Monday, March 27, 2006


boxing helen – a bill o’reilly love story
For a cowardly bastard, Bill O’Reilly loves to talk about fighting.

Not just the war in Iraq, either – although he does love to tout his wartime experiences. The fact that he’s never served notwithstanding, of course.

The Falafel Master (to understand the nickname you have to read about the sexual harassment lawsuit his former producer filed against him) famously brayed about wanting to fight Al Franken after the two appeared on at a bookseller’s convention. Franken was pushing a new book, “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.” And O’Reilly took offense at being proved a liar in person.

The fact that Franken was a collegiate wrestler and is a tough little bastard in spite of his glasses led me to wager that the Air America Host would have kicked Bully Bill’s right-wing ass.

O’Reilly’s now threatening to beat up Helen Thomas.

Yes, Helen Thomas.

Little woman. Been around since the Kennedy Administration. Covered the White House for UPI for decades and now writes as a columnist for Hearst Newspapers. The Senior-most White House correspondent in the press corps.

Old Bill got heated up last week after Thomas dared – dared, I say – to question George Walker Bush about his reasons for going to war. Every STATED reason, of course, has long since been proven false, Thomas pointed out. What is the REAL reason, Mr. President?

Never mind the fact that it’s taken three years before a member of the White House press corps has been able to ask Bush that question. And ignore the fact that the question is valid – every excuse Bush has made for invading Iraq HAS been proven false.

Nope. Bully Bill called the question “absurd” and “out of bounds.” He accused her of hating Bush and trying to undermine everything he does.

And for a capper, he said that, if he were Bush, he “would have laid her out.”

There are some obvious smartass comments I can make, but will refrain for the time being.

From Media Matters for America:

On that same day, O'Reilly began defending Bush and attacking Thomas. During the March 21 broadcast of Westwood One's The Radio Factor, O'Reilly stated that if he were Bush, he "would have laid her [Thomas] out" for asking such questions of him. "I would have laid into that woman, and I don't care how old she is," O'Reilly said, "I would have laid her out, saying, 'How dare you?' "

On the March 21 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, O'Reilly called Thomas's question "out of bounds," and on the March 22 Radio Factor, O'Reilly accused Thomas of trying to "undermine everything" Bush does. Additionally, during the same show, O'Reilly asserted that the "essential element" of the exchange between Bush and Thomas was whether Americans would rather have Bush or Thomas "in charge of the war on terror."

O’Reilly wasn’t the only Republican shill to attack Helen Thomas. LA Times columnist Jonah Goldberg, smartass whelp of Lucianne Goldberg, called her “that thespian carbuncle of bile” – and he should know considering who his mother is. Radio dimbulb Glenn Beck played goat noises while playing the tape of her question.

Tucker Carlson questioned Thomas’ skills as a journalist and described her questioning as “bloviating.” Forgetting for a moment that Tucker Carlson is the boil on the butt of MSNBC, this idiot wouldn’t know journalistic skill if it jumped up and bit him on his bowtie.

Let there be no mistake about this, Bill – and if you want to start a fight over my telling you this, you know where to find me – Helen Thomas would flat kick your ass without ever putting down her pad and pen.

More soon.

harris won’t bet on her pair after all
Katherine Harris, the Chad Harpy of Florida and candidate for Sen. Bill Nelson’s seat in the Sunshine State, made a big show on Sean Hannity’s Republican gabfest show on Fox News.

She’s staying in the campaign, she said, pointing her heavily-pancaked face at the camera and batting her mascara-laden eyes. And she was going to win.

To back up that claim, she proclaimed, her voice filled with emotion, she was going to infuse her campaign with her inheritance from her father – $10 million of her own dollars.

"I'm going to take his legacy that he gave to me, everything I have, and I'm going to put it in this race," she sniffed. "I'm going to commit my legacy from my father -- $10 million."
Surprise.

Jim Stratton, a reporter for the Orlando Sentinel, writes in the March 25 edition:

Campaign spokeswoman Morgan Dobbs said Thursday that Harris will sell her existing assets rather than rely on money from her father, a bank executive who died in January.

“It is my understanding from her statements that she does not plan to use inherited money on the campaign -- rather, money from liquidating her personal assets, which she says total $10 million,” Dobbs wrote in an e-mail to the Orlando Sentinel.

“I think I am being pretty clear.”

Since that announcement, Harris has pandered heavily toward the Religious Right, casting herself in a biblical parable – calling herself a poor, pious widow “willing to take this widow’s mite (an ancient coin and a reference to her inheritance) … and put everything on the line.”

She even told ABC News that, by the end of the campaign, “I won't have anything left.”

That, of course, is a lie, since Harris and her husband are independently wealthy and she is not using assets currently in his name at all. Calling herself “poor” is like Donald Trump calling himself “humble.”

Pious? Apparently not pious enough to avoid lying to potential voters and current constituents – or bending over backwards to thwart the will of Florida voters while Secretary of State.

And a widow? Bet the husband enjoys that reference.

Callow Republican is a more apt description.

Guess she’ll be betting, as The Daily Show lampooned, on her breasts after all.

