumbents, who were named.

“What’s stunning about this is not just that the race has moved over the last three months,” said Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg. “There’s no reason to believe this won’t continue to move.” He is a founder of Democracy Corps, a non-profit that conducted the poll.

The poll found that Barack Obama and John McCain were running roughly even in the 45 Republican districts. Independents split their votes between the candidates, with 43% going for Obama and 45% going for McCain.

THIS GUY IS AN EXTREMIST

And I hope the Dems point that out, over and over again. (Via Atrios)

"I think 'rape and incest' is a buzzword. It's a bit of a throwaway line and not everybody who says that really understands what that means. How are you going to define that?" --South Dakota state Rep. Joel Dykstra (R-Lincoln County) on why the state legislature didn't include those exceptions in its abortion ban, April 20, 2006.

Dykstra won the GOP primary to run for the U.S. Senate from South Dakota.

DESCENT INTO WINGNUTTERY

In this case, it's the wingnuttery in the comment section at this post on NO QUARTER, Larry Johnson's site.

First, I found a repeat of a wingnut claim I read a few weeks ago: Michelle Obama is under wraps because she is inflammatory. A little Lexis-Nexis search found otherwise:

Michelle Obama to visit New Mexico for fundraisers next week
The Associated Press State & Local Wire, May 21, 2008 Wednesday 5:11 PM GMT, STATE AND REGIONAL, 131 words

Michelle Obama To Hold Closed Fundraiser
The Frontrunner, May 29, 2008 Thursday, NATIONAL CAMPAIGN NEWS, 262 words

Michelle Obama to visit Billings, Kalispell
The Associated Press State & Local Wire, June 1, 2008 Sunday 7:31 PM GMT, STATE AND REGIONAL, 110 words

Michelle Obama rallies supporters on eve of Montana primary
The Associated Press State & Local Wire, June 3, 2008 Tuesday 3:53 AM GMT, STATE AND REGIONAL, 328 words

Michelle Obama to be a guest host on `The View’
The Associated Press, June 4, 2008 Wednesday 10:05 PM GMT, POLITICAL NEWS, 261 words

Then, I read a statement expressing profoundly irrational belief:

Comment by Tigger12 2008-06-05 00:54:30

It doesn’t really matter to me whether the tape exists or not….something does and it will come out

ANOTHER LIE BY McCAIN

David Kurtz at TPM catches McWAR lying about a Katrina issue. When McCain was asked by a local reporter why he opposed a federal commission to investigate what happened, McCain LIED and said he never voted against it. Eric Kleefeld, also of TPM, found that McCain TWICE voted against such a commission, along strict party lines. Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic also links to one of McCain's Nay votes.

When will the major news media start calling McCain on his BS?

THE MICHELLE VIDEO, DAY 2, PART 2

Larry Johnson sez:

I believe my sources and believe the tape will appear after August and before November.

McCAIN SPEECH IN LOUISIANA

Josh Marshall provides this clip of FAUX News pundits talk about McWAR's terrible speech. Best question: "Does he need help in sort of presenting ..." See for yourself:

THE STUPIDS ARE STILL WITH US

Intelligent Design and the Discovery Institute may be headed for the dustbin of history, as PZ Myers claims and I certainly hope, but the real idiots are still with us. In a halfway rational world, this clown McLeroy wouldn't be allowed to make ANY decisions about science education.

Opponents of Evolution Adopting a New Strategy
By LAURA BEIL
Published: June 4, 2008
NY Times

Starting this summer, the [Texas] state education board will determine the curriculum for the next decade and decide whether the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution should be taught. The benign-sounding phrase, some argue, is a reasonable effort at balance. But critics say it is a new strategy taking shape across the nation to undermine the teaching of evolution, a way for students to hear religious objections under the heading of scientific discourse.

The chairman of the state education board, Dr. Don McLeroy, a dentist in Central Texas, denies that the phrase “is subterfuge for bringing in creationism.”

“Why in the world would anybody not want to include weaknesses?” Dr. McLeroy said.

