From LA Indymedia, reposted in full, Richard M. Mathews info on the Downing Street Memo events:

Over 150 Events Planned on 3rd Anniversary of Downing Street Memo

Rep. Maxine Waters will host an Out-of-Iraq teach-in on July 23 in Inglewood to commemorate the 3rd anniversary of the Downing Street Memo. Hear about the Out of Iraq Caucus & Resolution of Inquiry in Congress. Learn how to protect our youth from military recruiters. Join a cell phone call-in demanding journalists tell the truth re: Downing Street Memo. This will be one of 150 events around the country organized by AfterDowningStreet.org.

ImpeachCentral.com andAfterDowningStreet.org
For Immediate Release: July 14, 2005
Over 150 Events Planned on 3rd Anniversary of Downing Street Memo
Congressional Town Hall Meetings, Public Forums, Dramatic Recreations, House Parties, Rallies, and Study Circles on July 23, 2005

LOS ANGELES, CA - On July 23, 2005, Congresswoman Maxine Waters will host one of many events around the United States that will mark the three-year anniversary of the meeting at #10 Downing Street in London, England, that was recorded in the now infamous minutes known as the "Downing Street Memo."

At least eight events will be hosted by or participated in by Members of Congress, including John Conyers in Detroit, Jim McDermott in Seattle, Barbara Lee in Oakland, Maxine Waters in Los Angeles, and Maurice Hinchey in New York. Congressman Charles Rangel will host an electronic town-hall meeting, answering questions from his New York constituents on the internet, from noon to 1 p.m., July 22. Congressman Xavier Becerra will host an event in Los Angeles on July 30, and Congressman Barney Frank in Boston on July 31.

Co-Founder of the After Downing Street Coalition, constitutional attorney John Bonifaz will speak at a town hall meeting on July 23rd in Northampton, Mass.

On July 23rd, in over 150 towns and cities, prominent speakers and ordinary citizens will hold public forums, perform dramatic recreations of the Downing Street meeting, and host house parties and study circles. Sixty-six events and counting are listed online at AfterDowningStreet.org. For details on events in any part of the country, see this map: http://heh.pl/&tm .

Another 16 events on surrounding days are also listed on the site.

In addition, Congressman Conyers' office has organized 105 house parties through their website. See http://johnconyers.com/ .

Los Angeles Area Event:
Congresswoman Maxine Waters
Out -of-Iraq Teach-In
Covenant Worship Center at Legacy Hall
Meeting Local Start Time: 12:00pm
425 South La Brea Avenue
(2 blocks south of Manchester)
Inglewood, California 90301

Conference Call for House Parties:
Congressman Conyers and former Ambassador Joseph Wilson will participate in a national conference call with house party attendees from 4 to 4:30 p.m. ET. For details, contact Jonathan Godfrey at 202-744-7441 or jonathangodfrey@gmail.com .

Blogging All Day:
Bloggers will report on events from around the country during the day at www.afterdowningstreet.org

Action Across the Atlantic:
On July 23rd, at 2 p.m. GMT just outside the gates to Downing Street in London, England, a group of actors and activists will perform a dramatic recreation of the Downing Street Memo as a Mad Hatter's Tea Party. The event is being organized by members of Bedford Stop the War, a member of the Stop the War Coaltion, and of After Downing Street. For more information, contact Linda Jack at (44) 7793556099, or linda_a_jack@yahoo.co.uk .

E-Town Hall on the 22nd:
Congressman Charles Rangel's E-town hall meeting will begin at 1 p.m. ET on July 22nd. For more information, go to: http://www.house.gov/rangel

Agenda for National Day of Events:
The agenda at various of these events will include speeches, panel discussions, viewing of DVDs, dramatic recreations of the Downing Street Minutes, debates, writing postcards and letters to congress members and senators not present, writing letters to the editor, training participants in effective lobbying, honoring local fallen soldiers, and planning local marches and flyering campaigns -- with such actions in some cases immediately following the event. Resources for these events have been made available by the After Downing Street Coalition at www.afterdowningstreet.org.

Participants around the country will be encouraged to
promote coverage of the Downing Street Minutes by their local media,
gather signatures on Congressman Conyers' letter to the President asking for explanations of the Downing Street Minutes (there are now 131 signatures by congress members and over 576,984 by U.S. citizens),
promote support for a Resolution of Inquiry expected to be introduced in the House of Representatives,
promote support for a Resolution expected to be introduced in the House of Representatives, which would create a select committee to investigate reports of a pre-war deal between the United Kingdom and the United States and evidence that pre-war intelligence was intentionally manipulated.
lobby the Senate Intelligence Committee to conduct the investigation of pre-war intelligence that it has failed to follow through on.

Details for Each Event:

For details on events in any part of the country, see this map: http://heh.pl/&tm . Here are a few:

Congressman John Conyers, Jr.
Wayne State University Law School Auditorium
Meeting Local Start Time: 2:00pm
471 W. Palmer Street
Detroit, Michigan 48202

Congresswoman Barbara Lee
Grand Lake Theatre
Meeting Local Start Time: 11:00am
3200 Grand AvenueOakland, California 94610

Congressmen Jim McDermott
Seattle Labor Temple
Meeting Local Start Time: 1:00pm
2800 First AvenueSeattle, Washington 98121

Congresswoman Maxine Waters
Covenant Worship Center at Legacy Hall
Meeting Local Start Time: 12:00pm
425 South La Brea AvenueInglewood, California 90301

New York City Town Hall Meeting
Sponsored by The Nation and Democrats.com and Progressive Democrats of America Speakers:
Congressman Maurice Hinchey, former Congresswoman Liz Holtzman, Air America Radio host Randi Rhodes, and as moderator President of Democrats.com Bob Fertik.
New York Society for Ethical Culture2 W. 64th St.
New York, NY

AfterDowningStreet.org is a rapidly growing coalition of veterans' groups, peace groups, and political activist groups, which launched on May 26, 2005, a campaign to urge the U.S. Congress to begin a formal investigation into whether President Bush has committed impeachable offenses in connection with the Iraq war.

ImpeachCentral.com is a nationwide organization of thousands of activists dedicated to the impeachment of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for violating the laws of the United States. While the Bush administration has violated the Constitution on numerous occasions, the group is focusing on the lies they told the American people and Congress which led the country into the disastrous Iraq War. These lies were confirmed when the Times of London published the secret Downing Street Memo.
- 30 -
Contact: Richard M. Mathews
Southern California DirectorImpeach Central
ImpeachCentral-LA-owner@yahoogroups.com
www.ImpeachCentral.com

The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.

[Note: This entry originally appeared at The Common Ills.]
 

An exhibit honoring the human cost of the Iraq War and sending a strong anti-war message will be in Ithaca in October if granted final approval by the full Common Council next month. The exhibit was given initial approval by the Community Services committee last week.
Eyes Wide Open, an exhibit sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee, features a wall of remembrance, a field of shoes and a pair of boots representing every soldier who died in the Iraq War. The exhibit was unveiled in January 2004 and has traveled across the country ever since. At each stop, visitors place flowers, photos and American flags that then accompany the exhibit on its travels.
Wilma Brown, a member of Ithaca's Society of Friends, said that the exhibit would serve as a stand against the war.
"(The memorial is) a witness to our belief that no war can justify human loss," she said.
Gerald Coles, co-chair of the Ithaca Reform Temple, spoke about the educational importance of the exhibit.
Not enough information was given to the public during the Vietnam War, and the Bush administration is "blockading" the truth about Iraq. Now that the opinion about the war is changing, and politicians are realizing that the decision to invade the war was a mistake, he said.

