Analogy Schooling Bushbots

Be sure and read the comments. A Tiny Revolution: Back To Analogy School For Paul Burgess

The Boss Dixie-Chicked

Radio Boycotts Bruce Springsteen's Latest - Entertainment on The Huffington Post: "Bruce Springsteen should be very happy. He has the No. 1 album, a possible Grammy for Best Album of the Year, for 'Magic,' an album full of singles, and a sold-out concert tour.

Alas, there's a hitch: Radio will not play 'Magic.' In fact, sources tell me that Clear Channel has sent an edict to its classic rock stations not to play tracks from 'Magic.' But it's OK to play old Springsteen tracks such as 'Dancing in the Dark,' 'Born to Run' and 'Born in the USA...'"

Prez Hillary From 2000

Hullabaloo: "I don't know if anyone's noticed, but George W. Bush is being disappeared from the presidential campaign and everyone's running against incumbent Hillary Clinton..."

Excellent post. Click the link.

With Friends Like This...

Talking Points Memo | Creeping Kerikism : "Rudy has picked up the endorsement of Joe Allbaugh, the Bush insider who put Mike Brown in charge of FEMA and left the government to set up a consultancy to bag Iraq contracts."

UFO Redux

NASA Will Re-Open Kecksburg UFO Files on Wired Science: "In a victory for UFO enthusiasts, NASA has agreed to search for documents related to a mysterious incident that the government has tried to downplay -- or, some would say, cover up -- for decades.

On the night of December 9, 1965, a sonic boom-causing 'fireball' streaked across North American skies before crashing in the woods near Kecksburg, Pennsylvania. The military promptly swarmed area, hauling Volkswagen bus-sized object away to an Air Force base in Ohio..."

Coultergeist Trick or Treat

Rick Jacobs: Ann Coulter: On the Gay Circuit in West Hollywood - Media on The Huffington Post

Krugman On Islamofascismcaliphatism

Fearing Fear Itself - New York Times: "...Beyond that, the claim that Iran is on the path to global domination is beyond ludicrous. Yes, the Iranian regime is a nasty piece of work in many ways, and it would be a bad thing if that regime acquired nuclear weapons. But let’s have some perspective, please: we’re talking about a country with roughly the G.D.P. of Connecticut, and a government whose military budget is roughly the same as Sweden’s.

Meanwhile, the idea that bombing will bring the Iranian regime to its knees — and bombing is the only option, since we’ve run out of troops — is pure wishful thinking. Last year Israel tried to cripple Hezbollah with an air campaign, and ended up strengthening it instead. There’s every reason to believe that an attack on Iran would produce the same result, with the added effects of endangering U.S. forces in Iraq and driving oil prices well into triple digits..."

Majority Says No Apology

The Raw Story | CNN Poll: 88% say Rep. Stark should not apologize: "CNN is reporting that 88% of those voting in their Friday morning online poll say there is no reason Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA) should apologize for remarks blasting President Bush on the floor of the House of Representatives..."

Here's another example of how spinelessness will drive you down in the polls. Stark is probably more popular now with his base than he ever was.

The Real Rudy

Talking Points Memo | Dangerous All By Himself: "Check out David Greenberg's piece on Giuliani in tomorrow's Post. The basic point is a simple but very accurate one: the talk of Rudy as too moderate or liberal for the GOP is malarkey. Rudy's reputation for liberalism is based on three factors -- abortion rights, gay rights and serial adultery. In which order, I'm not certain. But those basically cover it. On most other key issues Rudy is fundamentally an authoritarian, and thus a right-winger on the key issues of the day. And that's a product Republicans are buying..."

Crooks and Holy Joe

Galante Donors Gave To Senator -- Courant.com: "Contributions from associates and friends of now-indicted garbage executive James Galante to the 2004 presidential campaign of U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman have sparked the interest of federal investigator..."

Religion and Voters

A long but very well-writen article. Evangelical Movement - Religion and Politics - Presidential Election of 2008 - Christians and Christianity - Voting and Voters - New York Times: "...Today the movement shows signs of coming apart beneath its leaders. It is not merely that none of the 2008 Republican front-runners come close to measuring up to President Bush in the eyes of the evangelical faithful, although it would be hard to find a cast of characters more ill fit for those shoes: a lapsed-Catholic big-city mayor; a Massachusetts Mormon; a church-skipping Hollywood character actor; and a political renegade known for crossing swords with the Rev. Pat Robertson and the Rev. Jerry Falwell. Nor is the problem simply that the Democratic presidential front-runners — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Senator Barack Obama and former Senator John Edwards — sound like a bunch of tent-revival Bible thumpers compared with the Republicans..."

The Wisdom of the Small Town Press

ptleader.com: "THE COMMON PEOPLE It took common people - farmers, brewers, printers, silversmiths - to write the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights some 218 years ago. And it looks as if it's up to the common people to try to defend those principles.

Somebody has to step up here.

The Bush administration mocks each provision of the Bill of Rights that protects private citizens from their government, and likewise pushes past constitutional constraints that protect other branches of government from the presidency. Meanwhile, most federal courts equivocate their way to approve most of these actions, and Congress, even though in control of the opposition party, dithers and compromises away our basic rights for fear of accusations of being soft on terror. The media, meanwhile, fawns and yawns its way through this immense power grab, distracted by the search for another faux pas by Britney Spears or startling new evidence about who killed Princess Diana.