Dr. McLeroy, the board chairman, sees the debate as being between “two systems of science.”

“You’ve got a creationist system and a naturalist system,” he said.

Dr. McLeroy believes that Earth’s appearance is a recent geologic event — thousands of years old, not 4.5 billion. “I believe a lot of incredible things,” he said, “The most incredible thing I believe is the Christmas story. That little baby born in the manger was the god that created the universe.”

But Dr. McLeroy says his rejection of evolution — “I just don’t think it’s true or it’s ever happened” — is not based on religious grounds. Courts have clearly ruled that teachings of faith are not allowed in a science classroom, but when he considers the case for evolution, Dr. McLeroy said, “it’s just not there.”

THE MICHELLE VIDEO, DAY 2

As I write, there's been no release of the rumored tape of Michelle Obama despite that fact that some told us it would be released today. A pro-Hillary blog pretends to know something about the contents of the tape but alas, it admits to not having heard/seen it. Somewhat surprisingly, the NRO has been doing some debunking of this rumor.

WHAT THE IRAQIS THINK

Not that the wingnuts care, but since they do go on and on and on about Democracy For Iraq, perhaps they might pay a little more attention to the wishes of a majority of the Iraqi Parliament, i.e, "get the fuck out of Iraq!!!" Notice the choice of word: "occupying."

Iraq lawmakers want U.S. forces out as part of deal
Wed Jun 4, 2008 8:11pm EDT


WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A majority of the Iraqi parliament has written to Congress rejecting a long-term security deal with Washington if it is not linked to a requirement that U.S. forces leave, a U.S. lawmaker said on Wednesday.

Rep. William Delahunt, a Massachusetts Democrat and Iraq war opponent, released excerpts from a letter he was handed by Iraqi parliamentarians laying down conditions for the security pact that the Bush administration seeks with Iraq.

"The majority of Iraqi representatives strongly reject any military-security, economic, commercial, agricultural, investment or political agreement with the United States that is not linked to clear mechanisms that obligate the occupying American military forces to fully withdraw from Iraq," the letter to the leaders of Congress said.

MORE FATS' FOLLIES

I caught about 15 minutes of Fat's show today and I heard make 2 mistakes but only correct one. The one he didn't correct because it's a standard wingnut lie was about the unemployment rate under Carter. Fats claimed it reached 14% and that's false.

Fats also said that the Medal of Honor was only awarded posthumously but he did correct himself at the end of the show and claimed he was thinking of another award. It couldn't have been a U.S. military award because none are only awarded posthumously.

WILL OBAMA CAVE-IN TO AIPAC & THE NEO-CONS?

I'm very skeptical of AIPAC's motives and I frankly don't trust the neo-cons, so I was a little bothered that Obama went to the AIPAC conference and spoke. Thanx to Ken Hoop, I found a report of Obama's speech by someone who was there, Philip Weiss. I have to give Obama credit for calling the Iraq War a fiasco, especially considering that AIPAC wanted the war.

Perhaps he won't cave-in to the Likudniks.

DAVID BROOKS COMES CLEAN ABOUT THE GOP

In his Tuesday op-ed, "Calling Dr. Doom," Brooks drops the hammer on the GOP:

More fundamentally, McCain’s problem is that his party is unfit to govern. ... Many Republicans are under the illusion that they are in trouble because they’ve betrayed their core principles. The sad truth is that if they’d been more conservative, they’d be even further behind.

Going back to "core principles" is exactly what Hannity has been urging for months and that's a good sign that the base of the GOP is out of touch with America. Brooks goes on to admit that spweing about the Free Market Fairy won't work:

I’ve spent the past few years trying to find conservative experts to provide remedies for middle-class economic anxiety. Let me tell you, the state of free-market thinking on this subject is pathetic. There are a few creative thinkers (most of them under 30), but for the most part, McCain is forced to run in an intellectual void.

OBAMA'S WHITE FOLKS PROBLEM???

