Shakesville

Wielding a Bicycle Chain*

So Rush Limbaugh is asking that liberals cease and desist on negative coverage of Iraq for 90 days. Sure, I’ll agree. But you first, Rushy boy. You give me 90 days with no misconstruing, miscontexualizing, or outright lying about liberals, their positions, and their policies, and I’ll give you 90 days of nothing but happy happy shiny shiny coverage of Iraq in return. Personally, I think I’ve got the better end of this deal. I’ll just have to write nothing about Iraq for 90 days; you’ve got to give up everything that keeps your ass on the air. Good luck.

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*Morrissey fans - Name that song.

Downing Street Documents: Action Alerts

Lots of stuff happening today.

1. The hearings on the Downing Street Memo have been moved to 2:30 at the U.S. Capitol (still tomorrow). In the interim, please contact your Congress Members and Senators to support the hearings. You can find a list of talking points for lobbying Congress here.

2. Also very important - CONTACT THE MEDIA and politely request that they cover the hearings. Specifically, look for the Washington Bureau Chiefs of the networks, cable news stations, major newspapers, and wires. (My home internet went down again so I've been having trouble doing research - if someone has this information available and can send it to me, I will distribute.)

3. Don't forget about the Live Chat tonight at 8:30 EST at the BBA main page. (Click on Live Chat.)

4. Other important links to check out if you haven't already:

Raw Story's list of the new Downing Street Documents with links to pdfs, players, dates, and key points.

A wiki set up by BBA member Kevin Baas. Very useful information and a good resource. Kevin is very active on the BBA Forums and will no doubt be happy to answer questions concerning the wiki.

And make sure to check in with the Alliance News Thread often at the Forums - Misty is doing a great job of posting current info there. And thanks to Pam for changing the Forum to be accessible by registered users only - we lasted quite awhile without a troll infestation, but nothing gold can stay, Ponyboy.

Thank you all for the amazing work you're doing. Keep it up, keep pushing, keep swarming, and keep the faith.

(And keep sending your posts to The Heretik and Freiheit und Wissen for inclusion in the round-ups!)

From the Wayback Machine

(Way back in...April.)

“So, one of the things that a blog really does, and I think is very effective in, is that it allows – what you get in a blog, essentially, is you get these affinity groups, right. You have people who are really interested in one particular topic, be it politics. And if you’re talking about politics, divided into libertarians and conservatives and liberals. You can have sports blogs. You can have technology blogs. And what it does is, these people are really passionate about that subject, and advertisers really have an extremely targeted group of people to reach. So there’s where the value I think comes. It’s not Yahoo! news or Google news, where it could be absolutely just anybody coming in to do that kind of advertising. And you hope that you get some targeted people, people who line up with what you’re advertising. With blogs you know exactly what the audience is into. And if you have a product that really sells to that audience – in my case, political campaign or partisan tee-shirts, anti-Bush DVDs – if you have that kind of product, it’ll do really well.”

— Markos "Kos" Zúniga Moulitsas, from Brian Lamb's April 10, 2005 Q&A interview

(Hat tip to Shaker and Mannion commenter JDC.)

Uh-Oh

Could it be that we’ve been right all along and Bush and his merry gang of miscreants are actually—gasp!—hypocrites?! Surely there’s a reasonable explanation that Mr. President Superstar and the GOP Family Values Revue decided to spend the evening with a dirty girl porn star, right?

Right, Ken Mehlman?

Right?!

[S]ome Christian evangelicals demanded an explanation.

"I've sent three E-mails to [GOP Chairman] Ken Mehlman saying, 'Hey, give us some kind of explanation here,'" said the Rev. Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association. "I think I'd be more interested in getting votes, rather than raising money."

…crickets…

Bush on the Dems: Get Out of My Way!

So President Bush is pouting because the Dems are, in his words, employing a “philosophy of the stop sign” and an “agenda of the road block.” He also noted that:

Political parties that choose the path of obstruction will not gain the trust of the American people.

Here’s the thing, George. Your party is about to run the country straight off a cliff, and Americans have actually begun to start appreciating the party that’s blocking the road between the crazyass jalopy you’re driving and the unknowable abyss. When all is said and done, I strongly suspect those who braved the oncoming traffic will indeed have gained the trust of the American people, who will soon, whether you like it or not, find out just how deep your betrayals really run.

