Blogger says "Blowjob" on MSNBC TV.

Yes, you read the title of that blog post correctly. Now, if that doesn't pique the curiosity, what will? A little background for you, dear visitors.



Today, blogger Marcy Wheeler over at Firedoglake went on to David Shuster's show on MSNBC, where she was debating a Bush/Cheney defender about potentially investigating Bush/Cheney criminal actions. Toward the middle of the piece, Marcy says (paraphrasing here) "You're saying that after investigating Bill Clinton for a blowjob for like, 5 years, we shouldn't investigate these huge and grossly illegal things done under the past administration, because Alberto Gonzales didn't investigate them when they were happening, because he was in Dick Cheney's back pocket? That's ridiculous."



After which, the Twittersphere erupted. So here's a handy tracking widget for your bloggers-vs- MSM viewing pleasure. Or, perhaps upon reading this, you'll feint with a case of the horrors. You decide.

Israel's "retaliation" was planned ahead of time, "cease-fire" was a ruse for preparation. Not reported in the US

Chris Floyd reports on the lies and disinformation about the current Israeli campaign of war crimes.

Here is a simple, stone cold fact. You cannot read or hear the truth about what is happening in Gaza from any corporate media in the United States. The only thing you will find there are regurgitations of Israeli spin, which are themselves only regurgitations of the kind of spin that American militarists have put on their own depredations -- for centuries now. Up and down the American media and political establishments, you will find nothing but bleatings about Israel being "forced" to launch its vicious blunderbuss attacks against heavily populated Gaza because of the "recent spate of Hamas bombings" since the end of a six-month ceasefire.

This is of course a damnable and deliberate lie. Papers in Israel -- in Israel, but not the United States -- are reporting the truth: the murderous assault on Gaza was planned not only before the six-month ceasefire ended -- it was planned before the cease-fire even took effect. Indeed, the cease-fire was part of the military plan to decimate the civilian areas of Gaza; it was a hoax, a scam, a deliberate feint to buy time for military preparations -- precisely the same strategy followed by the Bush Regime (and its bipartisan Establishment supporters) in "going to the UN" to seek a "peaceful solution" to the "Iraqi crisis" -- when the invasion was already in the works.

Lucky for us, Barack Obama supports Israel unapologetically. Until we get rid of the decrepit corpse of the American media establishment, the US population will continue to blindly support this sort of criminal activity, when not distracted by their iPods and iPhones. It's a sad state of affairs. Rememember when the Soviet Union collapsed due to the sagging weight of their military empire and totally corrupt political class? Don't say it can't happen here. Why else would we need the army to intervene to protect the political elites who have robbed our country blind keep order in case of domestic disorder.

Why we need real investigations of the Bush administration

What Digby said. The torture zombie needs to be stopped. Next time it could be permanent.

This movement conservative zombie was created at the time of Nixon and his pardon, extended through Iran Contra, went through the insane era of partisan investigations in the 1990s which culminated in a trumped-up, partisan impeachment, a stolen election and the lawbreaking Bush years. Nobody has ever paid a price for any of that.

There is absolutely no reason to believe that the next time a Republican is elected to the presidency he or she won't pick right up where they left off. That is the story of the last 40 years and until there is some price to pay they will keep right on doing it, escalating each time. For all the Colin Powell's who have come over from the Dark Side, there a many more who were trained in this worldview during this long conservative era. At some point they will try to keep power permanently. All it would take is just the right kind of crisis for them to justify it. After all, the precedents are all lined up --- normalized and legalized each step of the way by Democrats who didn't want to spend their political capital to stop it.

Now go read the whole thing.

nytimes cover

nytimes cover
Originally uploaded by mgris.

The yes men rock. this prank is a great way to illustrate the point -- a majority of people reading these headlines would be very, very happy. this should be happening.

Now it's out in the public press: Bush and Cheney broke the law, repeatedly committing and ordering felonies. Then what happened?

Several years ago.

Vice President Cheney convened a meeting in the Situation Room at 3 p.m. on Wednesday, March 10, 2004, with just one day left before the warrantless domestic surveillance program was set to expire. Around him were National Security Agency Director Michael V. Hayden, White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales and the Gang of Eight -- the four ranking members of the House and the Senate, and the chairmen and vice chairmen of the intelligence committees.

Even now, three months into a legal rebellion at the Justice Department, President Bush was nowhere in the picture. He was stumping in the battleground state of Ohio, talking up the economy.

With a nod from Cheney, Hayden walked through the program's vital mission. Gonzales said top lawyers at the NSA and Justice had green-lighted the program from the beginning. Now Attorney General John D. Ashcroft was in the hospital, and James B. Comey, Ashcroft's deputy, refused to certify that the surveillance was legal.

That was misleading at best. Cheney and Gonzales knew that Comey spoke for Ashcroft as well. They also knew, but chose not to mention, that Jack L. Goldsmith, chief of the Office of Legal Counsel at Justice, had been warning of major legal problems for months.

More than three years later, Gonzales would testify that there was "consensus in the room" from the lawmakers, "who said, 'Despite the recommendation of the deputy attorney general, go forward with these very important intelligence activities.' " By this account -- disputed by participants from both parties -- four Democrats and four Republicans counseled Cheney to press on with a program that Justice called illegal.
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In fact, Cheney asked the lawmakers a question that came close to answering itself. Could the House and Senate amend surveillance laws without raising suspicions that a new program had been launched? The obvious reply became a new rationale for keeping Congress out.

The Bush administration had no interest in changing the law, according to U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, chief of the federal government's special surveillance court when the warrantless eavesdropping began.

"We could have gone to Congress, hat in hand, the judicial branch and the executive together, and gotten any statutory change we wanted in those days, I felt like," he said in an interview. "But they wanted to demonstrate that the president's power was supreme."

...

The FBI director was no more tractable than Comey. This was a rule-of-law question, he told the president, and the answer was in the Justice Department. The FBI could not participate in operations that Justice held to be in breach of criminal law. If those were his orders, he would respectfully take his leave.

Check out Comey's draft resignation letter: "I and the Justice Department have been asked to be part of something that is fundamentally wrong."

But what hasn't really been discussed, at all, is why no one investigated the actual criminal activity -- the illegal spying program.

When Comey and Mueller and the others threatened to resign, the illegal program i.e. what "Justice held to be in breach of criminal law" had been ongoing for years.

What exactly were they doing in this criminal program? Why was no one investigated or prosecuted?

Are they still doing it?

No one knows.

President Cheney's domestic spying program

From the Washington Post:

The command center of "the president's program," as Addington usually called it, was not in the White House. Its controlling documents, which gave strategic direction to the nation's largest spy agency, lived in a vault across an alley from the West Wing [7] -- in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, on the east side of the second floor, where the vice president headquartered his staff.

The vault was in EEOB 268, Addington's office. Cheney's lawyer held the documents, physical and electronic, because he was the one who wrote them. New forms of domestic espionage were created and developed over time in presidential authorizations that Addington typed on a Tempest-shielded computer across from his desk [8].

It is unlikely that the history of U.S. intelligence includes another operation conceived and supervised by the office of the vice president. White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. had "no idea," he said, that the presidential orders were held in a vice presidential safe

Makes you wonder what burned up in that fire in the VP's office a while back. Cheney knew his program was illegal and didn't care. Check out the whole article. I bet this will get a lot of coverage in the mainstream press and the Presidential campaign.

McCain -- dazed and confused

Now that's not change you can believe in.