Why the Dems Need James Carville to Take a Long, Long Vacation

Hey Democrats! Now that we know Matalin is working for Cheney, please don't take campaign advise from this man!

Why the Dems Need James Carville to Take a Long, Long Vacation:
That's all in the past. Now, as one of Dick Cheney's most trusted first-term advisors, one of eight founding members of the White House Iraq Group, a witness in front of the Plamegate grand jury, and a close friend of Scooter Libby ("The man you pray you get seated next to at a dinner party," she recently cooed), Matalin is a central player in all this.


"And it has hopelessly handcuffed Carville. Check out this exchange from his appearance on The Situation Room this week:

BLITZER: Should the vice president hold a news conference or grant an interview and answer the tough questions that are being asked out there?

CARVILLE: I've got a better idea. Why doesn't the president get out and have one? Harry Truman didn't say the buck stops with the Vice President. The buck stops with the President.

[snip]

I think the first step is not the Vice President -- [it's] the President of the United States standing up, answering to the American people, answering people's questions... The Vice nothing. There aren't no Vices around here. There's one man in charge of this country and that is George W. Bush."

"The Vice nothing"? "There are no Vices around here"? The buck doesn't stop with the Vice President? Are you kidding me? The Vice President's office is Ground Zero on Plamegate -- and on the Bush administration's push for war. It was Cheney who regularly stormed over to the CIA, knocking heads and twisting arms to get the intel he wanted. It was Cheney who set the Plamegate ball rolling by demanding info on the bogus claims of a Niger/Iraq uranium connection. It was Cheney who led the media charge in selling the war with his unwavering claims that Saddam had the ability to "subject the United States...to nuclear blackmail." It was Cheney who helped foster the bogus impression that there was an al-Qaeda/Saddam connection -- continuing to tout the "Atta met with Saddam's reps in Prague" story long after it had been shot down by the FBI. It was Cheney's office that opened its arms to Chalabi after the CIA soured on him. It was "Cheney's Cheney," Scooter Libby, who wrote the original draft of Colin Powell's shameful UN speech. And it was Cheney's office that took the lead in the administration's efforts to discredit Joe Wilson and his wife.

Memo to Carville: If you can't talk about Dick Cheney, then you can't talk about Plamegate. Or about the war -- and the lies and deceptions the administration used to sell it to the American people. And if you can't talk about Plamegate and the war, you should not be talking at all from the Democratic side of the aisle.

Arrianna piles on with this quote!

I think Democrats have a great opportunity to show that they're going to stand up for the interests of working people, going to stand up for the interests of middle-class people and get away from the machine gun lobby and the anti-Family Medical Leave and all of these other decisions here.

Were in the middle of the Plame investigation, the President has a 35% approval rating and he still wants to focus on domestic issues. Come on? He is clearly too compromised to advise Democrats on this matter. Frankly he was during the Kerry campaign as well.

Smoking Gun on Manipulation of Iraq Intelligence? 'NY Times' Cites New Document

The New York Times Drops a Bomb Shell

Smoking Gun on Manipulation of Iraq Intelligence? 'NY Times' Cites New Document: "Tomorrow, in its print edition, The New York Times starts to answer the question, with reporter Douglas Jehl disclosing the contents of a newly declassified memo apparently passed to him by Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

It shows that an al-Qaeda official held by the Americans was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the basis for its claims that Iraq trained al-Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to this Defense Intelligence Agency document from February 2002.

It declared that it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, 'was intentionally misleading the debriefers' in making claims about Iraqi support for al-Qaeda's work with illicit weapons, Jehl reports.

“The document provides the earliest and strongest indication of doubts voiced by American intelligence agencies about Mr. Libi's credibility,” Jehl writes. “Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi's information as ‘credible’ evidence that Iraq was training Al Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons."

We also have more evidence Democrats are finally starting to move on Bush!

Broadcasting & Cable: The Business of Television

Broadcasting & Cable: The Business of Television: "The Corporation for Public Broadcasting Board of Directors said Thursday that embattled former board chairman Ken Tomlinson has resigned.

The board has been reviewing a CPB Inspector General's report--called for by a pair of congressmen--on Tomlinson's relationship with the board stemming from Tomlinson's attempts to add more conservative programming.

The board said in a statement: '[F]ormer chairman Kenneth Y. Tomlinson has resigned from the CPB board. The board does not believe that Mr. Tomlinson acted maliciously or with any intent to harm CPB or public broadcasting, and the board recognizes that Mr. Tomlinson strongly disputes the findings in the soon-to-be-released Inspector General’s report.

'The board expresses its disappointment in the performance of former key staff whose responsibility it was to advise the board and its members.

'Nonetheless, both the board and Mr. Tomlinson believe it is in the best interests of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that he no longer remain on the board."

