YouTube – April 28, 2008 Bill Maher O V E R T I M E
District Of Corruption
Netroots and Chris Dodd Stop Bill To Grant Immunity To Telecoms Who Spied On U.S. Citizens
StoriesFrom the indispensable Nicole Belle at Crooks And Liars Dot Com
Chris Dodd Thanks You For Your Support
By: Nicole Belle
Chris Dodd thanks the netroots for their support and congratulates his colleagues for their help in the fight against retroactive immunity.
“Today we have scored a victory for American civil liberties and sent a message to President Bush that we will not tolerate his abuse of power and veil of secrecy. The President should not be above the rule of law, nor should the telecom companies who supported his quest to spy on American citizens. I want to thank the thousands of Americans throughout the country that stood with me to get this done for our country.”
The progressive blogs, who played a huge role in lobbying the Senate to support Dodd’s leadership against retroactive immunity, are joining in the celebration now that the FISA bill has been pulled until next year.
In an email, Athenae of First Draft writes, “Seriously, that was some awesome with awesome sauce and a side of pure, crispy win.”
Crooks & Liars has video of Dodd’s closing remarks this evening.
Jason Rosenbaum at The Seminal writes, “This victory means Dodd’s filibuster has weight. It also makes it much more likely that he will win round two as he continues to stand up for the Constitution and against telecom immunity.”
Sam Stein at the Huffington Post sets the early narrative – one which I think accurately describes how events evolved over the course of the last few days – in an article titled “Dodd’s Filibuster Threat Persuades Reid.”[..]
Also, thanks to everyone at FireDogLake for all the help driving activism today.
You can keep giving Chris Dodd the props he’s due at ChrisDodd.com
The Nine Dark Lords of the Senate
StoriesThe Nine Dark Lords of the Senate
Wayne Allard: Supports Torture
http://allard.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Contact.Home
202-224-6471 – fax
Kit Bond: Supports Torture
http://bond.senate.gov/contact/contactme.cfm
No fax
Tom Coburn: Supports Torture
http://coburn.senate.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Contact.Home
202-224-6008 – fax
Thad Cochran: Supports Torture
http://cochran.senate.gov/contact.htm
No fax
John Cornyn: Supports Torture
http://www.cornyn.senate.gov/contact/index_1.html
202-228-2856 – fax
James Inhofe: Supports Torture
http://inhofe.senate.gov/contactus.htm
202-228-0380 – fax
Pat Roberts: Supports Torture
http://roberts.senate.gov/e-mail_pat.html
202-224-3514 – fax
Jeff Sessions: Supports Torture
http://sessions.senate.gov/email/contact.cfm
202-224-3149 – fax
Ted Stevens: Supports Torture
http://stevens.senate.gov/contact_form.cfm
202-224-2354 – fax
Bush To Bloggers, MoveOn, Code Pink: " Get Off My Lawn" (Dirty Hippies)
9/11, Bin Laden
BILL MAHER:: THE COMPLETE SHOW 09/07/2007
9/11, Bin Laden, GiulianiPEGGY NOONAN'S ACID TRIP
9/11, Bin Laden, RoveA Time for Grace
America needs unity in dealing with Iraq. That means the president must lead.
Friday, August 31, 2007 12:01 a.m.
What will be needed this autumn is a new bipartisan forbearance, a kind of patriotic grace. This is a great deal to hope for. The president should ask for it, and show it. Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, will report to Congress on Sept. 11. From the latest metrics, it’s clear the surge has gained some ground. It is generally supposed that Gen. Petraeus will paint a picture of recent decreases in violent incidents and increases in safety. In another world, that might be decisive: It’s working, hang on.
At the same time, it’s clear that what we call Iraq does not wholly share U.S. objectives. We speak of it as a unitary country, but the Kurds are understandably thinking about Kurdistan, the Sunnis see an Iraq they once controlled but that no longer exists, and the Shia–who knows? An Iraq they theocratically and governmentally control, an Iraq given over to Iran? This division is reflected in what we call Iraq’s government in Baghdad. Seen in this way, the non-latest-metrics way, the situation is bleak.
Capitol Hill doesn’t want to talk about it, let alone vote on it. Lawmakers not only can’t figure a good way out, they can’t figure a good way through.
But we’re going to have to achieve some rough consensus, because we’re a great nation in an urgent endeavor. The process will begin with Gen. Petraeus’s statement.