The above is from Stephanie Bergeron's "Anti-war display" from the Ithaca Times and Ty e-mailed to note it.

Brad e-mails to note Pamela White's "Selling death to kids" from Boulder Weekly:

It turns out that when George W pushed through his No Child Left Behind act back in 2001, he wasn't just thinking of providing every American child with a quality education. He was also thinking of sending them to war.
A relatively obscure provision of the bill requires high schools that receive federal funding to make students' contact information available to military recruiters--unless parents "opt out" in writing. What this means in many school districts is that students' phone numbers and addresses are dutifully turned over to the government without parents' knowledge.
In the Boulder Valley School District, we are more fortunate. Rather than leaving it up to parents to know every provision of No Child Left Behind, the district modified its registration materials so that parents are required to check a box--yea or nay--as to whether their child's information can be sent to military recruiters. These forms were shipped to thousands of Boulder County families last week.
It's not surprising that in peacenik Boulder there are many families who adamantly do not want their children to be contacted by military recruiters. What might surprise some folks is that school districts across the nation are encountering this response. It seems that George's pet war isn't as popular with parents as he'd like it to be.
From sea to shining sea, parents are organizing to minimize the impact of military recruiters on children in their school districts. Some avenues parents have explored include prohibiting recruiters from bringing high-tech, "cool" toys like Humvees to schools and providing kids with counter-recruitment materials that debunk the "be all you can be" propaganda.

Sally e-mails to note Jim Hightower's "Common Sense" from the Illinois Times:

Isn't it obvious by now that President George W. Bush is totally lost in Iraq, without a clue of how to get out?
Instead of a coherent Iraq policy, Bush relies on political one-liners. His most infamous was "mission accomplished," but, for me, the most disgusting was his response two years ago when he was asked about the Iraqi insurgents who were beginning to attack our occupation forces. "Bring 'em on," Bush said. That's the kind of macho-posturing, false bravado you might expect from someone safely inside a frat house or barroom, but it's completely irresponsible for a commander in chief to incite enemies to attack our soldiers.

Billie e-mails "Starving Inmates at Lew Sterrett" by Renegade Rene (North Texas Indymedia) (Lew Sterret is a facility in north Texas):

Just got word that the inmates at Lew Sterrett are hardly being fed. They are getting BALONEY AND CRACKERS for a meal, or sometimes a little Macaroni and Cheese with Jello. Bread hasn't been served this week. Right now the Jail is so overcrowded and resources are so strained that they had to open up an older facility just to accommodate everyone after the DPD's latest "clean sweep".
Medical care is still at a low - many inmates can't even get a band-aid when they need one and just about everyone has a staph infection. Many of the inmates are mentally ill and need special care or don't even belong there, they belong in a psychiatric facility. What can we do to help provide the basics for those incarcerated in this messed up justice system?! Many of the inmates in County haven't even had their trial yet. They are supposed to be presumed innocent until proven guilty - and in the meantime are being treated like dogs. Guards are there for their paycheck and look the other way, they are used to all this.Some inmates don't even have a pair of shoes on their feet. They have to special order those dumb cloth shoes that wear out in just a few weeks. It's so frustrating because families can't do anything to help provide for their loved ones other than give them commissary money so they can get a little extra to eat. Skinny is the norm there, and if other inmates see that anyone has extra food they will beat each other up for it. When things are like this and inmates are hungry, sick and irritated, then there are usually more violent incidents.
I just wanted to let y'all know on the inside that you're not forgotten and that people do care.

Brad e-mails to note "UPDATE: Fed Raid on Black Panther's Widow, Son Connected to Patterson Trial" by Chris Geovanis (Chicago Indymedia):

Federal agents descended this morning on the home of Akua Njeri – the widow of assassinated Black Panther leader Fred Hampton – to 'question' her about an alleged threat to the U.S. Attorney for northern Illinois.
According to Njeri and her son Fred Jr., who was present during the incident, federal agents connected the inquiry to Njeri's support of jailed police brutality opponent and former death row inmate Aaron Patterson, who is currently on trial in federal court on gun and drug charges that supporters say are trumped up. Njeri, Fred Jr. and eyewitnesses say that at least ten FBI agents came to the front of Njeri's house on Chicago's south side between 7 and 7:30 AM Wednesday morning.
At the same time, four and possibly more unmarked police cars gathered outside. Eyewitnesses report that many additional officers gathered on foot in the vicinity, some as far away as the alley across the street, dressed in plain clothes or unmarked black military-style uniforms, with bulletproof vests and dogs. Several of the officers reportedly drew their guns.
The agents at the door flashed badges, identified themselves as FBI agents to Fred Jr., and asked to speak to 'Deborah', Njeri's slave name. Njeri came to the door, Fred Jr. began contacting members of the press and attorneys, and after Njeri declined to admit the agents to her house without a warrant, the subsequent conversation between Njeri and the agents was conducted through the closed door.
"We just want to talk to you about you threatening a U.S. Attorney's life," the agents reportedly stated to Njeri, who was flabergasted by the question and refused to open the door, saying "I can hear you just fine through the door."
The agents alleged that Njeri had made a veiled threat to U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, saying that Njeri stated that that 'the US attorney has a mark on his head' in federal court last week.
"Absolutely not," responded Njeri. "I don't even talk like that."
Njeri also asked the FBI agents why they had brought so many officers, at which point an agent responded, "They're not with us."
After some additional verbal exchange through the door, the federal agents reportedly said to Njeri that if anything 'happened' to the U.S. Attorney, "the first person we'll come to is you." "And I said ' If anything happens to me, the people will know what happened, and they'll look to you-all,'" Njeri responded to the officers.
"The last time I saw the FBI was December 4, 1969, when they came calling," Njeri said later in an interview, referring to the date the FBI and local law enforcement raided the west side apartment in which she was staying with her fiance, Black Panther activist and others.
Police assassinated Hampton in that raid along with Black Panther Mark Clark, in an incident that sparked international outcry and condemnation from human rights groups around the world.
Njeri and Fred Jr. have linked today's early-morning FBI raid on her house to their position as supporters of jailed police accountability activist Aaron Patterson, who is currently on trial in federal court on drug and gun charges in a case that his supporters have characterized as a trumped-up vendetta designed to silence him and his advocates.

Trevor e-mails to note lotu5's "Pirate 96.9 Raided" (San Diego Indymedia):

This morning, July 21st, at approximately 11AM, Pirate 96.9 was raided by the FCC. An audio interview with one of the DJ's is atached to this posting, below.
Please replay on your free, community and pirate radio stations.
The broadcast location of Pirate 96.9 was raided by a number of FCC agents with marshalls.
No one was present at the location, so the FCC broke the locks on their doors, entered by force, took their equipment and left.
They left a warrant behind them.
The antenna was taken as well as a number of other major components of broadcasting equipment.
Pirate 96.9 is currently off the air.
More information at http://pirate969.org
Read a blog entry from just after the raid here:
http://blog.myspace.com/steadydietofnothing

96.9 raid interview 2005-07-21, mp3 -

The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.

[Note: This entry originally appeared at The Common Ills.]

