This is a reminder of what the former Administration said -- just look around and see where that got us, and the size of the mess it created for the current Administration, for the nation and for the world:

Isn't it time for a little accountability, some legal investigation and some accountability?

A diary @ dailykos asks several key questions of Mitch McConell who stated

"the key to a bipartisan bill is not to have a government plan in the bill."

But, before you read The Unmitigated Gall of Mitch 'The Public Option is a Problem' McConnell!, readers should watch a discussion among Bill Moyers and guests Dr. Sidney Wolfe and Dr. David Himmelstein (full transcript here).

Watch the entire interview because, on the whole, it's a mind-blower making bluntly clear why Sen. Max Baucus invited NO single-payer advocates to discuss reform options:

It just cannot pass. We can't squander this opportunity. We can't spend - we can't waste capital on something that's just impossible.

Bill Moyers answers his rhetorical question of why no single-payer advocates testified to Baucus' Roundtable immediately, despite change promised in a clip of State Senator Obama, once we 'take back the White House', Senate and House: "I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care plan."

Moyers is clear:

A quick look at this panel of witnesses appearing before the Senate Finance Committee, it tells you all you need to know. The Business Roundtable. The U.S. Chamber Of Commerce. The conservative Heritage Foundation. Representatives of the insurance industry, including Blue Cross Blue Shield - all in favor, more or less, of the status quo.

After I heard Obama's speech in New Mexico, recently, I accepted in his argument of the difficulty that would result from presumably displacing one-sixth of the economy in moving to become a single-payer nation. But the Moyers' guests tell a very different story, of a nation very much like our own including exactly the same insurance companies, for example, that made the transition to a CHEAPER, more reliable health care system that covers a much greater portion of the population.

CANADA

Just a few of what I found to be the mind-blowing points in discussion follow.

BILL MOYERS: I've heard you say that several times. I've read you're saying it. We can do away with the health industry.I mean, them's fightin' words, a very powerful part of the economy, and they're a powerful part of the political statute, as David said.

[continued]

BENEATH THE SPIN • ERIC L. WATTREE

Wikileaks servers are overloaded and cannot operate. They recently posted a secret list of a proposed banned sites.

According to Forbes, the scope of Australia's internet censorship has developed far beyond its initial aim to block child pornography and web pages associated with terrorism. Free speech advocates fear it could be used to block legitimate activity.

Wikileaks recently published a complete list of the proposed blacklist sites currently under review in Australia, under the guise of protecting the people of Australia from child pornography.  The Australian government has issued a statement calling the list a fake and threatening action against Wikileaks.  Wikileaks is standing behind the list's authenticity and has issued a statement informing the Australian government of their full rights to publish the list as well as a promise to pursue legal action against anyone attempting to censor Wikileaks.

Is the United States of America the world's largest dealer of illegal drugs?  What about the world's largest gun runner?  For years our government has used the CIA, NSA & other super-secret 'intelligence' agencies to cultivate drug harvest and distribution in SE Asia and Afghanistan.  We offer 'aid' and 'trade' to countries in the forms of weapons and ammunition.  The drugs come home to the US to poison and kill our own population.  The weapons we sell are used either against us directly by people to kill others, who then seek to kill Americans.  Did the founding fathers envision a country that would become the world's largest debtor and blood merchant?

Image courtesy of cesr.org

This post begins a series to recognize people that speak about the world in terms of what they observe and what they can prove.  Their voices stand out in the crowd.  In their words, they speak not of fantasy, delusion and rationalization.  Instead, they utilize the gifts of human cognition, awareness to observe what is here in the world around us.  They are not dogmatic, but analytic and take in the world 'warts & all' for what it is and what it is not.  They do not separate humankind from nature in any form of grandeur.  In short, they look at things the way they really are and not what we would have them be.

Note: The term 'reality' is subjective because of differing perspectives from one person to another.  Our individual experiences with language, sensory perception and associative cognition all conspire to individuate and isolate us from each other.  The differences can range from miniscule to incomprehensible. 

Then, there are shared agreements of 'reality' that occur nonetheless.  We can look at a mass grave and all agree that there are dead people there.

Given all of this, it's a wonder we communicate at all.

On to Arundhati Roy.  I first learned of her this year.  John Cusack quoted her in this article about his film "War, Inc." 

White Paper Justifying Iraq War Written Three Months before Intel Report Arrived

A war based on deception and fraud Worldpassion cc

From Media Matters:

_____

In June 5 reports on CNN's The Situation
Room and Fox News' Special Report, CNN correspondent Carol Costello, CNN White House correspondent Ed Henry, and Special Report host Brit Hume falsely suggested that only the Democratic members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence approved the committee's June 5 "Report on Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information." In fact, the report had bipartisan support: Republican Sens. Chuck Hagel (NE) and Olympia Snowe (ME) endorsed the report and stated that it "accomplished its primary objective." As Costello noted, the report concluded that "the Bush administration misused intelligence to build its case [for war in Iraq] in 2003 and misled Americans about links between Iraq and Al Qaeda."