Well, it's not that much of a problem if we can judge by the results in South Dakota and Montana. South Dakota is 87% white and with 99% of the precincts reporting, Obama got 45% of the vote. Montana is 89% white and white 65% of the precincts reporting, Obama has 57% of the vote.

Hat-tip to the DKOs writer who first alerted me to the Montana situation, perhaps a week ago.

THESE PEOPLE ARE STUPID, IGNORANT AND NUTS

First we have Bill O'Reilly claiming that there is no tape of Pastor Hagee making insane remarks, then there's David Brooks babbling about a non-existent salad bar at Applebee's and finally, the main course: Dick Morris on the Stalinists in Obama's campaign.

You simply can't negotiate with people who think like this because they are too irrational.

AIPAC COVER-UP BY AP

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is a right-wing lobbying group that promotes the views of the Likud Party and American neo-conservatives, yet one would never guess that from this description given by AP Diplomatic Writer Anne Gearan:

US, Israel: World not doing enough to counter Iran
By ANNE GEARAN – 3 hours ago

a pro-Israel lobbying group

Let's recall that AIPAC dealt with the spy Larry Franklin.

PRES. BUSH IS A LIAR

(h/t Atrios)

In Richard Engel's new book, War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq, he let's us read about more lies from Pres. Bush. Excerpt from Muckraked:

- Bush admits to Engel that going to war was a decision based on his personal instinct and not on any long-range strategy for the Mideast: “I know people are saying we should have left things the way they were, but I changed after 9/11. I had to act. I don’t care if it created more enemies. I had to act.”

As both Paul O'Neill and Bob Woodward let us know, this is a lie. Bush was determined to attack Iraq from the very beginning of his 1st term.

OLMERT IS ALSO A WAR WHORE

and it makes perfect sense that he will address AIPAC.

PM heads to D.C. to lobby Bush on Iran
By Barak Ravid
Wed., June 04, 2008 Sivan 1, 5768
HAARETZ

In his meetings in Washington, Olmert will concentrate on the efforts to foil Iran's nuclear program.

Olmert will try to convince Bush to set aside the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear program in favor of data presented by Israel, and determine the administration's policy on Iran accordingly.

McCAIN TRIES TO UPSTAGE OBAMA, FAILS MISERABLY

UPDATE: Malkin and Mark Levin also pan the speech, transcript here.

McWAR's speech in New Orleans was terrible and you can tell that's true when both Josh Marshall and Glenn Reynolds agree that it sucked. I won't link to McCain's site but you can find the speech there and I found this line VERY interesting:

The wrong change looks not to the future but to the past for solutions that have failed us before and will surely fail us again.

Hannity, Ingraham and the Heritage Foundation go on and on about how we have to get back to Reagan and that's clearly not going to work in this election and hopefully never.

LIBBY QUAID OF THE AP BLOWS IT

In her AP article, "McCain welcomes Obama with fresh criticism," she writes:

McCain sought to distance himself from Bush by delivering the speech in New Orleans, a city whose ravages from Hurricane Katrina became a glaring symbol of Bush administration incompetence.

While people in New Orleans were drowning, McCain was having cake with Bush.

SULLIVAN SMACKS AROUND SLOTS BENNETT

I'v noted before that right-wing pinheads have been calling everything to the left of their extreme positions "far left" and Slots Bennett just used that phrase to describe Barack Obama. Andrew Sullivan provides a near-perfect riposte:

This "far left" meme is meaningless. It says everything about the intellectual bankruptcy of the talk radio right and nothing about the substantive polices and challenges of a president Obama.

WILL HANSON EVER FOLLOW THROUGH ON THIS STATEMENT?

(h/t Michael Doyle at McClatchy)

Here's what war whore Victor Davis Hanson wrote over 5 years ago:

March 28, 2003 7:30 AM
History or Hysteria?
Our vulture pundits regurgitate rumor and buzz.
By Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online

When this is all over — and I expect it will be soon — besides a great moral accounting, I hope that there will deep introspection and sober public discussion about the peculiar ignorance and deductive pessimism on the part of our elites.

