OK, OK, I know I'm taking the low road here, following up on my McCrank diary with this one.  But isn't it true?  Bill Richardson called him out on it

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (D) said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is "overreacting" and "whining" in response to The New York Times refusing to run his editorial about Iraq.

so why can't I?

In response to Keith Olbermann's diary, Well You stumped Me, which says:

Thus, as I phrased it on the air tonight, obviously Obama kicked the left in the teeth by supporting the bill. But anybody who got as hot about this as I did would prefer to see a President Obama prosecuting the telecoms criminally, instead of seeing a Senator Obama engender more "soft on terror" crap by casting a token vote in favor of civil litigation that isn't going to pass since so many other Democrats caved anyway.

But what if Obama doesn't win?  What if a McCain administration becomes ascendent in January 2009?

I've been contemplating the various epithets for John McCain for months now.  I liked McBush.  It doesn't play any games and puts McCain's connections to the Bush Administration front and center, but well, it just doesn't sound that great.  McSame is better.  It rhymes and tacitly conveys the Bush Administration connection but, well, it's a bit ambiguous.  It stands in good contrast, however, when used in comparison to Obama's campaign for change.  I played around with McCheney for a whle, but it doesn't quite seem to have the poetic charge of the others.

Finally, I came up with one this morning that might be a good alternative:

The US Senate has finally released the official Phase II report on the topic.

OK, maybe I'm going to get in trouble for writing such a crappy diary, but this story has already been covered by bejammin075.

Please, go recommend Rockefeller's Phase II Report out TODAY! Not a whitewash!

I consider this to be the most important story of the day.  Please don't let if fall off the diary list.

There is an article in the Boston Globe this morning, Study finds lawmakers invested $165m in defense.  I expected this article to be more of the same old, same old about Republican conflicts of interest, Halliburton, Betchtel, ad nauseum.  But to me chagrin, it was reveled that

Several members earning money from these contractors have plum committee or leadership assignments, including Senator John F. Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut, and the House minority whip Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri.

Lieberman, of course!  But John Kerry?  What gives?

There is a must-read article in today's Boston Globe, Bush move on Darfur law criticized, by Charlie Savage.  In case you haven't heard of Charlie Savage, he is the Globe journalist that won the Pulitzer Prize for his work on Bush's signing statements.  He compiled this reporting into his book, Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy.  Yesterday, the House Financial Services Committee held a hearing in which Democrats and Republicans expressed outrage at the Bush Administration for issuing a signing statement on the unanimously passed, Sudan Accountability and Divestment Act.  This showdown exemplifies the Bush Administration's pursuit of executive power and insane laissez-faire economics at the price of effective anti-genocide legislation.

I am writing this diary to correct some deceptive information that was posted by a commenter on DailyKos and my own formulations on the candidate.  I am not an Obama fanatic but, for a variety of reasons, I think he is the best "top tier" candidate.  With that said, I do have some reservations and I am receptive to the argument that we need a fighter, not a compromiser, when it comes to defeating the conservative movement.  So I was distraught when an Edwards supporter posted a comment stating that Barack Obama had endorsed the king of capitulation, Joe Lieberman.  After a bit of research, I discovered that this comment was (surprise, surprise) an unfair characterization of Obama's support for Lieberman.

Today's Sunday Globe has an article, Tough talk drives Clinton effort, and from the opening sentence, you can see where this one is going.

Facing liberal bloggers last weekend, Hillary Clinton reminded the crowd that she experienced firsthand the sickening smell and taste in the air at the World Trade Center site after Sept. 11, 2001.

That's right.  Hillary Clinton, like Rudolph Giuliani, knows what 9/11 smells like.  And it smells like... codpiece.

Bush's press conference yesterday was unbelievably disingenuous.  The Bush Administration continues to justify the Iraq War based on the threat of Al Qaeda despite all evidence to the contrary.  Prof. Juan Cole tells it like it is:

Bush was out there again on Wednesday trying to link Iraq to al-Qaeda and maintaining that the US was mainly fighting it in that country. In fact, No Mahdi Army Shiites are al-Qaeda. Almost all Sunni Arab guerrilla cells are Baathist or Salafi rather than al-Qaeda. Probably of 100,000 guerrillas fighting in Iraq, perhaps 2% could be categorized in some vague way as "al-Qaeda" if you take that term as referring to a franchise. They are mainly foreign fighters and if the US left Iraq, the local Sunni Arabs would slit their throats. Some slitting is going on even now, and the Bushies celebrate that while not seeming to recognize the implication that "al-Qaeda" doesn't amount to anything as an Iraqi political force.

