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The Carpetbagger Report » Blog Archive » House Republicans blame their incompetence on Dems:

I think we all need to be a bit more sensitive here and stop offending those who have done us no harm.

I’m talking about:

1) your lying sacks of shit,
2) your fuckwits,
3) those who are batshit crazy (an ATF for me)
4) creeps (an oldie but a goodie)
5) fuckbrains (a newbie but destined to be a classic)
6) punkasses,
7) incompetent zeros
8) clowns

I’m sure there are a few that I’m forgetting but no insult is intended to them.

These people have their own problems – can’t we just leave them alone? I think calling Republicans “Republicans” is demeaning and offensive enough

Salon News | Smearing Hillary:

Even more damning was a “Nightline” report broadcast that same evening. The segment came very close to branding Hillary Clinton a perjurer. In his introduction, host Ted Koppel spoke pointedly about “the reluctance of the Clinton White House to be as forthcoming with documents as it promised to be.” He then turned to correspondent Jeff Greenfield, who posed a rhetorical question: “Hillary Clinton did some legal work for Madison Guaranty at the Rose Law Firm, at a time when her husband was governor of Arkansas. How much work? Not much at all, she has said.”

Up came a video clip from Hillary’s April 22, 1994, Whitewater press conference. “The young attorney, the young bank officer, did all the work,” she said. “It was not an area that I practiced in. It was not an area that I know anything, to speak of, about.” Next the screen filled with handwritten notes taken by White House aide Susan Thomases during the 1992 campaign. “She [Hillary] did all the billing,” the notes said. Greenfield quipped that it was no wonder “the White House was so worried about what was in Vince Foster’s office when he killed himself.”

What the audience didn’t know was that the ABC videotape had been edited so as to create an inaccurate impression. At that press conference, Mrs. Clinton had been asked not how much work she had done for Madison Guaranty, but how her signature came to be on a letter dealing with Madison Guaranty’s 1985 proposal to issue preferred stock. ABC News had seamlessly omitted thirty-nine words from her actual answer, as well as the cut, by interposing a cutaway shot of reporters taking notes. The press conference transcript shows that she actually answered as follows: “The young attorney [and] the young bank officer did all the work and the letter was sent. But because I was what we called the billing attorney — in other words, I had to send the bill to get the payment sent — my name was put on the bottom of the letter. It was not an area that I practiced in. It was not an area that I know anything, to speak of, about.”

ABC News had taken a video clip out of context, and then accused the first lady of prevaricating about the very material it had removed. Within days, the doctored quotation popped up elsewhere. ABC used the identical clip on its evening news broadcast; so did CNN. The New York Times editorial page used it to scold Mrs. Clinton, as did columnist Maureen Dowd. Her colleague William Safire weighed in with an accusatory column of his own: “When you’re a lawyer who needs a cover story to conceal close connections to a crooked client,” he began, “you find some kid in your office willing to say he brought in the business and handled the client all by himself.” Safire predicted the first lady’s imminent indictment.

Los Angeles Times:

U.S. leaders’ visits to the region reap only warnings and worry.
By Paul Richter
Times Staff Writer

December 3, 2006

WASHINGTON — President Bush and his top advisors fanned out across the troubled Middle East over the last week to showcase their diplomatic initiatives to restore strained relationships with traditional allies and forge new ones with leaders in Iraq.

But instead of flaunting stronger ties and steadfast American influence, the president’s journey found friends both old and new near a state of panic. Mideast leaders expressed soaring concern over upheavals across the region that the United States helped ignite through its invasion of Iraq and push for democracy — and fear that the Bush administration may make things worse.

President Bush’s summit in Jordan with the Iraqi prime minister proved an awkward encounter that deepened doubts about the relationship. Vice President Dick Cheney’s stop in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, yielded a blunt warning from the kingdom’s leaders. And Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s swing through the West Bank and Israel, intended to build Arab support by showing a new U.S. push for peace, found little to work with.

In all, visits designed to show the American team in charge ended instead in diplomatic embarrassment and disappointment, with U.S. leaders rebuked and lectured by Arab counterparts. The trips demonstrated that U.S. allies in the region were struggling to understand what to make of the difficult relationship, and to figure whether, with a new Democratic majority taking over Congress, Bush even had control over his nation’s Mideast policy.