When will he apologize for being a war whore?

MORE WINGNUT WELFARE

First, information about the award:

The Bradley Prizes formally recognize individuals of extraordinary talent and dedication who have made contributions of excellence in areas consistent with The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation’s mission. Up to four Prizes of $250,000 each are awarded annually to innovative thinkers and practitioners whose achievements strengthen the legacy of the Bradley brothers and the ideas to which they were committed.

Each year, Bradley Prize nominations are solicited from a national panel of more than 100 prominent individuals involved in academia, public-policy research, journalism, civic affairs, and the arts. All nominees are carefully evaluated by a distinguished selection committee that makes recommendations to the Foundation’s Board of Directors, which selects them. The Prize winners are then honored at a celebratory awards ceremony.

These awards are given to wingnut hacks like Charles Krauthammer, George F. Will, Fouad Ajami and John R. Bolton. Here's the latest freakshow winner, a Cheney favorite:

Victor Davis Hanson awarded $250,000 honor
By Michael Doyle McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Tuesday, June 3, 2008

WASHINGTON -- A prominent conservative foundation is lavishing a $250,000 award on Victor Davis Hanson, the Fresno-area farmer and classics professor turned public intellectual.

He's traveling in headier company than when he published his first book in 1983, titled "Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece." He has since authored or edited another dozen books that address modern controversies, consulted with the likes of Vice President Dick Cheney and energetically championed the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The award was first established in 2004 by the Wisconsin-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which bills itself as "strengthening American democratic capitalism."

LET'S SEE HOW THIS PLAYS OUT

There's been a effective whisper campaign about a video of Michelle Obama saying something like "get whitey" but so far it hasn't made the intertubes. The wingnuts and the anti-Obama folks are pretty excited about this and Bob Beckel said on FAUX News that the video will come out tomorrow.

One of the airheads on FAUX asked is this worse than "a college thesis?" and that shows you how out of it FAUX is because there was no fuss over Michelle's thesis despite Hannity's best efforts.

AUSTRALIA & THE WINGNUTS

I noted below that the war whore wingnuts pointed to an opinion piece that argued that America's standing in Asia, particularly with Japan, S. Korea and Australia, was strengthened by the Iraq War. Today I learn that we can cross Australia off that list.

Why Australia is leaving Iraq
Prime Minister Rudd criticized the US justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq as 550 Australian troops packed up to leave.
By Nick Squires Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
from the June 3, 2008 edition

Sydney, Australia - Australia's prime minister said Monday that the reasons used to justify joining the war in Iraq turned out to be false.

Labor leader Kevin Rudd made the remarks a day after ordering his country's 550 combat troops to head home after five years in Iraq.

He dismissed one by one the reasons used by the Howard administration – and by association the Bush administration – to topple Saddam Hussein.

- "Have further terrorist attacks been prevented? No, they have not been, as the victims of the Madrid train bombing will attest," Rudd told Parliament.

- "Has any evidence of a link between weapons of mass destruction and the former Iraqi regime and terrorists been found? No.

- "Have the actions of rogue states like Iran been moderated? No ... Iran's nuclear ambitions remain a fundamental challenge.

- "After five years, has the humanitarian crisis in Iraq been removed? No, it has not."

HANNITY CAN'T TAKE THE HEAT

I was listening to Hannity's show this afternoon and a caller was complaining about Hannity's use of guilt by association, especially when it comes to Barack Obama, Wright and Ayers. The caller was about to give an example and Hannity abruptly ended the call and moved on to the next one without commenting. I can't know this but I wonder if the caller was going to bring up Hannity's association with Hal Turner and Bob Grant?

This reminded me of the time Laura Ingraham cut off a caller and apparently switched to a pre-recorded rant.

