Smafty Mac: Fighting the kakistocracy!!!

More protesters arrested, welcome to Amurikaaah.

Manhattan was spin city last night as 5,000 activists on bicycles swarmed city streets and snarled traffic during a protest of the upcoming Republican National Convention.

At least 264 riders were arrested on charges of disorderly conduct for blocking intersections near Madison Square Garden and in the East Village, police said.

The arrests marked the first real confrontation between cops and the thousands of protesters who have descended on New York ahead of the convention, which starts Monday.

"The cops said, 'Get out of here!' and I was trying to get out and I was cuffed," complained one busted bicyclist who identified himself as Keith from Brooklyn.

At first, police seemed willing to allow the protesters to have the run of the road as they zigzagged up and down Manhattan from Union Square.

But as the cyclists blocked the intersection of W. 34th St. and Seventh Ave. at the Garden, police began arresting demonstrators.

Many more were collared later at Second Ave. around E. 10th St., near St. Marks Church, which was hosting an after-party for the bicyclists.

"The cops are coming! Move out!" bicyclists screamed to each other as they made their way down Second Ave., hurling their bikes over the church fence in a desperate bid for sanctuary.

"They just all came to a stop," said Reggie Lakew, 28, a gift coordinator from Roosevelt Island, who saw the cyclists as they approached E. 10th St. "Everyone picked up their bikes over their heads and started cheering. Some sat down in the street. The cops surrounded them in a line and they were picking them off from the back and arresting them."

Some witnesses said the arrests in the Village began when someone tossed some spaghetti at a cop.

"This whole thing is about peace," said one cuffed and disgruntled biker who identified himself as Jesse from Brooklyn. "I don't have a gripe with the police. I have a gripe with the RNC, although the cops were pretty rough."

Cops slapped plastic cuffs on the protesters' wrists while other officers snapped Polaroid photos of the detainees in what appeared to be bid to head off allegations of police brutality.

Two busloads of protesters were taken from the scene to a temporary jail on the West Side Highway while a flatbed truck was piled high with their confiscated bikes.

"They're trying to set the tone for the next week," suggested Annette Wilcox, 47, as she watched the protesters being hauled off. "If you sneeze the wrong way, they're going to arrest you."

So the couple who put a banner out of their hotel window to protest are being charged with a felony, the naked people were arrested with out hesitation (not a bad idea) and now bike riders are being arrested by the NYPD.

Is this the America you want to live in?

Free speech zones, protesters being charged with felonys for pputting up a banner. Protest was the first weapon fired during our revolution, American expressed ideals and new ways of doing things, they protested and fought and bled for our country.

Now Republicans believe protesters are Unamerican and should be treated with spite, if you're Liberal you are called Anti-American or Communist by ignorant fools who don't understand that their efforts to shut you up, to keep you silent are the actions of a real Anti-American.
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More people in poverty, thanks Dubya!

The number of poor Americans grew by 1.3 million last year, according to a sobering and politically sensitive Census Bureau report issued Thursday.

The increase marks the third straight year the impoverished population has grown. An estimated 35.9 million U.S. residents were living in poverty in 2003, compared with 31.6 million at the advent of George W. Bush's presidency.

That increase, and a similarly steady rise in the number of Americans without health insurance, immediately cast the otherwise-dry Census Bureau statistics into the white heat of the presidential campaign.

"Today confirms the failure of President Bush's policies for all Americans," Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry declared while campaigning in Anoka, Minn. "While George Bush tries to convince America's families that we're turning the corner, slogans and empty rhetoric can't hide the real story."

While campaigning Thursday in New Mexico, President Bush avoided making specific reference to the latest poverty findings, citing instead more positive economic developments.

"Because we acted, the people of this country are working," Bush said, adding that "there's more work to be done."

For a family of four, the federal government pegs the annual income poverty threshold at $18,810. Last year, the new report estimated, 12.5 percent of Americans were considered poor. This was up from 12.1 percent the year before, though still lower than the poverty rates during parts of the 1980s and 1990s.

California's average poverty rate of 12.9 percent over the past three years was slightly above the national average.

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Bush says he "miscalculated" in Iraq.

President Bush, undertaking a heavy campaign schedule in key states in the run-up to the Republican National Convention, acknowledges a "miscalculation" about what the United States would encounter in post-war Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime.


In an interview with The New York Times, Bush said for the first time that he made a "miscalculation of what the conditions would be" after U.S. troops went to Iraq and toppled Saddam's regime in May 2003. The insurgency, he maintained, was the unintended result of a "swift victory" that led to Iraqi troops disappearing into the cities and mounting a rebellion.






In a six-day tour of battleground states starting Friday in Miami, Bush wants to demonstrate his ambition to reach beyond his conservative base and appeal to undecided voters. In doing so, he is advancing the argument that the country will be safer with him in charge because he makes the tough decisions and sticks with them.



Bush also told the Times that he did not believe his Democratic opponent, Sen. John Kerry, had had lied about his service in Vietnam. The group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has aired advertisements challenging Kerry's account of his service and claiming Kerry lied about circumstances surrounding his war medals. Kerry has accused Bush of using the group as a front to run a smear campaign.

# posted by Smafty : 3:47 PM

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Today while I was out we left the Best Buy.

I was with my mom and she drove well her car has a Bush/Cheney sticker on the back. So after we got done shopping we came back to the car and under the windshield wipers was a note that read as the following:

How can you vote for a dick like that

To be honest with you I always ask the same thing, however it's in jest but I would never leave a lewd note under someone's windshield or just start talking shit to someone like that, especially in a cowardly note. It's no different then the horrible hate mail I get from the Hannity is a moron site, it's mean spirited and cruel and very vicious.

To top it off there was a guy registering voters and he had a sign on his table : Democrats make the world better he had blue pens all over his table and he scanned us walking out of the store, watched us the entire way back to the car; where we found the note...Written in blue ink.

The Republicans are worse and often get vicious.

If you need to get something like that off of your chest leave a clean note or wait to talk with them offer them lunch or buy them a beer do something constructive DON'T BE AN ASSHOLE!

This is also the 500th post, proving I have way too much time on my hands!
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If you are reading this my e-mail blogging is working!

It's going to be fun the next few weeks!


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Finally

Pinochet is stripped of immunity!

Chile's Supreme Court stripped Gen. Augusto Pinochet of immunity from prosecution Thursday, paving the way for possible trial of the former dictator on charges of human rights abuses.


The court voted 9-8 to lift the immunity the 88-year-old Pinochet enjoys as a former president, a court spokesman said.



The decision removes a major legal hurdle for prosecutors seeking to bring Pinochet to justice, adding to his legal woes after Chilean investigators recently opened a probe into multimillion dollar bank accounts in the United States.



The ruling came in a lawsuit brought on behalf of victims of "Operation Condor," which they say was a coordinated plan of repression against opponents by the military dictatorships that ruled South American nation in the 1970s and '80s.