----------------------

Aside…check out this sentence from the same Reuters article:

"On issue after issue, they (the Democrats) stand for nothing except obstruction," Bush said at the annual President's Dinner, a $23 million fund-raiser attended by Republican leaders, party donors, and a blond porn star and former California gubernatorial candidate named Mary Carey.

Read: “On issue after issue, they (the Democrats) stand for nothing except obstruction,” Bush had the unmitigated temerity to say while parting down with a fucking porn star and his fatcat friends who made his coffers flush with cash while Afghanistan faces a cholera epidemic, Iraq continues to degenerate into an ever more horrible quagmire, the economy sags, the genocides and AIDS crises in Africa wage on unabated, our energy crisis worsens, more Americans continue to lose health coverage and fall into poverty, schools go unfunded, and a national civil culture war fueled by Bush’s extremist agenda rages on. Oh, and did we mention a porn star was there?

The tide, my friends, has turned.

DSM News

The L.A. Times on the Memos. Go read.

Must See TV

Per Paul's post below, see Hijacking Catastrophe here.

Sensenbrenner Does the GOP Two-Step

Step One: Be a total dick.
Step Two: Repeat

Freiheit und Wissen (emphasis mine):

Last Friday Republican House Judiciary Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner shut off the microphones of Democrats during a hearing for the Patriot Act. Sensenbrenner then picked up the gavel and stormed out of the room. This sudden move was directed in particular at Representative John Conyers who wanted to call the Chair of the Board of Amnesty International to testify.

Now today a report has surfaced that Sensenbrenner has denied Conyers space on the Hill in which to conduct the hearings for the Downing Street memo on Thursday – hearings that the After Downing Street Campaign has been waiting for with bated breath. Indeed, it seems that Conyers has been forced to move the hearings off site, to the DNC.

How far, exactly, does the GOP need to go before someone, anyone, besides a bunch of liberal bloggers says, “Hold on just a fucking minute,” and calls these unbelievable pricks on their relentless abuses of power?

Fan Mail

I love it when fans write to me!

You said:

"Just a thought, but perhaps a bigger part of the reason Democrats can't win elections is because they, and a certain contingent of Dem bloggers, continue to show contempt for women."

Get over yourself. They're not showing contempt for WOMEN, they are showing contempt for YOU.

What a putz.

I can certainly see his point. If there's anyone worthy of contempt from the Democrats, it's me.

Downing Street Memo Media Alert

Programming Note: Tomorrow we begin webcasting a short video clip we call "The Smoking Gun," from the documentary film "Hijacking Catastrophe." The clip shows the bottom-line importance of the Downing Street Memo and how it confirms the insights of Daniel Ellsberg and the firsthand testimony of Pentagon whistleblower Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski. TO will also send a crew to Washington to cover the John Conyers hearing on the Downing Street Memo. For the latest details on that event go to http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/.

Shout out in comments after you've watched it!

(Pulling cross-posts out of a hat..)

What the Hell?

This is the list of fucknuts who refuse to co-sponsor the Senate’s anti-lynching resolution (finally brought to a vote about 5 generations or so after we really needed it):

Lamar Alexander (R-TN)
Robert Bennett (R-UT)
Thad Cochran (R-MS)
Kent Conrad (D-ND)
John Cornyn (R-TX)
Michael Crapo (R-ID)
Michael Enzi (R-WY)
Chuck Grassley (R-IA)
Judd Gregg (R-NH)
Orrin Hatch (R-UT)
Trent Lott (R-MS)
Lisa Murkowski (R-AK)
Richard Shelby (R-AL)
John Sununu (R-NH)
Craig Thomas (R-WY)
George Voinovich (R-OH)

And yes, co-sponsor in the present tense is correct, as Senators have the option of co-sponsoring a resolution after it has already passed. (Because of that, this list may not be final.)

What in the name of all that’s holy is wrong with these people? Especially Kent Conrad. Fuck, go join the GOP, you twit.

