why is it always the democrats getting smeared?

ya never hear of republicans who have "earned' purple hearts getting smeared. doesn't that say something?

Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), the former Marine who is an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq, has become the latest Democrat to have his Vietnam War decorations questioned.

n a tactic reminiscent of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth assault on Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) during the 2004 presidential campaign, a conservative Web site yesterday quoted Murtha opponents as questioning the circumstances surrounding the awarding of his two Purple Hearts.

David Thibault, editor in chief of the Cybercast News Service, said the issue of Murtha's medals from 1967 is relevant now "because the congressman has really put himself in the forefront of the antiwar movement." Thibault said: "He has been placed by the Democratic Party and antiwar activists as a spokesman against the war above reproach."

--source

Letter Of The Day

Recipients of gifts from lobbyist Jack Abramoff scrambled to give back the money. If these guys had even a shred of moral fiber or conscience, they would have never taken the money in the first place. Time to clean House (and Senate). Both sides of the aisle.

—Ross Cornelison, St. Charles

attribution

FARPOINT.FACTOID

Every month’s full moon has a special name, and sometimes several, according to the Farmers’ Almanac.

February: Snow Moon, Hunger Moon.

March: Worm Moon, Crow Moon, Crust Moon, Sap Moon, Lenten Moon.

April: Pink Moon, Sprouting Grass Moon, Egg Moon, Fish Moon.

May: Flower Moon, Corn Planting Moon, Milk Moon.

June: Strawberry Moon, Rose Moon.

July: Buck Moon, Thunder Moon, Hay Moon.

August: Sturgeon Moon, Red Moon.

September: Harvest Moon.

October: Hunter’s Moon.

November: Beaver Moon, Frosty Moon.

December: Cold Moon, Long Nights Moon, Moon before Yule.

SOURCE

apple's itunes is spyware

The big problem, however, is that the new Mini Store feature installs spyware on your PC or Mac. In order to offer up targeted advertising, the Mini Store examines the music you're currently playing and transmits that information to Apple, which then provides relevant ads. iTunes never mentions that it's doing this, nor that it's also secretly transmitting the user's unique iTunes account information along with the song data. The revelation about Apple's secret transmissions has even the staunchest Apple supporters questioning their allegiance, as this isn't exactly the kind of behavior they'd expect from Apple. RealNetworks yes. Microsoft, maybe. But not Apple.

--from paul thurrot
(in email)

Quote of the Day

comes today from Matthew Yglesias, a columnist over at TPM:

"One would do well to note an ideological point here. Abuse of the government contracting process is bad, and perpetrators of wrongdoing should in no way get off the hook. Nevertheless, the entire concept of farming government out work to private firms is a more-or-less open invitation to corruption. There are instances when contracting is the only reasonable solution. But for some years now -- predating Bush, predating the DeLay era -- all the pressure has always been to privatize more and more government functions. The theory is that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector, so contracting functions out to private firms should save money. The reality has had a lot more to do with union-busting, machine-building, and "honest graft" than money saved or improved efficiency."

--Matthew Yglesias

just so nobody tries to sell you a lemon

that 'clinton did it too' is a lie.

Former President Clinton said Thursday that he never ordered wiretaps of American citizens without obtaining a court order, as President Bush has acknowledged he has done.
Clinton, in an interview broadcast Thursday on the ABC News program ''Nightline,'' said his administration either received court approval before authorizing a wiretap or went to court within three days after to get permission, as required by law.

--source

still lying after all these years

"The fact is we know that Saddam Hussein and Iraq were heavily involved with terror,". "They were carried as a terror-sponsoring state by our State Department for many, many years." He cited two terror organizations in particular -- Abu Nidal and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad - that operated out of Saddam's Iraq. He also noted that Saddam was making payments to families of suicide bombers. "All of this is very well established," Cheney said.

--source

fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me

Driven by the cost of hurricane relief, the federal budget deficit is expected to balloon back above $400 billion for the fiscal year that ends in September, reversing the improvements of 2005, a White House official told reporters yesterday.
...
"This administration has a history of overestimating the deficit early in the year, lowering expectations, then taking credit when it comes in below forecast," said Stanley E. Collender, a federal budget expert at Financial Dynamics Business Communications. "It's not just a history. It's almost an obsession."

