Roll Roundup: Friday Edition

post from Moue Magazine on 08 February 2008 01:06:00 PM. © Moue Magazine

It’s ‘Roll Roundup Time!Ice Station Tango links to a Action Alert for people to protest 60 Minutes’ pulled broadcast on Rove enemy Don Siegelman. “Can John McCain Be Stopped?” wonders Jon Swift.Did you know that there were a[...]

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Danny Schechter: What is the change we can
believe in Candidates cannot downplay America's economic pain

post from BuzzFlash.org - Progressive News and Commentary with an Attitude | Fight Ignorance: Read BuzzFlash on 08 February 2008 01:03:31 PM. © BuzzFlash.org - Progressive News and Commentary with an Attitude | Fight Ignorance: Read BuzzFlash

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Danny Schechter
Mediachannel.org

I have something in common with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. We had all been engaged in community organizing.

The college-age Hillary Clinton wrote her senior thesis on a community organizer named Saul Alinsky, a brilliant grassroots strategist, the author of a small-d democratic manifesto called Reveille for Radicals. The thesis was later defensively removed from circulation when right-wing attackers tried to use it as part of full-court-press Clinton bashing. She writes admiringly of Alinsky but criticizes his approach as anachronistic, affirming the need to work in the system, not outside of it. No surprise. (Ironically, her academic advisor was a professor named Alan Schechter, a namesake, not a relative.)

Bookmark/Search this post with: buzzflash | delicious | digg digg | technorati Technorati Tags: Guest Contribution Danny Schechter 2008 race Hillary Clinton Barack Obama economy Saul Alinsky Cesar Chavez

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Olbermann named Dobbs "Worst Person" for saying
ADL is "a joke"

post from Media Matters for America on 08 February 2008 12:59:36 PM. © Media Matters for America

On the February 7 edition ofMSNBC's Countdown, hostKeith Olbermann named CNN host Lou Dobbs the "winner" of hisnightly "Worst Person in the World" segment for calling theAnti-Defamation League (ADL) a "joke," as Media Matters for America documented. Olbermann stated:"[N]ow he's [Dobbs] going after the ADL, the Anti-DefamationLeague, founded in 1913, still a bastion against anti-Semitism and for civil rights.In an exchange with a guest, Dobbs says, 'The ADL is' -- the guestsays, 'They're a very[...]

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Bill Clinton: Playing With Words Again

post from Connecting.the.Dots on 08 February 2008 12:59:00 PM. © Connecting.the.Dots

"I think the mistake that I made is to think that I was a spouse like any other spouse who could defend his candidate," Bill Clinton told a TV reporter in Maine today. "I think I can promote Hillary but not defend her because I was president. I have to let her defend herself or have someone else defend her."

We are back to the meaning-of-is era with the former president redefining the charges and evading answers. In the uproar over his behavior on the campaign trail, no one begrudged him the right to "defend" his wife.

What was in question was his distortion of Barack Obama's anti-war positions ("fairy tale") and his attempt to pass off Sen. Clinton's loss as a racial aberration by citing Jesse Jackson previous victories in South Carolina.

Her campaign has promised a new, improved Bill Clinton, but apparently we will get only the post-Monica version, admitting nothing and still trying to slide away from the consequences of his behavior.

The good news, for what it's worth, is the chastened former President's promise to keep a low profile if Mrs. Clinton is elected.

"I will do what I'm asked to do," he said today. "I will not be in the Cabinet. I will not be on the staff full-time. I will not in any way interfere with the work of a strong vice president, strong secretary of State, strong secretary of Treasury."

But that leaves out Chief of Staff, Press Secretary and a lot of other Cabinet positions.

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Bill Clinton: Playing

post from Connecting.the.Dots on 08 February 2008 12:59:00 PM. © Connecting.the.Dots

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Dems Brace for the Long Haul

post from OutrageNation on 08 February 2008 12:47:00 PM. © OutrageNation

A new OutrageRadio podcast recapping Super Tuesday and looking ahead to the long hard slog to the nomination

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Alex's book hits the news stands next week. It's
about Iraq.

post from AMERICAblog: A great nation deserves the truth on 08 February 2008 12:47:00 PM. © AMERICAblog: A great nation deserves the truth

As you may have heard, our own contributing editor AJ "Alex" Rossmiller has a book coming out next week, from a Random House subsidiary, about the war in Iraq. Even more interesting, he's writing it from his vantage point as a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer, working in the Iraq office during the war, and then working in Iraq itself for 7 months or so. Alex joined the Pentagon as one of the post-9/11 generation, motivated by the attacks to serve his country. His disillusionment with that service is the topic of his book. As you all know, Alex is a great, measured, thoughtful and interesting (and even wryly amusing) writer, and Joe and I are just thrilled that a subsidiary of Random House, no less, picked up his book.

