Why Alllow Any SOTC Nominee that Doesn't Fully Disclose

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Tuesday January 17, 2006 · 8:23 PM PST

2006/01/17 · 20:23

Something that has been troubling me since the Roberts nomination: why do we allow ANY supreme court nominee to be nominated and agreed upon if their whole history is not available? If it were any job of serious note, these things would be requisite.

How can an Alito and Roberts get by with only releasing partial records like we're pulling teeth. If they want status as top notch judicials they should be open and honest. But instead they lie at every opportunity to get the job. This applies across the board. If you can't be fully honest, why should you be a JUDGE. the man that guages peoples honesty. the people that set the standard for everybody else as far as truth. If they don't fully disclose their judicial record, they shouldn't even apply.

Hannity Calls Frmr. Dir. Nat. Mine Academy "extreme left-winger"

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Thursday January 05, 2006 · 10:01 PM PST

2006/01/05 · 22:01

You all know the drill by now; if you criticize the president you must be a partisan freedom-hating extremist. And so says the wizened lick spittle of Sean Hannity. See below for the partial transcript: Read More

How Abramoff Abused Judaism

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Friday December 30, 2005 · 5:35 PM PST

2005/12/30 · 17:35

Now that we know how much of a scumbag Abramoff was and all of his connections, let's look back on how he has used and abused the Jewish faith to hide and deceive his money-making schemes:
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Osama Satellite Phone: Complete Hokum

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Thursday December 22, 2005 · 10:46 AM PST

2005/12/22 · 10:46

So Bush's reason to sidestep the law banning eavesdroppping on US citizens was because Bin Laden might find out!!! OH NOES NOT BIN LADEN.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

So if you believed Bush, you believed that Osama had NO IDEA that the US was trying to trace his satellite phone, even though he was the #1 most wanted in the world. Well even so, it complete hogwash. By the time the mention in the press that Osama was being tracked by satellite phone, he had already turned it off, and the information was already public.

The press gave nothing away. There's absolutely no reason for Bush to sidestep the FISC courts.

Some Founding Fathers Quotes for Kristol

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Tuesday December 20, 2005 · 7:52 PM PST

2005/12/20 · 19:52

We already know William Kristol is a liar about the FISA stuff, but when he talks about the Founding Fathers as "...intend[ing] the executive to have -- believed the executive needed to have -- some powers in the national security area that were extralegal but constitutional" is he full of even more horseshit?

I've never heard of them mentioning anything like that, but let's have a look at some quotations to see...

Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers saying that impeachment should be for...

...offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated political, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to society itself.

and again:

Men in public trust will much oftener act in such a manner as to render them unworthy of being any longer trusted, than in such a manner as to make them obnoxious (subject) to legal punishment.

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Monday December 19, 2005 · 7:20 PM PST

2005/12/19 · 19:20

I'm not sure how many folks here know about Cryptome. It's a great site that's essentially a storage house for information about cryptography/privacy issues. They post files that would otherwise fall by the wayside, like this statement by George Tenet about how the FISC will never be used on U.S. citizens without a warant. Like The Memory Hole.

They have usually been anonymous with their posting. Essentially libertarian, they rarely have any political statement, but have finally spoken out about the recent illegal domestic spying by the U.S. to call it a "crystal clear felony".

If anybody tries claiming, like some 10 other diaries have, that the White House was abusing the law for "technical reasons", i.e. ESCHELON/CARNIVORE, Cryptome knows for sure that the claim is full of hokum and they have the documents to prove it.

These guys have been an essential resource for things like this and could use some respect.

Strauss, Nazism, and the New Yorker

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Thursday December 15, 2005 · 10:51 AM PST

2005/12/15 · 10:51

I posted this in lyson's diary about Strauss, but I think it deserves a separate diary of it's own.

There's an awful New Yorker movie review in last week's issue about "The Power of Nightmares", an amazing documentary about the rise of extremist Islam paralleling with the rise of neo-conservatism. It's an amazing movie and all should see it.

