You can talk directly to Corsi from 8:30 a.m. to 9:15 a.m. on Washington Journal and hear him lie to you. (or better yet, tell him he's a liar and just throw one or two or ten facts at him.)

Paul Waldman from Media Matters will be the next guest from 9:15 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. to mop Corsi's scum up and inform the viewing public of the truth.

Summary: I found out via the occasionally useful Newsbusters that there's a rap song out there called, "Kill Bill O'Reilly".

To the "East Coast Avengers" who made this song...uh, guys, you're not helping.

Warning: I'm not going to censor the rather explicit lyrics to this song, so you shouldn't exactly read this where you're going to get in trouble for doing so.

The New York Times Best Sellers' list has had a horror show of books topping their list over the course of time. An absolute horror show.

The likes of Peggy Noonan (aka Brooklyn’s embarrassing Reagan representative), good ol’ Patty Buchanan and, of course, the one and only Billie-O to name a few have sullied an accomplishment that used to be worth a little something. But the latest book to atop the list doesn’t even do proper justice to "absolute horror show." It is worse than that.

Jerome Corsi rears his ugly, curmudgeon face head again, and some Americans (i.e. the entire conservative nation) have made his -"No Shame on Smearing Democrats Because I Can Part 2"- "Obama Nation" number one on the list.

Thankfully, great people are slapping it down hard and expediently.

Peter Wehner is a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.  (Reminds me of calling the Center something like "Cute Puppies in a Basket..." A line I "stole" from I've forgotten who.  They want you to believe it's really about ethics and good public policy.)

This is what he wrote about Keith Olbermann, and appeared on Washington Journal and essentially said the same thing:

(Follow me below the fold:  MSObama)

After it was revealed that there was an undisclosed relationship between the Associated Press Washington Bureau Chief Ron Fournier, Karl Rove and John McCain’s campaign, and the documented bias shown by the AP since Fournier took over, you would think they would at least make an effort to put out an unbiased story. You would be wrong.

Yesterday Associated Press writer Charles Babington wrote what was ostensibly an article critical of John McCain, but in reality Babington bent over backwards to minimize and explain away McCain’s problem with “details.”

At times McCain can appear to be short on details. In some instances, he has made misstatements or eyebrow-raising comments during the long days of campaigning in front of cameras and microphones. Sympathetic listeners call them understandable slips of the tongue and question whether any candidate can know everything. Opponents call them gaffes, or worse.

Babington follows with a statement from McCain’s spokesman and the news that there are websites dedicated to making lists of Obama’s misstatements before getting back to the point of the article.

Some of McCain's remarks seem to stem from his generally breezy nature and occasional tendency to leave details to subordinates.

I’ll skip Babington’s six paragraphs about McCain’s position on an affirmative action referendum in Arizona and go right to McCain’s breezy take on Viagra versus birth-control pills.

"I don't know what I ..." McCain said. He rubbed his face while looking thoughtful. "I'll look at my voting record on it. But I have — I don't recall the vote right now. But I'll be glad to look at it."

McCain was looking thoughtful? You be the judge. At this point a journalist might mention what McCain's voting record on the issue is, but apparently Babington has a breezy nature too. Instead he does a packed little paragraph of other details McCain has been short on, mentioning his Czechoslovakia gaffes, and:

He also implied that the so-called "Sunni Awakening" in Iraq occurred after President Bush announced plans in 2006 for a surge in U.S. troops, when in fact it began several months before.

Now I'll give McCain a pass on his Czechoslovakia problem...after all, he spent the first 57 years of his life calling it that, but I won't give Babington a pass on that dismissive, revisionist description of McCain's mistake about the timing of the Anbar Awakening and the surge. McCain didn't imly that the Anbar Awakening happened after George Bush announced the surge in 2007 (not 2006...details, Charles, details), he said it:

Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that's just a matter of history.

And when McCain was called on it? He defended his remarks and to this day maintains that he wasn't wrong. And of course Babington forgets to mention the three separate occassions where McCain showed that he either forgot, didn't know, or lied about Iran, Shiites and Sunnis. Those are two examples where McCain has shown an appalling lack of understanding about fundamental elements of the war that he claims to be an expert on, yet Babington ignores one, downplays the other and tells us that John McCain has a breezy nature.

