That to which we aspire
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Less beautiful stuff below.
How many times must we say it? Cuba is not letting China drill for oil off Florida!
It has been a common Republican talking point, but it’s patently false — the Chinese are not drilling off Cuba’s coasts. The day after Cheney made the bogus claim, the V.P.’s office acknowledged that he was mistaken.... TPM has been keeping track of all the examples, and there are some real doozies in there. Some Republicans have altered the myth a little — I think Giuliani is the first to suggest that the Cubans and the Chinese are taking our oil — but they’re all repeating a charge that isn’t remotely true. Either they don’t know what they’re talking about, or they know the claim is false and repeat it anyway. At this point, it’s hard to know which is the case.
Obama's Plot to Destroy the Religious Right
At Last: A Good, Issue-Driven Health Care Story The Catholic Courier makes things clear for readers
Ecstatic Sex In honor of her 232nd anniversary of freedom we present a brief romp through America's favorite, most taboo subject; Sacred sex, the mighty orgasm, and the pleasure and pain of the body.
"Biblical Manhood" Conference Espouses Male Supremacy This is sooooo.... 1950. Grow up.
Behind Barack's "Suspicious" Mortgage Why did the Post run its Obama mortgage story?
World Bank Report Says Biofuels Are Prime Cause of Food Crisis
Now a leaked report from the World Bank claims that biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75%. The Guardian writes: "Senior development sources" say the report was spiked to avoid embarrassing President Bush. "It would put the World Bank in a political hot-spot with the White House," said one yesterday.
Biased Bunch: Religious Right Wants ‘Faith-Based’ Hiring and Firing Along With Federal Funds
Obama is up 5 points in Montana.
McCain supporters working hard to get around McCain-Feingold spending caps, with a little help from the Republican Governors Association.
Neocon media gone wild
Reporters with brains -- please!
The simple truth is that this campaign offers a very clear cut choice on Iraq. One candidate believes that the US occupation of Iraq is the solution; the other thinks it's the problem. John McCain supports the permanent deployment of US troops in Iraq. That is why his hundred years remark isn't some gotcha line. It's a clear statement of his policy. Obama supports a deliberate and orderly withdrawal of US forces from Iraq. It's a completely different view of America's role in the world and future in the Middle East. Reporters who can't grasp what Obama is saying seem simply to have been permanently befuddled by George W. Bush's game-playing over delegating policy to commanders.
The Media loves to read anti-Obama pieces on the air Never one about McCain. How odd.
Why is this so hard? News Orgs Already Getting Obama's Iraq Stance Wrong
Basically, unless Obama comes out and says something like "I'm a totally unreasonable person whose views on Iraq will in no way be influenced by anyone's advice or any possible factual developments" he's now a flip-flopper. Meanwhile, John McCain's views on Iraq receive no scrutiny whatsoever.
WSJ editorial paints Obama as Bush’s ideological heir -- and MSNBC is quick to repeat it
The purposeful and obtuse willingness on the part of CNN/HLN’s Mike Galanos to further the narrative started by his colleague Rick Sanchez that Clark was "swiftboating" McCain by questioning his experience, his patriotism and his sacrifice as a veteran and POW is stunning. There’s not even an attempt to see it from the other side. Note even the chyron headline is that Clark is questioning McCain’s "service," a shorthand that spins it in a far more malevolent way.
PBS and NBC’s symbiotic sins of omission
Watching the media react to Gen. Wesley Clark was a sight to be seen.
Is the AP taking sides in this election?
Reporter Dana Priest Mocks Liberals For Taking Seriously The Threat Of An Attack On Iran
Obama's FICO scores Seriously, folks, I know it's summer, but has the beltway press corps gone completely batsh*t insane?
...now we have a complete non-scandal over the fact that people with high incomes generally qualify for slightly better mortgage rates than regular working stiffs. Is there something in the water back in DC, or what?
Right-wing radio talker Monica Crowley caught plagiarizing. She steals a Moveon.org ad and claims it as her own.
It's difficult to know precisely how The Villagers decided the rampant presidential lawbreaking was just peachy and started going about defending it in utterly dishonest ways. My only theory is that the Republicans have held the executive for so much of the post 40 years that the Washington Establishment is almost indistinguishable from the Republican Establishment. They're practically one and the same, and its members protect their own. It isn't entirely new, of course, as the Iran-Contra situation was quite similar.