--WaPo

Letter Of The Day

Clair Snyder's letter of Jan. 1 is a bit puzzling.

How can he or she characterize the Register as a "liberal rag" when the paper features a regular column by David Yepsen and frequent contributions from the likes of Cal Thomas?

Radical conservatives just cannot handle any criticism of our mean-spirited, intellectually challenged president, who has been responsible for thousands of deaths in an unjustified, unnecessary Iraq war, who has demonstrated amazing incompetence in dealing with domestic crises and who has exhibited unflinching loyalty to the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor and vulnerable.

-Dean R. Prestemon, Ames.

attribution

FARPOINT.FACTOID

another one in the same day is a rarity.

Fetuses do not count as passengers when it comes to determining who may drive in the carpool lane, a judge ruled.
--source

FARPOINT.FACTOID

Lobbyists for BNSF Railway and United Parcel Service held a luncheon for Rep. Jim Gerlach (R-Pa.) at the Associated General Contractors townhouse ($1,000 per PAC, $500 a person), according to the Web site for the National Republican Congressional Committee. A few blocks away, according to the NRCC, lobbyists for MasterCard, Time Warner and DuPont honored Rep. J. Gresham Barrett (R-S.C.) at Tortilla Coast ($1,000). That evening, Promia Inc.'s Adrian Plesha hosted a reception for Rep. John E. Sweeney (R-N.Y.) at his East Capitol Street home—$5,000 for "sponsors," $1,000 for PACs and $500 for individuals
--SOURCE

i learned something new today

"There are no Democrats who took money from Jack Abramoff," Dean answered. "Not one. Not one single Democrat. ...There is no evidence that Jack Abramoff ever gave any Democrat any money, and we've looked through all those reports to make sure that's true."

He's right, according to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics, which keeps track of such things. The center's analysis of FEC records shows that Democrats received about a third of the $4.2 million donated between 1998 and 2005 by Indian tribes that had hired Abramoff to represent them in Washington.

The problem with such analyses is that they tell you how much money someone gave to a political candidate without telling you why the money was given. By all indications, donations from the Indian tribes were no less legitimate than the political donations any individual, organization or industry with an interest in legislation frequently gives to candidates. If anything, the tribes are the true victims in the Abramoff saga. Federal investigators claim Abramoff used racist slurs when he referred to his Indian clients in his e-mails and represented rival tribes competing for the same casino turf, the mother of all conflicts of interest.

Nevertheless, the stink of scandal is so fierce in Washington these days that numerous Democratic as well as Republican senators and representatives have been giving money to charity equal to the amount they received from tribes linked to Abramoff in order to avoid even the appearance of wrongdoing.

As a result, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), for example, gave up a measly $2,000 donation she received from a tribe and the Bush-Cheney campaign gave up a $6,000 donation. But as Democrats are quick to point out, the Bush campaign kept the $100,000 that Abramoff directly raised, which earned Abramoff the coveted "Pioneer" status among Bush campaign donors.
.

--chicago tribune

he's a liar

President George W. Bush defended his decision to authorize secret government eavesdropping on communications between the U.S. and other countries as fulfilling his oath to protect U.S. citizens from attack.
--bloomberg

oh really? attack us with what? words?

The National Security Agency has been spying on a Baltimore anti-war group, according to documents released during litigation, going so far as to document the inflating of protesters' balloons, and intended to deploy units trained to detect weapons of mass destruction, RAW STORY has learned.
--source

my rant on the local newspaper board

oh poor dennis, always the victim of the liberal establishment. always whining about others not having an answer, yet never providing one himself. this is called hypocrisy. the liberals aren't the ones who created these problems (i'd sure like to see someone blame iraq on liberals), so why should they be the ones to clean it up? it's just sad that the republican party had to get hijacked by the neocons - for they would have been the perfect ones for the job of cleaning up washington's corruption. but they've all sipped on the coolaid (well, not all of 'em, but the majority has and there aren't enough that haven't to bail the party out. there's just going to have to be a major turnover in republican leadership for the elephant to get back on her feet. and when you have leaders thinking the same way people like dennis think, you can understand why this country is in such deep doodoo. want proof? turn on fox.

the thread

give that guy a cigar

for he wins the 'HEAD ON YOUR SHOULDERS award.