Babington finishes with thoughts from a professor at George Washington University, who is "amazed" that politicians don't misspeak more often and warns that Democrats need to be careful about making McCain's age an issue. And while it's tempting to mock that concern for Democrats, I'll instead point out that Babington dug up a speechwriter for EISENHOWER to warn the Democrats not to make an issue of McCain's age. It's the only funny thing about this article.  

Once upon a time I was an officer in the uniformed services, specifically, the service otherwise known as Uncle Sam's Confused Group (USCG)...one of the sayings peculiar to that occupation was "Stand by for Heavy Rolls".  This was both a practical admonition and a code for look out there's some BS headed your way.  The "heavy rolls" comes from ship-board experience where when your ship/boat is caught in the wake of another ship/boat and the captain of your boat is warning you that the vessel you are currently on is going to experience some unusally dramatic "rolls" (shifting from side to side, or possibly front to back).
This is the practical application of the term...the other way this was used is if, for instance your buddy knew that your Commanding Officer (C.O.) was mad at you for some reason or just ready to explode in general, he would (maybe) warn you by saying "stand by for heavy rolls"...

Well...all of that is long way around to explain to the fellow Kossacks and Obama-ites out there...to get ready...

About fucking time!!!

why can't the Obama campaign step up once in a while and correct perception problems this way...

Media Matters is spending about $100,000 to air the ad on mostly cable in Washington and New York, according to an aide for the liberal media watchdog group.

I had no idea that Media Matters ran commercials... apparently they do.  You can join their group here

Andrea Tantaros, who recently tried to slime Barack Obama as a "fancy lad," is referred to as a "Republican strategist" by both Fox and MSNBC. So I decided to look into what passes for Republican strategy these days, and it’s pretty funny.

Tantaros’ previous experience apparently consisted of spokespersoning for the unsuccessful William Weld race in New York and both of Jeanine Pirro’s flameouts. (Did Tantaros have anything to do with Pirro’s do you have page 10  moment?) Prior to that, her most newsworthy mark was made as conservative columnist for her college newspaper, Lehigh’s The Brown and White. The New York Observer caught some of her more choice lines in one column :

"...Mrs. Clinton realizes that her time as first lady is coming to a close and this power-hungry monster..."

"...Mrs. Clinton is a power-hungry congenital liar..."

"Whitewater. This was the Clinton`s real-estate scam in Arkansas that ended up costing us taxpayers $69 million and White House Deputy Vincent Foster's life."

From Media Matters:

In a July 14 Washington Times article, staff writer Andrea Billups characterized the tone of a Michigan campaign event featuring Sen. Barack Obama's wife, Michelle Obama, as "as much estrogenfest as it was campaign rally" and later wrote: "Even Michigan Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm got in on the girlie show as they campaigned together." Describing the event with Obama and Granholm, Billups wrote: "[T]he economic bantering did not begin until after the two-term Democratic governor offered a gal-pal fashion compliment, telling the cheering crowd of mainly black women that while she and Mrs. Obama had something in common as Harvard Law School graduates, she would not bare her arms in public."

So when two women get on stage together, all of the sudden it's an "estrogenfest" and a "girly show"?

So, by now, nearly every news outlet has reported on the Imus racial slur / comment: AP (Via Yahoo!), MSNBC, ABC NEWS, Faux News, CBS NEWS, Sports Illustrated, CNN, Google News (which lists 1016 articles on this story), Some other sources that you can find on Google News that prominently address this story:

Yep, John McCain, not content to become Bush's third Term, has decided to make his campaign all about him being the next Dick Cheney.

From Fortune Magazine
, via
Media Matters we get the first atrocity.

Read below, if you dare.

In a recent The Atlantic blog post, blogger Matt Yglesias inexplicably writes he "100% agrees with" a Jonah Goldberg recommendation to turn Meet The Press into a panel-show hosted by Chuck Todd.