AIPAC & THE IRAQ WAR

Here's something interesting from the Asia Times:

THE ROVING EYE
And the winner is ... the Israel lobby
By Pepe Escobar
Jun 3, 2008

It has become relatively fashionable for some members of the Israeli lobby to deny any involvement in the build-up towards the war on Iraq. But few remember what AIPAC executive director Howard Kohr told the New York Sun in January 2003: "Quietly lobbying Congress to approve the use of force in Iraq was one of AIPAC's successes over the past year." And in a New Yorker profile of Steven Rosen, AIPAC's policy director during the run-up to the war on Iraqi, it was stated that "AIPAC lobbied Congress in favor of the Iraqi war".

Given that, this paragraph should offer no surprises:

AIPAC keeps a very close relationship with an array of influential think-tanks, like the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Security Policy, the Hudson Institute, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, the Middle East Forum, the The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Sprinkled neo-cons in these think-tanks can be regarded as a microcosm of the larger Israel lobby - Jews and non-Jews (It's important to remember that Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser and five other neo-cons drafted the infamous "A Clean Break" document to Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996 - the ultimate road map for hardcore regime change all over the Middle East.)

SOMETHING TO KEEP TRACK OF

Col. Ralph Kohlmann may be telling the truth but we've been lied to so many times that we should suspend judgment until more facts are in. We KNOW there has been a lot of political pressure on the judges and prosecutors.

Chief judge defends replacement of Guantanamo judge
Mon Jun 2, 2008 8:33pm EDT

By Jane SuttonMIAMI, June 2 (Reuters) - The decision to replace the judge in the Guantanamo trial of a young Canadian prisoner was "completely unrelated" to any ruling or actions by that judge, the tribunals' chief judge said on Monday in a rare public statement.

Judge Army Col. Peter Brownback was replaced because his duty orders expire later this month, said Marine Col. Ralph Kohlmann, the chief judge in the U.S. war crimes court at the Guantanamo naval base.

It's not like theu have a surplus of judges, as a defense lawyer said:

Khadr's lawyer, Navy Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, called the explanation "odd to say the least," given that the Defense Department had recently put out a call urging Navy lawyers to volunteer as judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys in the Guantanamo trials, as a national priority assignment.

"Whatever the case, this latest gaffe seriously undermines any integrity or perception of legitimacy these proceedings once possessed," Kuebler said.

MORE BAD NEWS FOR McWAR?

The Politico reports that The Drudge Report has been leaning toward Obama and away from McCain and quotes a GOP operative:

“The MSM is already sending love letters to Obama,” said a GOP operative who worked for the Bush-Cheney reelection. “That’s something that has traditionally been countered on the Republican side with talk radio, blogs to a lesser degree but especially Drudge. If those tools are not part of the Republican vehicle for message delivery, that’s crippling.”

If you add in the fact that Fats Limbaugh and many of the other gasbags opposed McWAR, then this means he will have a much harder time in the Fall because he won't be able to count on them to push his talking points.

THEY SURE DON'T KNOW WHAT "KNOW" MEANS

(h/t Atrios)

I suppose I've read or heard 100s of false statements made by wingnuts over the last 5 years and I'm amazed how often they use the word "know" to preface their claims. Just to be pedantic, here's the Merriam-Webster definition:

Main Entry: know
Pronunciation: 'nO
Function: verb Inflected
Form(s): knew /'nü also 'nyü/; known /'nOn/; know·ing
tymology: Middle English, from Old English cnAwan; akin to Old High German bichnAan to recognize, Latin gnoscere, noscere to come to know, Greek gignOskein

transitive senses

1 a (1) : to perceive directly : have direct cognition of
(2) : to have understanding of
(3) : to recognize the nature of : DISCERN b (1) : to recognize as being the same as something previously known
(2) : to be acquainted or familiar with
(3) : to have experience of2 a : to be aware of the truth or factuality of : be convinced or certain of b : to have a practical understanding of
archaic : to have sexual intercourse with

intransitive senses

1 : to have knowledge
2 : to be or become cognizant -- sometimes used interjectionally with you especially as a filler in informal speech- know·able /'nO-&-b&l/ adjective- know·er /'nO(-&)r/ noun- know from : to have knowledge of

Huge Ego Hewitt often makes this mistake and ThinkProgress catches another one:

HEWITT: What do you learn from being on the ground actually? I know you’ve been to Iraq after the surge began, what do you learn from that kind of a trip?

