In a letter received and excerpted by mod mom:

"I WANT TO EMPHASIZE THAT THE DEMOCRATIC NOMINEE WILL BE DETERMINED IN ACCORDANCE WITH PARTY RULES. OUT OF RESPECT FOR THE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS AND THE STATES THAT DID NOT VIOLATE PARTY RULES, WE ARE NOT GOING TO CHANGE THE RULES IN THE MIDDLE OF THE GAME".

It's a good post. Read and rec here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discu...


Howard Dean will not bend or break.

Yesterday, Mommie Dearest spoke at the National Archives


In Bar's beautiful mind, she still lives at the White House:



Damn, cake again?





No worries - I hear their health care coverage is fabulous.





Bubble? What bubble? No self-respecting cult leader Dubya allows the family any contact with the outside world. Is that so wrong?





Right! No reason literacy should cost the government any money duh. Thank goodness she cleaned up that whole mess.

Now, can you guess which government expenses she absolutely adores? Perhaps the most outrageous remark recorded from this interview:



Hear it? Though she is undoubtedly blind to myriad societal woes, Bar did just admit that at least she knows the drop-out rate. But what astonishes her? What rattles her to her cold conservative heart? She's astonished by the spectre of her own filthy rich self not receiving "help" from our "generous" country.

What is wrong with her?

Perino responds by lecturing her, even challenging her position in the room-




I guess you have to be a male prostitute to get any respect in an administration press briefing. -Or a government plant. That works, too.

Take your worthless "regret" shove it, Dana.

Man of the Peep-hole, Face Shooter, Statesman-o-war. Sure, you've read about the continuing success of his energy task force, but what else has he done for you lately? Froomkin links one of today's WaPoo's op-eds regarding the crisis in Pakistan, to one by the same author from June:



An unimpeachable record of failure.


Hey, wake up and pass the dick taters

...Bush invited Sen. Dianne Feinstein to join him on Air Force One during his trip. It may not have been coincidence that less than 24 hours earlier, Feinstein played a pivotal role in allowing Judge Leslie Southwick, a target of liberal groups, to be confirmed to an appeals court when she voted to block a filibuster and support the president's nomination.

With a 7:40 a.m. Thursday departure from Andrews Air Force Base, Feinstein found herself seated in the rear of the plane with a handful of Southern California congressional representatives.

After a breakfast of scrambled eggs, sausage and French toast, Bush popped back for what the senator described as a frank two-hour conversation, mostly about foreign policy.

"I found the discussion extraordinarily positive," Feinstein said. "I came away with a very different view about him."

As for the president's performance on the ground?

"It was a wonderful thing to see, to be candid," Feinstein said. "I saw a warm, caring human being."

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?...

See? If Democrats would just cave be reeeeeeasonable, maybe they could ALL get plane rides and Freedom Toast with the Hugger in Chief!

I swan, the woman must have the memory of a popsicle.

*That's the US military in the form of Col. Steven A. Boylan, Public Affairs Officer and personal spokesman for General Petraeus (Commander, Multi-National Force-Iraq)

My unintimidated hero posted the communication, which reads like a right wing blogger rant.

This is not the way you might expect a high ranking officer to address a civilian.



The hapless Colonel Boylan only illustrates Greenwald's assertion about politicization of the military.

More, and Glenn's response at http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/200...

Ken Silverstein
October 4, 2007

Turns out there’s more on those supposedly neutral public servants in charge of the Pentagon’s blogger outreach program that I’ve been discussing over the last few months. The Washington Post reported yesterday that the newest addition to the Pentagon’s outreach team is Michael Allan Leach.

And who is Leach? The Post cites a St. Petersburg Times story which “reported that Leach blamed President Clinton and media liberals for a decline in morals, and wrote in a 1998 Internet posting: ‘I can no longer sit idly by while liberals in Washington with seven brain cells drag this country into the muck and mire of stupidity’.” The same story described him as playing as big a role as anyone in George W. Bush’s victory in Florida in 2000.