But this making up things out of thin air is typical of W.'s Propaganda Presidency, or  what Chris Floyd calls the "powerful odor of mendacity."

So I'm reading Matt Taibbi's interview with Seymour Hersh in Rolling Stone and I get to this:

America's pre-eminent investigative reporter of the last half-century, Hersh broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and was on hand, nearly four decades later, when we found ourselves staring back at the same sick face in the mirror after Abu Ghraib. At age seventy, he clearly still loves his job.

What?  Is that for real?  Dubious, I check Wikipedia to confirm and he's listed as

(born April 8, 1937 Chicago)

This is a single-issue diary: Please stop using the phrase, "voter fraud".  The expression plays right into the Bush Administration's hands by evoking that which does not exist.  As today's NY Times reports:

Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.

Haven't we learned anything from David Frum and George Lakoff?  The choice of words is crucial to framing the issue and formulating public understanding.  As a better frame and more accurate depiction of the phenomena with which we are confronting, I humbly suggest, "voter suppression".

Today on VIP Gore's testimony to the Senate, Inhofe ran the gamut of wingnut denialist lies about global warming.  The big gotcha moment came at the end when Inhofe lead Gore into a yes/no questions and culminated with a pledge that recalled the post-Oscar energy bill smear.

Having the luxury of screen capture, I took a moment to read and transcribe the pledge.

Contrary to a recommended diary, Dick Cheney was not the target of an assassination attempt on Tuesday.  The claim that this is an assassination attempt was made by the Taliban.  US military officials have denied this claim and a spokesperson has called the allegation "absurd".

So I'm watching this guy, Gregg Jackson on C-SPAN2's BookTV, and I'm literally laughing out loud at this spectacle.  It's still in progress and I don't have Tivo so please forgive my brevity.  He's promoting his book, "Conservative Comebacks to Liberal Lies" to the Eagle Council, a bunch of conservative high school students.  It's a fascinating window into conservative brainwashing.

Newsday has an article about some recent comments made by Homeland Security Chair, Peter King.

Declaring that airport screeners shouldn't be hampered by "political correctness," House Homeland Security Chairman Peter King has endorsed requiring people of "Middle Eastern and South Asian" descent to undergo additional security checks because of their ethnicity and religion.

There is a poll on that page asking "Should racial profiling be permitted?"  It currently reflects the opinion of ignorant xenophobes.  You know what to do.

-> Newsday - King endorses ethnic profiling

For more information on why this kind of profiling doesn't work and causes harm, procede below.

This is the rare occasion when free market Republicans and environmentalists can see eye-to-eye:

Unless it is defeated in Congress, a just-completed conference report on the Coast Guard re-authorization bill gives the Massachusetts governor the power to cancel the promising Cape Wind alternative-energy project, which, if allowed to go forward, would become America's first large offshore wind farm. Shortly after announcing his candidacy for governor in 2002, Mr. Romney declared his opposition to Cape Wind, a technologically advanced wind farm of 130 turbines in Nantucket Sound that would be capable of generating 75 percent of the electricity needs of Cape Cod and the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. The Cape Wind project would place America on the cutting edge in the renewable, alternative-energy industry, which has the potential to generate incalculable benefits throughout the world well into the future.

And that's without even considering the benefits of reducing our carbon dioxide emissions.

A day late and a dollar short but the Gray Lady finally does her job.  The NY Times has finally picked up on a story that Chris Mooney has been raising bloody hell about all week.  

Michael Janofsky writes,

In his new book about Mr. Bush, "Rebel in Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush," Fred Barnes recalls a visit to the White House last year by Michael Crichton, whose 2004 best-selling novel, "State of Fear," suggests that global warming is an unproven theory and an overstated threat.

While coverage of this meeting in itself is important, Janofsky does little to plunge the depths of this confluence of mendacious mediocrity.

This is an important story and I'm surprised that the recent climate change negotiations haven't received much attention on DKos.  The British press has a story on a couple of documents that were passed to Greenpeace by the German energy company, RWE.  In these documents a template is outlined for creating a "European Sound Climate Policy Coalition", a European disinformation campaign similar to the ones conducted in the United States.  As Chris Mooney has pointed out, 'sound science' is a right wing framing technique with an ignominious past.  This is a logical extension to the campaign that we have seen waged in the United States with a science fiction writer testifying to congress about the soundness of climate science and Exxon lobbyist, Phil Cooney, rewriting National Science Foundation reports.  We are witnessing an all-out attack on science and sustainable environmental policies.