Particular atmospherics, and personal dynamics, are the backdrop to the debate. People are imperfect, and people in politics tend to be worse: “Politics is not an ennobling profession,” as Bill Buckley once said. You’d better be pretty good going in, because it’s not going to make you better. Politicians are individuals with a thirst for power, honors, and fame. When you think about that you want to say, “Oh dear.” But of course “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”
All sides in the Iraq debate need to step up, in a new way, to the characterological plate. From the pro-war forces, the surge supporters and those who supported the Iraq invasion from the beginning, what is needed is a new modesty of approach, a willingness to admit it hasn’t quite gone according to plan. A moral humility. Not meekness–great powers aren’t helped by meekness–but maturity, a shown respect for the convictions of others.
What we often see instead, lately, is the last refuge of the adolescent: defiance. An attitude of Oh yeah? We’re Lincoln, you’re McClellan. We care about the troops and you don’t. We care about the good Iraqis who cast their lot with us. You’d just as soon they hang from the skids of the last helicopter off the embassy roof. They have been called thuggish. Is this wholly unfair?
The antiwar forces, the surge opponents, the “I was against it from the beginning” people are, some of them, indulging in grim, and mindless, triumphalism. They show a smirk of pleasure at bad news that has been brought by the other team. Some have a terrible quaking fear that something good might happen in Iraq, that the situation might be redeemed. Their great interest is that Bushism be laid low and the president humiliated. They make lists of those who supported Iraq and who must be read out of polite society. Might these attitudes be called thuggish also?
Do you ever get the feeling that at this point Washington is run by two rival gangs that have a great deal in common with each other, including an essential lack of interest in the well-being of the turf on which they fight?
Not only hearts and minds are invested in a particular stand. Careers are, too. Candidates are invested in a position they took; people are dug in, caught. Every member of Congress is constrained by campaign promises: “We’ll fight” or “We’ll leave.” The same for every opinion spouter–every pundit, columnist, talk show host, editorialist–all of whom have a base, all of whom pay a price for deviating from the party line, whatever the party, and whatever the line. All this freezes things. It makes immobile what should be fluid. It keeps people from thinking. What is needed is simple maturity, a vow to look to–to care about–America’s interests in the long term, a commitment to look at the facts as they are and try to come to conclusions. This may require in some cases a certain throwing off of preconceptions, previous statements and former stands. It would certainly require the mature ability to come to agreement with those you otherwise hate, and the guts to summon the help of, and admit you need the help of, the other side.
Without this, we remain divided, and our division does nothing to help Iraq, or ourselves.
It would be good to see the president calming the waters. Instead he ups the ante. Tuesday, speaking to the American Legion, he heightened his language. Withdrawing U.S. forces will leave the Middle East overrun by “forces of radicalism and extremism”; the region would be “dramatically transformed” in a way that could “imperil” both “the civilized world” and American security.
Forgive me, but Americans who oppose the war do not here understand the president to be saying: Precipitous withdrawal will create a vacuum that will be filled by killing that will tip the world to darkness. That’s not what they hear. I think they understand him to be saying, I got you into this, I reaped the early rewards, I rubbed your noses in it, and now you have to save the situation.
His foes feel a tight-jawed bitterness. They believe it was his job not to put America in a position in which its security is imperiled; they resent his invitation to share responsibility for outcomes of decisions they opposed. And they resent it especially because he grants them nothing–no previous wisdom, no good intent–beyond a few stray words here and there.
And here’s the problem. The president’s warnings are realistic. He’s right. At the end of the day we can’t just up and leave Iraq. That would only make it worse. And it is not in the interests of America or the world that it be allowed to get worse.
Would it help if the president were graceful, humble, and asked for help? Why, yes. Would it help if he credited those who opposed him with not only good motives but actual wisdom? Yes. And if he tried it, it would make news. It would really, as his press aides say, break through the clutter. I don’t see how the president’s supporters can summon grace from others when they so rarely show it themselves. And I don’t see how anyone can think grace and generosity of spirit wouldn’t help. They would. They always do in big debates. And they would provide the kind of backdrop Gen. Petraeus deserves, the kind in which his words can be heard.
Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of “John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father” (Penguin, 2005), which you can order from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Fridays on OpinionJournal.com.
“They wanted them poor n***ers out of there.”
Stories
“They wanted them poor n***ers out of there.”
New Orleans two years after
by Greg Palast
Thurs August 30
“They wanted them poor ni***rs out of there and they ain’t had no intention to allow it to be reopened to no poor niggers, you know? And that’s just the bottom line.”
It wasn’t a pretty statement. But I wasn’t looking for pretty. I’d taken my investigative team to New Orleans to meet with Malik Rahim. Pretty isn’t Malik’s concern.
We needed an answer to a weird, puzzling and horrific discovery. Among the miles and miles of devastated houses, rubble still there today in New Orleans, we found dry, beautiful homes. But their residents were told by guys dressed like Ninjas wearing “Blackwater” badges: “Try to go into your home and we’ll arrest you.”