Leach’s role was spelled out in a New York Times story that year. Leach, it said, “took his laptop computer to the Seminole County elections offices this fall and added missing identification numbers to roughly 2,000 absentee-ballot applications from Republican voters” so they could be counted for Bush. The Times cited a Florida statute, designed to crack down on absentee-ballot fraud, which said that “only voters, their relatives or their guardians may “request” absentee ballots, and goes on to list all the information, including the voter registration number, that ‘the person making the request must disclose’.”

It takes less than seven brain cells to figure out what participation by Leach means in regard to the objectives of the Pentagon’s blogger outreach effort.

http://harpers.org/archive/2007/10/hbc-900...

This hack's career closely tracks with a number of this administration's disasters. Details, from Kamen in the Post:

...So, after the election, Leach spent six years as a political appointee as special assistant to the administrator of the Agriculture Department's rural development office, minus time out to handle press duties for the CPA in Iraq. He also picked up a master's degree in international affairs from Georgetown and worked most recently in public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...

Their leadership, not ours. Via Hullabaloo. Try to imagine the response had the DCCC sent a mirror version of this after the attack on MoveOn.



Playing A Different Game Altogether
by digby

From the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee:

Friends,

<snipping>
...I'm encouraging you to click here to "Stand With Rush" and sign this petition.

It is at moments like these when we need to band together as conservatives and fight back.

This issue is bigger than you or me, it is bigger than Rush Limbaugh. With the recent liberal effort to resurrect the "fairness doctrine," we have to recognize that free speech -- conservative free speech is under direct attack. These are issues that speak directly to the core of the modern conservative movement – are we going to allow ourselves to be pushed around by liberal extremists, or are we going to fight back?

I want to send Washington Democrats a message that their attempts to distract aren't working – I stand with Rush Limbaugh against liberal attacks.

Rep. Eric Cantor (R - VA)
Chief Deputy Republican Whip


Recall that the House recently voted 371 to 79 to condemn the MoveOn ad. We aren't just playing a different game. We aren't even in the same ballpark.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2007/10/pla...

And still the Decider chose war-



That's very potent evidence, in Bush's own words, that this is purely a criminal war of aggression.

And it takes the fact that Republicans can't be trusted with other people's money to a whole new level.

In the beginning of August, liberal bloggers met at the YearlyKos convention while centrist Democrats met at the Democratic Leadership Council’s National Conversation. Almost every Democratic presidential candidate attended YearlyKos, and none visited the D.L.C.

At the time, that seemed a sign that the left was gaining the upper hand in its perpetual struggle with the center over the soul of the Democratic Party. But now it’s clear that was only cosmetic.
...
The fact is, many Democratic politicians privately detest the netroots’ self-righteousness and bullying. They also know their party has a historic opportunity to pick up disaffected Republicans and moderates, so long as they don’t blow it by drifting into cuckoo land. They also know that a Democratic president is going to face challenges from Iran and elsewhere that are going to require hard-line, hawkish responses.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/opinion/...

This "factoid" is offered by bobo sans attribution. If that's true -it probably is for many of the centrists, at least- how ironic that after last week's shamefully self-righteousness pageant that was the Senate's MoveOn res, these "many Democratic politicians" would target that very attribute as detestable.

And WHEN did advocating for a govt worthy of the consent of the governed become "bullying"? I must be missing a constitutional amendment or two.

A fitting re-baptism....

This afternoon's announcement looks like a significant development:

After weeks of suggesting Democrats would temper their approach to Iraq legislation in a bid to attract more Republicans, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared abruptly Tuesday that he had no plans to do so.

The Democratic leader said he will call for a vote this month on several anti-war proposals, including one by Sen. Carl Levin that would insist President Bush end U.S. combat next summer. The proposals would be mandatory and not leave Bush wiggle room, said Reid, D-Nev.

"There (are) no goals. It's all definite timelines," he told reporters of the planned legislation.
.......
Reid's hardline stance, announced after the party's weekly policy lunch on Tuesday, reflects a calculation by Democrats that Levin's proposal probably would have failed either way......When asked why Democrats won't soften the deadline, the majority leader said he doesn't have confidence Republicans are willing to challenge Bush on the war.

"I think they've decided definitely they want this to be the Senate Republicans' war, not just Bush's. They're jealous," he said with a smile.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n...

Source: AP via SFGate

After weeks of suggesting Democrats would temper their approach to Iraq legislation in a bid to attract more Republicans, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared abruptly Tuesday that he had no plans to do so.

