If you’re not familiar with the back story, it’s this: James O’Keefe, a patently dishonest right-wing firebrand, if that’s not redundant, and Hannah Giles, a patently dishonest right-wing surf bunny took a hidden camera into various offices of ACORN, an umbrella operation for community organizing groups, and produced a patently dishonest video purporting to show [...]

The United States, we are often told, is a nation bound by the rule of law. We hear that less and less as it becomes more and more risible but I guess it still officially is, unless you’re the president, or you’re operating an armed drone on behalf of the president, or torturing someone on [...]

Stuff worth reading:
The Columbia Journalism Review’s story on the Russian press and Russian journalists. The story cites the Committee to Protect Journalists ranking of Russia as the third most dangerous country for journalists, behind second-place Algeria and the US-created democratic capitalist paradise of Iraq, and describes the gyrations that reporters and writers for independent newspapers [...]

From big-time Village Voice blogger Roy Edroso: Scott Brown Wins Mass. Race, Giving GOP 41-59 Majority in the Senate.
Plus: IOZ is the Helen Reddy of nihilistic triumphalism.

I hardly ever watch Chris Matthews on MSNBC but recently I’ve made an effort to inoculate myself against the madness by watching him and some of the other ADD media types who populate the various aethereal passages. Much of today’s episode was focused upon Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance lecture—assessments of which varied wildly across the [...]

I can’t believe anyone believes the CIA when it says that Iran was working toward nuclear weapons for a while but now they’re not. This sounds like they got snookered on the front end and now they’re covering for it. “Oh, shit. They weren’t working on a bomb. What do we do now?” I wonder [...]

I’ve written a lot about the alleged financial crisis afflicting the country, by which is meant Wall Street and investors, but I don’t really care about it beyond the very considerable entertainment value. Some real pain attaches to it, but by the time we hear about that the revolution will be here and the authors [...]

Continuing from where we left off, which was with the explanation that however poorly you may think of politicians, you are, unless burdened with a constant and absolutely crushing sense of impending doom, nowhere near the awful truth. The reason politicians get away with what they do is that recognizing what they do is the [...]

I’m monitoring Barack Obama not by listening to anything he or Joe Biden says, but by tracking the sputtering heads bobbing in his wake. I’m no longer reading blogs that appear to be taking either man or the Democratic party seriously, so when I run across something like Digby’s lament of Joe Biden’s elegiac portrait [...]

You don’t try very hard to please me; with what you know it should be easy … this could be the last time, this could be the last time, may be the last time, I don’t know …
If I had an audience large enough, I’d make “The Last Time”, a pre-punk Rolling Stones anthem of [...]

Barbara Ehernreich’s most recent blog post relates the suicide of a woman facing foreclosure on her home. Robert Reich’s penultimate post, before he becomes one of the 40% of Americans who can afford to take time off this summer, relates the yet to be fully realized suicide of the American economy.
Reich, the lone leftist/populist [...]

The frothing radical right thinks the New York Times is the frothing radical left, as if such a thing exists in this country in this day, but this is a newspaper that doesn’t speak truth to power even when the power is itself, even after the lights are out, even in the sound-proofed panic room [...]

I do my writing and online reading at the Santa Monica library now. It’s comfortable and quiet, but there’s no place like home; without one, I find myself easily distracted, a much less prolific writer and a less omnivorous reader. Accordingly, I’ve trimmed my blogroll by about a hundred to include only the ones I [...]

When Hillary Clinton used the example of Bobby Kennedy’s June 1968 assassination to argue that withdrawing from the Democratic presidential primary contest would be stupid because other primaries have extended to June and beyond, some prominent Obama supporters (and many less so) translated her comments as “Obama could get killed, and I could win” rather [...]

Many months ago when I was writing something about health care I ran across a blog that had a number of entries on the subject, one of which I used in my piece. That web page and 70-some others are still open in my browser, which in retaliation is now consuming most of my computer’s [...]

It’s not just Iraqis, or even Muslims. Christian militarism has been getting along just fine for centuries now, even turning on each other when there was no non-Christian enemy to bring to Jesus at the point of a sword. When it comes to war, Christian militarists – I also like the term Christian fascists, and [...]

What could possibly go wrong with a scheme to introduce tens of thousands of young, stressed out soldiers fighting a guerrilla war in a Muslim country to a particularly bloody-minded brand of aggressively evangelical apocalyptic Christianity? As Max Blumenthal reports in The Nation, the Pentagon is on a quest — one might say a crusade [...]

Susie Madrak at Surburban Guerrilla neatly illustrates the educational clout blogs bring to the masses when she links to this post at Boing-Boing, which explains the genesis of the Bush-Cheney policy toward Iran. The vice-president, under the bedsheet, with a flashlight …

The Guardian published a story on Sunday detailing concern about Afghanistan among Britain’s military, [...]

