brainrow

Crooks and Liars has more on Fox’s bold and independent “news” coverage.

Hey, can they help it if the only way to really get to the bottom of tough news stories is to repeat and repeat and repeat Republican talking points?

Via Atrios, let’s examine just how fair and balanced Fox News really is.

Ann Coulter got all the attention at the Conservative Political Action Conference:

Ann Coulter used an anti-gay slur to describe John Edwards (the line drew applause) and asked: “Did Al Gore actually swallow Michael Moore?” When a questioner asked Coulter why she praises marriage but broke off so many engagements, she responded by calling the questioner ugly.

Classy lady. But you know, she’s not the only right-wing superstar:

Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Tex.) said of Cindy Sheehan, whose son died in Iraq: “She’s an idiot.”

Class, class, class.

Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) got the crowd cheering early in the day. “I have been called — my kids are all aware of this — dumb, crazy man, science abuser, Holocaust denier, villain of the month, hate-filled, warmonger, Neanderthal, Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun,” he announced. “And I can just tell you that I wear some of those titles proudly.”

Which ones, huh? C’mon, tell us — which ones?

Talk about class warfare — the Democrats just don’t play in the same league as these class acts.

What a coincidence — exactly 2000 days — not quite five and a half years — after George W. Bush promised to get him, “dead or alive,” Osama bin Laden observed his 50th birthday.

I think that’s enough birthdays for this guy, don’t you?

Update: via Hetty Litjens, CNN reports Bush success — bin Laden is, in fact, “dead or alive.”

Because he is a psychiatrist, the author of Corpus Callosum has an interesting perspective on recent abuses of investigative powers:

Never take legal advice from someone who is not your lawyer. The only thing worse than taking legal advice from someone who is not your lawyer, is to take legal advice from somebody else’s lawyer.

With that disclaimer out of the way, I am going to tell you what I find particularly galling about the FBI “National Security Letter” scandal. Yeah, it shows that we can’t trust our own law enforcement agencies. But we knew that already. …

The National Security Letters allow the Executive Branch to circumvent oversight From the Judicial Branch. That is what most of the fuss is about. But there is more to it than that.

You see, the NSLs also deprive the recipient of the right to representation. As I understand it, if you get an NSL that demands information, you are not allowed to tell anyone about it. That means you cannot seek legal advice about the NSL, specifically, you cannot ask an expert if it is a legal order, in order to determine whether you really do need to comply. There is no recourse, no due process, no option. Either you comply in silence, or you put yourself in legal jeopardy.

When I first heard about them, I thought about what I would do if I ever got a NSL demanding that I turn over protected health information. Protected health information, by the way, is a special class of information defined by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA).

The law provides stiff penalties, including prison terms, for some violations of patient privacy.

So this is not a trivial matter. The law does permit disclosure for “activities related to national defense and security,” but due to the nature of the NSL, the health care provider is not in a position to make an independent judgment about the relevance or legitimacy of the demand for information. …

Why do I find this issue to be troubling? It has to do with some of my own experiences. It has happened a couple of times that I have gotten subpoenas requesting protected health information regarding persons involved in nasty divorces. The opposing attorney sends the subpoena, hoping to find something damaging.

Now, a lot of health care professionals, upon receiving an official-looking subpoena, will just go along with it, and send the records. But I have learned that it is not always necessary or proper to do so. So now when I get one of those subpoenas, I first copy it and send it to my patient’s attorney. Let them fight it out. Usually the subpoena just goes away. These experiences show that official-looking documents are not always valid. They may carry threats, but the threats may be empty. It makes it hard to have confidence in the system.

Something that occurs to me: how do you know that a National Security Letter is the real thing?

I get emails purporting to be from banks or credit card companies asking me to log in to verify my login info. Those email messages are fraudulent, with links to sites created specifically to steal my login info. It’s called “phishing.” Now there is phone phishing, called “vishing”.

Isn’t the National Security Letter a perfect set-up for fraud? You can’t tell anyone, you can’t ask for advice, and you can’t say no.

It’s time — it’s past time — for the debate on this unrestrained government power.

Want to upset our whole political system?

In recent years, so very much has been built based on the notion that we should all just stop thinking and shut up.

Yeah, it’s time to tear all that crap down.

Bob Geiger is keeping track of the number of days since George W. Bush promised to get Osama bin Laden “Dead or Alive.”

It’s been 2000 days.

Do you suppose he even remembers?

From Mike the Mad Biologist:

When I heard that Republican Senator and presidential candidate John McCain spoke at the [anti-Darwin] Discovery Institute, I was disappointed but not surprised. In March, there’s going to be a report released about antibiotic resistance in bacteria. A major finding of the report: roughly 40,000 people die every year from hospital-acquired antibiotic resistant bacterial infections.

The problem of antibiotic resistance is, fundamentally, a problem of evolutionary biology. Species of bacteria which had very few resistant strains (or none at all) now contain high frequencies of resistance strains (e.g., methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus, commonly known as MRSA). In other words, populations of bacteria have undergone genetic change — evolution — which has led to thousands of unnecessary deaths. How can one expect any administration which has to pander to creationists to take this evolutionary problem seriously? Could you imagine if flat-earthers ran NASA? I fear we would have, at best, another four years of government inaction regarding antibiotic resistance.

The interesting thing about reality is that it always wins. Every single time.

Pig-headed ignorance kills. We’ve had enough of that. Time for a change.