Although Pinochet has never been indicted in connection with "Operation Condor," government spokesman Francisco Vidal signaled the ruling clears the way for a possible investigation.

I hope this monster gets everything coming to him!
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Iraq a fiasco because of the Neo-Cons, well don't take my word for it, take it from the insider!

There was no "imminent threat" to the United States from Iraq. Then there was no strategy for building a new Iraq. Our closest allies and international help were "marginalized" and "ignored." "The Bush administration was never willing to commit anything like the forces necessary to ensure order in postwar Iraq." "Hubris and ideology" ruled. When chaos and insurgency overwhelmed "naive assumptions," the blunders were "compounded" by a further refusal to recognize reality. "The obsession with control was an overarching flaw in the U.S. occupation from start to finish." When faced with a harsh choice between "legitimacy and control ... the U.S. administration opted for the latter whenever the tradeoff presented itself." Now, "Iraq is more dangerous to the U.S. potentially than it was at the moment we went to war."


These are the reluctant judgments of one of the key U.S. officials who participated in the highest levels of decision making of the Coalition Provisional Authority. In an interview with me and in a forthcoming article in Foreign Affairs, Larry Diamond offers, from the heart of Baghdad's Green Zone, an unvarnished firsthand account of the unfolding strategic catastrophe.






Diamond, a scholar at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank located on the Stanford University campus, was personally recruited to serve as a senior advisor to the CPA by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who had been the Stanford provost.

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NYC to RNC: Drop dead 81% ofr New Yorkers support the protests Stick that in your pipe and smoke it!

Seventy-one percent of the city's registered voters think protesters should be allowed to demonstrate in Central Park during the Republican National Convention, and 11 percent plan to go to a demonstration themselves, according to a poll released Thursday.

Most New Yorkers, 81 percent, approve of lawful demonstrations during the convention, and 68 percent approve of nonviolent civil disobedience, the Quinnipiac University Poll found. Nearly all disapprove of violent protests, according to the poll.

"The city is rolling out the red carpet for the Republican delegates, but most New Yorkers would roll out the green carpet of Central Park for the anti-Republican demonstrators," Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, said in a statement.

"Lawful demonstrations - even nonviolent civil disobedience - are a time-honored tradition and still widely supported," he said. "But 19 out of 20 New Yorkers draw the line at violence."

Two-thirds think the convention and the protests surrounding it will cause major disruptions, but just 10 percent plan to leave during the event, the poll said. Half said they were worried about the convention being held in the city, and 31 percent said they thought a major terrorist attack during the convention is "very likely" or "somewhat likely," the poll found.

New Yorkers were split on whether the convention will be good for the city, with 30 percent saying it would be, 33 percent saying it would not be, and 33 percent saying it won't make a difference, according to the Quinnipiac University Poll.

As for President Bush, the star of the event, 70 percent said they disapproved of the job he is doing, compared with 25 percent who approved, the poll said.

The poll surveyed 822 New York City registered voters between Aug. 20 and Aug. 24 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.

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Smafty Mac on the road

Over the next three weeks I will be on the road away from my Computer. I have business in Silicon valley then I'm going to Arizona to visit my sister and her kids and after that wherever the wind takes we, better known as NYC (if economically feasible). Normal work will keep me even farther away from my computer so I have come up with an Idea: Chronicle my adventures for you.

I am setting up a travel log complete with pictures and audio commentary to document my time away from the blogsphere! Today I will purchase a Palm Zire 72 that will allow me to do all of that and more, plus with Bluetooth wireless connectivity I can surf the web and send posts when I want them sent.

Today I have about 30 more minutes before I am gone all day again so just in case you think I'm just being lazy this next week, I'm really not. I leave town on Wednesday and come back God knows when so I have to put more hours in for more money lucky me and try to make it to NYC for the showdown because getting pelted by rubber bullets sounds like a good way of starting a road trip!

See on on the road, and you'll see lots of me!
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John O'Neill: Flip flopping liar

This is in complete context John O'Neill earlier this month

JOHN O'NEILL: The whole country's watching him avoid the question. You asked about Cambodia. How do I know he's not in Cambodia? I was on the same river, George. I was there two months after him. Our patrol area ran to Sedek, it was 50 miles from Cambodia. There isn't any watery border. The Mekong River's like the Mississippi. There were gunboats stationed right up there to stop people from coming. And our boats didn't go north of, only slightly north of Sedek. So it was a made up story. He's told it over 50 times, George, that was on the floor of the Senate. He wrote articles about it, it was a malicious story because it painted all the guys above him, all of the commanding officers, in effect, as war criminals, that had ordered him into a neutral country, it was a lie.

Read what he said, specifically the most important line There were gunboats stationed right up there to stop people from coming. And our boats didn't go north of, only slightly north of Sedek. So it was a made up story.

John O'Neill claims in his book:

“Kerry [conclude the authors] was never in Cambodia during Christmas 1968 or at all during the Vietnam War In reality, during Christmas 1968, he was more than fifty miles away from Cambodia. Kerry was never ordered into Cambodia by anyone and would have been court-martialed had he gone there.”

Completely going from what John O'Neill said and I am not putting any opinion into this, just his own words according to John O'Neill no one went into Cambodia and if they did they would have been court martialed.

Well here comes the shocker for the fans of the Swift boat vets John O'Neill claimed to have been in Cambodia

O'NEILL: I was in Cambodia, sir. I worked along the border on the water.

NIXON: In a swift boat?

O'NEILL: Yes, sir.

Case closed on the swift boat vets, John O'Neill is either lying now or lying to then President Nixon

Consider them debunked, partisan hacks go away.

I understand why people were upset over Kerry's anti-war stance and many of the vets say that's why they are against him and that kind of legit anger should be expressed, no one should shut them up. It's a different story however when you lie, your freedom of speech is revoked and you shouldn't be allowed to take up anymore time spewing hate over the air waves.



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Swift boat liar gets caught lying and he's a Prosecutor.... trouble ensues!

Several Vietnam veterans are calling for an assistant district attorney to resign after questions were raised about his statement in a recent ad criticizing Democrat John Kerry's military service.

Alfred French of the Clackamas County district attorney's office appears in the ad sponsored by the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. In the spot, French says: "I served with John Kerry. ... He is lying about his record."



A group of Vietnam veterans who protested outside the county courthouse Monday said French implied he had firsthand knowledge of Kerry's war actions when in fact he had heard about what Kerry did from friends.



In an interview with The Oregonian newspaper last week, French said he relied on the accounts of three other veterans in making the statement about Kerry and did not personally witness the events. French did not return two messages left at his office Monday.



"As a senior assistant district attorney, you know as well as we do that that kind of ridiculous statement would never pass muster in a court of law," veteran Terry Kirsch said of French's account.



"We question your fitness to serve as an enforcer of the law after swearing to facts in a legal affidavit that you do not know to be true," he said.

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Great speech from Democracy Now

Today we spend the hour with famed Indian author and activist Arundhati Roy.