More soon.
when all else fails . . .
I love it when Republicans tip their hand.

Bill Frist sent this in an email to supporters last week: “The Democrat alternative to Republican efforts to restrain spending is clear: Continue to spend beyond our means, mortgaging our children's future by saddling them with a debt of $8 trillion … and continue to ratchet up taxes to pay for their fiscal irresponsibility, stifling the American economy.”

Either Bill has been plagiarizing old campaign letters from Richard Nixon or he’s been living in Never Never Land the six years.

Let’s see now. Republicans control all three branches of government, both houses of Congress and most of the media in this country. They’ve cinched the Beltway so tight that a Democrat can’t go to the bathroom without permission and flushed traditional civility down the toilet in the process.

And it’s Democrats’ fault Republicans had to raise the debt ceiling to $9 trillion last week?

Bill. Buddy. Lay off the medical marijuana. For your own good.

Go back to diagnosing patients from highly edited videotape from the Senate Floor. You know, something you’re good at. No. Wait. Check that.

Just go home.

More soon.

Sunday, March 26, 2006


teddy takes dead-aim at dead-eye dick
We’ve heard the Dick Cheney song and dance over and over again. Democrats bad. Dick Cheney good. Democrats live in a pre-9/11 world; Vote Republican.

Cheney’s shotgun-on-the-fly target of late has been the Republcan’s favorite target over the last two decades: Sen. Edward Kennedy. The senior senator from Massachusetts got “dicked” most recently as the veep continues to bite back on the NSA surveillance issue.

Kennedy, who had drawn my ire of late for not supporting Russ Feingold’s resolution for censure, fought back Sunday on Face the Nation.

Quoting from the official transcript of Face the Nation:

“Vice President DICK CHENEY: (From March 19, 2006) I would not look to Ted Kennedy for guidance and leadership on how we ought to manage national security, Bob. I think what Senator Kennedy reflects is sort of the pre-9/11 mentality about how we ought to deal with the world and that part of the world.

“BORGER: "Pre-9/11 mentality." What's your response?

“Sen. KENNEDY: Well, I think we can get along with fewer wisecracks from the vice president, and perhaps listening to some wise men and women on this issue. I'd suggest that the vice president didn't get the 9/11— he didn't get it. Because 9/11 was a result of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and that is Afghanistan. So in response to the 9/11, the vice president recommended we go to war with the Taliban? No, to go to war in Iraq.

“There was no question now that--about the misuse of intelligence, there's no question now looking at the 9/11 commission, that the association with al-Qaeda and 9/11 was completely fabricated. There's no question now that the vice president's representation of weapons of mass destruction were wrong. There's no question when he said we would be welcomed as liberators he was wrong. There's no question that in his recent interviews that he said we're in the last throes of the insurgency he was wrong. He's been wrong on every single instance, and I would hope that the president and the National Security Council would recognize that when they're listening to his advice.”

Now, ain’t that better than a shotgun blast to the face? Anyone care to bet whether the Veep tells Ted to go fuck himself next time he sees him in the Senate chamber?

More soon.


lara thoroughly kicks laura’s ass
If anyone even remotely agrees with what right wing bimbette Laura Ingraham said earlier this week on The Today Show – that comment about journalists in Iraq reporting from hotel balconies and missing all the good news coming out of this war-ravaged country – needs to see this clip from Howard Kurtz’ program on CNN, “Reliable Sources.”

The link goes directly to the Crooks and Liars website – one I heartily recommend to anyone looking to cut through the right wing bullshit in our “mainstream” media. I thank them for making this clip available – it should be required viewing.

In it CBS reporter Lara Logan, the network's senior foreign correspondent, takes the entire right wing meme to task, in particular Ingraham’s idiotic rant.

Ingraham was in Iraq for eight days and has been spouting off all week like she, and only she, knows the inside story. Logan has been there for three years doing a damned good job.

Here’s the transcript from CNN:



KURTZ: Bush and Cheney essentially seem to be accusing you and your colleagues of carrying the terrorist message by reporting on so many of these attacks. What do you make of that?

LOGAN: Well, I think that's -- that is a very convenient way of looking at it. It doesn't reflect the value judgment that's implicit in that. As a journalist, if an American soldier or an Iraqi person dies that day, you have to make a decision about how you weigh the value of reporting that news over the value of something that may be happening, say, a water plant that's being turned on that brings fresh water to 200 Iraqi people.

I mean, you get accused of valuing human life in a certain way depending on how you report it. And also, as -- I mean, what I would point out is that you can't travel around this country anymore without military protection. You can't travel without armed guards. You're not free to go every time there's a school opening or there's some reconstruction project that's being done. We don't have the ability to go out and cover those. If they want to see a fair picture of what's happening in Iraq, then you have to first start with the security issue.

When journalists are free to move around this country, then they will be free to report on everything that's going on. But as long as you're a prisoner of the terrible security situation here, then that's going to be reflected in your coverage. And not only that, but their own figures show that their reconstruction project was supposed to create 1.5 million Iraqi jobs. To date, 77,000 Iraqi government jobs have been created. That should give you an indication of how far along they are in terms of reconstruction. We have to put everything in its context. We can't go to one small unit and say, oh, they did a great job in this village and ignore all the other villages that haven't seen any improvement in their conditions.