Oh, what fun they all had. But then, sadly, the game was halted when rain broke out. The instant Rove drifted into the prosecutorial crosshairs, and in particular when his emails to Matt Cooper went public, the media canned the Tom Sawyer act—as though Rove had suddenly become unclean.
And what was he before? That's the outrage. The Washington press corps, which has proven repeatedly over the last five years that there is no gross lie or cheap stunt too stupid for them to fall for, never really clued in to the way Rove, the so-called master media manipulator, was managing his own image.
[. . .]
A persistent feature of the Rove profile is the reporter's close proximity to Rove in a casual, intimate setting (i.e., Elisabeth Bumiller astride the "bombastic, deceptively cherub-faced" Rove on the campaign plane as he "playfully withholds news of recent polls from the president"). Rove made sure to invite every reporter in Washington for a one-day private tour of his world of dirty jokes, harried cell-phone calls and ad-hoc strategizing. And every hack that took the tour came away with stars in his eyes, primed to make Rove into the larger-than-life villain role he had been fitted for.
The result of all this was to obscure the basic fact about Rove, which is that he's not a genius at all. He is a pig, and the only thing that distinguishes him is the degree of his brazenness and cruelty. It doesn't take a genius to send out fliers calling your opponent the "fag candidate." It doesn't take a genius to insinuate that your opponent's wife is a drug addict. There's nothing cunning or clever about saying your opponent came home from a war too fucked in the head to govern (particularly when your own candidate was too much of a coward to fight in the same war), or about whispering that that same candidate may have an illegitimate black child. And there's nothing clever about calling the followers of the opposition party traitorous and un-American, and claiming that they all want to coddle and appease the murderers of our brothers, sisters, sons and daughters.

The above is from Matt Taibbi's "Death To The Hog: To hell with the whole Karl Rove story" from the New York Press and Cedric e-mailed to note the article.

We're staying with this topic in this Indymedia roundup. Julia e-mails Brian Morton's "Excuses, Excuses" from Baltimore City Paper:


But think about it. You can give in to just about each and every excuse made in the last week regarding l'affaire Valerie (or Plameout, or Intimigate--choose your own scandal name), but the central fact remains the same. Plame's husband very well might be a Bush-hating Democrat. Partisans on Capitol Hill probably do smell blood in the water. "Everybody" might have known Valerie Plame was a CIA agent anyway. But the fact is that a member of George W. Bush's administration appears to have blown a covert agent's cover to a reporter for political reasons during wartime. The word "treason" gets bandied about an awful lot these days, and I've never been a fan of how it has been devalued. But in this case, it hardly gets any closer to the real thing, and even this president's father, once the head of the CIA, said so.
[. . .]
Growing up overseas among American-embassy personnel, I quickly learned that everyone knows that there are things one doesn't talk about out loud, like who among your group is with the CIA--because someone is. Those people often have to work in places and among people who are less than savory.
Valerie Plame worked for a front company called Brewster-Jennings. She wasn't a "black passport diplomat" as we were, and quite likely my father's in-embassy spook colleague was; Plame was "all the way in." And the minute Robert Novak and his White House sources (and he says there were two of them) blew her cover, he blew the cover of everyone she ever worked with who said they were employed by "Brewster-Jennings." That is truly despicable.


Brady e-mails "Karl Rove's Defense is No Defense" by H.C. Kennedy (Tennessee Independent Media Center):

The Right Wing is arguing that Rove did not know that Valerie Plame was a covert agent and is therefore not guilty. They are arguing that Rove does not have the requisite intent under the statute to be culpable for committing the crime of releasing the name of a covert agent, because he did not know that Plame was a covert agent. But the plain meaning of the statute shows that this line of argument does not matter . . .
The statute does not require Rove to have known that Plame was a covert agent. All that the statute requires is that Rove intended to reveal the identity of the person who happens to be covert.
It is to Rove's misfortune that the person he intentionally named happened to be a covert agent.
I Repeat: Nowhere in the statute does it require that Rove knew that Plame was covert.
The issue is not one about Rove's intent, he clearly intended to leak the name of a CIA employee when he told Matt Cooper that "it was Wilson's wife who works at the Agency." The issue is instead whether Plame's employment status at the CIA was "covert."
Evidently it was.
Novak's initial column identified Plame as "an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction." He has since claimed that he believed Plame was merely an analyst at the CIA, not a covert operative--the difference being that analysts are not undercover, so identifying them is not a crime. Critics contend that after decades as a Washington reporter Novak was well aware of the difference and would be unlikely to make such a mistake. Indeed, a search of the Nexis database for the terms 'CIA operative' and 'agency operative' shows Novak correctly used them to describe covert CIA employees every single time they appear in his articles. Including the Plame article.
Here is the language of the Intelligence Identities Protection Statute:
Whoever, having or having had authorized access to classified information that identifies a covert agent, intentionally discloses any information identifying such covert agent to any individual not authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such covert agent and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent’s intelligence relationship to the United States, shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.
As you can see, the language of the statute says, "intentionally discloses any information identifying." Nowhere in the statute does it require that Rove KNOW that the person he identified was covert.
Therefore, this statute is part specific intent and part strict liability.
It does require the specific intent of "intentional disclosure," and "knowledge that such disclosure identifies the covert agent," however, it does not specifically require that Rove know that the person he identifies is covert. The "knowledge" language in the statute is referring to knowledge of the disclosure of the identity of the agent, NOT knowledge of the status of the person whose identity was disclosed. And of course status meaning whether the person is a covert agent.
If the legislators that passed this law intended that the person know that the person he was revealing was a covert agent, then the statute would look like this, with the words in CAPITAL LETTERS being the different language which would satisfy the type of intent the right wing is arguing the statute says.
Whoever, having or having had authorized access to classified information that identifies a covert agent, WITH KNOWLEDGE OF THE COVERT STATUS OF THE AGENT intentionally discloses any information identifying such covert agent, to any individual not authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such covert agent and KNOWING that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent’s intelligence relationship to the United States, shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.
Therefore, if Plame was not a covert agent, then Rove would not be guilty under the statute. Unfortunately for Rove, whether he knew that Plame was covert or not, it was to his misfortune that she was a covert agent. Rove and his right wing friends can argue all day long that Rove did not know that Valerie Plame was a covert CIA operative. He is still guilty under the statute.
Take a statute for statutory rape for example. This is a classic Strict Liability statute that all law students study when they take criminal law.
"A person is guilty for statutory rape where he intends to have sex with a child under the age of 18."
This statute merely requires that the accused INTEND to have sex. It wouldn't matter whether the accused KNEW the victim was under 18. He can argue all day long that he did not know the victim was under 18. In every criminal court in the United States, this man would be guilty of statutory rape if the person he had sex with was under 18.
Just as the statutory rape statute does not require that the accused know that the victim was under 18, the Identities Protection statute does not require that Rove know that Plame was a covert agent.

