Internal Monologue

Specter has consistently said he’s going to stand up for the Constitution and stand against this administration’s illegal wiretapping. But time and time again, has caved to Whitehouse pressure to carry water for the administration. When it came out that Specter was going to include a retroactive pardon for any administration lawbreaking involving FISA, there was widespread outrage, including from this blog . Specter immediate appeared on CNN denying that there was anything like Amnesty in his proposed bill: BLITZER: Are you, as the Washington Post reported, ready to give what they call blanket amnesty to anyone who authorized these wiretaps? SPECTER: Absolutely not. That was an erroneous report. If anybody has violated the law, they'll be held accountable, both as to criminal conduct and as to civil conduct. And in no way did I promise amnesty or immunity or letting anybody off the hook. Well, according to Glen Greenwald , Specter was lying through his teeth. Greenwald obtai

[Note: “Joementum can refer both to Josheph Lieberman himself, or to any claim of political momentum that turns out to be embarrassingly false. In this case, it is the latter definition to which I am referring.] OK, let’s put what we’ve learned from the previous post to use in inoculating our minds from the powerful wingnut meme machine. False meme virus: Bush is due for a bounce in the polls, a comeback; his presidency is turning around and he will triumph over the recent spate of adversity. I don’t know if this meme has been put out there by a coordinated push of the vast, right-wing conspiracy (VRWC), or its just because folks in the media are getting bored with the “Bush is tanking” story and want to shift to something new to entertain themselves or capture more eyeballs (=$$$).). But it’s there, and so far, it is false. This story on AmericaBlog talks about how in the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll Bush’s approval rating moving up one percentage point from 36% to 37%, and t

OK, readers, it’s posts like this one that will keep you informed and more knowledgeable than those who rely only on the mainstream media for their news. There’s this false “conventional wisdom” developing that the purpose of the progressive blogosphere is to drag the Democratic party to the left. This is not true. The purpose of the progressive blogosphere is to get the Democratic party into fighting trim so that it can beat the Republicans and stop the moral, financial, physical, and political damage they are doing to this country and its reputation. As is often the case, Glen Greenwald powerfully articulates this point of view , and excoriates Instapundit (whom I will not honor with a link) for falling into this lazy and convenient narrative that is false, false, false. Always be careful when the mainstream media (or anyone else) gets an idea stuck in its head and stops looking at the world to see if that idea is true or not. Listen to these phrases: “Republicans stand for fiscal re

Digby has lots of info on the Democratic primary for US Senator from Connecticut. This small poll has Lamont with 6 points of Lieberman. There’s also lots of information about the conflict between the bottom-up, blogosphere/activist-driven politics, and the top-down, consultant/insider hierarchy-driven politics of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee ( DSCC ). We’re all on the same side against the Republicans, but there’s a lot of difference of opinion on how to go about doing things. I’d be more ready to defer to the “experts” in the Democratic hierarchy if they had a better record of victories. But we’ve been losing races I feel we shouldn’t have recently, so my reverence for the grand pooh-bahs is limited. And yes, some of those losses could be due to Republican election shenanigans, but I think the Democratic aristocracy has not done a good job of investigating that either.

Christianism and jingoism often go hand-in-hand, and usually tagging along is the ridiculously distorted notion that the Founding Fathers of this country were a bunch of bible-thumping Jesus freaks. This is simply not true. Andrew Sullivan points to a particularly egregious example of this Christianist revisionism from the Concerned Women for America: Swann said, "As Americans commemorate Flag Day, it is also appropriate to remember the importance of keeping God in our Pledge. CWA strongly supports the mention of God in our nation's oath in keeping with our constitutional freedoms. We are free from an established religion and free to worship as we choose. Our country's founding fathers were men of faith who intentionally included the phrase 'under God' in an oath that serves as a symbol of loyalty and patriotism to our great country. I’ll let Andrew do the criticism: The small factual problem is that the pledge was not created or conceived by the founding fathe

Lieberman has come out for Net Neutrality . (TPM via Atrios ) That’s good and he should get kudos for this. If he pledged not to run as an independent and to support the winner of the Democratic primary in CT, that would go a long way towards lowering my enthusiasm for Ned Lamont.

It’s a sad state of affairs when comedians are better journalists than…journalists. Crooks and Liars (a great site) has this video of Jon Stewart interviewing Ken Mehlman, Chariman of the Republican National Committee. Here some analysis from Kos diarist Kevin lyda: I think this comment by Mehlman at the last few seconds of the clip sums up the problem with the news media in America these days. The context is Stewart complimenting him on being sent out by the GOP to tv shows and talking up the GOP: "Although - I chose to go on this show. So. I don't know if they put me on this one. This is harder than most. " This is harder than most. A fake news show on a cable comedy channel. Harder than most. If I had Tim Russert's address I'd put that quote on a postcard and send it to him. That quote is a job performance review and if it was directed at me, I'd change careers. Sometimes I wonder if all the progressive blogosphere griping (such as this from The Huffingt