HEWITT: Oh, I was under the impression you had made a trip to Iraq, governor. I’m sorry I got that wrong.

ROMNEY: No, I have…I have been to Iraq, but I’d like to go more frequently than I’ve been able to go. I’ve only been one time and I think, well, I don’t know what year that was. It was probably 2006.

HEWITT: Yeah, I think it was after the surge, I’m glad I wasn’t completely wrong about that.

The Surge was announced in January 2007 and did not occur in 2006.

Here's a more serious mistake:

"We know for a fact there are weapons there." - Ari Fleischer, Jan. 9, 2003

LET'S NOT FORGET THAT OUR CURRENT SECRETARY OF STATE IS...

A WAR CRIMINAL.

I've noted before that insiders like Larry Wilkerson and Richard Armitage agreed the then-national security advisor Condoleeza Rice did not do her job and in this excerpt from McClellan's book published in the WSJ, we have more evidence that damns her:

When Bush was making up his mind to pursue regime change in Iraq, it is clear that his national security team did little to slow him down, to help him fully understand the tinderbox he was opening and the potential risks in doing so. I know the president pretty well. I believe that, if he had been given a crystal ball in which he could have foreseen the costs of war – more than 4,000 American troops killed, 30,000 injured, and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens dead – he would have never made the decision to invade, despite what he might say or feel he has to say publicly.

And though no one has a crystal ball, it's not asking too much that a well-considered understanding of the circumstances and history of Iraq and the Middle East should have been brought into the decision-making process. The responsibility to provide this understanding belonged to the president's advisers, and they failed to fulfill it. Secretary of State Colin Powell was apparently the only adviser who even tried to raise doubts about the wisdom of war. The rest of the foreign policy team seemed to be preoccupied with regime change or, in the case of Condi Rice, seemingly more interested in accommodating the president's instincts and ideas than in questioning them or educating him.

I CAN BARELY TYPE THE FOLLOWING...

Cheney is correct about the proposed Federal gas tax cut: it won't really help. What's interesting is that McWAR backed this goofy idea and Obama didn't, thus Cheney seems to provide support to Obama.

Cheney calls suspending gas tax a 'false notion'
By BEN FELLER – 2 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President Dick Cheney on Monday rejected a suspension of the federal gasoline tax as proposed by his party's presumptive presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain. Cheney said it would offer little help to consumers coping with gas prices around $4 a gallon.


"I think it's a false notion, in the sense that you're not going to have much of an impact, given the size of the gasoline tax on the total cost of the gallon of gas," Cheney said when asked about the matter during a luncheon appearance. "You might buy a little bit of relief there, but it's minimal."

WE NEED A PRESIDENT WHO CAN SPEAK ENGLISH

Not the current clown. From the WaPo:

Quote of the Week

"And so the fact that they purchased the machine meant somebody had to make the machine. And when somebody makes a machine, it means there's jobs at the machine-making place."
-- President Bush, at Silverado Cable Co. in Mesa, Ariz., on May 27.

UNBELIEVABLE WALL STREET DISHONESTY

(h/t Atrios)

We simply can't trust the Master of the Universe. They are as dishonest as 3-card-monte dealers and they have a much greater negative effect on our lives. The latest piece of insanity involves treating a downgrading of debt as INCOME! The Wall Street banks are selectively picking some of the bonds they issued and choosing the ones that are trading at a discount. For example, a $100 bond from CitiGroup may now be trading at $80. CitiGroup can now claim that it made $20 even thought it still owes the original $100.

Wall Street Says -2 + -2 = 4 as Liabilities Get New Bond Math

By Bradley Keoun

June 2 (Bloomberg) -- Leave it to Wall Street to profit from its own distress.

Merrill Lynch & Co., Citigroup Inc. and four other U.S. financial companies have used an accounting rule adopted last year to book almost $12 billion of revenue after a decline in prices of their own bonds.