And let's remember what Bob Somerby was discussing today at The Daily Howler re: the lovefest on John Roberts, Jr.:

Times sure-enough have changed since then, ain't they? Back in 1999, no one at the Washington Post said it was "admirable" that Gore had worked some long, hard summers on a farm in Tennessee. And no one stood up and spoke back to Kelly, although everyone--surely including Dionne--knew that his piece was pure bullshit. How did they know this? We ourselves conducted a three-day exchange with Kelly that April, in the pages of the Hotline. And the Post was good enough to publish a letter in which we quoted Kelly's previous work about Gore--work in which he explicitly described the chores which somehow became a "delusion" when the press corps got mad at Bill Clinton. Everyone--everyone--knew Kelly was lying. But no one stood up and explained what was happening as Gore was trashed for being "delusional" in the bald-faced start to the twenty-month war which eventually put George Bush in the White House. Let’s say it again: A different tone obtained in March 1999, in the wake of the Clinton impeachment. The press corps had its shorts in a knot because Wild Bill had got those ten blow jobs. And they quickly took it out on Clinton's VP--through lying, like that of Michael Kelly. The war began with Gore's farm chores--and extended right through the election.
So that's why you’re reading about the fact that John Roberts was a steel-drivin' man. In fact, everything you now lament resulted from that War Against Gore--the war that began with Kelly's blatant dissembling about Gore’s work on the farm. Why did Bush get the chance to go into Iraq? Because of the press corps' War Against Gore. Why was Bush there to nominate Roberts? Because of the press corps' War Against Gore. And why are we reading about Karl Rove? Because folks like Dionne didn't say squat when Kelly played the nation for fools, right on their own op-ed pages! Today, we're reading about King Karl because of that twenty-month War Against Gore. Rove, the Boy Genius, couldn’t have won without the lies of Michael Kelly.

Bob Somerby is indpendent media. So is BuzzFlash and we'll note their contribution from Ray McGovern's "Why 'White House v. Wilson/Plame' Matters:"

The key issue in the affair has little directly to do with former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson; or his wife, Valerie Plame; or Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby; or even President George W. Bush's alter ego, Karl Rove. White House v. Wilson/Plame is about Iraq, where our sons and daughters -- and many others -- are daily meeting violent death in an unwinnable war.
And it's about manipulation.
It's about how our elected representatives were deceived into voting for an unprovoked war and what happened when one man stood up and called the administration's bluff. And it's about the perfect storm now gathering, as:
~ more lies are exposed (whether in journalists' e-mails or in the minutes of high-level meetings at 10 Downing Street),
~ the guerrilla war escalates in Iraq, and
~ more and more Americans find themselves agreeing with Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., that administration leaders seem to be "making it up as they go along."
It wasn't envisaged this way by the naive "neoconservative" ideologues that got us into the quagmire in Iraq. Actually they still seem to believe that all will be well if the Iraqi people can only get it into their heads that we are liberators, not occupiers.
So much smoke is being blown over White House v. Wilson/Plame that it is becoming almost impossible to see the forest for the trees. Bewildered houseguests from outside the Beltway throw up their hands: "It's all just politics...and character assassination." And that may well be precisely the impression the media wish to leave with us. Otherwise, left to our own devices, we might conclude they served us poorly with the indiscriminate, hyper-patriotic cheerleading that helped slide us into the worst foreign policy debacle in our nation's history.

If you'd like to support BuzzFlash, a list of premiums can be found here.

The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.

[Note: This entry originally appeared at The Common Ills.]

Eddie e-mails asking that we help get the word out on an event posted at Randi Rhodes site:

NYC TOWN HALL MEETING
Torture & Lies: Who is Accountable?
From Abu Ghraib to the Downing Street Minues

This Saturday from 2-4 pm join:
-Randi Rhodes
-Congressman Maurice Hinchey
- Former Congresswoman Liz Holtzman
- President of Democrats.com Bob Fertik

Discussions to include:

- Karl Rove/TraitorGate
- The Downing Street Minutes
- How to be heard in Washington
- Getting involved in your community, etc.

When: Saturday, 7/23 from 2-4 pm
Where: New York Society for Ethical Culture, 2 West 64th St., NYC
Admission: Free!

More info on the NYC eventEvents near youHost your own meeting

I'm sure this goes without saying but Randi Rhodes is the host of The Randi Rhodes Show which broadcasts Monday through Friday on Air America. (And Laura Flanders is back on The Laura Flanders Show this weekend, by the way.) We'll note this again Friday and Saturday morning at Eddie's request. If you're in the area, please consider attending. If you're not in the area but know someone who is, pass on the news. And if you're not in the area and know no one in the area, it's still worth noting because people haven't given up on this and those who haven't deserve credit.

The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.

[Note: This entry originally appeared at The Common Ills.]

Italian Prosecutor Wants CIA Arrests
An Italian prosecutor asked an appeals court Wednesday to issue arrest warrants for six more purported CIA operatives, accusing them of helping plan the kidnapping of an Egyptian Muslim cleric in 2003. An Italian court issued warrants for 13 alleged CIA officers last month but turned down a request by prosecutor Armando Spataro to issue warrants for six Americans accused of helping prepare the abduction of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr. According to the AP, the prosecutor's request says the six were involved in studying the area in Milan where the cleric was seized and his habits, as well as the best routes to the highway the kidnappers would use to bring the Egyptian to Aviano, a joint U.S.-Italian air base north of Venice. Nasr was allegedly snatched on a Milan street on Feb. 17, 2003, flown from Aviano to Ramstein air base in Germany and then to Egypt, where he reportedly was tortured. The operation was allegedly part of the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" program, in which terror suspects are transferred to third countries without court approval, subjecting them to possible torture.


Roberts Meets With Senators, Pro-Choice Groups Protest
Supreme Court nominee John Roberts met with key senators from both parties yesterday as the White House rolled out a methodical campaign to secure his confirmation and Democrats posed their first probing questions. Abortion and access to internal government memos loomed as likely flash points as Democrats pointed toward the nationally televised proceedings. Meanwhile, civil liberties and women's rights groups continue to protest against Roberts’s nomination. Last night in New York, City Council member Margarita Lopez spoke at a rally organized by Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Rights Action League.
Margarita Lopez:"My reproductive system is mine and mine and mine only! It doesn't belong to anybody else except me. I decide what happens to it, what I do to it and it's mine to take care of it. Whatever I do is between me and my doctor when I have to make decisions about it. George Walker Bush! Keep your filthy hands out of my body!"

The two items above are from Headlines on today's Democracy Now! and were selected by Lily and Rod. Democracy Now! ("always worth watching," as Marcia says):

Headlines for July 21, 2005
- Algerian Diplomats Kidnapped in Baghdad
- Twin Suicide Bombings in Iraq
- New Saudi Ambassador Linked to bin Laden 9/11?
- Roberts Meets With Senators, Pro-Choice Groups Protest
- Memo Identified Plame as Undercover
- Italian Prosecutor Wants CIA Arrests
- London Mayor Blames Western Policy for London Bombs
- Mass Hunger Strike at Guantanamo?

Day of Protest Decries Deaths in Haiti
In Haiti violence continues two weeks after a UN raid in Cite Soleil may have left as many as 23 people dead. Today there are coordinated protests in Brazil and ten cities throughout North America. We go to Port-au-Prince to hear from Lavalas leader Father Gerard Jean-Juste.

What's My Name, Fool!: Sports and Resistance in the United States
As London prepares for the 2012 olympics in the aftermath of the July 7 bombings, we look at the history of crackdowns in olympic cities over the past century. Sports writer Dave Zirin chronicles a history of athletes who have stood up to war and racism in the United States, from Muhammad Ali to Pat Tillman. His new book is "What's My Name, Fool!: Sports and Resistance in the United States."



