Kelly inquiry may be live on TV
Posted Wednesday, July 23, 2003 by vgdesign

Matthew Tempest, political correspondent - The Guardian

Tony Blair was faced with the prospect of a long, hot and troubled summer today, as it emerged that Lord Hutton has requested that his judicial inquiry into the death of David Kelly be broadcast live on TV.

The investigation, which is expected to last around two months, is already likely to take evidence from the Mr Blair, his director of communications, Alastair Campbell, and the defence secretary, Geoff Hoon.

Lord Hutton, who was appointed on Monday to head the inquiry, has already stated he wants to take most evidence "in public", but transmitting testimonies live raises the stakes still further. >>More

Bush's nose is growing; nobody cares
Posted Tuesday, July 22, 2003 by vgdesign

By ANTONIA ZERBISIAS, Toronto Star

It has been exactly one week since the Washington Post  ran a page one story quoting U.S. President George W. Bush as saying that the reason the U.S., "along with other nations,'' invaded Iraq was because its brutal vicious dictator would not permit any weapons inspections.

Here is the quote, from Bush's news conference with U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan, which CNN ran live last Monday. (The italicized emphasis is mine.)

Asked about those infamous 16 words in his State of the Union Address about Iraq shopping in Niger for yellowcake uranium, the leader of the free world replied: "The larger point is and the fundamental question is, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer is absolutely. And we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power ..."

So yes kids! We were all hallucinating when we watched news footage of reporters chasing U.N. weapons inspectors around Iraq last winter. Those were but voices in our collective head when we heard pleas from the likes of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and former weapons inspector Scott Ritter to allow the digging around to continue. And we must have all swallowed a giant tab of yellowcake when we read the news of U.N. weapons inspectors scrambling to beat a path out of Baghdad on the eve of the Shock & Awe bombing campaign. >>More

Senator Accuses White House of Retaliation
Posted Tuesday, July 22, 2003 by vgdesign

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Democratic lawmaker accused the White House on Tuesday of trying to have him removed from the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee in retaliation for remarks critical of the administration over Iraq.

Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois charged that the White House had floated a bogus story that he had disclosed classified information regarding Iraq's suspected weapons of mass destruction.

"The White House allegations ... were, in fact, false, and inaccurate," Durbin said on the Senate floor.

"Sadly, what we have here is a continuing pattern by this White House," Durbin said. "If any member of this Senate ... questions this White House policy ... be prepared for the worst." >>More

>>Support Senator Durbin, one of the best!

Republicans Are Adding Weight to Reversal of F.C.C. Media Rule
Posted Tuesday, July 22, 2003 by vgdesign

By STEPHEN LABATON, New York Times

Until recent days, the nation's largest media conglomerates had hoped that the House of Representatives would kill the growing political efforts to overturn their recent deregulation.

But in a stunning political development, the House now appears poised to support the reversal of a new rule that permits the nation's biggest TV networks to grow even larger.

The House began debate today on a spending measure that contains a provision that would overturn the new network ownership rule. Both supporters and critics of the rule say that the measure has broad bipartisan support and is likely to be approved this week. >>More

White House Threatens Veto on Media - Ownership Cap
Posted Tuesday, July 22, 2003 by symbolman

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration said Tuesday it would consider vetoing a large spending bill if it reimposed media-ownership caps that were recently relaxed by the Federal Communications Commission.

A House of Representatives committee altered a spending bill for the FCC and other government agencies last week to prevent the FCC from approving deals that would permit television networks from owning stations reaching more than 35 percent of the national audience.

``If this provision or a provision like it with respect to any one of the other FCC Rules is contained in the final legislation to the President, his Senior Advisors would recommend that he veto the bill,'' the Office of Management and Budget said in a statement.>> More

And thank god too! Wouldn't want to see the Emperor without his clothes. NAKED ARROGANCE, folks. They don't even pretend anymore. Plus, if you notice it's not BUSH doing this (just like the Yellowcake Scandal) but someone ELSE is making the mistake if the Public catches on - BUSH only takes CREDIT for others, never BLAME. Like for his LIES that are continually KILLING US TROOPS. Maybe it's time to IMPEACH THE MEDIA as well.