Spreading Censoring Democracy

Seriously, what is up with Microsoft? First they throw gays to the wolves, then we find out makes-me-Ralph Reed is on their payroll, and now they’re voluntarily cooperating with Chinese authorities to censor content, including words such as "freedom," "democracy," "demonstration," "human rights," and "Taiwan independence."

There are, of course, two sides to this:

"If you want to deal with the Chinese, you have to deal with their rules," said William Makower, CEO of Panlogic a marketing consultancy with operations in China.

"It is all very well to have high-minded ideals about how you want the Chinese to behave, but opposing China is going to be counter-productive."

"Microsoft is being pragmatic in its approach," said Mr Makower. "It is not up to it to make political statements."

Well, as we established during Microsoft’s whole legislative debacle in April, corporations, in fact, make political statements by engaging in social activism all the time. Here’s a refresher:

[I]n response to those who suggest that social activism isn’t the responsibility of corporations, I would remind them that any time a corporation (or group of corporations) lobbies Congress for something like deregulation on pollutants or stricter bankruptcy laws, or against family leave or universal healthcare, that is social activism. Corporations are collectively one of the primary social activists in this country; it's just that they tend to be pro-corporate and anti-society. The redistribution of taxation is a primary example of that of which I speak. A century ago, the vast majority of federal taxes were paid by corporations; now the vast majority is paid by individuals. That is a massive societal shift. We didn't lobby for that—corporations did.

Being “pragmatic,” I’ve noticed, is always the explanation when doing the right thing might mean making a little less money.

According to Reporters Without Borders, China is using a system called Night Crawler to patrol web journals and make sure that only registered blogs are published. Unregistered blogs will be shut down.

"Following Yahoo, here is a second American internet giant giving way to the Chinese authorities and agreeing to self-censorship", said the group in a statement.

"The lack of ethics on the part of these companies is extremely worrying. Their management frequently justifies collaboration with Chinese censorship by saying that all they are doing is obeying local legislation."

"We believe that this argument does not hold water and that these multinationals must respect certain basic ethical principles, in whatever country they are operating."

It’s truly pathetic that’s considered a radical notion. I guess I’m a radical after all.

But then again, what would I know? I do this for free and can barely pay my bills. If I were a major for-profit international corporation, or perhaps even if I made my living as a blogger, maybe I wouldn’t have any ethics, either.

(Hat tip to John Howard, who’s got his own commentary on the issue you should check out.)

Tragically Unfunny Feminists, Continued

Idyllopus Press:

Click through to see the rest of the comic and read the associated post. Great stuff. It’s just too bad it’s so fucking humorless.

Homobigotry in Hoosierland

It’s not hard to believe that in this reddest of red states, my loved and hated Indiana, the first state called for Bush on every newscast I watched on election day, there’s a bunch of GOP numpties trying to ramrod the anti-gay agenda, embraced and encouraged so wantonly by the homobigots currently running the GOP, through our state legislature. But even though it’s expected, it still sucks nuts. At least we’ve got some protestors down south, too:

When the speaker of the Indiana House of Representatives held a fundraiser in Downtown Indianapolis on Monday night, demonstrators were waiting for him.

The Indiana Action Network disagrees with Rep. Brian Bosma's backing of a proposed amendment to the Indiana Constitution to ban same-sex marriages. Bosma's event was at the Rathskeller Restaurant in the Massachusetts Avenue district, which the group says has a high concentration of gay and lesbian businesses.

"Bosma is apparently willing to promote Mass. Ave's businesspeople as artists and tourist draws while simultaneously advocating the curtailing of human rights for those very same people," Jerame Davis, the organization's president, said in a statement.

Bosma, R-Indianapolis, said he's held a legislative fundraiser at the Rathskeller for eight years now, and he's not ready to change the location.

"I'm not overly concerned about any protest," Bosma said. "We will just have to agree to disagree on this issue."

Okay, how’s this sound to you, Brian? You’ll disagree that it’s inappropriate to keep exploiting the gay district while trying to pass legislation codifying discrimination against gays, and we’ll disagree with anyone who says you’re not a useless plonker. Agreed?

Bleh.

This could come up for a statewide vote as soon as 2007. I hope it never gets that far, but if it does, Brian and his phobic pals had better brace themselves for quite a rumble in the northwest corner of the state.

(Thanks to Shaker and Julien’s List contributor Holly for the pointer.)