From Perrspectives: the last throes of the Bush presidency:

Start with Tuesday’s conviction of former Cheney chief-of-staff Scooter Libby on four counts of obstruction and perjury in the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame. In revelation after revelation, the administration’s duplicity in selling its Iraq war was laid bare. …

Meanwhile, the Senate Judiciary Committee began to peel back the onion on the growing Bush Justice Department scandal involving the politically motivated firings of 8 U.S. prosecutors. Senators heard six of the attorneys tell them under oath of pressure from the White House and Congressional Republicans to pursue — or not pursue — a raft of public corruption cases. …

Even as the prosecutors’ imbroglio is just starting to simmer, the outrage over the appalling conditions for wounded American servicemen at Walter Reed Army Medical Center is now at a full boil. The disgraceful conditions reported by the Washington Post and the dismissive response of the Army’s former head at Walter Reed Lt. General Kevin Kiley undermined the last remaining trump card of the Bush team — its mantra of “we support the troops.” …

Sadly for President Bush, the news coming out of Iraq was no better. Even as he praised the initial successes of his surge in Iraq, over 100 Shiite pilgrims were slaughtered in bomb blasts south of Baghad in Hillah. Worse still, nine U.S. soldiers were killed in separate attacks across Iraq on the same day that the Pentagon revealed that Bush’s “surge” would actually require 28,000 additional troops, 7,000 more than the White House claimed.

The toll on President Bush’s standing was reflected in polls released yesterday as well. A new USA Today/Gallup survey showed that fully 60% of Americans now support a timeline for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, while only 28% say the U.S will win the war. …

For the Bush administration, it is all over except for the shouting. His domestic agenda dead, President Bush can only stubbornly move forward with his debacle in Iraq while threatening to veto Democratic domestic initiatives such as union rights for TSA workers.

Gee, I wonder how history will judge the Bush presidency?

Via GrrlScientist: the George W. Bush postage stamp.

It’s worthless. So it’s perfect.

From The Nation: Vermont Leads:

When Vermont Governor Jim Douglas, a Republican with reasonably close ties to President Bush, asked if there was any additional business to be considered at the town meeting he was running in Middlebury, Ellen McKay popped up and proposed the impeachment of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

The governor was not amused. As moderator of the annual meeting, he tried to suggest that the proposal to impeach — along with another proposal to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq — could not be voted on.

But McKay, a program coordinator at Middlebury College, pressed her case. And it soon became evident that the crowd at the annual meeting shared her desire to hold the president to account.

So Douglas backed down.

“It became clear that no one was going home until they had the chance to discuss the resolutions and vote on them,” explained David Rosenberg, a political science professor at Middlebury College. “And being a good politician, he allowed the vote to happen.”

By an overwhelming voice vote, Middlebury called for impeachment.

So it has gone this week at town meetings across Vermont, most of which were held Tuesday.

Late Tuesday night, there were confirmed reports that 36 towns had backed impeachment resolutions, and the number was expected to rise.

In one town, Putney, the vote for impeachment was unanimous.

Impeach Bush and Cheney?

Hmmm… President Nancy Pelosi. I like the sound of that.

Cartoonist D.C. Simpson thinks about Bush’s current low poll numbers:

The numbers are clear. George Bush is now less popular than getting kicked in the groin.

… and flashes back to recall the political climate at the start of the Iraq War:

George Bush is so brave and heroic! He held office when something bad happened!

What we believed, of course, was that George W. Bush would do as other presidents had done in times of crisis, and would rise to meet history’s challenge. But George W. Bush was not like other presidents. He had reached the White House not by the process defined in the Constitution, but in an anti-Constitutional judicial coup d’etat. He has spent his presidency disabusing us of our optimism.

Via Hetty Litjens: Some people are such optimists:

Dick Cheney has been diagnosed with a blood clot in his left leg, leading to speculation he will be forced to resign as U.S. Vice-President.

The United States has the most expensive medical care on earth. Cheney will be blighting lives for years to come.

Atrios makes a good point about Fox News:

The problem with Fox isn’t that it’s conservative, it’s that it’s basically a propaganda outlet for the GOP. The difference is an important one. Back when Clinton in power, their true nature was somewhat obscured by the fact that were doing what media should be doing at least in broad terms, which is be skeptical about the actions of the powerful. Back when Bush was popular, it was also easier for people to fail to understand just what Fox does on a daily basis. But now that they spend 24/7 propping up Mr. 30% and his gang of incompetents, the absurdity of considering them to be a “news channel” should be apparent.

I started watching Fox News at about the time we invaded Iraq. They advertised with the slogan, “We Report, You Decide,” and within a few hours I noticed that they never, ever played a story straight. You might not notice the constant editorializing about the war — CNN and CBS and the New York Times all got teary-eyed about “our brave soldiers” during those early days in Iraq. But Fox was different. Reporting even something as simple as an auto accident, they never resisted tacking on a little sermonette about the deeper cultural meaning of the event.

I watched Fox for about two days, then decided they were not a trustworthy source of information. I haven’t watched since.

You know who played the Iraq War story straight? The BBC. There were brave British soldiers in the fight, but the BBC reported just the facts. They left it to each of us to decide for ourselves how to feel about those facts.

The Daily Show on Monday was dynamite, as Jon Stewart took on the Walter Reed story. Crooks and Liars has video. They also have video of Jon Stewart’s interview with wounded ABC News reporter Bob Woodruff.

Stephen Colbert also looked at the Walter Reed story Monday night, focusing on the role of Congress. Think Progress has the video, including Colbert’s summary of Joe Lieberman:

The senseless war in Washington must end, so the War in Iraq can continue in peace.

Switch parties, already, Lieberman. You’re embarrassing the Democrats.

Update: Crooks and Liars is calling the Walter Reed scandal “Waltergate.” Good one!