Roy was born in Shillong, India in 1959. She studied architecture in New Delhi, where she now lives, and has worked as a film designer, actor, and screenplay writer in India. Her first novel, The God of Small Things, won the 1997 Booker Prize, Britain's most prestigious literary award. It has sold six million copies and has been translated into over 20 languages worldwide.

She is also the author of several non-fiction books: The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile, The Cost of Living, Power Politics and An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire.

Last week, she addressed the American Sociological Association in San Francisco. She spoke to an overflow crowd about war, resistance and the Presidency. Her speech is entitled "Public Power in the Age of Empire." [Includes transcript]

Arundhati Roy, speaking in San Francisco, California on August 16th, 2004.

Check out the audio here

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Krugman:read

Almost a year ago, on the second anniversary of 9/11, I predicted "an ugly, bitter campaign - probably the nastiest of modern American history." The reasons I gave then still apply. President Bush has no positive achievements to run on. Yet his inner circle cannot afford to see him lose: if he does, the shroud of secrecy will be lifted, and the public will learn the truth about cooked intelligence, profiteering, politicization of homeland security and more.

But recent attacks on John Kerry have surpassed even my expectations. There's no mystery why. Mr. Kerry isn't just a Democrat who might win: his life story challenges Mr. Bush's attempts to confuse tough-guy poses with heroism, and bombast with patriotism.

One of the wonders of recent American politics has been the ability of Mr. Bush and his supporters to wrap their partisanship in the flag. Through innuendo and direct attacks by surrogates, men who assiduously avoided service in Vietnam, like Dick Cheney (five deferments), John Ashcroft (seven deferments) and George Bush (a comfy spot in the National Guard, and a mysterious gap in his records), have questioned the patriotism of men who risked their lives and suffered for their country: John McCain, Max Cleland and now John Kerry.

How have they been able to get away with it? The answer is that we have been living in what Roger Ebert calls "an age of Rambo patriotism." As the carnage and moral ambiguities of Vietnam faded from memory, many started to believe in the comforting clichés of action movies, in which the tough-talking hero is always virtuous and the hand-wringing types who see complexities and urge the hero to think before acting are always wrong, if not villains.

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The guy who was with Kerry when he won a Silver Star says Kerry chased a full-grown, fully clothed man who was about to attack them with an RPG. How would he know?, oh he was there.

Bush response: He's politically motivated

President Bush says attack ads by independently funded groups against either candidate should stop. The president's comments follow Sen. John Kerry's insistence that the White House is coordinating attack ads put up by the group Swiftboat Veterans for Truth. NPR's John McChesney reports.

Thanks for denouncing the Swift Boat ads too, douche bag!
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Dole said Kerry never bled, why don't we listen to the crew.

President Bush denounced TV ads by outside groups attacking both John Kerry and himself today and called for a halt to all such political efforts.

"I think they're bad for the system," he said.

The president made his comments as the Kerry campaign fought back against charges made by an outside group that the Democratic senator had lied about wartime events in Vietnam for which he received five medals.

In a conference call with reporters arranged by aides to the Democratic presidential candidate, Navy swift boat officers Rich McCann, Jim Russell and Rich Baker said Kerry acted honorably and bravely and was well qualified to be the nation's commander in chief.

"He was the most aggressive officer in charge of swift boats," Baker said.

Additionally, crewmate Del Sandusky said at a news conference in Harrisburg, Pa., that he personally witnessed the battle action for which Kerry received Silver and Bronze stars and two of his three Purple Hearts.

"He deserved every one of his medals," Sandusky, a retired computer repairman who drove Kerry's boat for nearly three months.

The attack on Kerry's war record has dominated the presidential campaign in the days since Swift Boat Veterans For Truth began airing its commercial in three states.

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Buy this DVD!!!


I recieved a screener of this movie today and wow, this is one of the best movies I've seen!

Mandy Moore was a little hokey at times, however she was also surprising at times. Good movie

Look I'm a film snob I enjoy cinema, the craft all of it and it takes allot to impress me and this movie did just that. The best thing is it doesn't beat up Christians or Christianity which is usually the case in movies like this and that surprised me. Christians and people in general are conflicted in their lives, by choices plagued by our own imperfections and doubt. We're subjected without pity through the dumb luck of the universe, you can take that two ways: Torture yourself and everyone around you because of all of this and use any religion to justify it or except the fact that this is the way it is and try to make it better for yourself and everyone else and if religion is the force you gain strength from then more power to ya!

The movie delivers that message.

Go buy the movie and I guarantee you won't regret it!

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Audit Finds a clean victory in Venezuela, too bad we couldn't say that about Florida in 2000.

An audit of Venezuela's recall referendum has confirmed that President Hugo Chavez won fairly and found no evidence to support fraud charges, observers and electoral council officials said on Saturday.

 


International observers carried out additional checks after the opposition rejected the results and said electronic voting machines had been manipulated to give Chavez a victory in the Aug. 15 vote. If he had lost, Chavez would have been removed from office.



"The audit is completed. ... The results we have obtained with this check are totally compatible with results of the electoral council," Organization of American States chief Cesar Gaviria told reporters.



The audit found only small discrepancies and no evidence that anyone had tampered with the electronic polling system, monitors said.

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George Bush is a coward that lets others do his dirty work, same with Rove, remember when McCain was called crazy, the Manchurian candidate, adulterer, race mixer and many other horrible things and George Bush didn't personally denounce it? Well flash forward to 2004 and the same ol' shits happening again, the cowardly George and Carl attack another war hero with professional liars and innuendo; so the Kerry campaign is fighting back...like the kids say ooh SNAP

The boy king needs to be shown the door!
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More proof the Swiftboat vets are liars and tools of the Bush administration, one of them worked for the Bush Campagin.

How long ago you ask? oh August 19th of 2004...two days ago.

I hope the Bush campagin gets everything coming to them, EVERYTHING!
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Kerry files FEC charge against Bush shadow force

Democratic White House hopeful John Kerry )'s campaign formally alleged that a group attacking his Vietnam war record had illegal ties to US President George W. Bush reelection bid.


In a statement released to reporters, Kerry's campaign announced it had "filed a legal complaint against Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (SBVT) before the Federal Election Commission (FEC) for violating the law with inaccurate ads that are illegally coordinated with the Bush-Cheney presidential campaign."



The move by the Kerry campaign came shortly after the Swift Boat group released a second ad attacking the Democratic presidential candidate, who was wounded three times while serving on a Swift Boat in Vietnam and decorated twice for valor.



Swift Boat Veterans for Truth have accused Kerry of lying about one of the wounds he suffered and of embellishing his acts of heroism during his four months in Vietnam, charges strongly rejected by the senator from Massachusetts.



Kerry on Thursday accused the Bush administration of using the Swift Boat veterans as a front group to do the "dirty work" of attacking his Vietnam War record.