Radio host sees Senate bid with a citizen's eye
Posted Tuesday, July 22, 2003 by vgdesign

By Eric Zorn, Chicago Tribune

Radio talk-show host Nancy Skinner has no legislative experience, no political organization, almost no campaign money and, as of Monday, no gig in Chicago.

But on the plus side of the ledger, the North Side resident has a national following, passionate self-confidence and a closet full of pink clothing that she says will be her trademark as she bids for the Democratic nomination in next year's U.S. Senate race in Illinois.

Though listeners couldn't see it, Skinner wore one of her hot pink blouses to WLS-AM's downtown studios Sunday afternoon where she surprised the audience, her engineer and her bosses by announcing that, on the way to the station, she had mailed a formal declaration of candidacy to the Federal Election Commission. >>More

>>Skinner for Senate 2004

White House Tries to Limit Iraq Damage
Posted Tuesday, July 22, 2003 by symbolman

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration is reaching out to its Republican allies in Congress in an effort to counter criticism of President Bush's Iraq policy and his use of discredited intelligence to advance the case for toppling Saddam Hussein.

With Bush's job approval ratings slipping, and U.S. casualties in Iraq continuing to climb, the White House is in full damage-control mode, trying to reframe the debate over the Iraq war away from the flap over Bush's assertion in his State of the Union address that Iraq was trying to buy uranium in Africa.

On Monday, White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett went to Capitol Hill to urge Republicans to emphasize positive aspects of the broader war against terrorism, administration and congressional officials said.

Bartlett met with top GOP House and Senate aides to essentially provide ``talking points'' for countering Democratic attacks and to share recently declassified intelligence information with them, officials said.

The administration wants its GOP allies in Congress to do more to emphasize some of the upside to deposing Saddam, including humanitarian gestures and the freeing of the Iraqi people.>> More

Gee, lying isn't working for you Mr Bush? Just add MORE LIARS and all your problems will be solved. Or maybe you could OUT someone's WIFE as a CIA Agent and put both HER and the entire Country in even MORE DANGER. IMPEACH BUSH and VOTE ALL REPUBLICANS OUT. If we could BANISH them from the USA we should since they HATE America so much.

Dynasty rule: It happens in America too
Posted Tuesday, July 22, 2003 by vgdesign

By CHIDANAND RAJGHATTA, Times of India

Those who despair about nepotism in India can draw cold comfort on this front from developments in the United States, the great exemplar of democracy. The Bush regime is spawning such a huge forest of spouses, sons, daughters, siblings etc in positions of power that this country can bid fair to be called a Nepotocracy.
...
Under the current administration, nepotism has begun to spread to the unelected ranks of the government too. We start with Secretary of State Colin Powell, whose son Michael Powell was made chairman of the powerful Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Vice President Dick Cheney's daughter Elizabeth Cheney is a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State and her husband is the chief counsel for the Office of Budget and Management.

Top Republican lawmakers are also part of this familial bonanza. Senator Mitch McConnel's wife Elaine Chao is Secretary of Labour, and her chief attorney Eugene Scalia, is the son of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who was part of the team that anointed George Bush President in that controversial verdict (Meanwhile, Chief Justice William Rehnquist's daughter works for the Health and Human Services Department). The late Centenarian Senator Strom Thurmond’s son Strom Thurmond Jr, 28, has been made the US Attorney for South Carolina. >>More

Asia Times: The consequences of invasion
Posted Tuesday, July 22, 2003 by vgdesign

... It remains a question when and if the American public will again get fed up with the casualties among its fighting men and women. For seven and a half years, during its most intense involvement in Vietnam, the Americans averaged 528 combat troops killed per month. That is about 17 per day.