At The Daily Howler today, Bob Somerby's addressing the issue of press dissembling and tying it into 1999:

JOHN ROBERTS WAS A STEEL-DRIVIN’ MAN: John Roberts was a steel-drivin’ man—and George Bush wanted the public to know it. “When Mr. Bush presented Judge Roberts...on Tuesday night, he made special mention of the judge's having worked summers in steel mills, an apparent effort to give him some working-class cachet,” Neil Lewis wrote in the New York Times (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 7/20/05). Result? In a well-reasoned column in today’s Post, E. J. Dionne handed Roberts his props:
DIONNE (7/21/05): The issues at stake [in this nomination] are not abstract. They have to do with the government's power to protect the environment, to safeguard civil rights, including the rights of the disabled, and to provide protections for employees and consumers. It's admirable that this son of a steel executive worked some summers in a steel mill. More important is how he would rule on cases involving steelworkers and other working men and women.
"It's admirable that this son of a steel executive worked some summers in a steel mill," Dionne conceded--reminding us of the way George Bush ended up in control of this process.
Yes, the youthful John Roberts worked in a mill--but then, the youthful Al Gore had worked on a farm! But uh-oh! When Gore mentioned this fact in March 1999 (responding to idiot jibes by Bill Bradley), no one at the Washington Post said it was "admirable that this son of a senator worked some summers on a farm." In fact, the reaction could hardly have been more different. What happened when Gore made his accurate statement, in response to Bradley's jibes? Here's what happened: The late Michael Kelly ran one of the most dishonest--and most influential--op-ed columns in recent years, a column which plainly implied that Gore was making ludicrous claims about those alleged youthful summers. Kelly, of course, knew Gore's statements were accurate; at the Baltimore Sun, he had profiled Gore's youthful work on the farm when Gore ran for president in 1987-88. (Kelly had described Gore's youthful work in detail. Links below.) But so what? In March 1999, the press corps had itself in a tizzy; its shorts were clearly in a large wad. Clinton's impeachment trial had just ended, and Gore was going out on the trail. Result? The corps began a twenty-month War Against Gore--a war in which the furious corps would insist that Gore was a liar, just like Clinton. So Kelly wrote his disgraceful column--a column he knew was baldly misleading--and weak-minded pundits across the country ran to follow suit. Al Gore had been "delusional" when he mentioned his farm chores, major pundits began reciting. And so began the twenty-month war which eventually put George Bush in the White House. Because people like Kelly lied in your faces when Gore discussed his youthful farm chores, George Bush was on TV this week, talking about his nominee’s youthful work as a steel-drivin' man. Because the press corps lied about Gore's chores, we now get to hear them tell the truth about the hard work of John Roberts.
Times sure-enough have changed since then, ain’t they? Back in 1999, no one at the Washington Post said it was "admirable" that Gore had worked some long, hard summers on a farm in Tennessee. And no one stood up and spoke back to Kelly, although everyone--surely including Dionne--knew that his piece was pure bullshit. How did they know this? We ourselves conducted a three-day exchange with Kelly that April, in the pages of the Hotline. And the Post was good enough to publish a letter in which we quoted Kelly's previous work about Gore--work in which he explicitly described the chores which somehow became a "delusion" when the press corps got mad at Bill Clinton. Everyone--everyone--knew Kelly was lying. But no one stood up and explained what was happening as Gore was trashed for being "delusional" in the bald-faced start to the twenty-month war which eventually put George Bush in the White House. Let's say it again: A different tone obtained in March 1999, in the wake of the Clinton impeachment. The press corps had its shorts in a knot because Wild Bill had got those ten blow jobs. And they quickly took it out on Clinton’s VP--through lying, like that of Michael Kelly. The war began with Gore's farm chores--and extended right through the election.
So that's why you're reading about the fact that John Roberts was a steel-drivin' man. In fact, everything you now lament resulted from that War Against Gore--the war that began with Kelly's blatant dissembling about Gore's work on the farm. Why did Bush get the chance to go into Iraq? Because of the press corps' War Against Gore. Why was Bush there to nominate Roberts? Because of the press corps' War Against Gore. And why are we reading about Karl Rove? Because folks like Dionne didn't say squat when Kelly played the nation for fools, right on their own op-ed pages! Today, we're reading about King Karl because of that twenty-month War Against Gore. Rove, the Boy Genius, couldn't have won without the lies of Michael Kelly.

This is an important Howler so pay attention to the excerpt (we'll note today's Howler again tonight).

Gina e-mails to note Margaret Kimberley's "Questions for the NAACP" (The Black Commentator):

There were two big stories coming from the recent NAACP annual convention. The first was that George W. Bush didn’t accept an invitation to appear. He made up for it by attending the Indiana Black Expo and getting plenty of good photo ops with brown faces. Bush sent Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman to the NAACP convention in his stead. Mehlman wept crocodile tears and swore that his party really, really wants our votes and is sorry for being mean in the past.
The other big news was the installation of a new NAACP president, Bruce Gordon. Gordon was a marketing executive at Verizon for many years. Marketing, a fancy word for selling, works by convincing us to buy things. Sometimes marketers sell us things that we really need. That is on a good day. On a bad day they get us to buy junk food and tell us that gas guzzling SUVs are safer when just the opposite is true.
What is Mr. Gordon selling now that he is at the helm of the NAACP? He says that "economic rights" will be the focus of his efforts. If he is talking about economic justice then his voice is a much needed one. Economic justice has been getting a hard way to go in recent years.
The income gap is widening in America. The wealthy are getting much wealthier and the rest of us are holding our own, if we are lucky. Those of us who aren't are in bigger trouble now than ever before. Congress passed a bankruptcy law that was written by credit card companies. Lo and behold, the new legislation benefits them quite a lot and us not at all. Big business decides that we need tort reform, a dubious conclusion to begin with, and then proceeds to write the legislation that they have been dreaming about for years.
Where does Mr. Gordon stand on these issues? What does he think of the effort to overhaul, that is to say decimate, Social Security? Social Security is the only safety net that Americans have. It is the retirement plan that black Americans depend on more than any other. Now that the guaranteed benefit pension system is both less common and on shakier ground than ever, Social Security is even more important.

We'll also note Bruce Dixon's "Mass Incarceration is an Abomination" (The Black Commentator):

"A great force of suffering accumulated between the basement of heaven and the roof of hell..."
Zora Neale Hurston wrote those words almost seventy years ago at the beginning of her great allegorical work on black America, Moses, Man of the Mountain. She could have been speaking about African America today. As black activists ponder how best to build a mass movement to transform America, a mass movement that must start in but not be confined to our communities, one single low-hanging fruit of organizing opportunity is hard to miss. That opportunity lies in the manifest unfairness and hypocrisy of America's system of racially selective policing, prosecution and mass imprisonment. These awful public policies are inviting targets for electoral and other mobilizations in black communities and beyond.
The fact that America does implement a public policy of racially selective mass imprisonment is well documented and beyond dispute. With under 5 percent of the world’s people, the US accounts for 25 percent of the planet’s prisoners. More than half its 2.2 million prisoners come from the one eighth of its population which is black. Today, an astounding 3 percent of all African Americans languish in prisons and jails, and nearly as many more are on probation, parole, bail, house arrest or court supervision. Tens of thousands of jobless, skill-less, often anti-socialized inmates are released into black communities each month in which jobs, medical care, educational opportunities and family or official support are almost completely absent. Unsurprisingly, many are back behind the walls in a matter of months. Right now, the shadow of prison squats at the corners of, and often at the center of nearly every black family’s life in this nation.
Since 1970, the US prison population has multiplied more than six times. The explosive growth of America's incarceration and crime control industries have occurred despite essentially level crime rates over the last four decades. This has only been possible because the public policies which enable and support locking up more people longer and for less have until now been exempt from analyses of their human, economic and social costs or any reckoning of the relationships of spiraling imprisonment to actual crime rates or public safety. Most tellingly, while public discussions of these policies are deracialized, their racially disparate impacts are a seldom discussed but widely known fact. Thus even though the damning numbers are widely reported and well known, mass incarceration is practically invisible as a political issue, even in those heavily black communities which suffer most from its implementation.

