Day: June 9, 2005

Duncan Black, aka Atrios, at Eschaton has a page up on the Democratic National Committee site where we are encouraged to show love for embattled DNC Chair Howard Dean by making a donation.

We cited a recent criticism of the Republicans by Jack Danforth, a Republican Episcopal minister and former Senator, below. Here’s Republican strategist Ed Rollins criticizing former RNC chairman Rich Bond in the National Review in 1993, for saying that only Republicans are “real” Americans and that only certain people – white Christians, presumably, are welcome in the GOP :

Rich Bond was wrong at the Republican Convention last August when he condemned the Democrats with his statement, ‘We are America; these other people are not America.” He’s wrong now when he says in effect, We are the Republican Party; these other Republicans are not.

If Republicans like Rich Bond can learn from past mistakes, it should now be apparent to them that we need to make room in our party for a broad and diverse range of ideas and lifestyles. We should not shut anyone out–including the more conservative elements of our party.

This is classic “liberal media” excess going after a Dem while giving Gops a pass on the very same “infractions” If Howard loses, we all do. To quote Atrios, quoting Bobbi Flekman in our favorite thrash-metal mockumentary, “Money talks and bullshit walks.”

Go – Give.

Borowitz does it again:

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean apologized today for calling Republicans “pretty much a white, Christian party,” saying that he failed to mention that they were “fat and ugly” as well…

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn) lashed out at Dr. Dean from the floor of the Senate…

But hours later, Dr. Dean continued to stoke the controversy with his response to Sen. Frist’s remarks: “I knew I was forgetting something – Republicans are really stupid, too, and Bill Frist, in my opinion, is not even a real doctor.”

In the aftermath of Dr. Dean’s latest remarks, leading Democrats were mulling what to do about their volatile party chief, exploring a range of options including driving him out to the country and ditching him along a secluded road.

AmericaBlog:

Gee, John Danforth is one angry Democrat. Oh, that’s right. He’s a former GOP Senator and not a Democrat at all. But, oh my, he criticizes the Republican party as being the party of conservative Christians. But, isn’t that what Howard Dean said? I’m so confused. Why isn’t the MSM all angry at John Danforth too?

From Danforth’s excellent NYT op ed earlier this year:

” By a series of recent initiatives, Republicans have transformed our party into the political arm of conservative Christians…. The problem is not with people or churches that are politically active. It is with a party that has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has become the political extension of a religious movement…. But in recent times, we Republicans have allowed this shared agenda to become secondary to the agenda of Christian conservatives.”

In the Soviet Union and Saddam’s Baathist regime, changing the facts to conform to the message was labeled “propaganda” by the American government and our media. In the Bush White House, it’s called Standard Operating Procedure:

The New York Times reported Wednesday that Philip Cooney, chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, changed descriptions of climate research approved by government scientists.

The Times said that Cooney, a lawyer and former lobbyist with the American Petroleum Institute, made notes on drafts of reports issued in 2002 and 2003, removing or adjusting language on climate research.

Some of the changes were as subtle as adding the words “significant and fundamental” before the word “uncertainties,” the Times reported. In one section, he crossed out a paragraph describing the projected reduction of glaciers and snowpack, the newspaper said.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said in a press briefing that Cooney’s editing was part of a broad review by 15 federal agencies, including policy people like Cooney as well as scientists. “Everybody who is involved in these issues should have input in these reports, and that’s all this is,” he says.

Climate change has been controversial for the Bush administration since 2001, when it withdrew support for the
Kyoto Protocol, a global pact to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. The administration questioned the cost and scientific merit of planned constraints.

“Scientists are best equipped to inform the public about climate science, not White House lawyers,” says Naomi Oreskes of the University of California, San Diego. “People have a right to know the truth about climate science and the scientific consensus on the seriousness of this problem,” she says.

Maybe If We All Hold Our Breath, the Media Will Cover the Downing Street Memo:

Is the media finally waking up to the Downing Street Memo? A few odds and ends:

> Rep. John Conyers on HuffPost: “This is a stunning account of the way our media has slid backwards from the days of Woodward and Bernstein.”

> MSNBC’s Countdown hasn’t ignored it. “If you have missed it, and many have, it was a set of leaked notes from a British cabinet meeting in July 2002 indicating the U.S. was already trying to make the crime fit the punishment, already finding excuses, it said, to go to the war in Iraq,” Keith Olbermann said on Tuesday.

> “I’m still not quite sure why CNN has been so slow to cover it; the least we could do is cover the growing outrage on the Internet,” a CNN employee e-mails. “I’m sure this issue is NOT going to go away. And we shouldn’t allow Bush’s allegation that the memo was just a dirty trick leaked 4 days before the British election to go unchallenged…that doesn’t detract from the fact that the memo was authentic…”

> On Monday MSNBC’s Connected tackled the memo as an blogger story. CNN used a similar tactic on Wednesday’s Inside Politics.

> Democrats.com offers “a close reading of FoxSpeak.”

Still – I wouldn’t hold my breath for any in-depth coverage.