McCain says patriotism means putting your country ahead of al else
I'm going to have to cop to not being so patriotic that there's literally nothing I would put above my country. Indeed, I believe that most Americans, whether secular or religious, put stock in some kind of universal ethical obligations that extend beyond national boundaries.
I just can't wait for some reporter to ask McCain: "Why do you hate Jesus?" On a more serious note, perhaps some pundit could explore the similarities of McCain's version of patriotism
"Patriotism is deeper than its symbolic expressions, than sentiments about place and kinship that move us to hold our hands over our hearts during the national anthem. It is putting the country first, before party or personal ambition, before anything."
with Mussolini's version of fascism:
"The fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value.."
and
"Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato" ("Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.")
Come to think of it, the American Right meshes pretty darn well with Semiotician Umberto Eco's identifications of the characteristics of proto-fascism: the cult of tradition, rejection of modernism, cult of action for action's sake, life is lived for struggle, fear of difference, rejection of disagreement, contempt for the weak, cult of masculinity and machismo, qualitative populism, appeal to a frustrated majority, obsession with a plot, illicitly wealthy enemies, education to become a hero, and speaking Newspeak. (Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt.)
Pentagon made ‘unprecedented’ effort to hide human cost of war.
Some of the key findings:
– Banning photographers on U.S. military bases from covering the arrival of caskets containing the remains of U.S. soldiers killed overseas
– Paying Iraqi journalists to write positive accounts of the U.S. war effort
– Inviting U.S. journalists to "embed" with military units but requiring them to submit their stories for pre-publication review
– Erasing journalists’ footage of civilian deaths in Afghanistan
– Refusing to disclose statistics on civilian casualties.
The Justice Department is currently considering "letting the FBI investigate Americans without any evidence of wrongdoing, relying instead on a terrorist profile that could single out Muslims, Arabs or other racial and ethnic groups." The ACLU criticized the announcement, saying that the FBI could begin investigations simply "by assuming that everyone’s a suspect, and then you weed out the innocent."
All modern cell phones are equipped with GPS capability that allows your location to be tracked within a few meters at all times. Question: does the federal government have access to this tracking information without a warrant? The ACLU filed a Freedom of Information request to find out but the feds refused to respond. So now they've joined with the EFF and filed a lawsuit:
More here.
Sounds vaguely familiar.... The latest calamity to hit the Beijing Olympic Games is a plague of locusts. Seriously.
Conservative columnist Tony Blankley questions the patriotism of environmentalists.
American Family Association Launches Boycott Against McDonald’s For ‘Promoting The Homosexual Agenda’ And not because it sells crappy food that kills you? Actually, this is likely to backfire by showing how weak the AFA really is -- people with velvet paintings of Jesus love grease more than the hate gays.
Timeline: Obama's FISA Flip-Flop
For the McCain campaign to put out a memo to reporters claiming that Obama has adopted McCain's policy only shows that his advisors believe that a sizable percentage of the political press is made up of incorrigible morons. And it's hard to disagree with the judgment.
McCain's record-setting flip-flop record You'll forgive a link to myself.
John McCain: Just a regular guy
John McCain is an all-American regular guy who, like most people, earns his keep by marrying an heiress. Like average, everyday folks the McCain's rely on credit cards to make ends meet month-to-month "Cindy McCain charged as much as $500,000 in a single month on one American Express card and $250,000 on another, while one of their two dependent children had an AmEx card with a monthly balance as large as $50,000." Yes it's true, one of McCain's dependent children spent approximately the median annual household income of the United States in a single month and that's how McCain knows how to connect with regular people.
Similarly, Mrs. McCain "favors suits made by the German designer Escada, which typically retail for around $3,000 a pop" so she understands that most Americans welcome Wal-Mart's discount prices. And like many Americans, the McCains are very effected by developments in the real estate market, since "trusts and corporations controlled by her and her children spent nearly $11 million between the summer of 2004 and February 2008 on three condominiums in Phoenix and a pair outside San Diego." The McCains understand that these days many young people graduate from college saddled with debt and need a helping hand, that's why they spent "$700,000 for a 1,900-square foot, three-bedroom loft condo for her then-22-year-old daughter Meghan McCain" after she graduated from Columbia. Similarly, they know all about problems with inflation since they "increased their budget for household employees from $184,000 in 2006 to $273,000 in 2007, according to John McCain’s tax returns."