Tina's e-mailed to note that it is Elizabeth Holtzman who will be on The Randi Rhodes Show this afternoon. (Tina notes that Randi did a funny bit on Scooter Scoots Libby and that's probably where she ended up getting "Libby" from). This should be a very interesting segment and if you haven't read Holtzman's article (from The Nation) "Torture and Accountability:"

No less a figure than Alberto Gonzales, then-White House counsel to George W. Bush and now US Attorney General, expressed deep concern about possible prosecutions under the War Crimes Act of 1996 for American mistreatment of Afghanistan war detainees.
This relatively obscure statute makes it a federal crime to violate certain provisions of the Geneva Conventions. The Act punishes any US national, military or civilian, who commits a "grave breach" of the Geneva Conventions. A grave breach, as defined by the Geneva Conventions, includes the deliberate "killing, torture or inhuman treatment" of detainees. Violations of the War Crimes Act that result in death carry the death penalty.
In a memo to President Bush, dated January 25, 2002, Gonzales urged that the United States opt out of the Geneva Conventions for the Afghanistan war--despite Secretary of State Colin Powell's objections. One of the two reasons he gave the President was that opting out "substantially reduces the likelihood of prosecution under the War Crimes Act."
Then-Attorney General Ashcroft sent a memo to President Bush making a similar argument. Opting out of the Geneva Conventions, Ashcroft argued, would give the "highest assurance" that there would be no prosecutions under the War Crimes Act of "military officers, intelligence officials, or law enforcement officials" for their misconduct during interrogations or detention.
Plainly, both Gonzales and Ashcroft were so concerned about preventing War Crimes Act prosecutions that they were willing to assume the risks--including the likelihood of severe international criticism as well as the exposure of our own captured troops to mistreatment--of opting out of Geneva.
The specter of prosecution was particularly worrisome because the Conventions use broad terminology. Noting that violations may consist of "outrages upon personal dignity" and "inhuman treatment," Gonzales advised the President in his memo that it would be "difficult to predict with confidence" which actions would violate the War Crimes Act and which would not.
Moreover, Gonzales opined, it was "difficult to predict the motives of prosecutors and independent counsels" acting in the future. (The "future" could be a very long time indeed, because there would be no statute of limitations on War Crimes Act prosecutions in cases where the victim died.)

As noted this morning, Holtzman discussed the article in an interview with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez on Democracy Now! Here's an excerpt from "Fmr. NY Congressmember Holtzman Calls For President Bush and His Senior Staff To Be Held Accountable for Abu Ghraib Torture:"

JUAN GONZALEZ: This 1996 law is not very well known.
ELIZABETH HOLTZMAN: No. It's totally obscure. I only found out about it because Alberto Gonzales was worried about prosecutions of high level officials under it.
JUAN GONZALEZ: What brought this law about? In other words, was Congress reacting to --
ELIZABETH HOLTZMAN: What happened was in the 1990s, during the, I guess it was the Clinton administration at that time, Congress decided that it wanted to adopt laws to take it into full compliance with its obligations under an international torture statute and an international torture treaty and the Geneva Conventions. And so, it passed two laws. One is a statute making it a U.S. crime to engage in torture. It was passed two years before the 1996 law, and then you have the War Crimes Act of 1996.
And basically, what it does, it makes grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions a federal crime. Got it? Just like kidnapping or interstate burglary or child pornography, it is a federal crime. And the other thing, that's interesting is that it carries the death penalty. If death results from torture or inhuman treatment, then there is a death penalty, and that means there's no statute of limitations. That means that if any high level official violates the War Crimes Act, and somebody died, they can be prosecuted. They are subject to prosecution for the rest of their lives.
AMY GOODMAN: So what did Gonzales do about President Bush?
ELIZABETH HOLTZMAN: What Gonzales did to President Bush, he said, ‘Mr. President, we have got to worry about prosecutions under this statute, and what we can do is we can reduce the possibility of prosecutions by opting out of the Geneva Conventions.’ And guess what. The President opted out of the Geneva Conventions. He followed the advice of Gonzales. And by the way, the same advice was given by Attorney General Ashcroft in a memo to the President, as well, saying that he wanted to make sure that law enforcement officials, intelligence officials and others were not prosecuted under the War Crimes Act. So, here we have two high level U.S. government officials warning President Bush that the War Crimes Act, a U.S. statute, could make high level American officials criminally liable, if they -- unless they opted out of the Geneva Conventions.

The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.

[Note: This is a repost. Once again, an e-mailed post has disappeared. I have no idea why.]


[Note: This entry originally appeared at The Common Ills.]

Via BuzzFlash, Doyle e-mails Walter Pincus and Jim VandeHei "Plame's Identity Marked As SecretMemo Central to Probe Of Leak Was Written By State Dept. Analyst:"

A classified State Department memorandum central to a federal leak investigation contained information about CIA officer Valerie Plame in a paragraph marked "(S)" for secret, a clear indication that any Bush administration official who read it should have been aware the information was classified, according to current and former government officials.
Plame -- who is referred to by her married name, Valerie Wilson, in the memo -- is mentioned in the second paragraph of the three-page document, which was written on June 10, 2003, by an analyst in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), according to a source who described the memo to The Washington Post.
The paragraph identifying her as the wife of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV was clearly marked to show that it contained classified material at the "secret" level, two sources said. The CIA classifies as "secret" the names of officers whose identities are covert, according to former senior agency officials.
Anyone reading that paragraph should have been aware that it contained secret information, though that designation was not specifically attached to Plame's name and did not describe her status as covert, the sources said. It is a federal crime, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, for a federal official to knowingly disclose the identity of a covert CIA official if the person knows the government is trying to keep it secret.

Tina e-mails regarding The Randi Rhodes Show. She says Randi was speaking of an important article by a "Libby" yesterday and that she'll have "Libby" on the show today. From the description of the article Tina offers, I think Randi said "Liz." (I didn't hear the show yesterday.) Elizabeth Holtzman's "Torture and Accountability." Does that sound right? Here's an excerpt:

Although the terrible revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib hit the front pages in April 2004, no senior officials in the US military or the Bush Administration have yet been held accountable. The scandal has shamed and outraged many Americans, in addition to creating a greater threat of terrorism against the United States. But it has prompted no investigative commission (in the manner of the 9/11 commission) with a mandate to find the whole truth, or full-scale bipartisan Congressional hearings, as occurred during Watergate. Indeed, it is as though the Watergate investigations ended with the prosecution of only the burglars, which is what the cover-up was designed to insure, instead of reaching into the highest levels of government, which is what ultimately happened.
In just the latest sign of the current Administration's nose-thumbing at accountability for higher-ups, Lieut. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander in Iraq when the Abu Ghraib abuses occurred, is reportedly under consideration for promotion.
Nonetheless, higher-ups can be held to account. Difficult as it may be to achieve, our institutions of government can be pressured to do the right thing. If the public and the media insist on thorough investigations and appropriate punishments for those implicated--all the way up the chain of command--they can prevail.
Several episodes from recent history illustrate how public opposition can change even the most entrenched government policy. Neither President Johnson nor President Nixon wanted to withdraw from Vietnam, but growing public anger forced Congress, finally, to end the war. Likewise, in Watergate, Congress did not commence impeachment proceedings to hold President Nixon accountable for his abuse of power until the American people demanded action after the Saturday Night Massacre (in which Nixon ordered the firing of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox to keep him from getting incriminating personal tape recordings). And, of course, the most important example from the past fifty years is the civil rights movement, which brought down the system of segregation in the South through sustained and peaceful public protest.