The only way to win the global war on terrorism and end the fighting in Iraq is to stop groups of disaffected men from being willing to die to strike a blow against the United States, the commanding general of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command said Tuesday.

--source

DELAY WATCH

http://www.dccc.org/hos_get_involved/abramoff_talking_points

DELAY WATCH

Tom DeLay threatens to sue any station that runs a new ad connecting him to the Abramoff scandal.

from josh marshall

the start of the end?

Israel is updating plans for a pre-emptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities which could be launched as soon as the end of March, according to military and intelligence sources.

from the herald

the liberal media and the conman president

After TP raised the issue last week, a WP editorial offers a red flag on the "signing statement" that Bush offered to the McCain anti-torture amendment suggesting the administration does not consider itself bound by the law.

[The White House] is explicitly reserving the right to abuse prisoners, while denying them any opportunity to seek redress in court. Having publicly accepted the ban on cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, Mr. Bush is planning to ignore it whenever he chooses.

Number of news stories the Post, NYT, USAT, LAT, and WSJ devoted to the signing statement: one—and that's being generous.

wanna know what started the insurgency?

how about this (from the Washington Post):

In an article published this week in the Army magazine Military Review, British Brig. Nigel Aylwin-Foster, who was deputy commander of a program to train the Iraqi military, said American officers in Iraq displayed such "cultural insensitivity" that it "arguably amounted to institutional racism" and may have spurred the growth of the insurgency.

something to remember this election cycle

A front-page Post piece notices that the two candidates vying to become House majority leader have both been plenty tight with lobbyists. Rep. Roy Blunt, R.-Mo., current substitute House Majority Leader, once tried to sneak into a bill a provision that would have benefited Phillip Morris, which his then girlfriend was a lobbyist for. The other guy, Rep. John A. Boehner, R.-Ohio, once gave legislators checks from the tobacco industry while on the House floor.

alito is a bore

The Post's Dana Milbank quantifies the combined effect of the senators speechifying and Alito's lengthy legal evasions: "By midafternoon, only 28 of the 130 seats in the press section were occupied, and not all of those seated had their eyes open."

Quote of the Day

from josh marshall:

But that's not the problem in Washington. The problem is a network of criminal activity stretching from the House of Representatives (and, to a lesser degree, the Senate) to K Street and then into the Executive Branch -- a network of bribery, money-laundering and fraud all aimed at selling public policy and official actions not in exchange for political contributions but money rewards to members of Congress, administration officials and their families.

Letter Of The Day

Time magazine has named Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono as "people of the year" for their work trying to end world poverty and disease. In my opinion, Bill, Melinda and Bono exemplify Christian behavior, unlike those who call themselves Christians and spend their time trying to deny rights of those of whom they do not approve.

-John Ousterhout, Windsor Heights.

attribution

how NOT to win a war

when you're trying to win the hearts and minds of people, you don't go into mosques and tear up the place, spray painting crosses on cupboards. you just don't do that and expect any kind of respect in return.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. troops, some in helicopters, launched a pre-dawn raid on Sunday on the headquarters of the influential Sunni Arab Muslim Clerics' Association and detained six people in what they said was an anti-terrorist operation.
---
In one room, cupboards used to store the shoes of those attending prayers had what appeared to be Christian crosses scrawled on them. Other footage showed papers strewn on office floors and windows smashed.

--source

Letter Of The Day

If there is one thing the modern secular mind claims to be certain of about morality, it is that no one can really be certain about morality. If there is one thing about religious believers that is utterly incomprehensible to most of the media, public education and journalism today, it is the fact that believers claim they can know what is really, truly good and evil.

Typically, modern people say that morality is a complex issue. G.K. Chesterton explained why: "Morality is always terribly complicated — to a man who has lost all his principles."

—Roger Smith, Waterloo.

attribution