So the policy question that Democrats, Republicans, anti-war and pro-war activists and ordinary voters have to ask is this: Before this becomes a quagmire, what is the US going to do? Because abandonment is unthinkable from a Western geopolitical standpoint, it is probably best for the Bush administration to swallow its considerable pride and ask for help from as wide a spectrum as possible of the United Nations, which has considerable experience in nation building and peacekeeping, however ineptly it does it. That will be a hard thing for Rumsfeld, Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz to do.

Already President George W Bush's popularity is falling. After just three months, 40 percent of the American people think there was not sufficient justification to go to war. What will happen if, as the American military says, it takes four to six years to pacify the country?

Today, the coalition forces are averaging roughly one GI killed per day. Sixteen to go. >>More

No 10 overruled defence chiefs in leaking Kelly's name to Press
Posted Tuesday, July 22, 2003 by vgdesign

By Kim Sengupta and Andrew Grice, The Independent

Downing Street overruled senior Ministry of Defence officials who wanted to protect the identity of David Kelly and prevent him appearing before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, according to Whitehall sources.

Geoff Hoon, the Secretary of State for Defence, is expected to be questioned by the judicial inquiry into Dr Kelly's death over whether he sided with Downing Street on the unmasking of the government scientist. Dr Kelly is understood to have been given guarantees from the MoD that his identity would remain secret.

The revelation calls into question Downing Street's assertion that the MoD took the lead in dealing with Dr Kelly after he admitted he had met Andrew Gilligan, the BBC journalist who claimed No 10 had "sexed up" a dossier on Iraqi weapons.

Downing Street conceded yesterday that it had been consulted by the MoD over the handling of the Kelly affair. >>More

Are the media reporting on the president or attacking him?
Posted Tuesday, July 22, 2003 by vgdesign

This is a transcript of the July 19 edition of FOX News Watch

BURNS: And so our question, has the president lost the press? Cal Thomas gets to start it as we cover the coverage.

CAL THOMAS, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: They never has the press to begin with. Post 9/11 and all of those patriotic songs and montages of flags being waved and people like Dan Rather crying on David Letterman and lapel pins, that was easy because it wasn't tied to policy.

Now we're a little more than a year away from an election. And we've got a Supreme Court at stake and issues like abortion and gay rights, that the media, most of whom are liberals, deeply care about. Plus, they want a tight race because it means something in the ratings for them.

BURNS: But the issue here, Cal, that the media are raising is not policy, it's truthfulness.

THOMAS: It's nice that the media's finally gotten around to wanting to hold the president accountable for telling the truth. It's about eight years too late, but I'm glad they're finally there. >>More

Watching the detective
Posted Tuesday, July 22, 2003 by vgdesign

This weekend one of the great investigative journalists was in London to give a masterclass to a British audience. David Leigh, a sleuthing hack himself, went along hoping to get some tips from Sy Hersh - Media Guardian

To his admirers the famous writer Sy Hersh represents a one-man cavalry charge against the dummies and neo-con crazies who infest his native America. But to those who denounce him, such as Richard Perle, Bush's arch-hawk on Iraq, he is a "journalistic terrorist". And a terrorist is a dangerous thing to be in America, these days, when you can end up in Guantanamo Bay, or worse, in no time.

So it was perhaps not as bizarre as it seems that when this beaky 66-year-old ambled into London at the weekend, he insisted on giving an eagerly-awaited lecture on investigative journalism entirely off the record.

It caused disappointment among those who hoped that Hersh would launch into a public tirade against George Bush and his failure to find any weapons of mass destruction, which Hersh is reputed to have once compared to a West Texas lynching party in which "You think a nigger's raped a white woman, mutilate his genitals, hang him, and two days later find the woman safe and sound".