_____

Aren't we getting a little old for this?

Hasn't enough blood been spilled while people play their games of misinformation and propaganda, just to score political points and win the ability to commit even more heinous crimes on our watch?

This is exactly the sort of poor, inaccurate and untruthful information that explains why the traditional media is losing ground to blogs, and it helps explain the growing support and popularity behind the rise of the blogosphere and citizen journalists.

by avahome, greyhawk, luaptifer & roxy

Back on August 8th, 2006 luaptifer brought us the story HACKED! Lies, Lieberman and Message-mongering -- a look at the "hacking" of joe2006.com. Now, the FBI has concluded the same thing the netroots concluded a year and a half ago.

Originally posted 2008-03-14 01:58:36 -0600

The "Iraqi Perspectives Project - Phase II" is up for your reading pleasure:

ABC News has requested and obtained a copy of the Pentagon study which shows Saddam Hussein had no links to Al Qaeda.

(READ THE FULL REPORT HERE.)

It's government report the White House didn't want you to read: yesterday the Pentagon canceled plans to send out a press release announcing the report's availability and didn't make the report available via email or online.

Based on the analysis of some 600,000 official Iraqi documents seized by US forces after the invasion and thousands of hours of interrogations of former officials in Saddam's government now in US custody, the government report is the first official acknowledgment from the US military that there is no evidence Saddam had ties to al Qaeda.

This is priceless: originally linked to here (no longer available) by Eric's Learning Curve blog, the post dated November 11, 2005 quotes an excerpt from Norman Podhoretz's piece Who Is Lying About Iraq? -- and guess what?

Among the many distortions, misrepresentations, and outright falsifications that have emerged from the debate over Iraq, one in particular stands out above all others. This is the charge that George W. Bush misled us into an immoral and/or unnecessary war in Iraq by telling a series of lies that have now been definitively exposed.

He was wrong -- surprising?

...no, not really.

As for the lies that took us to war, those are now very well documented, thank-you-very-much.

So, does this mean Norman Podhoretz is as smart as William Kristol...?

From here:

"Don't let the quiet fool you," a senior defense official says. "There's still a huge chasm between how the White House views Iraq and how we [in the Pentagon] view Iraq. The White House would like to have you believe the 'surge' has worked, that we somehow defeated the insurgency. That's just ludicrous. There's increasing quiet in Iraq, but that's happened because of our shift in strategy - the 'surge' had nothing to do with it."

It must suck for the WH and their pundits to have the walls of false reality come crashing down around their heads.

An article in the Washington Post tonight caught my eye, almost simultaneous with the eye-catching (and popping) article from Norman Podhoretz that I'll get to in a minute. Army Off Target on Recruits, by Josh White, starts off with an interesting blurb:

The percentage of new recruits entering the Army with a high school diploma dropped to a new low in 2007, according to a study released yesterday, and Army officials confirmed that they have lowered their standards to meet high recruiting goals in the middle of two ongoing wars.

So, this means that as the Army fails to get the numbers of fresh bodies it needs going into the Iraq meatgrinder, it lowers the standards in order to expand the net and capture more folks -- folks who would not have formerly qualified.

Via PrgrsvArchitect on a comment over in a DailyKos Open Thread, here:

Just out from the Center for Public Integrity

http://www.publicintegrity.org/...

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.

On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush administration's case for war.

President Bush, for example, made 231 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and another 28 false statements about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda. Secretary of State Powell had the second-highest total in the two-year period, with 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda. Rumsfeld and Fleischer each made 109 false statements, followed by Wolfowitz (with 85), Rice (with 56), Cheney (with 48), and McClellan (with 14).

The massive database at the heart of this project juxtaposes what President Bush and these seven top officials were saying for public consumption against what was known, or should have been known, on a day-to-day basis. This fully searchable database includes the public statements, drawn from both primary sources (such as official transcripts) and secondary sources (chiefly major news organizations) over the two years beginning on September 11, 2001. It also interlaces relevant information from more than 25 government reports, books, articles, speeches, and interviews.

Heh. Right from the horses ass mouth primary oratory orifice.

The scandal over the CIA torture tapes continues to spin. Over on DailyKos, several articles with good insights, particularly this one by gchaucer. Over here, clammyc's commentary and several by Jeff Huber lead the way, and emptywheel over at TheNextHurrah has some excellent stuff.

Here's a little more fuel for the fire -- an interview between an apparently defensive Bush and Matt Lauer.

Note how well Bush prevaricates, dissembles and obfuscates.

Just a little more after the jump.