Score one for Bill Moyers and Link TV. They have been broadcasting the speech Bill Moyers gave in May to the "National Conference on Media Reform" in St Louis.

Exerpt of speech

We didn’t know this a year ago. We just learned it from The New York Times two weeks ago that last year Mr. Tomlinson had spend ten thousand dollars to hire a contractor who would watch my show and report on political bias. That’s right. He spent ten thousand dollars of your money to hire a guy to watch “NOW” to find out who my guests were and what my stories were. Ten thousand dollars. Gee, Ken, for two dollars and fifty cents a week, you could pick up a copy of TV Guide on the newsstand. A subscription is even cheaper, and I would have sent you a coupon that can save you up to sixty-two percent. Or, for that matter, Ken, all you had to do was watch the show. You could have made it easier with a double Jim Beam, your favorite. Or you could -- mine, too. We have some things in common. Or you could go online, where the listings are posted. Hell, Ken, you could have called me collect, and I would have told you who we were having on the show.

[break]

The public paid for that study, but Ken Tomlinson acts as if he owns it. Let’s see it. You can watch my bias. You can watch my mistakes. You can watch everything I do right there on the air. We have the funders listed, everything is there, it’s all listed. But he won’t do it. In a May 10th op-ed piece in Reverend Moon’s conservative Washington Times, Ken Tomlinson maintained he had not released the findings because public broadcasting is such a delicate institution he did not want to, (quote), “damage public broadcasting’s image with controversy.” Where I come from in Texas, we shovel that kind of stuff every day.

As we learned this week, that’s not the only news Mr. Tomlinson tried to keep to himself. As Dr. Wilson indicated, and as reported by Jeff Chester’s Center for Digital Democracy, which the Human Center for Media and Democracy also support, there were two public opinion surveys commissioned by CPB, but not released to the media, not even to PBS and NPR. According to a source who talked to Salon.com, the first results were too good and Tomlinson didn’t believe them. After the Iraq war, the board commissioned another round of polling, and they thought they’d get worse results, but they didn’t.

This is the man, by the way, who was running the Voice of America back in 1984 when a fanatic named Charlie Wick was politicizing the United States Information Agency of which Voice of America was a part. It turned out there was a blacklist of people who had been removed from the list of prominent Americans sent abroad to lecture on behalf of America and the USIA. What’s more, it was discovered that evidence as to how those people were chosen to be on the blacklist, more than seven hundred documents, had been shredded. Among those on the blacklist of journalists, writers, scholars and politicians were dangerous left wing subversives like Walter Cronkite, James Baldwin, Gary Hart, Ralph Nader, Ben Bradley, Coretta Scott King and David Brinkley.

They did it as part of their fundraising drive. They probably broadcasted it every day for an entire week. Even offered it in DVD form as a gift for being a sustaining member. Needless to say there is a lot of overlap between Link TV and Now viewers.

"Moral Disaster of Monumental Proportion Reconciliation Act"

Are the Democrats finally getting feisty? Today Senator Frank Lautenberg (D)New Jersey, introduced an amemendment to change the name of the Republican "Deficit Reduction and Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 2005" to the "Moral Disaster of Monumental Proportion Reconciliation Act"!

The post quotes him as saying,

"'Let's call this bill what it is -- a moral disaster,' explained Lautenberg. 'This bill would close the door of opportunity and cut critical services to the poor, elderly, sick and hungry.'

Senators had yet to vote on the amendment as of this post, but given the Republican majority in the Senate the name change seems to have little chance of passage.

The overall bill being debated in the Senate is aimed at making cuts in spending on entitlement programs in order to offset the massive federal costs incurred for the clean-up of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita along the Gulf Coast. Democrats have massed in opposition to the cuts, which they insist disproportionately disadvantage the nation's poorest and most infirm citizens."

I really was shocked at the level of gall it would take to make the poor pay for this. However the Democrats have let other things like this slide, so I no longer expect anything from them.

Joe Biden: "Antiwar Democrats are elitists, unpatriotic, and out of touch with America

I guess Joe isn't reading the polls!

SEN. JOE BIDEN, D-Del., made some interesting comments during his Manchester stop Tuesday night. He said too many Democrats were elitist and even unpatriotic, and he blamed them for helping Republicans paint the entire party as out of touch with America.

Biden noted that some Democrats had even questioned why he wore an American flag pin on his lapel.

The senator has been refreshingly honest about his run for the Democratic nomination for President in 2008. Further honest comments like those he made Tuesday night might hurt his chances within a party lurching increasingly to the left. But the Democrats need to hear them.

The anti-American left has seriously damaged the party, and unless more high-profile Democrats take them on, theirs will continue to be the minority party in America.  

I think he made the part about the American flag pin up!

According to the latest polls Bush's approval rating is at 35%.  His favorability rating is 33%.  If the Democratic party nominates him or someone like him it is truly dead, dead dead!