Must-Reads on the DSM

[UPDATE: NBC story added; hat tip Green Knight.]

MSNBC:

Just last week, President Bush and Blair vigorously denied that war was inevitable. “No, the facts were not being fixed, in any shape or form at all,” said Blair at a White House news conference with the president on June 7. But now, war critics have come up with seven more memos, verified by NBC News...

AlterNet:

A number of citizen groups and Democratic politicians are launching an initiative to investigate information contained in newly unearthed British memos on the war in Iraq, and to demand answers from President Bush. The memorandums provide further evidence that Bush's administration had no reasonable plan for achieving stability or rebuilding Iraq after the war, and build on earlier memos that state it was "fixing" intelligence information to remove Saddam Hussein months before the war started…

TomPaine:

When asked about the July 23, 2002, minutes at their press conference last week in Washington, President Bush and Prime Minister Blair did a good job of obfuscating—enough to mislead our corporate press into the all-too-familiar he-said, she-said reporting. What went unnoticed was the fact that in the process, the two leaders unintentionally acknowledged the authenticity of the minutes, which read like a meeting of Mafioso. They may think no one will read the actual minutes. In that, they are dead wrong…

Editor & Publisher:

Just as the U.S. media -- albeit a month late -- scramble to get on top of the so-called “Downing Street Memo,” the Sunday Times in London unveiled another leaked document which confirms and goes behind the message of the memo…

The Nation:

It's not exactly a news flash that the Bush Administration lied to the public before the invasion of Iraq. What should be on front pages, though, is new proof of the Bush Administration's lies brought to light by the previously unknown Downing Street Minutes, recently obtained and printed in the Times of London. (The Downing Street Memo is a transcript of minutes of a secret meeting chaired by Tomy Blair in Britain in July of 2002 to discuss preparations and propaganda before going to war. It was marked "Secret and strictly personal--UK eyes only.")…

The Heretik:

GEORGE W. BUSH: He’s a Pistol.
And His Own Words Are the Real Downing Street Smoking Gun. People say things in unguarded moments. The idea that a sitting President could poke his head in a briefing meeting National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice is conducting with three Republican senators and say this is astounding. If you want to know whether George W. Bush had decided on war well before he now claims, what more proof do you need? Why has no one asked Bush directly about this?…

(Go read it. You’ll be wondering the same thing.)

And here are a couple of other rather interesting things…

From the FSU News:

For the last month and a half, a gargantuan news story has been slowly gaining coverage in the U.S., though it should have exploded across the front pages as soon as it was reported. In the British press, it was immediately recognized for the bombshell that it was, but here, it has taken the efforts of concerned Americans demanding that the press and Congress acknowledge and pursue this scandal…

A letter to the editor of the Nashville City Paper:

Bush's smoking gun
The Downing Street Memo, the big giant huge smoking gun that confirms that Bush lied us into war. Why it's not on every front page in the country I don't understand. This is way bigger than Watergate ever was. People have died because this president lied us into a war.

An educated citizenry is crucial to a healthy democracy. People in this country aren't getting the information they need to make informed decisions. The American people deserve better from their media. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

37076
Cecily A. Letendre

Seen anything else? Let me know in comments.

And be sure to check the round-ups at The Heretik and Freiheit und Wissen to see what other bloggers are writing about the Downing Street Memos. CN Todd at F&W’s got an especially superb and inspiring post today as part of the round-up you’ll definitely want to read.

Give it a Rest Already

And by “it,” I mean Bill Clinton’s cock. Heck, even Bubba himself gives it a little R&R now and then.

Justin Cognito:

Why do conservative writers rage at Bill Clinton anymore? Specifically, why do they rage at Bill Clinton's dick? Ann Coulter seems fascinated with it, probably because it's even bigger than her own. And anything touched by it is considered rotten; even though Hillary seems to be moving more towards the center, even slightly to the right, she's still a target of constant vitriol.

Now comes the allegation- by which I mean, "complete bullshit lie"- that Chelsea was the product of spousal rape. So continues the rage against Clinton's evil, evil phallus. At least it never lied to us about war.

I don’t understand it, either. I’m sure I hate George Bush at least as much as they hate Clinton, and I swear to the fates, once that mofo’s out of office, I never want to think about him (or any of his body parts) again!