So, this is just to give you a heads up that the book is coming out next week. We're going to try to do a big push to sell the book right when it comes out, to help Alex's ranking on Amazon, so no links to the book yet, please :-) And for any media types out there, I think Alex and his book could make a really interesting interview - former Defense intelligence officer comes clean with how the administration mis-handled the intelligence surrounding the war, and in the process disillusioned a new generation of Americans. You can contact AJ, as he goes by, directly at AJamericablog (at) gmail.com

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Air Force Academy Criticized For Hosting
Terrorism Experts With False Claims

post from Crooks and Liars on 08 February 2008 12:46:18 PM. © Crooks and Liars

This story just reeks of propaganda and a sneaky agenda. The article mentions that these consultants were paid in part from private donations, and it would be interesting to know just who that is, because I have a feeling that would make clear the agenda working here. I just hate how fundamentally dishonest this [...]

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-terrorism-experts-with-false-claims/

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A Tortured Explanation From The White House

With the White House confirming that torture is the official policy of the United States, their explantions and rationalizations are nothing less than torturous...in a non-organ-failing-death kind of way.

Let's start with how many people have been tortured in our name:

Q General Hayden confirmed yesterday that the CIA subjected three terrorist suspects to waterboarding...Would you tell us if there were other instances where interrogators used that technique?

MR. FRATTO: I think General Hayden in his testimony yesterday limited it to the three terrorist suspects that he mentioned.

In press secretary-ese, the words "I think," and "limited it to," can be translated as, "that's all we're admitting to at this time."

And will waterboarding be used in the future? Apparently only on a need-to-torture basis. But rest assured, there is a process. The CliffNotes version is, a Bush appointee suggests it, a Bush appointee decides if it's legal and then Bush decides if he agrees with his appointees. Then he'll let Congress know that he's ignoring the law, or as Fratto put it, informing them that there's been a "change in the program."

But isn't waterboarding torture and therefore illegal under any circumstances?

MR. FRATTO: Yes, torture is illegal. We don't torture -- we maintain and as we have said many times that the programs have been reviewed, and the Department of Justice has determined them to be legal.

Well, that's what the White House says, but what does a former instructor at the U.S. Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) school, who underwent the process, say?

In my case, the technique was so fast and professional that I didn't know what was happening until the water entered my nose and throat. It then pushed down into the trachea and started the process of respiratory degradation. It is an overwhelming experience that induces horror and triggers frantic survival instincts. As the event unfolded, I was fully conscious of what was happening. I was being tortured.

Who are you going to believe?

But the White House insists that waterboarding is not torture, it is legal, it has garnered valuable information that has saved American lives.

Q So is waterboarding currently authorized?

MR. FRATTO: No, it's not.

And why is that? Well, because it's something you only use "under certain circumstances," and that they "felt at the time was necessary." But it's not torture and it's not illegal. And when asked that, given its origins in the Spanish Inquisition, the five centuries that it's been considered torture, and that the United States itself has prosecuted people for it, why isn't it torture now? Mr. Fratto couldn't say. But doesn't that mean that the Bush administration changed the defintion of torture?

MR. FRATTO: No, I don't think that's the case at all, and I don't think that's the way DOJ would explain it...the Attorney General said was that any use of any enhanced interrogation technique depends on the circumstances: who is carrying out the interrogation; who the target of interrogation is; what the threat environment is; what is the information that you're attempting to seek.

That sounds like situational torture, doesn't it? But no need to worry because this has all been reviewed (a number of times) by the Justice Department. And if there are calls for an investigation, the Justice Department will decide if it's necessary.

Let's review: waterboarding is torture except when it's not, torture is illegal except when the Justice Department says it's not, the administration doesn't torture except when they do, and if anyone has a problem with that, the Justice Department investigate, except that they won't. Got that?

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Blogger responds to O’Reilly, videos
homeless Americans.

Fox News host Bill O’Reilly has repeatedly disputed John Edwards’s claim that there are “100 to 200 homeless Americans” living under a bridge in New Orleans. On Jan. 30, O’Reilly said:

Now, we called the Edwards campaign and asked where exactly is that bridge so we could help those people. … Just tell me where the bridge is. We will help those people. They can’t tell me. OK.

As it turns out, one concerned citizen answered O’Reilly’s request and videotaped those homeless Americans. (Here’s a map of their location.) Hopefully, O’Reilly will live up to his promise to help them, unlike the way he recently snubbed homeless veterans.

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http://thinkprogress.org/2008/02/08/blogger-responds-to-oreilly-videos-homeless-a
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