icWales: “Saddam given death sentence Nov 5 2006

icWales

Iraq’s High Tribunal today found Saddam Hussein guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to hang for the 1982 killing of 148 Shiites in the city of Dujail. The visibly shaken former leader shouted “God is great”.
Saddam’s half-brother and former intelligence chief Barzan Ibrahim, and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, head of the former Revolutionary Court, were sentenced to join Saddam on the gallows for the Dujail killings after an unsuccessful assassination attempt during a Saddam visit to the city 35 miles north of Baghdad.
Clashes immediately broke out in north Baghdad’s heavily Sunni Azamiyah district where police were battling men with machine guns. At least seven mortar shells slammed to earth around the Abu Hanifa mosque, the holiest Sunni shrine in the capital. There was no immediate word on casualties.
Celebratory gunfire rang out elsewhere in Baghdad, and the people in Sadr City, the capital’s Shiite slum, celebrated in the streets, calling out “Where are you Saddam? We want to fight you.”
A jubilant crow of young men carried pictures of radical anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and handed out candy to children.
In Tikrit, Saddam’s hometown, 1,000 people defied the curfew and carried pictures of the city’s favourite son through the streets.
Some declared the court a product of the US “occupation forces” and decried the verdict.
“By our souls, by our blood we sacrifice for you Saddam” and “Saddam your name shakes America.”
People were celebrating in the streets of Dujail, a Tigris River city of 84,000, as the verdict was read. They burned pictures of their former tormentor.”

icWales – Saddam given death sentence

Brendan Nyhan: September 2006: “a senior adviser to President Bush bragged to Ron Suskind in 2002 that the administration ‘create[s] our own reality’:
The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'”

Crooks and Liars: “”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.'”

Plush Life: “Dear Media, You blow
Let me just say that all of you, the entire journalism industry, are a bunch of suck-ass idiots.

You know that what Kerry said was not an insult to the troops. You know it was a botched punchline, and yet you take republican talking points and run amok like a bunch of two year-olds who got into the sugar jar. You are an embarrassment to your profession.

When are you going to start reporting the real news and stop sucking republican dick? For fuck’s sake.

If you want an apology from someone, why don’t you ask why Bush hasn’t apologized for causing the deaths of 2,800 American servicement over a lie?

And when is Bush going to apologize for sending them into a war ill-equipped and unsupported?

And when are YOU, the media, going to hold this administration accountable for anything?

You owe US an apology for your bullshit.Dear Media, You blow
Let me just say that all of you, the entire journalism industry, are a bunch of suck-ass idiots.

You know that what Kerry said was not an insult to the troops. You know it was a botched punchline, and yet you take republican talking points and run amok like a bunch of two year-olds who got into the sugar jar. You are an embarrassment to your profession.

When are you going to start reporting the real news and stop sucking republican dick? For fuck’s sake.

If you want an apology from someone, why don’t you ask why Bush hasn’t apologized for causing the deaths of 2,800 American servicement over a lie?

And when is Bush going to apologize for sending them into a war ill-equipped and unsupported?

And when are YOU, the media, going to hold this administration accountable for anything?

You owe US an apology for your bullshit.”

“Tom Friedman: What does being right have to do with it?
By: John Amato @ 2:02 PM – PDT

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H/T to Kurtz for picking up his six month mantra.
Greg Sargent:
K, the transcript’s in. Here’s what Tom Friedman had to say to Howard Kurtz yesterday about Iraq:
You know, the problem with analyzing the story, Howie, is that it doesn’t — everyone, first of all, this is the most polarized story I’ve certainly written about, so everyone wants, basically, to be proven right, OK? So the left — people who hated the war, they want you to declare the war is over, finish, we give up. The right, just the opposite. But I’ve been trying to just simply track the situation on the ground. (Emphasis added.)
I don’t know, I kinda think being right on such matters as whether to fight a war might be important. Particularly if you’re Tom Friedman, the man whom wavering liberals trusted more than anyone else in the galaxy to interpret the Middle East for them in the runup to the Iraq war. Whether you were right about that or not should tell us a thing or two about the soundness of your judgments and doctrines. Yet in Friedman’s world, those who were right about Iraq couldn’t possibly have been motivated by reason or sound thinking. No, they were driven by emotion: they ‘hated’ the war….read on”

Crooks and Liars » 2006 » June » 12: “Arthur Silber:
‘You therefore should feel free to disregard the following in its entirety. Perhaps a commentator like Tom Friedman is more suited to your tastes. Friedman has been consistently, relentlessly wrong about everything. Moreover, Friedman is admirably and extraordinarily conscientious in his refusal to recognize even one of his errors, and believes that his time is far better spent in vilifying and marginalizing those who would dare to point out his mistakes, and their calamitous costs. In the race to destroy the few remaining vestiges of intelligence in our national debates, always having been wrong makes one especially well-qualified to serve as an expert with regard to what we should do now and in the future. If others happened to be right and, even worse, if they were right for provable reasons which were also correct, well, that only demonstrates their nefarious, ugly motives and that they are not to be trusted on even a single point….read on”

Crooks and Liars » 2006 » June » 12: “David Horowitz laughed off of Larry King…
By: John Amato @ 8:42 PM – PDT

Horowitz was on Larry King to defend Ann Coulter’s vicious attack of the 9/11 widows in her new book. He wasn’t actually booted off the show, but when he defended Coulter by saying that she didn’t write the book for money…well…I hear she’s such a giving person. It happens at about the three minute mark.
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Horowitz: and I don’t think for a second that she wrote this book for money, ahh..
Everybody on the set broke up in laughter. It was such a ridiculous statement that he started laughing at himself.
People like Horowitz say the stupidest things to justify their arguments.”

Pass the Bread

Crooks and Liars: “Bill Moyers’ Baccalaureate Address at Hamilton College, Clinton, NY”