A few quick hits before I'm out the door

Seems I'm about an hour behind this morning, and it's too nice not to play outside...

Maureen Dowd's got her indignant on, and as usual it looks sexy on her:

This is the fourth exhaustive investigation that has not answered the basic question: How did the White House and Pentagon spin the information and why has no one gotten in trouble for it? If your kid lied and hid stuff from you to do something he thought would be great, then wouldn't admit it and blamed someone else, he'd be punished - even if his adventure worked out all right for him.

When the "values" president and his aides do it, they're rewarded. Condoleezza Rice was promoted to secretary of state. Stephen Hadley, Condi's old deputy, was promoted to national security adviser. Bob Joseph, a national security aide who helped shovel the uranium hooey into the State of the Union address, is becoming an undersecretary of state. Paul Wolfowitz, who painted the takeover of Iraq as such a cakewalk that our troops went in without the proper armor or backup, will run the World Bank. George Tenet, who ran the C.I.A. when al-Qaeda attacked and when Saddam's mushroom cloud gained credibility, got the Medal of Freedom.

And another Republican blogger says it's time for Tom DeLay to go, and lays out the compelling case (yes, most of us know this already, but those with their heads in the sand will find it shocking news). Don't miss the comments, either. And John Zogby via the Houston Chronic gives La Cucaracha Grande the bad polling news.

A post about rotisserie baseball

...so if you're looking for something on Tom DeLay, scroll down (or wait a few minutes, because it shouldn't be long before he's in the news again for threatening federal judges or something).

I'm in seven different leagues again this year, and this website has consistently proven to be the most helpful in terms of who's healthy, who's not, who's winning a position coming out of spring training, who's going to close for the Dodgers now that Eric Gagne has gone on the DL, and so on. Unlike most sites of its type, it's also free. But it's the high level of sarcasm that I really enjoy the most. Look at this post about Danny Graves, the Reds closer:

Danny Graves has been wearing vision-enhancing contact lenses.''They help you pick up the ball more easily,'' Graves said. ''Nike makes them. You can see every blade of grass. It's like a picture.''

The benefits of this are obvious for a hitter, but what exactly does it do for a soft-tossing closer, let him see the gopher balls he serves up more clearly?

You gotta love that (even if you own Graves).

Update: From another good site for this sort of thing, Fanball:

Padres pitcher Jake Peavy completed four innings of work against Single-A Lake Elsinore on Saturday. He allowed six hits and three runs and struck out four. Peavy is scheduled to start in the Padres' home opener on Thursday.

No word on if Doug and Bob McKenzie were playing for Lake Elsinore, but that's not really important, eh.

"TRMPAC, in its own words"

The Texas Observer has the story, with screen shots of emails, brochures, checks, and memos detailing the election law violations, as well as the PAC's cozy ties to La Cucaracha Grande:

Maloney also relates in his e-mails that he will be delivering "2 checks from Reliant" to "TD" (Tom DeLay). The circumstances under which DeLay sealed the Reliant deal earned him a rebuke from the U.S. House ethics committee in 2004. In early June 2002, DeLay held a two-day golf tournament at the Homestead resort in Hot Springs, Virginia. The cost of attending the event was a corporate contribution of $25,000 to $50,000. Five energy companies were invited by Maloney to attend: El Paso Corp., Mirant, Reliant Energy, Westar Energy, and Williams Companies. (DeLay's dealings with Westar would earn a separate rebuke from the committee.) The golfing took place just before a House-Senate conference on an omnibus energy bill. (It's understandable why, four months later, Maloney would complain about Reliant's tardiness.) The Homestead event was supposed to benefit equally TRMPAC and DeLay's Americans for a Republican Majority (ARMPAC), according to an e-mail from an ARMPAC staffer to TRMPAC's accountant.

The Majority Leader has insisted that there was no relationship between the solicited money and any actions to influence the legislative process in Congress. Furthermore, DeLay has claimed while lashing out at Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle that he had no more than an advisory role in TRMPAC. Still, it's not hard to see why the Williams Company might be confused about where to send the check and who was in charge.

And Republicans are beginning to acknowledge in unnerved tones that maybe it's time for King Cockroach to go.

Damn, that dripping is getting faster...

Independent Media in a Time of War

Last evening a group of us went to see Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now! speak at the River Oaks Theater here. Over 500 people were in attendance; the event was sold out and it was SRO in the back of the theater. Also speaking was Javier Couso, brother of Jose Couso, the Spanish cameraman killed when a US military tank fired on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad nearly two years ago, who is in the United States to call for an independent investigation into the death of his brother and the prosecution of those responsible. Amy was also preceded by a short documentary with the title above, and the film consists of one of her speeches illustrated with US media coverage of the Iraq war, and occasionally juxtaposed with some rarely-seen footage from independent and foreign reporters in-country. You can see it here if you have RealPlayer and a broadband connection. It's about 30 minutes. There's also a transcript here, along with a link to the video for those on dialup.