Here's how it works, according to Richard Bove, an analyst at New York-based Ladenburg Thalmann & Co. A company decides to designate $100 million of its subordinated bonds as subject to mark-to-market accounting. The price of the bonds drops to 80 cents on the dollar from 100 cents. So the firm books $20 million on the ``presumed savings that you have on your liabilities,'' Bove said.

``In the real world you didn't save a dime,'' he said. ``You still owe the $100 million. It's another one of these accounting rules that basically takes you further and further away from reality.''

The Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Office of Thrift Supervision objected to the rule before its passage, saying in a joint 2006 letter to the FASB that it would ``have the contrary effect'' of increasing a bank's net worth at the same time its ``financial condition is deteriorating.''

ANOTHER LTE GETS PUBLISHED

I'm encouraged that this was published because it was a very frank appraisal of agit-prop. The paper did leave out my last line, "Lieberman is either stupid or dishonest. In either case, his opinion has no merit."

One data point can't carry argument
Re: the May 26 article "Costly 'Climate Security' bill would do little good."

Ben Lieberman makes an atrocious error in this passage: "But there is growing evidence that the warming threat has been exaggerated. Indeed, 2008 is shaping up to be a cooler year than 2007, and some scientists are predicting that this countertrend will last for a while."

One can't use a single data point to refute the thousands and thousands of data points that support the existence of man-made global warming.

Steven J.
Tucson

MORE "GROWTH PAYS FOR ITSELF"

That's the mantra of the local pro-growth crowd and was quickly forgotten when they tried to get an increase in the local sales tax passed. The increase was approved but we still have a lot of transportation problems. The bus fares will most likely increase and that will most affect the bottom 40%. Now we find that miles and miles of roads are in terrible shape and need to be completely rebuilt.

13% of major Tucson-area streets so bad they need complete rebuilding
By Andrea Kelly and Erica Meltzer
Arizona Daily Star
Tucson, Arizona Published: 06.01.2008

About 13 percent of the major roads in and around Tucson are in such bad condition that repaving in not an option. The only real fix is to tear them out and rebuild from the ground up.

In odometer talk, that's like driving over 481 miles — roughly from Tucson to Los Angeles — on a continuous ribbon of bumps, ruts, cracks, holes and waves.

A NEW LIE ABOUT OBAMA

I found this on one of AOL's new comment boards:

thundervoz 01:35:15 AM Jun 02 2008
Report This!
Researching Obama's roots reveals that on his father's side, he is descended from Arab slave traders. They operated under an extended grant from Queen Victoria, who gave them the right to continue the slave trade in exchange for helping the British defeat the Madhi Army in southern Sudan and the Upper Nile region. Today, the British again face the Madhi Army, albeit this time the Shiite, not the Sunnis as in 19th-century Sudan.Telling America's black community that while their ancestors were breaking the shackles of slavery, Obama's ancestors were enslaving and trading black Africans would hardly make it as an Oprah bestseller. Being the son of a poor Kenyan goat herder plays much better than being the son of a highly placed Arab African who operated at the top of the Kenyan government following his education at Columbia. Thus, the way he portrays his father in the book is a lie.

I kept after this guy to provide some evidence for this claim and he finally provided this link. The underlying article is here and it's a doozy. It's based on "research" by historian Leroy Vaughn, author of Black People and Their Place in World History but it makes no mention of Obama's Arab ancestry. That's what the first link did and it was posted by someone who goes by the screen name " teckel" and teckel doesn't provide any evidence.

HOW MANY???

(h/t Cernig)

Der Spiegel has a lengthy article about Afghanistan -

Why NATO Troops Can't Deliver Peace in Afghanistan
By Ullrich Fichtner
05/29/2008

Forty nations are embroiled in an unwinnable war in Afghanistan. Anyone who travels through the country with Western troops soon realizes that NATO forces would have to be increased tenfold for peace to be even a remote possibility.