A Matt Yglesias commenter (in a comment typical of those on the thread) writes: "I think Chuck Todd would be a great choice. Cerebral, likeable, not overtly ideological, not a blowhard, projects competence."

But Chuck Todd is a typical corporate media shill who uses his position in the mainstream-media to trim the facts presented to the public and to promote Republicans!

I have been thinking about this for some time regarding a Meet the Press appearance by Newt Gingrich from December 17, 2006.  At the time, I was paying only mild attention, as I was busy grading final exams.  However, you know how it is when you hear something that just catches you and won't let go.  So, this morning I pulled down the transcript, and what I was hearing indeed did happen.  Fortunately, it appears on a single page.

The Newt & Whomever Show

Summary: The following is an add-on to Indyslip's diary about the NY Post printing Keith Olbermann's address over a story about him and his taxes.

Basically, I want to give a little background on the website that started this mess, Olbermannwatch.

Fox News contributor David Horowitz visited UC Santa Cruz to explain how  conservative viewpoints are not represented in an academic setting. You may remember that Horowitz has called UC Santa Cruz the worst school in the country, based on his conversations with five students. I am serious, he only talked to five students. Though many students were forced to watch David Horowitz's speech from outside of the auditorium, that did not stop Horowitz from making fun of the people outside. We heard later that he called us "racist bigots". One person on the outside held up a sign saying "Kill Whitey" which most of the others outside, including myself, opposed. Ironically, it was written by the same guy who disrupted Horowitz's presentation. There is one funny segment in the clip At 1:38 and 1:52 into the clip, as Horowitz pops a snot bubble. Send this clip to Media Matters if you think it is deserving of being shown.

[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster.]

Watch the evening news on television.  I started casually stating this to my friends and family soon after Kerry was defeated and found the results extremely interesting, a remarkably consistent bland acceptance of the fact, perhaps a few small nods, followed by a long polite silence that always produced a change of subject.  Been reading too much Chomsky—something like that—was always the inevitable silent response.

ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, PBS Newshour, MSNBC and FOX are propaganda broadcasters for corporate America.  This true statement also produces an inevitable polite silence to be followed yet again by a change in subject, for many reasons most Americans simply will not believe that Almighty America would produce such a sewer of childish lying and culpability, such a phenomena could only exist in fiction.  Been reading too much Orwell, they silently intone, and move on.

Amidst the uproar over George Bush politicizing the 60th anniversary of Israel's independence, the media has been strangely silent about the revelation that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, by George Bush and John McCain's own definition, is guilty of "foolish delusion," and lacks "the knowledge, the experience, the background to make the kind of judgments that are necessary to preserve this nation's security."  

Just one day before Bush declared that "some," also known as Barack Obama, is an appeaser to terrorists, the likes of which have not been seen since Hitler invaded Poland, and before John McCain chimed in by saying Obama wanted to enhance "the prestige of a nation that's a sponsor of terrorists and is directly responsible for the deaths of brave young Americans," Robert Gates said:

We need to figure out a way to develop some leverage with respect to the Iranians and then sit down and talk with them. If there's going to be a discussion, then they need something, too. We can't go to a discussion and be completely the demander with them not feeling that they need anything from us.

And while there has been plenty of coverage of Bush's remarks, McCain's parroting of Bush's remarks and Obama's smackdown of both of them, no one seems to be covering Gates' policy of terrorist-enabling appeasement.  Or as Jamison Foser at Media Matters put it:

Naturally, then, a media firestorm erupted, with the Bush administration and its political allies questioned all day about whether Bush has any idea what he is talking about, whether he has lost control over the Pentagon, whether Gates will be fired, what Gates thinks about Bush's comparison of those (like Gates) who advocate dialogue between the United States and Iran to appeasers of Adolf Hitler, and whether the fiasco will remind voters that the Bush administration's foreign policy has been marked by incompetence and dishonesty, thus doing irreparable electoral damage to John McCain and other Republican candidates.

Sorry -- what was I thinking? That didn't happen.

Foser points out that ABC, CBS, the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Time and ABC's The Note, have all extensively covered the "appeasement controversy," but have made no mention of Gates' comments.  Given that Dana Perino claimed that Bush's remarks simply reflected "long-established United States policy," why is the fact that Bush's own Secretary of Defense opposes this policy not news?  