But the blurb trashes the movie for disparaging Leo Strauss. Saying that Strauss was "troubled by Hitler's rise to power", like that's reason enough to like Strauss. But Strauss believed in fascism! He believed what they believed. See here:
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Woodward & The Failure of Embedded Journalism

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Monday November 28, 2005 · 11:40 AM PST

2005/11/28 · 11:40

By now, most people know the story of Woodward and how he's been two-timing the Washington Post and his own credibility to get inside scoops for his books. He protects the crimes of the administration in the process. Writers at the WP complain but Downie still thinks he's still doing a heck of a job. Was it worth it?

Somewhere between Watergate and now, Woodward convinced himself that shoe-leather journalism doesn't exist. That a reporter is nothing but his sources. That good journalism is nothing but being the closest microhphone to the speaker. In that sense he's nothing different than James Guckert.
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INR Didn't Believe Iraq WMD Hokum

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Wednesday November 16, 2005 · 6:43 PM PST

2005/11/16 · 18:43

Sorry if this is old news for some, but the right keeps making the claim that "everybody thought Iraq had WMDs" or that "we didn't make a bad decision, our intelligence was faulty". Complete bullshit. It's right there in the 2002 NIE that was handed from the CIA to the president:

State/INR Alternative View of Iraq's Nuclear Program
The Assistant Secretary for Intelligence and Research (INR) believes Saddam continues to want nuclear weapons and that available evidence indicates that Baghdad is pursuing at least a limited effort to maintain and acquire nuclear weapon-related capabilities. The activities we have detected do not, however, add up to a compelling case that iraq is currently pursuing what INR would consider to be an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons...

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Tuesday November 15, 2005 · 7:15 PM PST

2005/11/15 · 19:15

Enough with the dalinaces about "we voted for the authority not the actual war" or the "we didn't have the complete intelligence" or the fabulous "everybody else thought he had WMD's". Or even the lovely "I was in support of regime change anyhow" hokum.

All of these pitiful excuses mean nothing to me without an apology that says "we should not have voted for this war". If, like Bob Kerrey on the Colbert Report, you want to call out Bush for never admitting he's wrong, you better start with the mea culpas right quick.

Let's go through some of these excuses: Read More

Captured al Qaeda Not #3

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Monday May 09, 2005 · 7:12 AM PDT

2005/05/09 · 07:12

via UK Times

THE capture of a supposed Al-Qaeda kingpin by Pakistani agents last week was hailed by President George W Bush as "a critical victory in the war on terror". According to European intelligence experts, however, Abu Faraj al-Libbi was not the terrorists' third in command, as claimed, but a middle-ranker derided by one source as "among the flotsam and jetsam" of the organisation.

I wonder how much of this is either "mistaken identity" on the part of the U.S. or Pakistan. We've put so much faith in Pakistan into the hunt for al Qaeda that they could just jerk us around with October surprises all year round.

And will this story actually make it into the U.S. press or just get ignored? Me think Bush's poll numbers probably hit a new low right before the capture.

Did Bush Get the "Filter" Term From Chomsky?

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Wednesday May 04, 2005 · 9:20 AM PDT

2005/05/04 · 09:20

Just saw Manufacturing Consent again last night (great movie) and just realized it was possibly the first instance of somebody referring to the media as "the filter".

He seems to be using it in clips from the seventies. Anybody know of any use of it before this?

I'm curious as to whether Bush is intentionally using that term as a way to get it's inference to mean a liberal filter - rather than the corporate elite interest filter that Chomsky talks about. Maybe something Frank Luntz advised him to do.

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Why Alllow Any SOTC Nominee that Doesn't Fully Disclose

Hannity Calls Frmr. Dir. Nat. Mine Academy "extreme left-winger"

How Abramoff Abused Judaism

Osama Satellite Phone: Complete Hokum

Some Founding Fathers Quotes for Kristol

Cryptome Speaks Out

Strauss, Nazism, and the New Yorker

Woodward & The Failure of Embedded Journalism

INR Didn't Believe Iraq WMD Hokum

Dems need to face facts and admit they screwed up too

Captured al Qaeda Not #3

Did Bush Get the "Filter" Term From Chomsky?