Do they just make this stuff up in their sleep or does it come directly from the Cheeny/Murdock offices every morning??

Every time Williams speaks the TOTAL IQ on the set goes from ZERO to ONE and then back down...They are the perfect reason that some of the American public is SO STUPID!

I can't understand why the Republicans don't trust the Constitution on FISA.

I just posted a question on NPR asking why the question of whether or not, if lessened telecom cooperation is the real issue in granting them immunity, the fact that the telecoms pulled the plug, so to speak, because the government didn't pay the bill on time destroys that assertion.

I'll tell you why I don't trust the Bush Administration on FISA. The term "terrorist" is a very vague term and the Bush Administration can label anyone, icluding dissidents or political rivals, with it. The Bush Administration has already proved time and time again that they can not be trusted. Why anyone would think of trusting them now is beyond me.

Why does Juan Williams continue to diminish his reputation by appearing on Fox?

Joe O. @ 8:

I'll tell you why I don't trust the Bush Administration on FISA. The term "terrorist" is a very vague term and the Bush Administration can label anyone, icluding dissidents or political rivals, with it. The Bush Administration has already proved time and time again that they can not be trusted. Why anyone would think of trusting them now is beyond me.

and how has "war" become a vague term now? E.g., "War on Terrorism," "War on Drugs,"
"War on Internet Progessive Bloggers?"

chicano2nd @ 12:

and how has "war" become a vague term now? E.g., "War on Terrorism," "War on Drugs,"
"War on Internet Progessive Bloggers?"

War on our Wallets. Duabi Land needs to be completed.

FOX is State Sponsored TV @ 3:

FOX is State Sponsored TV and Juan Williams is part of it.

Maura is WAY WORSE. Did you hear her downplay Obama's energetic speech and then suggest that McCain's response (regarding platitudes) has merit???

A fun game to play during FNS is to see how many seconds it takes for Brit or Kristol to interrupt Juan.

Brit hold the current record at 3 seconds.

L.A. Confidential @ 9:

Joe O. @ 8:

The Bush Administration has already proved time and time again that they can not be trusted. Why anyone would think of trusting them now is beyond me.

Because it makes them feel "Safe"

That is more than likely true. They probably do feel "safe" under Bush's increasing dicatorial security blanket. However, I do not view Bush's criminal actions against our civil liberties as a security blanket. I view it as an iron curtain.

Joe O. @ 18:

However, I do not view Bush's criminal actions against our civil liberties as a security blanket. I view it as an iron curtain.

Anyone with any sense of individuality left would feel the same way. I agree.

L.A. Confidential @ 7:

People have forgotten about that meeting Bush had with the Television and Media Executives just before the Iraq War was about to kick off.

Most don't even know it occurred.

Clearly, I didn't know it occurred. Please enlighten.
I tried google, but nothing came up.

Coulda stopped the headline after the first three words....

leslie @ 22:

L.A. Confidential @ 7:

People have forgotten about that meeting Bush had with the Television and Media Executives just before the Iraq War was about to kick off.

Most don't even know it occurred.

Clearly, I didn't know it occurred. Please enlighten.
I tried google, but nothing came up.

I'll look for it. If "they" haven't already scrubbed it from the records.

L.A. Confidential @ 26:

leslie @ 22:

L.A. Confidential @ 7:

People have forgotten about that meeting Bush had with the Television and Media Executives just before the Iraq War was about to kick off.

Most don't even know it occurred.

Clearly, I didn't know it occurred. Please enlighten.
I tried google, but nothing came up.

I'll look for it. If "they" haven't already scrubbed it from the records.

Here's a start

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/showbiz/1651173.stm

L.A. Confidential @ 28:

Clearly, I didn't know it occurred. Please enlighten.
I tried google, but nothing came up.

I'll look for it. If "they" haven't already scrubbed it from the records.

Here's a start

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/showbiz/1651173.stm

I mean what else is there to know?

