FCC = LOL

Via Digby, I see this fellow named Matthew Whitmyre is cooking with gas, baby!

Abolish the FCC

Why do we need a government censorship and moral regulation department? Sounds like those pointy-headed Washington types are trying to force their values on me. Damn conservative intelligentisia, living in their ivory towers, trying to impose their twisted values on a hard working Amurican like me. Shut those Washington Bureaucrats down!

Ha ha ha. Stupid conservative elites, think they're better than regular 'Muricans like me.

I hope Karl Rove enjoys the taste of his own medicine; with any luck, he'll be drinking it in copious quantity over the next four years.

Changin' The Law! Changin' The Law!

Sometimes, just when you think they can sink no lower, the Republicans pull out all of the stops and do something that can only be described as...

Awesome.

[W]hat I'm about to describe is outrageous and almost literally unbelievable.

As you've probably heard, the congress is pushing through a big omnibus spending bill this weekend. And at the last minute, Republican leaders tried to slip in a provision that would give certain committee chairman and their staffers unlimited access to any American's tax return, with none of the standard privacy protections applying.

You heard that right.

They could pull anyone's tax return, read it over and do whatever they wanted with the information. Those who would have this power would be the chairs and ranking members of the senate and house appropriations committees and subcommittees and "their designees."

The key is that the privacy rights provisions, and criminal and civil penalties that go with them, don't apply for the appropriations committees.

Deja Vu All Over Again

This is from Wednesday's Washington Post.

The United States has intelligence that Iran is working to adapt missiles to deliver a nuclear weapon, further evidence that the Islamic republic is determined to acquire a nuclear bomb, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said Wednesday.

This is from today's LA Times.

Some administration officials "were surprised he [Powell] went public on something that was weak and, because it was weak, was not supposed to be used," the source said.

One senior Democrat on the House International Relations Committee said Iran's efforts to build nuclear weapons and mount them on missiles have been known for years, but the United States faces new hurdles in making its case to the world.

"After crying wolf for so long about Iraq, how are we going to have any credibility on this?" said Rep. Gary L. Ackerman of New York, who recently returned from a trip to the Middle East. "People in the Arab world won't believe it and say we have a bad track record and just want to invade another country in the Middle East."

Ackerman added: "How do we expect anybody to believe us, even if we know it's true? This is the disaster we created for ourselves in lying about Iraq."

...

"I was surprised the administration put him out there or he put himself out there on this," said David Kay, the former head of the U.S. weapons search team in Iraq. "I thought if there was anyone in the administration that had been sufficiently burned by such sources, it would be Powell."

Bear With Us

I'm finally learning to use the Blogger "Time Stamp" function after 8 months; the order of the posts may be screwed up for a little while.

I'm With Stupid

This is rich. The Washington Post has decided the reason for the paper's decline in circulation is that it isn't dumb enough.

In an effort to win new readers, Downie said Post reporters will be required to write shorter stories. The paper's design and copy editors will be given more authority to make room for more photographs and graphics.

Right. The decline couldn't have anything to do with this.

Days before the Iraq war began, veteran Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus put together a story questioning whether the Bush administration had proof that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction.

But he ran into resistance from the paper's editors, and his piece ran only after assistant managing editor Bob Woodward, who was researching a book about the drive toward war, "helped sell the story," Pincus recalled. "Without him, it would have had a tough time getting into the paper." Even so, the article was relegated to Page A17.

"We did our job but we didn't do enough, and I blame myself mightily for not pushing harder," Woodward said in an interview. "We should have warned readers we had information that the basis for this was shakier" than widely believed. "Those are exactly the kind of statements that should be published on the front page."

As violence continues in postwar Iraq and U.S. forces have yet to discover any WMDs, some critics say the media, including The Washington Post, failed the country by not reporting more skeptically on President Bush's contentions during the run-up to war.

An examination of the paper's coverage, and interviews with more than a dozen of the editors and reporters involved, shows that The Post published a number of pieces challenging the White House, but rarely on the front page. Some reporters who were lobbying for greater prominence for stories that questioned the administration's evidence complained to senior editors who, in the view of those reporters, were unenthusiastic about such pieces. The result was coverage that, despite flashes of groundbreaking reporting, in hindsight looks strikingly one-sided at times.

Censory Deprivation

From Frank Rich's column in the NY Times.

Even without being threatened, American news media at first sanitized the current war, whether through carelessness or jingoism, proving too credulous about everything from weapons of mass destruction to "Saving Private Lynch" to "Mission Accomplished." During the early weeks of the invasion, carnage of any kind was kept off TV screens, as if war could be cost-free. Once the press did get its act together and exercised skepticism, it came under siege. News organizations that report facts challenging the administration's version of events risk being called traitors. As with "Saving Private Ryan," the aim of the news censors is to bleach out any ugliness or violence. But because the war in Iraq, unlike World War II, is increasingly unpopular and doesn't have an assured triumphant ending, it must also be scrubbed of any bad news that might undermine its support among the administration's base. Thus the censors argue that Abu Ghraib, and now a marine's shooting of a wounded Iraqi prisoner in a Falluja mosque, are vastly "overplayed" by the so-called elite media.

American Taliban

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome.



Gay sharks. You can't make this stuff up.

Feeling Safer?

All of us who were under the impression that the job of the CIA was to, you know, gather intelligence, were apparently mistaken.

Porter J. Goss, the new intelligence chief, has told Central Intelligence Agency employees that their job is to "support the administration and its policies in our work,'' a copy of an internal memorandum shows.

Awesome.

Voted W? Go To Iraq.

