^You obviously don't understand moral authority. I can't believe it, but this is starting to sound like, "our party's scandals are not as bad as your party's scandals." I don't care what party they belong to: a dirtball is a dirtball.

...and I'm sorry I stooped to the level of partisan politics. This post just sucked me in. You've got neverending rationalizations and excuses for everyone in your party, don't you? You're right, some of the examples I gave were a few years back, but my point is that they're still active/in office.

I think Sanford should be run out of town, just like all of the dirtbags we're talking about. Sure, we've all got our own issues, but if you don't have your personal affairs in order then you shouldn't be in office. One doesn't accedentally cheat on his/her spouse. That's a pre-meditated offense. It should NOT be acceptable for somebody in office to lack integrity, regardless of who is directly effected by their sins/crimes/mistakes.

If they can't be trusted with something as simple as 'don't cheat on your wife,' and it's pretty easy NOT to cheat on your wife, then I don't want 'em! Saying "At least it was better than Iran-Contra" does not make it okay.

From YT: http://liebermanmustgo.com

Joe Lieberman has launched consistent, deeply partisan attacks on President-elect Barack Obama, questioning his patriotism and fitness to lead. While Lieberman campaigned for John McCain and spoke on his behalf at the Republican National Convention, he spread some of the GOP's nastiest smears. Think Progress has provided thorough evidence of Lieberman's partisan politics. Lieberman should not be allowed to have subpoena power to investigate the Obama administration as chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. In fact, he should not be allowed to remain chairman of this or any other committee.

Lieberman has proven he cannot be trusted to hold a high rank within the Democratic caucus. That is why we launched Lieberman Must Go last summer, a campaign that caught Congress' attention when we delivered a petition with over 43,000 signatures. Now, we ask you to help us escalate the pressure by contacting members of the Senate Democratic Steering Committee. Tell them to strip Lieberman of his chairmanship in the Democratic caucus.

We have included a sample script and phone numbers below for you to use, and we ask that you be polite when you explain why Lieberman Must Go.

Start making calls: http://liebermanmustgo.com

where to begin... i am tempted to be drawn into qm's debate here, but i fear i can't contribute anything convincing (certainly to him) other than more fuel to flame with.

i did, however, want to stress that the housing and credit crisis currently goes so far beyond fannie and freddie and partisan politics that it really should not ever be invoked to argue against dems/republicans. to do so just shows an incomplete understanding, and it's inappropriate to try to pin this on party negligence or willful government harm. it's mostly hinged on nonfeasance (sec/greenspan), unfettered greed, as well as the mortage borrowers borrowing more than they could from lenders lending more than they should.

anyways, my real comment was that powell makes a decent point about taxes: they have to be collected. you have to hire a janitor to clean the toilets or they'd never be done... i'm sure everyone can talk about cleaning toilets better than "uncle sam's janitorial service", but that's not the point. it just so happens that of the 20$/hr paid to "uncle sam's janitorial service", about 5$ goes to cleaning the toilets. the other 15$ goes to brass knuckles for the janitors or whatever. it's a silly analogy. there's bureaucratic waste, but it's not 80% inefficient as qm suggests -- i don't know where that figure comes from. the inefficiency is secondary to the poor allocation of funds; namely, the lack of reinvestment in infrastructure, the superfluous military spending, and now trillions for banks in combined capital injections and loan guarantees.

i honestly just hope obama (since mccain is not specific about his plans for significant change aside from just vocalizing that sentiment), should he be elected, delivers on enough of his campaign talking points. i mean... what then? what if good shit happens? we really need, as a nation, to figure out how to pull out of this nose dive in order to even contemplate competing with china and india in the world scene.

and seriously, if you don't believe in global warming, you sure as hell should believe in our loss of superpower status enough to want to reclaim it.

It's amazing how much stuff like this they can get away with, and any attempts to bring them to account for it are slapped down as "partisan politics". There's no doubt democrats would be the biggest ones gunning for it, but at what point should the rest of us stop looking the other way?

Of course he's liberal, but nothing he said in those links was wrong.

The 2nd link had it right...

"Bill Moyers is, as Dan Rather would say - a partisan political operative, cloaked in the auspices of a journalist taking tax money from the public against the will of the majority."

...my point all along.

