I HAVE TO SHARE THESE....

Here are excerpts of 3 comments from The Belmont Club, presented for your edification and amusement!

By backing the communists at MoveOn…
# posted by M. Simon : 11:51 PM http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/2005/01/wave-of-future-joshua-micah-marshall.html#110695631239413710

What is 90% of the MSM if not a massive message apparatus for the Dems…
# posted by charlotte : 3:21 PM [sorry, I didn't save the link but these are all on the same thread]

OK, the two above are standard lines of the radical right but I don't think you've seen this before now (if you have, please let me know!):

The last president with any economic sense at all was Hooover…
# posted by hound : 8:53 PM http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/2005/01/wave-of-future-joshua-micah-marshall.html#110694560329379013

KYL: WHORE OR HYPOCRITE?

SEN. JON KYL: The accountability should be in the people who rendered the bad advice, who had it wrong. And that's the Central Intelligence Agency and George Tenet specifically. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/fedagencies/jan-june05/rice_1-25.html

Dear Senator Kyl,

Why did Bush give Tenet the Medal of Freedom?

TALON NEWS == BROTHEL FOR BUSH?

MediaMatters has a good write-up of Talon News. It's pretty much a part of the vast Republican Noise Machine. Here's an excerpt:

A more in-depth look at Talon, Gannon, and Eberle casts additional doubt on Talon's claim to be a media outlet and raises questions about whether Gannon should be a credentialed member of the White House press corps.
Eberle is also, as Media Matters has previously noted, president and CEO of GOPUSA, a "conservative news, information, and design company dedicated to promoting conservative ideals." Though Eberle has claimed on the September 13, 2004, edition of MSNBC's Scarborough Country that GOPUSA and Talon News are separate companies, they overlap heavily.

Here's the link: http://mediamatters.org/items/200501280006

LIE RADIO & CENSORSHIP

This morning, Laura Ingraham started her show with a rant about how awful it was for the media to show the latest American hostage clip from Iraq. It was the usual blaming-the-messenger crap except this time she actually included Fox News. She asked for calls about this topic and soon after said the lines were full.

She took the first caller, a lady from Texas who thought interviewing the parents and relatives was a mistake. The next caller was a male and he got out about one clause that ended with "sports" before the program suddenly switched to (apparently taped) rants about the Rice confirmation hearings.

I listened for about another 45 minutes and L did not revisit the topic nor did she say why she was no longer taking calls about it. Going by my own experience with calling her show, I guess that male caller disagreed with her and she couldn't deal with it.

World fears new Bush era

Blair urges more consensual US approach as poll shows unease in 18 out of 21 nations
Ewen MacAskill, diplomatic editor
Thursday January 20, 2005
The Guardian

A poll of 21 countries published yesterday - reflecting opinion in Africa, Latin America, North America, Asia and Europe - showed that a clear majority have grave fears about the next four years.
Fifty-eight per cent of the 22,000 who took part in the poll, commissioned by the BBC World Service, said they expected Mr Bush to have a negative impact on peace and security, compared with only 26% who considered him a positive force.
The survey also indicated for the first time that dislike of Mr Bush is translating into a dislike of Americans in general."Our research makes very clear that the re-election of President Bush has further isolated America from the world," he said. "It also supports the view of some Americans that unless his administration changes its approach to world affairs in its second term, it will continue to erode America's good name, and hence its ability to effectively influence world affairs."

New Year, Same old reactionary nominees

President Bush ushered in the new year by resubmitting 20 old judicial nominees who failed to be confirmed in the last Congress. The group of extremist, activist nominees is part of the right-wing's broader plan to use the federal courts to undermine laws that protect public health, civil liberties and women's rights. The White House continues to carp about obstructionism, but Senate Minority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) noted "last Congress...approve[d] 204 judicial nominees...reduced the vacancy rate on our courts to the lowest level in 15 years, and outpaced the confirmation rate of Reagan, Clinton and former President Bush." Half of those Bush renominated never made it out of the Republican-controlled Judiciary Committee. Even Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), the incoming Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, expressed disappointment about the President's actions, saying, "I would have preferred to have had some time in the 109th Congress to try to cool the climate." The central problem, however, was not the timing of the nominations but the nominees themselves. Here is a look at some of the lowlights:
HAYNES'S WAR ON HUMAN RIGHTS: President Bush has nominated Pentagon general counsel William J. Haynes IV for a second time. Haynes led the group of attorneys responsible for the memos contending "the president wasn't bound by laws prohibiting torture and that government agents who might torture prisoners at his direction couldn't be prosecuted by the Justice Department." Haynes's nomination was derailed when "he was asked by the Judiciary Committee to provide material about his role in the [torture] issue and failed to do so." Haynes also developed and defended the administration's policy of incarcerating "U.S. citizens without counsel or judicial review" which was rejected as illegal by the Supreme Court. Another Haynes product: the rules for military tribunals planned for Guantanamo Bay that was described as "unjust, unwise, un-American" by the Economist magazine.
BROWN'S WAR ON MAINSTREAM VALUES: Bush is determined to install California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rodgers Brown to the federal courts. The New York Times described her record as a "war on mainstream legal values that most Americans hold dear." It's not hard to see why. Brown on seniors: "Today's senior citizens blithely cannibalize their grandchildren because they have a right to get as much "free" stuff as the political system will permit them to extract." Brown on New Deal programs, such as Social Security: "The New Deal...inoculated the federal Constitution with a kind of underground collectivist mentality. The Constitution itself was transmuted into a significantly different document...1937...marks the triumph of our own socialist revolution." Brown, ignoring Supreme Court precedent, has argued that racially discriminatory speech in the workplace is protected by the First Amendment. She has also denounced the Supreme Courts landmark ruling U.S. v. Carolene Products; a view which, if adopted "would signal the death-knell for a vast range of health labor, and environmental standards it enacted during the last century." Learn more about Janice Rodgers Brown.
PRYOR'S WAR ON WOMEN: Bush also renominated Alabama Attorney General William Pryor. His confirmation to a lifetime appointment on the federal bench would be a huge blow for women's rights. Pryor considers Roe v. Wade to be "the worst abomination of constitutional law in our nation's history." Further, he has defended restrictions on abortion in Alabama even when they lacked "the constitutionally required exception to protect the health of the pregnant woman." Pryor supported legislation in Alabama which would have required Alabama to appoint "a lawyer representing the state whenever a female under age 18 sought to have an abortion without her parents' consent." Pryor argued that the government attorney "should be involved to protect the state's interest in preserving life." The AP reported that Pryor "envisioned attorneys with networks like the Alabama Lawyers for Life, of which he used to be a member, agreeing to represent the state for free and 'potentially' taking an adversarial stand against abortions." Learn more about William Pryor.
OWEN'S "UNCONSCIONABLE" JUDICIAL ACTIVISM: During their time together on the Texas Supreme Court, Attorney General-nominee Alberto Gonzalez repeatedly criticized Pricilla Owen – another judge that Bush re-nominated – for ignoring the law. In one case, relating to requirements for minors to "judicially bypass" parental consent requirements for abortion, Gonzalez characterized Owen's narrow view of the statute as "directly contradicted" by the legislative history and "an unconscionable act of judicial activism." In another case, where Owen would have effectively rewritten the law to protect manufactures of products that cause injury, Gonzales called Owen's opinion an attempt to "judicially amend the statute." Gonzales also joined an opinion that described an Owen's dissent, which would have allowed certain private land owners to exempt themselves from environmental regulations, as "nothing more than inflammatory rhetoric."

