How come the Repugs get a snazzy background (including the prez’ airplane??!!), while the Dems got a bunch of screaming people (read populists??) waving signs, a marching band and cheerleaders. As loose as the Dems’ debate was, the Repugs’ was TIGHT.
Comments??
Yesterday, on the fourth anniversary of his “Mission Accomplished” debacle, Pres. Bush delivered a speech to a construction industry group in which he desperately tried to link the war in Iraq to 9/11 — using the words “al Qaeda” 28 times in 73 minutes. (He also used the word “progress” 15 times.)
Here he is at his most shameless:
Al Qaeda is the group that plot [sic] and planned and trained killers to come and kill people on our soil. The same bunch that is causing havoc in Iraq were the ones who came and murdered our citizens. I’ve got to tell you, that day deeply affected my decision-making. And I vowed that I would do anything that I possibly could within the law to protect the American citizens against further attack by these ideologues, by these murderers.
And:
For America, the decision we face in Iraq is not whether we ought to take sides in a civil war, it’s whether we stay in the fight against the same international terrorist network that attacked us on 9/11. I strongly believe it’s in our national interest to stay in the fight.
The only rational explanation for reviving the 9/11-Iraq bugaboo now is to keep Fox News watchers in the fold. They’re the only ones who still believe Saddam was behind the attacks.
Or maybe, as Keith Olbermann suggested, the White House message team is forced to drag out this tired crap because that’s all they’ve got left.
At the Veteran’s Administration, it pays to support your president. Literally.
By lying about their budget, doling out care so bad it risked the lives of wounded veterans, and presiding over rat-infested hellholes, the guys and gals who run the V.A. took the biggest “performance payments” of anyone in civil service.
The list of bonuses to senior career officials at the Veterans Affairs Department in 2006… documents a generous package of more than $3.8 million in payments by a financially strapped agency straining to help care for thousands of injured veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Among those receiving payments were a deputy assistant secretary and several regional directors who crafted the VA’s flawed budget for 2005 based on misleading accounting. They received performance payments up to $33,000 each, a figure equal to about 20 percent of their annual salaries.
Also receiving a top bonus was the deputy undersecretary for benefits, who helps manage a disability claims system that has a backlog of cases and delays averaging 177 days in getting benefits to injured veterans.
The bonuses were awarded even after government investigators had determined the VA repeatedly miscalculated if not deliberately misled taxpayers with questionable methods used to justify Bush administration cuts to health care amid a burgeoning Iraq war.
Ever idly wondered what selling your soul feels like? Just ask the V.A. They sold theirs to Bush.
In July 2005, the VA stunned Congress by suddenly announcing it faced a $1 billion shortfall after failing to take into account the additional cost of caring for veterans injured in Iraq and Afghanistan…
The investigative arm of Congress, the Government Accountability Office, determined the VA had used misleading accounting methods and claimed false savings of more than $1.3 billion, apparently because President Bush was not willing, at the time, to ask Congress for more money.
V.A. officials based in Washington D.C. got the biggest checks, triggering the Senate Chair of the Veteran’s Affairs Committee, Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) to ask what’s up with that. Smells like cronyism to me.
After six years of Bush, the big surprise is that we can still be surprised at his administration’s blatant raiding of the public till. After all, this is small potatoes compared to the rip-off which is private contracting. But still.
Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, said the VA bonuses appeared to reflect a trend in government where performance bonuses were increasingly used to reward loyal associates and longtime employees…
“Simply put, people who nearly shortchanged our veterans shouldn’t get a bonus check at the end of the year,” he said.
Progressive radio talk show host Stephanie Miller is doing a great job in the old Imus spot on MSNBC, and I hope everyone has a chance to catch her show.
Stephanie is a comedienne, radio host and progressive impressario, and it’s great to see her doing cable television.
She’s funny, pointed, provocative, progressive and her time on MSNBC is a mini-breakthrough and I suspect we’ll be seeing more of her.
There are some exciting developments in progressive radio and entertainment.
MSNBC is famously located across the river from Manhattan in Seacaucus, NJ. Stephanie talked a lot about being homesick for Los Angeles, so I’m not sure she’ll be back on the air anytime soon, which is a shame.
Now that’s keeping a secret!
A lawyer with “good reason” to suspect his client will appear on the D.C. Madam’s list has contacted ABC News to keep them from revealing the client’s identity.
But his client’s name is so secret, he didn’t even tell ABC. Wha?
In a letter to ABC News, Steven Salky of Zuckerman Spaeder in Washington, D.C., said he has “reason to believe” that his client might be named in this Friday’s “20/20” report about the alleged prostitution ring.