I reluctantly watched the clip. Now I need a full decontamination workup. Hell of a way to start my Sunday.

Ed Brayton sums it up nicely:

http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2008/02/mommy_im_scared.php

Because the House didn't vote to extend the earlier "compromise" (read: total surrender by the Democrats), the law now reverts to the old FISA statute and the Patriot Act amendments to that statute. The Bush administration and McCain are telling the American people that this leaves them completely unprotected against the "evildoers"; here's what it really means:

It means that the government, if it wants to listen in on a phone call between two people overseas, say two "evildoers" talking in Afghanistan, they can do so all they want with no legal restrictions on them whatsoever; that is the way it has always been and it still is. And if they want to listen in on a phone call or intercept an email between someone in another country and an American citizen, they can still go ahead and do it and they have three days to ask the secret FISA court for a retroactive warrant.

That's right, they can still do it without a warrant and they can just go back and ask for one after the intercept has already taken place. And when they ask for one, they don't have to show probable cause as the 4th amendment requires, they only have to show that the request is part of an ongoing national security investigation and, under the Patriot Act, the judge has to grant it.

We are STILL screwed until we repeal the Patriot Act!!

This is smoke and mirrors to make you think that the Constitution is not being violated. It still is.

moniker @ 4:

I can't understand why the Republicans don't trust the Constitution on FISA.

Srsly.

clytemnestra @ 35:

It's not just Bill it's Fred who doesn't understand either.

And the Democrats just got a wake up call in the form of Donna Edwards . . . we will voted them out if they will not stand up for us and the Constitution.

Juan was actually good here but he should have asked Fed what he thought the Donna Edwards vistory meant.

The Edwards nomination hasn't even registered with the Democratic Establishment. Else there would be no super delegates for Clinton at this point. They think of it as Ned Lamont-lite. It will take a lot more than this to shake 'em up.

Propagandists, not "pundits." A grammatical usage error.

As demonstrated in Outfoxed and other documentaries, at Fox News, journalism and honesty will literally get you fired.

http://tomdispatch.com/post/174894/jonathan_schwarz_bill_kristol_s_obscu...

Give the prez the benefit of the doubt? Isn't that what got us in this mess in the first place?

Fair and balanced must mean our way or shut up!

Someone should sent Bill Kristol the Children's Book called "The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf." Apparently, he's never heard of it.

ltfcrazy @ 46:

Fair and balanced must mean our way or shut up!

Kristol established, along with conservative John Podhoretz and with financing from Rupert Murdoch, the conservative periodical The Weekly Standard.

Go figure!

Kristol would have trusted Hitler.

Joe O. @ 43:

ysbaddaden @ 29:

Hell, I can top that

Democrats don't trust wee willy kristolnacht either.

Additionally, for a guy with pretenses to intellectualism

He's offering us a false dilemma

Which is known as a logical fallacy.

Agreed. That is exactly what Kristol is offering and nothing more. People like him always offer the public only the two most extreme options when in reality there are many options to choose from. One can see why they do this though. It is meant to raise the fear of the public and by doing so the public will then demand that the Bush Administration get their way.

I might also add to my comment that this method is also used very often by dictatorial regimes as it appeals to the lowest of intellect and the most primative of emotions (I.E. fear of being attacked). By doing this all intellectual reasoning and/or arguments are drowned out or shouted down. I think Nazi Germany's Herman Goering had made a similar comment about how useful this method really was in Germany.

did anyone else hear what wallace said at the end of this clip?

he said something like, "when it's a question of whether we should listen to al qaeda, the democrats said 'no'."

the democrats never said 'no' to listening to al qaeda! they said 'no' to listening to ALL AMERICANS without a warrant. THAT is what they said 'NO' to.

it's amazing how wallace gets away with saying such blatant lies.

I think the best defense for the Democrats is offense. The Democrats should bring up retroactive immunity for the telecoms as a stand alone bill, and proceed to hold hearings on what government actions induced the telecoms to act as they did. In particular, were any Justice Dept or FCC rulings on unrelated matters influenced by telecom cooperation in the wiretapping?