And last time I checked, Fox news and the reactionary "new media" aren't taking over. Huffington Post, CrooksAndLiars.com, and Daily Kos each have more hits per day than Free Republic, National Review, or Michelle Malkin. Huffington Post gets more hits than MM, NR, and Freep combined times 3. Slate.com, which is definitely to the left of Fox, gets more hits than MM, NR, and Freep combined, but half as much as Huffington Post. TheDailyShow.com gets 10 times as many hits as billoreilly.com. This is all from Alexa.

The miracle is there's any center/right-of-center content at all. Coming full circle, 20 years ago Moyers wouldn't have to deal with any resistance. The ratings/numbers aren't a big deal, sensationalism versus truth.

Thanks for writing. I appreciate your willingness to debate and/or offer an alternative point of view to my alternative point of view. haha!

Yes jwray.. the neocons have control of the conservative party now.. as you can see by this neocon candidate that has been nominated. I agree he makes a great puppet president like Bush. The paleoconservatives have been pushed out... as have the non-neoliberals... It's all CFR candidates in the spotlight now... I can't choose between 3 neocon/neoliberal candidates... it's pathetic. They're all of the same cut. Go play partisan politics though.. as if it really mattered.

>> ^SDGundamX:
Unfortunately, our legislators aren't lawyers in most cases and craft laws with vague language or gigantic loopholes. In those cases the courts wind up having to decide how to effectively carry out the law in practice. And that's where the politics come into play.

Well put.

I just absolutely hate that the legality of torture has somehow turned into just another "partisan political issue."

Sit yourself down to the partisan politics dinner table.. for you are being served!



Divide and conquer.

1) Germany killed 6 million Jews, many of which were from Prague. If there is any justification for zero tolerance on anti-semitism, that would be it. In principle, I agree with you.

2) I've got no gripes with the reporting here. If convicted, this is not right.

3) There is a big difference between being charged with a crime and being found guilty. If this guy is convicted, then you have a story, and I agree with you. Otherwise, he is innocent until proven guilty and this story is nothing more than agit-prop.

4) Welcome to the world of the protester. I know several protesters who have been arrested and it's not a big deal. It's an expected part of the protest experience and more common than you think. I would guess that these particular protesters probably got better treatment than most protesters (no tear gas, riot police, tazer guns or billy clubs). The 45 years thing is pure bullshit, and who ever told that to you was trying to manipulate you. If any of these protesters spend a single day in prison beyond their initial arrest, I will eat my hat.

In general, political fringe news sites such as World Net Daily, Raw Story, Human Events Online, etc. are not the best source material. They just aren't trustworthy. There are plenty of respected partisan political publications that you can source if you must, such as the conservative 'National Review' or the liberal 'Nation', but citing WND is only going to make people dismiss your views as flat out BS. It's better to stick to sources with wide and varied readership. It lessens the echo chamber effect.

As for 'http://www.romea.cz', if the site looks like a tripod homepage, no one is going to buy it.

If you can't find a good source for something, I wouldn't blog about it. Just sayin'

If you want a good case on thought crime that has been well covered and analyzed from many perspectives, google 'Jose Padilla'.

I respect your opinions, but this post seems like the kind of vague agit-prop I used to get from conservative relatives (before I started making my rebuttals re: all. ). You are better than this, Eric.

Tedbater wrote: "If she's elected...I'm leaving the county.

Don't know if this will make it on LiberalSift...but we'll see..."

Yes, she is a piece of crap... she takes her orders from the same power hungry people that all of the other CFR candidates and the Bush's and administration appointees are a part of.

If any of you believe this left vs. right slander party, then you are as gullible as a lemming. This rivaly.. this division of the people of the US is exactly what they prey upon.

Divide and Conquer is the saying, isn't it?

This being said, I advise you to not trust these CFR candidates. Left or Right. They have the same ultimate agenda. America's sovereignty will be destroyed if they are allowed to persist. You've been warned, but from what I've seen in the past, you will not heed the warning. Many would sell out their own country while waving the flag it seems. It's a shame. We were given something great and it seems it may all be for nothing if the law of the land is ripped apart by the Neo "Libs" and the Neo "Cons".

The only party I can possibly trust are the Libertarians. The other candidates seem to prey on your desire for entertainment. It's pathetic.

Yesterday I posted a video of Giuliani giving a medal to Rockefeller - which had created and controlled the CFR and Trilateral just to name a few and was one of the top advisors to the Bilderberg meetings (Hillary also attended these). Not a single person voted on it even though these were words right out of the ex-mayor of NYC during 9/11... the same one that shipped the remains of the WTC to Communist China under armed guard. Not a single person voted on this. Was it because it was so blatently obvious? I think it's fear.