The New York Times on Friday reported that there is a "web of connections" between the Swift Boat group and the "Bush family, high-profile Texas political figures and President Bush (news - web sites)'s chief political aide, Karl Rove."

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Smafty's Jams

Spend $.99, the saviours of rock have a catchy hit, check it out!

Song: 12:51
Album: Room On Fire
Artist: The Strokes




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Can you hear the horsemen of doomsday, well listen to Dracula: The musical and prepare your soul; Jesus is coming back!

looming like a giant stuffed bat on a stick, the easiest target on Broadway. "Dracula, the Musical," which sets the familiar tale of old snaggletooth to the familiar music of Frank Wildhorn, creaked open last night at the Belasco Theater with all the animation, suspense and sex appeal of a Victorian waxworks in a seaside amusement park.

Expectations were exceedingly low for this latest offering from the unstoppable Mr. Wildhorn — the composer of the expensively dressed clunkers "Jekyll and Hyde," "The Scarlet Pimpernel" and "The Civil War" — and expectations have not been disappointed. So go ahead. Take your shots. Say something, if you must, about toothlessness or bloodlessness or the kindness of hammering stakes into the hearts of undead shows. Think of every appropriate variation you can involving the verbs to bite and to suck.

What's next, a musical about talking cats? oh never mind.
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Craptacular Malkin defends her smear on Hardball

Here's a peek behind the cable TV curtain. It's not pretty.




So, my publicist arranges for me to go on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews on Thursday night to talk about my recent columns on the FBI and national security profiling and my new book. Despite the show's basement ratings, we figure it's a good opportunity to reach out to a new audience. FOX News, with whom I have a contract, has generously allowed me to appear on some competing networks to talk about the book. Thursday was the second to the last day that I could make such appearances.




A few hours before the show, a producer calls to tell me I will be on for two segments--the first topic will be the Swift Boat Veterans, the second topic will be related to the book. Fine. This is the news business. I understand the need to go with the flow and cover the hot issues of the day. I am prepared to discuss both topics.




In a pre-interview, the producer goes over general questions about Kerry's response to the Swift Boat vets, whether the charges will be an issue in the presidential debates, and the basic themes of my book and its implications for the current War on Terror. I am originally scheduled to be on with the Washington Post's Dana Milbank. This was scratched and I am informed at the last minute that the other guest will be former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown.




As I am seated at the table with Matthews, who I am meeting for the first time, he cracks a joke--and not in a well-meaning way--about how I look. (There are quite a few people who are hung up on this.) "Are you sure you are old enough to be on the show? What are you? 28?" I grit my teeth. He badgers me again with the same question. I politely answer his question and supply my age.




(I wonder how Matthews' wife, the respected TV journalist Kathleen Matthews, who hosts a show about working women, would react if informed about her husband's treatment of a fellow female journalist. I've been in the business a dozen years and would be happy to talk to Mrs. Matthews about my firsthand experience with Neanderthal chauvinism in the workplace.)




Needless to say, things went downhill, fast and loud, from there.

She was smearing him with second hand knowledge from a dubious source and she has the nerve to talk sh*t about Chris Matthews?

He is a tool, don't get me wrong but yesterday he really showed something hell even John Kasich subbing for O'Reilly did a good job taking these guys on. What a bunch of lying, crooked, bastards they are.

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No hold on for a shock, Bush money men connected to Karl Rove and Bush himself are funding the "Swiftboats for fascists" campagin

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Sorry for the lack of posting this week busy with work and a new hobby Learning Russian.

I understand that sounds odd learning Russian of all things but hear me out, I'm bored. This is how I spend my free time learning another language or some other device to better myself, I honestly believe that communication is the foundation of respect for another culture and we should all try and learn another language.

There are six languages I want to learn

1. Mandarin

2. Japanese

3. Cantonese

4. Russian

5. French

6. Arabic

I decided to start the process the other day while at a book store, there I could choose between the six starter courses and see which one jumps out at me. The big three were Mandarin, Russian and Arabic, the others I could wait to become fluent in. I wanted to learn Arabic for a while but this would cause a problem; Data mining which has given us such debacles as the voter purge in Florida and the flight list errors of the past few years is currently being used by Homeland Security thanks to the Patriot Act. If I bought an Arabic language course it would hit their computers, as digital red flag would be placed on my purchase and thanks to Data mining they'll go after everything I have purchased with a credit card over the last five years and oops theirs another red flag, it seems as if I bought the Koran in 2001.

Thanks to profiling it shows I bought a Koran in 2001 and (for the sake of argument) I recently purchased a Arabic language course so now I personally have a red flag over my name, regardless of the fact I bought the Koran well before 9/11 and the language course was to better myself or the fact that I have an FBI file which passed the background test, one I've had since the early eighties thanks to (oddly enough) the Soviets and my Uncles involvement in Military intelligence in Turkey.

So there I am and I have to pass up a language because it would be a bigger hassle than it's worth to deal with the orwellian control grid and have my life turned up side down all because I want to better myself.

So it came down to Mandarin and Russian, Mandarin is really hard to learn and Russian is easy, I went the easy road although I chose Russian the next is mandarin because something tells me I should learn the language quickly and I should learn Russian too, just my gut reaction to the world situation probably unfounded but hey always go with your gut!

Also thanks to insomnia I'm also working on the new site, in fact I've gone through four different designs and still no where near what I want it to look like, and I'm having to deal with load times, bandwidth and the total lack of an artistic sense is making it difficult to make and honestly two of them would be just fine but I am really a perfectionist and I come down hard on myself with I don't like what I see. I would use an existing blogging software, however I have NO IDEA how to use PERL, for those unfamiliar that's a programming language and apparently it's one of the easier programming languages.

The new site should be up before 2005 with LOTS of audio and Media files, streaming and download and a few other surprises I'm cooking up if everything works out, needless to say it will be user-friendly and get lots out of it. For laughs only I will put in test pages and gag pages, just for the hell of it.


Off to watch Quantum Leap and and learn some more Russian!

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More proof Data mining doesn't work Ted Kennedy on the no fly list

The Senate Judiciary Committee heard this morning from one of its own about some of the problems with airline "no fly" watch lists. Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., says he had a close encounter with the lists when trying to take the U.S. Airways shuttle out of Washington to Boston. The ticket agent wouldn't let him on the plane. His name was on the list in error.

After a flurry of phone calls, Kennedy was able to fly home, but then the same thing happened coming back to Washington.

Kennedy says it took three calls to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge to get his name stricken from the list. The process took several weeks, in all.

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Another Swift boat liar exposed as such: a liar

Newly obtained military records of one of Sen. John F. Kerry's most vocal critics, who has accused the Democratic presidential candidate of lying about his wartime record to win medals, contradict his own version of events.




In newspaper interviews and a best-selling book, Larry Thurlow, who commanded a Navy Swift boat alongside Kerry in Vietnam, has strongly disputed Kerry's claim that the Massachusetts Democrat's boat came under fire during a mission in Viet Cong-controlled territory on March 13, 1969. Kerry won a Bronze Star for his actions that day.