I'll make it a point to try to listen today (yesterday was too busy) and urge others too as well.
(The Randi Rhodes Show can be heard online if you don't get it via your traditional radio or satellite radio.) (Holtzman was a guest on Democracy Now! discussing the article. I'll pull a link later this morning.)

And Rick e-mails to note the topic for Democracy Now! today:

Thur, July 21: Anti-Muslim sentiment in the aftermath of the London bombingsmay only get worse as the British capital prepares to host the 2012Olympics. We'll speak with sports writer David Zirin about his new book"What's My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States"

The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.

[Note: This entry originally appeared at The Common Ills.]

We're noting the current edition of Harper's Magazine in this entry (and remember, they have an event in D.C. this moring -- even if you can't go, you should be aware of it).

Nothing from the issue (August 2005) is available online (yet?) and the cover of the new issue doesn't yet show up when you click "current issue." Trisha e-mailed to complain about a magazine report elsewhere and asked that we do another one here. I'm currently reading three magazines (of which Harper's is one) but to get this entry up this morning, we'll just focus on Harper's. Three things stand out (my opinion). (And note, I'm only half-way through the issue. There may very well be more and there may be things that would stand out to you that didn't to me.)

Lewis H. Lapham's "Moving On" is worth reading (as Lapham always is) and he's addressing reality vs. "reality" and the state of our country (as he usually does). Here's an excerpt on the press' response to Mark Felt:

The television anchorpeople knew that the Watergate story once had been important, but they were hard-pressed to remember why. The cable news channels rounded up opinions from Nixon's prominent and still surviving associates, among them Henry Kissenger ("I don't think it's heroic to act as a spy on your president when you're in high office") and Charles W. Colson, who wanted "kids to look up to heroes" and thought it shameful that Nixon (that wise prophet and noble statesman) had been airlifted out of Washington in a cloud of undeserved disgrace. The bland hypocrisies met with no attempt to place them in either a past or present context; without objection they were allowed to float in the vacuum of virtual reality with the cartoon captions that bubble out of the mouths of late-night Hollywood celebrities. Nobody to cared to make the point that Kissenger in his capacity as Nixon's national security adviser routinely tapped Nixon's phone, or that Colson, as a White House special counsel, once proposed bombing the Brookings Institution and served seven months in prison for his work as a moonlighting thug.

Also worth noting is Bill McKibben's essay entitled "The Christian Paradox: How a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong." Here's the opening:

Only 40 percent of Americans can name more than four of the Ten Commandments, and a scant half can cite any of the four authors of the Gospels. Twelve percent believe Joan of Arc was Noah's wife. This failure to recall the specifics of our Christian heritage may be further evidence of our nation's educational decline, but it probably doesn't matter all that much in spiritual or political terms. Here is a statistic that does matter: Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teachs that "God helps those who help themselves." That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture. The thing is, not only is Franklin's wisdom not biblical; it's counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor. On this essential matter, most Americans -- most American Christians -- are simply wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists believed that Newton proved gravity causes apples to fly up.
Asking Christians what Christ taught isn't a trick. When we say we are a Christian nation -- and overwhelmingly, we do -- it means something. People who go to church absorb lessons there and make real decisions based on those lessons, increasingly, these lessons inform their politics. (One poll found that 11 percent of U.S. churchgoers were urged by their clergy to vote in a particular way in the 2004 election, up from 6 percent in 2000.) When George Bush says that Jesus Christ is his favorite philosopher he may or may not be sincere, but he is reflecting the sincere beliefs of the vast majority of Americans.
And therein is the paradox. America is simultaneously the most professedly Christian of the developed nations and the least Christian in its behavior. That paradox -- more important, perhaps, than the much touted ability of French women to stay thin on a diet of chocolate and chesse -- illuminates the hollow at the core of our boastful, careening culture.

That's an excerpt. It's a seven page essay. If it hooked you or interested you, check your libraries or bookstores.

[Note: Although not currently available online, McKibben's previous article, "The Cuba Diet" is.]

Mark Crispin Miller has an important article as well, "None Dare Call It Stolen: Ohio, the election, and America's servile press."

How did he [Bully Boy] do it? To that most important question the commentariat, riskly prompted by Republicans, supplied an answer. Americans of faith -- a slient majority heretofore unmoved by another politician -- had poured forth by the millions to vote "Yes!" for Jesus' buddy in the White House. Bush's 51 percent, according to this thesis, were roused primarily by "family values." Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, called gay marriage "the hood ornament on the family values wagon that carried the president to a secon term." The pundits eagerly pronounced their amens -- "Moral values," Tucker Carlson said on CNN, "drove [. . .] Bush and other Republican candidates to victory this week" -- although it is not clear why. The primary evidence of our Great Awakening was a post-election poll by the Pew Research Center in which 27 percent of the respondents, when asked which issue "mattered most" to them in the election, selected something called "moral values." This slight plurality of impulse becomes still less impressive when we note that, as the pollsters went to great pains to make clear, "the relative importance of moral values depends greatly on how the question is framed." In fact, when voters were asked to "name in their own words the most important factore in their vote," only 14 percent managed to come up with "moral values." Strangely, this detail went little mentioned in the post-electoral commentary.
The press has had little to say about most of the strange details of the electorate -- except, that is, to ridiculde all efforts to discuss them. This animus appeared soon after November 2, in a spate of caustic articles dismissing any critical discussion of the outcome as crazed speculation: "Election paranoia surfaces: Conspiracy theorists call results rigged," chuckled the Baltimore Sun on November 4. "Internet Buzz on Vote Fraud Is Dismissed," proclaimed the Boston Globe on November 10. "Latest Conspiracy Theory -- Kerry Won -- Hits the Ether," the Washington Post chortled on November 11. The New York Times weighed in with "Vote Fraud Theories, Spread by Blogs, Are Quickly Buried" -- making mock not only of the "post-election theorizing" but of cyberspace itself, the fons et origo of all such loony tunes, according to the Times.
Such was the news that most Americans received. Although the tone was scientific, "realistic," skeptical and "middle-of-the-road," the explanations offered by the press were weak and immaterial. It was as if they were reporting from inside a forest fire without acknowledging the fire, except to keep insisting that there was no fire. Since Kerry has conceded, they argued, and since "no smoking gun" had come to light, there was no story to report. This is an oddly passive argument. Even so, the evidence that something went extremely wrong last fall is copious, and not hard to find. Much of it was noted at the time, albeit by local papers and haphazardly. Concerning the decisive contest in Ohio, the evidence is lucidly compiled in a single congressional report, which, for the last half-year has been available to anyone inclined to read it. It is a veritable arsenal of "smoking guns" -- and yet its findings may be less estraordinary than the fact that no one in the country seems to care about them.

