Think Progress » The Dixie Chicks Ad NBC Doesn’t Want You To See: “The Dixie Chicks Ad NBC Doesn’t Want You To See
NBC is refusing to air an ad for the new Dixie Chicks documentary, “Shut Up & Sing.” Variety reports, “NBC’s commercial clearance department said in writing that it ‘cannot accept these spots as they are disparaging to President Bush.’”
Harvey Weinstein, who is distributing the movie, issued the following statement:
It’s a sad commentary about the level of fear in our society that a movie about a group of courageous entertainers who were blacklisted for exercising their right of free speech is now itself being blacklisted by corporate America. The idea that anyone should be penalized for criticizing the president is profoundly un-American.
ThinkProgress has obtained the ad NBC doesn’t want you to see. Watch it:”

Social Investing and Consuming Cartoons: “‘There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know that we don’t know. But there are also unknowns unknowns. These are things we don’t know we don’t know.'”

Midterm elections: the blame game, George Allen, and more. – By Mark Halperin and John F. Harris – Slate Magazine: “Sexual Tension Unbearable Between 15-Year-Old, Rest Of World”

The Washington Post’s John Harris tells co-author Mark Halperin of ABC to STFU – The Smirking Chimp: “Bookmark/Search this post with:
delicious digg reddit newsvine google yahoo technorati”

Unclaimed Territory – by Glenn Greenwald: More on Mark Halperin’s sad little crusade for right-wing blessings: “Isn’t there something extremely unseemly about the political director of ABC News engaging in such an intense campaign to win the approval of one of the most blindly partisan, extremist Bush followers in the country?”

DRUDGE REPORT FLASH 2006
ABCNEWS, WASH POST REPORTERS: ‘DRUDGE RULES OUR WORLD’

Here they come…

In the stampede of books attempting to make their mark this season comes THE WAY TO WIN, by longtime political reporters Halperin and Harris.

The political director of ABCNEWS and the national politics editor of the WASHINGTON POST make it official in their new insider tome on DC politics and how it’s played: The four words in every newsroom and campaign headquarters are: Have you seen DRUDGE?

MORE

In an extended 15-page homage to the glories of this site, they report: ‘Matt Drudge is the gatekeeper… he is the Walter Cronkite of his era.’

‘In the fragmented, remote-control, click-on-this, did you hear? political media world in which we live, revered Uncle Walter has been replaced by odd nephew Matt.’

Mark Halperin and John Harris write ‘Matt Drudge rules our world.’ They say, ‘With the exception of the ASSOCIATED PRESS, there is no outlet other than the DRUDGE REPORT whose dispatches instantly can command the attention and energies of the most established newspapers and television newscasts.’

Page after page…

‘Matt Drudge counts as one of the most important entrepreneurs of his era…’

Paragraph after paragraph…

‘One of the biggest success stories of his generation….’

Halperin and Harris explain: ‘So many media elites check the DRUDGE REPORT consistently that a reporter is aware his bosses, his competitors, his sources, his friends on Wall Street, lobbyists, White House officials, congressional aides, cousins, and everyone who is anyone has seen it, too.’

And the dynamic duo get their plug. Hitting boo”

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.'”