Twenty-four days of silence and still counting.

On Sunday, April 20, The New York Times published David Barstow's article on the propaganda conduit the Pentagon had built for itself to television, radio and cable channels, turning retired military-cum-media-analysts "into a kind of media Trojan horse - an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks."

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air."

Since then, as a number of bloggers have repeatedly noted, almost zero coverage about Barstow's story has appeared on the television and radio networks and cable stations where these analysts have appeared. Not even 30 seconds in most cases.

That's high contrast with how many times the analysts themselves have appeared.

Media Matters, which has been doing an excellent job of hammering on this story, has conducted a review which found that since January 1, 2002:

...the analysts named in Barstow's article collectively appeared or were quoted as experts more than 4,500 times on ABC, ABC News Now, CBS, CBS Radio Network, NBC, CNN, CNN Headline News, Fox News, MSNBC, CNBC, and NPR in segments covering the Iraq war both before and after the invasion, as well as numerous other national security or government policy issues. ...

Media Matters used the Nexis database to tabulate appearances by [20] analysts on networks with which they were affiliated that included discussions of issues related to national security or U.S. government policy. Instances in which analysts appeared on networks other than those with which they were affiliated were not counted. (My emphasis - MB)

For instance, Thomas G. McInerney, a terrorist-promoting retired lieutenant general, appeared on Fox News 144 times. Retired Brigadier Gen. David L. Grange analyzed for CNN and CNN Headline News 921 times. Retired Major Gen. Wayne A. Downing analyzed 270 times for NBC, MSNBC, and CNBC.

A spreadsheet listing each of the analysts' appearances is available at the Media Matters' link above.

Someone else who has been doing a fine job of dogging the military analyst story since it broke is Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com. He is one of those rummaging around in the document dump of 8000 pages and audiotapes that the Pentagon was forced to provide The New York Times.

Greenwald's latest piece, on Tuesday, asked, Was Karl Rove involved in the military analyst program?:

I have no idea whether the "Karl" with whom they had weekly briefings and were planning to brief on the military analyst Iraq trip is Karl Rove. I asked Larry Di Rita by email about this exchange and specifically whether Rove was ever briefed on the program, and he has not replied.

In the documents I reviewed, I haven't seen any other "Karl" referenced who works at the DoD. These are fairly high-ranking DoD officials and there aren't many people they're worried about having to explain themselves to (Smith's position as Assistant Defense Secretary was one requiring Senate confirmation and he reported to Rumsfeld). Given the significant possibility that this program was illegal, and given Perino's denial of the White House's knowledge of it, this question -- whether the "karl" being briefed on the program was Karl Rove -- certainly seems to be one that should be asked.

UPDATE: I think it's fair to call this "confirmation" that Rove was involved in the military analysts program. First, a March 16, 2006 email from Dallas Lawrence (6548), referencing a briefing of military analysts -- which, he wrote, was "a closed call opened only to our retired military analysts" in order "to get them on message heading into the weekend on Iraqi troop strength, advances, etc."

Some bloggers have wondered why anybody should make such a big deal of this story. After all, we've known for years that  government propagandists exaggerated, distorted and lied about the Iraq war before it started and have continued to do so as the occupation has dragged on and on. So nobody should be shocked that this Pentagon project occurred. Moreover, it is said, this is nothing new in U.S. history.

That misses the point. Yes, our government did not begin engaging in this kind of media-mediated propaganda on September 12, 2001. Starting in the 1950s, for instance, the CIA eventually put together a cohort of 400 American journalists at highly respected newspapers that it could count on to provide information about countries they visited and leaders they talked to as well as to get story angles the agency wanted published into print.

This latest domestic propaganda project is no surprise, and only a shock to the naive. But just because it's not surprising doesn't make it any less outrageous. And those who are digging out the details of what went on, how the project came about, who thought it up and carried it out, deserve our kudos for their efforts just as the media who operated as conduits for this propaganda deserve our jeers for failing to vet these experts in the first place and for keeping silent about them now.

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