At Hullabaloo, Digby takes note that former administration toady Andrew Sullivan is now calling, in the wake of the Scooter Libby verdict, for the investigation and, should he not cooperate, the possible impeachment of Cheney in connection with the administration’s assault on Joe Wilson and the outing of his wife as a covert CIA agent. [...]

This is inside bloggy baseball, so if tempests in the world of raging individualistic prose warriors doesn’t interest you, be forewarned.
I belong to an organization called the Media Bloggers Association. You can find the raison d’etre of its founder and board members here. The chairman, Robert Cox, worked with the district court in Washington to [...]

Imagine if you will a portrait of George W. Bush wearing a bibulous nose, an Alfred E. Neuman expression and a helmet made of Jack Kemp’s epoxied hair. And then imagine it captioned with the memorable phrase, “The Colossus of Crawford.” If you can’t, which is perfectly normal, not to worry: the original is here, [...]

“Why do they hate us? Is it somehow connected to the way we cut off their limbs with chainsaws?” That’s Jonathon Schwarz’s question, and by golly it’s a good one. He’s referring to the exhumation of butchered bodies from a mass grave near a Colombian village that was attacked by chainsaw-wielding right wing paramilitaries who [...]

Steve Clemons at The Washington Note earns a ticket behind the curtain and finds that the Wizard is depressed. After attending a dinner populated with “a few former Secretaries of State and foreign ministers, top intelligence officials, think tank chiefs, Senators and House Members, former National Security Advisors and Secretaries of Defense,” Clemons says that [...]

Meet Mark Halperin, world’s most pathetic journalist. Halperin, who runs ABC’s conventional wisdom assembly line, The Note, co-wrote a book with the Washington Post’s John Harris ironically entitled The Way to Win. Regardless what the book says, Halperin’s winning strategy appears to involve publicly debasing yourself beyond any hope of redemption. Glenn Greenwald, whose [...]

Oh, the perils of blogging. Joe Lieberman’s communications director, Dan Gerstein, has some fundamental differences with his boss. In March of this year, Gerstein wrote on his now-dormant blog that “I disagree with Lieberman about the conduct of the war in Iraq” and that “I view Bush as one of the worst leaders in American [...]

Needlenose blogger Swopa is so good at predicting various Iraq-related stupidities, cupidities and disasters that I sometimes think US policymakers are reading the blog and mistaking it as prophetic command. “Swopa says we’re going to alienate al Sadr and magnify his influence again. To hear is to obey!” This entry, “How many soldiers’ lives has [...]

Thanks to a blogging librarian in San Antonio, we now know a bit more of what George Bush thinks constitutes torture. BiblioSquirrel has unearthed a 1967 New York Times story in which Bush downplays his fraternity’s practice of branding new recruits with the Delta Kappa Epsilon emblem.
A former president of Delta [said] that the branding [...]

Slate’s Fred Kaplan narrowly avoided quoting Shakespeare in a story about George Bush’s phoned-in UN speech today. Kaplan said the speech “was full of stirring words, signifying nothing,” but that was an exaggeration in service to art: the words were stirring only in the sense that they stirred Kaplan to exasperated puzzlement, which was [...]

As John Aravosis and others have noted, one voice is conspicuously missing from the controversy over ABC’s “The Path To 9/11.” 9/11 Commission co-chair Lee Hamilton has yet to speak publicly about the issue. The program will apparently air as scheduled, complete with key scenes that distort and in some instances completely fabricate the conclusions [...]

The ever disreputable Swopa, whose foreign policy analysis is both obsessive and superb, has detected a rash of strained national psyches. President Bush, he notes, offered during his press conference last Monday that our times “are challenging times, and they’re difficult times, and they’re straining the psyche of our country.” And Saturday, the New York [...]

Henceforth we will recognize that anything which fulfills certain conditions is a sign.
– Charles Morris, “Signs, Language and Behavior”
Among the startling characteristics of the Bush administration and their various adventures is the speed with which contemporary events and documents become historical artifacts. They’ve authored so many accidental and deliberate grotesqueries, and so much of [...]

The Pentagon and Republicans are collaborating to prevent troops suffering combat head injuries from receiving adequate treatment.
In their ongoing war against the men and women who are actually going to war at their behest, House Republicans cut the budget of the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center (DVBIC)by half, while the Pentagon is refusing [...]

As a substantive political project, E.J. Dionne is right – conservatism is finished. While he didn’t mention it, my pet example is the provision in the (failed) law to pre-empt state policies prohibiting tips from being counted against the minimum wage. When I mentioned the proposed law to my wife Dr. Brazen Hussy, she [...]

Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert has told US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice to back off with respect to Israel’s attack on Lebanon. That’s according to Steve Clemons, who writes on foreign policy and has what he describes as reliable sources within the state department.