(Since Harper's doesn't have any of the articles available online, I'll steer you towards another resource, FAIR, that has Miranda Spencer's "America’s Broken Electoral SystemGet over it, says mainstream press." Spencer's article is worth reading, so is a trip to your local library to read the August 2005 edition of Harper's.)

Note that any and all spelling errors are mine and not the authors we excerpted from. Tonight's Indymedia roundup night. Which hopefully means that there won't be time for another magazine report today. (One of the three, a magazine not on our permalinks, is one I expected to enjoy, after passing the last issue on to a friend unread. I'm not enjoying it thus far.)

The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.

[Note: This entry originally appeared at The Common Ills.]

Apologies that this is only going now, this event happens this morning, from the home page of Harper's Magazine:

Harper's Magazine invites readers in the Washington, D.C. area to
What Went Wrong in Ohio? A Forum on Voting Irregularities in the 2004 Election
Featuring:
Rep. Sherrod Brown (D-OH)
· Eleanor Clift, contributing editor, Newsweek
· Rep. John Conyers (D-MI)
· Mark Crispin Miller, contributing writer, Harper's Magazine
· Rep. Stephanie Tubbs-Jones (D-OH) ·
Moderated by John R. MacArthur, publisher of Harper's Magazine.
Thursday, July 21
8:15 - 10:00 A.M.
Room HC-5
The Capitol Washington D.C.
The forum is free, but seating is limited. If you plan to attend, please R.S.V.P. to (212) 420-5745 and leave a message with your Social Security number and date of birth.

The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.

[Note: This entry originally appeared at The Common Ills.]

Yesterday, while noting the Times' saturation coverage on Supreme Court nominee Roberts (which continues today), I offered that Elisabeth Bumiller truly was the type of "reporter" to handle these sort of stories because her overheated "style" allows for "announcements" to easily be turned into "events."

There's another key to that "style" and we see it this morning in "An Interview by, Not With, the President." There is so much wrong with this "reporting" that hours could be spent going over it (and skewering her). Instead, we'll zero in on one passage from this morning:

Judge Wilkinson said he was not asked about his views on issues like abortion or even a particular legal case in his interview with Mr. Bush as well as in interviews with others on the White House staff; he would not say if he had talked to Vice President Dick Cheney. "I wasn't crowded in any way," Judge Wilkinson said. "There was no litmus test applied." Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, said in a briefing on Wednesday that neither Mr. Bush nor White House staff members asked any of the finalists about their positions on issues.

Has she completely left the planet earth? Seriously, has fluff poured out of her head for so long that nothing's left?

There are so many problems with a reporter including such an assertion/claim in a story but it's doubly so for Bumiller.

Why is that?

Is November 12, 2004 so far in the past?

It hasn't even been a year.

I can pull my from clippings and find an article, a Times article, from that day.

On November 12, 2004 an article ("Choice of Gonzales May Blaze a Trail for the High Court") appeared in the Times:

Conservatives said on Thursday that a leading candidate for the first nomination to the Supreme Court was Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, who sits on the federal appeals court in Richmond. He was a protege of the late Justice Lewis F. Powell, who was widely admired. Although Judge Wilkinson is opposed to abortion, he may be palatable to some Democrats because of his strong environmental and First Amendment record.

Oh, someone scoffs, Bumiller's too busy fluffing to read her own paper!

Possibly so. But does she not read her own copy? Bumiller's credited for that article (along with Neil A. Lewis).

Maybe Lewis wrote the portion of the article that makes Bumiller's "reporting" today so insipid?
Maybe while he was writing it, Bumiller was off doing finger excercises to work her stenography muscles? Or maybe she was attempting another creative visualization where fluff bends reality?

Why would Bully Boy need to ask someone their position on something if it's in the public record? And why would it be "news" that the question wasn't asked of someone know to be opposed to abortion?

Common sense doesn't allow one to lead the Elite Fluff Patrol, true. But while posing as a journalist, as Bumiller continues to do, she might attempt to find a way to reconcile this morning's cheery-Sunshine-Day "reporting" with a claim made eight months ago.

Only Bumiller can trumpet as "NEWS!" that someone known to be opposed to abortion (someone she even reported that on) wasn't asked where he stood on abortion by the Bully Boy.

Wilkinson claims he wasn't asked about abortion. Bumiller reports it's as "NEWS!" How is it news? It's not news at all.

And a real reporter, if they felt the need to include such a fluff quote, would have then noted, "Wilkinson's position on abortion has been widely reported by some, including this reporter, to be opposed to abortion."

Squad leader can't do that. Doing that turns her tiny, nothing "report" into even less of a reason for a tree to die. So she fluffs.

Nobody fluffs better than Bumiller. That's why she can tease an annoucement into an event. That's why she see "significance" where there is none. It requires shutting off all skepticism, reason and memory, but time and again, she demonstrates that she's able to do just that.

Doing so today allows her to push the talking point that Bully Boy's all about the process, why he didn't even ask a potential nominee about abortion!

Reality, as opposed to talking points, will note that Wilkinson is reported to be opposed to abortion. Reality will also note that Bumiller should have known that fact since she previously reported it. Reality rears it's head from time to time; however, it's sadly no match for the skill of the Elite Fluff Patrol squad leader.

As we've noted before:

If this is what access brings, someone cut her off, she's had more than enough. Can we get a designated driver?

The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.

[Note: This entry originally appeared at The Common Ills.] 

After months of political maneuvering, the House is set to open debate Thursday on the future of the sweeping antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act, as the Bush administration pushes to solidify support for the law and Democrats sought to impose new restrictions.
The House vote on whether to extend the government's counterterrorism powers will be the first time either chamber of Congress has considered the act as a whole since it was passed by wide margins just weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks. Officials expect daylong debate on the House floor on Thursday, with a vote probably Friday. The Senate must still consider competing versions of its own.
[. . .]
Representative Bernard Sanders, the Vermont independent who wrote the amendment on library records, called the decision by the committee's Republican leaders to keep his proposal off the bill "an outrage" and a subversion of the democratic process. A similar provision that Mr. Sanders tacked onto an appropriations bill last month passed the House by a wide margin.

The above is from Eric Lichtblau and Scott Shane's "House to Take Up Patriot Act Extension"
in this morning's New York Times -- one of the few non-Roberts article.

It's our spotlight story. If you read one article in the paper this morning, read this one. They've offered a clear summary of what's going on and they've actually gone beyond the usual sources for comments. In addition to Bernie Sanders, you also get Democrat Jim McGovern and Republican David Dreier who, apparently, only clams up on some questions. (You know what questions.)

The article also informs us that Bully Boy's taken his solo act to Baltimore. With J-Ass gone from Justice and his Bullying the USA tour a fading memory, Bully Boy seems to think he can strike a nostalgia vibe. He even tries to sell the Patriot Act on the backs of those who suffered in London. (Did anyone else wonder why brave Bully Boy didn't stop in London to say some encouraging words? Maybe his spare time at the G8 was too busy napping? Maybe he had to rush back immediately because someone forgot to pack his favorite pillow?)

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[Note: This entry originally appeared at The Common Ills.]