Larry Thurlow in an anti-John Kerry ad. Thurlow said he would consider his own Bronze Star "fraudulent" if coming under enemy fire was the basis for it. (AP)

But Thurlow's military records, portions of which were released yesterday to The Washington Post under the Freedom of Information Act, contain several references to "enemy small arms and automatic weapons fire" directed at "all units" of the five-boat flotilla. Thurlow won his own Bronze Star that day, and the citation praises him for providing assistance to a damaged Swift boat "despite enemy bullets flying about him."

Does that make him a liar then....?

I'd like to thank the Washington Post for catching up with the story we knew about last month,
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Another Swift boat liar exposed as such: a liar

Newly obtained military records of one of Sen. John F. Kerry's most vocal critics, who has accused the Democratic presidential candidate of lying about his wartime record to win medals, contradict his own version of events.




In newspaper interviews and a best-selling book, Larry Thurlow, who commanded a Navy Swift boat alongside Kerry in Vietnam, has strongly disputed Kerry's claim that the Massachusetts Democrat's boat came under fire during a mission in Viet Cong-controlled territory on March 13, 1969. Kerry won a Bronze Star for his actions that day.

Larry Thurlow in an anti-John Kerry ad. Thurlow said he would consider his own Bronze Star "fraudulent" if coming under enemy fire was the basis for it. (AP)

But Thurlow's military records, portions of which were released yesterday to The Washington Post under the Freedom of Information Act, contain several references to "enemy small arms and automatic weapons fire" directed at "all units" of the five-boat flotilla. Thurlow won his own Bronze Star that day, and the citation praises him for providing assistance to a damaged Swift boat "despite enemy bullets flying about him."

Does that make him a liar then....?

I'd like to thank the Washington Post for catching up with the story we knew about last month,
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As seen on Hoffmania

An unidentified supporter of President Bush tries to silence protester Kendra Lloyd-Knox (right) outside Southridge High School in Beaverton. Elsewhere in Portland, supporters of Democratic candidate Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., rallied on the waterfront.

Democracy, Bush style!
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Throw her some Cash please!

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NO child left behind my applesauce, Charter schools are failing!

The first national comparison of test scores among children in charter schools and regular public schools shows charter school students often doing worse than comparable students in regular public schools.

The findings, buried in mountains of data the Education Department released without public announcement, dealt a blow to supporters of the charter school movement, including the Bush administration.

The data shows fourth graders attending charter schools performing about half a year behind students in other public schools in both reading and math. Put another way, only 25 percent of the fourth graders attending charters were proficient in reading and math, against 30 percent who were proficient in reading, and 32 percent in math, at traditional public schools.

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The Daily Howler just made the best campagin this cycle!


I voted to give President Bush the authority. Then President Bush fucked it up.

Now if he can only find a way to sneak that one in!
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Krugman: read

Everyone knows it, but not many politicians or mainstream journalists are willing to talk about it, for fear of sounding conspiracy-minded: there is a substantial chance that the result of the 2004 presidential election will be suspect.

When I say that the result will be suspect, I don't mean that the election will, in fact, have been stolen. (We may never know.) I mean that there will be sufficient uncertainty about the honesty of the vote count that much of the world and many Americans will have serious doubts.

How might the election result be suspect? Well, to take only one of several possibilities, suppose that Florida - where recent polls give John Kerry the lead - once again swings the election to George Bush.

Much of Florida's vote will be counted by electronic voting machines with no paper trails. Independent computer scientists who have examined some of these machines' programming code are appalled at the security flaws. So there will be reasonable doubts about whether Florida's votes were properly counted, and no paper ballots to recount. The public will have to take the result on faith.

Yet the behavior of Gov. Jeb Bush's officials with regard to other election-related matters offers no justification for such faith. First there was the affair of the felon list. Florida law denies the vote to convicted felons. But in 2000 many innocent people, a great number of them black, couldn't vote because they were erroneously put on a list of felons; these wrongful exclusions may have put Governor Bush's brother in the White House.

This year, Florida again drew up a felon list, and tried to keep it secret. When a judge forced the list's release, it turned out that it once again wrongly disenfranchised many people - again, largely African-American - while including almost no Hispanics.

Yesterday, my colleague Bob Herbert reported on another highly suspicious Florida initiative: state police officers have gone into the homes of elderly African-American voters - including participants in get-out-the-vote operations - and interrogated them as part of what the state says is a fraud investigation. But the state has provided little information about the investigation, and, as Mr. Herbert says, this looks remarkably like an attempt to intimidate voters.

Given this pattern, there will be skepticism if Florida's paperless voting machines give President Bush an upset, uncheckable victory.

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California will get hit hard by global warming

California will become hotter and drier by the end of the century, menacing the valuable wine and dairy industries, even if dramatic steps are taken to curb global warming, researchers said on Monday.

The first study to specifically forecast the impact of global warming on a U.S. state also shows the snowpack melting in the Sierra Nevada mountains, more frequent heat waves hitting Los Angles and disruptions to crop irrigation.

Researchers from the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology in Stanford, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the National Center for Atmospheric Research and elsewhere ran scenarios through new computer models of global warming.

All predicted California's weather would be hotter and drier, but this would be worse if only weak action is taken to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases contributing to warming the planet.

"We are already in a situation where we have seen some warming and we have seen some impacts," said Carnegie's Christopher Field, who led the study.

"If we stay on higher emissions trajectory, there will be consequences over the coming decades that are truly, truly serious and something I think reasonable people would be doing whatever they could to avoid," he said in a telephone interview.

Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Field and colleagues described the impact based on scenarios devised by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

One forecast, the so-called high emissions trajectory, is what Field described as business as usual. "High economic growth, high globalization and a strong emphasis on fossil fuels," he said.

The low-emissions trajectory has slightly lower economic growth with industries shifted from factories toward service industries and information technology.

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Cheney VS Cheney: Can you say hypocrite?

HH: Vice President Dick Cheney, welcome to the Hugh Hewitt Show.

VP: It is good to be on here.

HH: Today you brought attention to John Kerry's plan to wage a more 'sensitive'
war on terror. What do you think John Kerry meant when he said 'sensitive,' Mr.
Vice President?

VP: Well, I'm not sure what he meant (laughing). Ah, it strikes me the two words
don't really go together, sensitive and war. If you look at our history, I don't
think any of the wars we've won, were won by us being quote sensitive. I think
of Abraham Lincoln and General Grant, they didn't wage sensitive war. Neither
did Roosevelt, neither did Eisenhower or MacArthur in World War II. A sensitive
war will not destroy the evil men who killed 3,000 Americans, and who seek
chemical, nuclear, and biological weapons to kill hundreds of thousands more....


...[later]...


HH: Will the Najaf offensive continue until that city is subdued even if that
means a siege of the Imam Ali shrine?

VP: Well, from the standpoint of the shrine, obviously it is a sensitive area,
and we are very much aware of its sensitivity. On the other hand, a lot of
people who worship there feel like Moqtada Sadr is the one who has defiled the
shrine, if you will, and I would expect folks on the scene there, including U.S.
commanders, will work very carefully with the Iraqis so that we minimize the
extent to which the U.S. is involved in any operation that might involve the
shrine itself.

So Cheney called Kerry a pussy because of one word he used in a speech, however when he uses it he's a tough guy.

This is all they have cherry picked comments taken out of context, feel good everyone they're losing abd they know it!
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Chavez stays put as the referendum winner

Officials from the National Electoral Council said that, with 94% of ballots counted, Mr Chavez had 58% of the vote.

It now appears clear that an opposition attempt to force him from office has failed, as have previous attempts, the BBC's James Menendez in Caracas says.

But opposition members on the electoral body rejected the partial result as a fraud, claiming their side had won.

There have been passionate scenes outside Miraflores presidential palace, where Mr Chavez has been singing to his cheering supporters.

Fireworks have been set off across the capital, Caracas.

So when do we send in the CIA or American troops to overthrow the "Communist"?
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I'm called a Bush hater because of my policy differences, I do not hate President Bush however for eight years it was OK to call Bill Clinton a drug running, murdering, rapist, in fact you could get on FOX or other tabloid trash with that attitude, but I disagree (and was proven right) about his tax policy and obviously I hate the man.

Check out this review for Unprecedented - The 2000 Presidential Election - 2004 Campaign Edition and tell me this isn't the perfect example of FOX on the brain.

null"dannysmith1979" (a Conservative from TEXAS) - See all my reviews
I cannot believe that you people who have reviewed this "documentary" thought that it was a fair representation of what occurred in Florida in the 2000 Election. You people must seriously have your heads stuck in the sand because you clearly have not seen the real news reports that covered the election. And to the gentleman from Washington, D.C., who said that President Bush learned from President Nixon the tricky ways to steal an election, I think you need to look no farther than the Democratic martyr of a president, President Kennedy, to show you how to really steal an election; from dead people voting in Chicago in 1962 to dead people voting in Florida in 2000. You people need to get out and watch some real news and read some real books, not watch these "documentaries" that attempt to rewrite history. Of course, reqriting history is something Democrats are quite good at, especially Hillary Clinton in her awful "autobiography" (which she did not even write herself).

It is a shame that I cannot give this "documentary" less than one star. It is truly deserving of less

So what does Hillary have to do with anything? We get called conspiracy nuts (which always gets a chuckle from the conspirators) if we bring up the Eron/Bush connection or the Bush/Saudi relationship, all of which has more meat to it than the Clinton scandals ever had but this guy goes right back to where he was led through the 90's, the garbage.

So where's the outrage over this?

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Wow the Krugman/O'Reilly debate is awful!


Bill is such a blow hard and someone needs to put him in his place, I'm watching him lie on camera, obvious false hoods there is nothing you can do. The damn Traditionalist monkier IS no diffrent than a gobbels ad, I stand for tradition.....Well what traditions do you stand for? The Bullshit false rose colored glasses view of the 1950's atomic family, church on Sundays and Lassie, or the real 1950's for the rest of America, segergation, repression, censorship, and fear! I look at both as real views of that decade and still O'Reilly's using that as a crutch to sell his right wing garbage.

Krugman is timid as hell and almost looks scared of Bill for a second there I thought Bill would have punched him once or twice. Especially when Media Matters was brought up, O'Reilly constantly goes to the far right "bomb throwers" for his info but Krugman cannot use a left wing media watchdog group using his own quote?

Much better than the Michael Moore/O'Reilly debate.
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Maher: Bush blew it the morning of 9/11
And I couldn't agree more!

John Kerry has waded into an issue raised by Michael Moore in his film "Fahrenheit 9/11," namely, President Bush's sitting for seven minutes in a Florida classroom after being told "the country is under attack." Republicans are waxing indignant, of course. But the criticism is richly deserved.

The fact that Bush wasted 27 minutes that day - not only the seven minutes reading to kids but 20 more at a photo op afterward - was, in my view, the most outrageous thing a President has done since Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court.

Watergate was outrageous but it still did not carry the possibility of utter devastation, like a President's freezing at the very moment we needed his immediate focus on an attack on the United States.

This is an issue about the ultimate presidential duty, acting in an emergency. If nothing else in Washington is nonpartisan, this should be.

But it is not. Republicans are tying themselves in knots trying to defend Bush's actions that morning. The excuses they put forward are absurd:




He was "gathering his thoughts." This was a moment a President should have imagined a thousand times. There is no time in the nuclear age for a President to sit like Forrest Gump "gathering thoughts" after an attack has begun. Gathering information is what he should have been doing.




From the White House press secretary: "The President felt he should project strength and calm until he could better understand what was happening." I agree that gaining a better understanding of what was happening should have been his goal. What I don't get is how that goal was reached by just sitting there instead of getting up and talking to people. Is he a psychic? Was he receiving the information telepathically?




"He didn't want to scare the children." Vice President Cheney has said of Kerry, "The senator from Massachusetts has given us ample reason to doubt the judgment he brings to vital issues of national security." So Kerry's judgment is suspect, but at a moment of national crisis, Bush's judgment was: Better not to scare 20 children momentarily than to react immediately to an attack on the country!

These aren't the actions of a strong leader, he froze after Andrew Card whispered in is ear "we're under attack". What a ballsey guy Bush is, he ran away from Vietnam and he froze on 9/11 the actions of this President is a disgrace to the office and in my opinion worse than getting blown and lying about that, Clinton might be a little sleazy but Bush is a coward!
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Bush's tax cuts heavily favor the rich, go figure!

Fully one-third of President Bush's tax cuts in the last three years have gone to people with the top 1 percent of income, who have earned an average of $1.2 million annually, according to a report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to be published Friday.

The report calculated that households with incomes in that top 1 percent were receiving an average tax cut of $78,460 this year, while households in the middle 20 percent of earnings - averaging about $57,000 a year - were getting an average cut of only $1,090.

The new estimates confirm what independent tax analysts have long said: that Mr. Bush's tax cuts have been heavily skewed to the very wealthiest taxpayers. Those are also the people, however, who pay a disproportionate share of federal income taxes.

The calculations, which were requested by Congressional Democrats, are all but certain to intensify a central debate between Mr. Bush and Senator John F. Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee.

Mr. Bush has argued that the tax cuts provided crucial support to the economy at a time when it was mired in a recession and reeling from the effects of a stock market collapse, terrorist attacks and corporate scandals.

Mr. Kerry has argued that the cuts were tilted so much in favor of the wealthy that they provided relatively little stimulus to the economy and set the stage for record budget deficits. Since 2001, the federal budget has deteriorated from a surplus of more than $100 billion to a deficit expected to exceed $400 billion in 2004.