^upvote to save this pathetic display of partisan politics.

No problem, and sorry I got a bit pissed off about it. I shouldn't have, I just get tired of the process I guess. Every time I start in a new place I've got to convince a new group that I'm neither left nor right, conservative nor liberal. I'm pretty fed up with partisan politics in general and just down to checking the results and going with what works. Checking the results we don't seem to do much these days, on any side.

It's not that I don't like or trust this guy in particular, it's more than this is the way the process works these days. Tax breaks for the rich were sold under claims of foreclosed farms due to inheritance tax. Problem was that when asked to source or prove it they couldn't come up with a single example. None.

Iraq was sold as self defense, people today still argue that it was bad intelligence rather than lies but don't bother to explain things like how Curveball turned from a source we had never properly met and those who did handle said was mentally unstable, but when Powell spoke to the UN the info he gave was that the single source had turned into a claim of multiple sourced and confirmed.

We've got media consolidation, was supposed to increase the variety of programming but what we ended up with is 200 channels of garbage that all looks the same and is all run out of the same dozen or so corporate offices. We think what we think these days because for the last few decades some of those most in need of being controlled themselves controlled our only means of news and communication.

We've got the drug war, who could argue that? At least at first, it was about protecting the kids after all. After a 6 times growth in the prison/jail population that's now left us as the single most imprisoned nation in the world both per capita and in raw numbers with a 6-8 times *increase* in the death rates of cocaine and heroin, now things aren't so clear anymore.

We're too easily impressed by ideas that *sound* good and we don't watch the details, again and again we end up wishing that we had watched them. In the early 1900's psychology found its way into advertising and after the politicians found how well it worked it found its way into politics as well, these days manipulation is most of what both "sides" do. Even the supposed good guys have to play the game simply because the other side does, eventually all are corrupted by the process. Watch the details, they don't mention too much that they really should and hide one aspect behind others. If overseas action is the only or even main goal here then why is it expected to "obliterate" Posse Comitatus?

It shouldn't be there, period. The rest I didn't have a problem with, just that angle, and for foreign use I see no reason for it to be there in the first place. If he thinks it should be then he's got to explain it better than that and define any limits that would remain. Obliterated doesn't imply any left. Posse Comitatus restricts the use of the military against American citizens, we're going to need better reasons to get rid of it I'd think. Even if we trusted him and how he wants to use it, he isn't going to control it. Bush will, Hillary will, or whoever comes after them will.

It's not a matter of can we trust this individual with it. It's a matter of can we trust the worst we can expect to hold that office with it and are there appropriate checks in place to stop abuse. That's why in the past it required Congressional approval, but we're chipping those checks away. Precedent isn't partisan and once we allow a line to be crossed a little bit we have less reason to stop them from crossing it at all. The law is as much precedent as what's on the books and we've been setting some bad ones. Yeah, it does worry me, the future of this nation isn't bright the direction we're going these days.

Thanks for posting this. I feel that more people need to become aware of how the Bush administration has granted itself powers far exceeding those explicitly allowed in the United States Constitution.

It goes well beyond the details of this video clip, as disturbing as this is. While many of us focus on the slight-of-hand squabbles of partisan politics (oversimplified red state vs blue state ideologies) and inane pop culture nonsense, the constitutional foundations and principles of the U.S. are being trampled upon by a small group of highly motivated individuals who do not appear to hold traditional Republican values.

The Bush presidency has recently and with little media attention, granted itself extraordinary authority without congressional approval or oversight. The "National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive" was signed May 9th, 2007. It contains the following directives:
National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD-51
Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-20

Combine this grab for power with George W. Bush's extensive, unparalleled and unchecked use of signing statements, his administration's history of disregarding outside intelligence sources in favor of its own sources, and tendency for absolutist world views, and I feel there is a frightening possibility that we will see a dramatic event orchestrated by the administration to avoid relinquishing the presidency via democratic elections in 2008. I suspect that our best hope for avoiding such an outcome will come primarily from Republicans who have grown weary of the neo-conservative agenda.

My intention is not to inflame. Please consider reading as much as you can about these issues from as many sources as possible.

BicycleRepairMan is right.

