Bernie Sanders (I-VT) fights Bush Nominee on WalMart tax breaks
The History of Nixon and the Future of Cheney
TDS-Gonzo-Mountain (Hillarious!)
Patriots Who Love the Troops to Death
(FRANK RICH) …As is becoming clearer than ever in this Korffian endgame, hiding behind the troops is the last refuge of this war’s sponsors. This too is a rewrite of history. It has been the war’s champions who have more often dishonored the troops than the war’s opponents. Mr. Bush created the template by doing everything possible to keep the sacrifice of American armed forces in Iraq off-camera, forbidding photos of coffins and skipping military funerals. That set the stage for the ensuing demonization of Ted Koppel, whose decision to salute the fallen by reading a list of their names in the spotlight of “Nightline” was branded unpatriotic by the right’s vigilantes.
The same playbook was followed by the war’s champions when a soldier confronted Donald Rumsfeld about the woeful shortage of armor during a town-hall meeting in Kuwait in December 2004. Rather than campaign for the armor the troops so desperately needed, the right attacked the questioner for what Rush Limbaugh called his “near insubordination.” When The Washington Post some two years later exposed the indignities visited upon the grievously injured troops at Walter Reed Medical Center, The Weekly Standard and the equally hawkish Wall Street Journal editorial page took three weeks to notice, with The Standard giving the story all of two sentences. Protecting the White House from scandal, not the troops from squalor, was the higher priority.
One person who has had enough of this hypocrisy is the war critic Andrew J. Bacevich, a Boston University professor of international relations who is also a Vietnam veteran, a product of the United States Military Academy and a former teacher at West Point. After his 27-year-old son was killed in May while serving in Iraq, he said that Americans should not believe Memorial Day orators who talk about how priceless the troops’ lives are. “I know what value the U.S. government assigns to a soldier’s life,” Professor Bacevich wrote in The Washington Post. “I’ve been handed the check.” The amount, he said, was “roughly what the Yankees will pay Roger Clemens per inning.”…
Tom Snyder RIP
My most (and really only) memorable Tom Snyder moment for me was when he covered for Bob Costas and interviewed Howard Stern in 1991 – Bask in the hostility (4 parts):
The Bush administration’s code of silence
by Sidney Blumenthal
(Guardian UK)Omertà (or code of silence) has become the final bond holding the Bush administration together. Honesty is dishonourable; silence is manly; penitence is weakness. Loyalty trumps law. Protecting higher-ups is patriotism. Stonewalling is idealism. Telling the truth is informing. Cooperation with investigators is cowardice; breaking the code is betrayal. Once the code is shattered, however, no one can be trusted and the entire edifice crumbles.
If Attorney General Alberto Gonzales were miraculously to tell the truth, or if he were to resign or be removed, the secret government of the past six years would be unlocked…
Ted Kennedy on Health Care
The boys were upstairs for their nap, and I was struggling energy-wise in a bad way due to back to back 3AM school nights (drinking coffee right now at 11PM, so…). These days I like to get some work done while they’re asleep, but some days I have to just collapse and stare at something on TV. Being the hip guy that I am, that means CSPAN is on. Good debate on the Senate floor on the bill to up the cigarette tax in order to pay for health care for children. Republicans (Trent Lott began just as I turned it on) were bemoaning the cost of this program, basically settling in to the old groove they’ve been wearing out since the 80s, after leaping out of it while they controlled 100% of the spending for 6 straight years…anways, now they’re back to playing the part of Ebenezer Scrooge, and the notion that working parents should be provided assistance from the government to ensure their children have medical coverage is too much lunacy for them to abide.
Once again I’m woken up by Massachusetts speaking in response to something Scrooge-like…Ted Kennedy making this voter proud today, here’s a clip:
“My just listened to my friend, and he is my friend, from Mississippi (Senator Trent Lott) talking about the cost of this program. $60 billion over five years. That’s what we’re spending on five months in Iraq. What would the American people rather have?”
Blast from the (recent) past – Senator Kennedy on Republicans and the minimum wage:
Hysterical Blindness
(Reuters) The FBI and IRS have searched the home of Republican Sen. Ted Stevens in a ski resort in Alaska as part of an investigation into his links with an oil-services company, officials said on Monday.
…that might make your average man decide to tune it down a bit
(TPMmuckraker) Republican Sen. Ted Stevens…has threatened to place a hold on the Democratic-drafted ethics legislation just passed by the House and expected on the Senate floor by week’s end.