The Democratic leader said he will call for a vote this month on several anti-war proposals, including one by Sen. Carl Levin that would insist President Bush end U.S. combat next summer. The proposals would be mandatory and not leave Bush wiggle room, said Reid, D-Nev.

"There (are) no goals. It's all definite timelines," he told reporters of the planned legislation.
.......
Reid's hardline stance, announced after the party's weekly policy lunch on Tuesday, reflects a calculation by Democrats that Levin's proposal probably would have failed either way......When asked why Democrats won't soften the deadline, the majority leader said he doesn't have confidence Republicans are willing to challenge Bush on the war.

"I think they've decided definitely they want this to be the Senate Republicans' war, not just Bush's. They're jealous," he said with a smile.



Read more: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n...

The Globe's Savage, who shed so much light on Bush's underreported signing statements, begins his book tour with this post at a TPM sight. He'll also be writing at Salon. Interesting stuff.....


The Cheney Project

snip>
I kept digging more and learned that this agenda of concentrating more unchecked power in the White House was primarily coming out of Vice President Cheney’s office -- and, on a day to day level, that it was the handiwork of Cheney’s longtime aide David Addington. I also learned that it long predated 9/11, even though the war on terrorism was the justification most often offered for the push. Following the vice president's own advice to reporters interested in the warrantless wiretapping program, I dug up a copy of Cheney's old 1987 Iran-Contra report, blew the dust from its cover, and discovered that he had articulated a vision of nearly limitless commander-in-chief power two decades earlier.

The full sweep and implications of the administration’s project came into sharp focus for me. Like many reporters, I had been focused in on a close-up of one or two controversies, but had been missing the broader context. Now, the camera had zoomed way out to bring the full panorama into view. Suddenly, what the Bush administration had been doing across a huge range of issues made much more sense – not just the 9/11-related controversies, but Cheney’s fight to keep his energy task force papers a secret, the attacks on open-government laws such as FOIA and the Presidential Records Act, the use of executive orders instead of legislation to push the faith-based initiative, the decision to pull out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty without consulting the Senate, the choices for Supreme Court nominations, unprecedented efforts to impose greater White House control over Justice Department lawyers and other executive branch bureaucrats, and many other things. These disparate controversies were all connected. The administration, from its very beginning, had set out to set precedents and take actions that would permanently expand presidential power for the long-term, even when such tactics brought them extra short-term difficulties. A quiet but sweeping constitutional revolution was well underway.

I kept asking the question why. What was driving Dick Cheney and the other “presidentialists” who were so relentlessly and systematically pushing this agenda, about which they had said nothing to voters when campaigning for the office? Where was this coming from? This question took me to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, where the National Archives houses a bookcase full of documents in gray boxes titled “RICHARD CHENEY FILES.” From that pile of memos, written when a 33-year-old Cheney had become the youngest White House chief of staff in history, the answers emerged........

It was clear that the signing statements story, as amazing as it was, was in fact just the proverbial tip of the iceberg – one tactic among many toward achieving a hidden agenda 30 years in the making........

http://tableforone.tpmcafe.com/blog/tablef...

"...it’s like {bin laden}’s been sitting around reading lefty blogs, and he’s one of these childish people posting rants at the bottom the page, you know, Noam Chomsky and all this stuff."

That's, um, us, I think.

I am so so so SICK! of preening tv stars like Bobo hurling hateful insults like this, all the while denegrating all who would dare to dispute him as "uncivil". Bastard. If you ever thought that sitting back and acting ladylike would save you from being linked to bin laden, think again. That's the very public opinion of a very mainstream, "moderate" voice -he's in the NYT, fer cryin' out loud!

How can any dem in Congress truly believe that they can work with anyone who wouldn't renounce Brooks' sentiment? If I NEVER hear the word compromise again it will be too soon.

The internet -and the voice that it has afforded people outside the beltway, especially on the left- will emerge as a terrorist-like enemy if the dangerous "middle" pushes this sort of attack.

Dear New York Times, It's my fucking country too; today, tomorrow, and waaaay back on September 11th. My country.




via Think Progress
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/09/08/brooks... /

(edited to fix my subject line)