Comparing illegal immigrants to cattle, Congressman Peter King has proposed erecting an electrified fence along the US-Mexico border. King, a Republican from Iowa, made the remarks on the House floor Tuesday. He also brought along a model of his proposed fence, but refrained perhaps due to logistical challenges, from actually electrocuting an illegal immigrant stand-in.

President Bush says he has the authority to order people kidnapped, tortured and held forever without charges. Is anything off limits?

One man I respect says that he’d no longer support another one. It’s no fun when your friends start fighting, is it?
PZ Myers of Pharyngula, like many good liberals, reacted quite strongly to Barack Obama’s recent speech suggesting that liberals take into account the role of faith in American life. Now I certainly have my [...]

An unbelievable number of bloggers on what is charitably known as the political right are throwing fits about this Times story on the homes, the village and the impact on local residents of hosting the two Bush administration honchos. So far as they’re concerned, the Times is taking revenge on the Bush administration for the heat directed at the newspaper over its publication of a story detailing measures the Bushies are taking to monitor financial transactions worldwide.

“First, your return to shore was not part of our negotiations nor our agreement, so I must do nothin’. And secondly, you must be a pirate for the Pirate’s Code to apply, and you’re not. And thirdly, the Code is more what you’d call “guidelines” than actual rules. Welcome aboard the Black Pearl, Miss Turner.”
– Captain Barbosa

The St. Petersburg Times inadvertently bought in to a bit of satirical truthiness today when it published a wire report on a Karl Rove press conference with Satan. Although the story has since been removed from the Times web site, a screen shot of it has been posted by the National Journal’s Hotline blog and the text was grabbed by the now Cox-less Wonkette. Here’s a sample:

At a joint press conference today in Washington, White House adviser Karl Rove said that he would be plotting the Republican Party’s fall election strategy with his longtime comrade-in-arms, Satan.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced today the arrest of some Americans plotting to blow up the Sears Tower and other targets. He says that “these homegrown terrorists may prove to be as dangerous as groups like Al-Qaeda.” He didn’t add “so bend over, America,” but then again, he doesn’t really have to.

A memo from the US embassy in Iraq to the US state department offers a bleak assessment of life for Iraqi employees of the embassy. As dark as it is, though, the memo may be more significant for what it doesn’t say.
Washington Post columnist Al Kamen got a copy of the memo (Acrobat file) and [...]

Roger Ailes wrote last Monday about shlock jock Howard Kurtz’s penetrating interview with Amanda Congdon of Rocketboom fame. Congdon, we learn, is young, hot and fond of brevity. Kurtz, we learn, is none of these things, although he confesses to being one of them some years ago.

Slate magazine has two offerings related to the centrist blogfest in Las Vegas over the weekend, one from Bruce Reed and one from John Dickerson. Reed, the current president of that millstone around the Democratic party’s neck known as the Democratic Leadership Council, writes from the perspective of someone who dearly wants bloggers such as those attending the Yearly Kos confab to sit down and shut up; Dickerson, Slate’s chief political correspondent, focuses more on bloggers as a media phenomenom.

A Gregg Easterbrook review of Al Gore’s new film prompts Atrios to question the degree of contempt in which Slate Magazine holds its readers. I can help out on that.

In a decision sure to aggravate relations between the institutional press and bloggers, a California court has established the right of bloggers to protect their sources. The decision arises from a case in which Apple Computer sought to compel bloggers to identify individuals who leaked information about a new Apple product.

Right-wing bloggers are in a huff because some of their colleagues have been dropped as Google News sources, in at least one instance for authoring what Google calls “hate speech.” They’re also upset because Michelle Malkin’s blog isn’t a source, nor Charles Johnson’s Little Green Footballs, which is due to not to an ideological bias but to Google’s policy of excluding sole-proprietor blogs of any stripe from the news aggregator.

Sometime on Sunday, March 21, our site reached the million visits* milestone. Thanks to everyone who visited and all those who have donated to the site to keep us up, running and writing.

If you don’t mind listening to music that might be more than a week old and isn’t in hourly rotation on your local station, check out BBC’s Radio 6. The programming includes documentaries, classic rock — actual classics, not just crappy antiques — current rock, dub and more, all available via a RealAudio feed and of course without commercials. I’ve been listening to it steadily for a week or so, and my only complaint is that Primal Scream’s “Country Girl,” a chameleon-like rocker destined to be this year’s must for cover bands, is the lone exception to the heavy rotation rule.

A Massachusetts company has developed a system allowing cell phone users to send text messages to large television screens in public places. The technology, dubbed “Wiffiti” by developer LocaModa, is designed to “extend and empower public expression and creativity in a socially responsible way, fostering an open and strong sense of citizenship and community.”