But in his published work in the New Yorker, Hersh has already mounted what is just about the only consistently powerful series of exposés available in the US media of the way Bush and his circle have shepherded the US and British public into a mendacious war. >>More

Readers Want Press to Cover All U.S. Casualties
Posted Tuesday, July 22, 2003 by vgdesign

Article on Media and Iraq Draws Big Response - By Greg Mitchell, Editor & Publisher

A news analysis that I wrote last week, posted at E&P Online on Thursday, has drawn the heaviest e-mail response of any article from E&P in the nearly four years I have worked for the magazine.

The article charged the media with providing a misleading sense of the recent U.S. death toll in Iraq. The press routinely highlights "combat" deaths and downplays all deaths, including accidents, suicides, and other causes (which vastly outnumber the deaths from hostile fire).

This apparently struck a raw nerve, with several dozen e-mails arriving in our mailbox within two days. And these weren't the usual media junkies or political activists, but an apparent cross-section of backgrounds and beliefs. Herewith an edifying sample: >>More

Columnist Blows CIA Agent's Cover
Posted Tuesday, July 22, 2003 by vgdesign

By Timothy M. Phelps and Knut Royce, Newsday

Washington - The identity of an undercover CIA officer whose husband started the Iraq uranium intelligence controversy has been publicly revealed by a conservative Washington columnist citing "two senior administration officials."

Intelligence officials confirmed to Newsday yesterday that Valerie Plame, wife of retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson, works at the agency on weapons of mass destruction issues in an undercover capacity - at least she was undercover until last week when she was named by columnist Robert Novak.

Wilson, while refusing to confirm his wife's employment, said the release to the press of her relationship to him and even her maiden name was an attempt to intimidate others like him from talking about Bush administration intelligence failures.

"It's a shot across the bow to these people, that if you talk we'll take your family and drag them through the mud as well," he said in an interview. >>More

Republican National Committee Tries to Intimidate TV Stations Not to Run DNC Ad About Bush Lies
Posted Tuesday, July 22, 2003 by symbolman

A BUZZFLASH READER COMMENTARY

A lawyer from the Republican National Committee has now sent a threatening letter to TV stations in Madison, Wisconsin (where a TV ad from the DNC critical of the administration is currently running) trying to intimidate stations into not running the ad. (The text of the letter is below.) The DNC ad, however, is 100 percent true -- the President misled the public during the State of the Union.

The Republican National Committee is trying to intimidate TV stations into not running the ads. Here's the letter its lawyer sent to TV stations.>> More

THE NERVE of the Reich Wing! Especially after BUSH LIED AND SOLDIERS DIED - excuse us, ARE DYING over his LIES to the Public. The Republicans that back BUSH need to be banished from AMERICA as they obviously HATE our country and want our troops DEAD to protect their LYING Leader. Impeach BUSH and his Co-horts and VOTE ALL REPUBLICANS OUT OF OFFICE FOR BACKING THIS KNOWN LIAR!!!At last the Democrats show some SPINE!

PAUL KRUGMAN: Who's Unpatriotic Now?
Posted Monday, July 21, 2003 by vgdesign

Some nonrevisionist history: On Oct. 8, 2002, Knight Ridder newspapers reported on intelligence officials who "charge that the administration squelches dissenting views, and that intelligence analysts are under intense pressure to produce reports supporting the White House's argument that Saddam poses such an immediate threat to the United States that pre-emptive military action is necessary." One official accused the administration of pressuring analysts to "cook the intelligence books"; none of the dozen other officials the reporters spoke to disagreed.

The skepticism of these officials has been vindicated. So have the concerns expressed before the war by military professionals like Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, about the resources required for postwar occupation. But as the bad news comes in, those who promoted this war have responded with a concerted effort to smear the messengers. >>More

Saudi involvement in September 11 attacks claimed in press report
Posted Monday, July 21, 2003 by symbolman

The Bush administration refused to declassify several key passages from the 900-page report, including a 28-page section that outlines the role played by Riyadh, removed from the final version, Newsweek claims.