For the record, our post the other day about the escalating monthly casualties in Iraq turned out to be correct. Save for the month of October -- in which our brave President ordered an operations halt so that voters could be influenced by the threat of fags marrying rather than actual events -- US casualties have increased every month since the transfer of power to the Iraqis in June. The total for November stands at 94, with almost two weeks remaining; the total for September was 80.

Bush voters who have yet to enlist should not be mocked for being scared of death; that's a reasonable fear. Mock them instead for voting with such braggadocio in favor of a failed policy which they support only with the lives of others, not their own; that's just cowardice.

People Who Need To Get Lives

Someone explain to these prudes that their children can see just as much risque content on a 6:00 PM rerun of Seinfeld or Friends as they did on the Monday Night Football intro. I'm sick and tired of the notion that everything in this country has to be kid friendly.

ABC apologized Tuesday for beginning this week's Monday Night Football telecast with a tease sequence in which Nicolette Sheridan, star of ABC's top-rated domestic drama, attempted to seduce Philadelphia Eagles receiver Terrell Owens into skipping the Eagles-Cowboys game.

...

Reaction to the pre-game spoof was mixed in Dallas and Philadelphia. As of late Tuesday, more than 3,000 people had voted in an online poll at www.philly.com, the Web site of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News, with 51 percent saying the scene was "entirely inappropriate." More than 500 readers posted comments at www.dallasnews.com, the Web site of the Dallas Morning News.

More Idiots From Texas

I would file this under "GOP Hypocrites," but the drawer has been full for months.

House Republicans plan to change their rules in order to allow members indicted by state prosecutors to remain in a leadership post, a move designed to benefit Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) in case he is charged by a Texas grand jury that has indicted three of his political associates, GOP leaders said today.

The rules change, which leaders said is likely to be adopted Wednesday, comes as House Republicans return to Washington indebted to DeLay for the enhanced majority they won in this month's elections. DeLay led an aggressive redistricting effort in Texas last year that resulted in five Democratic House members retiring or losing reelection. It also triggered the grand jury inquiry into fundraising efforts related to the state legislature's redistricting actions.

Pick Me! I'm Your Best Friend!

It would be hilarious that the Prez picks cabinet members employing the kind of crtieria used by grade-schoolers choosing teams for dodgeball, if, of course, our lives weren't hanging in the balance. From Josh Marshall:

Is it really a paradox?

The lede from a piece in tomorrow's Post ...

Condoleezza Rice, who will be named as Colin L. Powell's replacement as early as today, has forged an extraordinarily close relationship with President Bush. But, paradoxically, many experts consider her one of the weakest national security advisers in recent history in terms of managing interagency conflicts.

I'm gonna assume there was a smirk on someone's face.

FUBAR

What the fuck have we gotten ourselves into?

The U.S. military is investigating the killing of a wounded and apparently unarmed Iraqi prisoner inside a mosque during combat operations here, the Defense Department told NBC News on Monday.

NBC’s Kevin Sites, who witnessed the incident Saturday while assigned to represent a pool of news organizations, reported Monday that the man was shot by a Marine who appeared to be unaware that the Iraqi was a wounded prisoner and did not pose a threat.

...

Sites saw the five wounded men left behind on Friday still in the mosque. Four of them had been shot again, apparently by members of the squad that entered the mosque moments earlier. One appeared to be dead, and the three others were severely wounded. The fifth man was lying under a blanket, apparently not having been shot a second time.

One of the Marines noticed that one of the severely wounded men was still breathing. He did not appear to be armed, Sites said.

The Marine could be heard insisting: “He’s f---ing faking he’s dead — he’s faking he’s f---ing dead.” Sites then watched as the Marine raised his rifle and fired into the man’s head from point-blank range.

“Well, he’s dead now,” another Marine said.

When told that the man he shot was a wounded prisoner, the Marine, who himself had been shot in the face the day before but had already returned to duty, told Sites: “I didn’t know, sir. I didn’t know.”

Walking The Line
with Dr. Victor Von Doom

"Fear is for lesser men . . . Never for Doom!"

Bah! So the insignificant, petty Blogger lost the godly picks of Doom last week; still Doom posted a 2-1 record, losing the Texans/Broncos matchup due only to the Texans ability to not keep the score within a demonstrably large spread.

This week, Doom returns with a vengeance!

PITTSBURGH @ CLEVELAND (-3.5)
Once, losing a game of chess to perennial cheater Dr. Strange, Doom unexpectedly stood, raised his seat in the air, then brought in down on the skull of Strange. His opponent unable to regain consciousness, let alone continue the game, Doom proclaimed himself victor and left. This week, a week where many in the betting game have predicted a Cleveland upset, Doom will once again do the unexpected: Take Pittsburgh against the spread.

TAMPA BAY (-4) @ ATLANTA
Once, in the span of just one week, Doom managed to not only drop several tons of granite on the head of the Human Torch, but also steal The Statue Of Liberty (Magneto bet Doom that Doom could not accomplish this meager task -- Bah!) That is what those in business call a hot streak. Tampa Bay quarterback Brian Griese has been on a bit of a streak lately as well; Doom likes Tampa Bay with the points.

BALTIMORE @ N.Y. JETS (-1)
Occasionally, Doom takes pity on the insufferable Reed Richards because it is difficult for Doom to imagine how hard it is for Richards to exist with a brain that seems almost simian in comparison to the mind of mighty Doom. In this way, Doom also pities the chimp-quaterback of the Baltimore Ravens: Kyle Bohler, whose brain Doom believes must function as the result of a small troll running on a treadmill. Unfortunately for the Ravens, Doom believes that troll fell off the treadmill sometime last summer, and never bothered to get back on. New York in a "pick'em" game.