KURTZ: There is no question that the dangerous conditions for journalists there are making it much harder to report on some of these signs of progress, as you point out. But I look at just the last couple of weeks of your coverage. Besides covering the Saddam trial, you reported on allegations that U.S. troops had killed a group of civilians. Then you reported an attack on a police station, the bombing of a police convoy, you talked about the threat of a civil war. All legitimate stories. But critics would say, well, no wonder people back home think things are falling apart because we get this steady drumbeat of negativity from the correspondents there.

LOGAN: Well, who says things aren't falling apart in Iraq?

I mean, what you didn't see on your screens this week was all the unidentified bodies that have been turning up, all the allegations here of militias that are really controlling the security forces. What about all the American soldiers that died this week that you didn't see on our screens? I mean, we've reported on reconstruction stories over and over again, but the order to (ph) general for Iraqi reconstruction says that only 49 of well over 100 planned electricity projects happened. So we can't keep doing the same stories over and over again.

When a police station's attacked, that's something new that happened this week. If you had any idea of the number of Iraqis that come to us with stories of abuses of U.S. soldiers and you look at our coverage over the last -- my coverage over the last few weeks, or even over the last three years, there's been maybe two or three stories that have related to that. So, I mean, we have to do the stories that when we've tested them and tested them and checked all our sources, and that they are legitimate stories on that day, that that is the biggest news coming out of Iraq, then that's what we have to do.

KURTZ: So what you're saying...

LOGAN: I mean, I really resent the fact that people say that we're not reflecting the true picture here. That's totally unfair and it's really unfounded.

KURTZ: So what you're saying is that what we see on the "CBS Evening News" or other networks actually is only a snapshot, is only perhaps scratching the surface of the kinds of violence and difficulties that you are witnessing day after day because you can only get so much of this on the air?

LOGAN: Oh, yes. Absolutely. And, I mean, our own -- you know, our own editors back in New York are asking us the same things. They read the same comments. You know, are there positive stories? Can't you find them? You don't think that I haven't been to the U.S. military and the State Department and the embassy and asked them over and over again, let's see the good stories, show us some of the good things that are going on? Oh, sorry, we can't take to you that school project, because if you put that on TV, they're going to be attacked about, the teachers are going to be killed, the children might be victims of attack. Oh, sorry, we can't show this reconstruction project because then that's going to expose it to sabotage. And the last time we had journalists down here, the plant was attacked.

I mean, security dominates every single thing that happens in this country. Reconstruction funds have been diverted to cover away from reconstruction to -- they've been diverted to security. Soldiers, their lives are occupied most of the time with security issues. Iraqi civilians' lives are taken up most of the time with security issues. So how it is that security issues should not then dominate the media coverage coming out of here?

KURTZ: I want to play for you a piece of tape involving Laura Ingraham, the conservative radio talk show how who was on "The Today Show" earlier this week and criticized "The Today Show" for not doing more from Iraq. Let's listen to what she had to say.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

LAURA INGRAHAM, RADIO TALK SHOW HOST: To do a show from Iraq means to talk to the Iraqi military, to go out with the Iraqi military, to actually have a conversation with the people instead of reporting from hotel balconies about the latest IEDs going off.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KURTZ: What do you make of that comment about reporting from hotel balconies?

LOGAN: Well, I think it's outrageous. I mean, Laura Ingraham should come to Iraq and not be talking about what journalists are doing from the comfort of her studio in the United States, the comfort and the safety. I mean, I don't know any journalist that wants to just sit in a hotel room in Iraq.

Does anybody understand that for us we used to be able to drive to Ramadi, we used to drive to Falluja, we used to drive to Najaf. We could travel all over this country without having to fly in military helicopters. That's the only way we can move around here. So, it's when the military can accommodate us, if the military can accommodate us, then we can go out and see.

I have been out with Iraqi security forces over and over again. And you know what? When Bob Woodruff was out with Iraqi security forces and he was injured, the first thing that people were asking was, oh, was he being responsible by placing himself in this position with Iraqi forces? And they started to question his responsibility and integrity as a journalist.

I mean, we just can't win.

I think it's an outrage to point the finger at journalists and say that this is our fault. I really do. And I think it shows an abject lack of respect for any journalist that's prepared to come to this country and risk their lives.

KURTZ: All right. I do...

LOGAN: And that's not just me. That's the crews, that's all the people that make up our teams here.

KURTZ: I do want to point out that Laura Ingraham was in Iraq last month for eight days, and that was part of the reason for her appearance. Lara Logan, stay with us. I want to bring...

LOGAN: For eight days.
I think I love this woman. Thank you Lara Logan for saying something that needs to be said!

Check it out. It’s even better watching her say these words.

More soon.
bringing out the big guns
And in Florida news, Katherine Harris' breasts campaigned this weekend in Kissimmee.