Senator Bob Graham, a Democratic candidate for the 2004 presidential elections who supervised the inquiry maintains that the US administration was "protecting a foreign government," according to Newsweek.

An attorney for victims of the attacks who are suing a group of suspected financiers of al-Qaeda, Jean-Charles Brisard, said the report shows that "at each stage in the preparation of the attacks" Saudi Arabia operated as an effective financial and logistical "patron" to the terrorists.

Brisard said the Saudi government had thus been an essential "cog" in the attacks' successfully being perpetrated.

Brisard said certain parts of the report mention "help provided by Saudi diplomats working in Washington to assist in several suicide (hijackers)' arrival and stay in the United States.">> More

How STUPID do they think we are? OF COURSE Saudis were involved - we've know that all along they represented the CORE of the attackers on the planes. Name the only other plane in the AIR on 911 besides the Air Force One - that's right, the one carrying ALL the Bush BIN LADEN Pals safely out of the Country. So Bush Attacks Afghanistan and Iraq instead of his Family PALS in Saudi Arabia. WAKE UP AMERICA - IMPEACHMENT TIME for this gang of criminals.

Why Liberals Are No Fun
Posted Monday, July 21, 2003 by symbolman

It wasn't in prime time, and the ratings weren't even on the charts. But in the 24/7 broadcasting arena of political talk, where liberals are on the losing side at least 22/7, they must take whatever scraps they can get.

For them, it was a rare red-letter day when Al Franken, appearing on Book TV on C-Span 2, landed a rhetorical uppercut to the jaw of Liberal Nemesis No. 1, Bill O'Reilly, and left him even more senseless than usual.

The setting was a panel at the annual booksellers' convention in Los Angeles last month. Mr. Franken was on hand to hawk his fall book, "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right." Mr. O'Reilly, plugging his forthcoming "Who's Looking Out for You?," was not overjoyed to find his face among the lying liars (George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Ann Coulter) on Mr. Franken's book jacket. It was downhill from there. After Mr. Franken took the mike to delineate the lies at issue, Mr. O'Reilly started calling his adversary an "idiot" and shouting "Shut up!" Such grace under fire was not so much Reaganesque as Baxteresque, after Ted Baxter, the preening local anchor of the late, great "Mary Tyler Moore Show."

But of course this liberal victory over a conservative blowhard was short-lived. Despite their domination of the entertainment industry, liberals barely have a foothold in the part of show business they are most exercised about.

And so liberals plot and dream, with the undying hope that their own Rush or O'Reilly or Hannity might turn up as miraculously as Lana Turner supposedly did at the Schwab's Pharmacy soda fountain.>> More

Nice little kick in the teeth for Liberals in this BS article - BUT, Look no further my friends - we're right HERE! Somebody tell the Drobnys that Stranger and Symbolman are ON THE AIR at TBTM RADIO! We have LOTS of fun - and we take no prisoners. Hell, we could easily do two or three hours a day. Let's ROLL!

Some Dare Call It Treason - A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL
Posted Monday, July 21, 2003 by symbolman

A Story of Two Unidentified "Senior Administration" Officials Who Allegedly Betrayed the National Security of the United States: No Response from the White House, and No Coverage in the Mainstream Press.

If David Corn, the Washington editor for The Nation is correct in his suspicions, two unidentified "senior administration officials" are guilty of betraying our national security.

What is their crime against the people of the United States of America, if it is true? It would be an unforgivable treason: these two Bush administration officials allegedly revealed the identity of a CIA operative to conservative columnist Bob Novak, who printed her name in his syndicated newspaper column.

The outing most likely rendered her future, present -- and much of her past work -- useless in helping to protect the people of this nation. What is the specialty of this alleged CIA operative? Tracking the trafficking of weapons of mass destruction.>> More

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