Arabs are “trying to figure out what the Americans are going to do, and trying develop their own plans,” said Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), one of his party’s point men on Iraq. “They’re trying to figure out their Plan B.”

The allies’ predicament was described by Jordan’s King Abdullah II last week, before Bush arrived in Amman, the capital. Abdullah, one of America’s steadiest friends in the region, warned that the Mideast faced the threat of three simultaneous civil wars — in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. And he made clear that the burden of dealing with it rested largely with the United States.

“Something dramatic” needed to come out of Bush’s meetings with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki to defuse the three-way threat, Abdullah said, because “I don’t think we’re in a position where we can come back and visit the problem in early 2007.”

The only regional leader to voice unqualified support for the Bush administration has been Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who has gone so far as to say that the Iraq invasion contributed to regional stability.

To Middle East observers, Bush can no longer speak for the United States as he did before because of the domestic pressure for a change of course in Iraq, said Nathan Brown, a specialist on Arab politics at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“He can talk all he wants about ‘staying until the job is done,’ but these leaders can read about the American political scene and see that he may not be able to deliver that,” Brown said.

The Bush-Maliki meeting Thursday, closely watched around the world in anticipation of a possible change in U.S. strategy, produced no shift in declared aims. Rather, it resulted in diplomatic stumbles that seemed to belie the leaders’ claims that their relationship was intact.

On the eve of the summit, a leaked memo written by Bush’s national security advisor, Stephen Hadley, showed that U.S. officials questioned Maliki’s abilities. But the memo also was a reminder of dwindling U.S. influence over Iraq. Some of the steps that Hadley said the Iraqis should take, such as providing public services to Sunni Arabs as well as Shiites, were moves that the Americans had demanded for many months, without success.

The leak of the memo cast a shadow over the summit, and Maliki abruptly canceled the first scheduled meeting, a conversation among Bush, Maliki and Abdullah. White House aides insisted that the cancellation was not a snub.

One Middle East diplomat said later in an interview that Maliki had canceled the meeting to put distance between him and Bush at a time when Iraq’s Shiite lawmakers and Cabinet ministers with ties to militant cleric Muqtada Sadr had halted their participation in the government to protest the summit.

On Saturday, in his regular radio address, Bush said that his relationship with Maliki was, in fact, improving.

“With each meeting, I’m coming to know him better, and I’m becoming more impressed by his desire to make the difficult choices that will put his country on a better path,” Bush said.

During the trip, Bush was unable to distance himself from the fierce debate about Iraq policy back home. The president felt the need to respond to news accounts saying that an advisory panel on Iraq would urge a gradual withdrawal of combat troops from the region. He insisted that suggestions for such a “graceful exit” were not realistic.

Despite this, Bush repeated in his radio address that he intended to look for a bipartisan solution to the war, and would listen to the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, which is scheduled to present its findings Wednesday.

He also said that his own internal review, coming from Pentagon and White House officials, among others, was near completion, suggesting that he may be discussing the options before him over the next several days.

“I want to hear all advice before I make any decisions about adjustments to our strategy in Iraq,” Bush said.

Cheney’s trip to talk to Saudi King Abdullah was far less visible than Bush’s mission, but helped to make painfully clear the gap between U.S. goals and those of its Arab allies.

U.S. officials said Cheney initiated the trip. But foreign diplomats said that Saudi leaders sought the visit to express their concern about the region, including fears of a U.S. departure and what they see as excessive American support for the Shiite faction in Iraq.

After the meeting with Cheney, Saudi officials released an unusual statement pointedly highlighting American responsibility for deterioration of stability in the region.

The Saudi officials cited “the direct influence of … the United States on the issues of the region” and said it was important for U.S. influence “to be in accord with the region’s actual condition and its historical equilibrium,” an apparent reference to the Sunni-Shiite balance.

The Saudi statement also said the U.S. in the Middle East should “pursue equitable means that contribute to ending its conflicts,” pointing to the Israeli-Palestinian situation.

The statement “came pretty close to a rebuke, by Saudi standards,” said Charles W. Freeman Jr., a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. “It said, in effect, that the United States needs to behave responsibly.”

There have been other signals of Saudi anxiety recently.