But Salky did not identify who his client is.
Jeane Palfrey, the so-called “D.C. Madam,” is pulling a Jack Abramoff and spilling her guts so she won’t be the only one in jail for breaking the law. She is also suing former employees who engaged in real sex, as opposed to the “fantasy sex” she says her business offered and that all her clients claim to have purchased.
Whoever the mystery man is, he must be really, really impotent. Sorry, I meant he must be “important,” if his lawyer is trying that hard to keep him out of the public mud.
Maybe ABC can hire Miss Cleo to figure out who the client is so they can comply with the lawyer’s request. Or to be safe, just not mention the name of any Republicans known to be flaming hypocrites. On second thought, calling Miss Cleo would probably be more realistic.
While I knew Bill O’Reilly was a bloviating blowhard before I read the Indiana University study, I did not realize that 40 percvent of Americans consider him a journalist while only 30 percent of Americans think Bob Woodward is a legit journalist. Now granted, Woodward’s creds have been somewhat reduced by his recent tactics, but still, he was half of the team that exposed the Watergate scandal, so he at one time was the kind of journalist that journalists want to be.
But O’Reilly has never been a journalist and should not be confused with one. Instead, according to the study, which used methods employed in the 1930s to measure propaganda, O’Reilly should be considered a master at propagandizing.
Using analysis techniques first developed in the 1930s by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, [researchers] found that O’Reilly employed six of the seven propaganda devices nearly 13 times each minute in his editorials. His editorials also are presented on his Web site and in his newspaper columns.
The seven propaganda devices include:
- Name calling — giving something a bad label to make the audience reject it without examining the evidence;
- Glittering generalities — the oppositie of name calling;
- Card stacking — the selective use of facts and half-truths;
- Bandwagon — appeals to the desire, common to most of us, to follow the crowd;
- Plain folks — an attempt to convince an audience that they, and their ideas, are “of the people”;
- Transfer — carries over the authority, sanction and prestige of something we respect or dispute to something the speaker would want us to accept; and
- Testimonials — involving a respected (or disrespected) person endorsing or rejecting an idea or person.
The same techniques were used during the late 1930s to study another prominent voice in a war-era, Father Charles Coughlin. His sermons evolved into a darker message of anti-Semitism and fascism, and he became a defender of Hitler and Mussolini. In this study, O’Reilly is a heavier and less-nuanced user of the propaganda devices than Coughlin.
[…]
William F. Buckley, ancient founder of the National Review and leading light of the once powerful country-club wing of the GOP, is worried that Pres. Bush is destroying the Republican Party:
The political problem of the Bush administration is grave, possibly beyond the point of rescue.
Buckley sees the fatal issue as Bush’s war in Iraq and fears that while the president’s aggressive campaign to win short-term political victories at home — like vetoing his own “emergency supplemental” war funding bill — may bolster his hardcore, mostly Christian nationalist base, it is all just a misdirection meant to hide the fact that Bush and his team know that the war is lost:
[Beyond] affirming executive supremacy in matters of war, what is George Bush going to do? It is simply untrue that we are making decisive progress in Iraq. The indicators rise and fall from day to day, week to week, month to month.
Buckley compares the Iraqi insurgency to the spread of early Christianity, casting America in the role of the faltering Roman Empire:
When the Romans were challenged by Christianity, Rome fell. The generation of Christians moved by their faith overwhelmed the regimented reserves of the Roman state. It was four years ago that [Vice Pres.] Cheney first observed that there was a real fear that each fallen terrorist leads to the materialization of another terrorist. What can a “surge,†of the kind we are now relying upon, do to cope with endemic disease?
He even suggests the insurgents’ cause is as unstoppable as your typical country clubbing freeman’s need for drink:
The parallel even comes to mind of the eventual collapse of Prohibition, because there wasn’t any way the government could neutralize the appetite for alcohol, or the resourcefulness of the freeman in acquiring it.
Finally:
There are grounds for wondering whether the Republican party will survive this dilemma.
Buckley ignores the source of his party’s affliction. Bush would have never reelected without the votes of the Christian nationalists, especially the ones in Ohio who turned out in droves to vote for Karl Rove’s anti-gay marriage amendment. These same easily fooled voters are largely still behind Bush and his lost cause.
Pundits say that Trump’s $5,000 midterm bribe was an overreach,
And they agree that if lies were a crime, he’d be impeached.
Despite all the dividend promises he’s made,
The fact is, not one has ever been paid,
So even before the midterms, he already owes us $8,000* each.
*$5000 stimulus checks via “DOGE dividend”; $2000 stimulus checks via a “tariff dividend”; $1000-plus checks via “savings” from expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies
