Day: May 12, 2005

And Pretty Soon You’re Talking About Real Numbers

Trish

I didn’t plan to post today but sometimes fate intervenes. I can’t resist this.

First we have the story about the Seminole County (near Orlando) GOP chair winning his defamation suit against another GOP officer who said he had been married six times when he was only married five so far.

Circuit Judge Clayton Simmons ruled Wednesday that a mistake on the number of Stelling’s marriages was harmless but concluded a spousal abuse claim was false and defamatory…

Stelling had been married five times but the letter said six.

“I believe in family values,” Stelling testified Tuesday.

Goettman asked Stelling whether being off by one really matters when the number gets that high.

“I beg your pardon,” Stelling said. “Of course I don’t agree with that statement.”

Two of Stelling’s wives were in the courtroom, including his current wife Lorayne.

Then you have a story about how Democrats are doing much better in Seminole County. With the Republican party leaders they have down there, is anyone surprised?

A longtime Republican said a rejuvenated Democratic Party would be a good thing in that it would encourage campaigns that focus on issues instead of personalities.

“If you have a viable opposing party, the discussion is issue-focused,” former County Commissioner Fred Streetman said.

Could not have said that better myself.

British Gov’t Memo Offers First Unrefuted Proof That Bush Lied Repeatedly During Run-up to Iraq War

Jon Ponder


If you’re like me your Outrage Alert Level has been bouncing from orange to red over the past five years, so it is hard to become even more outraged than normal. However, the treatment in the U.S. press of the contents of a recently released secret British government memo that proves that Bush and Blair were conniving to go to war in Iraq long before Bush & Co started “marketing” the war to the American public has finally done it for me.

What is outrageous is not so much that the memo offers unrefuted proof that Bush lied to the American public time and time again during the run up to the war – or that the announcement of the war was timed to influence the U.S. Congressional elections in 2002. I knew all that.

What is outrageous is that the revelations in this memo – which was released on May 2, 2005 – have caused barely a blip on the radar screens of the So-Called Liberal Media.

Finally, today a story about the memo appeared discreetly at the bottom of page 3 in today’s Los Angeles Times, but the focus of the story is not on the President’s veracity – imagine if this were Bill Clinton – but rather on how lack of coverage of the story has sparked outrage among Bush’s critics. And while CNN International has a piece on it their website, there hasn’t been a peep about it otherwise on cable news.

Here’s how the Times set it up:

Reports in the British press this month based on documents indicating that President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair had conditionally agreed by July 2002 to invade Iraq appear to have blown over quickly in Britain.

But in the United States, where the reports at first received scant attention, there has been growing indignation among critics of the Bush White House, who say the documents help prove that the leaders made a secret decision to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein nearly a year before launching their attack, shaped intelligence to that aim and never seriously intended to avert the war through diplomacy.

Political Gateway has the full contents of the British memo, along with a letter from a couple dozen Democratic members of the House of Representatives demanding an explanation from George Bush.

Alternatively, I have pulled the choicer quotes from the memo and posted them after the jump.

JUMP: Read the rest of the article.

Good One from Borowitz

Trish

Fabulous Borowitz Report today about the grenade thrown at Bush in the former Soviet state of Georgia.

But after authorities were able to examine both the grenade and the president more closely, it was determined that they were both completely fake.

“The grenade posed no real threat at all,” said a top Georgian security official. “Much like Iraq in March of 2003.”

The White House issued no official comment on the phony grenade, but said that the president would make a false statement later in the day.

Sometimes he’s even better than The Onion.