QM's main prerogative is to muddle the argument, bringing factors that have nothing to do with the discussion to throw it off to the deep end and create another polarizing affair. With people like that you don't get fair and rational discussion or debate, you get partisan politics. I say that because for all the times he says we are the Chomskysift and the leftist PC pinko liberal whatever he still keeps coming back because he just likes to stir up shit by saying ridiculous things. Like Ann Coulter.

As for Iran, it's anti-American because of American involvement in installation of the Shah of Iran by the CIA of which the CIA itself said it would receive 'blow back', the covert word for "It will come and bit us in the ass one day". Blowback.

Bush receives the treatment because he deserves it AND NOT THROUGH A MAINSTREAM MEDIA unless he really really fucks up. Clinton is receiving it because Fox was attempting to set a political agenda through the interview and elections are fast approaching... Fox takes any and all shots at known democrats to attempt to alleviate pressure on the republicans and the Bush administration. Remember the battle against Chrismas? Completely orchestrated by Fox News in order to turn the cameras away from the administration.

Not to mention that Clinton was arbitrarily ambushed, the interview was NOT ABOUT his anti-terror policy, rather his humanitarian initiative. He may have looked prepared but I will guarantee you that he wasn't. Would Fox ever do that to Bush or anyone in the republican party? Hell no. The reporter continually interupted him which of course would make Clinton angry, it would make my blood boil to be interupted while attempting to answer a question, and that was what half of this piece was about, him not being able to control his temper and being an "angry democrat". They said that Clinton was beating or whatever in this piece, but he still answered the questions well and was able to prove that he did do things, and more things than the current administration pre 9/11. Was this mentioned at all? no...

Don't attempt to pull moveon.org and other partisan political interest groups to justify Fox's right journalism because there are just as many if not more interest groups for the republicans. News organisations like CNN and MSNBC might lean one way or the other, but they don't feed viewers propaganda which Fox does. Also you seem to be very naive in what a majority of democrats or a moderates are. I'll speak on my ideology (moderate). I don't care where the news comes from so long as it isn't slanted and the viewer is able to recognize bias, it is very easy to do this while watching CNN and MSNBC, reading the New York Times, New York Post, whatever. But whenever I turn on fox news or read the washington post I see them indirectly and sometimes directly saying that John Kerry or X canidate will create chaos as president without ANY BACKING, or NCLB has outstanding results and enough funding, just opinionated or false statements pushed as facts. It has come to the point where I will not believe any publication of Fox news as fact or if the ISSUES ARE EVEN RELEVANT... I do not represent the majority of individuals (as the ratings and lack of a party show) but all that does is show the oppression of democracy because I end up with a president that a majority of retards voted for.

"I'd argue that people wouldn't know the pure truth if it ran up and smacked them in the face, because while the truth doesn't have a bias to it, people waste an incredible amount of time trying to find one if it doesn't agree with their world view."
I'm assuming "it" refers to truth or the status quo? I'll assume the status quo as "trying to find truth if truth doesn't agree with their world view." doesn't make sense. If you have that little faith in people's intellect why are you defending Fox news which so obviously distorts reality and creates more ignorance?

I don't think you can criticize Jon for not "holding Kerry's feet to the fire". Did you watch that interview? He usually goes into things regarding these issues (meaning politics) with one key thing to find out about, or get across. On Crossfire that key thing was bi-partisan politics is not good for getting things done. It causes deceptions and focuses on winning the House and Senate etc. and gaining control for THE PARTY not for THE PEOPLE. On the Kerry interview he did try to get something out of him. I think his key point for that interview was showing that "Flip-flopping" is always not a bad thing. It shows rethinking, and it shows consideration of topics and watching for changes in knowledge. But he did try to do this without really putting Kerry ahead and making his appearance just a free TV spot for campaigning. He did his share of keeping Kerry from Bush-Bashing. Kerry tried a few times, also to push his own agenda if he was elected president. He's been campaigning, so he very easily can slip into it :-P Jon picked up on it and stopped it.

As for tgeffeney's comment: he makes fun of partisan chicanery, and exposes it. And he makes fun of it in use by both parties. Watch his shows and other public appearances and you'll see that. He is a very large promoter of killing bipartisanship, as am I. Maybe that's why I like him so much :-) To be honest, I know he would never do it, but if he ran for a public office, I'd vote for him. He knows he hasn't got the skills he may need, and knows that the parties will chew him up and spit him out, but he has a level head, and an honest heart. Watch him. He admits his mistakes and he says when he thinks he's made a wrong choice. Politicans dont do that, and they should.

sorry for the long post. This is something I'm passionate about.