On Wednesday, an advisor to the Saudi government wrote in the Washington Post that if the United States pulled out of Iraq, “massive Saudi intervention” would ensue to protect Sunnis from Shiite militias.

The Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Turki al Faisal, warned in a speech in October against an American withdrawal, saying that “since the United States came into Iraq uninvited, it should not leave Iraq uninvited.”

Rice encountered the limits of U.S. influence when she visited Jerusalem and the West Bank town of Jericho last week, trying to entice Arab confidence by displaying a renewed interest in Israeli-Palestinian peace.

But Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was gloomy about the prospects for a deal between his Fatah party and the militant group Hamas that would allow formation of a nonsectarian government and open the way for increased aid and, potentially, peace talks with Israel.

Rice said afterward that the administration “cannot create the circumstances” for peace.

“This is the kind of thing that takes time,” she said. “You don’t expect great leaps forward.”

Expressing deeper unhappiness with the United States, leaders from Jordan, Egypt and Persian Gulf countries told Rice during her trip to an economic development conference in Jordan on Friday that the U.S. had a responsibility to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which they and many analysts viewed as the key to regional stability.

Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League, urged greater U.S. action, warning that the Middle East was becoming “an abyss…. The region is facing real failure.”

paul.richter@latimes.com

Times staff writers Doyle McManus and Peter Wallsten contributed to this report.

Spin Brian Springer:

Artist Brian Springer spent a year scouring the airwaves with a satellite dish grabbing back channel news feeds not intended for public consumption. The result of his research is SPIN, one of the most insightful films ever made about the mechanics of how television is used as a tool of social control to distort and limit the American public’s perception of reality.

TPMmuckraker December 18, 2006

* In March, the administration announced it would no longer produce
the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation, which
identifies which programs best assist low-income families, while also
tracking health insurance coverage and child support.

* In 2005, after a government report showed an increase in terrorism around the world, the administration announced it would stop publishing its annual report on international terrorism.

* After the Bureau of Labor Statistics uncovered discouraging data

about factory closings in the U.S., the administration announced it
would stop publishing information about factory closings.

* When an annual report called “Budget Information for States”

showed the federal government shortchanging states in the midst of
fiscal crises, Bush’s Office of Management and Budget announced it was discontinuing the report, which some said was the only source for comprehensive data on state funding from the federal government.

* When Bush’s Department of Education found that charter schools were underperforming, the administration said it would sharply cut back on the information it collects about charter schools.

* The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has to date failed to produce
a congressionally-mandated report on climate change that was due in
2004. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has called the failure an “obfuscation.”

* The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently announced

plans to close several libraries which were used by researchers and
scientists. The agency called its decision a cost-cutting measure, but
a 2004 report showed that the facilities actually brought the EPA a
$7.5 million surplus annually.

* On November 1st, 2001, President Bush issued an executive order

limiting the public’s access to presidential records. The order
undermined the 1978 Presidential Records Act, which required the
release of those records after 12 years. Bush’s order prevented the release
of “68,000 pages of confidential communications between President
Ronald Reagan and his advisers,” some of whom had positions in the Bush
Administration. More here. (Thanks to Roger A. and nitpicker below.) Update: TPMm Reader JP writes in to point out that Bush did the same thing with his papers from the Texas governorship.

* A rule change at the U.S. Geological Survey restricts agency scientists

from publishing or discussing research without that information first
being screened by higher-ups at the agency. Special screening will be
given to “findings or data that may be especially newsworthy, have an
impact on government policy, or contradict previous public
understanding to ensure that proper officials are notified and that
communication strategies are developed.” The scientists at the USGS
cover such controversial topics as global warming. Before, studies were
released after an anonymous peer review of the research. (Thanks to Alison below.)

* A new policy

at the The U.S. Forest Service means the agency no longer will generate
environmental impact statements for “its long-term plans for America’s
national forests and grasslands.” It also “no longer will allow the
public to appeal on long-term plans for those forests, but instead will
invite participation in planning from the outset.” (Thanks to libra below.)

* In March 2006, the Department of Health and Human Services took down

a six-year-old Web site devoted to substance abuse and treatment
information for gays and lesbians, after members of the conservative
Family Research Council complained.

* In 2002, HHS removed information from its Web site pertaining to risky sexual behavior among adolescents, condom use and HIV.