These aren’t just any homes. They are the public housing projects of the city; the Lafitte Houses and others. But unlike the cinder block monsters in the Bronx, these public units are beautiful townhouses, with wrought-iron porches and gardens right next to the tony French Quarter.
Raised up on high ground, with floors and walls of concrete, they were some of the only houses left salvageable after the Katrina flood.
Yet, two years later, there’s still bars on the windows, the doors are welded shut and the residents banned from returning. On the first anniversary of the flood, we were filming this odd scene when I saw a woman on the sidewalk, sobbing. Night was falling. What was wrong?
“They just messing all over us. Putting me out our own house. We come to go back to our own home and when we get there they got the police there putting us out. Oh, no, this is not right. I’m coming here from Texas seeing if I can get my house back. But they said they ain’t letting nobody in. But where we gonna go at?”
Idiot me, I asked, “Where are you going to go tonight?”
“That’s what I want to know, Mister. Where I’m going to go – me and my kids?”
With the help of Patricia Thomas, a Lafitte resident, we broke into an apartment. The place was gorgeous. The cereal boxes still dry. This was Patricia’s home. But we decided to get out before we got busted.
I wasn’t naïve. I had a good idea what this scam was all about: 89,000 poor and working class families stuck in Homeland Security’s trailer park gulag while their good homes were guarded against their return by mercenaries. Two decades ago, I worked for the Housing Authority of New Orleans. Even then, the plan was to evict poor folk out of this very valuable real estate. But it took the cover of a hurricane to do it.
Malik’s organization, Common Ground, wouldn’t wait for permission from the federal and local commissars to help folks return. They organized takeovers of public housing by the residents. And, in the face of threats and official displeasure, restored 350 apartments in a destroyed private development on the high ground across the Mississippi in the ward called, “Algiers.” The tenants rebuilt their own homes with their own sweat and their own scraps of cash based on a promise of the landlords to sell Common Ground the property in return for restoring it.
Why, I asked Malik, was there this strange lock-out from public housing?
Malik shook his dreds. “They didn’t want to open it up. They wanted them closed. They wanted them poor niggers out of there.”
For Malik, the emphasis is on “poor.” The racial politics of the Deep South is as ugly as it is in Philadelphia, Pa. But the New Orleans city establishment has no problem with Black folk per se. After all, Mayor Ray Nagin’s parents are African-American.
It’s the Black survivors without the cash that are a problem. So where New Orleans once stood, Mayor Nagin, in connivance with a Bush regime more than happy to keep a quarter million poor folk (i.e. Democrats) out of this swing state, is creating a new city: a tourist town with a French Quarter, loose-spending drunks, hot-sheets hotels and a few Black people to perform the modern version of minstrel shows.
Malik explained, “It’s two cities. You know? There’s the city for the white and the rich. And there’s another city for the poor and Blacks. You know, the city that’s for the white and rich has recovered. They had a Jazz Fest. They had a Mardi Gras. They’re going to have the Saints playing for those who have recovered. But for those who haven’t recovered, there’s nothing.”
So where are they now? The sobbing woman and her kids are gone: back to Texas, or wherever. But they will not be allowed back into Lafitte. Ever.
And Patricia Thomas? The middle-aged woman, worked sweeping up the vomit and beer each morning at a French Quarter karioke joint. Not much pay, no health insurance, of course. She died since we filmed her – in a city bereft of health care. New Orleans has closed all its public hospitals but for one “charity” make-shift emergency ward in an abandoned department store.
And the one bright star, Malik’s housing project? The tenants’ work was done this past December. By Christmastime, they received their eviction notices – and all were carried out of their rebuilt homes by marshals right after the New Year, including a paraplegic resident who’d lived in the Algiers building for decades.
Hurricane recovery is class war by other means. And in this war of the powerful against the powerless, Mr. Bush can rightly land his fighter plane in Louisiana and declare that, unlike the war in Iraq, it is, indeed, “Mission Accomplished.”
***************
This report is based on Greg Palast’s film, Big Easy to Big Empty: The Untold Story of the Drowning of New Orleans.
JOHN EDWARDS DEMANDS AIRPLANE BE STOPPED-$1000 HAIRCUT GIVEN
9/11, Scaife 
Good Stuff StoogeWatcher!
You managed to get all the Dollar Store talking points in -Soros, Homosexuality, Manliness, Fear of a woman with a viewpoint, (“Gosh -I don’t know what it is about my lizard frat-boy brain that there’s just SOMETHING that bothers me, no, more like gnaws at me, about Hillary Clinton. She’s a no-good forgiver of her murdering husband Jeff Gerth told me. John Edwards makes airplanes stop on the runway and makes the stewardesses give him $1000 haircuts[John Tully]
The New York Herald Sun 