Mr. Bush's top economic priority has been to make his tax cuts permanent, rather than letting them expire at the end of this decade as they would under current law. Mr. Kerry would seek to roll back the tax cuts for households with incomes above $200,000 a year, a move his campaign estimates would save $860 billion over 10 years, and use that money in large part to pay for a vast new national health care plan.

According to the new report from the Congressional Budget Office, about two-thirds of the benefits from the tax cuts, enacted in 2001 and 2003, went to households in the top fifth of earnings, with an average income of $203,740.

To be fair some lower income people got a tax rate drop,however it was peanuts compared to the rich!
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Gen. Clark sets Cheney straight!

General Wesley Clark, USA (ret) released the following statement today in response to Vice President Dick Cheney’s attacks on John Kerry:

“I spent almost all of my adult life in uniform serving this great nation in the United States Army. I have led American soldiers into battle and led an international coalition in the Balkans where diplomacy, backed by force, was the winning formula.

“George W. Bush failed to learn the lessons from his predecessor or history. His ideologues who control American foreign policy have squandered much of our credibility with our allies and failed to achieve victory in the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. They gambled with a go it alone policy and our soldiers are paying with their lives.

“Today we Americans are shouldering the overwhelming costs of rebuilding Iraq without sufficient help from our allies. The administration’s incompetence in protecting our security effectively is rightfully a key issue in this campaign

“Today, Dick Cheney took the lowest road in politics -- it was a cheap shot unworthy of the office of Vice President.

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Porter Goss tapped as new CIA chief, only problem is Porter Goss said he wasn't qualified enough to take th job.

Don't take my word for it, watch him say it!
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Did Aliens save in 1908, thank World Net Daily for the link.

Members of a Russian scientific team researching the site of the Tunguska meteorite crash of 1908 say they have found remnants of an extraterrestrial spacecraft, report a variety of Russian news agencies.

The object appeared to be a large metallic block, according to the reports. The researchers chipped off a piece of the object and will now test its composition.


One scientist said based on his calculations, the mass of the space object headed for Earth in 1908 was nearly 1 billion tons. He believes the meteorite was blasted by the spaceship at an altitude of 10 kilometers to prevent the destruction of all humanity on the planet.

"I am fully confident and I can make an official statement that we were saved by some forces of a superior civilization," Yuri Lavbin said. "They exploded this enormous meteorite that headed towards us with enormous speed," he said. "Now this great object that caused the meteorite to explode is found at last. We will continue our research," he added.

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Bush breaks environmental promise

By ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.

There are several ways to measure the effectiveness of a democracy. One is to look at how much the public is included in community decision-making. Another is to evaluate access to justice.



The most telling aspect of a government, however, is how it distributes the goods of the land. Does it safeguard the commonwealth -- the public trust assets -- on behalf of the public? Or does it allow the shared wealth of our communities to be stolen from the public by corporate power?



The environmental laws passed after Earth Day 1970 were designed to protect the commons -- those shared resources that cannot be reduced to private property, including the air, flowing water, public lands, wandering animals, fisheries, wetlands and aquifers.



Since then, life has improved dramatically in the United States. Children have measurably less lead in their blood and therefore greater IQ levels. We breathe cleaner air in cities and parks, swim in cleaner water in lakes and rivers.



These laws have protected the stratospheric ozone layer, reduced acid rain, saved threatened wildlife such as the bald eagle, and preserved some of the last remaining wild places that make this country so beautiful. In other words, they protect the parts of the United States that we all hold in common.



But George W. Bush's policy advisers somehow don't see the benefits we've received from our investments in America's environmental infrastructure. All they see is the cost of compliance to their campaign contributors -- a group that is led by
the nation's most egregious polluters.

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Outfoxed


I finally received the movie after weeks of waiting and I was looking forward to finally seeing the movie and let me tell you I wasn't disappointed. I can't tell you how nice it is to see the info in your head displayed in a movie, without missing any beats. The production value was a little low but not enough to distract you from the message in the DVD yet still you could tell it didn't take a whole lot of money (movie wise) to produce the film. The movie leaves you with a desire for just another hour with more depth to some of the interviews but most people will not sit through a 2 hour movie, let alone a documentary.

The most damning aspect of the film is the use of Fox's own footage against them. Watching them follow GOP talking points, verbatim was nauseating coming from a "Fair and Balanced" "News organization" and to be honest I was shaking my head half of the time in disbelief. When presented with the facts about FOX not opinions from former employees but actual memos and current employees.

Take for example the weekday line up

Neil Cavuto: Republican
David Gibson: Republican
Brit Hume: Republican
Fox All Stars: Mostly Republican a few moderates who have changed more political associations quite often.
Bill O'Reilly: Traditionalist (code for Conservatives without the balls to be honest with their viewers)
Sean Hannity: Republican
Alan Colmes: Democrat
Greta Van Susteren: Democrat

Two Democrats and only one of them discuss politics on their show and that one is an poor debater, looks weird, and incredibly weak when compared to his sparring partner, much like yours truly discussing economic theory against a mute with down syndrome I will come out on top, no different then with Hannity and Colmes. And the other touted Liberal covers court tabloid stuff, the Peterson or Bryant cases and when Greta does a segment she has Washington Times hacks on her show, so to say there is any balance it absurd.

One definite clip really hit home for me, the pre-interview banter between "Campaign Carl" Cameron and then Presidential nominee George W. Bush, apparently Carl's wife was involved with the Bush campaign and they shared some stories about his wife's life on the road with the Bush campaign. Now in order to be objective I would think that the guy covering your campaign shouldn't have such a personal connection to the candidate or a personal stake in the outcome in the election and as *the film pointed out CNN fired someone for being too close to the Gore campaign*. The Supreme court decision in 2000 should have seen Scalia and Thomas barred from ruling in that case Thomas's wife was a member of the transition team and Scalia's son was on the Bush Legal team. Being "Fair and Balanced" is also being objective and in context, something FOX threw away by letting "Campaign Carl" cover Bush and any Journalist worth his salt would agree.

The problem with the movie, the only one I could find is it preaches to the choir a bit, it's red meat for the starving lions but I'm not sure how it will translate to people on the fence or FOX fans. The argument is "Well I don't care if FOX is biased for Republicans, it balances out the Liberal Media", so this film has to go against the mentality of "I don't care, I want my views reenforced" and the film will lose, at no fault of the film makers. People on the fence I think will really appreciate the film for what it brings out, however for Republicans, FOX fans or the close minded in this regard you could show Rita Cosby snorting blow off of O'Reilly's chest while Geraldo and Hannity worship Satan, anointed in baby seal blood in the gayest club SF has to offer and they'd still support it because it reenforces their beliefs and doesn't ask the questions they don't want to answer.

I liked the movie quite allot, buy it and spread the word and hopefully the next documentary can cover the Noise machine of televised news!

Correction:
*I was wrong about the producer being fired, she was taken off of the campagin. No excuses, I screwed up and the film never said she was fired.