It seems to me Bush wants retroactive immunity without scrutiny. The Dems should not simply forget about the matter, bu instead, take it up with the scrutiny the Administration doesn't want. In other words, check out the arrangements for corruption.

Fox is like a support group for the 29-percenters. Anyone who takes these clowns seriously is too far gone to worry about.

“Naturally the common people don’t want war. But after all, it is the
leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it’s always a
simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy or a
fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.
Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of
the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are
being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and
for exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every
country.”
--- Hermann Goering, Hitler’s Reich Marshall, at the Nuremberg
Trials after World War II.

It certainly looks like Goering is right. What Kristol is saying in regards to FISA is exactly what the Bush Administration wants done.

I say, give Texas and Oklahoma (no offense meant to progressives there) to shrub, the dickster, and the 29-percenters. Let them set up their own religious-fascist country, and let evryone else get along without 'em. I won't miss Houston in the summer or DFW. I might even get a passport so I can go visit their thousand-foot high rendition of the 10 commandments.

VietVet8666 @ 64:

I say, give Texas and Oklahoma (no offense meant to progressives there) to shrub, the dickster, and the 29-percenters. Let them set up their own religious-fascist country, and let evryone else get along without 'em. I won't miss Houston in the summer or DFW. I might even get a passport so I can go visit their thousand-foot high rendition of the 10 commandments.

I say split the whole damn country up into independent entities and let people prosper or fail of their own freaking devices without the Bushes or the Governments help at this point.

Ha! Keep this up, Kristol, and you will have a show on Comedy Central.

Kristol wasn't serious, was he? :)

Good question, Bill. Why don't we trust the guy who built a system to illegal spy on us? What a moron.

[Deleted. Off topic-Sitemonitor]

C&L'ers, you's is awesomely gifted McName generator-denigraters!!

Updated list on AM open thread as promised :)

Use you're favorites or collect 'em all!

Will update at my convenience on pertinent threads.

8-D

Kristol is a neocon, most people don't like or respect neocons.

I don't care what he has to say.

HAHAHA-- why not give them "the benefit of the doubt"?

A better question is "why not instantly doubt everything they say?". These people have lied about everything from trivial matters to crucial ones, like war. They can't even tell the truth about what the weather was that day (remember Bush's press guy saying it had been raining when it hadn't, in order to explain Bush's fall?).

These people stopped deserving "the benefit of the doubt" before they even took office. C'mon-- they've been lying and cheating from the very beginning, and it couldn't have been more obvious.

.
.
.
Two words.

Valerie Plame.

Why don't the Dems evoke this treasonous outing of a CIA agent to reason why they can't trust the Bush administration?!!
.
.
.

We need a lot more talk and a lot more action to get this country away from these PNAC/War Mongering criminals.

L.A. Confidential @ 14:

chicano2nd @ 12:

War on our Wallets.

Nice.

The Kristol Whose Crystal Ball Never Works
TOM ENGELHARDT
BLOG | Posted 02/15/2008 @ 09:41am

As Eric Alterman has written, he's the "journalist" of "perpetual wrongness" (as well as an "apparatchik" of the first order and a "right-wing holy warrior"). And for that, he's perpetually hired or published: Fox News, the Washington Post op-ed page, Time Magazine, and most recently, the New York Times where, in his very first column, he made a goof that had to be corrected at the bottom of column two (and where, with his usual perspicacity when it comes to the future, he predicted an Obama victory in the New Hampshire primary). Liberal websites devote time to listing his many mistakes and mis-predictions. In a roiling mass of neocons, right-wingers, and liberal war hawks, he's certainly been in fierce competition for the title of "wrongest" of all when it came to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. ("Iraq's always been very secular…") I hardly have to spell out the name of He Who Strides Amongst Us, the editor of Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard. But, okay, for the one person on the planet who doesn't know -- it's Bill Kristol. The notorious Mr. Kristol, the man whose crystal ball never works.