* Also in 2002, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission removed
from its Web site a document showing that officials found large gaps in
a portion of an aging Montana dam. A FERC official said the deletion
was for “national security.”

* In 2004, the FBI attempted

to retroactively classify public information regarding the case of
bureau whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, including a series of letters
between the Justice Department and several senators.

* In October 2003, the Bush administration banned photographs depicting servicemembers’ coffins returning from overseas.

* In December 2002, the administration curtailed funding
to the Mass-Layoffs Statistics program, which released monthly data on
the number and size of layoffs by U.S. companies. His father attempted
to kill the same program in 1992, but Clinton revived it when he
assumed the presidency.

* In 2004, the Internal Revenue Service stopped providing data demonstrating the level of its job performance. In 2006, a judge forced the IRS to provide the information.

* Also in 2004, the Federal Communications Commission blocked access
to a once-public database of network outages affecting
telecommunications service providers. The FCC removed public copies and
exempted the information from Freedom of Information Act requests,
saying it would “jeopardize national security efforts.” Experts
ridiculed that notion.

* In 2002, Bush officials intervened to derail

the publication of an EPA report on mercury and children’s health,
which contradicted the administration’s position on lowering
regulations on certain power plants. The report was eventually leaked
by a “frustrated EPA official.”

* In 2003, the EPA bowed to White House pressure and deleted

the global warming section in its annual “Rep
ort on the Environment.”
The move drew condemnations from Democrats and Republicans alike.

* Also in 2003, the EPA withheld

for months key findings from an air pollution report that undercut the
White House’s “Clear Skies” initiative. Leaked copies were reported in
the Washington Post.

REASON NUMBER ONE:
Senate hearings …

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Secretary, the behavior by Americans at the prison in Iraq is, as we all acknowledge, immoral, intolerable and un-American. It deserves the apology that you have given today and that have been given by others in high positions in our government and our military.

I cannot help but say, however, that those who were responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on September 11th, 2001, never apologized. Those who have killed hundreds of Americans in uniform in Iraq working to liberate Iraq and protect our security have never apologized.

And those who murdered and burned and humiliated four Americans in Fallujah a while ago never received an apology from anybody.

So it’s part of — wrongs occurred here, by the people in those pictures and perhaps by people up the chain of command.

But Americans are different. That’s why we’re outraged by this. That’s why the apologies were due.

Loose lips sink Viveca Novak’s career | Needlenose:

The week of Oct. 24, 2005, was Indictment Week. . . . It seemed clear that Scooter Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was in deep trouble, but Rove’s status was uncertain. Sometime during that week, Luskin, who was talking at length with Fitzgerald, phoned me and said he had disclosed to Fitzgerald the content of a conversation he and I had had at Cafe Deluxe more than a year earlier and that Fitzgerald might want to talk to me.

Luskin clearly thought that was going to help Rove, perhaps by explaining why Rove hadn’t told Fitzgerald or the grand jury of his conversation with my colleague Matt Cooper about former Ambassador Joe Wilson’s wife until well into the inquiry. . . .

. . . Here’s what happened. Toward the end of one of our meetings, I remember Luskin looking at me and saying something to the effect of “Karl doesn’t have a Cooper problem. He was not a source for Matt.” I responded instinctively, thinking he was trying to spin me, and said something like, “Are you sure about that? That’s not what I hear around TIME.” He looked surprised and very serious. “There’s nothing in the phone logs,” he said.

. . . I was taken aback that he seemed so surprised. . . . I hadn’t intended to tip Luskin off to anything. . . . Luskin walked me to my car and said something like, “Thank you. This is important.”

Regan was fired after slur, News Corp. says – Los Angeles Times:

erasing.org:

Welcome to December. An apparel-soaking, marrow-chilling, street-flooding, window-pelting, tree-felling umbrella-destroyer of a morning this morning, outdoors. Nonstop pouring rain, violent winds, the temperature that perfect sweet spot of misery: a biting low-aughts (or mid-thirties F) cold that hovers just above freezing enough to keep these sideways sheets of rain from becoming slightly-tamer snow. To compensate for my being in a warm dry home office, I get to listen to someone buzzsawing something made of metal just down the hall for much of the day.