I'd like to summarize my thoughts from last night, but it's difficult to do so. You see, things are much, much worse than I thought.

Now most of you reading this are fully aware that the corporate media (sometimes referred to as the MSM, though there's barely anything mainstream remaining about it) has gone bad. In fact it's soured. Curdled. No, come to think of it, it's worse even than that. It's growing black, moldy, fuzzy lily pads. It's gone so bad that it's almost completely worthless. Oh there's a few things worth saving, but we'll talk about those later. For now, we're going to focus on the negative.

And some of you reading this have started to curl your upper lip into a sneer. That's OK; if you can make it to the end of this post it means your mind is still open to the possibility that something has gone seriously wrong in this country, and it's actually not all the fault of the neoconservatives currently in control of all branches of our government. Keep reading, please.

In the documentary, Amy asked the question (in reference to the coverage of the Iraq war): "If there was a state-run media in this country, what would be the difference?"

And after watching Sheperd Smith say "Stay brave, stay aware, and stay with FOX", and Paula Zahn say "We're savoring these pictures" as bombs explode in downtown Baghdad on the first night of 'shock and awe', and a parade of retired generals talk about "rolling up the Republican Guard" and "We're coming, and there's nothing you can do to stop us" as pictures of warplanes and battleships and missles flying into their targets in grainy black-and-white video play, and breathless embedded reporters say, "It's just like a video game"...

... I have to answer, "yes, what would be the difference?"

Javier Cuoso revealed data relating to the attack on the Palestine Hotel, where his brother and hundreds of other journalists -- unimbedded -- were staying (this information being well known to US and coalition forces). For example, I was not aware that there are very specific rules of engagement associated with firing on a known and obvious civilian facility, even if the soldiers perceive a threat. There are high level chain-of command authorizations which must be secured in advance of any action. The military will prosecute harshly breaches in those rules of engagement and breakdowns in the chain-of command.

Usually.

Cuoso said (through an interpreter):

"The recent attack on the Italian journalist shows yet again that the US military has decided that journalists are fair game in Iraq. The Bush administration agreed to a full investigation of the attack on Giuliana Sgrena, so we believe that a full, independent investigation is long overdue into the attack which killed my brother. Then, those responsible should be brought to justice."

Wasn't Eason Jordan fired for saying something like that? Oh that's right, he resigned.

And Amy Goodman spoke for about 45 minutes, keeping the crowd hushed with the story of her experience in East Timor at a protest and subsequent mass execution of the protestors by the Indonesian army in 1998. But she also mentioned the experience of Phil Donahue, whose MSNBC program was cancelled at a time when it was one of the channel's highest rated programs, on March 19, 2003 -- the eve of the Iraqi invasion. (Of course you already knew that MSNBC's parent company, GE, is one of this country's largest defense contractors, right?)

Donahue, one of the few anti-war broadcast voices prior to the beginning of the war, has kept silent about the dismissal for the past two years, but no longer. He related to Amy the gist of the memo he received at the termination of his program two years ago: essentially it said that since the US was going to move ahead with the invasion, that it was important to 'speak with one voice in support of the country'.

If we had state-run media in this country, what would be the difference?

Aaron Brown was asked, in an interview aired on Democracy Now!, why the pictures of the blown-to-bits Iraqis weren't being shown by CNN; his answer was, "They're tasteless." Well, war is tasteless, said Ms. Goodman, in reply. No response from Brown.

Wolf Blitzer, when asked by Jon Stewart if he had any regrets about how the runup to the war was vetted by his network, said: "Haven't you ever made a mistake?"

At one of her speeches in New York, Amy related that al-Jazeera regularly showed pictures and video of Iraqi casualties, and a German journalist approached her afterwards and said, "It's not just al-Jazeera that's showing these. All over Europe we see them day and night. It's just here in the United States that you don't see them."

You see, it's much worse than we thought.

Then again, some people actually like buttermilk. It's simply unhealthy, of course, to drink it every day.

Update: Lyn at the Houston Democrats blog has a take, including pictures.

Whoever did this is going to Hell

This blog is kinda sick, but I must confess that I L'dMAO. So maybe I am, as well.

Chris Bell is THE MAN

The Austin American-Statesman (reg. req.) interviewed potential Democratic gubernatorial candidate Chris Bell; here's some of what he said:

Q. How much money should a Democrat expect to raise to be competitive with the eventual Republican nominee?

A. A lot. Actually, an obscene amount, but let me put it in perspective. We think we need to raise far less than it cost Texas hospitals to provide basic health care in ERs to the uninsured, and about 40 times less than the amount in federal matching funds for children's health insurance we have turned away. It will cost 45 times less than Texas would have saved by reimporting prescription drugs, but almost twice as much as drug companies spend a year for Texas lobbyists. Perhaps worst of all, it's less by a lot than the tuition increases that UT students paid.

You want an exact number? We figure it'll cost as much as the amount of CHIP money that the state auditor said Gov. Rick Perry lost through mismanagement. And I'll wager the governor has no idea how much that is.

Awesome.