But isn't it the essence of American punditry that serial mistakes don't matter and no one is ever held to account (as in this primary season) for ridiculous predictions that add up to nothing? As New York Times editorial page editor Andy Rosenthal put it after his paper signed Kristol to a one-year contract, "The idea that The New York Times is giving voice to a guy who is a serious, respected conservative intellectual -- and somehow that's a bad thing… How intolerant is that?"

How intolerant indeed! Since no one in the mainstream is accountable for anything they've written, the management of the Times can exhibit remarkable tolerance for error in its gesture to the neocon right by hiring a man who's essentially never right. His has been a remarkable winning record when it comes to being right(-wing) by doing wrong. Former Saturday Night Live contributor Jonathan Schwarz pays homage to that record in "The Lost Kristol Tapes, What the New York Times Bought."

Read the Rest at thenation website @
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?bid=15&pid=285542

The Lost Kristol Tapes
What the New York Times Bought
By Jonathan Schwarz

Imagine that there were a Beatles record only a few people knew existed. And imagine you got the chance to listen to it, and as you did, your excitement grew, note by note. You realized it wasn't merely as good as Rubber Soul, or Revolver, or Sgt. Pepper's. It was much, much better. And now, imagine how badly you'd want to tell other Beatles fans all about it.

That's how I feel for my fellow William Kristol fans. You loved it when Bill said invading Iraq was going to have "terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East"? You have the original recording of him explaining the war would make us "respected around the world" and his classic statement that there's "almost no evidence" of Iraq experiencing Sunni-Shia conflict? Well, I've got something that will blow your mind!

I'm talking about Kristol's two-hour appearance on C-Span's Washington Journal on March 28, 2003, just nine days after the President launched his invasion of Iraq. No one remembers it today. You can't even fish it out of LexisNexis. It's not there. Yet it's a masterpiece, a double album of smarm, horrifying ignorance, and bald-faced deceit. While you've heard him play those instruments before, he never again reached such heights. It's a performance for the history books -- particularly that chapter about how the American Empire collapsed.

At the time Kristol was merely the son of prominent neoconservative Irving Kristol, former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle (aka "Quayle's brain"), the editor of Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard, and a frequent Fox News commentator. He hadn't yet added New York Times columnist to his resumé. Opposite Kristol on the segment was Daniel Ellsberg, famed for leaking the Pentagon Papers in the Vietnam era. Their discussion jumped back and forth across 40 years of U.S.-Iraqi relations, and is easiest to understand if rearranged chronologically.

So, sit back, relax, and let me play a little of it for you.

To start with, Ellsberg made the reasonable point that Iraqis might not view the invading Americans as "liberators," since the U.S. had been instrumental in Saddam Hussein's rise to power: Here's how he put it:

Read the entire and long article @:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/print/174894/Tomgram%253A%2520%2520Jonat...

Joe O. @ 54:

Joe O. @ 43:

ysbaddaden @ 29:

Hell, I can top that

Democrats don't trust wee willy kristolnacht either.

Additionally, for a guy with pretenses to intellectualism

He's offering us a false dilemma

Which is known as a logical fallacy.

Agreed. That is exactly what Kristol is offering and nothing more. People like him always offer the public only the two most extreme options when in reality there are many options to choose from. One can see why they do this though. It is meant to raise the fear of the public and by doing so the public will then demand that the Bush Administration get their way.

I might also add to my comment that this method is also used very often by dictatorial regimes as it appeals to the lowest of intellect and the most primative of emotions (I.E. fear of being attacked). By doing this all intellectual reasoning and/or arguments are drowned out or shouted down. I think Nazi Germany's Herman Goering had made a similar comment about how useful this method really was in Germany.

This is a combinantion of Argumentum ad Verecundiam, and Argumentum ad Populum.

That's why the misuse of the term rhetorics honks my cheese off.