NP & "Imagination"

The commission also spoke of a “failure of imagination.”Maybe so again; and yet the word “failure”seems inappropriate, implying as it does that success was possible. Surely a failure so widespread deserves to be considered inevitable.
(p. 19)

FALSE:

Ms. Rice confirmed in 2002 that information picked up by U.S. intelligence services indicated that an attack might be made on Mr. Bush and other leaders at the July 2001 Group of Eight summit in Genoa, Italy. Former White House officials confirmed that in response to the warning, Italian authorities closed the local airport, restricted airspace and positioned surface-to-air missiles around the city. WSJ, 4/1/04

“FBI investigators visited two of the flight schools in 1996 after the plot was uncovered in the Philippines, school operators said. In 1998 and 1999, analysts warned federal officials that terrorists might crash hijacked aircraft into landmarks such as the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Then, last July, the Italian government closed airspace over Genoa and mounted antiaircraft batteries based on information that Islamic extremists were planning to use an airplane to kill President Bush.

According to Italy's Deputy Prime Minister Gianfranco Fini, in remarks reported by the Italian news agency ANSA, Italy told the Americans "that there was the possibility of an attack against the U.S. president using an airliner. That's why we closed the airspace and installed the [antiaircraft] missiles" around the meeting site.
Because of the threat from jetliners, it has been standard operating procedure since the Atlanta Olympics in 1996 to create "no- fly zones" for high-profile occasions designated "National Security Special Events." Others included the 50th anniversary summits of NATO and the United Nations. The no-fly zones are areas of restricted airspace defended by fighter jets and antiaircraft batteries”
Clues Pointed to Changing Terrorist Tactics; Foiled Plots, FBI Data Showed Al Qaeda Groups Might Use Airplanes as Missiles
Steve Fainaru. The Washington Post. Washington, D.C.: May 19, 2002. pg. A.09

Norman Podhoretz and WW 4

NP is one of the founders of the neo-con movement. In a recent article in Commentary, he presents the ne0-con world vision:
{ World War IV:
How It Started, What It Means,
and Why We Have to Win
Norman Podhoretz
Commentary, Sept. 04}
Here, I will pull out some quotes from that article and show the factual and logical mistakes. These will be separate entries because there is so much that is wrong about the article. Page numbers refer to those in the original.

The point I wish to stress is not that Clarke was exaggerating or lying. It is that the attack on 9/11 did indeed come out of the blue in the sense that
no one ever took such a possibility seriously enough to figure out what to do about t. (pp. 18-19)

FALSE: Clarke had been concerned about the danger posed by aircraft since at least the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. There he had tried to create an air defense plan using assets from the Treasury Department, after the Defense Department declined to contribute resources. The Secret Service continued to work on the problem of airborne threats to the Washington region. In 1998, Clarke chaired an exercise designed to highlight the inadequacy of the solution. This paper exercise involved a scenario in which a group of terrorists commandeered a Learjet on the ground in Atlanta, loaded it with explosives, and flew it toward a target in Washington, D.C. Clarke asked officials from the Pentagon, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and Secret Service what they could do about the situation. Officials from the Pentagon said they could scramble aircraft from Langley Air Force Base, but they would need to go to the President for rules of engagement, and there was no mechanism to do so. There was no clear resolution of the problem at the exercise.16
In late 1999, a great deal of discussion took place in the media about the crash off the coast of Massachusetts of EgyptAir Flight 990, a Boeing 767. The most plausible explanation that emerged was that one of the pilots had gone berserk, seized the controls, and flown the aircraft into the sea. After the 1999–2000 millennium alerts, when the nation had relaxed, Clarke held a meeting of his Counterterrorism Security Group devoted largely to the possibility of a possible airplane hijacking by al Qaeda.17
(911 Final Report, p. 345)