The good news comes out of 12 jurors in a Dallas courtroom on Monday. The jury sat and listened for two months to the testimony of federal agents, Israeli intelligence officers, wiretaps, videotapes and saw thousands of documents produced by government prosecutors. They worked their way through 197 counts of charges against a charitable fundraising organization called the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, a Muslim organization that says it directs funds to the construction of hospitals and providing food for the poor in Palestine.

The Bush Administration closed the group down and froze its assets in December 2001 for supposedly financing terror attacks and murder around the world. The case against the Holy Land Foundation was the largest prosecution case by the U.S. government against an Islamic fundraising group.

Instead, a jury of common people told the judge, after two months of testimony and 19 days of sifting through testimony and evidence, that they were ready to acquit three of five defendants on almost all charges and could not reach a verdict on the other defendants or charges. The judge declared a mistrial and threw the case out.

The U.S. attorney involved said the government will attempt to retry the case. We'll see how another group of common people deals with this intricate set of facts and assumptions in the future.

One must thank God - or Madison, Adams and Jefferson - that the judgment of common people was written into our Constitution and basic legal codes. It was done for times like these, when almost every branch of officialdom gets stampeded into dangerous over-reaction..." (more)

From The Good Work...

If You Can Get It Department: The Price of Any Departure Will Be at Least $159 Million - New York Times

Merrill Lynch’s directors may be weighing E. Stanley O’Neal’s future, but one thing is already guaranteed: a payday of at least $159 million if he steps down...

“I lay the blame at the foot of the board,” Frederick E. Rowe Jr., a money manager and president of Investors for Director Accountability. “He was paid a tremendous amount of money to create a loss that is mind-boggling, and he obviously took risks that should never have been taken...

Veto Explained

Bush's strategic failure on S-CHIP - AMERICAblog: A great nation deserves the truth: "The brilliant Amanda Terkel -- of ThinkProgress fame -- takes to the pages of the American Prospect to debunk the Republican spin over Bush's veto of S-CHIP, demonstrating the weakness of the veto in particular and the administration's agenda in general. Terkel incisively sifts through the self-congratulatory Bush administration rhetoric to get at the truth about the veto: It was the act of a weak, failing administration, an ever-lamer duck quacking feebly in an effort to remain relevant..."

Crying Wolf

The Daily Dish: Bush and Cuba

"A reader writes:

Babalu Blog completely misses the point on Bush's Cuba speech. It's not that Bush is wrong about Cuba -- clearly, he's right. But unlike Reagan in 1987, Bush in 2007 has as much credibility lecturing about the human rights of prisoners as the Catholic Church would have advising schools on how to prevent child molestation."

Cafferty Goes KO

The Raw Story | Cafferty File viewers: Let's start another revolution: "CNN commentator Jack Cafferty speculated on Wednesday about how George W. Bush's unilateral grab for presidential power might be reversed.

'The president of the United States didn't have the power to spy on Americans ... operate secret prisons ... suspend due process ... torture ... hide the conduct of the government from the public,' Cafferty stated. 'It's not like anybody gave President Bush any of these powers -- he took them, as a brain-dead Congress just stood there and watched...'"

Two Truths

Dodd and Paul keep telling the truth ... and are ignored - The Smirking Chimp: "There seems to be an unwritten and immutable rule in American politics that the candidate who stands little or no chance of being elected gets to tell the truth. This holds as true on the local level as it does in the race for the White House. For a variety of reasons, we simply do not gravitate to the truth tellers.

Perhaps it's as simple as this: they make us think too much and, for that sin, they must be slapped down as too smart for their own good. Or they put too much of the burden of governance on us, telling us, in effect, 'Hey, just electing me isn't going to solve the problems ... to keep our democracy alive, you're going to have to do some work too.' This does not sound promising to the majority of Americans already stretched thin working two jobs to pay off the credit card cartel's monthly interest charges on a debt they'll never clear..."

How-To Hissy Fitting

The Art Of The Hissy Fit | Campaign for America's Future

"I first noticed the right's successful use of phony sanctimony and faux outrage back in the 90's when well-known conservative players like Gingrich and Livingston pretended to be offended at the president's extramarital affair and were repeatedly and tiresomely "upset" about fund-raising practices they all practiced themselves. The idea of these powerful and corrupt adulterers being personally upset by White House coffees and naughty sexual behavior was laughable.

But they did it, oh how they did it, and it often succeeded in changing the dialogue and tittilating the media into a frenzy of breathless tabloid coverage.

In fact, they became so good at the tactic that they now rely on it as their first choice to control the political dialogue when it becomes uncomfortable and put the Democrats on the defensive whenever they are winning the day..."

Missing bin Laden, Again

This is enough to make you scream. Crooks and Liars » Did The White House Miss A Chance To Catch OBL Again?: "Col. David Hunt (ret.) on FOXNews.com (I’m citing the relevant portion if you don’t want to give them the hits):

Besides, these things are of little consequence when you realize how we missed, squandered, screwed up, made a mess of and were massively risk adverse - again - when we did not kill Usama bin Laden in Afghanistan just two short months ago..."

Big Bro Wants To Know Before You Go

Prior Permission From Government to be Required for Each Flight - 10 Zen Monkeys: "The Transportation Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security are quietly pushing for a set of crazy new rules. All travellers in the U.S. will be required to get government-issued credentials and official clearance before every flight, both within the United States as well as internationally..."