I apologize for my error
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Are you a lonley Republican in a swing state?

Then go to Fthevote.com and get your freak on with models... for a price you must vote against Bush. Will you vote against Bush to get some bus.....I won't go there.

Warning adult content and their server is running very slow so be patient, no I don't support the site and I am not moving to a swing state or changing my voter registration.
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Oregon national guard unit witnessed torture while in Iraq

A team of Oregon Army National Guard troops "frustrated and infuriated" after witnessing the torture and abuse of prisoners in Iraq earlier this summer, has turned to The Oregonian in Portland to get their story told. This has led Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) to demand that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld investigate whether the soldiers were improperly ordered by superior officers to leave a detention area after they intervened to stop Iraqi guards from beating handcuffed prisoners.

An editorial in The Oregonian (Click for QuikCap) today supported that move, adding that "the U.S. must demand human-rights accountability."

Wyden, meanwhile, has promised to protect from retaliation the Guardsmen who served as sources for the Oregonian's bombshell report on Sunday.

A guardsman who witnessed the day's events, Capt. Jarrell Southall, had provided the newspaper with a written account of the episode. The newspaper, led by reporter Mike Francis, also interviewed other Guardsmen who did not wish to have their names used. Fifteen photos of what the soldiers found also appeared in the paper.

The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad has also confirmed the incident.

The story stems from an incident on June 29, the first full day of Iraqi sovereignty after the handover of power. A guardsman peering inside a walled compound at the Iraqi Interior Ministry through a rifle scope saw security officers beating bound and blindfolded prisoners. The guardsman radioed for help, saying (according to one soldier) that if no assistance arrived he would begin shooting the jailers one by one.

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Kerry saves life of GOP Senator in '88. Contrast not withstanding

Former U.S. Sen. Chic Hecht of Nevada is a staunch Republican, but he thanks his lucky stars for Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.

On July 12, 1988, Hecht was attending a weekly Republican luncheon when a piece of apple lodged firmly in his throat.

Hecht stumbled out of the room, thinking he might vomit but not wanting to do it in front of his colleagues. Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., thumped his back, but Hecht quickly passed out in the hallway.

Just then, Kerry stepped off an elevator, rushed to Hecht's side and gave him the Heimlich maneuver -- four times.

The lifesaving incident made international news, and Dr. Henry Heimlich, who invented the maneuver in 1974, called Hecht to say that had Kerry intervened just 30 seconds later Hecht might have been in a vegetative state for life.

"This man gave me my life," the 75-year-old Hecht said Thursday.

Hecht said he was amazed that Kerry acted so quickly -- some people were assuming that he was having a heart attack.

"He knew exactly what to do," he said. "But a lot of people know what to do. They just don't size up the situation immediately."

The story has a twist of irony: Hecht was up for re-election that year, and Kerry, who was serving as the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, had pegged Hecht as one of the most vulnerable Republican seats.

Indeed, the Democratic nominee for Hecht's seat, then-Gov. Richard Bryan, beat Hecht, who served just one term in office.

"Only in America can this happen, where he's working against me to get me defeated and then saves my life," Hecht said.

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I just got OUTFOXED


I am watching it right now, will post a review soon!
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Fire/Police in NYC might protest the RNC convention

Police officers and firefighters announced an impasse Tuesday in their contract negotiations with the city and refused to rule out an illegal strike or sickouts during the Republican National Convention.

Off-duty police officers have recently been showing up at Mayor Michael Bloomberg's daily public appearances and picketing outside Madison Square Garden, the site of the Republican National Convention beginning Aug. 30.

Remember when they gave Democrats McShizzle over possible Firefighter protests,still waiting for the "LIberal Media" to pounce on this one!
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KrugmanREAD

When Friday's dismal job report was released, traders in the Chicago pit began chanting, "Kerry, Kerry." But apologists for President Bush's economic policies are frantically spinning the bad news. Here's a guide to their techniques.

First, they talk about recent increases in the number of jobs, not the fact that payroll employment is still far below its previous peak, and even further below anything one could call full employment. Because job growth has finally turned positive, some economists (who probably know better) claim that prosperity has returned - and some partisans have even claimed that we have the best economy in 20 years.

But job growth, by itself, says nothing about prosperity: growth can be higher in a bad year than a good year, if the bad year follows a terrible year while the good year follows another good year. I've drawn a chart of job growth for the 1930's; there was rapid nonfarm job growth (8.1 percent) in 1934, a year of mass unemployment and widespread misery - but that year was slightly less terrible than 1933.

So have we returned to prosperity? No: jobs are harder to find, by any measure, than they were at any point during Bill Clinton's second term. The job situation might have improved somewhat in the past year, but it's still not good.

Second, the apologists give numbers without context. President Bush boasts about 1.5 million new jobs over the past 11 months. Yet this was barely enough to keep up with population growth, and it's worse than any 11-month stretch during the Clinton years.

Third, they cherry-pick any good numbers they can find.

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Alan Keyes says Obama is holding the Slave Masters position.

Republican Alan Keyes ripped into Democratic rival Barack Obama's views on abortion Monday, calling them "the slaveholder's position," as the U.S. Senate race roared back to life in Illinois.

Up at dawn for a whirlwind round of broadcast interviews, the conservative former diplomat started his first full day of campaigning as the GOP candidate by saying Obama, a state senator from Chicago, had violated the principle that all men are created equal by voting against a bill that would have outlawed a form of late-term abortion.

Keyes said legalizing abortion deprives the unborn of their equal rights.

"I would still be picking cotton if the country's moral principles had not been shaped by the Declaration of Independence," Keyes said. He said Obama "has broken and rejected those principles-- he has taken the slaveholder's position."

Alan, you know there using you only because you're black. Seriously, they Considered Mike Ditka before they called you up buddy.

You are being used to spoil the black vote and that's it!
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Be the first to Pre-order the summers hottest movie

To anyone who truly understands what it means to be an American, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 should be seen as a triumph of patriotic freedom. Rarely has the First Amendment been exercised with such fervor and forthrightness of purpose: After subjecting himself to charges of factual errors in his gun-lobby exposé Bowling for Columbine, Moore armed himself with a platoon of reputable fact-checkers, an abundance of indisputable film and video footage, and his own ironically comedic sense of righteous indignation, with the singular intention of toppling the war-ravaged administration of President George W. Bush. It's the Bush presidency that Moore, with his provocative array of facts and figures, blames for corporate corruption, senseless death, unnecessary war, and political favoritism toward Osama Bin Laden's family and Saudi oil partners following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Moore's incendiary film earned Palme d'Or honors at Cannes and a predictable legion of detractors, but do yourself a favor: Ignore those who condemn the film without seeing it, and let the facts speak for themselves. By honoring American soldiers and the victims of 9/11 while condemning Bush's rationale for war in Iraq, Fahrenheit 9/11 may actually succeed in turning the tides of history

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