Question of the Day

So. Now that we keep finding these British memos that point out Dear Leader is as big of a lying scumbag as he appears to be....

How long do you think it will be before we stop speaking "English," and start speaking "Freedom?"

(You've got to... cross-post the monkey)

Who Wishes They Were Funny? Update 2…

Because I have a mind like a steel sieve, I forgot to include Kenneth Quinnell of T. Rex’s Guide to Life on the Guys Who Wish They Were Funny list, for this excellent post (which also includes a comprehensive round-up of those talking about the issue). Other Guys Who Wish They Were Funny are Lance Mannion, The Green Knight, Scott at Lawyers, Guns and Money, and Paul the Spud.

Some more Girls Who Wish They Were Funny are Pam, Majikthise, Media Girl, Echidne, Mad Kane, Bitch PhD, and Pen-Elayne. Plus all of yesterday’s list, most of whom are still desperately working to try to overcome the humorless frigidity suffered by all resolute feminists.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t include one member of the #5 sex from an alien species which has 14 different sexes, Norbizness, who I fear will actually never be funny, poor thing.

Stand-Up Guy

There's been a lot of talk of various schisms of one kind or another lately, one of which has manifested itself in concern among members of the Big Brass Alliance that some of the bigger bloggers haven't come on board with us, which was disheartening for many people. I received an email tonight that I wanted to share (with permission), because it's just the opposite of divisive...and because it's just fucking classy:

You were right and I was wrong about the memos. Maybe they will break through, and at any rate, they should. Sometimes the coldly political side of me takes over, and, sadly, it doesn't always result in the best judgment. In any case -- you're doing wonderful work and the right thing, I shouldn't have dismissed the issue.
-- Ezra Klein

Ezra's referring to this. And he never had to say a word about it again, but he did. And I think that's pretty cool.

Marked Men and Women

Or, Welcome to the Weimar Republic, Part Zwei.

The leader of a conservative Christian lobby group appears to suggest that gays should be required to wear warning labels, although he denies that was his intention.

"We put warning labels on cigarette packs because we know that smoking takes one to two years off the average life span, yet we 'celebrate' a lifestyle that we know spreads every kind of sexually transmitted disease and takes at least 20 years off the average life span according to the 2005 issue of the revered scientific journal Psychological Reports," Rev. Bill Banuchi, executive director of the New York Christian Coalition told the Mid Hudson News.

The journal regularly publishes articles described by many mainstream psychologists as misleading and faulty. The homosexuality morbidity study was conducted by the conservative anti-gay Family Research Institute.

Okay, so he's using bullshit science and making statements about sexuality (“a lifestyle that we know spreads every kind of sexually transmitted disease”) as if they are true solely of homosexuals. Last I checked, anyone getting fucked can get infected with and transmit every STD available for the catching. (Unless there’s some secret gay syphilis that makes you more fashionable before it rots your brain that I don’t know about.) So, three paragraphs in, and we know that the good reverend is a homobigot, fan of crackpot junk science, and disingenuous knob. But is he also a human tape recorder programmed to spit out the anti-gay dogma of the Right?

He called on people to "pray for those who are deceived by the lies of popular culture, who are caught up in a destructive lifestyle, and for the children who are being zealously evangelized by radical homosexuals."

Check.

The issue of labels is particularly sensitive to gays. In Nazi Germany they were forced to wear the pink triangle to differentiate them from other internees at concentration camps.

But that’s not really what he meant. He just meant that there should be a better warning system for kids thinking about going all light in the loafers, that’s all. It’s sort of like, sure—you can get a shitty tent or an ugly jacket if you smoke lots of Marlboros and save up the “miles” from every pack, but you might also get lung cancer. All Rev. Bill is saying is that maybe dying young or getting gay herpes (as opposed to the regular kind you might get losing your virginity in the back seat of a Chevy Celebrity the way the heteros are supposed to) isn’t worth that toaster you’ll get for signing the Gay Pledge—and you ought to know that before you give the nice man in pink Spandex biker shorts your John Hancock on the dotted line.

Pay attention, kids. Rev. Bill’s just looking out for you.

(Hat tip Ms. Julien.)