What Cernig and I found amazing was this paragraph from page 3:

ISAF Commander McNeill has said himself that according to the current counterterrorism doctrine, it would take 400,000 troops to pacify Afghanistan in the long term. But the reality is that he has only 47,000 soldiers under his command, together with another 18,000 troops fighting at their sides as part of Operation Enduring Freedom, and possibly another 75,000 reasonably well-trained soldiers in the Afghan army by the end of the year. All told, there is still a shortfall of 260,000 men.

SCOTTIE DOES THE RIGHT THING

Unlike Douglas Feith, L. Paul Bremer, Oliver North and Tommy Franks, Scott McClellan will donate some of the proceeds from the sale of his book to veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is what MoveOn wanted and today, Chris Wallace agreed with MoveOn for perhaps the first time in his broadcast career.

THE NYT ADMITS THAT AN OP-ED WAS BS

You might recall the Wingnut Luttwak op-ed in which he claimed Obama was an Islamic apostate and thus much more likely to be assassinated. Via Atrios, I learn that the Public Editor has come out and said the op-ed was FALSE and misleading.

Did Luttwak cross the line from fair argument to falsehood? Did Times editors fail to adequately check his facts before publishing his article? Did The Times owe readers a contrasting point of view?

I interviewed five Islamic scholars, at five American universities, recommended by a variety of sources as experts in the field. All of them said that Luttwak’s interpretation of Islamic law was wrong.

David Shipley, the editor of the Op-Ed page, said Luttwak’s article was vetted by editors who consulted the Koran, associated text, newspaper articles and authoritative histories of Islam. No scholars of Islam were consulted because “we do not customarily call experts to invite them to weigh in on the work of our contributors,” he said.

That’s a pity in this case, because it might have sparked a discussion about whether Luttwak’s categorical language was misleading, at best.

Luttwak can't come to terms with this and insists he is correct and the Islamic scholars, all 5 of them, are wrong:

Luttwak said the scholars with whom I spoke were guilty of “gross misrepresentation” of Islam, which he said they portrayed as “a tolerant religion of peace;” he called it “intolerant.”

PRICES GOING UP FOR THOSE WHO CAN LEAST AFFORD IT

In response to rising fuel prices, Tucson is considering increasing the fares.

Gas woes hit Sun Tran
By Andrea Kelly
Arizona Daily Star
Tucson, Arizona Published: 06.01.2008"

City Manager Mike Hein and the Transportation Department have proposed a 25 percent hike in all economy and full fares, effective July 1. That would raise the full fare from $1 to $1.25 for a single trip and $28 to $35 for a monthly pass.

Economy fares for eligible low-income, senior and disabled riders would increase from 40 cents to 50 cents, and $12 to $15 for a monthly pass. Specialty fares would increase even more, with day passes climbing 50 percent, from $2 to $3.

I was hoping that the increase in the number of riders would offset this but it isn't enough to keep up with the rising cost of fuel:

Sun Tran ridership on the rise.

February — Up 8.6 percent over February 2007

March — Up 6.4 percent over March 2007

April — Up 11.8 percent over April 2007

MORE ON RACHEL RAY AND "THE SCARF"

This idiotic flap made another message board on AOL and the verdict is almost unanimous: the people who complained about the "keffayeh" are wackos. A sampling of the responses:

-I am sorry, but this is the biggest bs i have ever seen. First off all, just because a tiny, tiny percent of islam has been hijacked by psychotic men for terrorism does not mean that everything that looks Muslim stands for evil. Secondly the scarf looks like a normal scarf someone would wear anyday....if people are getting upset about this then as a nation we really need to reevaluate ourselves.

-It is dreadful to think people are so narrow minded. Has anyone complained about the scarfs worn in Sex and the City? How a simple scarf worn around the neck and be blown out of proportion and shame on Dunkin Donuts for pulling the ad.

-What happened to "OUR AMERICA"? Where are all the freedoms we used to enjoy, and that our military )our sons, daughters, fathers, brothers etc.) fought for? Why do we now have to ask permission for eveything we do, say, or even think?